VAN NUYS, Calif. — Witnesses have accused Robert Blake of faking the role of grieving husband on the night his wife was killed, but on Monday, the 71-year-old actor had a genuine emotional and physical reaction to a series of video and audio clips prosecutors played for jurors before resting their case.

Moments after the last juror filed out of the courtroom, Blake could be heard moaning and crying from the defense table.

The defendant, who has been mostly stonefaced throughout his murder trial, rushed out of the courtroom — his knees buckling and his hand over his mouth as if he might be physically ill. A member of the defense team followed him.

Minutes later, Blake returned, his eyes and nose red. He sat quietly, his gaze downward, occasionally taking deep breaths as the attorneys tended to court business. The defense would not comment on Blake's reaction, except to say that he was all right.

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The defense will begin its case Tuesday morning.

The clips jurors viewed included less than a minute of a Feb. 20, 2003, jailhouse interview Blake gave to Barbara Walters, in which he gives an affirmative response when Walters asks if he and Bonny Lee Bakley had a good relationship before her murder.

"Yes, yes. We had a lot to talk about, because it was a time when her entire family was coming to California," a wide-eyed and emaciated Blake, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, tells Walters. "There certainly wasn't any downside for me."

However, prosecutors claim Blake misrepresented his relationship on national television, and in reality, he hated Bakley. When he couldn't hire anyone else to kill her, prosecutors say, he pulled the trigger himself on May 4, 2001, in a desperate attempt to retain custody of their infant daughter, Rosie.

Prosecutor Shellie Samuels then played brief audiotapes of three separate jailhouse conversations the actor had with visitors.

The audiovisual presentation as a whole — less than three minutes in length — appeared to be an anticlimactic finale to the prosecution's case.

The most damaging statement Blake makes in the clips is when he tells a visitor that no matter what happens to him, "Rosie is safe. Those monsters will never get her — that other family."

Blake's attorney told jurors during opening statements that while the defendant may not have loved or even liked Bakley, he did not wish her dead.

The statements Blake makes on the audiotapes, the defense claims, reflect the actor's state of mind as he sat in jail facing a murder trial and dealing with a wrongful death civil-suit filed against him by Bakley's family members.

Mystery prints

Prosecutor Samuels conceded to jurors from the first day that her case against Blake is built around circumstantial evidence. Last week, the panel heard the state's most compelling testimony to date: three witnesses who claim that Robert Blake asked them either directly or indirectly to kill his wife.

Yet after 28 days of testimony from 68 witnesses and the introduction of more than 100 pieces of evidence, the state's glaring lack of direct evidence appeared to be punctuated by the testimony of a prints expert who testified Monday morning that he could not identify latent prints found on the vehicle in which Bonny Lee Bakley was shot to death.

Forensic prints specialist Scott Hurwitz of the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division said he found 11 latent prints on the exterior of Robert Blake's black 1991 Dodge Stealth. Five of those prints belonged to Blake and Blake's former handyman/bodyguard Earle Caldwell.

But the remaining six prints — all on the driver's-side door and windows — could not be identified.

On the night of May 4, 2001, paramedics called to a residential neighborhood in Studio City found Bakley bleeding and unresponsive from two gunshot wounds.

Blake, who was questioned that evening, had no blood on his clothes and could not be linked to the murder weapon — an untraceable WWII-era pistol found the next morning in a Dumpster near the car.

The "Baretta" star maintains his innocence and claims that someone else shot the 44-year-old mother of four when he briefly stepped away.

Hurwitz testified that the only identifiable prints found on the passenger side, where Bakley was sitting, were two prints on the window belonging to Caldwell. Attorneys agree that the shooter approached Bakley from the street on the passenger side, but Caldwell was likely a passenger in Blake's car at some point, making the findings inconclusive.

Caldwell was cleared of murder and conspiracy charges in 2003 after the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him, and jurors will not hear from the handyman, as he recently invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Suspicious activity?

Jurors also heard from Helga Shattuck, a senior compliance specialist at City National Bank, who said that Blake's withdrawals from two bank accounts in the months before his wife's death triggered what she called a "Suspicious Activity Report," which was sent to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a federal investigative agency.

Prosecutors say that Blake was beginning to withdraw small sums of cash to quietly pay a hit man to take Bakley out.

Shattuck, a thin bookish woman with a thick German accent, testified that between September 2000 and March 2001, Blake wrote out checks payable to cash, withdrawing a total of $126,000, mostly in increments of $5,000.

Last week, stuntman McLarty testified that Blake mentioned a figure of $10,000 during their murderous discussions; stuntman Ronald Hambleton testified that Blake told him he had been withdrawing small sums of cash; and Detective Robert Bub, who joined the search of the actor's home, said he found two envelopes, each containing $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills, in the bottom drawer of a master bedroom dresser.

However, the defense claims that it was Blake's habit to pay for things in cash, requiring him to keep large amounts of money on his property.

To bolster his point, defense attorney Gerald Schwartzbach spent more than an hour with Shattuck on cross-examination, going over dozens of withdrawals Blake made in 1999 and early 2000, sometimes totaling more than $20,000 in a single month.

During a morning recess, civil attorney Eric Dubin, who is representing the Bakley family, was subpoenaed to testify as a defense witness and is expected to take the stand Thursday.

"I don't know why they're subpoenaing me," Dubin told Courttv.com. "I'm one of the few people in California Blake didn't approach to kill his wife."

Robert Blake is on house arrest on $1.5 million bond. He is charged with one count of murder with the special circumstance of lying in wait and two counts of solicitation.

He faces life in prison if convicted of Bakley's murder.