Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 7:59 pm

SIX: The Polygraph Test

On June 20, SUS lead supervisor, Lieutenant Manny Pena, suggested that Sergeant Enrique "Hank" Hernandez take Ms. Serrano out for a steak and talk her into taking a polygraph test to determine whether she was telling the truth about the girl in the polka-dot dress.

In 1992, Pena reflected on his dilemma, with attorney Marilyn Barrett: "We got to a point in the thing, where we had to establish something on an investigative basis, that she was mistaken. So I suggested to him that why don't you take her out to dinner and talk nice to her and see if she will take a polygraph. It was a necessary move on my part. I wasn't about to leave the case hanging there. You know very well if we didn't dispel that, we'd still be looking for the girl in the polka-dot dress, you know, and never found her."

Pena's antipathy to Serrano was founded on bad information: "These stories about hearing shots and what have you, it's impossible! Impossible .... I requested the reconstruction of the shots. The ballrooms had veloured drapes that thick, all drawn. They had three orchestras going with music on three floors, balloons popping everywhere, and I had a decibel-graph placed at strategic locations to see if you could pick up any sound of the actual reconstruction of the shooting and they couldn't hear a damn thing!"

***

In his widely used textbook on criminal investigation, Pena defined the polygraph as a scientific instrument to diagnose truth or deception based on the emotion of fear. Typically, an arm cuff is strapped to the subject's forearm, and changes in breathing, blood pressure, pulse rate, and the electrical resistance of the skin are charted as the subject is asked a series of yes-or-no questions. "Fear of detection by an untruthful subject will cause physiological changes to occur in the subject's body at the point of deception," noted Pena. These changes can be diagnosed only by a "trained, competent examiner."

The accuracy of the polygraph has been contested since its invention by Dr. William Marston in 1915. Marston later created the comic book superhero Wonder Woman, who carried a golden lariat in her belt that compelled enemies to tell the truth.

Polygraphs are inadmissible as evidence in federal and most state courts. One Supreme Court judgment states that "there is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable."

A 1997 survey of 421 psychologists estimated the test's average validity at about 61 percent, a little better than chance. ''A big problem is that it's not really a test of anything," explained psychophysiologist William Iacono of the University of Minnesota. Nobody knows how the nervous system acts when a person is lying, he said, and people who don't believe in the polygraph may be more likely to fail tests, as their disbelief and nonresponsiveness may look like deception.

***

Bearing this in mind, we examine Sergeant Enrique "Hank" Hernandez, the "Terminator" of all conspiracy allegations in this case. Hernandez was the sole polygraph operator for SUS, assigned to "background investigation and conspiracy aspects of the case." He was thirty-seven years old at the time, with fifteen years of police work behind him and, like Pena, had served in the Korean War.

Hernandez would conduct examinations alone with the subject and discuss his findings with Pena. The tapes of his sessions with Serrano could be listened to only with Pena's approval, so a jury of two would decide her fate.

Pena told Barrett that the polygraph is only "as good as the objectivity of the operator." In his book, he advised that "extensive interrogation of the subject within four hours prior to the examination should be avoided.... Prolonged interrogation produces an exhausted or antagonistic subject who may not be a fit subject for the examination."

In fact, Hernandez spent at least an hour interrogating Serrano and Di Pierro before their tests, leaving them highly emotional and anxious prior to the examination. By then, they knew Hernandez didn't believe their answers to key questions, so their physical responses were likely to spike on the "pressure" questions.

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Lieutenant Manuel Pena, lead supervisor, Special Unit Senator.

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Sergeant Enrique Hernandez, LAPD polygraph operator.[/i]

Serrano's interrogation also took place at night, between nine and ten, after intense questioning that clearly upset her and left her exhausted before the test. But Pena "had every confidence in the guy. He's a very skilled operator ... very intelligent, very charming and I knew he wouldn't spook her, you know."

***

The evening started well. Hernandez took Sandra and her aunt out to dinner and even bought Sandra two drinks -- though she was underage -- plying the subject with alcohol before the polygraph.

''I'm the last person that you will talk to about the tragedy from an investigative standpoint," Hernandez assured her. "You're a very intelligent girl ... I'll believe everything that you tell me."

They then adjourned to Parker Center, and an enthusiastic Serrano told her story over again, the same as before.

Hernandez explained the workings of the polygraph, but Serrano was still unsure. Her lawyers had advised her not to take one, and from what she'd read, she didn't trust the polygraph.

"I don't want it to put me in a bad way," she said. "We went on a field trip one time to Cleveland and they asked the teacher her name and the polygraph machine showed she was lying."

Hernandez said the success of the test was down to the skill of the operator. He talked up his credentials, but Serrano wasn't convinced: "The thing that I don't understand is why a polygraph is administered, if it will not even stand up in court?"

"Somebody has given you wrong information on that," said Hernandez, deliberately misleading her. "If that was the case, we wouldn't have polygraphs ... but we're not going to court with this thing." He'd make sure of that.

"I will give you a fair, honest and objective test," he said. "I like you as a person .... You see, Sandy, this is a great tragedy, probably the second greatest tragedy we've had in this country."

"I know!"

"We don't want to give anyone an opportunity of saying this was not the truth ... to make sure that this report is not incomplete [like] the Warren Report that was written in Dallas, Texas."

Sandy was hooked up to the polygraph, and Hernandez performed a "control test," to gauge her normal physiological response. He asked Sandy to stop nervously tapping her fingers and to answer questions with one-word answers -- yes or no. He then asked her aunt to leave and began the test proper.

"Is your true first name Sandra?" he asked.

"No." Sandra laughed nervously, trying to test him.

"Do you believe I will be completely fair with you throughout this examination?"

"No."

"Between the ages of eighteen and nineteen, do you remember lying to the police about something very serious?"

"No."

"When you told the police that a girl with a polka-dot dress told you she had shot Kennedy, were you telling the truth?"

"She didn't say, 'We had shot Kennedy.' She said, 'We shot him.'''

"Did a girl in a polka-dot dress tell you that 'We have shot Kennedy'?"

"It was a white dress with black polka dots."

"Did a girl in a white dress with black polka dots tell you 'We have shot Kennedy'?"

"Yes."

"You can relax now," said Hernandez. "Remember I asked you to answer all my questions with one word -- yes or no."

"Yeah, but they can't be answered like that."

"Well, we'll review them, okay? I'll word them any way that you want me to, so you can answer them with one word, yes or no. Are you afraid right now, Sandra?

"I don't like this. It's not that I'm afraid; I just don't like it."

"I know you don't."

"May I ask you something? When you asked me what my name was, what'd it turn out?

"Sandra?"

"Yeah," she said.

"That you said no. It was meaningful to you. I think you have a different name ... you use a different name. I'm not concerned with it, though."

Sandra snorted in derision. "See ... this is what I mean!"

"Do you believe me, what I'm telling you?"

"No." She laughed. "Because I think it was rotten in the beginning that you never mentioned it to my aunt that I was going to take a polygraph."

"Oh, yes, I did. I told her this morning."

"She said you just wanted to talk to me, 'cause I asked her. And I think that's rotten ... but anyways, go ahead. We're here; we can't do anything about it. Let's go and get it done with."

Hernandez reminded Sandy that they needed to do this so the family of Senator Kennedy could rest -- "Ethel wants to find out what happened to her husband. This isn't a silly thing."

"I know it's not a silly thing, but don't come with this sentiment business. Let's just get this job done."

He asked another question. "What state is it now that we're in?"

"Ohio," said Sandra, doing everything in her power to mess up the machine.

"Sandy, I want to talk to you like a brother," ventured Hernandez. "You're an intelligent young girl. You know that for some reason this was made up ....

"You owe it to Senator Kennedy, the late Senator Kennedy, to come forth and be a woman about this. You don't know and I don't know if he's our witness right now in this room, watching what we're doing here. Don't shame his death by keeping this thing up! I have compassion for you. I want to know why you did what you did. This is a very serious thing."

"I seen those people!"

"No. No. No. No, Sandy. Remember what I told you about that? You can't say you saw something that you didn't see. I can explain this to the investigators so you won't even have to talk to them. What you say you saw is not true. Tell me why you made up the story and no one else will talk to you. You can't live a life of shame knowing what you're doing right now is wrong .... Please, in the name of Kennedy!"

"Don't say 'in the name of Kennedy.'''

"You know that this is wrong."

"I remember seeing a girl!"

"No ... no ... I'm talking about what you have told me here about seeing a person tell you, 'We shot Kennedy,' and that's wrong!"

"That's what she said!"

"No, it isn't. Sandy, please ... I loved this man!"

"So did I! Don't shout at me."

"Well, I'm trying not to shout, but this is such an emotional thing with me, you see. If you loved the man, the least you owe him is the courtesy of letting him rest in peace."

***

Hernandez told Sandy she could either confide in him or he could tell the press she was a liar -- "but this is the wrong way because I have to look at myself when I shave in the morning. You're a young lady and I wanna try to do whatever I believe is best for you. I have the authority to cancel the report that you've made but the only way I can do it is by you telling me the truth."

"But there's nothing more to tell!" Sandra insisted.

"It's like a disease that is gonna grow with you and make an old woman out of you before your time. I'm asking you to redeem something that's a deep wound that will grow with you -- like cancer."

He asked her to go back over her story.

"Well ... there was this girl coming down the stairs and she said, 'We shot him, we shot him.'"

"No, Sandy."

"This girl in a polka-dot dress, a white dress with polka-dots."

Hernandez shook his head as they stared down at the charts drawn by the polygraph needles.

"Sandy, it's like a disease."

"It says I never even seen a girl with a polka-dot dress?"

"No, it's saying that nobody told you 'We have shot Kennedy.'''

"Somebody told me that they have shot Kennedy. I'm sorry, but that's true! That is true. I'm not gonna say, 'No, they didn't tell me: just to satisfy anybody else.... I remember seeing the girl!"

"You mark my words that one of these days, if you're woman enough, you will get a letter from Ethel Kennedy, personal, thanking you for at least letting her rest on this aspect of this investigation. And I'm not going to put words in your mouth but I want you to tell me the truth about the staircase. Nobody on that staircase told you that 'We have shot Kennedy.'''

"Somebody told me that. Honest!"

"Right now, I have my deepest compassion for you because ... you're an intelligent girl ... you have a nice future ahead of you, but ... you're growing real fast in this room right now because you know that you have to make a decision to tell what's truthful, what's honest, what's right."

"I've already told you that."

"No, you can't say that."

"I can so!"

"With your lips you can say it. But with your feeling, your heart, your soul ... You know you feel like crying right now."

"Who, me? No, I don't."

"Yes, you do."

''I'm not crying!"

"Well, you feel like crying .... How come you're making yourself suffer like this?"

''I'm not making myself suffer! I'm not suffering."

Hernandez changed tack. "Do you want me to try and take care of this thing as easily and as sensibly as we can for you?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, let me tell you this. After some time, I will have to make a report .... I can make the report myself if you take me into your confidence, but there's people out here waiting, and if you don't tell me the truth, Sandy, they're gonna want to talk to you again. And the way it was mishandled last time, what if it's mishandled again?"

"I'll tell them they can go to hell."

Hernandez could see Sandra's resolve beginning to crumble. He started up the machine again and began to chip away at her story by insisting the machine said she was lying. First, he removed the polka dots from the dress. Now, it was a white dress. Next, he tried to change "we shot him" to "they shot him" and suggested she only saw the girl, and no one else.

"Somebody was with her ... somebody else was there."

"Somebody else was where?"

"On that stair. Coming down."

"Below?"

"Above!"

***

Hernandez was obviously trying to confuse her -- it's quite disgusting to listen to. Finally, exhausted and distraught, Sandra recanted. She started crying and blamed the whole thing on "the damn cops" who first interviewed her.

"They messed me all up and I knew all along they were messing me up. That's when we first hired the lawyer, 'cause they'd been messing me up. They'd keep asking me over and over, 'What did you see that night?' ... All I know is that it was one big mess."

"Well, we're gonna stop it right now, aren't we, Sandy?" soothed Hernandez. "And I'm gonna go see if we can get a stenographer to come up and take a statement and stop it right now. Okay?"

Sandy let out a big sigh, and Hernandez put his polygraph machine back in his briefcase, mission accomplished.

***

When Hernandez came back with a stenographer and a tape recorder, he offered Sandra a chance to "rectify her misquoted statements."

"When was the first time you knew that this was a pack of mistruths somebody else had misquoted or printed?" he asked.

Serrano admitted, under guided questioning, that "the whole thing was a lie." She got the polka dots from Vincent Di Pierro, when they met in the witness room before her TV interview and talked about the girl.

"So that's where this thing about the polka-dot dress, that's where it started," he suggested.

"I guess, I don't know," said Serrano.

This was obviously not true. Vincent Di Pierro said he didn't share any details of the mystery girl with Serrano because an officer saw them talking and warned them not to discuss the case. Now, Sandra herself remembered talking to Deputy DA Ambrose about a polka-dot dress out in the parking lot before she met Di Pierro.

"Well, regardless of what was said before," said Hernandez, swatting away the facts, "now we know it was a girl in a white dress that you saw?"

"Right," said Sandra, anxious to play along.

But even at this point, there was something halfhearted about her responses, and she didn't suffer Hernandez's fabrications easily.

"The facts that you saw were mistelevised," he said at one point.

"Well, they can't have been mistelevised, because I said that; I actually said that!"

"Also, before, you said that you had heard some shots?"

"No, I never said I heard shots."

"Well, now, somebody quoted you as saying you heard shots?"

"I heard backfires of a car.... I know they weren't gunshots."

***

Sergeant Hernandez's report of the interview states that while Serrano "was sitting on the stairway, approximately four or five people came running down the stairway screaming that Kennedy had been shot .... Miss Serrano was interrogated extensively and ultimately she admitted that the story about Sirhan Sirhan, the girl in the polka dot dress and the gunshots was not true. She stated that she had been sitting on the stairway at the time that she had mentioned and that she did in fact hear a car backfire a couple of times, but knew that the sounds did come from a car, and were not gunshots." The later LAPD summary characterized Serrano as the young woman who admitted she concocted her story after failing a polygraph.

***

The day after the Serrano polygraph, the APB on the girl in the polka-dot dress was canceled and the LAPD announced to the press that they were calling off their hunt for the mystery girl. Inspector John Powers told reporters "they had established that no such person ever existed but was the product of a young Kennedy worker's hysteria after the assassination." Once Serrano had retracted her story, the LAPD was off the hook.

Sandy Serrano quit her job as a keypunch operator and fled back to her parents' home in Ohio to escape further harassment. In mid-July, the LAPD interviewed her friend, Greg Abbott. Sandy told him she had cooperated with investigators but had been unfairly treated. She still stuck to her story about seeing the girl in the polka-dot dress. A month later, Sergeant Hernandez was promoted to lieutenant.

***

Three days after the LAPD investigation files were finally released to the public, on April 22, 1988, Serrano surfaced to tell radio interviewer Jack Thomas, "There was a lot of badgering that was going on. I was just twenty years old and I became unglued .... I said what they wanted me to say."

***

In 1992, Marilyn Barrett read some of the more objectionable passages of Serrano's polygraph test back to Manny Pena:

Using good emotional techniques to bring somebody around to admitting something, that's just interrogating technique .... I don't see anything wrong with the use of those words, trying to draw out compassion ... there's all kinds of ways to draw somebody into a crying jag for the purpose of getting to the truth. I don't see anything harmful in the way Hank handled this ... He was a fine polygraph operator ... and he came back with a positive on it, that she admitted she was probably mistaken and that she didn't hear them say "we shot him" and quite frankly, I welcomed it because we tried every way in the world to find the gal in the polka-dot dress and see if we could substantiate her story and we couldn't do it.

I'm a professional -- I've never faked a piece of evidence in my life. I sincerely believe that she was just honestly mistaken. Because everything else in the case points to Sirhan working alone.

She was a young kid and she was projected into the national limelight. She was on every television set in the country overnight. There were interviews on top of interviews and she was a real celebrity. She was the hottest thing on TV, nationwide. And for a young kid like that to be projected into this kind of limelight -- it might be a little difficult to give it up. I felt at the time that it was very difficult for her to say, "Yeah well, I was mistaken." She'd be losing a lot of celebrity status.


This is nonsense. Serrano gave only one television interview, to Sander Vanocur, and it was the press and police attention that made her life difficult. Pena's attitude amply illustrates the pigheaded thinking within LAPD at the time.

***

In December 2006, Sandra Serrano granted me the first full interview she has given since the polygraph test with Enrique Hernandez. She was a California delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and still lives in Los Angeles, where she runs a children's center.

Sandra still clearly describes what happened that night:

It was very claustrophobic in the ballroom; you could barely move ... so I just stepped out onto the fire escape and a little balcony attached. . . . While I was sitting there, three people passed by -- a woman and two men. The woman, I remember, was definitely an Anglo and, at the time, I thought both men were Latinos. And it struck me that an Anglo woman was with two Latinos. One of the guys looked like service help, and she was dressed better, so I thought, "Oh, that's strange."

And they went in, said, "Excuse me," very polite. Then, a little later, two of them came out and, like, tripping over each other and tripping over me. And I said, "What happened?" They said, "We shot him, we shot him." I said, "You shot who?" And they said, "The senator."

And I said, "What?" And I remember going into the ballroom, and everything was chaotic, absolutely chaotic. People were crying and screaming .... I remember having to ask somebody what happened. And they said the senator had been shot."


Sandra recalls that the girl did the talking. She was a light-skinned brunette with "a Bob Hope, Richard Nixon kind of nose ... a little bit ski [turned up] .... I remember very distinctively [sic] that she was wearing a white dress with black polka dots. With a round collar and a little ruffle around the collar, like a bib top, sort of."

Were the three who went up, together? "Yes. Oh, they definitely were together." The guy in service clothes resembled Sirhan -- when she saw the photo in the LA Times the next day, "I said, 'Wow, it really does look like that guy.' I remember being frightened because he lived about a mile and a half from my house."

The attitude of the two on the way down was "'Get out of my way, I'm leaving,' 'cause I distinctly remember them tripping, like ready to fall on me, they were moving so quickly."

Sandra remembers meeting Vincent Di Pierro amid all the confusion. "He said, 'Why are you here?' and I told him what happened, and I remember him saying, 'Oh, I saw that woman, too,' and I said, 'You did?' and he said, 'Yeah,' and I said, 'Wow.' And I don't remember anything more. If we were together five minutes, that was a long time, 'cause it was just like somebody that was sitting next to you and the next moment they were gone, you know? Things were moving so quickly."

Watching the Sander Vanocur interview again, Sandra says, "I seem very controlled -- you're gonna break down at any moment but you're controlling it -- but at the same time, very sure of what I'm saying."

After the Vanocur interview, she was turned over to the LAPD. "The interviews after were just horrible. I felt like I was a criminal. That's my best description. I felt like I was a criminal and I had done something wrong. I didn't make the connections that other people were trying to make. I just simply reported what I seen."

She was fearful for her safety, after the wave of political assassinations, "and the LAPD interviews played very heavily into that. They made me feel unsafe. They made me feel like if I made a spectacle of myself ... I could be next. Which is simply ridiculous now that I think of it -- as an adult, I've thought of it many times -- but when you're eighteen and you have people in power telling you things, you sort of fall into the trap. So I thought the police were mean; I thought they were really, really mean."

First came the polka-dot dresses. "I distinctly remember feeling like they were trying to drive me crazy, to say that I was mentally unstable, because they had hung probably ten to twelve polka-dot dresses in a room and left me there with all these polka-dot dresses all hanging around. And then coming in and asking me, 'What dress most looks like the dress that the girl wore? Were the polka dots the size of a nickel, were they the size of a dime, were they the size of a quarter?' You know ... you're trying to confuse a person, trying to make them feel like 'Oh I don't know .... I don't know what it was.'''

Then came the sessions with Hernandez:

He was a very frightening person, a very frightening person. He was like some Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde type, you know. One minute, he was just really nice and soft-spoken, like a wonderful big brother. Then, the next minute, he was like, "You're an awful person and you're hurting the Kennedys and Mrs. Kennedy asked me personally to tell you," and I'm like, "Oh, my God," you know. I think a lot of it was classic ''good cop, bad cop" kind of stuff. ... I had a vague feeling it was his job to make me sound like a crazy person ... to discredit me ... and all through the interview he kept turning on and turning off the tape recorder. And I remember saying, "Why do you keep turning that off and turning that on; you're only recording some of what I'm saying. Why aren't you recording it all?" And him convincing me that I was being hysterical, so I needed composure time ....

In retrospect, I think he was using a form of editing. I might have said some things that they didn't want to hear ... and I remember thinking that he was lying and then thinking, "No, he can't lie, he's the police, the police don't lie, the police stand for good and honor and all that stuff you're raised with in the Midwest in the fifties.


She laughs.

"When I was asked to go through my time on the fire escape, I said 'I heard backfires of a car.' 'Oh, are you saying you heard gunshots?' 'No, I heard backfires of a car.' And before you knew it, backfires became gunshots. But again that was all in the questioning."

Gradually, Hernandez wore her down. "I felt like I was going crazy. I just wanted to be done with it ... so I remember saying to him, 'Whatever you want me to say, I'll say, okay. I'm not here to hurt anybody, I don't want to do anything bad, so whatever you want me to say, I'll say.' I mean they were the cops, they were the good guys."

***

Today, Sandra still stands by her original story. "I saw the two people come down and saw three people go up. They made those statements to me and that's what I saw, that's what I experienced .... There's certain things about what happened that day that I will never forget and the statement 'We shot him, we shot him,' I'll never forget that. So I'm very clear in my mind that that's what was said."

She's also suspicious of Hernandez's motives: "You didn't do that, you didn't see that, you weren't there ... you're making all of this up.' Just a lot of browbeating. So, you know, during later years, it crosses your mind -- 'if there was nothing there, why did they beat you up so much?'"

***

In the early seventies, Serrano became heavily involved in Latino politics, and the same guy would always be at the fund-raisers, staring at her across the room. Years later, she asked a politician friend who he was.

"'Oh, that's Hank Hernandez,' and I said, 'Oh ... who's he?' and he said, 'Oh, he used to work for LAPD but he's really with the CIA.' I said, 'The CIA?' and he said, 'Yeah, he's got something going on the side with security.' So, like a week later, my friend calls me, 'You know who that guy is? The guy that's staring at you. He's the guy who interviewed you during the Kennedy stuff.' I said, 'What?' And he said, 'Don't mess with him. Don't talk to him, just stay away from him.' And I remember getting scared again.

''And I remember at one event, years later, he was staring at me and I just stared at him and made a face at him and him just sort of like chuckling and walking off ... like he was saying, 'Oh, she finally figured out who I was,' you know .... I just blocked him out. Bad man. Put him aside."

I asked Sandra if she thought there had been a conspiracy. "If you think about it unemotionally ... common sense tells you, yes, more than one person had to be involved. It's just too big of a deal. I think, like the guy in Dallas ... certain people are just fall guys. So, yeah, I think there was something bigger behind the whole thing. But time does not necessarily tell all. Some things, for whatever reason, are left to be a mystery."

***

On July 1, Vincent Di Pierro was given a polygraph examination by Sergeant Hernandez. Audiotapes of these sessions still exist, but the first hour of tape, before the test began, is inaudible. The next audiotape begins with Hernandez selling the virtues of the polygraph to Di Pierro.

"It's a piece of machinery; that's what it is," said Hernandez.

"I guess it can make mistakes, too," said Vince.

"No, no. That's the funny thing about it. It has no feelings .... The thing is this, Vince, that there are people who are capable of taking a lie detector test, lying and not being found out. ... But the last national survey found only thirty-three people out of a thousand could beat the system."

''I'm curious; has it ever been wrong?" Vince asked.

"No. In fact, you know Sandra Serrano?"

"Yeah."

"I gave her a test the other day," teased Hernandez.

"Yeah? What happened?"

"Well ... it wasn't wrong."

"It wasn't wrong?" Vince suddenly sounded worried.

"It wasn't wrong."

Vincent sat in silence for a moment. "Did she make it up or what?"

"Well ... I think in all fairness to you," said Hernandez, ''I'll discuss this with you later."

Vince apologized for being so nervous, saying he was keen to testify but wanted to know "what you advise on what I should testify to."

Hernandez then played magician as he ran Di Pierro through a control test by asking him to pick one of five numbered cards and place it face-down on the table. He then asked Vince to answer no as he ran through each of the five numbers, expecting Vincent's nervous response to reveal which card he was holding.

Hernandez started asking for numbers: one, two, three, four. When he got to five, Vince swallowed his answer and comically mumbled no, making it obvious that was the card he was holding. Hernandez guessed correctly and Vince was impressed.

"So I'm not one of the thirty-three!" said Vince. "It's amazing. There's absolutely no way you can fool it. That's good."

When the test started, Vince answered yes, he believed Hernandez would be completely fair with him, but seemed to choke with nerves on the key questions.

"Is there anything about the story that you have told me that is not really true?" asked Hernandez.

Vincent's "no" is almost inaudible. He sounds petrified.

But he did stick to his story. Yes, he was telling the truth when he said he saw a girl standing next to Sirhan right before Kennedy was shot. No, there wasn't any question he was afraid to be asked.

Hernandez stopped the test after the first few questions, clearly unhappy, saying they needed time to talk away from the machine.

"Because I think if we go through with this ... you know that you're gonna flunk the test.... I think that you want to square off whatever you want to square off in your mind before we continue here .... You don't want a piece of machinery to find out for you what you know."

Vince was impatient. 'I'm sorry. When you mentioned about the girl, did it say I was lying or what?"

"Well, no ... I'm not going to put it that way.... I want you to tell me and correct what you should correct at this point. Okay?"

"Okay. Fine. You asked about the girl and I say that there is a girl. I saw a girl there. Now, whether the machine said yes or no, I don't know .... I won't change it because that's what I remember seeing."

Hernandez pointed to the spike on his charts and coaxed Vince to a point where he was no longer convinced that he saw the girl.

''And we can't go ahead and say that you did see a girl when you're not convinced that you did see a girl," reasoned Hernandez.

"All right. Okay. That's fair."

"I want you to be clear with yourself .... Did you first get the idea about a girl being next to Sirhan when you talked to Sandra Serrano?"

"Maybe I did .... I don't know," said Vince. "Like I say, there was so much confusion that night."

"You know, it could be a very easy question for me to ask you, 'Did you make up the story about the girl in the polka-dot dress?' And you can't say maybe."

"Can you ask that? I'd feel better .... Seriously, I want to find out myself."

When Hernandez started up his questions again, Vincent insisted he saw a girl with a polka-dot dress looking at Sirhan and that he didn't make the story up.

"What does it say? Did I or didn't I?"

"You know what it says.... You made the story up. You didn't see a girl with a polka-dot dress."

"I didn't?"

Hernandez showed him the charts, allegedly spiking at the key questions.

"Let's do this, I'm gonna go back here, get a stenographer to clarify the statement, and we'll get it squared off and nobody's gonna talk to you anymore as far as I'm concerned."

"Okay ... and you want me just to leave the girl or what?"

"I want you to tell the truth about the girl."

''According to that, I'm lying. I don't see how."

"Well ... like I said to you before, I think you made it up after you heard Sandra talking about it ... and, for your own information, she was lying about it, too."

Hernandez praised Vince for being a man about this -- "maybe you saw her in the ballroom somewhere."

"She was in the same room, though .... I swear it looked as though she was with him."

The session ends with Vince apologizing if the machine says he wasn't truthful. "I don't know, maybe it was because I was nervous, I'm sorry .... Could it possibly be, though, that I heard it from Serrano and then kept it in my mind?"

"You know, Vince, the human mind is a funny piece of machinery."

"'Cause I'm confused myself now, you see.... I don't know."

They moved to another room and a stenographer joined them. Now that Vince had his story straight, it would go on the record. What went before was only on tape, and that would be locked away for twenty years.

We hear an off-the-record comment by Hernandez before the reinterview begins. ''I'm gonna try and keep it from being an outright lie, you see, so we'll try and approach it that way".

"Uh-huh," agreed Vincent. He then takes a backseat as Hernandez guides him through a stage-managed charade.

"Okay, Vincent, there are many statements in that previous conversation that we know are false, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"As a matter of fact, you have now told me that there was no lady standing next to Sirhan."

"That's correct."

"I think what you have told me is that you probably got this idea about a girl in a black-and-white polka-dot dress after you talked to Miss Sandra Serrano."

"Yes, sir, I did."

"What did she tell you that prompted you to dream up ... a woman behind Sirhan?"

"She stated that there was this girl that was wearing a polka-dot dress came running down, I guess it was this hallway, saying that 'we shot him' and then we started asking each other questions about the girl, and evidently, I went along with what she said as being a person that I imagined I saw."

"Is there anything else that you have told me previously ... that you know now is not the truth?"

"No. Nothing. Only about the girl," says Vincent. "That good enough?"

"I think this is about all we need."

***

I met Vincent in Los Angeles a couple of hours after I interviewed Sandra Serrano. He followed his father into the catering business and is now retired, with a love of old sports cars. Unfortunately, there are major problems with Vincent as a witness. Today, he insists he saw Sirhan's gun a couple of inches from Kennedy's head, but he told the grand jury it was two to four feet away.

He also has his own take on his encounter with Hernandez:

He was trying to say that there was no girl. And I said, "No, there was a girl. ... I'm not going to say I didn't see a girl. I'd be lying." He says, "You're lying now."

I say, "Really? The polygraph doesn't say that."

"Well, you can't read a polygraph."

I wouldn't change my story and he finally had to give in because [Deputy DA] John Howard said, "Stop, he's testifying, period," ... and I was on the stand for three days in the trial with Grant Cooper.... I was scared out of my mind.


While Vincent strongly resisted Hernandez at first, his memory of this encounter was highly selective. He forgot that he finally crumbled under pressure with Hernandez and that he was on the stand for twenty minutes with Grant Cooper, not three days. His testimony was a shambles for the prosecution, as will be shown in Chapter 11, as Vincent contradicted both his grand jury testimony and his "corrected statements" to Hernandez.

***

On July 19, Lieutenant Manuel Pena forwarded his second progress report to Captain Hugh Brown, commander of the LAPD Homicide Division. Of the 1,485 interviews that had been assigned, 838 had been completed. "To date, no factual information has been developed that would in any way substantiate a conspiracy."

***

What happened to fourteen-year-old Katie Keir, who saw a girl in a white dress with black polka dots run out of the Sunset Room and down a stairway, yelling, "We shot Kennedy"?

A later progress report on Keir and her friends, Irene Gizzi and Jeanette Prudhomme, carried the instruction "Re-interview all persons named in this interview. Inform that Serrano story [false]. Offer tactful opportunity to correct statements."

Two months later, each girl was reinterviewed in the presence of her parents, and the police persuaded Keir that she had heard the girl say, "Someone shot Kennedy" or "They shot Kennedy." The other girls "who initially thought they saw Sirhan ... retracted much of their earlier observations," which the police blamed on "the publicity concerning the woman in the polka-dot dress."

By the end of August, a progress report concerning witnesses claiming to see Sirhan with coconspirators at the hotel concluded that "each individual was re-interviewed in depth and has either retracted statements after they have been proven false or ... voluntarily modified previous statements. To date, there has been no evidence located or truthful witnesses contacted that indicate a conspiracy existed to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy."

***

The last man standing was John Fahey. Hank Hernandez stepped up to the plate with his foolproof polygraph, and Fahey was summoned to Parker Center and wired up to the machine.

Fahey gamely stuck to his story, but Hernandez concluded that most of his answers were lies -- he had never seen Sirhan and the girl had never told him of a plan to assassinate Kennedy.

"These answers will have to be changed," Hernandez informed him.

"Either you change them, or I'll change them in my report."

"Can I come back later and make my own corrections?" asked Fahey.

"Of course you can," said Hank.

On September 9, Fahey returned to Parker Center to see Hernandez and Sergeant Phil Alexander "in order to clarify the situation." A stenographer recorded the proceedings.

"Now, what we're trying to do here, John," began Hernandez, "is to determine the truth .... Was there anything during your association with that woman that led you to believe that she was in any way connected with the assassination of Senator Kennedy?"

"No, sir."

Fahey said he had been overexcited and the lady's "bad taste toward Mr. Kennedy led me to believe that possibly she had something to do with it."

"Okay, as a matter of fact, John, now you know that in your mind all along there was nothing that happened that would lead any reasonable person to form a belief that she was connected with the assassination of Senator Kennedy, was there?"

"Now that I have sat down and thought it all through, yes, you're right, sir."

Hernandez suggested to Fahey that "the man following you and the girl to Oxnard might have been a jealous boyfriend or husband ... have you ever thought about that?"

"No, sir," said Fahey.

"Will you think about it now?"

"Yes, sir. That could be true."

Hank blamed the newspaper reporter for the confusion. "I think Faura romanticized you."

"He put words in your mouth, so to speak," chipped in Sergeant Alexander, "led you to believe certain things that you consequently found out not to be true and so forth. He created some of these beliefs in your mind."

"Yes, sir ... he romanced me," agreed Fahey.

''As a matter of fact, John," said Hernandez, "this girl that you're referring to from the IdentaKit, you knew all along that this girl didn't exist, didn't you?"

"The girl exists," insisted Fahey. "The girl was with me that day. That's who the girl is, the picture is of." It was a "pretty close" likeness to the girl, as later verified by Vincent Di Pierro.

Faced with an awkward fact, Hernandez changed the subject.

"In my mind, though, John, as I understand you, you had no sound basis for ... any connection with this woman and the assassination of Kennedy."

"No, sir, only that someone was after me for my car possibly, or I was getting hijacked or something."

"Right .... Maybe you concocted this whole story to cover up your secret meeting with this girl, Gilderdine?"

"No, I didn't state all this to cover up anything," insisted Fahey, "but I would appreciate if you didn't bother my wife about this ... because I love my wife, and, gentlemen, I want to keep her."

"No problem," replied Hernandez.

"Could you also help me get rid of Faura?"

"If he bothers you any more, you refer him to us," said Alexander. "If he refuses to go, he can be put in jail for disturbing the peace or trespassing."

"Sure. This is your inherent right," confirmed Hernandez. "Nobody can go around bothering you, John."

***

The final report stripped Fahey's story to the bone: "Fahey stated he had actually picked up a woman at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4th and spent the day with her. The rest of the story had been a figment of his imagination."

***

After dismissing or discrediting every witness to a sinister girl in a polka-dot dress, the LAPD decided to produce its own polka-dot girl. Their summary report offers a section titled "Actual Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress." Valerie Schulte, an attractive blond Kennedy girl, models a green dress with large yellow polka dots and is photographed in front and profile shots.

But there are a couple of obvious problems: Schulte was a blonde, not a dark brunette; she wore a green dress, not a white one; her dress had large yellow polka dots instead of small black ones; and on the night of the assassination, her leg was in a cast from hip to ankle and she walked with a crutch -- a detail every witness to the girl in the polka-dot dress seems to have missed.

Vincent Di Pierro said the girl caught his attention as he walked through the swinging doors into the pantry with the senator. Schulte was walking right behind Di Pierro at the time. She was later pushed forward into his line of vision, but at no point was she standing anywhere near Sirhan.

As with the polygraph examinations, such subtle nuances weren't allowed to get in the way of what the LAPD decided had happened. Vincent Di Pierro was later called to testify at Sirhan's trial and readily identified Valerie Schulte as the girl he had seen. The defense attorneys then read his craven responses to Hernandez into the record, destroying his testimony.

The crux of the problem was that Vincent had insisted there was a girl by Sirhan wearing a white dress with black polka dots, yet he identified the girl as Valerie Schulte. As Grant Cooper demonstrated, this didn't make any sense, but Vincent still sticks to this story today:

I was sure it was Valerie.... John Howard made me look at a whole bunch of pictures and I picked Valerie out sixteen times.... I actually had the ability to talk with her prior to the trial and I apologized for putting her in a bad position because ... I think she had a broken foot at the time, so I don't think she was the one running through the hallway, screaming anything, so I'm sorry that people have made a big thing of that. I really never should have even mentioned her because I really don't think she had anything to do with it.

He glanced at her as though a guy was checking out a girl. Whether they were together I doubt it. ... I don't think that she would have wanted to go out with someone like him, but ... he was standing on the stacker and she was behind that ... to his left.... It looked like he turned to her [and] said something; he may have been just checking her out.


Vincent can no longer remember what Valerie looked like -- "all the years of questioning ... I've literally put it out of my mind." He looked unsure when I reminded him of the discrepancies in hair and dress color between Schulte and the girl: "I remember her face ... and it was the same girl I identified in court. ... Do I think it was her? I think it was Valerie that I saw. That's the way I remember it.... Whether she had brown hair at that time or not, I don't remember, but I remember seeing what I thought was brown hair that night .... All I remember was she was very pretty. And she looked just like Valerie, unless she has a twin that had dark brown hair."

Image
left: Valerie Schulte as she appeared in the pantry-wearing a green dress with yellow polka dots and carrying a crutch.

Image
Right: Police photos of a blond Valerie Schulte.[/i]

***

In late September, Sergeant Paul Sharaga was instructed to prepare a follow-up report by SUS, which he based, almost verbatim, on a copy of his first report. He personally delivered a copy of the new report to SUS Headquarters, but nobody there expressed any interest in interviewing him.

