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.
Lieutenant Manuel Pena, lead supervisor, Special Unit Senator.
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."
left: Valerie Schulte as she appeared in the pantry-wearing a green dress with yellow polka dots and carrying a crutch.
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."