Several weeks later, Sharaga needed to refer to his report but found that the copies he had placed in his personal box in the Sergeants' Office, the watch commander's desk, and the Records section were all gone. His fellow officers seemed to know nothing about the missing reports, but Day Watch Sergeant Cravens told him two plainclothes SUS investigators had been there earlier in the day and had taken all the reports, including his initial one. "I called SUS and was told, in no uncertain terms, 'Nobody from SUS has been to Rampart, much less removed any of those reports.''' His superiors at Rampart were also uncooperative, and his inquiries began to irritate them.

By the end of the summer, Bill Jordan was made lieutenant and became Sharaga's immediate superior. Suddenly, Sharaga's usually high proficiency ratings began to plummet. Sharaga took premature retirement in July 1969 on service pension -- pushed out, he felt, by his refusal to go along with the official story.

In December 1974, Sharaga phoned in to Art Kevin's radio show on KMPC in Los Angeles after he heard news reports that the "girl in a polka-dot dress and male companion" fleeing the crime scene was "a made-up story" by a witness. Kevin interviewed him, and Sharaga stuck to his story -- he still felt this couple was involved in the killing with Sirhan. Sandra Serrano's story "was incredibly similar to what my two independent witnesses had told me, relating to near-identical time frames and location."

Sharaga first felt there was something odd about the police investigation when there was no mention of the Bernsteins in Chief Houghton's book on the case, Special Unit Senator. Sharaga wrote off the omission as the product of an "inadequate investigation" and found it hard to believe that anyone in the LAPD "would have deliberately done anything wrong." After the radio interview, Inspector Powers phoned Kevin and called Sharaga "a liar."

***

In 1988, author Jonn Christian contacted Sharaga after the long-awaited release of the LAPD investigative files. Christian showed Sharaga the summary of an alleged LAPD interview with him dated September 26. The summary recounts the older couple telling Sharaga their story and states that their "names and addresses [were] given to Rampart detectives." Yet there is no mention of this information in the LAPD files or a record of any attempt to contact the Bernsteins. The interview summary also states that Sharaga "believes that due to the noise and confusion at the time ... what was probably said was 'they shot him,''' and that Sharaga gave Communications "a description of the suspect as given to him by additional witnesses."

An angry Sharaga told Christian, "Nobody from LAPD ever interviewed me, at any time. That interview is a phony, and many of the statements in it are just plain lies, containing false and deliberately misleading statements."

The summary reads as a fraudulent redrafting of Sharaga's detailed report, censoring any hint of conspiracy. It falsely implies that Sharaga rejected the Bernsteins' story and that the couple mistakenly heard "We shot him," a tactic the police also applied to the other witnesses. Sharaga called altering his report in this way a criminal act.

Sharaga told me he now strongly believes the LAPD covered up the true circumstances surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy and that Jordan, Sillings, Powers, Hernandez, and Pena were all involved. Sharaga's morning watch commander at Rampart, Lieutenant Sillings, died of a brain tumor a couple of years after he left the force in the early seventies.

***

When Marilyn Barrett showed the doctored interview summary and Sharaga's later affidavit to Manuel Pena, he sounded genuinely taken aback: "That's an interesting statement by Sharaga .... I personally have never talked to this Sharaga, and I don't recall ever reading his report, quite frankly .... I can't imagine why anyone would want to change anything."

Pena said he never knew about the Bernsteins. "The statements of this couple never figured into my decision to ask Hank to put Sandy on the polygraph. I had no knowledge of this." Barrett told him Sharaga's report had seemingly disappeared. "Well, that's possible, but I certainly haven't seen it. It would've been interesting if, at that time, I knew of these Bernstein people, I'd put them on the polygraph, too ... but I've never seen that report."
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:04 pm

PART 1 OF 2

SEVEN: Security on the Night

Witnesses in the pantry described Secret Service agents jumping Sirhan when they heard the shots, but there was actually no Secret Service protection for presidential candidates until President Johnson ordered it in the early hours of June 5, after the shooting. During the 1968 campaign, Kennedy's security rested with one man alone -- his personal bodyguard, William Barry, charged with getting him through thick crowds and running interference. It was an impossible job.

Look magazine reporter Warren Rogers traveled with Kennedy on the campaign and neatly summed up the senator's attitude to security: "Bob despised the very thought of bodyguards. Even when he hit the campaign trail, he only had one security man, William Barry, and he tolerated Bill because he liked him .... Once, when I expressed concern about how he waded into churning crowds without protection, he told me: 'Oh, hell! You can't worry about that. Look at their faces. Those people don't want to hurt me. They just want to see me and touch me. And, if there's somebody out there who wants to get me, well, doing anything in public life today is Russian roulette.'''

Barry had first met Kennedy when the senator was attorney general in the early sixties. Barry was the FBI agent assigned to be Kennedy's driver when he was in New York. They grew so c;ose that when Kennedy ran for the Senate from New York in 1964, Barry spent his vacation traveling with the candidate through the last few weeks of the campaign. When J. Edgar Hoover got wind of this, he transferred Barry to Mobile, Alabama, so Barry resigned. When Barry congratulated Kennedy on election night, the new junior senator from New York replied, "Well, if my brother was alive, I wouldn't be here. I'd rather have it that way."

On March 23, 1968, they teamed up once more. "When I got off a plane at San Francisco and saw that first [crowd], the shock sobered me on what the job was," Barry later recalled. "People hit me, tried to pull me away. At the end of the day, [Kennedy's] hands and mine would be bleeding. Once, at the beginning, I told the senator, 'I wish these people would be more courteous.' He answered, 'They're here because they care for us and want to show us.' After that, I never had any trouble adjusting to crowds."

As they traveled through thick crowds in open convertibles, Barry would kneel next to Kennedy, locking his left arm around the senator's waist to keep him from being pulled out of the vehicle. After one nine-hour motorcade, Barry's knees were rubbed raw and bleeding. "Ethel Kennedy got him a rubber kneeling pad," Jules Witcover wrote, "but still it was sheer physical punishment. Yet Barry, perhaps more devoted to the candidate than any other member of the party, maintained his consistent cheerfulness and gentleness."

For Barry, it was a labor of love: "I loved him intensely as a human being .... I wanted him to be President of the United States for the sake of my children and generations to come. It was not just a professional job with me. It was something my life qualified me for."

Once, as a group of kids pedaled their bikes alongside Kennedy's car, Barry noticed a ten-year-old boy with one arm in a cast, tugging his younger sister along behind him as he ran beside the car. The girl stumbled; the boy swept her up on his shoulders and never broke stride. Barry pointed them out to Kennedy, who asked the driver to stop. Barry lifted the brother and sister into the convertible and sat one on either side of the senator. They stayed with the motorcade all day, and later, Kennedy had his car pulled out of the motorcade to drive them home. The children's mother served iced tea as Kennedy sat on the steps of their small frame house and chatted while the motorcade waited.

Kennedy didn't want Barry to carry a gun, so he resorted to less conventional methods of protection. At a school rally in Oregon, a young man went berserk and charged after Kennedy as he left. Dick Harwood of the Washington Post tried to wrestle him to the ground, but he slipped through and an alert Barry intercepted him. He pushed the man to the ground and got Kennedy supporters to sit on him until the police arrived.

Fred Dutton, Kennedy's campaign manager, was a veteran of the JFK administration and a constant presence alongside Barry and the senator. He skillfully balanced the egos of the older Kennedy aides from Jack Kennedy's 1960 campaign -- who worked as volunteers -- and the young, salaried speechwriters, who were in tune with the new generation of voters.

At night, Kennedy would skip the late-night drinking sessions with staff and press and go back to his hotel room with Barry or Dutton, make a few phone calls, relax with a bottle or two of Heineken or a scotch, take a long, hot bath, and retire. Barry tried hiring off-duty policemen to stay in the hotel lobby, but when Kennedy found out, he got rid of them.

***

In this campaign year of unprecedented violence and discord across the country, Kennedy often returned to a quote from his favorite poet, Aeschylus: "To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world." This optimistic, perhaps overly romantic vision seemed to permeate the campaign, but there were also real threats along the way.

On April 11, at the Jack Tar Hotel in Lansing, Michigan, Barry told Dutton the police had spotted a man with a rifle on a rooftop across the street. Dutton went into Kennedy's bedroom and discreetly shut the blinds. Kennedy, slipping on a clean shirt, looked up at once and said, "Don't close them. If they're going to shoot, they'll shoot."

When it was time to leave, Dutton led the senator into the hotel elevator and down past the first floor into the basement, where the car was waiting. "What's the car doing down here?" Kennedy wanted to know. "Well, we have a report -- maybe serious," Dutton said. Kennedy was furious. "Don't ever do anything like that again!" he told Barry. "If somebody's going to shoot me, they'll shoot me. But I'm not sneaking around like a thief in the night." "When we got out in front of the hotel," Dutton recalled, "Bob said, 'Stop the car.' And he got out and shook hands [with the crowd]." The gunman on the roof turned out to be an insurance company employee preparing to leave on a hunting trip after work.

***

Barry and aide Walter Sheridan continually discussed the security problem. "And we knew," said Sheridan, "that, really, there wasn't anything you could do about it because he was uncontrollable, and if you tried to protect him, he'd get mad as hell." Someone later asked Barry whether Kennedy was foolhardy. "I don't know whether that's the correct word .... He just didn't want to live in fear. So I think he was making a personal judgement of his own, based on his own life force."

The traveling press pack could sense what was coming. Columnist Jimmy Breslin asked John Lindsay of Newsweek if Kennedy had the stuff to go all the way. "And I said, 'Yes, of course, he has the stuff to go all the way, but he's not going to go all the way ... somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it, just as sure as we are sitting here .... He's out there now waiting for him.' There was a sort of stunned silence around the table, and then, one by one, each of us agreed."

Kennedy told NBC reporter Charles Quinn he thought about the danger a lot but he wasn't going to change his style. He wanted to get as close to the people as possible. He got pulled out of a car and chipped a tooth and had his shoes and cuff links stolen, "and he knew that he got a lot of publicity by having all this wild hysteria swirling around him to the point of physical danger ... [but] the touching of Kennedy and the pulling and the pushing and the screaming and all that frenzy and turmoil and turbulence that used to surround him ... had a great symbolic meaning. He was not only there, saying 'I'm here because I want to help you.' But he was also there to let them touch him ... so that they really could feel physically -- not just emotionally -- that here was a guy who was interested in them .... 'You know, if I'm ever elected President,' he said, 'I'm never going to ride in one of those bubble-top cars.'''

***

The irresistible passion and excitement of the Kennedy motorcades hit an immovable object when they came to Los Angeles -- the LAPD. The city saw two sides of Fred Dutton and the tensions between law, order, and bureaucracy, and Kennedy's freewheeling campaign.

First, on May 20, came a three-hour motorcade through raucous Mexican American crowds in East LA. At one point, Kennedy looked down to see a young teenager removing his shoes. He carried on shaking hands, regardless, in his stocking feet, until the motorcade reached Temple Isaiah, a synagogue in Los Angeles, well after dark. As he was about to go in to make a speech, Kennedy looked down. "My shoes," he said, turning to Dutton. "I'll have to borrow yours." His faithful lieutenant took off his shoes and waited in the car.

Kennedy donned a yarmulke and spoke to the assembled Jewish voters in Dutton's shoes, pledging support for Israel with remarks Sirhan may have later heard on all-news station KFWB. When the speech was over, the party went for dinner to a fancy restaurant. Kennedy walked in and Dutton, shoeless, followed. The Mexican boy wore Kennedy's shoes to school the next day.

***

But tensions with the LAPD and Mayor Yorty undercut the spontaneous outpourings of hysteria in Los Angeles. Police files report that when officers responded to telephoned death threats against RFK during his speech at Valley College on May 15, campaign workers yelled, "We don't want you fascist police here. We didn't call for the Gestapo." The department had been widely criticized for abuses against antiwar and black activists, which included beatings and false arrests on made-up charges.

On May 29, the day after the loss in Oregon, the LAPD saw another side to Dutton during a thirteen-vehicle Kennedy motorcade through downtown Los Angeles. The head of the Traffic Bureau played hardball, instructing his commanders that "this man is on his own. No service will be given other than that which would be given any other citizen." Officers were assigned to accompany the motorcade only; they were not to act as escorts, and no traffic violations were to be allowed.

The Los Angeles Times reported the incident the following day in a story titled "Police Charge 100 Traffic Violations to Kennedy Caravan." The Kennedy campaign had contracted Riggs Funeral Home to provide seven motorcycle escort riders for the motorcade. As thousands lined the streets to see the senator, the civilian escorts started running red lights and blocking intersections, and the police stepped in with verbal warnings.

"We've been booby-trapped by Mayor Yorty," a Kennedy aide grumbled later. When a colleague sought permission for the motorcade to disregard traffic signals that morning, "he was told police did not have the authority to grant such immunity."

At one point in the motorcade, at Ninth and Santee, Kennedy was tugged from his car by a large, enthusiastic crowd. Sergeant Paul Duncan, a motorcycle cop, feared for Kennedy's safety. When he plunged into the crowd to help, Kennedy berated him: "I don't need your help. We did not ask for you. We don't want you." ''I'm sorry," said Duncan, and withdrew.

Dutton grabbed Duncan by the arm and said, ''I'm the chief security officer here. We didn't ask for you, and we don't want you here. So leave.... I know what you guys on motorcycles will do. You have a reputation. You will gun your motorcycles into the crowd and run over the people to keep them back so that our man cannot talk to them. We have been in Los Angeles twice, and it happened the same way the last time .... I'm going to report you."

As the motorcade continued, police telling the crowd to keep back were drowning out the senator. Dutton ran up to two motorcycle officers: "Why don't you bastard cops get out of the way? All you bastards want to do is push people around and fuck over them. They're going right back into the street to shake hands with him anyway, you stupid ass."

The officers considered arresting Dutton for breach of the peace and filed a complaint about his vulgar language, but after the assassination, all charges were "withdrawn in the interest of justice."

It was an extraordinary performance from the mild-mannered Dutton but captured the deep unease about authoritarian tactics in the face of popular expression at the time. As a regent on the board of the University of California, Dutton championed student protesters at Berkeley's People's Park and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, often clashing with Governor Ronald Reagan.

***

The LAPD final report on the assassination acknowledges hostile relations with the Kennedy camp: "During the primary campaign ... Department security policies and the attitude of Senator Kennedy came into conflict ... immeasurably affecting the conditions which existed just prior to the assassination." But the report is evasive in explaining why there was no police protection at the Ambassador hotel that night, turning strangely philosophical: "The ultimate question which will be asked is whether law enforcement in a free society can provide the necessary security for its leaders and political candidates [given] the right of individuals to come and go freely whenever they wish and ... to be free from the unsolicited concern of others."

Barry told the LAPD he was responsible for the liaison between Kennedy staff and law enforcement agencies. A contact in the Department of Justice kept him apprised of any threats against the senator and the identification of possible suspects in cities on their schedule during the campaign. When additional protection was considered necessary, Barry would contact the Kennedy advance man in that city, who would make arrangements with the local police. He said motorcade escorts were hired for crowd control, not protection, and he had not contacted the LAPD with a request for security for the Ambassador Hotel. Barry admitted that Kennedy was extremely difficult to protect. In fact, he had intended to discuss security with the senator when they got back to New York.

Los Angeles Police Department policy was that they did not provide security for visiting VIPs, unless specifically asked. The day after the shooting, LAPD spokesman Inspector Peter Hagan told the LA Times, "We were not there because we were not wanted. These candidates never want us around. They want to get with the people. They think we get in the way. This was true of President John Kennedy ... and especially true with Robert Kennedy. He has told us on several occasions that he didn't want us around. In any case, we would never attend a private party unless we were asked, and we definitely were not asked."

Chief Reddin and Mayor Yorty also said they were never asked to provide security. Interviewed in 1976, Reddin said, "Robert Kennedy very definitely wanted no part of us from the beginning of the trip, despite implicit hazards .... He blocked us out of the Ambassador, where we were allowed only outside plainclothes and traffic details. Had we been able to control security from the start, certainly the attack on him quite possibly could have been averted." In a further interview, Reddin was more blunt: "The indisputable fact is that he told us to get lost -- and he paid for that order with his life."

Kennedy's press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, and Pierre Salinger refute this -- Salinger said they asked for protection, and the LAPD refused. No paperwork has been produced by either side, so it's hard to know how much of this is face-saving.

***

In the days before the California primary, strange things were afoot at the hotel. Busboy Juan Romero told the FBI that two days before the shooting, he was approached at work by two white men wearing Kennedy pendants on chains around their necks. One was "very stout, about six feet tall and 45 years old" and asked Romero where he could get a hotel jacket like the one Romero was wearing. He said they were police officers, but Romero did not ask for or see any identification. Romero reluctantly took the men down to the supply room, but it was closed. He never saw the men again.

Later the same day, two Caucasian males returned to the Uniform Room and asked Frances Bailey for two waiters' jackets, so they could get in to see the senator while he was at the hotel. She refused. While she could not provide a description, she felt neither of the men was Sirhan.

Sometime during the evening of June 4, student Mark Armbruster tried to enter the Embassy Ballroom by going through the kitchen. Two men stopped him -- one a security guard in uniform, the other in a suit. The man in the suit stated, ''I'm a sergeant, Los Angeles Police Department; you can't come in here." He produced some sort of badge, and then withdrew it. Armbruster then left the kitchen and went back out into the lobby as the same man positioned the uniformed guard outside the kitchen doors.

Armbruster didn't think anything of the incident until he heard there were no LAPD officers present at the hotel prior to the shooting. He described the man as a male Caucasian in his thirties, six foot one, 170 pounds, dark hair with a slight touch of gray. This was too young to be William Gardner or Fred Murphy, both retired LAPD lieutenants and the only plainclothes hotel security officers. Who was this man, quite possibly positioning Thane Cesar? Could it have been Gene Scherrer? The LAPD never followed up.

***

And so, on the night of June 4, Kennedy's security was in the hands of Bill Barry alone. He was not armed -- primarily because he worked in crowds, "where a gun would be impractical." If Barry lost the senator, there was no protection.

One of the most elusive aspects of the assassination is the last-minute route switch that propelled the senator headlong into the pantry toward a waiting gunman. How did Sirhan know that Kennedy would be coming through the pantry after the speech, when the decision was made only five minutes before? And if there was a conspiracy, how was the senator manipulated into the "killing zone," a narrow, dimly lit, and poorly guarded corridor where press came looking for sandwiches, and waiters and an off-guard Kennedy entourage mingled in a euphoric mood?

***

After the polls closed at eight o'clock, huge crowds began building in the hotel's two main ballrooms for Kennedy's anticipated victory speech. According to Richard Kline, PR director for Kennedy's California campaign, the original plan was for the senator to speak first to seven hundred Kennedy staff and news media in the Embassy Ballroom on the second floor. He would then go downstairs to address the overflow crowd of supporters in the Ambassador Room directly below before meeting twenty selected newsmen in his fifth-floor suite and going on to a private victory party at the Factory, a Hollywood club part-owned by Pierre Salinger.

Image
Kennedy snapped by a supporter as he arrived on stage. To his left, California Speaker Jesse Unruh; to his right, his wife, Ethel, and hotel captain Karl Uecker.

Image
LAPD diagram showing the second-floor layout of the Ambassador Hotel. At bottom left, the West Venetian Room, where Sirhan visited the Rafferty party. At bottom right, the Palm Court, from where he went outside to a patio area and met Rabago and Cordero. They went inside to the lobby, and at one point Sirhan was seen staring at the Teletype machines in the Colonial Room, center right. Senator Kennedy spoke from the podium on the north wall of the Embassy Ballroom, then went backstage. Instead of turning left and going downstairs to the Ambassador Ballroom, he turned right and went through the kitchen en route to the Colonial Room. The fire doors in the southwest corner of the Embassy Ballroom can be seen in the top left corner of the Embassy Ballroom. Sandra Serrano sat on a fire escape below these doors.

Kline expected a press briefing around nine thirty but the vote count dragged on much longer, so he moved it to the Colonial Room, a space assigned to the "writing press," a short walk from the Embassy Ballroom through the pantry.

Fred Dutton and Bill Barry were in charge of the senator's movements, with Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson helping out on crowd control. Barry didn't ask for help from hotel security and worked with Uno Timanson, VP of banquet and sales, to move the senator around the building. Out front clearing a path for the senator were advance man Jack Gallivan and assistant maitre d' Eddie Minasian. As Ethel was pregnant, Rosey was assigned to her that night.

Close to midnight, the networks were projecting a comfortable victory, so Kennedy went down to address the crowds. To huge cheers, he emerged through a door to the right of the stage (stage left) and walked up some wooden steps to the speaker's platform.

As Kennedy spoke, the temporary stage was jammed with so many people, Timanson feared it might collapse. It had been raised and extended out eight feet for the night. Behind the gold curtain was a two-foot drop into darkness onto the regular stage. From there, a door led out to a dim backstage hallway.

Three FBI photos reconstruct Kennedy's route from the stage.

Image
Top: The podium where Kennedy spoke, with curtain drawn back to reveal the door to the back hallway. The stage was raised and extended out on a temporary platform for Kennedy's speech, so he jumped down onto the permanent stage as he left after his speech.

Image
Center: Light spills from the stage through the door to the back hallway. In the distance are the swinging doors to the pantry.

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Bottom: The swinging doors to the pantry, viewed from the backstage hallway. Kennedy walked through these on his way to the stage, and then back through them on his way to the Colonial Room.

To the left was a staircase leading down to the Ambassador Ballroom. To the right lay the pantry and the Colonial Room.

Behind Kennedy stood smiling German assistant maitre d' Karl Uecker, in a black tuxedo. Tonight, Karl was in charge of the Embassy Ballroom. His boss, maitre d' Angelo Di Pierro, had briefed him, and now he stood poised behind Kennedy, ready to help him leave: "I was going to take him behind the stage, and we were supposed to go downstairs to the Ambassador Ballroom where he had more guests, and he was going to make another speech there."

Di Pierro watched from the wings, waiting for the senator to come back out the same door he entered.

But after the speech, to almost everyone's surprise, Kennedy didn't go downstairs to the Ambassador Room. Amid confusion onstage, he was ushered through the gold curtain at the back of the platform by Uecker and led through the backstage area to the door into the backstage hallway. Instead of turning left and walking down a back staircase to speak to the crowd downstairs, he was led to his right through double swinging doors into the pantry, en route to an impromptu press conference in the Colonial Room. Within seconds, he was shot.

One of the first things the LAPD wanted to know in the early phase of their investigation was: Who changed the plans? When and why?

***

Detectives got to work immediately and interviewed Dutton and Barry at five o'clock that morning, while the senator was still in surgery. Both interviews were audiotaped, and this is what Dutton said:

"While the senator was speaking, Barry and I went to look to see what would be the route to take him from the stage to where he went next. There was one possibility of his going off to the right of the stage and down a flight of stairs to an overflow crowd in a room on the next lower floor.

"However, in order to avoid further crowd scenes which we had in the Embassy Room ... and because we had a number of reporters waiting to talk to him, we decided to take him ... to a press room adjoining the Embassy Room. Barry and I saw the senator was speaking, walked that route, through the hallway where the shooting finally occurred. Walked over, walked back very quickly. As far as we know, nobody knew what we were doing or why we were there. We came back and went up on the stage."

In a telephone interview with the LAPD three months later, Dutton told a similar story. "It was a last-minute decision I would say made within five minutes before the shooting occurred ... and only Barry and I really knew about it."

During the speech, Dutton said he and Barry left stage right, "circled around in back of the stage, and went straight down through the narrow hallway [the pantry] to the press room." They stayed there "for less than thirty seconds, standing just inside the door there, and then walked back until the senator was finished speaking."

Dutton didn't notice Sirhan in the pantry during this trial run and didn't tell anyone else about the change -- "Barry and I were really the only ones [who knew] .... We didn't stand around discussing it. We just walked through. There is no reason, unless Sirhan knew our movements, which I doubt that he did, to let him know why we were walking it." Either Sirhan was "entirely fortuitous" or somehow, he knew about the change. Dutton and Barry then returned to their positions at stage left, expecting the senator to leave the same way he had entered.

***

But between the Dutton interviews that bookended their investigation, the LAPD struggled to confirm this was the case. A Colonial Room Progress Report dated July 30 states, seven weeks after the shooting, '''When was the decision made?' and 'Why?' cannot be answered at this time."

Part of the problem was that key individuals were not asked the right questions by investigators. Bill Barry was interviewed right after Dutton at Good Samaritan at 5:05 in the morning but never mentioned the walk-through to investigators and was never asked about it in subsequent interviews.

To further muddy the waters, three other versions of this walk-through were described to investigators, causing some confusion about who did this last-minute route scout. Thirty-year-old Kennedy volunteer Thadis Heath told the LAPD he did it with Dutton:

"During [Kennedy's] speech, Fred Dutton came to me and asked me to go with him as he wanted to check a rear hallway." They passed hotel staff in the pantry, "stayed about four or five minutes in the press room, then returned ... through the rear door to the stage."

Hotel liaison Uno Timanson told the FBI he also scouted the route. The first he knew of a route change was just before the end of the speech, when Dutton asked him if there were television sets in the Ambassador Room downstairs. Timanson said there were, and Dutton decided that as the crowd downstairs was already watching the speech on TV, the senator would go straight to the Colonial Room.

Timanson then left the podium to check out the Colonial Room and returned to tell Dutton there were only four or five people there. Dutton wasn't bothered. Kennedy had gone to the press room right after his victories in Indiana and Nebraska, so Dutton knew the press would go there after the speech.

Advance man Jack Gallivan told the FBI he accompanied Timanson on this route scout. They then returned to the stage and advised that the most convenient way for the senator to leave was the same way he had entered -- through the door at stage left.

Timanson and Gallivan then left the platform and began clearing the way through the pantry. Gallivan said there was no question in his mind as to the safety of the senator -- "instead of a spirit of tight security, there was a spirit of relaxation and celebration."

Word filtered through to the security guards, and just before the end of the speech, Ace guard Stanley Kawalec was instructed by hotel guard Tom Perez to clear the crowd in the kitchen area, as the senator would be coming through.

***

The LAPD never made any attempt to clarify these conflicting accounts. NBC Unit Manager James Marooney later confirmed to the FBI that he had accompanied Dutton and Barry off the stage to check out the Colonial Room, so the net result seems to be this: Dutton, hearing that the impatient and unruly crowd below was watching the senator's speech on television, decided on the route switch. He then walked the route himself with Barry and, possibly, Heath. Timanson and Gallivan did a second check after this.

But what's puzzling is that even during the trial, Bill Barry never mentioned this. If Barry did check the kitchen, why didn't he notice Sirhan standing on a tray stacker as he walked past?

***

If this had been the only change made during the speech, Kennedy might have survived. Yes, he would now enter the "killing zone," but his bodyguard, Bill Barry, customarily led the way, with CBS cameraman James Wilson and his team providing a security wedge in front of the senator -- a wedge a gun would need to penetrate to get within an inch of the senator's head.

But amid the confusion of the route change, a second change concerning how the senator would leave the stage proved catastrophic, catching Kennedy's security team out of position and sending the senator into the pantry fatally exposed.

***

As Kennedy finished his speech, Barry, Dutton, and Rafer Johnson started to clear a pathway for him through the crowd at the bottom of the stairs, expecting him to leave stage left, the same way he had entered. Dutton was ready to brief him on the change of plan, and Barry would lead the way back through the kitchen to the Colonial Room.

But Kennedy aides on the other side of the podium had also cleared a path stage right -- Pierre Salinger wanted the senator to come off that side and greet campaign workers at the "anchor desk," busy working the phones all night to canvass returns from colleagues across the state.

According to Kennedy fund-raiser Nina Rhodes, Salinger explained this to a tall blond man at the anchor desk during Kennedy's speech, but this man said it would take too long -- the senator would be better going off the back of the stage through the curtain. The tall blond man sounds like Uno Timanson.

The smiling man in the tuxedo standing behind Kennedy during the speech had the same idea. Karl Uecker quite logically felt that the quickest way off the stage was out through the back curtain. But none of Kennedy's party knew who Uecker was or expected the senator to leave this way, setting the scene for tragedy.

***

Standing onstage and filming these key moments was CBS cameraman James Wilson, caught as flat-footed as everyone else by what happened next. It's very poignant reviewing Wilson's footage today. Watching these images in slow motion, you realize that these thirteen seconds on a packed and noisy stage played a fateful part in the assassination. A look here, a glance there, made all the difference.

As Kennedy concluded his speech, he answered a question from newsman Andrew West, who was to the right of the podium. His pregnant wife, Ethel, and Karl Uecker waited behind him, shadowed by Rosey Grier. On a concurrent audio track, Fred Dutton is heard telling someone, "Yes, we're gonna go for a press conference."

As Kennedy turned away from the crowd, he moved stage right, and Karl Uecker tapped him on the right shoulder. Kennedy turned around to see Uecker and Ethel at midstage. His eye was caught by Uecker's right hand, beckoning him toward the curtain. Another hand beckoned to Uecker's right and a voice shouted, "Senator! Senator, this way!" The voice may be Uecker's colleague Eddie Minasian, waving from beside the curtain.

Bill Barry was caught out of position on the left side of the stage. As Kennedy was distracted, Ethel and Rosey Grier spotted Barry shaking his head and pointing frantically back the way they had come. We hear, "No, Rosey, no, no!" -- possibly Barry shouting to Grier that they're going the wrong way.

But in the maelstrom, Kennedy didn't see Barry. He pointed stage right and seemed to ask Uecker, "Aren't we going this way?" Uecker shook his head, parted the gold curtain, and ushered him off the back. Kennedy turned and followed Uecker and Minasian through the gold curtain, jumped down two feet onto the regular stage and moved quickly through the anteroom to a doorway leading into the back hallway.

At this point, nobody had told Kennedy, Minasian, or Uecker about the route change. They still thought the plan was to go downstairs to the Ambassador Ballroom.

***

Five hours later, on the ninth floor of Good Samaritan Hospital, a stunned Bill Barry remembered the scene: 'Well, the senator finished his speech and turned to leave the platform and turned the wrong way.... I called him to come back toward the kitchen ... and I wanted to lead him down the steps and someone parted the curtains in back of the platform and motioned him to jump off the platform that way and he did."

Later, at trial, Barry testified that Kennedy "was called by someone at the mid-rear of the stage, and he turned that way. The curtains were parted and he jumped down ... about three feet, I guess [into the backstage area], and of course, I was committed on the other side of the stage." Barry didn't recognize the man who beckoned Kennedy but noted he was wearing a black tuxedo.

Fred Dutton was also caught out of position: "Instead of coming off where we were, he stepped off that back side ... and because that little stage was so crowded ... we got a few feet behind him rather than being right with him like we should have been. And from then on it was -- we were rushing to catch up .... I was still not quite in the hallway when I heard the damn gun go."

***

As Grier, Dutton, and Barry helped the pregnant Ethel negotiate the two-foot drop from the stage down into the backstage area, Mrs. Kennedy told Barry to "stay with the senator," and he raced to catch up.

Uecker and Minasian emerged from the doorway at the back of the stage and turned toward the stairway to their left, leading downstairs to the Ambassador Room. Then somebody told Uecker, "No, we're not going to go there; we're going to the press room." Uecker couldn't recall who it was, "but somebody was talking to the senator and to Uno Timanson, and Uno told me, 'This way; we will go to the press room:" Uecker took Kennedy's right hand in his left and started down the ramp toward the pantry.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

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PART 2 OF 2

The only Kennedy staff with the senator at this point were advance men Jack Gallivan and Rick Rosen and press aide Judy Royer, all of whom walked ahead of the senator through the pantry. Gallivan had done the route scout with Timanson and was probably the one who redirected the senator. Gallivan, Rosen, and Timanson then led the way into the pantry, with Royer alongside.

At the time of the first shot, Gallivan and Rosen were ten or fifteen feet ahead of the senator, looking toward the Colonial Room. Timanson was six feet ahead of the senator, looking back at him and indicating which way to go, and Bill Barry had just caught up and was abreast of the senator on the outside of the crowd.

The CBS crew who normally acted as a security wedge were just entering the doors when soundman Bob Funk heard "what sounded like paper cups popping when someone stamps on them."

"Oh, my Jesus Christ!" shouted cameraman James Wilson, pounding the concrete floor. (Wilson never recovered from the shooting. He had a nervous breakdown soon after and died six months later.)

Grier, Johnson, Dutton, and Mrs. Kennedy were all just outside the double doors when they heard the shots. As Rosey shielded Mrs. Kennedy, Dutton rushed up to the senator, unbuttoned his shirt, took off his shoes, and loosened his belt. Bill Eppridge took Dutton's photograph as he stood, horrified, over Kennedy, hands to his face in anguish.

***

The LAPD ran a background check on Dutton, but it seems clear the last-minute change was a terrible accident. Dutton and Uecker have since died. Timanson still works in the hotel industry in Los Angeles but declined to discuss the case with me. Bill Barry remains close to the Kennedy family and also politely declined. "I don't answer questions; I never have. It's hard stuff and it just rakes it all up again. But, good luck."

***

The LAPD final report skirts all of these issues, stating that the reason for the press conference "was not determined" and that "as Kennedy finished his speech, one of his aides said 'This way, Senator' and he turned and exited through the rear of the stage." There's no mention of the aborted plan to go to the Ambassador Ballroom or of the unexpected way the senator left the stage, wrongfooting Barry.

***

One key question remains: How did Sirhan know Kennedy would be coming through the pantry? Perhaps he had seen Kennedy come down through the kitchen on his way to the Embassy Ballroom and assumed he would leave the same way. Perhaps he was one of several gunmen, positioned at various exits, ready to fire. Perhaps he just got lucky. But Sirhan wasn't the only one with apparent foreknowledge that Kennedy would be coming through the pantry.

***

Although the group escorting the senator down from his suite expected to go downstairs after the speech, Kennedy's press people had other plans. An hour before the speech, Pierre Salinger told assistant press secretary Dick Drayne the senator would go straight to the Colonial Room. Salinger and Drayne told reporters, and Richard Kline asked twenty-year-old press aide Judy Royer to go tell the press in the Colonial Room.

One AP reporter described a young Kennedy aide (probably Royer) coming into the busy Colonial Room between eleven fifteen and eleven thirty and briefing each member of the press individually about the press conference.

About forty-five minutes before the speech, Kline or Royer also told Captain Kenneth Held of the Los Angeles Fire Department that Kennedy would go to the press room after the speech. Held then assigned two of his men to the Colonial Room to cover crowd control for the press conference and requested a security guard to keep the public out.

So, while the group with Kennedy thought he was going downstairs, his press aides, the press themselves, and the hotel guards all thought he was going to the Colonial Room. Though not all reporters knew about the press conference, most of the heavyweights assumed the senator would visit the press room. As columnist Jimmy Breslin told the police, he "always did."

***

Whether Sirhan picked up on any of this, we don't know. As we've seen, around 11:45, a group of waiters were talking in the kitchen when Sirhan approached Martin Patrusky and asked, "Is Mr. Kennedy coming through here?" He then asked Jesus Perez the same question three or four times. Patrusky and Perez didn't know. Sirhan had already seen the teletype machines in the Colonial Room and may have assumed Kennedy would go to the press room after the speech.

***

When I've discussed the possibility of a planned assassination with covert operatives, one key question is always asked -- how was the senator manipulated into the "killing zone?" Was there someone inside the Kennedy party or among the hotel staff wittingly or unwittingly feeding information to the assassins about the senator's plans? The chaos outlined above seems to preclude this, but it's equally possible a well-planned assassination conspiracy would position shooters both in the pantry and downstairs in the Ambassador Room.

It's difficult, though, to point a finger of suspicion at any of the characters mentioned here. Ironically, Karl Uecker, the man who led Kennedy to his death, went on to become the strongest advocate of the second-gun theory.

Remember that Uecker was set to lead Kennedy away from the kitchen when Timanson and Gallivan, on orders from Dutton, redirected him into the pantry.

All roads lead back to Fred Dutton and his tragic and fateful decision to protect his exhausted candidate from more rowdy and boisterous crowds.

The senator himself seems to have ignored Barry in his desire to avoid the crowd massing in the doorway, opting for the cleaner exit through the back curtain, which stripped him of protection. Kennedy and Barry had been inseparable throughout the campaign, and Barry, with his law enforcement background, would have had a far better chance of intercepting Sirhan than Uecker.

If there was a plan to this assassination, it's hard to discern it in this tragedy of errors.

***

The hotel security force that evening consisted of eleven hotel guards, supplemented by six men from Ace Guard Service. The Ace guards carried .38-caliber guns and nightsticks, while the hotel guards were unarmed. The force was headed by two former LAPD lieutenants -- the hotel's head of security, William F. Gardner, a retired homicide detective, and his elderly assistant, Fred "Pat" Murphy, who'd retired from the department in 1944. All guards wore gray uniforms, of either the hotel or Ace design, except Gardner and Murphy, who patrolled in plainclothes, and Ace guard Willie Bell, who turned up in a black sweater and a white helmet and "looked ridiculous."

The Kennedy campaign had used the hotel as their base in California for six weeks prior to the shooting, reserving the Royal Suite on the fifth floor for the senator. Gardner discussed security with Kennedy's staff, who "did not want anything to interfere with the Senator mingling with the people." They also made it clear the senator did not want uniformed guards with him, so Gardner saw his men's primary role as crowd control, assisted by six safety officials from the fire department.

Gardner initially placed five guards on the ground-floor Casino Level and four on the upper Lobby Level, home to the Embassy Ballroom. Five more were at regular posts around the hotel, and one on the fifth floor restricted traffic to the Kennedy suite. Gardner did not receive an itinerary for the senator, so he tried to move his guards around during the evening as conditions changed, or at the request of fire inspectors or Kennedy aides. Ace supervisor Jack Merritt checked on his men every thirty minutes.

As the Embassy Ballroom quickly filled with supporters, Kennedy press aide Hugh McDonald stood at the doors with Ace guards Jack Merritt and Albert Stowers, supervising the admission of Kennedy campaign workers and press with the correct badges.

Two guards were screening the inside stairs from the Ambassador Ballroom foyer up to the Embassy Ballroom, but it was easy to avoid the guards by going around the back way -- through the Colonial Room and serving pantry.

Fire inspectors closed the Embassy Ballroom doors at nine thirty, but Kennedy supporters continued to sneak in through the pantry, so Gardner posted Ace guard Thane Eugene Cesar there an hour later. Cesar wasn't doing a very good job, as witnesses Marcus McBroom and Valerie Schulte described freely walking though the kitchen into the ballroom. Judy Royer chased Sirhan out of the pantry, and other Kennedy staff tried to police the area. When one staff member berated Cesar for leaving the doors unattended, he shrugged and said they didn't have enough manpower.

Cesar later admitted to the police that he'd been having problems -- "Everybody imaginable was trying to sneak into the Embassy Room to see Kennedy when he come down. And the only ones that 1 was actually letting through the kitchen area was the working press. Also the staff that had staff cards that was working for Kennedy."

At nine thirty, Cesar was told that Kennedy would walk through the Embassy Ballroom to the stage. "I asked if we were to be out there to assist him through the crowd and I was told 'no.'''

Around eleven fifteen, Fred Murphy moved Cesar from the east doors of the pantry to the west swinging doors, through which Kennedy would eventually enter the pantry after the speech. Cesar was told Kennedy was coming downstairs through the kitchen area, up on the stage and then back from the stage through the pantry to the Colonial Room for a press conference. Soon after, Bill Gardner instructed Cesar to accompany Kennedy through the pantry to the Colonial Room. "He just said, 'Keep the aisle clear. Make sure that everybody's out of the way, so that Kennedy's group can walk through freely.'''

Fred Murphy could see that unauthorized people were getting into the ballroom through the kitchen, so at 11:50, he stationed himself just outside the double service doors leading into the southeast corner of the pantry from the Embassy foyer. As the crowd left after the speech, he could stop them from coming through these doors and impeding the senator's short walk to the Colonial Room.

***

When Kennedy entered the Embassy Ballroom from the back hallway, Gardner was at the doorway with hotel guard Thomas Perez. At this point, four hotel guards and three Ace guards were in the vicinity of the pantry. Perez stood by the door to the Embassy Ballroom, Kawalec by the door to the rear of the stage, and Cesar by the west swinging doors into the pantry. Ace guards Jack Merritt and Albert Stowers were on the main doors to the Embassy Ballroom, Arthur Maddox was at the main entrance to the Colonial Room, and Fred Murphy was outside the service doors leading from the Embassy foyer into the southwest corner of the pantry. None of these guards reported seeing Sirhan before the shooting.

Perez was told to keep his doorway clear, as Kennedy would leave the same way he came in. "They told us he was supposed to come through this door and leave down these steps, that's the route we had, but the crowd he had went that way through the kitchen."

Near the end of the speech, Gardner was in the rear hallway behind the stage and told Kawalec to clear the crowd in the kitchen area, as the senator would be coming through. As Karl Uecker led Kennedy toward the swinging doors leading into the pantry, Thane Cesar grabbed the senator by the right elbow. They walked toward the steam tables and the senator stopped to shake hands.

When Cesar looked up, he saw a hand with a gun, the shots went off, and he fell back against the ice machines. Stanley Kawalec was up ahead, still pushing the crowd back, when he heard four shots. Tom Perez was being pushed toward the swinging doors and heard seven shots, one after the other. Then everyone went wild, yelling, "Close the doors! Call the police! Call an ambulance!" Elizabeth Evans emerged from the pantry with blood streaming from her head, and Perez helped her onto a table in the ballroom as Kawalec joined hands with two firemen to hold the crowd back in the pantry.

Fred Murphy was blocking the service doors leading into the southwest corner of the pantry: "I was standing with my back to the door, facing where these people would endeavor to come in and I heard a series of what appeared to be shots" -- three at first, then a series. "I immediately jumped through the door in the direction of where I heard the shots .... I observed several men screaming, 'Kill him! Kill him!' and women who appeared to be hysterical, yelling." No one obstructed his entry or walked past him toward the exit. Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson were struggling with the suspect, and Karl Uecker had his arm around the suspect's neck. Murphy identified himself as a former police lieutenant and tried to get the gun from Sirhan but was pushed away. Then Rosey got the gun and passed it to Rafer, who put it in his pocket. Murphy then ran for a telephone and called the police and ambulance from the bell captain's desk.

***

Over the years, Thane Eugene Cesar has emerged as the lead suspect in the search for a second gunman, and his story is explored in depth in Chapter 13. But much can be gained from the interviews with other security guards that night. Among the most puzzling are the interviews with the hotel's head of security, William F. Gardner. He gave conflicting accounts of his actions before the shooting, and his immediate response was frankly bizarre.

Three days after the shooting, in the first of five FBI interviews, Gardner said that shortly after midnight, he was at the bottom of the inside staircase leading down from the backstage area of the Embassy Ballroom, with Ace guard Willie Bell and hotel guard Lloyd Curtis. He was there at the request of a Kennedy aide who said the senator would come down those stairs to go to the Ambassador Room for another speech. Gardner understood that the senator would then go down the fire escape to his car and leave the hotel. The next part of the report is very strange:

"At approximately 12:20 a.m., a female aide of Senator Kennedy came to where he was located and advised him that there had been a terrible accident. She did not tell him anything about a shooting at that time." Gardner didn't hear any gunshots and estimated it "was probably fifteen minutes after the actual shooting ... that he heard Senator Kennedy had been shot." Gardner told the FBI that he didn't walk up the stairs to "the level where the shooting took place until sometime after Senator Kennedy and the other wounded individuals had been taken from that location."

Gardner's statements are simply not credible. What was the terrible accident the Kennedy aide described? If she didn't tell him about a shooting, what did she tell him and what did he do to respond? All he had to do was climb the stairs; the pantry would have been right in front of him. He would be able to command the scene of the "terrible accident" until the police arrived.

Instead, as hysteria spread through the hotel in reaction to the shooting, the head of security would have us believe he heard nothing about it for fifteen minutes and didn't check the crime scene until the senator had been evacuated from the building. None of these statements were challenged at any point by the investigators. Police interviews with Curtis and Bell, who were with Gardner at the time, render his statements completely untenable.

At 11:25, Gardner let Curtis take a break and told him to report back to the Ambassador Ballroom, "where Mr. Kennedy was supposed to speak later." When Curtis came back at midnight, Gardner told him to clear the way to the lower ballroom.

Curtis said Gardner then "went upstairs to see how the situation was and when he came back down, he just shook his head and said 'forget about it.' And then a girl came down, crying, screaming and hollering. She sat about halfway down the stairway and started crying .... 'It couldn't be true, it couldn't be true,' she just kept repeating .... So then, another girl came down beside her, she was also in hysterics .... This was the stairway leading right in the corridor where he was shot."

"And Mr. Gardner was with you?"

"Yes ... and a gentleman came down right after her and ordered myself and another guard, an Ace guard, to 'lock the doors,' 'lock the doors.' Kept on screaming, 'lock the doors.' ... Well, anyway, me and Mr. Gardner, we shut the doors."

Curtis was with Willie Bell, an Ace guard who hadn't brought the right uniform -- in his black sweater and white helmet, Curtis thought he "looked ridiculous." Both men were standing at the bottom of the stairs, by the fire doors, at the time of the shooting.

Willie Bell confirmed Curtis's story. He was at the bottom of the stairs when two women came and sat on the steps, saying Mr. Kennedy had been shot. Both men agreed the first girl had a pink dress and the second girl wore blue. Bell chained the doors and stopped people going up the stairs to the kitchen. Neither man heard shots, but Bell heard shouts of "Kill him, Rosey!" and "Take the gun, even if you have to break his fingers" (reporter Andrew West).

Clearly, from Curtis's account, Gardner lied to the FBI and was in the vicinity of the pantry at the time of the shooting. He knew what happened, walked away shaking his head, and by his account, didn't return until Kennedy had left the building.

***

Gardner's accounts of where Kennedy was going after the speech also seemed to fluctuate every time he was asked. At 11:25, he gave Curtis instructions to clear a path to the Ambassador Ballroom, yet Gardner later told the FBI he understood Kennedy would proceed to the Colonial Room for a press conference after the speech.

Kawalec told the FBI that while he was standing in the rear hallway behind the stage as Kennedy was completing his speech, Gardner moved him into the pantry to clear a path for the senator. Gardner told the FBI and LAPD that near the end of the speech in this same rear hallway, a female Kennedy aide in her mid-thirties, in a green dress, advised him the senator was not going to return via the kitchen, but was going to go directly downstairs and out the fire exit to his waiting car. She asked him to clear a pathway for the senator's exit, so Gardner telephoned his gate man and verified that the car was in front of the hotel. He then added two guards and went to the bottom of the stairs himself, to clear the area for the Kennedy party.

But the two guards, Curtis and Bell, were already at the bottom of the stairs expecting Kennedy to go to the Ambassador Room. Gardner said he assumed Kennedy would no longer go to the Colonial Room but did not remove any of the guards from the kitchen area. In fact, he had just moved Kawalec into the pantry.

Why, in the space of six days, Gardner gave such conflicting accounts of where the senator would go next is a mystery. As with his disappearance after the shooting, he was never challenged on these inconsistencies.

In a later FBI interview, Gardner stated that he "selected two waiter captains to lead the Kennedy procession to and from the Embassy Room where Senator Kennedy was to speak." As we know, Uecker and Minasian expected to go downstairs to the Ambassador Room but were diverted by somebody at the rear doorway, instructing them to turn right into the kitchen. Gardner was at this doorway as Kennedy was completing his speech. Did Gardner give the order to Uecker and Minasian to change direction? This question was never asked by investigators.

Within two months of the shooting, Gardner left the Ambassador to go to law school. Frank Hendrix, the owner of Ace Guard Service, later told researcher Betsy Langman that Gardner committed suicide on Christmas Eve 1969. When Hendrix asked about Gardner down at the hotel, nobody would talk. I have been unable to confirm Gardner's death through a public record search, but his accounts of what he did that night remain highly suspicious.

***

There are only two pages in the investigation files for Ace supervisor Jack Merritt -- summaries of interviews with the LAPD and FBI. He gets a ten-line summary in the LAPD final report, part of which reads, "Merritt drew his gun and ran into the pantry in time to see two men struggling with Sirhan .... He observed two men and a woman walking away from him and out of the kitchen. They seemed to be smiling. He added that the woman was wearing a polka-dot dress."

The guns of Merritt and Thane Cesar were never checked by the police on the night of the shooting, and neither man was reinterviewed until 1971, when controversy about Wolfer's ballistics work accompanied allegations that Cesar had fired his gun in the pantry.

Twelve days after interviewing Cesar, Sergeants Patchett and Sartuche traveled to Las Vegas to interview Merritt on July 26, 1971. He had moved to Vegas in August 1968 and was now the manager of the Blue Skies trailer park off the Strip. The surviving audiotape of the thirty-minute interview makes one wonder how on earth Merritt's story was ignored for so long. He gives measured answers throughout, reflecting his experience in law enforcement, and seems to speak through an artificial voicebox -- he would die of throat cancer in 1975.

On the night of the shooting, Merritt was forty-four years old and the supervisor for the other five Ace guards at the hotel. He was carrying a two-inch .38 revolver and stationed at the main entrance to the Embassy Ballroom with young Ace guard Albert Stowers. Every half hour, he and Stowers took turns to go check on the other men, and every so often, they went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

Merritt thought that after his speech in the Embassy Ballroom, Kennedy would go backstage, turn left, and go downstairs to the Ambassador Ballroom, to address the overflow crowd. A short time after Kennedy left the stage, a woman came running out of service doors in the southeast corner of the pantry into the hall outside the main doors of the Embassy Ballroom where Merritt was standing, yelling, "My God we need a doctor, Kennedy's been killed."

Merritt ran into the pantry through the same service doors and drew his gun. He saw Karl Uecker, Rosey Grier, and Rafer Johnson wrestling with the suspect on the steam table and went over and asked Karl what had happened. Uecker said the senator had been shot, and Merritt looked to his left and saw the senator on the floor, with Mrs. Kennedy kneeling by his side. As it took Mrs. Kennedy a minute or two to reach her husband, this must have been two or three minutes after the shooting.

Merritt stood over Kennedy for about a minute with his gun arm high and his .38 pointed toward the ceiling. There was pandemonium to the west end of the pantry by the fallen bodies of Schrade and Weisel, and to the east, as several men struggled with Sirhan. But where Merritt was, for a moment, it was calm. He looked up and saw a girl and two men standing a few feet north of him, by an opening into the main kitchen. They were all smiling, looking down at Kennedy. The girl especially had a big smile on her face and held both hands over her head in a V-for-victory sign and "yelled either, 'We shot him,' or 'He shot him,' perhaps meaning Sirhan. Twice. One of the men then took her arm and pulled her away and they all turned and left through the kitchen."

Merritt didn't get a good look at their faces, but he originally told the FBI the woman was about five-five, with light-colored hair, and wore a white dress with dark polka-dots. One of the men was six-two with dark hair and a dark suit. The other was thin, five-five or five-six, with dark hair, and was also wearing a suit.

As they left, an Ace guard walked up to him and asked, "What happened?" Merritt said Kennedy had been shot and put his gun back in his holster. He told the guard to stand there and went back through the west doors into the Embassy Ballroom to find a telephone. The other guard did not have his gun out, and the interviewers didn't even ask Merritt for a description. They knew that the only other Ace guard in the pantry was Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar told police he ran out of the pantry to alert Merritt, but in Merritt's account, he seems to disappear from the pantry after the shooting and come back minutes later, asking, "What happened?"

As the interviewers go back over Merritt's story about the girl saying "We shot him" or "He shot him," they sound increasingly troubled by what Merritt is saying, as if it's suddenly dawning on them that there may be something to this story about the girl after all. They then ask a question I have never heard on any other audiotaped police interview -- "Is it your opinion that there's a conspiracy involved here?" Merritt contemplates this for a few seconds and replies, "I would say yes." He also expresses regret that he did not pay that much attention to these three people in all the confusion.

"Did you at the time think that you should have apprehended them or attempted to?"

"Not at the time. But as the excitement wore off a little bit ... I should have tried maybe to ask what they were talking about or why they were going out through the kitchen area."

While Merritt's account has the girl and her companions fleeing on the opposite side of the hotel from where Sandra Serrano was sitting, the dress description, smile, and comments clearly echo both Serrano and Di Pierro's descriptions. But by 1971, the girl and her companions were long gone.

***

Merritt's statements deepen the cloud over Thane Eugene Cesar's movements after the shooting. Cesar claimed he ran out of the pantry to the main doors of the Embassy Ballroom and summoned Merritt into the pantry, but Merritt makes no mention of Cesar until he turns up a few minutes later as Kennedy lies on the floor. Albert Stowers, the guard stationed with Merritt, was alerted by a Kennedy aide and also doesn't mention Cesar. Stowers did not enter the pantry but stood outside the service doors with Merritt until one a.m. to block the crowd from entering -- again, he doesn't mention Cesar, who claims he did the same thing.

Where did Cesar disappear to in those few minutes after the shooting? Why did he ask Merritt what happened when he returned? Nobody can account for his movements. If he needed to get a gun out of the pantry during this time, no one was any the wiser.

In the Vegas interview, Merritt could not remember the name of the Ace guard in the pantry and the interviewers never mentioned Cesar by name, which, given the notoriety of Cesar at that point, is astonishing.

***

Merritt was a fascinating and highly credible witness. Nobody had contacted him about the case since 1968, until two days before the visit of Sartuche and Patchett. At nine on that Saturday morning, a man approached him at the trailer park and asked, "Are you Jack J. Merritt?" Merritt said he was, and the man introduced himself as a police officer from Los Angeles. When Merritt asked for ID, the man checked both sides of his jacket, said, "By golly, I think I left it at home," and without missing a beat, turned and walked all the way back down the drive out of the trailer park and onto the Strip.

Merritt thought it odd because the man didn't carry a briefcase or papers and didn't seem to have a car. He described the man as white, in his early fifties, about six-two and 220 pounds, clean cut, with "a dangling gut" and light blond hair, and dressed in a light gray suit and tie. "He was not a native of this part of the country," Merritt said.

Merritt died in West Virginia in 1975. His death certificate lists his occupation as "Retired -- Security officer" and names two companies he worked for, Hughes Corporation and Allied Security. (By then, Thane Cesar also worked for the Hughes Corporation at Hughes Aircraft, a company with known ties to the CIA.)

Thirty minutes before the shooting, as Sirhan asked the waiters which way Kennedy would come, Cesar knew the route and was ready to take the senator by the right elbow as soon as he left the stage, to lead him into the "killing zone."
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:07 pm

PART 1 OF 2

EIGHT: Sirhan's Defense Team

At 7:25 a.m. on June 5, seven hours after the shooting, John Doe was arraigned by Judge Joan Dempsey Klein in Division 40 of the Los Angeles County Municipal Court. The prisoner was represented by LA County Public Defender Richard Buckley, and Deputy District Attorney John Howard appeared for the prosecution. The complaint alleged a violation of six counts of Penal Code 217, Assault with Intent to Commit Murder, and bail was set at $250,000.

***

Later, during the trial, Sirhan told his chief defense attorney, Grant Cooper, he recalled very little of his time in custody. He chatted freely with the detectives and Dr. Crahan, who examined him, but he didn't discuss the case because "they never brought it up, sir."

He knew Kennedy was involved because he heard his name mentioned by the "lady judge" during the arraignment, but he didn't actually realize he was charged with shooting Kennedy until A.L. Wirin of the ACLU came to see him later that morning. He told defense psychiatrist Dr. Diamond he didn't give his name because he was "still dazed ... why not keep my mouth shut until I could see what the hell's going on?"

"You joked," said Diamond.

"I didn't give a shit."

"You think you were out of contact with reality?"

"I think I was high, sir."

"You were very talkative. You were willing to talk about anything except yourself."

"Hell, that's what I don't understand!" said Sirhan.

***

In the audiotapes of these sessions, Sirhan's explanation rings true. After the trial, NBC's Jack Perkins again challenged him on this point.

"You didn't know while you were being held at the police station what had happened?"

"No, sir."

"Why did you think you were there?"

"It all seemed like a nightmare to me, sir. It seemed unreal.... Nothing ever dawned on me to ask."

"But you were being held in the middle of the night in a police station, with officers all around you, and you were handcuffed. It must have occurred to you to ask, 'Why am I here?'''

"I wish I could have, sir. I wish I could have."

"Which, of course, makes it look like you knew why you were there."

"I honestly did not, sir."

"And then when the attorney Al Wirin for the Civil Liberties Union came and visited you, he told you what had happened, did he?"

"Yes, sir ... [later] he told me ... that Mr. Kennedy had ten children ... and I couldn't believe it, sir."

"That bothered you?"

"It bothered me .... The whole thing was so unreal, sir. I couldn't believe the whole thing has happened yet!"

***

Wirin later told author Robert Blair Kaiser that during his first visit with Sirhan, the young suspect whispered a confession: "You know, I did it. I shot him." "He pulled an imaginary trigger on an imaginary gun," wrote Kaiser in his book.

Wirin may have had an agenda here. He had earlier publicly defended the Warren Commission Report, which ruled out conspiracy in the JFK assassination. In a debate with assassination researcher and author Mark Lane shortly after its release, Wirin said, "I say thank God for Earl Warren. He saved us from a pogrom. He saved our nation. God bless him for what he has done in establishing that Oswald was the lone assassin." When Lane asked Wirin if he would feel the same way if Oswald were innocent, he thought for a moment and replied, "Yes, I still would say so."

***

On Friday, June 7, twenty-three witnesses were called to testify before Superior Court judge Arthur L. Alarcon and the Los Angeles County Grand Jury. A murder indictment was returned against Sirhan and in late afternoon, the court reconvened in the Chapel facility of the Los Angeles County Jail, and Sirhan was informed of the indictment. Sirhan was again represented by Public Defender Richard Buckley, who now assigned Sirhan's case to his colleague Wilbur Littlefield. Wirin was present as a "friend of the court" to ensure that Sirhan's constitutional rights were preserved.

Littlefield requested that two psychiatrists be appointed to ascertain Sirhan's mental state at the time of shooting. Dr. Eric Marcus and Dr. Edward Stainbrook were so appointed. Judge Alarcon also issued an order limiting publicity on and discussion of the case to ensure that the defendant received a fair trial. Witnesses could no longer talk to the press, by court order.

Robert Kaiser had been among a group of thirty reporters in the front yard of the Sirhan bungalow at 696 East Howard the morning after the shooting. Kaiser had just retired as a writer for Time & Life but was now pressed back into action. He watched Al Wirin pull up and go in to meet the family; two days later, after the grand jury, Kaiser gave Wirin a call.

"Mr. Wirin, I'd like an interview with the assassin," he said.

"You and all these other guys, right?" Wirin replied.

"Well, he hasn't lost his right to free speech."

"Who told you that?" asked the expert on constitutional rights.

"Well, Grant Cooper, a friend of mine."

"Wirin flashed on the name Grant Cooper," Kaiser told me, "because he was one of the most, if not the most, prominent criminal attorneys in Los Angeles at the time.

"He said, 'Do you know Grant Cooper?'

"I said, 'Yeah.'

"He asked, 'Could you persuade him to take the case?'"

Cooper was a friend of Kaiser's -- he had represented him in his divorce. On Sunday, Kaiser went over to Cooper's house and found him in an office overlooking the pool, poring over evidence for a case involving card cheating at the Friars Club, which was to start the next day.

Image
Sirhan in custody.

Cooper was sixty-five years old and one of the leading criminal defense attorneys in the country. He had recently served as president of the LA County Bar Association and the American College of Trial Lawyers. After passing the bar exam in 1927, he earned a reputation as a tough prosecutor during six years at the LA County district attorney's office. As chief deputy DA in the early forties, he successfully fought the powerful crime and gambling interests that had corrupted the mayor's office and the police force.

Cooper subsequently built up a thriving practice as a defense attorney and, in June 1967, flew halfway around the world into a war zone to win acquittal for a Marine sergeant charged with murdering a Vietnamese civilian. When asked why, Cooper replied, "I've never defended a man in a military court before."

Back by the pool, Kaiser told Cooper that Wirin was having trouble finding a private attorney for Sirhan. It wouldn't look good if Sirhan had to rely on the public defender. Cooper agreed the boy had a right to a fair trial, and agreed to take the case pro bono on one condition -- that the Sirhan case would be postponed until after the Friars Club case, which Cooper estimated would be "sometime in September."

***

The Friars Club case bears some background discussion here, as it would get Cooper into hot water later and present major conflicts of interest to his defense of Sirhan.

Cooper was defending Maurice Friedman, an obese Las Vegas hotel and casino developer, who, along with four others, had been charged in federal court with a five-year conspiracy to cheat wealthy members of the exclusive Friars Club in Beverly Hills. They had rigged gin rummy games by sending electronic signals to certain players from peepholes in the ceiling. The highly publicized scam had cheated celebrities including Phil Silvers and Zeppo Marx out of substantial sums.

One of the co-defendants was the notorious mobster Johnny Rosselli, a close associate of Friedman's who spent a lot of time at the Friars Club. The word was that Rosselli was the Chicago Mob's man on the West Coast. When he got wind of the scheme, he demanded a cut. Rosselli described himself as "an investor," and two alleged peephole operators were too scared to testify.

These were troubling bedfellows for an attorney representing Sirhan. Beside his Mob ties, Rosselli also had a strong Kennedy connection. In January 1967, Rosselli had gone public with allegations that Bobby Kennedy had gotten his brother killed by supervising assassination plots on Castro.

Image
Sirhan as he later appeared with attorneys Russell Parsons (left) and Grant Cooper (right).

Rosselli's attorney Ed Morgan leaked the story to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. When Lyndon Johnson finally learned of the plots from Anderson's boss, Drew Pearson, he called the attorney general, Ramsey Clark:

"It's incredible! ... They have a man that was ... instructed by the CIA and attorney general [Bobby Kennedy] to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs.... So he [Castro] tortured [the would-be assassins] and they told him all about it. [Castro] called Oswald and a group in and told them ... go ... get the job done."

Fifteen minutes after the shooting at the Ambassador, foreign policy adviser Walt Rostow called Johnson with the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot. Twelve minutes later, Johnson called Rostow back with questions. Johnson's handwritten notes of the conversation contain the following: "Guard him. Local FBI. Keep away from Press. Way interrogated -- not to do things that will create error. Movie made." The notes also show Johnson was still consumed with the Castro plots and seemed to connect them to RFK's shooting: "Burke Marshall [the Kennedys' lawyer] ... Ed Morgan [Rosselli's lawyer] ... Cosa Nostra [Mafia] ... Send in to get Castro ... Planning."

[Kay Griggs] You didn't used to kill women and children in war, you know, when the British army were pure, kind of. You know, you didn't go out and kill. I think at Dresden they did do some of that, but that was Walt Whitman Rostow and his crowd. And he's a very dangerous man. Because Walt Whitman Rostow is a Communist. Oh, he was one of the wise men in Kennedy's administration. I think he was probably responsible for the movement that got Kennedy murdered. I believe it was an Israeli group which did it, with some of these rogues. Walt Whitman Rostow was the one who got us into the Vietnam war because he wanted to sell the weapons and stuff. He and Victor Krulak who is the present Commandant's father, Krulak was his lackey. Walt Whitman Rostow went with General Taylor and wrote the report that got us into the Vietnam war. And all the time that the Pentagon was saying, "No, no, no, no," he was a cheerleader for the weapon sales. He and Henry Kissinger. He and Henry. Walt Whitman Rostow, Eugene Debs Rostow, these were Communists, names for Communists. Eugene Debs Rostow, and, it's either his son or his other brother, runs the big Boston mob, the Port there. His name is Nicholas Rostow.

-- Mrs. Kay Griggs on How the Government Works


Years later, Rosselli testified that he had been contracted by the CIA to oversee an assassination attempt on Castro. One account has Rosselli working with CIA operatives in Miami on the project under military cover as Colonel Rosselli. Cooper's proximity to Rosselli in this context is troubling.

***

So Cooper agreed to take the case, but only if another attorney could be found to file motions and handle the initial phases, so his future participation could be kept secret and not prejudice the jury in the Friars Club case.

Wirin went up to see Sirhan and showed him a list of five prospective attorneys. Sirhan loved reading about famous legal cases and recognized Cooper's name right away. On Tuesday, June 11, Sirhan signed retainers for Cooper and two other lawyers Cooper wanted to bring into the case -- Herman Selvin and Joseph Ball, who had served on the Warren Commission. When both turned Cooper down, the attorney asked Kaiser about the other two names on the list.

"Russell Parsons and Luke McKissack."

"Let's have Parsons take over," said Cooper. "I don't know McKissack and I've worked with Russ before."

Russell Parsons was seventy-three years old and had been practicing law for more than fifty years. Like Cooper, he had worked for the LA County DA's office as a prosecutor in the late thirties and, before that, had gained some notoriety defending a murderer called "Rattlesnake" James, who tried to kill his wife by forcing her foot into a box of rattlesnakes. When that didn't work, he drowned her. By filing numerous appeals, Parsons managed to keep James from the gallows for seven years, at a time when appeals were rarely successful.

On June 19, over breakfast, Al Wirin offered Parsons the chance to handle the Sirhan case while Cooper was busy with the Friars Club trial. Parsons immediately accepted and, by noon, was on his way to visit Sirhan in his cell. Sirhan seemed delighted to finally have an attorney of his own, and Parson's feisty, talkative style seemed to put the young prisoner at ease.

Parsons returned to his office to find fifty reporters waiting for him and his phones ringing off the hook. He told the collected newsmen that he would represent Sirhan without a fee as a public service -- "there's a poor devil in trouble and that's enough for me." Asked his age, Parsons replied, "In the late sixties, that good enough? Who are you going to tell? Some girl?"

Parsons said he'd be joined later by another attorney, but newspaper speculation that this might be Cooper was met with a flat denial from Cooper himself -- "Definitely, positively, unequivocally, no."

***

Parsons also brought some odd baggage to the case. As Kaiser notes, in the forties, when he was defending some well-known members of the Mob, a deputy DA named Grant Cooper tried to run them out of town. The LAPD substantiated claims that Parsons had represented mobster Mickey Cohen's henchmen, the Sica brothers, dating back to the mid-fifties.

Parsons also held a grudge against Bob Kennedy. When Kennedy was an investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee, he once paid a call on Parsons's banker in LA, wanting to know "if Parsons was holding any funds for Murray Chotiner." Chotiner once shared an office with Parsons and had raised funds for Richard Nixon through Mickey Cohen. Parsons couldn't get a loan from his bank as a result -- "Kennedy hurt me with my banker. He was a dirty son of a bitch and I never forgave him for that."

***

Also waiting with the press in Parsons's office that first day was his routine investigator and process-server, Michael McCowan, and his partner, Ron Allen. When the press left, McCowan told Parsons, "I know you need help. I'll drop everything I'm doing." "And so they went right to work with me," recalled Parsons, again without a fee.

McCowan was a thirty-four-year-old former Marine who had served ten years in the LAPD while putting himself through law school. Kaiser later described him as "a natty Irishman with clear, blue eyes and a roguish smile" who drove around town in an air-conditioned Cadillac.

After graduating from law school, his ambition to be an attorney was set back when he resigned from the LAPD in 1965 "in lieu of disciplinary action after being arrested for theft and tampering" with U.S. mail. According to police reports, McCowan got involved with a pretty blond housewife named Jean Ortiz. McCowan helped send her husband to prison on a burglary charge, then started sharing the Ortiz bedroom, leading to a divorce suit from McCowan's wife. One LAPD report continues: "Ms. Ortiz' charms weren't the only thing that interested officer McCowan ... the woman's husband had gathered a small arsenal of weapons in the home and McCowan ... took possession of them. Then, too, Mrs. Ortiz had three diamond rings valued at about $4500. She decided she wanted to send the rings to her sister in the East to get money that would help pay her husband's legal bills. Wearing civvies, McCowan went to the post office and mailed the rings. A short time later he returned in police uniform, persuaded postal officials to hand over the rings, then took them and sold them."

***

Parsons defended McCowan during his legal difficulties -- "The trial of McCowan itself would make a book! He was a detective, worked on a case and got involved with two women, which of course is the kiss of death! They claimed that he stole their jewelry. They were angry with him ... he had intercourse with them!"

Parsons helped McCowan appeal a five-year sentence, and on January 29, 1968, McCowan was given three years' probation. Parsons was a client of Ron Allen Associates, a successful attorney service run by McCowan and Allen. They had six or seven men serving papers for law firms, and McCowan did a lot of the routine investigation. When Parsons became Sirhan's attorney, they came with him. Allen later rued ever getting involved:

"Our firm handled the investigation for Parsons .... The Sirhan case is the reason Mike and I aren't in business anymore .... We lost our shirt. ... We put in eight or nine months on that case.... We had a good investigation business going .... It all went right down the tubes because of the Sirhan case.... It's a very touchy subject. I lost a lot of friends on the Sirhan thing .... I was threatened with bombs .... I was spit on."

***

Today, Mike McCowan lives in a beautiful house, full of Chinese antiquities, in California wine country. I visited one Sunday in late 2006 and found him a real gentleman as we chatted for four hours about the case while his charming wife painted in her studio out back. When I first made contact with him, McCowan had just taken his files out of storage and was planning to give them to the Secret Service Museum. His only previous interview about the Sirhan case was given to researcher Betsy Langman in 1973.

He showed me his archive -- a sketch of Sirhan by courtroom artist Howard Brodie signed by Sirhan: "Mike, you're a hell of an investigator, Sirhan Sirhan"; and a telegram for Mary Sirhan: "Please accept my sincerest and deepest sympathy, Marguerite C. Oswald." Mrs. Sirhan gave it to him as a memento.

When we sat down for the interview, my cameraman and I couldn't help feeling Michael seemed quite nervous. He was hard to maintain eye contact with and his voice quavered a little -- we weren't sure why. Perhaps he was feeling defensive, worried that we were going to rub his nose in all the bad press he'd had over the years. He's been accused of being a plant on the defense team for the FBI or the CIA, or both.

"When I got asked to come into the case," he explained, "I knew there wasn't a lot of monetary remuneration, but it was an exciting thing to do and I was doing quite fine financially, so I could afford to do it. And I like to investigate things; I really wanted to find out really what happened. And I really tried to find out to the best of my ability if there was a conspiracy. If Sirhan acted alone or if he didn't."

When I asked Michael about the mail fraud conviction, he rubbed his eye uncomfortably. "I think several people thought I got a really bad deal. A really bad deal. Because the two officers that were supposed to testify for me didn't testify or were scared to testify ... they were worried about their job. And so they left me sitting out on a branch. And I've talked to both of them people and they know how I feel."

***

On July 3, 1968, Jacquelyn Caporozzo notified detectives that six months earlier -- around the time his probation started -- McCowan had asked her to keep a collection of guns in her house for safekeeping: "He told her that he had confiscated them from Jean Ortiz who had been involved in a burglary with her husband and that the guns were possibly stolen. Los Angeles Police detectives took four rifles, two shotguns, eight pistols and one automatic .25 caliber pistol into custody."

Even though McCowan had successfully appealed his conviction, it seems he was still hiding a cache of possibly stolen guns from Jean Ortiz. This was a clear violation of his probation, so before the case had even started, the LAPD had the goods on McCowan, though he was never prosecuted or suffered any probation-related consequences.

***

Two weeks into the Friars Club trial, Grant Cooper also found himself in trouble for the first time in his career. On July 23, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Nissen spotted a transcript of comedian Phil Silvers's grand jury testimony lying on Cooper's counsel table -- in federal cases, such transcripts are sealed by court order. Cooper was called into chambers by U.S. District Judge William P. Gray and asked for an explanation the following day.

He pleaded innocent -- "I found it on the table in the courtroom. I have no knowledge how it got there." That night, he reportedly went home and burned three other transcripts before further questioning in chambers two days later. It soon emerged that Cooper had been trying to obtain the transcripts for six months, finally receiving the stolen transcripts from a co-counsel two weeks before the trial began. The truth would out, however, and soon Cooper had an indictment hanging over him.

***

So with Cooper obtaining stolen grand jury transcripts for a Mob front man in federal court and a chief defense investigator with a probation violation hanging over him, the defense team set to work.

As the forty-member SUS team and the FBI conducted well-resourced investigations, McCowan was, in his own words, a "lonesome cowboy" following up leads on witnesses by reading the grand jury transcript and press reports. He would not see any police or FBI files until the first motion for discovery was granted by the court in mid-October.

"Russell, I think, was like late seventies," McCowan told me, "and he didn't have a lot of energy, so I basically tried to hold the thing together until Grant Cooper could get there .... I'd go over to the federal courthouse and speak with him from time to time." But Cooper didn't really want to think about the Sirhan case until the Friars Club trial was over, and, in the meantime, the prosecution wasn't making life any easier.

"The police were not cooperative with us," recalled Parsons. "Did Mike tell you how the police refused to let us look at their reports? The FBI denied to McCowan they were even investigating the case and told witnesses not to speak to us. The D.A. and the Sheriff and the FBI stopped the people at the little hospital in Corona from giving us any information about Sirhan getting his head injury after he was thrown off a race-horse. Whatever I got from the police, I had to wring out of them." According to McCowan's partner, Ron Allen, the defense team was also put under surveillance by the LAPD, and the FBI had their phones tapped.

Image
Robert Kaiser shakes hands with Sirhan as the rest of the defense team looks on: (left to right) McCowan, Parsons, Cooper.

***

On August 2, Sirhan pleaded not guilty to murder and intent to commit murder, and Parsons strongly hinted that the defense strategy would be based on the California legal definition of "diminished capacity" -- that Sirhan did not have the emotional or mental capacity to meaningfully and maturely reflect on the gravity of his contemplated act.

Parsons's main worry at this point was money for the defense. Nobody was getting paid, but there were expenses to cover, and writer Bob Kaiser told Cooper he had a possible solution: "I said, 'Look, Grant ... I know there's no money here, the family is poor but I can do some journalism and sell some stories to Life magazine and maybe some European magazines like Paris-Match and I can generate some funds, so you don't have to go into this thing out of your own pocket.' And he flashed on that, he kind of liked that idea and that's what I did. So, once I got Cooper in the case, he got me in the case. He made me an investigator for the defense."

Parsons met Kaiser and agreed to bring him on board, and a deal was struck whereby Kaiser would contribute half of his earnings from magazine articles and a book on the case to the defense in return for access. But Parsons wouldn't let Kaiser anywhere near Sirhan until he came through with some money. In the meantime, Kaiser worked with McCowan on the investigation. They prepared discovery motions to find out what the prosecution knew about Sirhan and interviewed witnesses.

Kaiser eventually contributed $32,000 to the defense team, a figure dwarfed by the $203,656 spent by the prosecution, but much needed at the time.

So now there were four on the defense team, split into two camps -- McCowan and Parsons on one side; Kaiser and Cooper on the other. Kaiser knew that Cooper had control of the case and that Parsons needed Kaiser for the money. But Parsons remained skeptical: "Kaiser did little for us. I never trusted Kaiser! I trusted McCowan. McCowan didn't like Kaiser and vice versa. He called him 'a failed priest' [he had spent some time in the seminary], digging up sensational facts about the Kennedy case to sell his book, digging up as many conspiracies as he could find." McCowan told Betsy Langman, "I did the defense investigation alone .... Sirhan hated Kaiser's guts.... He liked me because I had a law degree."

In his book, Kaiser later described Parsons as "garrulous, funny, senile and a fool.... Cooper wanted an attorney who wasn't going to take over the case, somebody who would do what he was told, and not be a problem later on. So he got harmless old Russell Parsons ... and Parsons enjoyed his few months basking in the publicity and seeing his face on television ... until Cooper came into the case and then he was decidedly a fifth wheel."

When I interviewed McCowan and Kaiser for this book, they were notably diplomatic. "Our personalities clashed," admitted McCowan, "but I have to say he was very helpful. He was basically interested in writing a story about it, and I was basically trying to find the facts about it, and he didn't have access to Sirhan, which I did, so that led to a little bit of inconsistency in our relationship, but he did come up with some good stuff. He was a good reporter."

According to Kaiser, "McCowan didn't tell me everything because he was trying to sell his own book. It created a certain amount of tension between us during the trial." They both continually described themselves as "lone investigators," overwhelmed by their workload, pursuing their own separate investigations, and keeping certain information from each other -- hardly ideal circumstances for a successful defense.

The key for both men was gaining Sirhan's trust, so they could get as much information from him as possible. McCowan built up the initial relationship: "My job was to learn everything I could about Sirhan that would be profitable for the defense to know. He confided in me, I believe, and I took my leads from there and checked the witnesses, talked with law enforcement people."

McCowan showed me yellow legal pads where he got Sirhan to write down what he could remember about the night of the shooting and asked him to draw a detailed floor plan of the Lobby Level of the Ambassador. The sketches show the Embassy Ballroom and Colonial Room but no pantry -- illustrating a good memory of the hotel layout up to a certain point in the evening.

McCowan put the apparent memory block down to the Tom Collins cocktails: "He's not a drinker, really, and apparently he was drinking that night, maybe to get some false courage or whatever. And maybe that's what caused him to black out or to have some fade in his memory."

McCowan would see Sirhan during the day, and at night, pore over the pile of books Adel Sirhan had given him from his brother's room. Some were obviously stolen from John Muir High School or the Pasadena Public Library, but two in particular caught McCowan's attention.

The first was History of the American People, by David Saville Muzzey. The following paragraph on President McKinley was underlined: "It was his last public utterance. The next day, as he was holding a reception in the Temple of Music, he was shot by a young Polish anarchist named Czolgosz, whose brain had been inflamed reading the tirades of the yellow press against 'Czar McKinley.' After a week of patient suffering the President died, -- the third victim of an assassin's bullet since the Civil War." After that was written in pencil, "many more will come."

Another book, The Transformation of Modern Europe, from the John Muir High School Library, summed up the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and someone -- McCowan assumed Sirhan -- had underlined parts of the following paragraph, as indicated: "It is conceivable that if the chauffeur of the archduke's car, having taken the wrong road on the way back from the official reception at the town hall, had not backed up to correct his error, the assassin would not have been successful. On the other hand, another assassin might have been because the plot to kill the archduke had been carefully laid under the direction of the colonel in charge of the intelligence division of the Serbian general staff, and more than one assassin was lying in wait that day."

This second passage is an alarming echo of the route switch discussed in Chapter 7. Both passages clearly show that whoever underlined them had assassination on the brain when they marked them. But were the notations Sirhan's? Russell Parsons didn't try to find out. As Kaiser notes, he ordered McCowan to make no mention of them in his report and hid the books in his office. To Parsons, these passages proved one thing: premeditation.

But the writings made a huge impression on McCowan, who somehow extrapolated that Sirhan had been thinking of assassinating someone since high school.

Grant Cooper later overruled Parsons and proceeded to introduce these passages and notations into evidence at trial, stipulating that the writing was Sirhan's without even subjecting it to handwriting analysis. Cooper elicited from defense psychiatrist Dr. Diamond an image of a Sirhan "obsessed with the idea of assassinations ... even in high school," and court-appointed psychiatrist Dr. Marcus noted "a paranoid schizophrenic ... who commits a murder ... takes about ten years to develop, and this is quite consistent with these ideas beginning to be formed back in high school."

Yet, there was really no basis for this suggested dating. If the underlining and notations were, indeed, Sirhan's, it's far more likely he did them during the period he was writing of assassination in his notebooks: from the days before the Six-Day War in early June 1967 up to the shooting of Kennedy. There is nothing to indicate that Sirhan had any thoughts of assassination before this time.

In the nineties, Sirhan's then attorney, Larry Teeter, noticed something odd about the "many more will come" notation. In a pretrial memorandum to the defense team, McCowan explained that "Sirhan underlines, italicizes and writes in the margins of almost all his books." But when McCowan attached a list of such passages -- including four from the Muzzey book -- the "many more will come" reference was missing. Teeter and Sirhan's family accused McCowan of fabricating it.

***

But at the time, the notations left their mark on McCowan. He began to research previous assassination attempts in the Secret Service archives to study the behavioral patterns of assassins.

"With Sirhan, I felt pretty certain that there wasn't a conspiracy -- reading those passages and the underlining things led me to believe that this guy was thinking about assassinating somebody all along. Now, in that vein, it's my understanding that the FBI had followed him [Sirhan] down to San Diego. A couple of weeks before Robert Kennedy's assassination, he was trailing Hubert Humphrey."

McCowan pinned Sirhan's rage not on the promise to send jet bombers to Israel but on his upbringing: "His mother was always telling all of her children all about the massacres at Deir Yassin, how they were put out of their own homes, and I'm sure she really believed all of that, but I think when it was imparted to you when you're very young and it continues on and on and on and on, I think that was a large basis for him to commit this assassination of Robert Kennedy.

"I see a kid that wanted to be a hero to the Palestinian people and promote that cause. His mother had harangued him over all those years about the way they were left without their home and all that. I think he would have shot any high-ranking political official, and the Secret Service told me that, two weeks [before], they were trailing him, following Hubert Humphrey, and ... I think they had some film on it."

This was the first I had ever heard of this story. It does not appear in any of the investigation files, and Kaiser wasn't aware of it, so it must be treated with caution. McCowan's confusion as to whether the FBI or the Secret Service told him this does not breed confidence. When challenged, he said it was the Secret Service, and clearly this information had a huge influence on the way McCowan approached his investigation.

As Sirhan sat in jail with no memory of the shooting, his head was turned by letters of support from the Middle East. He was hailed as a hero, and the Palestinians made a poster of him with the strap line "I did it for my country." He began to rationalize the shooting as a political act and to dream up ways he could use international diplomacy and political blackmail to get out of his nightmarish predicament. McCowan read me a note Sirhan wrote from jail at the time:

"This deal will be a secret between the President, Mr. Parsons, Michael McCowan, the Judge and myself and permanently binding. We will agree to sign an agreement, second degree or manslaughter. Doctor from San Diego. The D.A. must be unaware of our deal. Remember D.A. Garrison. The Judge is to guarantee me parole at first request, my safety in jail and a private cell. ... What can the President do if he rejects our proposition?

Definitely I will not accept life imprisonment. The President can contact the Judge through the Attorney General. One hundred years ago, they tried to impeach a President Johnson. How about it nowadays? Another Johnson to be impeached. Well, try to caution the President not to be patriotic by refusing to cooperate because he will not enjoy his over-patriotism too long. It is better for him and HHH [Hubert Humphrey] to swallow their pride than be impeached and be subjected to public shame. I may be a son of a bitch, Truman called me so. They may tell us to go to hell, we'll go but we will take them with us.


Page two consists of random jottings:

[quote]Will tell about election. Other gents hired me. Arab countries helping me. LBJ's own prestige is at stake. This is a small price.... We will play legitimate trial. Tell the President we have a ready market to sell our story if he doesn't comply in a foreign country. Show letter of support from Arab countries. Ask $750,000 because they might Jew us down to $500,000. Minimum that we'll accept. Money to be in used unmarked cash. Will put it in a safe deposit box. Penalty assessment: imprisonment in Chino only.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:07 pm

PART 2 OF 2

Nasser. New Middle East War. Challenge him to dare us.... Arab oil countries pressure H.L. Hunt to pressure LBJ. Tell LBJ that we will tell Nixon that LBJ wanted to knock off Kennedy so that Nixon uses this against the Democratic party.[/quote]

McCowan still rolls his eyes at Sirhan's "grandiose ideas" of a deal with the president in exchange for his freedom. Sirhan's offer seems to be this: Guarantee him a conviction of manslaughter or second-degree murder based on "diminished capacity." Get the doctor from San Diego, Dr. Schorr, to verify it. Put Sirhan in Chino for a few years, then give him half a million dollars to go into exile in Jordan. If not, Sirhan will tell Nixon that LBJ wanted to knock off Bobby, Nixon will win the election, and, with pressure from the Arab states, Sirhan may touch off a new Middle East War.

I read these notes myself, written on sheets from a yellow legal pad. McCowan didn't feel it was appropriate to give me copies, so I didn't have the handwriting analyzed, but they seem legitimate and do make Sirhan look bad. While Sirhan was heading for death row for a crime he couldn't remember, his desperation tactics here seem pretty inexcusable. I can understand McCowan seeing these notes, at the time, as further confirmation of Sirhan's guilt.

The notes seem to be a precursor to a plea Sirhan made to Russell Parsons on September 24 to negotiate with the State Department for his extradition to Jordan or he'd "blow the top off this thing." Parsons let it blow over.

***

When Robert Blair Kaiser came into the case in August as a defense investigator, he was charged with developing "all the background material he could obtain for the purpose of establishing Sirhan's mental state at the time of the shooting for the benefit of the psychologists and psychiatrists working on the case." Again, the most direct route to this was Sirhan himself -- to try to get Sirhan's story as completely as he could.

After a couple of initial meetings, on August 27, Kaiser, Sirhan, and the defense team signed a contract giving Kaiser exclusive access to Sirhan's story and splitting all proceeds three ways -- Kaiser would be paid to write magazine articles and a book on the case; the rest would go to the defense team and the Sirhan family, to cover defense expenses and basic living costs.

As a result, "I interviewed the assassin almost every day for six months before, during, and after the trial, much more than the attorneys did," Kaiser recalled. "A good interviewer tries to be open, friendly, elicit stories by telling stories, like a couple of guys having a beer at a bar and gradually, Sirhan loosened up with me, telling me all about his life and his aspirations, his hopes and despair.

"Sirhan was a highly suggestible young man. He was not an idiot. He was quite intelligent; he was well-read. I would use big words on him on a Monday, and on Tuesday, he would use them back to me, sometimes correctly even, so he was a sponge, he was soaking in information all the time. We had some fascinating conversations, political conversations and so forth. But he stuck to the story that he didn't remember killing Robert Kennedy."

Kaiser felt and still feels that there were others involved with Sirhan. "One of the reasons I think Sirhan didn't act alone is that he was such an unlikely assassin. He was a kind of a chickenshit, to use an American expression. Example -- he worked as a grocery boy in a store in Pasadena, and he got very angry with the owner one day, and then he said, 'And then I called him a goddamn son of a bitch.' And I said, 'Oh, did you call him a goddamn son of a bitch right to his face?' And he said, 'No, I said it under my breath so he couldn't hear me.' Well, that kind of a guy, it's very unlikely that he's gonna be a macho assassin. How does he make that transformation?"

Kaiser also makes it clear that he didn't believe everything Sirhan was telling him and that there were certain subjects Sirhan wanted to avoid. "Sirhan usually got evasive with me when I got into the involvement of others, and I think he was lying much of that time. And I found a little tic in his conversation. He used the word 'sir' as a kind of filler. Whenever he was lying, he sprinkled this word 'sir' throughout his conversation. It was like a tell a poker player will find to figure out when his opponent is bluffing."

Sirhan also withheld certain information from Kaiser. At first, he told him he wasn't at the Ambassador on the Sunday before the shooting. He later confessed to Parsons and McCowan that he was, "but I didn't want to tell Kaiser." Why not? "Well, because Kaiser's only interested in writing a book. I'm worried about the trial."

***

By mid-September, SUS was winding down. Investigators returned to their normal divisions, and only fourteen men stayed on to tidy up conspiracy allegations, prepare the case for trial, and write the final report. Manny Pena worked only mornings, and the job was almost done. Mike McCowan had still found no trace of conspiracy or any witnesses who might challenge the idea that Sirhan was the lone assassin.

***

On October 12, Parsons arranged an EEG for Sirhan to discover whether the fall from the horse in 1966 had resulted in any brain damage. Sirhan was hoping the test would show some abnormality and make the "diminished capacity" defense more credible to a jury. Sirhan didn't like being called crazy, but brain damage was outside his control. He reputedly asked McCowan whether he should bang his head against his cell wall to prepare for the test.

Electrodes were fitted to Sirhan's head by brain specialist Dr. Edward Davis, and electrical activity in the brain was found to be normal. Dr. Davis then prepared the equivalent of four Tom Collins cocktails according to the Ambassador Hotel recipe, using six ounces of Gordon's gin. Sirhan drank the mixture down in eight minutes, but again, over the next seventy-eight minutes, no unusual brain activity was noted.

Sirhan did put on an interesting show while drunk, however. For ten minutes, he shivered violently as Dr. Marcus, the court-appointed psychiatrist, looked on. Sirhan had always been friendly and polite to Dr. Marcus, who happened to be Jewish. But now, when someone told him Dr. Marcus was present, he shouted, "Get that bastard out of here!"

Dr. Marcus recalled the test at the trial:

"He kept grabbing for his throat, and he said, 'What the hell is going on here?' And you would have thought we were choking him."

"I hate his guts," shouted Sirhan; then, later on, he kept repeating, "I will get even with those Jews, goddamn it."

Twice, Sirhan asked a young female technician in uniform for a glass of water. She declined, as it would interfere with the test.

"You're a hell of a waitress!" said Sirhan.

"He thought, apparently, that he was back at the Ambassador," recalled Dr. Marcus, "when, I believe, a waitress refused him a drink, as he looked a little too erratic."

Sirhan was in a kind of "hostile delirium," throwing out phrases:

"Twenty years is long enough for the Jews We have got to have justice ... Didn't have to help them by sending planes. That bastard just can't, he can't help those bastards! One year and those goddamn Jews are still left!"

Sirhan mistook Dr. Marcus for his brother Adel and kept telling him to speak Arabic. "He thought he was back at the Ambassador Hotel and he had had too much to drink and he wanted me to drive him home."

When Dr. Marcus corrected him, Sirhan muttered darkly, "You're one of them." He looked around at the four or five deputy sheriffs guarding him and thought they were Israeli soldiers.

"During this entire time, he was trembling and he got irritated and very depressed. I asked him repeatedly to describe killing Kennedy and he never said that he did. He kept talking about Kennedy as if Kennedy was alive. He kept saying, 'That bastard isn't worth the bullets,' and I constantly tried to get him to admit what happened, and he never said that he committed the act."

When Marcus tried to goad Sirhan about the power of the Jews over the Arabs, Sirhan replied, "They'll have to drink every drop of my blood."

"My interpretation," Marcus concluded, "is that although he had more to drink than he undoubtedly had at the Ambassador, the alcohol triggered off the same sort of delusional type of personality, and he became sort of a wild beast."

When Sirhan got the results of the EEG, he was dismayed to hear there was no brain damage, fearing the death penalty was now a step closer. "Well, if it's going to cost me my life," he said, pledging his future course, "I want to help the Arabs."

***

While Sirhan rationalized the shooting as a political act, he still insisted he couldn't remember the shooting or the writing in his notebooks. He struggled to make sense of the weird chain of events on June 4: "Why did I not go to the races that day? Why did I not like the horses? Why did I go to that range? Why did I save those Mini-Mags? Why did I not expend those bullets? Why did I go to Bob's? Why did Mistri give me that newspaper? Why did I drink that night?" He clenched his fists as he spoke. "It was like some inner force."

"But you wrote in your notebook 'R.F.K. must die,''' said Kaiser.

"After that, I forgot it all," said Sirhan. "The idea of killing Kennedy never entered my mind, sir. I just wanted, sir, to stop him from sending planes to Israel."

***

On October 14, Judge Herbert V. Walker put the trial date back to December 9 -- due to Cooper's involvement in the Friars Club case -- and granted the defense their first motion for discovery. McCowan and Kaiser had drawn up a list of files held by the prosecution that the defense team wanted to see. Deputy DA David Fitts duly surrendered 111 witness statements, six transcripts of interviews with Sirhan, and a seven-page report covering the activities of Los Angeles police officers on June 5, 1968.

Chief Deputy DA Lynn Compton told the court the surrendered witness interviews showed no evidence of a possible conspiracy but stressed that the prosecution had nothing to hide or withhold from the defense, turning over all statements that "could possibly be of any value at this time."

But seven months later, in a post-trial meeting with Judge Walker to discuss where the investigation files and evidence should be housed, David Fitts and SUS chief Robert Houghton indicated otherwise. Fitts admitted that the discovery material had been "scaled" -- interview summaries were left in, interview transcripts were left out, and investigators' assessments and conclusions were "abstracted from the file."

Parsons would never pick up on this. When he spoke to reporters after receiving the discovery material, he parroted Compton's statement. Before he could even review the files, he boomed, "We have seen no evidence of conspiracy." The following morning, the LA Times ran a front-page story under the banner "Both Sides Agree Sirhan Was Alone."

Only the two defense investigators, Mike McCowan and Bob Kaiser, reviewed the witness statements in any detail. To uncover any conspiracy, they would have to have been extraordinarily resourceful. Up to now, they had to rely on press reports, the 273-page grand jury transcript, and their own witness interviews. Now, here they were, four months after the shooting, wading through thousands of pages of LAPD and FBI files for the first time, playing catch-up with police and FBI investigations that were almost complete. And they weren't reading raw files but summaries that were often sanitized, with any hint of conspiracy written out of the report or debunked, often with the help of the Hernandez polygraph test.

"We had so much eyewitness evidence that Sirhan was, indeed, the shooter," remembered Kaiser; "we weren't looking to exculpate him for not being the guy who shot Kennedy. We kind of took the LAPD's word for it and, in the trial, that's what Cooper did. He didn't challenge them."

Cooper never questioned the muzzle distance or the ballistics, and it seems the possibility of a second gun never occurred to the defense team, despite clues in the grand jury testimony they'd had a copy of for months. Vincent Di Pierro placed Sirhan four to six feet away from Kennedy, while Dr. Noguchi set the muzzle distance at an inch. A deputy DA asked Noguchi about the discrepancy, but the defense investigators never did.

McCowan and Kaiser overlooked the discrepancies regarding muzzle distance and bullet trajectories, and still dismiss them today. "Kennedy was not a statue standing there, looking at Sirhan," says Kaiser. "The fact that Sirhan was only three feet away ... Well, if you're only three feet away and you reach out your arm and your gun is extended, you've narrowed the gap, so that isn't persuasive to me."

McCowan makes a similar point, recalling the muzzle distance as "two feet, approximately." He's casting his mind back forty years, but his loose grasp of the muzzle distance seems to confirm it was never a big issue for him.

***

McCowan wrote up a thousand-page briefing book to get Cooper up and running quickly when he started on the case. The book included brief summaries on key witnesses, which often seemed like distillations of LAPD or FBI reports, with rough edges explained away and, often, no analysis or indication that McCowan had interviewed these people himself. Here's what he wrote about Vincent Di Pierro: "This is the young man who stated that he saw Sirhan with a girl in a polka dot dress standing with him by some stairs prior to the shooting. He later admitted that he had made up the story and that it was Sandy Serrano who had told him that she saw a girl in a polka dot dress running out of the kitchen yelling, 'We shot him! We shot him!' Miss Serrano's testimony was also proven false."

This shows a mangled understanding of events (here, Di Pierro sees the girl out on the stairs and Serrano sees her running out of the kitchen) and a conclusion that toes the police line. It's clear from this report that McCowan could not have interviewed either witness.

On Thane Cesar: "This man was holding on to Kennedy's arm when he was shot. He was on Kennedy's right side and places the arm and gun two feet from the senator's head and four feet from him. He claims he heard five shots and that all he saw was an arm and a gun arched over people, and then it fired. He never had a chance to stop it, and he was knocked down in the ensuing confusion."

This seems to be a condensed version of Cesar's FBI interview, leaving out the most important detail -- that Cesar had a gun and that he pulled it. When Betsy Langman later asked Parsons if he ever suspected the security guard, Parsons said he was never told about a guard with a gun close to Kennedy. "They never pressed me enough to subpoena such a person .... I asked them for a complete investigation of everything." Cooper and Parsons did not recall being told about Thane Cesar or Don Schulman, who saw a security guard fire -- they found out about them only after the trial.

Kaiser and McCowan both told me they interviewed Cesar but they never examined his weapon.

"I could never go along with the theory that there was a second gun in the pantry," said Kaiser. "Teddy Charach did a whole documentary on the second gun and he found a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar who had voted for George Wallace, a conservative Democrat in the primary. And, to him, that was prima facie evidence that he must have shot Robert Kennedy, which is absurd. I interviewed Thane Cesar; he was innocent; there was no doubt in my mind."

Kaiser also told me he spent a lot of time with Sandra Serrano and listened to tapes of her sessions with Hernandez. But it's clear from his book that Kaiser never connected Sirhan with the third man going up the stairs before the shooting who never came back down. Kaiser ultimately dismissed Serrano as a "red herring" -- "I was a lone investigator. I relied so heavily on the FBI and the police reports."

The result of all this was that Cooper and Parsons were never properly informed of the key witnesses to conspiracy in the case and didn't call them to the stand.

***

Various LAPD documents also suggest that McCowan was open to helping out the other side. SUS Chief Houghton's stated position was that he would release LAPD files to the defense team only on court order through the discovery motions initiated by McCowan and Kaiser.

The SUS Daily Summary of Activities (DSA) shows McCowan, overstretched and underresourced, cozying up to the LAPD, attempting to trade information. On November 1, he met with SUS lieutenant Enrique Hernandez:

"McCowan was in, saw Hernandez. Michael professed cooperation and indicated he'd obtain needed background information from family. He wants photos or maps showing kitchen and location of witnesses."

Three days later, the DSA reads: "Made decision to decline McCowan's offer of help in obtaining miscellaneous information from family; information is not worth what he would want in exchange. It also raises the specter of 'dealing with the enemy,' which could embarrass the investigation at a later date."

Secretly working for the prosecution to elicit information from the Sirhan family was a dangerous game, even allowing for the LAPD's hardball tactics in releasing routine information to the defense camp. It's also curious that McCowan's contact would have been Hernandez, of all people, the polygraph operator.

***

On November 5, 1968, Richard Nixon edged Hubert Humphrey to take the presidency. Kaiser asked Sirhan what he thought of the result. "Nixon! He's worse than Kennedy. To get the Jewish vote, he said he'd help the Israelis. But what good did it do him? Hell, he only got 4 per cent of the Jewish vote. Humphrey got most of it, the son of a bitch. Nixon! Hell, I gave him the election, I gave it to him!"

Sirhan reasoned that in return for giving him the election, Nixon should arrange his freedom, a passport to Jordan, and a million dollars. He printed out his demand on a legal pad, underlining the phrase "We are desperate!!!" three times.

***

On November 26, Dr. Martin Schorr visited Sirhan and gave him a battery of psychological tests in search of a psychosis that would support a defense of "diminished capacity." Schorr believed that men killed to avenge the wrongs of their dominant mothers or fathers. He was planning a book on this psychodynamic pattern, called Murder Is a Family Affair.

At the end of the interview, Schorr asked Sirhan, "If you had three wishes, what would they be?"

"One -- a pardon from President Nixon," said Sirhan. "Two -- two million dollars. Three -- the freedom to spend it."

The next day, Sirhan was freaked out by Schorr's visit. "I want to plead guilty," he told Parsons. "I don't want a trial. I don't want the doctors proving I'm insane." He wrote an angry note to Judge Walker, protesting his decision to allow the notebooks into evidence. "You're a bloodthirsty bastard," it read, "so take a good deep drink of my blood because justice will not be served." Between the judge and the Kennedys, Sirhan felt he had no hope of a fair trial. "I want to plead nolo contendere," he said.

McCowan said that's funny, they'd been thinking of pleading guilty for weeks, but if they did, they wouldn't be able to introduce the material about the Arab-Israeli War and promote the Palestinian cause.

"Oh, yeah," said Sirhan.

***

On December 2, the Friars Club case finally ended -- the five defendants were found guilty on all counts after a six-month trial. Cooper now formally announced he was to lead the Sirhan defense. He was granted a continuance until January 7 to completely familiarize himself with the case.

The next day, the papers also ran stories about Cooper's trouble with the grand jury transcripts, but Cooper told Parsons he wasn't worried. A lawyer's first duty was to his client, and his conscience was clean.

Aside from a few brief meetings with Parsons and the briefing book from McCowan, all that Cooper knew of the Sirhan case he'd read in the newspapers. A month's preparation would never be enough.

"Cooper was kind of a Johnny Appleseed," recalled Kaiser, "a warm, friendly human being who didn't think along the lines of conspiracies. He didn't have a suspicious mind at all. He pretty much took people at their face value." Al Wirin told Cooper that Sirhan admitted he did it and everyone else assumed he did it, so it was case closed regarding conspiracy. Cooper would never ask the prosecution to prove Sirhan killed Kennedy. Instead, he would stipulate to the killing and try to find a way to save the boy's life.

From reading McCowan's summary of the state's evidence, it seemed to Cooper a clear case of first-degree murder. "Would we be derelict in our duty," asked Cooper, "if we pleaded guilty in return for a sentence of life, rather than death in the gas chamber?"

Parsons argued that the psychologists' testimony and the influence of alcohol provided a good chance of second-degree murder, based on "diminished capacity." Cooper agreed on this direction.

From this point on, the defense focus narrowed to psychological rather than witness testimony, exploring Sirhan's mental and emotional state before, during, and after the shooting. But McCowan was still not ruling out conspiracy: "I got a feeling in the back of my mind that somebody put him up to this." He noted Sirhan was reluctant to talk about the influence of the occult on his life and was insistent that McCowan and Kaiser stay away from the Rosicrucians.

***

Cooper visited an excited Sirhan for the first time on December 3. "We're looking into the possibility of pleading guilty and arguing to the penalty," said Cooper. "The main thing we're trying to do is save your life." A prisoner trade in the future with the Russians might be a possibility -- like the Russian spy Abel traded for U-2 pilot Gary Powers -- but Cooper ruled out a deal with the State Department until after the trial.

"My life is in your hands," Sirhan told him.

***

On his next visit, Cooper asked Sirhan to level with him, forget what he'd told Parsons, and just tell him the truth about the notebooks and the day of the shooting -- the whole story. Sirhan repeated the account he gave to Parsons, Kaiser, and McCowan, and would later give in court. These statements are remarkably detailed and consistent and have a strong ring of truth.

Sirhan admitted that the writing in his notebook promised to kill Kennedy. "But, honestly, sir, I had no intention of carrying it forward."

"But, nevertheless, you still wrote it down."

"I still wrote it down."

"Where was it, though, that you very definitely decided to do it?"

"I honestly did not decide to do it, sir -- very definitely. Objectively, I had no awareness of what I was doing that night. I will swear to anything on that point .... I never believed that I would do it."

"Well, who do you think killed him?"

"Obviously I must have -- but I have no exact -- no objective of what I was doing."

Cooper shook his head. He didn't get it. He got Sirhan to go back over the writing in the notebook again. Sirhan said seeing that TV program "was the last straw."

"You felt he should be dead?"

"I didn't like him at all. So whatever in hell happened to him, I didn't give a damn."

"Well, obviously you felt that you were the one to stop him."

"Yes, I did."

Why, then, Cooper asked, was Sirhan so admiring of Kennedy when he saw him at the Ambassador on the Sunday before the shooting?

"You have to hit me at the time. At the time I heard these things I was mad, but again, sir, the madness, this feeling or emotion or whatever, had subsided .... I had to do it but I didn't, or I couldn't or shouldn't -- this double feeling here, and that's why, I thought I decided to like him again when I went down there to see him."

"Why did you cool off, though, if you had this inborn hatred and he was going to give aid to the enemy?"

"He could have just said that story for the votes, and then maybe he could have decided not to send those arms after those Jews voted for him." Sirhan's anger at Kennedy was only "good for while it lasted, you might say."

***

Cooper wasn't happy with Sirhan's memory lapse. It was too convenient, and the jury wouldn't like it, but "since that's the situation, I am going to prepare, based on what you have told me .... If this doesn't work, don't blame me."

"This is the truth -- as far as I can objectively be, sir. That's the truth."

Cooper felt that Sirhan was sane enough to know the difference between right and wrong. "One of the psychologists has indicated that you are psychotic, but talking to you, you seem as normal as apple pie."

It would be an uphill battle to avoid the death penalty, so Cooper saw no harm in letting the prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Pollack in to see Sirhan. If Pollack found mental illness, it might help the defense strike a deal with the DA.

"There's no question about the facts: He killed Kennedy, and he planned it in advance," said Cooper when he got back to the office, so "diminished capacity" seemed the best strategy. But the jury wouldn't like Sirhan's story, particularly the memory lapse.

"It would be better for Sirhan if he could remember, if he could say, 'Yes, I got mad at Kennedy and set out to kill him and I did!'"

"But he doesn't remember," said McCowan.

"Yes, I know," said Cooper. "What the hell you gonna do? You gotta go with what you've got. That's why I lean to a plea."

***

On December 10, Cooper met the prosecutors. Deputy DA David Fitts, according to his own memo of the meeting, asked Cooper if Sirhan would submit to a lie detector test "performed by an acknowledged and totally impartial expert with a view to determining whether Sirhan acted alone or in concert with others .... The results of such test would be for their ultimate historical significance and would not be available to the parties."

Later the same day, Fitts told the FBI that Cooper had suggested the polygraph, restricting it to questions concerning a possible conspiracy, on the understanding that nothing obtained could be used against Sirhan in the trial but anything of benefit to Cooper could be used in any subsequent executive clemency hearing.

Why would the defense and prosecution in such a high-prome case collude to conduct a polygraph for the historical record? Fortunately, this polygraph never happened.

In the same meeting, Cooper also floated the possibility of pleading "no contest" or "a possible guilty plea on behalf of Sirhan after the jury is selected and sworn in, obviating the necessity of a trial to determine guilt. The jury would then merely hear evidence to determine the degree of penalty following the guilty plea."

Thus, a week into the case, Cooper was already colluding with the prosecution and floating plea bargains. He seems to have been more interested in striking a deal than going beyond Sirhan's hazy memory to examine the evidence.

***

In the week before Christmas, New York attorney Emile Zola Berman was added to the defense team and the court granted the defense a second motion for discovery. At last they could see Sirhan's notebooks.

***

Bob Kaiser visited Sirhan in late December, for a background piece that would appear in Life magazine at the start of the trial. Sirhan's thirteenth-floor cell in the Halls of Justice was six feet wide by eight feet long, with a sink, a lidless toilet, and a steel bunk. He wore prison slippers and faded bell-bottom prison jeans and had stopped ordering the Los Angeles Times, depressed by world events. "It's all violence, chaos, unrest. Whatever happened to the old days, peace and quiet?"

Sirhan was now smoking ten Muriel perfecto cigars and six packs of cigarettes a day -- "three different brands" -- and reading books on logic and Indian philosophy. He felt like "a man without a country," seen as a foreigner by Americans and in his native land. He enjoyed discussing trial strategy with his three attorneys, each of whom was old enough to be his grandfather -- paternal figures perhaps standing in for the father he hadn't seen since his early teens.

Sirhan's mother Mary stayed home, read her Bible, and prayed for a miracle at the trial. She kept the June 14 issue of Time and the June 17 issue of Newsweek on a table in the dining room. Every so often, she would pick up the Time cover and talk to the face of Robert Kennedy. She'd tell him how sorry she was, and he'd say, "It's O.K., Mary, I forgive you."
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:08 pm

NINE: Sirhan's Memory

As Sirhan's defense team prepared for trial, Sirhan still could not remember shooting Robert Kennedy. Over and over, he was asked to re-create the night of the shooting, and his story came out the same every time. It's also never been clear where Sirhan was on Monday, June 3, the day before the shooting.

Sirhan got up early that morning and drove his mother to work. At around ten thirty, he put gas in his car at Richfield Service Station, where he used to work, waved to his former boss, Jack Davies, and drove off.

According to one FBI report, sometime during the day a man from the telephone company was doing service work at a house across the street from the Sirhan home when he saw Sirhan being dropped off in a green or metallic-colored Mercedes. The car was driven by a male, and a female was riding in the front seat.

Mary Sirhan was at work in the morning but said Sirhan was home the rest of the day; Sirhan himself has contradicted this statement, and has always been vague about his movements that day.

According to Robert Kaiser, he changed his story three times. "First, he said he was home all day. Then he admitted to me he'd gone to Corona. Later still, he told me it wasn't Corona at all, but 'someplace in that direction.' And still later, he told defense investigator Michael McCowan with some satisfaction that he'd put 350 miles on his car June 3 and no one knew where he'd gone ... [he said] 'the FBI doesn't know everything.'''

McCowan speculated that Sirhan may have gone to the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego to see Kennedy speak there that night. The senator started his speech, then collapsed with exhaustion. After going backstage and vomiting, he returned to the stage and finished his comments. But there were no sightings of Sirhan, and his old DeSoto probably wasn't up to such a lengthy trip.

Grant Cooper skipped over June 3 in his questioning of Sirhan.

***

June 3 was a busy day for Sirhan's twenty-one-year-old brother, Munir. He was on probation after an earlier narcotics charge and appealing deportation.

Vernon Most, Munir's supervisor in the houseware section at Nash's Department Store, said that "Joe, on the first of every month, is supposed to report to someone, I assume his probation officer, since he returned to work here last November .... Last Monday [June 3], Munir left to report, but never returned that day as he had in the past. The excuse he gave me for not returning was that he lost a certain piece of paper, at the office of the probation officer, which allows him to leave and return to work."

Elizabeth Raaegep, working security at Nash's, told a different story. On Saturday, June 1, Munir had asked her for the numbers for the Department of Immigration, but they were closed and he became very upset. That Monday, June 3, he called from Immigration and said they had lost his papers and he couldn't come to work. The next day, Raaegep was in Most's car and was discussing handgun laws with Most and Munir. Munir said, "Boy, I shouldn't have bought that gun."

On June 5, when Munir told Most his brother had shot Kennedy, Most asked if the gun his brother used was Munir's. "He told me, 'I can't say.'''

Munir later denied to police and his probation officer, Darrel K. Gumm, that he bought the gun, and Sergeant Hernandez later claimed the polygraph showed he was lying.

While the timing of Munir's conversation with Most about guns is extremely odd, the fact remains that Munir hadn't spoken to Sirhan for three months. They'd had a fistfight when Munir asked Sirhan to drive him to El Sereno in a borrowed car, but Sirhan refused because it had no insurance.

While some researchers claim that one or more of Sirhan's brothers were also involved, I can find no credible evidence to support this. Munir's deportation appeal was eventually delayed until June 23, 1969, after his brother's trial. Today, he is still living in the family house in Pasadena.

***

On June 4, Sirhan woke up just before eight, and Munir saw him on his way to work, buying a newspaper on a street corner in Pasadena. Sirhan had been going to the races, betting, nearly every day for two weeks, and today he planned to go again to Hollywood Park. But he'd been losing money and he didn't like the horses that were running that day, so he decided to go shooting instead.

He counted what ammunition he had -- a box of Mini-Mags, a box of Federal long rifle .22s (his favorite), and a box of Super-X -- then drove off to pick up another six or seven boxes of Federal long rifles at the East Pasadena Firearms Co. He was in luck. They were on sale at seventy-five cents a box. He stopped off for a quick coffee at a Denny's and arrived at the San Gabriel Valley Gun Range on Fish Canyon Road in Duarte around eleven thirty.

He signed in, paid the range master, Everett Buckner, the two-dollar admission fee, set up his target at the west end of the pistol range, and stayed until Buckner came around at five and announced that the range was closed for the day.

"What kind of a shot are you?" Grant Cooper asked him later.

"With a good gun, sir, I consider myself to be a pretty good shot."

Sirhan's gun had a fixed sight, which he had to adjust himself to hit the bull's-eye. Several witnesses described him aggressively shooting rapid-fire, against range rules, but Sirhan denied it -- they were mistaking him for an elderly NRA member in a military jacket and earmuffs, who was shooting a .38 rapid-fire next to Sirhan for about an hour.

Every so often during the day, Buckner would call a break, and Sirhan would go over and buy a Coca-Cola and talk to him about the operation of the range. He fired all the Federals he had and bought three or four more boxes of Federals from Buckner later on.

Just before three, Sirhan struck up a conversation with college student Michael Saccoman, who was firing beside him on the range with a brand-new gun.

"That's a pretty nice gun you have there. Sort of heavy. Can I see it?"

The two swapped guns and Sirhan fired Saccoman's gun a couple of times. "His were the best two shots in my target," Saccoman said later. He then fired Sirhan's gun. "I put it down because I didn't want it to blow up in my hand. He was firing hollow points, and the gun looked like a piece of junk."

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Sirhan's signature on the gun range sign-in sheet. By odd coincidence, LAPD officer Harry Lee had signed in seven names above him.

It was a cheap .22 with black plastic grips and a short barrel. Sirhan said he had bought it for forty bucks from a friend. Saccoman asked Sirhan why he was firing high-velocity Mini-Mags for target shooting.

Sirhan shrugged. "They're supposed to be the best brand."

"They're for hunting," Saccoman corrected him. "They're way too strong for this gun. They're what you use to kill rabbits."

"Well, this can kill a dog," said Sirhan.

"How did you learn to shoot so well?"

"I learned up north. I've only been shooting for a couple of months."

Saccoman left at three fifteen, and Sirhan took his advice and stopped using the Mini-Mags. He would shoot and throw his empty shell casings on the range.

"Did you have in mind shooting Kennedy at that time?" Cooper asked.

"No, I did not. He was totally off my mind, sir."

***

Later on, Sirhan struck up a conversation with Claudia Williams, a pretty blond (five-two, twenty-six years old), trying out a new .22-caliber revolver she'd received as a Christmas present.

On June 6, Williams called police to say that Sirhan was shooting next to her on the pistol range -- "He asked her if she wanted to try his gun and she shot several rounds. This is the gun that killed the Senator?"

Williams and her husband, Ronald, arrived at the range at around 3:50, to find the place deserted except for the range master and Sirhan. Mr. Buckner set up Claudia's target while her husband went over to the rifle range.

She found it hard to pull the trigger on her double-action revolver and called down the range to Sirhan to ask for help. He came over and showed her how to properly "sight" and fire the gun and demonstrated by firing off about eighteen rounds of his high-powered Mini-Mags from her revolver. She then fired about sixteen rounds from his.

"He was very polite," she recalled. "Didn't make any advances or anything like that, even though it was only him and I out there." They chatted for about twenty minutes; then her husband, Ronald, returned from the rifle range. They chatted briefly about guns, and then, around five o'clock, Buckner said the range was closing and they left.

"Mr. Buckner just came over and ... told us that the range was closing ... ," recalled Sirhan. "I think I had ... about eight or nine Mini-Mags left ... and I loaded my gun .... And at that moment, sir, Mr. Buckner came by and he said that the range was closed. I didn't expend the bullets from that gun."

"Why didn't you take the bullets out?" asked Cooper.

"I had quite a difficult time, sir, with the ejection system in my gun."

In fact, Sirhan was forced to use a screwdriver to pry empty shell casings from his barrel. When time was called, he picked up his screwdriver and empty boxes and went home. He had two bullets in his pocket and the remaining eight in his gun. As Sirhan told it, another minute firing on the range and he would have been out of ammunition.

"And you weren't saving these bullets to shoot Robert Kennedy?"

"No, sir, I was not," said Sirhan.

"Weren't you practicing that afternoon so you would be able to hit accurately?"

"I was so thrilled with my performance on that target sheet. That was my main interest at that time."

***

The prosecution would later argue that the firing on the gun range showed premeditation of the first magnitude: the assassin spent hours perfecting his shooting skills, and even signed the register. But, curiously, when DeWayne Wolfer examined 489 expended shell casings collected by Michael Saccoman and another 37,815 collected by FBI agents from firing positions adjacent to where Sirhan was on the range, they found not one that was fired from Sirhan's gun.

Image
Sirhan's pink-and-white 1956 DeSoto.

Sirhan climbed into his beat-up, pink-and-white 1956 DeSoto and threw his loaded gun on the backseat. On the way home, around six-thirty, he dropped by Bob's Big Boy in Pasadena, next to his old college, for a hamburger and some coffee. He spotted a college acquaintance sitting at the counter -- an East Indian, by the name of Mystery.

"M-y-s-t-e-r-y?" asked a bemused Cooper.

"Yes," replied Sirhan. In fact, it was Gaymoard Mistri. Sirhan joined him and treated him to a burger. After a few minutes of chitchat, Mistri began reading a newspaper with a caption concerning the Israeli-Jordan situation. "Things are wrong there," said Sirhan, but Mistri didn't take him up on it and they chatted about horses for the rest of the meal.

They were there about fifteen minutes. As they left, Sirhan asked Mistri where he was going.

"Back to PCC."

"I think I'll come with you," said Sirhan.

Mistri bought a preview edition of the Los Angeles Times from a newspaper rack and they talked horses again as they walked over to the cafeteria in the PCC Student Center. Sirhan spotted a friend in a group of four Arab students and chatted with them in Arabic. When the group left for a seven o'clock class, Sirhan and Mistri moved to another table, and as they talked, Mistri remembered Sirhan "toying with a small metal object ... in his hands" -- what seemed to be a spent .22 caliber bullet.

"Are you a hunter?" asked Mistri.

"Sometimes," said Sirhan, "but I'm still learning." From the ensuing conversation, Mistri thought Sirhan actually knew very little about hunting or firearms.

As they walked back to their cars, Sirhan challenged Mistri to a couple of games of pool, but Mistri begged off -- he had to go check the classifieds in the paper for a summer job. Sirhan was going to buy a paper to check the racing results, but Mistri took just the classified section and gave him the rest of his.

Sirhan lingered a few minutes more, asking after some former students, how many children they had now. To Mistri, he seemed to have nothing to do and just wanted his company. There was no mention of Kennedy or the primary and "no indication of emotional instability or any type of contemplated violent act." When Mistri left, it was about seven fifteen.

***

Sirhan got in his car and was leafing through the Sports section when an advertisement caught his eye -- "Join in the Miracle March for Israel on the Miracle Mile tomorrow, Wednesday, June 5, at 6 p.m. on Wilshire Boulevard."

That jolted Sirhan back to the Six-Day War the previous year -- "I was completely pissed off at American justice at the time." Now these emotions started up again. "The fire started burning inside of me, sir. These Zionists, these Jews, these Israelis ... and the fact that they had beat hell out of the Arabs one year before."

Sirhan had nothing to do until the Tuesday night Rosicrucian meeting at eight, and his friend had turned him down for pool, so he decided to go down "to see what those God damned sons-of-bitches were up to."

In his rage, Sirhan had mistaken the date -- "I was that burned up, sir. I thought it was for that evening, sir.... I was driving like a maniac and I missed the turnoff." He couldn't remember where Wilshire was and got lost and asked for directions. He kept driving down Wilshire, looking for the parade.

"Where was your gun?" asked Cooper.

"My gun was completely out of my mind," said Sirhan.

"Where was it, though?"

"Where I left it, sir -- the backseat of my car."

He was ready to give up, then spotted a well-lit building hosting an election-night party for former senator Thomas Kuchel. He parked the car a few blocks away, left his wallet in the glove compartment, and locked up, as usual. He carried his money loose in his pocket -- about $440.

"Did you put your revolver in your pocket?"

"No, sir. My revolver was still in the backseat of my car."

Dressed in blue denim pants, a blue long-sleeved shirt, and blue sweater, he went in and had a look around. It was dull. "I heard these two kids say there was a bigger party down at the Ambassador, so I said, 'Well, I'm on Wilshire Boulevard. I couldn't see the parade, so I might as well go down there and see what was going on."

Sirhan later struggled to make sense of the day with prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Pollack.

"What I did that whole day, what happened before the shooting at the Ambassador, it just all didn't fit in when I look at it. There are so many points that are unexplainable ... my whole going to the range that day. I decided not to go to the races. I didn't want to lose any more money ... at the very last, when I had these few [bullets] left and I put them into my gun ... the range master comes and announces that the range is closed."

"So why didn't you empty it?" asked Pollack.

"That's what pisses me off, sir. I've told this to Kaiser a thousand times. Why did I do that? Why didn't I fire 'em, despite the range master's orders? This is what I can't explain to myself .... Why didn't I take' em out, throw them away instead of firing 'em? I didn't. I don't know. It was loaded. I was just ready to pop it, the range was closed, so I said, 'Fuck you, you son of a bitch,' and I started walking to my car and put the gun on the backseat and kept going to Pasadena."

"It's almost as if you yourself, maybe without being aware of it, were always planning this," suggested Pollack. Sirhan didn't take the bait.

"I challenged Mistri to a game of pool. Had he just taken me up on that, this whole mess wouldn't have happened, you see.... Why couldn't I have fired the first time at the range? Why did I keep my gun loaded? Why didn't I go to a game of pool with Mistri? I was planning to go to that Rosicrucian meeting on Tuesday night and I had some tires in my trunk that I was gonna replace for my car."

"And you didn't know that Kennedy would be down there?"

"He was off my mind that night. He was off my mind, sir. It's just that ad that took me down there."

***

Sirhan walked down to the Ambassador, and on the way, he saw a big sign for a Jewish organization in a shop window, and that boiled him up again. He arrived at the hotel about eight. The crowd was very mixed, and everybody was "all dressed up .... The whole place was milling with people, sir. There were many TV cameras, a lot of bright lights, sir."

He walked up the circular stairway to the lobby and saw a big sign for Republican Senate candidate Max Rafferty, and the name rang a bell. Rafferty's daughter Kathleen had been in Sirhan's Russian class at high school. He dropped into the Rafferty reception in the Venetian Room, thinking he might see her. The room was filled with "brilliant lights," but Kathleen wasn't there.

He was still mad about the parade, but there was a pleasant mood throughout the hotel, so he went to the bar and bought a Tom Collins cocktail. He didn't normally drink, but "it was a hot night. There was a big party, and I wanted to fit in .... " He liked the Tom Collins; it tasted like lemonade.

He stayed at Rafferty headquarters for about an hour, then bought another Tom Collins and went outside to a lawn area where Kennedy had addressed the overflow crowd on Sunday.

***

Around nine thirty, auto mechanic and Kennedy supporter Enrique Rabago got separated from a friend in the hotel lobby and walked out onto the front porch to look for him. He spotted Sirhan sipping a drink alone and started chatting with him about the election.

"Are we going to win?" asked Rabago.

"I think we're going to win," Sirhan replied.

"I don't know; McCarthy is ahead now."

"Don't worry about Kennedy if he doesn't win. That son of a bitch is a millionaire. He just wants to go to the White House. Even if he wins, he's not going to win it for you or me or any of the poor people. He's just going to buy the presidency."

Rabago was a little disgusted by Sirhan's anti-Kennedy comments and was about to walk away when his friend Humphrey Cordero found them and suggested they go back inside the lobby. Rabago was worried he was too casually dressed, and Cordero turned to Sirhan, also in working clothes.

"Look at my friend; he doesn't want to go in because of his clothes. What do you think of that?"

"I'm dressed the same way. Why shouldn't we go in there? We're voters. We're putting them in office."

"Where did you get your drink?" asked Cordero.

"I just came from the Rafferty party. As I walked in, the hostess looked down at me because they were dressed like millionaires and I was dressed like this. I took out a twenty-dollar bill, bought a drink, and left her the change. Then she was all smiles. It goes to show you, it's not how you look; it's the money you got that counts."

Sirhan seemed extremely aggrieved that these "rich people looked at me as if I was dirt." Cordero described him as intelligent and a gentleman, but he had a chip on his shoulder about people with money.

Cordero said he "didn't sound like he was on drugs or dope or drink or anything .... He didn't appear to be in any other state of mind .... He was just a little disgusted with the party." Rabago agreed that Sirhan didn't seem drunk or belligerent. He described him as "educated but arrogant." A few minutes later, Cordero and Rabago wandered inside to watch the returns on a television in the lobby, and they didn't see Sirhan again.

Around ten o'clock, waiter Gonzalo Cetina-Carrillo saw Sirhan standing outside the restrooms behind the Venetian Room. Sirhan had a Tom Collins glass in his right hand and rolled newspapers under his left arm. Sirhan said he was tired, and Cetina pointed to a stack of chairs. Cetina took his glass while Sirhan unstacked a chair and sat down. Cetina gave Sirhan back his drink and went back to work.

Around the same time, Lonny Worthey accidentally bumped into Sirhan while ordering a drink at a bar in the Ambassador Room. He apologized, but Sirhan didn't respond. A few minutes later, Worthey saw a female standing alongside Sirhan. He didn't see them speak and, with the large number of people in the room, he couldn't tell if they were together.

It's hard to trace Sirhan's movements from this point on, because of different timings given by or assigned to witnesses in various reports.

Sirhan does remember standing in front of a Teletype machine in the Colonial Room, staring at it over the shoulder of Western Union Teletype operator Mary Grohs, as the keys tapped out their messages. "I was mesmerized," he said. "I had never seen anything like that before .... The keys were going all by themselves."

Grohs told the LAPD that sometime between nine thirty and eleven, she saw a young man with "intense eyes" staring at the Teletype machine. He was "dressed like a poor Mexican," and she told him the Teletype tapping out Kennedy election returns was farther down the line. He looked at her "with that intense look," then walked away without saying anything.

Later, when Sirhan was brought out of the pantry through the Colonial Room, Grohs jumped up and screamed, "That's the man I talked to!" and Sirhan gave her "the same intense look."

When Bob Kaiser learned about Grohs after the trial, he called her up, and after some hesitation, she recounted the episode: "Well, he came over to my machine and started staring at it. Just staring. I'll never forget his eyes. I asked him what he wanted. He didn't answer. He just kept staring. I asked him again. No answer. I said that if he wanted the latest figures on Senator Kennedy, he'd have to check the other machine. He still didn't answer. He just kept staring."

"In retrospect," Kaiser asked, "do you think he might have been in some kind of trance?"

"Oh no!" she said. "He wasn't under hypnosis .... I just assumed he couldn't speak English." When Kaiser tried to pursue the matter, Grohs asked for his name. "I want to talk to the police about you. They told me not to say anything about this."

Was Sirhan's staring a form of hypnosis, or was he just intently curious? In Sirhan's own words, "I was shit-faced drunk."

***

At one point, Sirhan appeared at the door to the electrician's booth in the Venetian Room and started chatting with the hotel's Danish electrician, Hans Peter Bidstrup. While the LAPD final report times this as eight forty-five, in his first FBI and police interviews, Bidstrup timed it as around eleven o'clock.

Sirhan was holding a half-empty Tom Collins glass and asked Bidstrup if he was a Democrat. Bidstrup said he was. "Shake hands with another Democrat," said Sirhan. He then sat down on an empty cable spool and they talked for ten or fifteen minutes. Bidstrup thought Sirhan was "half drunk" and chatty, but not slurring or staggering. Sirhan remembered asking Bidstrup about his job "and all the switches and communications and what have you" and offered to buy Bidstrup a drink.

Bidstrup said Sirhan asked if Kennedy was going to be at the hotel that night, what floor he was staying on, and what time he would arrive. He also asked about Kennedy's security, whether or not he had bodyguards. As they were talking, a Los Angeles fireman came into the booth, startling Sirhan, and chatted with them for a short while.

But Bidstrup later told McCowan and Cooper that Sirhan showed no more interest in Kennedy than any other Democrat.

By this time, Sirhan had drunk four Tom Collins cocktails. "It was like drinking lemonade. I was guzzling them. My body is small. It was hot in there, and I wasn't used to it. I was feeling it, and I got sleepy. So I wanted to go home." During the trial, Sirhan added, "I was quite high and I was alone. If I got any more drunk, there was nobody with me to take care of me ... so I decided to go home, sir."

He went out the same way he came in and walked uphill and back to his car. When he got in, he realized he was in no condition to drive. He had no insurance and was afraid he'd get a ticket or get into an accident.

"What did you do, then?" asked Cooper.

"I decided, sir, to go back down to the party and sober up, drink some coffee."

"Did you pick up your gun?"

"I don't remember, sir.... I must have, but I don't remember."

"And where did you go when you got back to the Ambassador?"

"In search of coffee .... I don't know where I found it, but eventually I found some."

Sirhan found a big, shiny coffee urn, surrounded by "piles and piles of cups and saucers."

"Did this place look like a kitchen?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Were there bright lights there?"

"No, sir, there weren't. There weren't any mirrors, either."

Sirhan seemed to take pleasure in debunking Dr. Diamond's theory that it was confusion caused by the bright lights and mirrors near the Embassy Ballroom that triggered his trance state.

"Did you see any people there?"

"I don't remember, sir. I was so glad to have found the coffee; that was the only thing on my mind, sir.... As I was pouring my coffee, some girl came up and said she wanted some, too. I like my coffee with cream and sugar, lots of cream, and that's exactly the way she liked it ... so I gave her my cup and poured myself another."

"Do you remember what this girl looked like?"

"She had some dark hair ... about my age."

"A good-looking girl?"

"Beautiful."

"Did you engage her in conversation?"

"As long as the coffee was being served, I told her how I would like to drink some coffee, too."

"What was the next thing you did?"

"The next thing I remember, sir, I was being choked."

"Do you remember anything in between?"

"No, sir."

"That you were standing in the pantry?"

"That is what I later learned in this court, sir."

"That you walked up to Senator Kennedy and put a gun toward his head, possibly within an inch or two, and you pulled the trigger and he eventually died."

"Yes, I was told this."

"Now, you believe it is true?"

"Obviously, sir."

"And after that you were choked?"

"I was choked, yes, quite severely.... I don't know who was doing the choking, but he was doing a good job at it."

Sirhan couldn't remember anything between drinking coffee with the girl and being choked, but several witnesses filled in the blanks. An hour or two before the speech, Kennedy press aide Judy Royer was trying to keep the backstage and pantry areas clear after a fire marshal complained of overcrowding in an area reserved for press and Kennedy staff. She saw Sirhan by the double doors at the west end of the pantry leading into the backstage area. He wasn't wearing a press or staff badge, so she asked him who he was. Without a word, Sirhan turned and walked back out into the ballroom. She watched him walk away and didn't notice anything unusual about his behavior and didn't see anything in his hands.

Shortly after eleven, Royer's friend Robert Klase was standing backstage by some ABC television cameras, awaiting Kennedy's arrival. Klase was asked to watch the door to the ballroom Kennedy would later come through, for a few minutes. While doing so, Klase saw Sirhan trying to pass through. He tapped him on the shoulder and said only ABC staff were allowed in the area. Sirhan turned around and went back into the central area of the Embassy Ballroom. Klase accurately described Sirhan's clothing and reasoned that "since the shirt and trousers were tight fitting, it was unlikely that Sirhan had a gun in his possession at that time."

Half an hour before the shooting, kitchen staff Jesus Perez and Martin Patrusky remembered Sirhan asking if Kennedy was coming through the pantry. Cooper asked Sirhan if they were lying.

"Sir, I don't know whether they were telling the truth or not; I cannot contest it; because I don't know myself, sir."

Barbara Rubin arrived at the hotel with her husband at 11:55 p.m. Rather than go into the Embassy Ballroom through the main doors and fight the crowd, they entered through the pantry and came out right next to the stage. On the way through, Rubin noticed Sirhan on her left, leaning against a table by the ice machines. He stood out because "he wasn't dressed like the rest of the workers and he was standing still whereas everyone else was moving around." Cooper asked Sirhan what he remembered next after the choking.

"I remember getting to the police car and one of the policemen pulling my hair and jerking my head backwards and putting a light for a long time in my eyes."

He was told that Jesse Unruh said he heard him say, "I did it for my country."

"Sir, Jesse Unruh must have been correct in saying that, but I myself don't remember saying that to him or to anybody."

"Do you remember eventually getting someplace that looked like a police station?"

"I didn't know what it was at the time, sir."

The only officer Sirhan remembered at the police station was Bill Jordan -- "because of his name, Jordan." The police were very friendly, and Jordan "was a very nice man."

"You refused to give the officers your name, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"You wouldn't discuss anything about the case?"

"They never brought it up, sir."

"Well, what did you think you were there for?"

"We were so engrossed in the discussion of what, I don't remember exactly, sir, and it was so friendly, the discussions were so interesting to me."

"Did you know in the early morning hours ... that you had shot Senator Robert Kennedy?"

"No, sir, I did not."

"When was the first time you remember that you were accused of shooting Senator Robert Kennedy?"

"When this Mr. Jordan took me to this courtroom and I was in front of a lady judge. I couldn't believe it, sir. That is the first lady judge I had ever seen in my whole life, and she started reading these names and Kennedy was on that list of names."

Sirhan was arraigned before Judge Joan Dempsey Klein at 7:25 that morning. He asked to see a representative of the ACLU so he could "find out what was going on."

Cooper led him through his blackout in custody right up to the visit from Al Wirin the next morning, when he finally realized what had happened. Summing up, Sirhan admitted to Cooper that he had bought the gun and wrote the notebooks, but he did not remember the shooting.

"You have told the jury that when you came to the Ambassador Hotel that night you didn't come there with any intention of shooting Kennedy, is that right?" asked Cooper.

"That is correct, sir."

"And you did kill him?"

"Yes, sir."

"How do you account for all the circumstances?"

"Sir, I don't know," said Sirhan.

"You don't remember shooting him?"

"I don't remember shooting him."
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:14 pm

PART 1 OF 2

TEN: Inside Sirhan's Mind

From the outset, defense attorneys Cooper and Parsons believed the best way for Sirhan to escape the death penalty would be with a defense of diminished capacity. Through psychiatric testimony, they hoped to prove that Sirhan's mental condition at the time of the shooting prevented him from forming criminal intent to kill Robert Kennedy. They would show he acted without malice or premeditation -- that, as defined by California law, he was unable to "maturely and meaningfully reflect on the gravity of his contemplated act." If their strategy worked, Sirhan would still bear partial responsibility for the crime but would be spared the death sentence and might expect a lesser charge of second-degree murder or manslaughter.

Cooper appointed an old friend, Dr. Bernard Diamond of DC Berkeley, as the defense psychiatrist. As associate dean and professor of the School of Criminology and a full professor in the Schools of Law and Psychiatry, Diamond seemed an ideal choice.

Cooper first brought Diamond to see Sirhan on December 23, the first of eight visits, during which Diamond spent almost twenty-five hours with Sirhan, often in the company of Bob Kaiser and prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Pollack. Diamond also interviewed Sirhan's mother and brother Munir, visited their house, saw Sirhan's room, and read all the defense and police reports and the various psychological tests conducted on the prisoner.

Diamond found Sirhan "superficially cooperative" during their first meeting. He had picked up colloquial language from his six children and his students at Berkeley, and this helped put Sirhan at ease, allowing him to open up about his memory of the Ambassador Hotel.

To Sirhan, that night was like a dream, but Diamond encouraged him to remember details from the dream. Sirhan remembered someone in the kitchen wearing a uniform -- a policeman or a fireman. He was leaning on a table, and then he was being choked. He didn't remember much about the police station, but he did recall kicking the hot chocolate out of the officer's hand. He was thirsty, but they wouldn't give him a drink.

"When I'm mad, sir, I don't give a damn what happens."

"Why didn't you talk about the killing with the police?" asked Diamond.

"They kept telling me about my constitutional rights."

"You wouldn't even give them your name?"

"Why should I?" protested Sirhan.

"What do you think the truth about the shooting is?" asked Diamond.

"I don't really know, sir."

"You sure of that? How do you know this wasn't a put-up job? How do you know it wasn't some kind of fix?"

"Well, it could have been. I don't know." Sirhan shrugged.

"Do you believe deep down inside that you shot him?"

Sirhan paused and thought for a moment. "I hated him, sir. I loved him before. He would finish what President Kennedy started. President Kennedy tried to help the Arab refugees. But then, when I watched him on the television, how he was trying to get all that Jewish vote behind him and how he was always for the persecuted people -- meaning the Jews, sir! -- my whole ... feelings toward him suddenly changed, and sharply. I hated his guts, sir."

"Did the thought that you wanted to kill him occur to you then?"

"Never. Never. Never," insisted Sirhan.

"Do you think what you did sort of helped things?" asked Diamond.

"I'm not proud of what I did."

"What do you mean you're not proud of it? You believe in your cause, don't you?"

"I have no exact knowledge, sir, that this happened yet .... It's all in my mind, but goddamn it, when my body played with it, I couldn't understand it. I still don't believe it. My body outsmarted my brain, I guess."

"What did your body do?"

"Pull that trigger."

"Does your body remember it, even if your mind doesn't?"

"I don't give a damn, sir, in a way. Now I don't even care."

"Did you feel Robert Kennedy betrayed you?" asked Diamond.

"Yes."

"What sticks in your mind about him?"

"Saying he would send fifty jet bombers to Israel."

"When did you decide to do something?"

"I don't think I ever decided. I'm mad, and it's good as long as it lasted, for the duration of the aggravation."

"So you don't think you carefully planned this, then?"

"Oh, hell, I never planned it. Sir, I wake up every morning and I say, 'Oh, hell, what's this all about?' My dreams are more pleasant than this predicament."

"Do you think you're crazy, Sirhan? Do you think you are a queer fish?" asked Diamond.

"I think I am just as normal as anybody else. Although I am a fanatic about the Arab-Israeli ... "

Sirhan didn't put much stock in the psychologists' opinions. He'd gotten off track for one night, but that didn't make him mentally ill. Diamond asked if he'd be willing to take truth serum or a lie detector test to help find out what had happened. He said he would. "All right," said Diamond. "I'm going to try to help you remember."

In this first interview, Diamond detected little sign of the paranoid schizophrenia suggested by the psychological tests performed on Sirhan. He felt that Sirhan was telling him a mix of truth, evasions, and lies, but he couldn't figure out which was which. He later noted that paranoid schizophrenics "simply do not trust any other person. They are abnormally suspicious; they believe that no one will believe them; other people are trying to harm them, persecute them [and] they are extremely reluctant to admit the existence of any signs or symptoms of mental illness." So, before he could get to the truth, he would have to gain Sirhan's trust.

Sirhan also fit into a pattern Diamond had once described in a 1956 paper for The Journal of Social Therapy, entitled "The Simulation of Sanity." Diamond wrote that faking sanity was much more common than faking insanity, particularly in the case of paranoid schizophrenia:

The paranoid schizophrenic is especially averse to admitting that his actions are due to mental disease, and will insist, even in the face of the threat of the death punishment, that his criminal actions were intentional .... Such schizophrenics pretend to be mentally healthy, because to admit mental illness would destroy their self-esteem and break down the remnants of their contact with reality.... So they would rather go to prison or even to the gas chamber than to violate the dictates of their delusional system.


"I had this very much in mind when I interviewed Sirhan for the first time," said Diamond. What was the truth, what were the evasions, and what were the lies and the reasons for the lies?

***

On January 2, Diamond paid a second visit to Sirhan and asked him about going to see Kennedy on June 2. Sirhan said he had seen an ad in the paper inviting people to come and meet Senator Kennedy at the "Cocoanut Grove."

"A guy like me! A nobody getting a personal invitation to go down to the Ambassador! Too much out of my class!" He took the clipping down with him, so "they couldn't throw me out of the place."

"How close to Kennedy were you?" asked Diamond.

"Oh shit, I was very far. I was in the crowd watching. Kennedy told the people to get started on the last drive."

"Did he talk about the Jews, Israel?"

"No, he was very quiet that day."

"Was that the first time you actually ever saw Kennedy?"

"It was, sir -- in reality .... It was a thrill to see him."

"It was a thrill to see him?"

"Shit, yes, really. Hell, you know, a presidential candidate, my first time. And especially the advertisement, the public is invited. Really, I enjoyed it."

Diamond was incredulous. "You had no idea that three days later you were going to kill him."

"Goddamn it, no, hell no, I didn't. I don't know what the hell made me, sir. I seem to have just been railroaded into this thing. But, hell, would I have left so much evidence behind me? I'm not that stupid!"

Sometimes, people who don't care about being caught don't bother to cover up things like the notebooks, said Diamond.

Sirhan did not buy this theory. "No, sir. I care what happens to me."

"You care?"

"You're goddamn right, I care, sir! That bastard is not worth my life, sir. He isn't worth a minute of all the agony I've had up here."

***

Diamond had three "shortcuts" to choose from in trying to recover Sirhan's memory of the shooting in the time available -- a polygraph, truth serum, or hypnosis. "I didn't use the lie detector because I have little or no faith in its accuracy and little faith in its ability to provide the information I wanted," he said at trial. The intravenous injection of sodium amytal, a very powerful sedative, carried a slight risk of causing respiratory paralysis, so that was also ruled out. Diamond settled on hypnosis "as a means of gaining access to the patient's mind."

Hypnosis was not a lie detector, Diamond later told the court, but it was a valuable tool in overcoming unconscious resistance and evasions. While a person could lie under hypnosis, overcoming memory loss through hypnotic techniques provided "considerable evidence that the amnesia was genuine."

The Shelburne machine owned France's Philippe Duke of Orleans, cousin and enemy to Louis XVI, and opponent of the French nation-building tradition which was now being applied to the American cause. Shelburne and the Duke of Orleans employed creatures from the swamp of mystics and charlatans centered in the freemasonic lodges of Lyons, France, in particular the Martinist Order. Among the Martinists who performed in the staged 1780s-1790s French destabilizations were Franz Anton Mesmer, Count Cagliostro (real name Giuseppe Balsamo), Jacques Cazotte, Fabré d'Olivet, and Joseph de Maistre.

-- A Short Definition of Synarchism, by Lyndon LaRouche


After establishing a good rapport with Sirhan, Diamond broached the subject in this second meeting. "Sirhan, you know what hypnosis is?"

"Isn't it the domination of the weaker will by the stronger?"

"No, it isn't that at all," said Diamond. "It's simply a way of demonstrating one's own ability to concentrate ... and the hypnotist is not dominating over the will of the other. No one can be hypnotized against his own will, and the hypnotist really just gives suggestions and encouragement to a person so that he can use his own willpower to strengthen his own abilities."

The phenomena of Suggestion and Hypnotism are explainable under the Rosicrucian Theory of Mental Sex. A writer on this subject has said:

"Suggestion and Hypnotism operate in the same way, viz., by the Masculine Principle projecting its vibrations toward the Feminine Principle in the mind of the other person, the latter taking the seed-thought and allowing it to develop into maturity when it is born on the plane of consciousness. The Masculine Principle in the mind of the person giving the suggestion directs a vibratory current toward the Feminine Principle in the mind of the person who is the object of the suggestions, and the latter accepts it according to natural laws, unless the will interposes an objection. The seed-thought thus lodged in the mind of the other person grows and develops and in time is regarded as the rightful mental offspring of the person, whereas it is really like the cuckoo's egg placed in the nest of the sparrow; and like the offspring of the cuckoo, it destroys the rightful offspring of the owner of the nest. The proper method is for the Masculine and Feminine Principles in the mind of a person to co-ordinate and to act harmoniously in conjunction with each other. But unfortunately the Masculine Principle in the mind of the average person is too lazy to act—the activities of the Will too slight—the consequence being that such persons are ruled almost entirely by the minds and wills of other persons, whom they allow to do their thinking and willing for them. The majority of persons are but mere shadows and echoes of other persons having stronger wills and minds than themselves. The strong men and women of the world invariably manifest the Masculine Principle of Will, and their strength depends materially upon this fact. Instead of living by the impressions made upon their minds by others, they dominate their own minds by means of their own will, obtaining the kind of thoughts desired; and moreover they dominate the minds of others, likewise, in the same manner. Look at the strong people, see how they manage to implant their seed-thoughts in the minds of the masses of the people, thus causing the latter to think thoughts in accordance with the desires and wills of the strong individuals. This is why the masses of the people are such sheeplike creatures, never originating an idea of their own, nor using their own powers of mental activity. The manifestation of Mental Sex may be noticed all around us in our daily life. The magnetic persons are those who are able to use the Masculine Mental Principle in the direction of impressing their ideas upon others. The actor who makes people weep or cry as he wills is employing this principle, more or less unconsciously. So is the successful orator, statesman, preacher, writer, or other person who is before the public. The peculiar influence exerted by Mme persons over others is explainable in this way— the operation of Mental Sex activity in the form of vibratory mental currents. Here we may find the secret of personal magnetism, personal influence, fascination, etc."

-- The Secret Doctrine of The Rosicrucians, by Magus Incognito


Sirhan hadn't studied it much but agreed to be hypnotized. Diamond had him lie down and asked him to concentrate on a quarter held eight inches from his eyes.

"Somewhat to my surprise, he went to sleep fairly promptly," Diamond later told the Court, "It took less than ten minutes."

"I think you've always underestimated yourself, Sirhan," Diamond intoned. "Did you ever hope you could do that? Are you aware that you could have helped your people?"

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-- The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula


Suddenly, Sirhan began to cry, and a startled Diamond moved quickly to encourage him. "Let your feelings out, Sirhan. Don't be afraid," he said as Sirhan's sobbing intensified.

An Achilles’ heel is a deadly weakness in spite of overall strength, that can actually or potentially lead to downfall. While the mythological origin refers to a physical vulnerability, idiomatic references to other attributes or qualities that can lead to downfall are common.
-- Achilles' Heel, by Wikipedia


"I don't know any people!" cried Sirhan.

"Go on, tell me about it, Sirhan. What about your people? Say what you feel, Sirhan. Say what you feel." Sirhan, still sobbing, cried, "What the hell did they do?"

"Sirhan went into a sort of convulsive rage response in which his fists clenched, arms tightened up, and he got a most dramatic contorted rage expression on his face and sobbed," Diamond recalled later. "The tears poured down his face. For the first time, I had a glimpse of a completely different Sirhan. Never before had Sirhan shown any signs of what I would consider real emotional depth. Everything was a certain superciliousness, a certain superficiality; every other word was a "fuck" or a "shit" and it was a very coarse kind of clever, supercilious, smart-alecky type of approach without any kind of depth to it. Here was a different picture."

After a while, the sobbing gradually subsided, and Sirhan slipped too deep into trance to say anything more.

In further sessions, Diamond found that the merest hint about the Arabs and their unfortunate plight, and any talk about the Jews, the bombs, and what had happened to Jerusalem were enough to trigger more sobbing.

"I was immediately struck by the close similarity of this kind of emotional convulsive state under hypnosis with his reaction to the television broadcasts and to the early childhood bombing experiences in Palestine," Diamond later testified. "And I believe that these are one and the same condition, which have varied in intensity."

As Sirhan's sobbing abated, Diamond woke him up. "Wake up, Sirhan. Wake up. Sirhan! Open your eyes."

Every time Sirhan emerged from a trance, he followed the same pattern. He would wake up "kind of startled; he looks around and is quite bewildered, obviously quite confused. It takes him a portion of a minute almost to reorient himself. His paranoia comes to the surface right away, immediately suspicious that somebody has done something to him, but he doesn't know what."

"Do you know what happened, Sirhan?"

"I don't know what the hell you're doing, doc," he said, wheezing. "Is this a game, doc?"

Diamond assured him it wasn't. "Are you afraid?"

"I don't have any fear."

"Oh, yes, you do. You are full of fear back there."

"It's cold, doc, cold."

Sirhan's coldness was reminiscent of the shivering Dr. Crahan had observed in him on the day of the assassination.

Sirhan could never remember the hypnosis -- last thing he knew, he was staring at the quarter -- but he always denied he'd been hypnotized, implying he had tricked Diamond.

Diamond put Sirhan under a couple of times more, but Sirhan simply started snoring. Diamond gave Sirhan a posthypnotic suggestion to follow. When Diamond counted to five, Sirhan would go to sleep. At the count of three, he would wake up.

Diamond was surprised that Sirhan took to his instructions so quickly. "He learned this very well, which made me suspicious because usually in my experience it is the exception rather than the rule that people pick this up so readily. It requires a certain kind of training period." It was as if Sirhan had been hypnotized before.

***

On January 11, Dr. Diamond hypnotized Sirhan and asked him a series of questions drawn up by Cooper. He stuck a sterilized safety pin into his hand to make sure the hypnotic state was authentic. Sirhan didn't flinch at all, and they continued.

Although Sirhan went under very easily, it was difficult to get him to talk. "He would mumble in a very soft tone and talk like someone who is profoundly asleep," recalled Dr. Diamond. "Whenever you put pressure on him or tried to push him where he was showing some initial resistance, he would go off into a real deep sleep in which you couldn't get anything out of him at all. This is a kind of emotional resistance, but it also indicated something peculiar about his hypnotic experience."

"Talk loudly and clearly and don't mumble," ordered Diamond, and they began. "Sirhan, did anyone pay you to shoot Kennedy? Yes or no."

Sirhan was silent for a few moments. "No."

"No? No one paid you to shoot Kennedy. Did anybody know ahead of time that you were going to do it, Sirhan?"

"No."

"Did anybody from the Arabs tell you to shoot Kennedy? Any of your Arab friends?"

"No."

"Did you think this up all by yourself?"

After stopping to think, Sirhan replied, "Yes."

"Are you the only person involved in the Kennedy shooting?"

Again, "Yes."

Here, Sirhan seemed to momentarily "block" a spontaneous response on two key questions, but Diamond let it pass.

"Why did you shoot Kennedy?" Sirhan did not respond.

"Why did you shoot him, Sirhan?"

"The bombers."

"You mean the bombers to Israel?"

"Yes."

"Why did you decide to shoot Kennedy?" No answer. Diamond repeated the question several times, and Sirhan finally said, "I don't know."

Diamond tried to get Sirhan to remember the shooting, and Sirhan finally remembered when Kennedy came into the pantry, but nothing else. After again suggesting that Sirhan remember more about that night at the Ambassador, Diamond woke him up.

Sirhan went through his usual reorientation ritual, then looked down at his hand, aghast. "Jesus Christ! What's that?" He pulled at the pin, and blood trickled down his hand. "You've got a lot of guts, doc."

"You're the one who's got the guts," said Diamond. "You're the one who controlled the pain."

"You put the son-of-a-bitchin' pin right in there."

The suggestion worked. Gradually, more details came back to Sirhan. He recalled seeing a man in uniform. Sirhan was leaning on a table.

"What kind of table?" asked Diamond.

''I'm not sure, but I recollect giving a girl a cup of coffee. I served myself. I didn't remember paying for it. ... " He remembered the mirrors -- they were bothering him, and it was too bright. He looked for coffee and met a girl. She looked Spanish or Armenian.

"I might have tried to hang around with her," he said. "She could have been a fast one."

"Did you talk about Kennedy with her?"

"Kennedy was out of my mind then."

He had remembered Kennedy under hypnosis, but he couldn't remember him now.

"Wait a minute," said Sirhan. "This is the press room? There was a lady there. A Teletype machine. Western Union. I was there."

Sirhan asked if he could go down to the Ambassador to help him remember where he went next. Diamond didn't think there was much chance of that.

"Hell," said Sirhan. "This girl kept talking about coffee. She wanted cream. Spanish, Mexican, dark skinned. When people talked about the girl in the polka-dot dress, maybe they were thinking of the girl I was having coffee with."

Diamond put Sirhan back in a light trance and asked him to think about the bombers over Jerusalem. Like clockwork, Sirhan started sobbing.

"He can't. He can't."

"What's happening to you, Sirhan? Don't run away from your feelings, Sirhan. Think of the bombers, Sirhan. Did Kennedy send the bombers?"

"He was going to."

"Were you going to stop him?"

"I don't know."

Mention of the bombers triggered tears, while mention of Kennedy had very little effect. Diamond visited Mary Sirhan and asked her about the bombings in Jerusalem during Sirhan's childhood.

The bombings were the reason the Sirhans came to the United States, she told him. The sounds of gunfire and explosions in the streets would make the children "cry and scream and shake all over." It seemed to affect Sirhan more than the other children. A soldier was blown to bits, and Sirhan saw his foot hanging from a church steeple. Afterward, Sirhan was pale and paralyzed with fear, then fainted. A bomb blasted a storekeeper across the street, and Sirhan blacked out in shock, as if he'd been hit, too.

When Sirhan was seven, he saw a nine-year-old girl hit in the knee by a piece of shrapnel with blood gushing down her leg. "What did she do? What did she do?" he cried; then he fainted.

There were other times when Sirhan fainted on the street, sometimes twice in one day. Why? Mary didn't know. "From fear. A bombing .... If Sirhan would see blood on the ground, he used to faint."

Mary Sirhan knew nothing about Sirhan's experiments with the occult, but his brother Munir remembered Sirhan staring into a mirror at the desk in his room and looking into candle flames. A lead fishing weight hung on a string from the ceiling. "Sirhan said he could make this move back and forth just by concentrating on it real hard. I'd come into the room and he'd be staring at it real hard and it would be swinging back and forth."

Later in court, Diamond described "the profound shock state" in Sirhan after the bombings -- "he would just stand motionless, trembling with fear, his fists clenched ... [an] agonized expression on his face... [with] no response to questioning at all; and on at least one occasion this may have lasted several days." These "shock responses" were Sirhan's first "trances" or "dissociated" states. Such states are often out of an individual's conscious control and followed by amnesia, like an unremembered dream.

Diamond traced "Sirhan's illness, his pathologically sick mental and emotional condition," back to these "shock responses" in very early childhood. They started in 1948 at the time of the first Arab-Israeli War, when Sirhan was four years old, "a very critical period in the development of the emotional life of a child."

He pinpointed another incident in the summer of 1957 of considerable psychological significance. Sirhan's father, Bishara, and brothers Adel and Munir were digging an irrigation ditch around a tree in their backyard. Sirhan was running around, being a nuisance, trampling mud onto the cement of the driveway. He ignored warnings to stop, and eventually, when his father tried to beat him, Adel stepped in to stop him.

Bishara was incensed and demanded of Mary Sirhan that she choose between him and the children -- he was the head of the family, and either he maintained the discipline or not. Mary Sirhan defended the children, so he told her he was going back to Palestine and took the family savings and left. "I think this episode had a considerable psychological effect not only on Sirhan but on the whole relationship of all the members of the family," said Diamond.

After dropping out of college in the mid-sixties, Sirhan saw himself "largely as a failure, as a nothing; yet he was full of daydreams of leadership, of sometimes becoming a very great man, a great hero; he thought oftentimes of his experiences in Jerusalem and the war and of the tensions in the Middle East; at the same time he was very lonely, and what Diamond "would consider an isolated, alienated person."

Diamond thought Sirhan's mental illness predated the fall from the horse but the "personality change" the family observed afterward helped them become aware of it. Munir had been away from home for more than nine months and returned in September of 1967, very shocked and alarmed to find that Sirhan had changed so dramatically -- from a "kind, gentle, sweet, loving personality to an angry, irritable, explosive kind of a person; very suspicious and distrustful."

Diamond later described in court how Sirhan's illness grew progressively worse and culminated in "various alarming responses" to radio and television broadcasts concerning the Arab-Israeli War in the year leading up to the shooting. He would go into "dissociated states," recalling the terrified child of the Jerusalem bombings -- "his fists were clenched and there would be a frozen expression of rage on his face." His family would try to calm him down, but "he didn't hear anything .... These broadcasts were quite sufficient to trigger off at least a partial loss of contact with reality," concluded Diamond.

On the afternoon of January 18, Cooper, Berman, and Kaiser visited Sirhan and showed him a copy of his notebook for the first time since his arrest. Sirhan seemed more concerned with Kaiser's impending book on the case. Kaiser suggested he write his own book. Berman rolled his eyes. "Judging from some of your writings, Sirhan, your book would be somewhat incomprehensible."

Cooper started to read from the notebook. "Lookit here. 'Long live Communism. Long live Communism. Long live Communism. Long live Nasser. Nasser. Nasser. Nasser. Nasser.'"

"Nasser was no Communist," said Berman.

"Yeah ... ," said Sirhan, struggling to understand his writing. "All this repetition!"

'''Peggy Osterkamp, I love you. I love you. Osterkamp. Miss Peggy. Peggy. P. P. P.' What is -- who is this?" asked Cooper.

"This must have been a long time ago!" said Sirhan. He hadn't seen Peggy since he worked at the ranch in Corona in 1966.

At Cooper's request, Sirhan translated a page of Arabic. It was a letter to his mother, asking her to forward his mail. Toward the end it read, "I especially beg of you in a special way to discuss the matter of my location with no one at all at all." If Sirhan wrote this from the ranch, why did he want to keep his location so secret?

"'Tonight. Tonight. Tonight. We. I must buy a new Mustang tonight. Tonight. Tonight. Tonight. Tonight. Meet me tonight," read Cooper.

"I must be psychotic," he said.

'''Let us do it. Let us do it. Let us do it do it it it. Let us do it. Please pay to the order of 50. 50. 50. 50,000. 5. 50,000. Very good. Very good. One hundred thousand dollars.'"

"Whew!" said Sirhan.

"How much did you say you made a week?" asked Berman.

"Seventy dollars a week," said Sirhan.

"'Please pay to the order of Sirhan Sirhan the the the the amount of 15 15 15 15 death life 15. $15,000. Must die. Die. Die. Die. Dollar sign. Life and death.'''

"For Christ's sake," said Berman. "Were you smoking hashish?" Sirhan denied that he smoked anything.

"Is it possible you wrote in your notebook when you were in a trancelike state?" asked Kaiser.

"I don't know," said Sirhan.

"Here, right here," said Cooper, clutching a page in Arabic and its translation, "you've written in Arabic, right between 'one hundred thousand dollars' and 'one hundred thousand dollars': 'he should be killed.' What about that?"

No comment from Sirhan.

"That could be interpreted that you were getting $100,000 to kill Kennedy," said Kaiser.

"Where is that money?" asked Cooper. "You holding on to it?" Cooper said Sirhan didn't have to answer that.

'"Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.'"

"He didn't write that," said Berman. "Give Mr. Marx some credit."

Cooper had had enough. He explained to Sirhan that the prosecution would enter the notebooks as evidence.

Sirhan was outraged. "What? It's unconstitutional!"

Maybe it was, said his lawyers, but they might also help establish diminished capacity.

"What kind of writing involves this kind of repetition of a word?" asked Berman.

"Yeah, that's what I've been wondering," said Sirhan. "Are they gonna say I'm psychotic? Crazy or something?" He would do anything to avoid the stigma of mental illness, though it was probably the only thing that could save him from a death sentence.

On the way out of the building, according to Kaiser, Cooper said, "I can't figure this kid out." Cooper knew Sirhan was sick, but the jury wouldn't like his memory lapses when it came to the notebooks and the shooting. They'd say he was lying. As Kaiser notes, "either Dr. Diamond had to help Sirhan remember or find out why he couldn't."

Diamond and Kaiser visited Sirhan again on January 25, to unravel the mystery of the notebooks, despite Sirhan's insistence they would never be used as evidence. Diamond turned to another page. "What about this '$15,000'? Does that amount ring any bells?"

"No," said Sirhan. "The only amount that rings any bells is $1,705. The money I got from the Industrial Accident Commission."

'''Please pay to the order of.' What's that?" Sirhan didn't know. "That's what you see on a check, isn't it?" Sirhan didn't even have a bank account. '''Kennedy must fall Kennedy must fall.' What do you think of that?"

"He fell," said Sirhan.

"Do you remember writing that?" No. "It's going to be very hard to convince a jury you could forget something like this, Sirhan. It's not gonna make much sense to them. They're going to think you're lying to protect yourself."

"Sir. Look, they can throw me in that gas chamber anytime they want, sir, and I wouldn't give a damn."

"Can I hypnotize you again, Sirhan?"

Diamond put Sirhan into a light trance and stuck a safety pin into his hand. As before, Sirhan didn't flinch.

"Sirhan, did you tell anybody you were going to shoot the senator?"

"No," said Sirhan.

"Did you tell that girl you had coffee with at the Ambassador?"

"No."

"Sirhan, when did you get the gun?"

"When I was working."

"Why did you buy a gun?"

"I liked guns."

Diamond got Sirhan to open his eyes while still under hypnosis. He admitted the writing was his but said he couldn't remember writing it. Diamond turned to the most incriminating page and read, '''My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession.'"

"You're back in your room. You're thinking of killing the senator. You're writing in your notebook. Are you watching TV? Huh? Remember the jets to Israel. Remember the jet planes, Sirhan? Remember the bombs and the Jews, Sirhan?"

Mention of the bombs and jets triggered another flood of moaning and sobbing. Diamond gave Sirhan a posthypnotic suggestion that his traumatic feelings about the bombs would come out while he was awake. Then he woke him up and asked about the bombs.

"What bombs?" asked Sirhan. It hadn't worked. "Under hypnosis, the merest mention of bombs triggered a real hysteria in Sirhan," wrote Kaiser. "Awake, he intellectualized about the injustice of the bombs he had seen explode back in Jerusalem."

"I asked how you felt," said Diamond, his frustration showing.

"Oh, shit, doc. I don't know. It helps not to remember."

***

Diamond put Sirhan under again but had him keep his eyes open. He handed him the notebook and pointed to the top of the page. "Read what it says, Sirhan."

'''RFK must dee.'''

"No," said Diamond. "It doesn't say 'dee.'''

"Die," said Sirhan. Kaiser watched Sirhan read "very poorly, like a second or third grader, his voice ... a barely audible whisper." Then he got stuck on a long word.

"Spell it out, Sirhan."

"A-S-S-," spelled Sirhan.

"What does that word spell, Sirhan?" No answer. "Sirhan, read like a grown-up. 'Robert F. Kennedy must be' -- what's the next word?"

"Killed."

"No, that isn't what it says. Open your eyes and look. 'A-S-S-' -- what does that say?"

"Assassinated."

Image
The most incriminating page of Sirhan's notebook.

"Right. Read on."

'''RFK must be assassinated. RFK must be assassinated.'''

"When did you write that, Sirhan?"

"'RFK must be assassinated. RFK must be assassinated.''' Sirhan repeated the sentence over and over again.

"What happened to Kennedy? Who killed Kennedy, Sirhan?"

"I don't know."

***

Diamond put Sirhan under again, gave him another suggestion to remember the notebooks, then woke him up and had him read some more.

'''Kennedy must fall. Kennedy must fall. Please pay to the order of Sirhan Sirhan. We believe that Robert F. Kennedy must be sacrificed for the cause of the poor exploited people.'''

Could he remember what he was thinking when he wrote this? No.

"Was it in your room at home?"

"It had to be at home."

"Think very hard. An image should come to you."

Sirhan remembered reading at his desk when he heard a radio news report about Kennedy speaking at a temple or a Jewish club somewhere. Maybe he wrote the page after that.

He recognized some of the pages as schoolwork. "Did the DA write the dates in?" he asked. No, said Diamond, the writing was his. Did he ever practice writing for his Rosicrucian exercises?

''I've read about -- I don't know, there's a special name for it."

"Automatic writing," offered Diamond.

"Yeah, where you have a blank sheet of paper and you can transfer it telepathically or somehow."

Diamond had Sirhan read out another page. "'A declaration of war against American humanity. When in the course of human events, it has become necessary for me to equalize and seek revenge for all the inhuman treatments committed against me by the American people.'" Sirhan stopped midway. "This sounds ... big. But shit, this is not like my handwriting. There's a difference in style in my handwriting."

"It looks a little sprawly," conceded Kaiser, "like you're a little out of control when you wrote this. Although it's your writing, it's bad writing. Like maybe you were tired."

Sirhan read on. "'The author expresses his wishes very bluntly that ... he wants to be ... recorded by historians as the man ...'" Sirhan stopped and whistled again, as if reading this for the first time.

"Go on," said Diamond.

"'The man who triggered, triggered' -- what's this?"

"'Triggered off.'"

"Whew! ... 'The last war.'"

"What do you think of that, Sirhan?"

"I don't."

"Well, think, Sirhan! When did you write that?"

"I can't, doc. My mind's a blank. I don't remember this."

The jury wouldn't like his memory lapses. "They'll really think you're a mental case then," said Diamond.

"I'm not mental, sir ... [but] that's the problem. If I say I'm mental, this whole defense of diminished responsibility, they're gonna say, hell, he's begging for his life.... I don't wanta beg for it, sir. If you don't have fucking justice in America, piss on you. And if America's the best country in the world and I cannot have what it gives, I don't wanta live at all."

"Well, that's big talk, Sirhan."

"Like I say, doc, take me up on it."

"Are you afraid that if they saw this notebook they'd think you're crazy? It's a crazy notebook, isn't it?"

"It's just none of their business."

"But it became their business when you shot Kennedy .... You can't get away from that. But it is a crazy kind of notebook."

"Hell, I know it, doc. I laughed at it as if I had listened to it or saw it for the first time."

Kaiser pointed out to Sirhan that the writing seemed to be inspired by the article in the Rosicrucian Digest called "Write It Down." "So, in a very remote way, at least, the Rosicrucians are involved, aren't they?"

"Yeah, but I don't want -- oh, shit -- I don't want to put any blame on them in that way. Oh, hell no. No, shit, no. Hell. No."

***

Dr. Seymour Pollack had been hired as the psychiatrist for the prosecution. He was a distinguished forensic psychiatrist from the University of Southern California, where he headed a special Institute on Psychiatry and the Law. Talking to Sirhan, Grant Cooper thought Sirhan seemed "as normal as apple pie," but they needed to show diminished capacity to counter the apparent premeditation shown in the notebooks to escape the death penalty. He had nothing to lose by letting Pollack see Sirhan -- if Pollack found him mentally ill, Cooper might be able to strike a bargain with the DA.

Pollack was introduced to Sirhan on January 18 and went up to see him again with Diamond and Kaiser eight days later. Sirhan told Dr. Diamond and Dr. Pollack that "he was through," recalled Kaiser. "He didn't want any more doctors bugging him .... He was going to plead guilty as charged. He'd rather go to the gas chamber than have anybody 'fuck around' with his mind."

"You guys are goofing up my mind; I don't understand it," he said. They were going to call him "a fanatic or some stupid person or something like that. I'd rather die and say I killed that son of a bitch for my country, period."

"You don't really trust the psychiatrists, do you, Sirhan?" asked Diamond.

"You know more about me than I know about myself," said Sirhan.

"Would it help," asked Pollack, "if, after Dr. Diamond hypnotizes you today, you listen to the tape yourself?"

"You don't understand, doc. I don't wish to cooperate any longer."

Diamond explained to Sirhan how important it was to recover his memory. He wanted Dr. Pollack to see "another Sirhan" under hypnosis -- "a part of you you don't seem to know anything about. I think you, too, should know about these feelings, Sirhan .... They're deep down inside you and they may be the real key to what's causing everything .... You don't remember yesterday, Sirhan? You sobbed and sobbed and sobbed?"

"Goddamn. That's not me, doc."

"That is you, Sirhan." Sirhan didn't get it.

''I'd like to put you to sleep one more time," cajoled Diamond. "Let me show this to Dr. Pollack. Let me show it to you. And I'll play the tape for you."

"Okay," said Sirhan.

Diamond put him back into a trance and tried to bring back his memories of the bombs.

"Remember the bombs, Sirhan? Remember the bombs?"

Once more, the sobbing fit from Sirhan. This time, Diamond woke him halfway through. Sirhan came to. It frightened him.

"What happened, Sirhan? What happened?"

"I saw that poor man .... They killed him." Sirhan had seen the grocer across the street in Jerusalem, blown to bits by a bomb outside his shop.

"Can you see him now, Sirhan? Close your eyes and look at him right now."

Sirhan closed his eyes and started sobbing again. "It's too bloody. Get me out of this, doc, get me out of this."

But there was nothing to get Sirhan "out of" -- he was awake.

"Sirhan, these are your feelings," said Diamond. "These are your feelings you've been running away from. Don't be afraid to cry, Sirhan. Real tears, Sirhan. Let it all come out, Sirhan." Sirhan broke down, his body shaking, in floods of tears -- at last his emotions bleeding into real life.

"The whole world has to know the truth, Sirhan. No lies, no cover-ups. Only you can let them know what the truth is, Sirhan. You mustn't be afraid of your feelings. You're awake now. You're not hypnotized, Sirhan. These are your feelings and you can't hide them."

Diamond put Sirhan under hypnosis again, but he went in too deep and mumbled incoherently. Diamond tried to pull him out into a light trance. "Sirhan, open your eyes and wake up," ordered Diamond. "One, two, wake up." Sirhan moaned and his eyelids fluttered.

"Now, Sirhan, we were talking about on Tuesday night, you'd gone back to your car. You're tired. You had four Collins to drink and you're too drunk to drive and you go back to the car and you see the gun on the back seat. Do you remember?"

"They can't steal it, they can't steal it," said Sirhan in a sing-song voice.

"You were afraid they were going to steal your gun," said Diamond. "So what did you do with it? Did you put it in the band of your pants?"

Sirhan continued his sing-song mumbling, so Diamond gave Sirhan a suggestion to remember everything discussed so far and woke him up.

"1-2-3: wake up, Sirhan, wake up."

Sirhan slowly woke up, shivering as usual.

"Are you cold again?" asked Pollack.

"How in the hell did you get here?" asked Sirhan, coming to, as if clocking Pollack for the first time.

"You don't remember my coming in?"

"Think, Sirhan, remember," said Dr. Diamond. "Dr. Pollack's been here all this afternoon."

"You're trying to frighten me," said Sirhan softly, like a little kid.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:15 pm

PART 2 OF 2

Diamond tried to pick up from where they stopped off a few minutes earlier under hypnosis.

"You had four Tom Collins to drink, remember that? When you were asleep, you told us that you counted them on your fingers, 1-2-3-4. Does that sound right?"

"I guzzled that stuff like lemonade, doc," said Sirhan.

"And then you got real tired, and you decided to go home and you went out to the car and you were too drunk to drive, you remember that?"

Sirhan remembered walking up a slant, he must have gotten into his car but "I was hazy, doc ... I wanted to sleep. Coffee was on my mind again."

Under hypnosis, he spoke of picking up the gun but, awake, he couldn't remember.

"You said the Jews were going to steal your gun," Pollack reminded him.

"I don't remember that, sir." He didn't remember where he put the gun either. "Those pants were pretty tight."

Pollack asked Sirhan to remember what happened when he got back to the Ambassador.

"I remember I got coffee. She wanted cream ... and there was a policeman there."

"Then what? Did you talk to the policeman?"

"It was dark. Oh hell, it was dark."

"It was dark? I thought there were a lot of lights there," said Pollack. "How can you drink coffee in the dark?"

"I don't know. It was dark.... A lot of lights, too. There was a hell of a lot of lights."

"This was consistent with what he said before, too," said Diamond. There were a lot of lights there, but he was in the dark."

"And there was a lot of silver around .... " Possibly the steam tables in the pantry. "She was tired, too. She wanted coffee just as much as I did."

"Did she tell you her name?"

"Coffee was all our discussion."

Earlier, under hypnosis, Sirhan told Diamond about getting coffee and going into a room with a Teletype machine. "Do you remember the Teletype machine? Concentrate, Sirhan .... Where is the Teletype machine?"

"Tap, tap, tap, tap," said Sirhan, mimicking the Teletype machine. "It was one of those Western Union jobs .... I was looking at the lady that was operating it .... It was a funny machine, doc. A funny machine."

"Sirhan, right next to the Teletype machine is a door, a swinging door. Do you remember a door?" The door led into the pantry.

"I don't remember any door," said Sirhan.

"When you were asleep, you said you went through the door next to the Teletype machine."

"That girl. I followed her."

"The girl with the coffee?"

"The coffee ... She led me into a dark place."

"Led you into a dark place. Was this where the Teletype machine was?"

"I don't know."

"What did she have in mind? What did you have in mind?" asked Pollack.

"I was just trailing her, that's all."

"He told me before what was on his mind is he hoped to be able to screw her afterwards, was that right, Sirhan?" asked Diamond.

"I guess I was.... Lot of empty rooms down there."

"You were thinking of taking her into one of the empty rooms?"

"Why not?"

"Why not? Sure. It makes sense," said Diamond, sounding more confused than ever.

"Is she the one who gave you the coffee?" asked Pollack.

"She's the one that asked for it ... and that's what I wanted ... and I gave her a cup and I made some for me and we sat there. Then she moved and I followed her."

"And then what?"

"There was a policeman .... He had a funny uniform."

Diamond explained to Pollack that this was probably a fireman but Sirhan couldn't say for sure.

"And then what happened?"

"Damn ... I was tired."

"Alright, you were tired," said Pollack. "Still drinking coffee or did you put the coffee down?"

"I remember lying on the table, together with the coffee, I had my elbows on there and I was just resting. And all of a sudden I was choked."

"Oh wait!" said Diamond. "You skipped something. You skipped a lot, Sirhan."

"You were choked because something happened, Sirhan," said Pollack.

"Now, lookit," said Diamond sternly. "You're back at the press room. You had your coffee already. You followed this girl around. Did you lose her?"

"I don't know .... A lot of darkness there."

"Do you remember the mirrors, Sirhan? Remember the mirror that you looked into when you saw Kennedy's face?"

"Oh yeah ... that fucker."

"That fucker, yeah ... Now, remember the mirror when you saw it at home. Now, do you remember the mirrors in the Ambassador Hotel?"

The only mirrors Sirhan could remember were in the Venetian Room.

"There are two entrances to the kitchen very close together," Diamond explained to Pollack. "One is from the press room; the other one is a little alcove that is totally mirrored. Doors mirrored, walls mirrored, everything is mirrored, so that you see a great many multiple reflections."

Diamond thought these may well have triggered the trance.

"Are there mirrors also in the other rooms?" asked Pollack.

"A lot of lights, a hell of a lot of fuckin' lights."

Kaiser suggested the coffee urn might have been in the pantry itself. Sirhan remembered a lot of cups stacked up by the coffee. He was lying on the table but he couldn't remember what kind of table it was.

"Were you looking for more coffee?"

"I was resting."

Sirhan seems to have been "resting" on the steam table after the shooting as Kennedy aides struggled to pin him down. The "enormously peaceful eyes" George Plimpton described fit this state of mind.

"I was leaning on the table and I was looking at that policeman."

"What did you say to yourself when you saw the policeman?" asked Kaiser.

"I don't know."

"Were you afraid of the policeman? Did you think he was going to arrest you?" asked Diamond.

"I was drunk."

"You told me, that when you were asleep, that you could see Kennedy walking towards you. And you told me you wanted to shake hands with him."

Sirhan smiled ruefully. "I wish to hell I did. Ohhh, goddamn!"

"Well, try to remember," said Diamond. "Put your head back and concentrate. You see Kennedy coming towards you and you wanted to shake hands with him, Sirhan."

Pollack provocatively challenged Sirhan: "Why would you shake hands with that son of a bitch? That I don't get. Why would you shake hands with that son of a bitch?"

"I don't know," said Sirhan.

"Sirhan, you know that you told me once that you loved the Kennedys," said Diamond.

"I liked him. I liked him."

"He was gonna be the hope for the Arab people?"

"I thought so."

Pollack found this incredible. "Bobby was gonna be the hope of the Arab people? Huh?"

"He was for the underdog," explained Sirhan. Diamond tried to refocus.

"Why not hypnotize me again, doc? On that part alone?"

At the start of the session, Sirhan had said he didn't want any more hypnosis; now he was once again a willing volunteer.

"One-two-three-four-five ... now, try to go into a fairly light sleep, that's it," said Diamond. "Now, try to picture in your mind the scene. You're in the kitchen there, you're standing in the corner, there's lots of people around, lot of noise. And you see Kennedy coming. Now what do you see, Sirhan? You're back in the kitchen there. What do you see?"

Sirhan remained motionless, eyes closed.

"Sirhan, open your eyes! You're back in the kitchen. Kennedy is coming toward you. Look at his face." No response from Sirhan. "Sirhan, you asked me to hypnotize you and I did. And you said you would talk; now, you keep your word and I'll keep mine. Sirhan, open your eyes and talk. What do you see?"

"He's running at me."

"Who's running at you?"

"People." Perhaps the rush of Kennedy and his party walking swiftly through the pantry toward the Colonial Room.

"Why are they running at you? Concentrate, Sirhan. Concentrate. Why are they running at you?" No response. "Remember, Sirhan. Why are they running at you? Sirhan, think back. You see Kennedy. What did he look like? Look in his face, Sirhan. Open your eyes. Look at Kennedy."

Sirhan groaned and grew increasingly disturbed.

"Open your eyes, Sirhan, and look at Kennedy. Sirhan, don't shake your head. Look at him. You must remember! I order you to open your eyes and look at Kennedy. Look at him. There he is. Don't shake your head. He's coming toward you, Sirhan. What do you see?"

"Bobby ... You-son-of-a-bitch."

'''You son of a bitch.' Were you mad, Sirhan? That son of a bitch is coming. What do you see?"

"What's he doing here?"

'''What's he doing here?''' Diamond repeated. "Go on."

Sirhan started to breathe hard. "You -- son -- of -- a -- bitch."

"'You son of a bitch,'" repeated Diamond. "You're talking to Kennedy .... Sirhan! Open your eyes and look at Kennedy."

"'You son of a bitch' has been verified by a witness," Diamond whispered to Pollack. "That's the first time he's talked about that .... Open your eyes, Sirhan! Open your eyes and look at Kennedy. There he is right there."

Sirhan gave a quick jump and suddenly started choking in his chair.

"Are they choking you, Sirhan?" asked Diamond.

Sirhan's face turned a little blue as the pronounced sound of choking was accompanied by anguished gasps for air.

"All right, Sirhan. They're not really choking you. It's all right. Sirhan, they're not really choking you. Sirhan, open your eyes. You haven't shot him yet, Sirhan, he's still there. Sirhan, there is Kennedy, open your eyes. Open your eyes, Sirhan. 'You son of a bitch,' you said, Sirhan."

"He can't. He can't."

'''He can't?' He can't do what?"

"Can't send those bombers."

"He can't send the bombers. You're not gonna let him, are you, Sirhan? Hmmm?"

"He can't. He can't. He can't. He can't," repeated Sirhan, in a fast, excited, breathy rhythm.

"Sirhan! Did you know Kennedy was coming this way?"

"No."

"Did you expect him?"

"No."

"Sirhan, were you waiting for him?"

"Uhhhh."

"Yes or no, Sirhan?"

"No."

"No. Are you sure you weren't waiting for him?"

"No."

"But you see him now. He's coming, Sirhan. He's coming down the hall." Sirhan let out an anguished groan.

"Look at him, Sirhan. Open your eyes."

"He's running, he's moving at me," said Sirhan, by now very disturbed.

"C'mon, look at him."

"You cocksucker," spat Sirhan.

"'You cocksucker,' yeah, go on."

Sirhan was trembling violently, still panting, his breath quickening as he approached the climax. "You can't. You can't. You can't," he repeated, over and over. "You can't. You can't. You can't. You can't. You can't."

"Are you reaching for your gun, Sirhan?" With his right hand, Sirhan grabbed an imaginary gun crudely from his left hip bone.

"You can't. You can't. You can't. You can't."

"Are you reaching for your gun, Sirhan?" asked Diamond again.

Sirhan's panting became faster. "You can't. You can't. You can't. You can't. You can't."

"You can't do that. You can't send the bombers," intoned Diamond. "Are you gonna stop him, Sirhan?"

Sirhan grabbed for the gun again, not from his left hip bone this time, but from his crotch.

"He can't. He can't. He can't."

"All right, he can't. Are you gonna stop him? How are you gonna stop him, Sirhan?"

"He can't, he can't," sighed Sirhan. He was still grabbing for his crotch; then he became quiet for a moment.

"Sirhan, open your eyes and look at Kennedy!" barked Diamond.

"Tell him to reach for his gun," whispered Kaiser.

"Sirhan, open your eyes. Look at Kennedy. He's coming. Reach for your gun, Sirhan. It's your last chance, Sirhan. Reach for your gun!

Sirhan's quick breathing started up again. "He can't. He can't. He can't."

"For the record," Diamond noted for the tape, "he is reaching spasmodically into the waistband of his pants on his left side in a crude kind of grabbing or gesture reaching for the gun."

"He can't. He can't."

"All right, what happened, Sirhan? Take the gun out of your pants. You've got the gun in your hand now. Let me see you shoot the gun, Sirhan. Shoot the gun. Shoot the gun."

Sirhan's panting intensified.

"Sirhan, take the gun out and shoot it. Who are you shooting, Sirhan? Who are you shooting? His fingers are going through repetitive spasmodic movements like pulling a trigger on a double-action revolver.... Sirhan! You're shooting Kennedy now, huh? The double-action gun. It's hard to pull the trigger."

According to Kaiser, "Sirhan's right hand pounded climactically on his right thigh -- five times. His right forefinger squeezed and twisted three more times in a weakening spasm. Then he was still."

"Sirhan, you have wanted to remember the shooting of Kennedy," said Pollack as he gave him a posthypnotic suggestion to remember everything he had just experienced in trance when he woke up.

Diamond started to bring Sirhan out, suggesting he remember everything but feel warm and relaxed when he woke up. "You won't be worried," said Diamond reassuringly. "And you won't be frightened. You got a lot of bad feelings out of you and you'll feel clean inside, Sirhan. You'll feel clean and you'll trust us .... We're doctors, Sirhan, and we want to help you. We're Jews, Sirhan, but we want to help you because we hate war, too, Sirhan. We hate war, Sirhan, just like you hate war."

Sirhan woke up, relaxed and smiling. "I don't see you smile very often," said Diamond.

"I can't afford to," said Sirhan, and the doctors laughed.

But he couldn't remember seeing Kennedy, saying "you son of a bitch," pulling a gun, or anything else from his trance state five minutes before.

"I must have been crazy."

"No, you weren't crazy, Sirhan," Diamond reassured him. "You were blind with anger. You're not a crazy person .... Do you remember where you told us where the gun was? Point to me where the gun was."

"I don't remember."

"Five minutes ago, Sirhan, you showed me where the gun was.... The gun was right there on your belt. You showed us, Sirhan, how you reached for the gun. Go ahead and reach for it."

"I never reached for my gun," said Sirhan, genuinely mystified.

"You reached and you showed us how you pulled the trigger."

Sirhan was nonplussed.

"All right, Sirhan. You had a long day and you did very well, and you got us a lot of information. We'll help you remember all this, Sirhan."

"What I said at the beginning, sir, still stands," said Sirhan, "that I don't want you to call me crazy."

"That we promise you;' said Diamond. "You're not crazy, Sirhan. You've been very badly mixed up. Sometimes, you can't remember things, but no one's going to call you crazy; nobody's going to put you in a crazy house."

Sirhan was also determined to plead guilty because he didn't think he could get a fair trial. "Why go to court, sir, and have you convict me and then turn around and have the State Department tell the world and the Arab people, especially after you gas me -- "Well, he's dead but we gave him a fair trial!"

"In other words, it would be better for the Arab world if you didn't have a trial," said Diamond.

"I think it would."

"It would be better for the Arab world if you weren't crazy."

"Yes, sir." Over the next several days, Sirhan had three sessions alone with Dr. Pollack. "You've convinced me that you do have trouble remembering what took place," said Pollack. "But your trouble remembering doesn't mean to me that you didn't intend to kill him; do you see my point?"

Pollack didn't really think Sirhan had a chance but agreed with Cooper and Diamond that the clearer Sirhan was about all of this, the better chance he had -- because the jury wouldn't believe him if he said he didn't remember, and the diaries showed premeditation.

"Those writings, you'll admit, don't look good, do they?"

"No, sir, they don't."

"You realize that they definitely indicate that you wanted to kill Kennedy before he was killed; you realize that, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

But Pollack still couldn't fit the notebooks to the person sitting next to him. "You hypnotize very easily, you know that? You're very suggestible .... I look at you as a very emotionally filled, intense kid .... But I can't conceive of you doing this. It doesn't jibe."

Sirhan called the angry part of him "the little punk" but insisted he didn't know what he was doing when he killed Kennedy.

"What you're doing is discounting the real Sirhan," said Pollack, "the intense -- what shall I say? -- freedom fighter? You didn't want the Arabs to be hurt more .... You felt it necessary to bring this to the attention of the world."

"Oh, shit, sir. I could have slapped him in the face; I could have broken his nose. I could have thrown my cup of coffee at him .... Why? Why not? Why the hell didn't I do that?"

"Because that wouldn't stop the jet bombers," replied Pollack, searching for an explanation. "I don't really think you thought the whole thing out. You certainly didn't work out a good way of killing him."

"That's what I don't understand," said Sirhan. "If I'd wanted to kill a man, why would I have shot him right there where they could have choked the shit out of me? Would I, sir, be so stupid as to leave that notebook there, waiting for those cops to pick up?"

"It might be that you wanted to be caught, if you wanted the world to know it was an Arab who did it." Sirhan made a face. "You don't think so."

"I may have done more damage to the Arab cause," said Sirhan ruefully. ''I'm not a killer; I'm not a killer," he repeated.

He wasn't a killer in the cold-blooded sense, argued Pollack, but a political assassin, to whom such details weren't important. "It's almost as if you're being a martyr .... To have the world see that, through your death, the U.S. is really pro-Israel?"

"No, I said this, sir, a thousand times; I'm not proud of this .... You could shoot me right here for what I did, sir.... My own conscience doesn't agree with me."

"Your own conscience?" said Pollack, a little incredulous.

"My own conscience .... It's against my upbringing, my very nature, sir," said Sirhan, sounding anguished. "My childhood, family, church, prayers ... the Bible and all this, sir. 'Thou shalt not kill.' Life is the thing, you know. Where would you be if you didn't live, sir? And here I go and splatter this guy's brains. It's just not me."

Pollack looked at his watch. It was close to six thirty p.m. He had to be going. Before he did, he again told Sirhan where he stood.

"As a psychiatrist representing society, I have to be able to put my feelings aside and offer an opinion, whether I like you or not. ... When I look at the material ... so far, Sirhan, the evidence appears to indicate that you carried your gun down there to shoot him; you see ... people don't carry loaded guns unless they intend to use them."

"Well, a layman could come up with the same conclusion .... They saw me shoot him, so kill that son of a bitch .... I only wish that I could agree with you. I only wish that I knew what I really carried a gun down there for."

"You told me that you were down at the Ambassador and Kennedy wasn't on your mind, you said, so why would you shoot him if he wasn't on your mind? Why would you bring the gun back if he wasn't on your mind?

"It's possible that your drinking gave you enough release so that you went ahead and did this," conceded Pollack.

"I need to be more mad to do something like that, then be released," said Sirhan.

***

Diamond met Sirhan again on February 1 and tried to solve the riddle of the notebooks one last time. Sirhan was still insisting he would ask for the gas chamber if his notebooks were introduced in court, and for an hour, Diamond's probing went nowhere. Then Diamond acted on a hunch that Sirhan wrote some of his notebooks in an altered state and made a breakthrough. He hypnotized Sirhan with a quarter and asked him to go into a very light sleep, "so light a sleep that you'll be able to remember everything."

He propped a yellow legal pad in Sirhan's lap, gave him a ballpoint pen, and asked him to write his name. Sirhan began to write, "Sirhan B Sirhan Sirhan B Sirhan Sirhan B Sirhan" over and over again, thirty seconds to a line.

For fifteen minutes, Diamond, Pollack, and Kaiser sat watching him fill the page with his name in a slow, robotic scrawl -- "automatic writing" triggered by the simple instruction to write his name. When Sirhan couldn't finish his name on one line in English, he started writing, right to left, in Arabic for a line and a half before correcting himself and switching back into English, "Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan" to the bottom of the page.

"Write about Kennedy, Sirhan," prompted Diamond.

He wrote, "RFK RFK RFK RFK RFK."

"Write it all out, not just the initials."

"Robert F. Kennedy Robert F. Kennedy."

"Tell us more than his name, Sirhan. Write more than the name."

"RFK RFK RFK RFK."

"More than the initials. What's going to happen to Kennedy, Sirhan? What's going to happen to Kennedy?"

Sirhan wrote, "RFK must die RFK must die RFK must die" nine times, until Diamond stopped him. It looked very similar to what Sirhan had written in his notebook.

"When must Kennedy die? When is Robert Kennedy going to die?" asked Diamond.

"Robert Kennedy is going to die Robert is going to die Robert is going to die."

"Don't write what I tell you, Sirhan. Answer my questions .... Start a new line over here. Who killed Kennedy?"

"Who killed Kennedy?" wrote Sirhan.

"You're writing the question; now write me the answer." Diamond couldn't help laughing.

"I don't know I don't know."

Diamond concluded that for Sirhan, emotionally, Kennedy was still alive.

Diamond kept his questions going: Did Kennedy talk to Sirhan? Did anyone tell him to shoot Kennedy? Did anyone give him money to shoot Kennedy? Did anyone help him? Was anybody with him? Sirhan wrote, "No no no ... "

Imagine going back to the fifties, when the Chinese were using brainwashing techniques on prisoners of the state. Instead of wasting thousands of dollars on interrogators, all they would have to do would be to lock up a prisoner with some pieces of paper, some incense, and a few candles. Of course, they would have to convince him that the material was worth reading. Perhaps they could actually let him out of the prison, put him on a work farm, and convince him, through surrogates, that the pieces of paper came from a rebel organization and that in order to become an effective enemy, he would need to enhance his spiritual power.

So he would study and meditate and become self-indoctrinated, thinking all along that he was free and working against his oppressors, not for them. Whatever the ruse, the process of indoctrination could go on for weeks or months with very little involvement on the part of the government. All along, their victim would be working hard on the farm for them and becoming more and more a believer in the alternative reality they had provided him.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


"What's the name of the person who was with you when you shot Kennedy, Sirhan? Who was with you? Write it down."

"Girl the girl the girl."

"Do you know the girl's name?" Sirhan groaned. "Write out the name of the girl."

"No No No."

"Start a new line, Sirhan. Is this the way you wrote the notebook at home? Write the answer, not the question. Is this the way you wrote the notebook at home?"

"Yes yes yes."

Diamond's hunch was right -- much of the notebook was written under hypnosis.

"Is this crazy writing, Sirhan?"

"Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes."

"That's enough 'yeses,' Sirhan. Go to another line. You're like the sorcerer's apprentice here. Are you crazy, Sirhan. Are you crazy?"

"No no no. N-"

"If you are not crazy, why are you writing crazy?"

"Practice practice practice practice practice."

"Practice for what, Sirhan?"

"Mind control mind control mind control mind --"

"Mind control for what? What are you going to do with your mind control, Sirhan?"

"Self improvement self improvement." Sirhan was tiring and began to drop off, his writing looser, more of a scrawl.

"Are you asleep now? Are you hypnotized?"

"I am sleepy."

''Are you hypnotized?"

"Yes yes yes."

"Were you hypnotized when you wrote the notebook?"

"Yes yes yes."

"Who hypnotized you when you wrote the notebook? Write his name down."

Image
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Sirhan answers Diamond and Pollack's questions through automatic writing on a yellow legal pad.[/i]

"Mirror mirror my mirror," wrote Sirhan, "my my mirror."

The monographs, utilized properly, basically guide readers to a certain state of consciousness. This involves getting into a meditative state, in front of a mirror, while burning candles and incense. The techniques of the monographs were promoted as being highly secretive and for the use of AMORC members only....

Now I know that the entire ritual of the home sanctum and its exercises were guiding members into a state of auto-suggestion, reinforced and directed by the teaching in the monographs....

AMORC had special requirements for its neophytes to study their monographs. One of those requirements was that the monographs were to be read in front of a mirror.....

As the monographs represent the authoritative voice of the AMORC leadership, living and ascendant, they take on an enhanced importance. In effect, the member will transfer his autonomy to the substance of the monographs themselves, their content representing the authentic and verified foundations of reality as understood by the enlightened Rosicrucian tradition.

The monographs then become a supereffective guidebook for creating auto-hypnotic states in the home sanctum. The various rituals of the sanctum -- such as chanting, visualization, and relaxation techniques -- provide a pathway for the member to regularly enter into at least a light hypnotic trance. After introducing these techniques in the beginning of his membership, the member is now primed for entering into deeper, more highly suggestible states when reviewing the monographs and practicing the exercises in later stages of membership.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


It was now clear to Diamond that Sirhan's previous sessions of self-hypnosis in his bedroom mirror produced much of the writing in the notebook. This helped explain why Sirhan was so readily hypnotizable and also why he responded better in written rather than spoken form. He didn't speak to himself in the mirror; he wrote out his thoughts, so writing answers naturally came easier to him in the sessions with Diamond than speaking them.

"Who taught you how to do this?" asked Diamond.

"AMORC," wrote Sirhan. "AMORC AMORC."

AMORC stood for the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross "That's the Rosicrucians, isn't it? Did they show you how to do that?" asked Diamond.

"No."

"Sirhan, did you read it in a book?"

"Yes yes yes."

"Who gave you the books, Sirhan?"

"I bought the books I b."

Dr. Pollack asked Diamond to take Sirhan back to the Ambassador on the night of the shooting. "Write down how many drinks you had, Sirhan," demanded Diamond. "Don't go to sleep. Write the number. Write it down."

"1234 1234 1234."

"What kind of drinks were they, Sirhan?'

"Give me a Tom Collins Collins."

"Were you drunk, Sirhan?"

"Were you drunk" wrote Sirhan.

"That's my question, Sirhan. Write the answer. Were you drunk?"

"Yes Yes Yes."

"Where is the gun?"

"I don't know."

"Did you take the gun out of the car?"

"Go home, go home, home go," wrote Sirhan, while mumbling "Go home, go home, go home."

Prompted by Pollack, Diamond asked Sirhan if he was thinking of shooting Kennedy.

"No no," wrote Sirhan, sliding off the legal pad and writing in the air.

"Were you hating Kennedy then?"

"No No," wrote Sirhan. Then he groaned and stopped writing. He'd come to the end of the page.

Sirhan's writing was getting more and more incoherent as he sank deeper into sleep. As Diamond took the pen and pad away, Sirhan kept writing on his trouser leg with an imaginary pencil. Diamond thought it best to start afresh another time and woke him up, suggesting that he remember everything that had happened in this session.

"I don't want you to run away from your thoughts; I want you to remember ... and feel warm and relaxed after a good sleep ... one-two-three, wake up, Sirhan."

Sirhan woke up slowly and yawned, in a smiling, relaxed mood.

"What's this, Sirhan, on your lap? Do you recognize that?"

Sirhan couldn't remember writing on the pad and didn't recognize the writing as his. It was too "scribblish ... like chicken scratches." He didn't even remember using the pen before. He was troubled.

"Sirhan, do you feel okay?" asked Diamond.

''I'm puzzled with all this. I don't understand it, sir, period."

"Do you think it's possible, Sirhan, that you were asleep when you wrote part of the notebooks?"

"Sir, honestly, I don't remember much of the notebooks. Those writings, they're not Sirhan. That's what bugs me, sir ... it's not the real me."

"That's another side of you, Sirhan. Did you ever hear of a double personality ... do you think you have a split personality, Sirhan?

"If I have a split, the other split of my half is not good," said Sirhan, and the doctors laughed. "Some mutation ... Those guys on the jury, sir, they go for computers and all that shit, they don't go for this stuff, so I don't want [the notebooks] presented in court .... What does it show?"

"What do you think it shows, Sirhan?"

"That I'm crazy, but I don't feel it, sir."

"No, it shows that you told us the truth, Sirhan."

If Sirhan wrote the notebooks in a trance, how could he remember writing them?

***

Diamond later noted that the notebooks contained three types of writing: Schoolwork and language studies; political manifesto, which Diamond ascribed to paranoid schizophrenic psychosis; and a third type to do with Kennedy's assassination. "It is my opinion that these were written in a self-induced trance, a dissociated state similar to that in which I believe he committed this killing itself."

***

Sirhan repeatedly told Mike McCowan he was fooling Diamond during the hypnotic sessions -- that he wasn't really asleep, he was just pretending. No doctor was going to "bug him" by hypnotizing him. McCowan wanted to see for himself, so on February 8, he came in to watch the session and they devised a secret finger signal -- Sirhan would lift his middle finger off his lap "in trance" and wave it to show he was faking.

As Diamond put Sirhan under, McCowan waited for the signal. "It was very curious," recalled Diamond. "In the state of hypnosis, you could see him trying to lift his finger, and he couldn't budge it."

To prove his point, Diamond suggested that when Sirhan came out of the trance and Diamond blew his nose, Sirhan would climb the bars of his cell like a monkey. Sirhan woke up, Diamond blew his nose, and up the bars Sirhan climbed, swinging upside down like a monkey.

"Why are you climbing the bars, Sirhan?" asked Diamond.

"For exercise," said Sirhan, matter-of-fact.

Diamond then played back the tape of the session to show how Sirhan had been programmed. "It wasn't your idea at all, Sirhan. You were just following my instructions."

Sirhan was quiet for a moment, then shivered. "Oh, it frightens me, doc."

"Now, get this straight, Sirhan. I do not believe that anybody hypnotized you and told you to kill Kennedy. I think you did it to yourself. You get the distinction?"

"Yes, sir. I understand."

The Power of Remote Indoctrination: The monographs, small treatises that comprise the "weekly" lessons of AMORC, are the key to AMORC's powerful indoctrination techniques. In most cults, indoctrination takes place in large meetings, and smaller groups are led by professionals, experienced in "programming" recruits with the key elements of their training. Although there are lodges in AMORC's system, the majority of members do not belong, either because they are content with the home-study course or because they do not have the time for the lodge meetings, or a lodge is simply not in their neck of the woods.

The amazing thing is that the monographs, which encourage the development of a home sanctum, a place for meditation and study, are sufficient to fully indoctrinate the majority of members. A review of the literature on cult psychology shows that all the elements are in place in the home-study course to fully indoctrinate members. Indoctrination functions best when the recruit psychologically accepts the authority of the leadership of the group. This is generally facilitated through a mentor or group leader, who makes the case for the higher leadership as having the needed authority to effect the transference.

The idea of transference has been used in psychiatric circles for decades, after the promotion of the idea in psychoanalysis by Freud. It implies the transference of the patient's psychological autonomy from the patient to his doctor. In a sense, the patient surrenders his judgment and often decision-making to the higher authority, the doctor. The doctor becomes a kind of positive father figure.

This concept of transference can also be seen in very diverse relationships in ordinary life. A prisoner might, after a time, transfer his autonomy to a professional interrogator, a student might surrender his autonomy to a teacher, or a citizen may give up his independence to a political leader.

In the case of AMORC, through a manipulation of the student's view of the unique authority of the order, the exalted power of the imperator and the AMORC leaders, and the alleged presence of the invisible masters in the training, the monographs themselves assume a unique role.

As the monographs represent the authoritative voice of the AMORC leadership, living and ascendant, they take on an enhanced importance. In effect, the member will transfer his autonomy to the substance of the monographs themselves, their content representing the authentic and verified foundations of reality as understood by the enlightened Rosicrucian tradition.

The monographs then become a supereffective guidebook for creating auto-hypnotic states in the home sanctum. The various rituals of the sanctum -- such as chanting, visualization, and relaxation techniques -- provide a pathway for the member to regularly enter into at least a light hypnotic trance.

After introducing these techniques in the beginning of his membership, the member is now primed for entering into deeper, more highly suggestible states when reviewing the monographs and practicing the exercises in later stages of membership.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


Diamond told Sirhan he believed he had programmed himself like a computer.

"It frightens me," said Sirhan. "It frightens me."

But Diamond branded Sirhan's belief that mind power could influence real world events delusional. "I asked him once if he could make the president's airplane crash by just concentrating on it and his answer was no, because he, Sirhan, is too weak and doesn't possess the power; but that if about fifty people all concentrated together, they could make it happen."

In the same vein, Sirhan admitted consciously and under hypnosis that he thought of the death of Kennedy -- "that he willed him to die so that the bombers would not go to Israel." But while part of him "believes in this magical power, another part of his more rational mind ... quickly dismisses it and says, 'this is ridiculous, this can't happen.' Sirhan did this frequently, I think, in a waking state, specifically sort of thinking of the death of Senator Kennedy."

Diamond concluded that when Sirhan was practicing in front of the mirror, he went into a hypnotic trance without realizing it, and when he came out, he found this material in the notebook, which he had no memory of writing. "To him," said Diamond, "the notebook is written proof positive of the 'crazy writing' which he knows he wrote and which was a product of this mirror-gazing, the self-hypnotic trances ... [but] he would prefer to go to the gas chamber than have it made public and be seen as crazy."

At trial, Diamond concluded that "Sirhan was suffering from a chronic paranoid schizophrenia, a major psychosis at the time of the shooting. He was in a highly abnormal dissociated state of restrictive consciousness as a direct consequence of his psychotic condition."

Diamond's opinion on "diminished capacity" was clear: "The defendant was unable because of mental disease to maturely and meaningfully reflect on the gravity of his contemplated act and ... comprehend his duties to govern his actions in accordance with the duties imposed by law."
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:16 pm

ELEVEN: The Trial

In early January, as Cooper was preparing for jury selection, he got a warning call from the respected criminalist William Harper, a consultant in more than three hundred cases in his thirty-five-year career. "Beware of Wolfer," he said. "He gives [the prosecution] what they want." Harper had come up against Wolfer's work before and had accused him of manipulating evidence to order. "He will do what's expected of him."

Cooper was unconcerned -- there was no question in his mind that Sirhan had shot Kennedy -- so Harper let the matter drop, but Russell Parsons was also wary of Wolfer from past experience -- "I had him in a murder case against me, and he was a smart alec, catered to juries, did everything but kiss their butt." But Parsons never expressed these misgivings to Cooper, and Wolfer got a free ride.

***

Coming late into the case, Cooper had a very poor grasp of the physical evidence. He was going to stipulate that Sirhan had killed Kennedy, so the less time spent discussing bullets and gunshot wounds in front of the jury, the better. The defense was chock-full of psychiatrists and psychologists but had no forensic expertise. Cooper stipulated to the bullets presented by Wolfer and asked Dr. Noguchi to spare the court "the gory details" of the autopsy. At no point in the trial were the issues of extra bullets or extra guns mentioned, and there was no meaningful examination of the ballistics.

The defense focused not on possible coconspirators but on Sirhan's mental and emotional state at the time of the shooting. "Cooper wanted to look good in front of the jury," recalled Bob Kaiser. "His idea was not to make the LAPD look bad; it was to try to convince the jury that Sirhan did not have the emotional capacity and the mental capacity to meaningfully and maturely reflect on the gravity of his contemplated act. That's the law of diminished capacity in California."

***

But, as the New Year began, Cooper's participation in the trial was in doubt. On Friday, January 3, he admitted to a federal grand jury that he had lied in court about the source of the unauthorized transcript found on his counsel table during the Friars Club trial.

Cooper said he had nothing to do with acquiring the transcripts -- he was on a fishing trip to the South Seas at the time. He cited attorney-client privilege in refusing to answer forty-six questions about how they were obtained and said he would risk contempt and jail before revealing anything that would damage his client.

An urgent three-page FBI Teletype, titled "Re Illegal Possession and Use FCG Transcripts," to J. Edgar Hoover later that day is still heavily redacted. Two pages are blacked out; then the last eight lines read, "USDJ set hearing for such argument at two PM Monday next. USA W. Matthew Byrne, Jr. today advised that if government obtained facts suitable to indict [Grant Cooper] and others while Sirhan case in progress, such indictment would be returned secretly and not released until Sirhan case concluded." The threat of an indictment weighed heavily on Cooper throughout the Sirhan trial. In fact, hearings on the stolen transcripts would resume the day after Sirhan was sentenced.

So, U.S. Attorney Matt Byrne was prosecuting Sirhan and pursuing a possible indictment of Sirhan's attorney at the same time. If an indictment was returned before the trial, it would be hushed up but still secretly hanging over Cooper while he defended Sirhan.

Three days later, Cooper played down the possibility of an indictment to Judge Herbert Walker, who would preside over the Sirhan trial. Al Wirin appeared in chambers to advise Sirhan that he should continue to be represented by Cooper, despite the conflict of interest posed by Cooper's possible indictment by an agency participating in the prosecution. Sirhan consented, and Cooper stayed.

But, according to Mike McCowan, "he was under stress all during the Sirhan case because he had never done the slightest thing wrong during all his years of trials. It was very disturbing to him and to his wife, Phyllis, who was an attorney also. And it wasn't resolved until after the case."

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Sirhan had a tempestous relationship with Cooper and Parsons.

On January 7, the trial commenced in Department 107 of the Superior Court on the eighth floor of the Los Angeles County Halls of Justice. With breathtaking arrogance, Cooper tried and failed in chambers to get a further thirty-day continuance from Judge Walker, arguing that the reports in the papers about his difficulties with the transcripts would prejudice the jury. It was a clear admission he wasn't ready, but Walker denied the motion -- there had been quite enough delays.

The attorneys for the prosecution were Chief Deputy DA Lynn "Buck" Compton and Deputy DAs John Howard and David Fitts. Cooper, Parsons, and Berman acted for the defense, and two SUS investigators, Sergeants Collins and Patchett, advised the prosecution on evidence, exhibits, and witnesses.

Eighty-nine witnesses would testify over the next three months and seven days, but the initial jury selection would go on for weeks, allowing the defense psychiatrists crucial time to explore Sirhan's memory of the shooting.

***

On the morning of February 10, three days before the start of the witness phase of the trial, DA Evelle Younger went up to see Judge Walker in his chambers. Cooper, without consulting the Sirhan family, had gotten together with the prosecution and worked out a plea of guilty to all counts, submitting only the issue of the penalty to the jury, with a recommendation from the DA of life imprisonment, not the death penalty.

"I understand that the defendant is prepared to plead guilty and accept a life sentence -- is that right, Mr. Cooper?" asked Younger.

"Yes," replied Sirhan's counsel.

"We favor it, Judge," said the DA, explaining that he had finally gotten a psychiatrist's report from Pollack. "Our psychiatrist," he said, "a man we have great confidence in ... says that the defendant is psychotic and his report would support the position of the defense because of diminished capacity."

On that basis, the result of the trial was "a foregone conclusion."

"We can't conscientiously urge the death penalty [and] we don't think under any circumstances we would get the death penalty even if we urged it.... Are we justified in going through the motions of a very traumatic and expensive trial, when we say we can't conscientiously ask for the death penalty anyway? We don't think we are."

Cooper said Dr. Diamond felt that Sirhan had diminished capacity and was entitled to a charge of second-degree murder, but the likelihood of obtaining such a verdict from the jury in such a high-profile case had to be weighed against the possibility of the jury ignoring the psychiatrists and returning a death sentence. Cooper concluded, "The odds were not in our favor, so the wise thing to do would be to enter a plea of guilty to first degree murder with life imprisonment."

If such a plea were accepted, to ensure the public didn't think "there was any hanky-panky going on," Younger promised to work with the LAPD to "put into the record all pertinent materials including statements of witnesses and that sort of thing and the psychiatrists' reports, so that the second-guessers, and they will be legion ... will have all the evidence upon which we base our recommendations." In fact, these files would not be released for another twenty years.

Judge Walker was having none of it, however. "I think you have got a very much interested public ... and they continually point to the Oswald matter, and they wonder what is going on because the fellow wasn't tried."

Cooper suggested putting on "a very skeleton outline of the case at the time of plea instead of submitting reports."

"Well, then they would say that it was all fixed, it was greased," said the judge, "so we will just go [on with] the trial."

Lynn Compton wasn't giving up. "If defendant were to plead guilty to first degree murder, there wouldn't be any evidence put on; we simply would offer no evidence on the penalty and there would be no trial."

"What I am trying to tell you," scolded the judge, "[is that] the jury ought to determine that and what they come out with ... is the jury's business .... Let's go on with the trial .... I don't think psychiatrists should determine the outcome."

***

Judge Walker gave them two days to decide what to do. "If we start dragging our feet, it would damage the case tremendously .... We are in a very precarious position. We've got a lot of smart people out there."

The press could sniff what was going on. On February 12, on the eve of opening statements, the Los Angeles Times ran a story that a plea of guilty to first-degree murder had been offered by the defense. The next day, Cooper moved for a mistrial on the grounds that the article would prejudice the jury. After questioning each of the jurors in chambers, Judge Walker was assured they could set aside this publicity and decide the case only on the evidence to be presented in court.

Walker denied the motion, and David Fitts made his opening statement for the prosecution before the jury was sequestered at the Biltmore Hotel.

During the trial, Mike McCowan would sit at the counsel table with the volatile Sirhan, trying to keep him under control. He'd also review the daily trial transcripts overnight and correct them in the morning with the judge and the prosecution, to make sure the court reporter's shorthand was accurate.

By now, Sirhan had grown distant with Kaiser. "We had a pretty good relationship for the first few months and then, the trial came and he began to cool toward me," Kaiser recalled. "I'd go to see him and he'd be pretty close to the vest. He didn't want to tell me things as he was telling me before. I found out later that Russell Parsons, one of the other attorneys in the case, told Sirhan's mother, Mary Sirhan, not to trust Kaiser because he was telling the DA's office everything he knew, which is not true.

"But there was a struggle for power inside the defense team, and that was one of the results of it. Parsons was not in the loop, and I think he resented my having more information than he did ... and so, maybe Sirhan got the word, you know, that I couldn't be trusted."

***

On February 14, Emile Zola Berman delivered a short opening statement for the defense. "The evidence in this case will disclose that Sirhan is an immature, emotionally disturbed and mentally ill youth," he began.

He told the story of Sirhan's traumatic childhood in Palestine, that he was three years old when the war broke out and his street became the dividing line between the Jews and Arabs. "One night, the building he lived in became a machine-gun nest and another night, his very home was bombed.

"They lived with a great many uprooted, evicted Palestinian Arabs in a hungry, war-torn, violent existence .... He saw a little girl's leg blown off by a bomb ... blood spurting from below her knee as though from a faucet. He went into a spell. He stiffened. His face became contorted. He lost all sense of where he was or what was happening to him. These severe reaction spells from the horrors of war occurred again and again.

''A bomb exploded when he was playing near the Damascus Gate. Sirhan went into a spell. Someone called his mother, who took him home, where he remained in a trance for four days. A bomb exploded outside the window of the Sirhan flat and tore apart the body of a man and again the spell -- the boy stiffened, his fists clenched, his mouth contorted. He lost all sense of what was happening around him."

As Berman recalled the traumatic moments in Sirhan's childhood that prompted his disturbed mental condition, Sirhan became agitated. Beating on the defense table with his hands, he repeated over and over, "No, no, no," shaking his head and attempting to rise from his chair. Judge Walker asked McCowan to "calm him down," and McCowan pushed Sirhan back down again and they had a whispered squabble.

"Jesus Christ," whispered Russell Parsons, "calm down, for my sake. We gotta have some defense."

Berman described Sirhan's early life in America -- his father abandoning the family within months and his failure to fit in at school, become a diplomat, make money at the races, or become a jockey. He told how Sirhan changed after the fall from the horse -- "he became more and more irritable, brooding, quick to anger and preoccupied with fanatical obsessions of hatred, suspicion and distrust. He took to long hours of reading works on the power of the mind."

Berman introduced the notebooks, quoting Sirhan's "Declaration of War Against American Humanity" on June 2, 1967, as "clear evidence of diminished capacity." He said the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War three days later again "triggered his spells."

"In his fantasies, he was often a hero and savior of his people. In the realities of life, he was small, helpless, isolated, confused and bewildered by emotions over which he had no control. He was unable to plan or think clearly, to maintain any meaningful direction in life.

"He became concerned with mystical thoughts and searched for supernatural powers of the mind over matter. He started mystical experiments in his room. He would concentrate on a hanging lead fishing sinker and make it swing back and forth by the power of his mind. He would concentrate on a candle flame and make it dance, first to the right and then to the left.

"But the mystical experiments gave him no peace of mind, only further bewilderment and confusion. Then came another heavy shock. ... Senator Kennedy, whom he admired and loved, said that if he were President he would send fifty Phantom jets to Israel. That did it. Israel. Back to mysticism. He concentrated in front of a mirror in his room and thought about Senator Kennedy until at last, he saw his own face no longer, but that of Senator Kennedy himself in the mirror.

"Sirhan never thought he would ever kill Kennedy, but through his mystic mind power he could fantasize about it and relieve that feeling of emptiness inside him."

Then, "while in a disturbed mental state, intoxicated and confused, he had the same spells that he had in Palestine. There is no doubt, and we have told you this from the beginning, that he did in fact fire the shot that killed Senator Kennedy. The killing was unplanned and undeliberate, impulsive and without premeditation or malice, totally the product of a sick, obsessed mind and personality. At the actual moment of the shooting, he was out of contact with reality, in a trance in which he had no voluntary control over his will, his judgment, his feelings or his actions."

Berman promised that "the tests of great men in the fields of psychiatry and psychology conclusively show that because of mental illness and emotional disorder, Sirhan did not have the mental capacity to have the mental states that are the essential elements of murder: namely, maturely and meaningfully premeditate, deliberate or reflect upon the gravity of his act, nor form an intent to kill, nor to harbor malice aforethought, as these are defined by the laws of California."

Berman's speech got a good reception in the press. "It promises to be a bizarre trial," wrote George Lardner in the Washington Post. "Only the hashish seems to be missing."

***

Over the next seven days of testimony, the prosecution put fifty-six witnesses on the stand. First, the LAPD's chief surveyor oriented the jury with a three-dimensional scale model of the first and second floors of the hotel. The pantry model featured miniature steam tables and an ice machine, but the nearby mirrors, which would become a key motif for the defense, were missing.

"When you get to the entrance to the Embassy Room, aren't there four floor-to-ceiling mirrors at these corners, so wherever you stand you can see yourself reflected in the mirrors?" asked Berman.

"I'm not sure, sir," replied Sergeant La Vallee, bemused by the line of questioning.

"Do you suggest that there are no mirrors?"

"They are not there on my drawing."

"But you don't suggest that those mirrors were not there on the day of this occurrence?"

"No, I don't say that," said the sergeant.

***

The first fifteen witnesses described the shooting and the capture and arrest of Sirhan. First on the stand was Karl Uecker, closely followed by Eddie Minasian. On cross-examination by Cooper, Uecker was first asked to point out where the mirrors should be on the scale model -- full-length mirrors along the east wall of the ballroom and mirrors on both sides of a foyer leading to the lobby. Besides mirrors, the defense also collected data on the height and weight of the men who tried to wrest the gun from Sirhan. Uecker was thirty-six, five-ten-and-a-half, and 190 pounds.

"Did he seem to be strong?" asked Cooper.

"He had very strong muscles because I was hitting the gun on top of the steam table very hard and I couldn't get rid of the gun," replied Uecker.

Later, Uecker discussed the sequence of shots.

"There were two or three shots fired before you grabbed his wrist, is that right, sir?" inquired Cooper.

"Yes, sir. Before I got hold of his wrist."

Cooper didn't ask about muzzle distance or bullet trajectories or even wonder aloud how Sirhan could fire four shots at Kennedy if Uecker grabbed him after two or three.

***

The afternoon session got off to a shaky start when busboy Juan Romero was called to the stand. Howard asked him if anyone in the courtroom resembled the gunman. Romero looked around.

"I don't think so," he said.

"Stand up please, Mr. Sirhan," said Cooper. Sirhan rose.

"I don't believe that's him," said Romero.

Unperturbed, Parsons established that Romero was three feet from Kennedy when the shots began and that he heard four shots. Parsons also didn't ask about the muzzle distance or how Kennedy's body was positioned at the time of the first shot.

***

And on it went. A procession of witnesses and an absurdly narrow focus for the defense -- mirrors, Sirhan's abnormal strength, and impatience to get the witnesses out of the way, so Cooper could get on with the psychiatric testimony.

En route, there were exceptions. Cooper took Vincent Di Pierro to the cleaners, reading his post-polygraph surrender to Hernandez into the record and pointing up numerous contradictions in his testimony.

John Howard led off by asking Di Pierro to recount seeing Sirhan on the tray stand, while carefully avoiding any mention of a girl. Di Pierro placed himself less than a foot from Paul Schrade and five feet from Kennedy when "I saw the gun aimed toward the Senator and I saw the flash."

"How many shots did you hear?" asked Howard.

''After the first shot was fired it was a pause, then two rapidly fired, and that's ... all I really heard, because then people started screaming and people started falling and Mr. Schrade fell into my arms."

Di Pierro said Sirhan had a "smirk or semi-smile" on his face and was "kind of crouching along," trying to push his way through to Kennedy. He pulled out the gun from his left side and fired.

"How close to the Senator was Mr. Sirhan when he produced the gun?"

"I would say within two feet to eight foot."

That was quite a range. Karl Uecker had ahold of the senator and was pulling him along. Sirhan then pushed Uecker with his left hand, "went around" him, came up with the gun, and fired.

"After the first shot was fired, [Kennedy's] head reared back and the blood from [his] head sprinkled on my face.... After the second shot ... he made a sudden jerking motion and he let go of Karl's hand ... and his hands started to go up as if to grab his head .... He started falling and then the third shot was fired and he hit the ground just prior to the third shot."

Uecker grabbed Sirhan around the neck and by the wrist "after the second or third shot." As Uecker threw him onto the steam table, the gun was still firing. Vincent heard another "seven possibly eight" shots. "Everyone was trying to get him away from Karl and really trying to kill him. It was just complete pandemonium."

Vincent thought Kennedy fell first, then "Mr. Schrade fell and I looked down at him, [then] Ira Goldstein fell on top of me."

This should have been a gold mine for a defense team with their wits about them. Di Pierro heard ten shots, but the murder weapon only held eight bullets. Kennedy hit the floor before the third, and Uecker grabbed Sirhan after the second or third, yet four shots hit the senator. Cooper told the judge that cross-examination would be somewhat lengthy, so court was adjourned until Monday.

When Cooper began his questioning, he didn't go near the ballistics but asked what caused Di Pierro to notice Sirhan on the tray stacker.

"At the time, there was, I believe, a girl standing within the area of Sirhan," said Vince. "It could have been at that time or possibly immediately after the shooting."

He first noticed the girl as he walked into the pantry because she was pretty. Then he wondered why the "dishwasher" (meaning Sirhan) was standing on the tray stand. The girl was wearing a polka-dot dress. He looked at her for "a matter of seconds," then shook hands with the senator and kept his eyes on the senator's head from then on.

"Did you see the girl talk to Mr. Sirhan at all?"

"Whether he conversed with her or whether he just looked at her, I could not say." It was a natural impulse to look at a pretty girl.

"In other words, he looked toward her?"

"For a split second."

"Did she look toward him?"

"I believe she did."

"Then what happened?"

"Then the Senator turned to me and I shook hands with him and I lost sight of her."

Cooper then skillfully questioned Vince based on what he said in his first police statement, taken in the chef's office less than an hour after the shooting. Forced to walk a fine line between contradicting his initial statement and sticking to his "corrected" story, Vince started to falter.

"Was she holding on to the trays?"

"No."

"Was she holding on to Sirhan?"

"No."

"Did she have a smile on her face?"

"Yes, I believe she did."

"She smiled at Sirhan?"

"Well, whether it was at him ... I do not recall."

"Did he return the smile?"

"I believe he did."

She was in her early twenties, wore a dress with black polka dots, and had dark brown hair. Cooper then turned to the statement Vince gave Hernandez on July 1.

"Now, let me show me your statement because I want to clear that up and, frankly, I have no desire to embarrass you .... "

"I am going to make an objection as improper impeachment," cried Howard. The prosecution was worried, but the objection was overruled. Where was Cooper going with the girl in the polka-dot dress?

Cooper then read virtually the entire transcript of Hernandez's corrected interview with Di Pierro, then asked Vincent to explain it.

"As I said, she could have been standing in the area at the time, I do not recall. There was an enormous amount of confusion at the time, and by speaking to Miss Serrano I could possibly have interjected the fact that she was standing next to him, whether it was next to him or beside him, I do not really remember."

On redirect, a surprised Fitts asked, "Are you telling us in substance there was a girl standing next to Sirhan at or near the time of the shooting, sir?"

"Yes, sir."

"With a polka-dot dress?"

"Yes."

The girl Hernandez had claimed didn't exist was back in the pantry. Fitts took out some photos of Valerie Schulte and asked Di Pierro if he recognized her.

"Yes, I believe I saw her that night."

"Are you telling us this appears to be a picture of the girl you saw in the pantry at or near the time of the shooting?"

"Yes, but I believe she had darker hair than that."

"In any event, she seems to be pretty blond in the pictures, doesn't she?" said Fitts witheringly.

"Yes, she does."

"Other than the difference in the color of the hair that you noticed, does she seem to be the girl?"

"Yes, I would think she would be."

Cooper took the photos on recross-examination.

"Is that the dress she was wearing at the time?"

"As to the dress, I do not recall. I can say it was, but I'm not sure."

"You have described a dress with black polka dots, is that correct?"

"Yes."

He pointed to the color photos of Schulte's dress. "What color would you say that is?"

"They are yellow polka dots on a green background."

Cooper showed the photos to the jury, also pointing out that while now Di Pierro said he heard seven or eight shots, in his original police interview he said he heard "four distinct shots." "Isn't that true?"

"Yes."

"I have no further questions."

"Anything further, Mr. Fitts?"

"Nothing further of Mr. Di Pierro."

***

So Cooper shredded Di Pierro, but to what purpose? Perhaps he was waiting for Valerie Schulte herself to testify the following morning. Schulte told Fitts she had walked into the pantry two people behind Kennedy, which would put her just behind Di Pierro. As the senator was shaking hands, she was pushed forward toward the ice machine by people coming in behind her.

"I noticed an arm extended with a gun and heard and observed the shots," she said.

"Was your attention on the Senator where he was shaking hands?"

"I turned and I spotted the Senator and immediately switched to the arm again."

"Where did you see the arm of the gun, please?"

"Approximately five yards from me, approximately three yards, something like that, from the Senator .... It was pointed at the Senator's head."

"What did you see then?" asked Fitts.

"I observed the shots and I either fell or was pushed ... to the floor."

She heard two shots, then fell to the floor, pointed back toward the Embassy Ballroom. Head down and crutch in hand, she crawled back the way she had come as the shots continued, past Paul Schrade, and behind a partition.

She stayed on the floor for a while; then a friend picked her up and stayed with her right in front of the dish rack.

She did not see Sirhan before the shooting, but as he fired, she could see him "from his shoulders up." She showed the jury the green dress with yellow polka dots she was wearing that night.

***

Cooper began his cross-examination by asking, "Obviously, Miss Schulte, you never knew Mr. Sirhan before that evening?"

"No, sir."

"I have no further questions. Thank you very much."

***

That was it -- astonishing. Cooper obviously didn't want to find a girl with Sirhan and was happy to allow the obvious police fudge to stand. But Schulte said Sirhan was three yards -- nine feet -- from Kennedy when she saw him. She was closer to Kennedy than Sirhan was, and Cooper didn't question it. What was more extraordinary, none of the press did either, missing out on the muzzle distance and the absurd concoction regarding the girl. The reaction to Schulte's testimony perfectly illustrates what a shambles this trial was.

***

After this debacle, the prosecution shifted swiftly through the gears in presenting a fairly straightforward case. Thirteen witnesses established premeditation -- the purchase of ammunition, Sirhan's firing at the ranges, and his presence in the pantry area prior to the shooting.

Judy Royer told of chasing Sirhan out of the kitchen, and Jesus Perez and Martin Patrusky both said Sirhan asked them half an hour before the shooting if Kennedy would be coming that way. As Kaiser recalls, Sirhan was upset. He leaned over to McCowan and whispered that he hadn't said any such thing. McCowan reminded him that he couldn't remember what he'd done in those moments before the shooting. Sirhan nodded and gulped.

***

Alvin Clark was less convincing as a witness. Clark said he had worked for ten years for the City of Pasadena Sanitation Department. He had collected trash in Sirhan's neighborhood every Wednesday for the last three years and had become friends with "Sol," as he called him.

Shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, Sirhan asked Clark how Negro people felt about it and what they were going to do about it. Then talk turned to the upcoming California primary, and Clark said he was going to vote for Kennedy.

"What do you want to vote for that son-of-a-b for? Because I'm planning on shooting him," Sirhan allegedly said.

"Well, you'll be killing one of the best men in the country," replied Clark.

On cross-examination, Berman established that Sirhan used to come out and bring Clark coffee, soft drinks, and sometimes sandwiches when he came by on Wednesdays. Clark said he thought "very much of him."

"Now, do you remember being examined by the FBI in September, 1968?" asked Berman.

"I do, sir."

"Weren't you asked whether you'd be willing to testify?"

"Well, I didn't want to testify."

Clark actually called the police to complain he was being harassed.

"And did you [say] you would not want to take the oath because you hated Sirhan so much that you would do anything to see him convicted?"

"Yes, I did."

"I have nothing else," said Berman.

Berman could also have cited Clark's prior arrests for burglary and child molesting, information the prosecution had but chose to suppress.

***

Sirhan later remembered many conversations with Alvin Clark but no specific details -- "mostly that was just plain, if I may use the word, B.S." He was absolutely sure he had never told Clark he was going to kill Kennedy.

***

Officer Arthur Placencia then recounted the trip to Rampart with Sirhan: He asked Sirhan his name several times but got no reply. He read him his rights, then asked Jesse Unruh, "Who did he shoot?"

"Bob Kennedy," replied Unruh.

This was the only time Kennedy's name was mentioned in Sirhan's presence from the time of his arrest until the arraignment. Sirhan later said he remembered Placencia grabbing him by the hair and shining a flashlight in his eyes. Did he hear Unruh say "Bob Kennedy"? He didn't remember.

Placencia had been with the force a year and two months and had graduated from the police academy three weeks before the shooting. On cross-examination, Cooper asked him, "Why should you examine a defendant's eyes?"

"To check for pupil reaction," said Placencia. "Pupil reaction [to light] usually can give you an idea to see if anybody that you have in custody might be under the influence of a drug or alcohol."

Placencia had arrested six or seven people who were under the influence of alcohol and performed the same test on Sirhan. He shone his flashlight in his face to examine his eyes.

"And how did his pupils react to the light?" asked Cooper.

"I can't recall," said Placencia.

Cooper read back a statement Placencia gave Mike McCowan on September 13:

"How did you check his pupils?" asked McCowan.

"With the flashlight. Put it up to his face and sort of looked to see if his pupils react," said Placencia.

"How did they react?" asked McCowan.

"They didn't."

"They didn't react to the light at all?"

"No. His pupils were real wide."

This helped refresh Placencia's recollection.

"In other words, his pupils did not react to the light, did they?" asked Cooper.

"No, sir," replied Placencia.

"Now, what did that mean to you as an officer?"

"That he was under the influence of something."

***

John Howard argued that Placencia wasn't qualified to give the test, and two days later, Placencia's more experienced partner, Travis White, testified that Sirhan's eyes were normal when he checked them later at the station. But once again, the defense noted discrepancies between White's testimony in court and what he'd told McCowan back in September. The fact remains: Sirhan was never properly tested for drugs or alcohol.

***

The chain of possession for the gun was established from clerk James Pineda, who first sold it to George Erhard, through to Sergeant Robert Calkins, who received it from Rafer Johnson. The victims of the shooting were called to describe their injuries, and doctors described how they had treated the senator.

Then, on February 24, DeWayne A. Wolfer was called to the stand. He gave substantially the same testimony as he had to the grand jury but could now add his conclusions on muzzle distance after examining Kennedy's suit coat and test-firing into the hogs' ears.

In the absence of Sirhan and without his knowledge or consent, Grant Cooper had agreed to stipulate to the ballistics evidence during a meeting in Judge Walker's chambers before Wolfer even took the stand. The defense didn't bother to hire a ballistics expert, so Wolfer's at times garbled responses were outgarbled by Cooper's often pointless questioning.

Cooper began by objecting to a photograph of the fatal bullet fragment and two photographs of the powder burns on Kennedy's ear as "highly inflammatory."

"We will stipulate that there was powder tattooing on the ear," he said, "[ and] that the gun was held as close as the witness wants to testify it was held. I realize the prosecution has a right to prove its case; at the same time ... with respect to this bullet fragment, it looks like a bullet from an exceptionally large revolver."

It was an enlarged photograph, explained Fitts, witheringly.

"We will stipulate that these fragments did come from Senator Kennedy," continued Cooper. "We will further stipulate that they came from the gun."

Wolfer was given carte blanche. All Cooper wanted to do was exclude the photographs from evidence, "having in mind the Kennedy family."

***

Fitts argued that "your Honor has heard Karl Uecker and any number of witnesses who attempted to describe what happened. One witness has put the muzzle of the revolver some three or four feet from the Senator's head, others have had it at varying ranges. The only way we can clear up whatever ambiguity there may be there and to show the truth is by the testimony of this witness who, on the basis of the powder tattooing and the experiments he performed with respect thereto, will testify that the muzzle range with respect to the Senator's head was approximately one inch."

This assumed there was only one gun and that all the witnesses had somehow seen it much farther away than it actually was.

"We don't quarrel that it was held within one inch," piped Cooper. "But I don't feel it's necessary to illustrate it."

Keeping the photos from the jury was more important to Cooper than witness discrepancies. The court overruled him anyway, and the photos were introduced.

Cooper then stipulated to the rest of the bullets and bullet fragments.

"Your Honor, I think this stipulation will save a couple days' testimony," said Fitts.

"Undoubtedly," said the judge, making serious presumptions about the integrity of the evidence bullets. These would be the subject of much controversy later on.

Wolfer then described firing the murder weapon into a water tank, to generate test bullets for comparison with the victim bullets, and Fitts presented an evidence envelope.

"If the Court please, I have an envelope which contains, and I can't read the writing and it is about time I got glasses, but I have not done it yet."

"Do you want to borrow mine?" asked Cooper.

"I would rather use the eyes of Mr. Wolfer," said Fitts, marking People's 55, an envelope containing three test shots from People's 6 (the "Sirhan gun"), which Wolfer had used "for comparison purposes."

The envelope was dated June 6 and bore the serial number of a different gun, H-18602 -- the test gun Wolfer had used for the powder-pattern tests on the hogs' ears. The serial number of the Sirhan gun, H-53725, was not read into the record at either the grand jury hearing or the trial, but nobody noticed the error. Having introduced test bullets from the wrong gun into evidence, "the eyes of Mr. Wolfer" proceeded to match them to Sirhan's gun, testifying that the three victim bullets suitable for comparison -- Kennedy, Goldstein, and Weisel -- could all be matched to the Sirhan gun, to the exclusion of every other gun. But again, no one was paying attention.

***

Kennedy's suit coat was then introduced into evidence. Bullet holes had been found in the right sleeve but the entire left sleeve was missing. Fitts explained that during the senator's treatment at Central Receiving Hospital, parts of the coat had been removed with scissors.

"And it accounts for the absence of one sleeve?" asked the judge.

"I should certainly suppose so," guessed Fitts. "I would have thought it would have had a sleeve at the time it was worn."

"The only point is that, obviously, it wasn't done by the defendant," said Cooper.

"I will stipulate he didn't cut up the coat," replied Fitts, turning back to Wolfer. "Did you find bullet holes in the coat?"

Amid this nonsensical repartee, nobody stopped to ask if the missing left sleeve might have contained more bullet holes. It was cut off at Central Receiving and never subsequently recovered by the police.

***

Cooper began his cross-examination by deferring to Wolfer's schedule.

"Officer Wolfer, let me ask what time you are leaving?"

"When we get through. Then I will go over and make my reservations for the first flight I can get on."

He was dashing off to a firearms convention.

"We won't keep you," said Cooper, as if Wolfer's travel plans were more important than his questioning.

Cooper started brightly by giving Wolfer a hard time for using a different gun -- not the murder weapon -- for the test-firing into the hogs' ears. Wolfer, defying industry practice, said it was not necessary to use the same gun for powder-pattern tests. Would he have preferred to use the Sirhan gun?

"No, I don't believe I would ... we did not make that exacting of a determination." He was allowing for an inch variation here or there; it wasn't that important. Wolfer estimated the muzzle distance at one inch.

"Now, also, sir," said Cooper, "there has been testimony by eyewitnesses of varying distances from the Senator's person, who actually say they saw it. This is your opinion, is that right?"

"It is my opinion based upon the scientific evidence, which we have to base it upon."

This tortured question was Cooper's only comment in the whole trial on the discrepancies between the muzzle distance described by Wolfer and Dr. Noguchi and the muzzle distance described by witnesses.

Cooper proceeded to go over and over the tests with the hogs' ears and whether the muzzle was three-quarters of an inch or an inch away but never related the findings back to what the witnesses testified they saw. He finally alighted on the test gun used for the powder-pattern tests.

"You say it wasn't possible to use the revolver that was in evidence?"

The DA's office had told Wolfer the Sirhan gun "wasn't available. "I was told that the gun would not be released for any further tests until they had a Court order approved by different counsel as such and there was never any time that they could get it approved. That was my understanding."

Is the test gun still available? asked Cooper.

"Yes, the revolver is still available."

Wolfer could easily have obtained a court order to use the Sirhan gun for the powder-pattern tests, preventing any possible inaccuracies. This test gun would become a hot item when the ballistics in the case were reexamined.

Cooper finished with the following bewildering exchange.

"Let me ask you this ... a weapon like this can cause death, and it did cause death, is that true?"

"That is correct."

"And it can cause death from one inch, two inches ... three feet, five feet, six feet and what are the outermost limits?"

"[With Mini-Mags], I would estimate about half a mile would be the maximum," replied Wolfer.

What on earth was Cooper blathering on about? He had established, for reasons best known to himself, that the murder weapon could kill from a distance of one inch to half a mile, but steadfastly ignored witnesses who could testify that Sirhan never got close enough to fire at the muzzle distance scientifically determined by Noguchi and Wolfer. It was a truly dreadful performance.

***

Later in the afternoon, Sergeant William Brandt took the stand and admitted he had searched the Sirhan house and confiscated the notebooks without a warrant. Brandt said Adel Sirhan had consented to the search. The judge overruled defense objections and was about to admit the notebooks into evidence when Sirhan blew up in court and a recess was called. Defendant and judge adjourned to chambers.

"Mr. Sirhan, will you put out your cigarette, please? Court is in session," chided Cooper.

"Your Honor, if these notebooks are allowed into evidence," said Sirhan, "I will change my plea to guilty as charged. I will do so, sir, not so much that I want to be railroaded into that gas chamber, sir, but to deny you the pleasure, sir, of after convicting me turning around and telling the world: 'Well, I put that fellow in the gas chamber, but I first gave him a fair trial,' when you in fact, sir, will not have done so.

"The evidence, sir, that was taken from my home was illegally obtained, was stolen by the District Attorney's people. They had no search warrant. I did not give them any permission, sir, to do what they did to my home. My brother Adel had no permission to give them permission to enter my own room and take what they took from my home .... I am adamant on this point."

Cooper took Sirhan away for a few minutes to calm him down. When he came back into chambers, Judge Walker assured Sirhan that while he had admitted the notebooks into evidence, "if there is an error, the upper court can reverse this case. You have got three counsel and ... they are running the lawsuit to your very best interest and there is no question in the Court's mind about that .... You are not going to go to the gas chamber unless that is the determination of the jury and I have an opportunity to set it aside if it is warranted .... Guide yourself by your attorneys. They are excellent, conscientious attorneys. They are doing an excellent job."

"I understand that," said Sirhan.

"Let's go to work."

***

After the pep talk, Officer Young of the Pasadena Police Department described how he found an Argonaut Insurance envelope in the trash while guarding the Sirhan house the day after the shooting. On the back of the envelope was more repetitive doodling in pencil:

"RFK must be be be disposed of d d d disposed disposed d of disposed disposed of properly Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy must soon die die die die die die die die die die."

Prosecution handwriting expert Laurence Sloan testified that most of the pages in the notebooks were written by Sirhan, but after lunch, as Fitts began reading the notebooks to the jury, Sirhan flipped out again and another recess was called.

"We are having a repetition of what we had this morning," Cooper told the judge. "He is insisting on pleading guilty, which would be against the advice of all counsel." Sirhan was demanding the gas chamber rather than sit there and hear his notebooks read to the jury. His mother was dispatched to the holding tank to try to calm him down, and they both emerged in tears ten minutes later. "They are throwing even the trash at him," she said.

***

The next morning, Parsons showed Sirhan the proposed witness list for the defense, and he was incensed, scratching off a dozen names he didn't want called. Cooper and McCowan went up to see him at lunchtime to try to explain why they wanted to call certain witnesses, but Sirhan wouldn't budge.

"If we can't call the witnesses we want, we'll have to withdraw from the case," warned Cooper.

"If that's the way it is, that's the way it is," said Sirhan.

He told McCowan he wouldn't testify if these witnesses were called.

Cooper told the judge that he would normally ask to be relieved from the case, but "believing as I do that he has diminished capacity -- not that he's insane -- I don't think he's in a position to exercise judgment and therefore I owe him a duty ... but I have got to have some control over him. I don't want him blowing up in courtroom and ruining my case."

***

On February 26, after nine days of testimony, the prosecution wrapped up its case with Dr. Noguchi. As he began his explanation of the autopsy, Cooper interrupted.

"Pardon me, your Honor. Is all of this detail really necessary? I think the witness can express an opinion that death was due to a gunshot wound but these details ... "

"Counsel doesn't suggest we are limited to asking one question?" asked "Buck" Compton.

"Maybe you can omit some of these details without damaging the value of the doctor's testimony?" suggested the judge.

In Dr. Noguchi's opinion, the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the right mastoid, penetrating the brain, and the gun was "one inch to one and a half inches from the edge [of the right ear]; and this takes it about two inches away from the skin of the right mastoid, sir."

Noguchi found unburned gunpowder embedded deep in the subcutaneous tissue of both entry wounds under the armpit, suggesting that these shots were fired "at very close range ... we are talking about either contact or a half-inch or one inch in distance."

"Did you measure the height of Senator Kennedy?" asked Compton.

"Yes, sir."

"How tall is he?"

"Your Honor please, how tall he was, I object to it as I don't think it is material," said Cooper.

"I believe it is in view of certain angles and things," said Compton.

Cooper was quick to overlook such details as bullet trajectories.

"Well, I will withdraw the objection," he said sheepishly.

"Kennedy was five foot, ten and a half," replied Dr. Noguchi.

***

Probing the wounds and assuming the senator was in an upright position, Dr. Noguchi found the direction of the fatal shot (wound 1) and the through-and-through wound (wound 2) to be back to front and upward at angles of fifteen and thirty-five degrees, respectively. The "slightly deformed" Kennedy "neck bullet" entered one inch below wound 2 and traveled slightly backward and up at an angle of thirty degrees.

Kennedy's arm was raised nearly ninety degrees for the armpit shots. Noguchi raised his right arm to demonstrate wound 2, holding his hand "about the level of his shoulder and extended forward from his body." For wound 3, the shoulder was raised a little higher and the elbow was drawn back to a point even with his shoulder.

"If it were a watch, it would be a quarter to twelve," said Cooper.

From Noguchi's examination of the wounds and clothing, "although there were different directions of the gunshot-wounds," the overall pattern was right to left and upward, consistent with a rapid succession of shots.

As before, the issue of muzzle distance went unchallenged by the defense. The prosecution then rested its case and, despite Sirhan's vehement objections, the jury was given copies of his notebooks.

***

The next day, LAPD investigators met with Fitts and Howard to review a job well done: "Prosecution witnesses testified as expected. Each witness was briefed as to what would take place in court. Each familiarized himself with his original statement made during the investigation. As a result, the witnesses listened, kept their answers short and did not volunteer information to questions."

For the defense, however, Cooper's muddled, bungling performance was merely a taste of things to come.
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Re: Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kenn

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 8:18 pm

PART 1 OF 2

TWELVE: The Case for the Defense

The defense began its case on February 28 and called two witnesses to testify to the bombings, shootings, and killings Sirhan had experienced in the war-torn Jerusalem of his childhood -- experiences, the defense contended, that created a twisted mind, diminishing Sirhan's capacity to premeditate murder.

Sirhan was still edgy about the witness list. At first he agreed to cooperate, but as court resumed after lunch, he again forbade his attorneys from calling a dozen different witnesses.

During the afternoon session, John Harris of the Pasadena School District testified about Sirhan's grades at high school. They were slightly above average, but according to one test, Sirhan's IQ was a slightly below-average 89, and at age seventeen, he had had a mental age of fifteen and two months. After a few minutes more of this testimony, Sirhan flipped out again.

He stood up and asked to be allowed to address the court. Judge Walker dismissed the jury and Sirhan came right out with it.

"I, at this time, sir, withdraw my original plea of not guilty and submit the plea of guilty as charged on all counts. I also request that my counsel dissociate themselves from this case completely."

He was boiling.

"Do I understand that you want to plead guilty to murder in the first degree?" asked the court.

"Yes, sir, I do. I will offer no defense whatsoever."

"All right, and what do you want to do about the penalty?"

"I will ask to be executed, sir," replied Sirhan.

"Now, I know nothing in the law that permits a defendant under any circumstances to enter a plea of guilty to murder in the first degree and ask for execution," said the judge.

"Well, I have, sir."

"Well, now, just a minute. Why do you want to do this?"

"I believe, sir, that is my business, isn't it?"

"No, it isn't. When we come to accepting a plea, you have to give me a reason."

"I killed Robert Kennedy willfully, premeditatively, with twenty years of malice aforethought. That is why," said Sirhan.

Judge Walker called him on his statement. "Well, the evidence has to be produced here in court."

"I withdraw all evidence, sir."

"There is no such procedure."

"To hell with it."

"Well, the Court will not accept the plea. Proceed with the trial."

Walker had had enough of Sirhan's tantrums and told him to sit down and follow the advice of his counsel.

"Any further interruptions will result in you being restrained ... you will have a face mask put on you which will prohibit you from talking and your arms will be strapped to your chair and the trial will proceed."

"I understand," said Sirhan. "However, sir, I intend to defend myself pro per" -- by himself.

"You have retained counsel. Counsel is staying in the trial."

"You are not going to shove a trial down my throat, sir, in any way you want."

"You say you want to go pro per?"

"Yes, I will."

"What are the defenses to murder in the first degree?" asked the judge.

"Sir, I don't know. I don't understand all of this legality."

"I find you are incapable of representing yourself. Sit down and keep quiet, and, if not, I intend to keep you quiet."

***

Judge Walker called afternoon recess, and Sirhan went into the holding tank, dragging furiously on a cigarette. The testimony about his IQ of 89 wasn't what prompted his outburst.

"I told you not to bring those two girls in here," he screamed.

Bob Kaiser didn't know what he was talking about. Which girls?

"Those two girls sitting next to you. As if you didn't know! One of them is Gwen Gumm and the other is Peggy Osterkamp."

These were the girls Sirhan had had a crush on and whom he wrote about in his notebook. But the girls in court were Sharon, an LAPD typist, and Karen, a beautician from Ohio. Sirhan shook his head -- his lawyers were trying to trick him. Adel and Mary Sirhan tried to talk to him in the tank, but he wouldn't back down, so Cooper made a motion to withdraw from the case, citing, with a poor choice of words, "a very violent difference of opinion as to how the defense should be conducted."

Judge Walker denied the motion and ordered the trial to proceed.

"I don't want it misunderstood that we are deserting him, your Honor," said Cooper. "I just wanted to make our position clear to him."

"Well, I appreciate your position," said the judge. "I think you have prepared a good defense, if not the only logical defense that could be presented."

***

That Sunday, Ambassador Issa Nahkleh of the Palestinian Arab delegation to the UN visited Sirhan in jail and brokered a compromise with the defense team. If the two girls he objected to weren't called, Sirhan would agree to the other witnesses. Before Nahkleh left, Dr. Diamond did a little hypnotic demonstration for the ambassador. He put Sirhan under and soon had him wailing and groaning about the war in the Middle East. This upset Nahkleh so much, he asked Diamond to bring Sirhan out of the hypnotic state immediately. Before he did, Diamond suggested to Sirhan that when he woke up, he sing an Arab song when Diamond took a handkerchief out of his pocket.

The sound of Sirhan's favorite Egyptian singer, Umm Kulthum, was soon filling the room. Diamond was still convinced that Sirhan had been in a trance when he shot Bobby Kennedy, but Cooper wasn't interested in fantastic theories. Mental illness and political paranoia were enough.

***

Mary and Adel Sirhan testified on Monday morning, and after the recess on Monday afternoon, Sirhan began just over three days of testimony. Cooper led him through the charges.

"Did you on or about that date of June 5, 1968, shoot Senator Kennedy?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you shoot Paul Schrade?"

"That is what the indictment reads. I must have."

"Were you aware of the fact that you shot Mr. Schrade?"

"I was not aware of anything."

And so it went with the rest of the victims. If the indictment said he shot them, he must have shot them, but he bore them no ill will and had never heard of them. Sirhan admitted to Cooper that the writing in the notebooks was his even if he couldn't remember writing it.

Cooper led him, step by step, through the traumas of his childhood in Palestine, coming to America, his upbringing in Pasadena, his failure as a jockey, and the months and days leading up to the shooting at the Ambassador.

Sirhan shared his earliest childhood memories: a "dismembered soldier with his body exploded"; walking around the casket of his dead brother, Munir; the panicked move, naked, to the Old City when war broke out; a local grocer blown to bits; bringing a bucket to the well and drawing up water to find a dismembered hand in the bucket, cut off at the wrist; hiding in the basement during bombings; and his mother stuffing cotton in his ears.

When he was eleven, Sirhan and some other kids were invited up to a military outpost where Arab soldiers overlooked the Jewish section with binoculars. "I could see, sir, the emotions ... of the soldiers. [One] was looking out there and he said, 'This is our land out there, that is our country, our property,' sir. I couldn't really understand but now I do."

Sirhan then gave a very scholarly dissertation on the origin of the Palestine problem, from the birth of Zionism up through the first Arab-Israeli War. His erudition startled the press and belied his supposed IQ of 89.

***

"What were your feelings toward John Kennedy?" asked Cooper.

"I loved him, sir," said Sirhan, "because just weeks before his assassination he was working, sir, with the leaders of the Arab countries to bring a solution, sir, to the Palestine refugee problem, and he promised these Arab leaders that he would do his utmost to force or to put some pressure on Israel, sir, to comply with the 1948 United Nations Resolution, sir; to either repatriate those Arab refugees or ... give them the right to return to their homes. And when he was killed, sir, that never happened."

***

After Cooper's questioning of Sirhan on the notebooks and the days leading up to the shooting, Sirhan was cross-examined by chief prosecutor Lynn Compton.

"Mr. Sirhan, are you nervous now, as you sit there on the witness stand?" began Compton.

"A little bit, yes."

"I notice you drink considerable water. Are you thirsty as a result of this nervousness?"

"No, sir, not really. It's something to do."

Compton proceeded to zero in on some of the key issues at hand. Sirhan told him he could clearly remember the bombing in his former homeland.

"You don't have any recollection of any incident where you blacked out, so to speak?" asked Compton.

"No, sir, I don't remember any actual blacking out, sir," said Sirhan. "I remember being nervous, being sick about it, yes. Being afraid, frightened -- I was. Very much so."

"As a matter of fact, except for this night at the Ambassador Hotel, you have never had any experience where you couldn't remember the things that you have done?"

"No, sir. There are some things I couldn't remember. I don't remember those notebooks, sir ... when I fell from that horse, sir, the same thing, sir."

Sirhan said he naturally had a great interest as an Arab in solving the problems of the Middle East. He wanted to be a diplomat to find a peaceful solution but admitted "a very intense hatred for the Zionists."

"And I assume this hatred would apply to anybody who appeared to be aiding the cause of the Zionists?"

"Yes, sir. I hold to the Arab proverb, 'The friend of my enemy is my enemy.'''

***

Compton turned to Sirhan's notebook and his "Declaration of War against America," dated June 2, 1967. "When did you develop that hatred of the United States as a country?"

"I never did have any hatred, as such, for the United States. I am most grateful, sir, to the United States for having lived here for the second half of my life. Although, from June, 1967 on, sir, I was very resentful towards the United States for their foreign policy, sir, in the Middle East; for their one-sided support, sir, for Israel against the Arab people."

"So you are telling us that never in your whole lifetime up to now that you had any hate for the United States Government or its policies?"

"No, sir, because government in school, sir, was my favorite subject. I had A's in some of those subjects. I loved the United States Government, the elections, checks and balances, Congress."

"Yet you don't deny that at some point in your career you felt very strongly about the overthrow of the United States Government?"

"As I said ... when I wrote it down and only at that time, sir. I don't remember entertaining it after or before. I don't remember that itself right then." Sirhan talked of "dirty politics" in American elections, how when Harry Truman ran against Dewey in 1948, he asked, "Do the Arabs have any votes in the American Presidential elections?" implying that only the Jews could vote, so he would support Israel in the Middle East.

Compton asked about his fondness for Senator Kennedy.

"I had always associated him with President Kennedy," said Sirhan, "and I was hoping he would become President and continue what his brother started, sir.... I was for him, very much so.... I still loved him but when he came out with this support for the State of Israel and when he said he would give fifty Phantom Jet bombers ... that is enough cause for me, sir, to hate him."

"Enough to kill him?" asked Compton.

"I don't know about that, sir," said Sirhan.

"Well, didn't you tell us that if you had him right there you would have blasted him?"

"At the time he came out and said he would send those fifty jet bombers I would have done that .... I am a very impulsive person." He snapped his fingers. "Whatever my objective would be, it is just good for that time only." He snapped them again.

***

Compton moved on to May 18. Sirhan was sure he wrote "RFK must die" in his notebook when "extremely provoked." Was it after the TV show?

"Sir, again, I don't remember what the exact provocation was. I have heard so many instances where Robert Kennedy was going to give those Phantom Jets to Israel. When he was in Oregon, sir, he came out again and spoke of sending those jet bombers to Israel."

"Well, you followed him pretty closely, didn't you in his campaign as to where he went and what he said?" suggested Compton.

"No, sir, I didn't. I was always certain that the stuff would come to me. I didn't go to it, sir."

Compton argued that the words "becoming more of an unshakeable obsession" indicated that he had been thinking of eliminating Kennedy for some time. "You wrote that the minute that you saw that television show?"

"Yes. I'm a very impulsive person. I thought to fight the minute when I saw that television program at home. I felt he had betrayed me and he was for Israel in 1948.... I was mad. I was burned up."

"As a matter of fact, you told us that if he had been right there you would have blasted him?"

"Yes ... Whatever I had written in there was good as long as it was being written ... as long as my emotions were charged up."

"But the minute you finished writing, you forgot about it?"

"As long as the provocation is withdrawn, sir, I don't respond to it."

***

Sirhan explained that his hatred for Kennedy wasn't continuous from May 18 to June 2 -- "I would have had to have been provoked to sustain this feeling." But his hatred for Zionists was there all the time. "Sir, I have a built-in bug in this brain of mine against the Jews and the Zionists, sir, and Israel; anything, sir, involving them turns me on." He gave another snap of his fingers.

***

Compton turned to Sirhan's interest in mysticism.

"When you read these books about how to improve your mind ... you didn't really expect to acquire some supernatural power, did you?"

"You're wrong, sir. I did .... The Bible says if you have as much faith as a drop of mustard, you can move mountains, sir. I believe that, sir. It has been proven to me, sir."

"So when you wrote down in your notebook 'Kennedy must die ... ' you were following the Rosicrucian idea that if you write things down and think about them hard enough they will happen, right?"

"Yes, sir. I was thinking about that exactly at the time I was writing it."

"Did you think that they would occur by some other force or that it would help you accomplish the goal?"

"That you would be helped by some force," replied Sirhan.

"Without you having to actually do it yourself?"

"I don't know, sir. I'm not that well versed in it.... I only read what they tell me and I do the exercises as told, sir."

"Was it going to happen by somebody else or was it going to help you do it?" asked Compton, probing possible conspiracy.

"I don't know, sir ... the way I felt at the time, sir, it might as well have been me."

The Concept of the Egregore: In the initiation, AMORC makes the claim that their order is empowered by an egregore, or group consciousness, consisting of both incarnated beings and non-incarnate spiritual masters. The sincere members, who study and practice the teachings of the monographs, receive a spiritual energy or influx from the egregore, which provides the student with regenerative energy and a sense of direction.

Image

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped from Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman


***

Compton said the notebook contained many things Sirhan was interested in -- names of race horses, girls, little songs, poems, jockey's names, racing terms like "tell them to put blinkers on the son-of-a-bitch."

Sirhan admitted they were his notebooks, in his handwriting, bought when he was at Pasadena City College (PCC). But he couldn't remember the last time he saw them in his room or wrote in them.

"Well, do you ever remember looking in the notebook at things you had previously written out?" asked Compton.

"Again, sir, I don't remember."

"You don't remember ever going through that and saying, 'Here is something I wrote down, that Kennedy has got to be assassinated, and I don't know why I wrote that?'"

"No, sir, I never have."

***

Compton asked Sirhan if he remembered actually signing his name at the Corona gun range on June l.

"You're asking me to remember when I wrote my name, sir, is the same as asking me to remember every bullet that I put in that chamber. That's stupid."

"I confess at times I do ask stupid questions."

"Yes, sir, you do," said Sirhan.

***

Sirhan denied he was shooting rapid-fire in San Gabriel on Election Day, contrary to what the other witnesses said. He must have fired six or seven hundred rounds that day -- "I fired a hell of a lot of holes." He normally used up all his ammunition, and he stayed later than usual that day; even so, time was called before he could fire the last few bullets.

Sirhan didn't normally drink, so Compton asked him about going back to his car after drinking at the Ambassador. "When you began to feel high ... what sort of symptoms did you experience?"

"I wasn't myself, sir. I wasn't the same Sirhan that came into the Ambassador that night."

"Did you feel dizzy?"

"I was like this, sir." He made a weaving motion with his hands. He didn't have trouble standing, but "I was so glad to have gotten that coffee, that was the only thing on my mind, sir."

Compton asked about the girl. "She was a pretty girl?"

"Sir, you could have had the ugliest gal in the place there and the way I was drunk or my mind wasn't with me, sir, you could have said she was the most beautiful, and I would have no way of disputing it."

"The last thing you remember is standing by this coffee urn talking to this girl?"

"Yes, sir. I gave her my cup and I was telling her how happy I was to get this coffee ... she wanted the coffee as badly as I did."

"The next thing you know you are being choked?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you told us this morning that you remember an officer grabbing you by the hair and pulling your head back."

"I didn't know it was an officer, sir, but when I was in that car this guy yanked my head back and had some light in my eyes."

"You told us about kicking a cup out of the hands of an officer there."

"I didn't know he was an officer, sir."

"Do you remember Officer Jordan going through your property with you?"

"The only thing that I remember about Jordan, sir, is when I was with him in that little room and we were talking about the coffee and when Mr. Howard was there .... He looked monstrous to me at the time."

"Were you still feeling kind of woozy?"

"I was tired, sir. I wasn't myself."

"You didn't think you had done anything at that time, did you?"

"No, sir, I didn't," said Sirhan.

"Everybody was very friendly?"

"They were extremely friendly ... so friendly, sir, that I didn't know what was going on."

"But you never were curious about why you were handcuffed or why you were in the police station?"

"No, sir, I wasn't myself, sir. I didn't know what was going on."

"Because you were still suffering from the effects of liquor?"

"I don't know from the effects of what, sir. I was not myself, sir, as I am now."

***

On Thursday afternoon, Compton completed his cross-examination.

"You told us earlier this morning that you were willing to fight for the Arab cause, right?"

"Yes, sir. The Palestinian Arab cause."

"And do you think that the killing of Senator Robert Kennedy helped the Arab cause?"

"Sir. I'm not even aware that I killed Mr. Kennedy .... I'm in no position to explain that."

"There's no question in your mind that you did it?"

"All this evidence has proved it. Your evidence," said Sirhan.

"Are you glad he is dead?"

"No, sir, I'm not glad."

"Are you sorry?"

''I'm not sorry, but I'm not proud of it, either."

"But you are not sorry?" asked Compton.

"No, sir, because I have no exact knowledge, sir, of having shot him."

"Well, the other day right here in this courtroom did you not say: 'I killed Robert Kennedy willfully, premeditatively, with twenty years of malice aforethought' -- did you say that?"

"Yes, I did, sir."

''Are you willing to fight for the Arab cause?"

''I'm willing to fight for it."

''Are you willing to die for it?"

"I'm willing to die for it."

***

This "twenty years of malice aforethought" was a low blow, and came to be used often over the years by those who wanted to reduce the complexities of the case to a sound bite damning the lone Arab madman. On redirect, Cooper asked Sirhan if he remembered making this statement the previous Friday, in the absence of the jury.

"Yes," said Sirhan.

"And twenty years ago, how old were you?"

"Four years old."

"And at that time did you entertain any malice against Senator Kennedy?"

"I didn't even know what malice was, sir."

***

Cooper read Friday's lengthy exchange into the record, and described the circumstances in which Sirhan made his absurd statement in midtantrum, after he was asked to give a reason for his sudden guilty plea.

"Did you have counsel's permission to do that?"

"You were fired as far as I was concerned," replied Sirhan.

***

"Are you mad at your lawyers today?"

"No, sir, I am not."

"Are you satisfied with your lawyers?"

"Very much so."

"After that flare-up ... did Mr. Parsons take your mother upstairs?"

"No, in the tank."

''And she told you to behave yourself."

"You all did, sir."

Sirhan was excused as a witness.

***

On, Friday, March 7, thirteen witnesses testified for the defense on Sirhan's background, the fall from the horse, and events at the Ambassador Hotel. Later in the trial, Murphy, Patchett, and Melendres were asked to describe Sirhan's condition in custody. Apart from them, all the other testimony came from psychiatrists and psychologists of one stripe or another. The leadoff, Dr. Martin Schorr, was on the stand for four days.

So the thirteen witnesses crammed into one day's testimony on March 7 were the only chance the jury had to hear an alternative take on the case from those who knew Sirhan before the shooting or who encountered him at the hotel.

By day's end, the press wondered what Cooper was up to. These witnesses seemed to help the prosecution. The DA was thrilled. The LAPD final report later gloated that "three witnesses [at the hotel] established that Sirhan had a drink in his hand but that he was not drunk. ... Enrique Rabago testified that Sirhan referred to Senator Kennedy as a 'son of a bitch who was a millionaire and wouldn't help the poor' [while] Humphrey Cordero ... recalled that Sirhan was sober. Sirhan's former boss John Weidner said he was a good worker but displayed flashes of anger."

***

The last witness called was Richard Lubic, the only defense witness who was actually in the pantry at the time of the shooting. He was on the stand for literally two minutes. Cooper established that he was in the pantry and there were a lot of people around.

"Do you recall -- you heard a shot fired or something that sounded like a shot or a popping of a balloon?"

"It sounded like a track meet starter," said Lubic.

"Like a starter's gun?"

"Yes."

"Alright, where were you standing?" Cooper asked. By the ice machine, said Lubic. He dropped down behind it when he heard the shots.

"Now, at the time you heard the first shot, did you hear someone say something?"

"Yes."

"What did you hear?"

"I heard a voice say, "Kennedy, you son-of-a-bitch."

"Was that simultaneously with the shot?"

"No, not simultaneously. I'd say the 'Kennedy, you son-of-a-bitch,' then the shot."

"Thank you."

And that was it.

***

In later interviews, Lubic placed the gun at least two feet from the senator's head, right next to security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, whose gun he saw pointing to the floor, by Kennedy. But during the trial, no one asked Lubic about Cesar or the muzzle distance. Instead, Cooper used Lubic to establish that Sirhan said, "Kennedy, you son-of-a-bitch."

The LAPD later smugly noted that "the prosecution anticipated the introduction of defense evidence without problems and no surprise evidence was introduced by the defense."

***
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