ASSASSINATIONS  AND THE NEWS MEDIA COVER-UP

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Assassinations and Cover-up

WHO KILLED ROBERT F. KENNEDY?
Evidence Showed Shots from the Rear

by Pat Shannan

The murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, who surely would have been president, was even a more mysterious crime than the assassination of his brother nearly five years earlier. The documented evidence in the first Kennedy murder was buried for 75 years, although much has surfaced through private investigation during the past thirty-seven. But the biggest secrets of the RFK murder lie locked in the most secure vault of all - a man's mind.

The power structure almost did away with Sirhan Bishara Sirhan forever by gaining a death penalty verdict at his 1969 trial. However, before he could be executed, the State of California rescinded the death penalty for all sitting on death row, and Sirhan was spared. He serves a life sentence today and has never been able to remember what happened on the night of June 4, 1968. This is fact. It is not the likely story of one attempting to disclaim any involvement by saying "I cannot remember." It is the most unlikely one. Sirhan said to his psychiatric examiners, "This is not like me. I know I did it, but I don't know why. Can you help me understand? Why did I do it?"

It was election night and the final tallies were in from the crucial California presidential primary. The best known brand name in American politics was a late comer to the presidential campaign but had already emerged as the frontrunner. At just after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Senator Robert F. Kennedy had completed a short victory speech with ". . . and now it's on to Chicago [scene of the August Democratic Convention] and let's win there!"

He began to move forward through the crowd toward the front door and a press conference in the Colonial Room when his Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz turned him around and sent him through the kitchen pantry, apparently because it was a more direct and less hampered route.

Not only were these the days before Secret Service protection was afforded to presidential candidates but Kennedy himself had requested that no Los Angeles Police officers should be near him - or so LAPD claimed in a statement that was never substantiated. Indeed, he was courting the black vote and did want to be associated with the stigma of the already infamous head-bashers. The reputation of LAPD had preceded them and long before the 1992 riots.

As the senator pushed through the throng in the kitchen's passageway, a brown-skinned man of obvious Middle Eastern descent was pushing a steel food cart on wheels toward the advancing crowd. When they were close enough, he screamed an epithet and began to fire an Iver Johnson .22 revolver. He emptied it of eight shots, but a later ballistics investigation showed that none Kennedy. All eight went wildly into bystanders, the walls and ceiling; before Sirhan was subdued by world class athletes Rafer Johnson and Roosevelt Greer, and "The Paper Lion," George Plimpton. Yet Kennedy was wounded three times, all from the back. 24 hours later, another Kennedy was dead by assassination. All of the others survived. For a day and a half Sirhan refused to identify himself. His name was learned when his brother came forward after seeing his picture on television.

Case Officially Closed

While LAPD was busy burying the truth, they were also assuring the public that they would not repeat the "mistakes of Dallas" and that would be no lingering doubts, once the investigation was complete.

But Special agent of the FBI William Bailey would soon be calling it "The biggest blunder in the history of criminal investigations." News reporters were frustrated by LAPD spokesmen who kept saying "This is

a solved case" but could never show why and how. In April of 1969, immediately following Sirhan's inevitable conviction, LAPD burned more than 2,400 photos of the crime scene. These were actually thrown in the incinerator for permanent disposal.

The ballistics evidence, presented below, was ignored. The official explanation was and is that Sirhan acted alone. Another "lone nut." It was always expected to be accepted as truth but never quite made it.

Case Unofficially Reopened

Retired Agent Bailey's assertion became clear when a total of eleven (some claimed 13, but two were questionable) bullet holes were found to be in the walls and people. It was obvious to the most obstinate conspiracy debunker that at least one more gun in addition to Sirhan's eight-shot revolver had been fired in the melee.

New York Congressman Allard Lowenstein first went public with this information in 1970, in a vain attempt to get the case reexamined. He was later shot to death in his NYC law office by another lone nut that was described in the news as "a disgruntled client." Lowenstein had been thwarted in his efforts but had never backed off of his desire to see justice done.

Following his autopsy of Kennedy, it also became obvious to Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the L. A. County Coroner and world renowned pathologist, that Sirhan had not killed RFK. The death shot was a .22 bullet behind the ear - a wound that included powder burns and one that was fired from "one to three inches away." No witness could place Sirhan closer than "three to four feet" from Kennedy at any time. Even if Kennedy had turned his head, as some had falsely claimed, the Sirhan gun was never close enough to produce powder burns.

Then who killed Robert Kennedy? The question was never asked because it had always been assumed that Sirhan had done it. The only question at the time was "Why?"

Most Likely Suspect

Dan Moldea, the author of The Killing of Robert Kennedy (1995), has offered a comprehensive study of the assassination. In it he also performs an intensive examination of both the suppressed evidence implicating and the information exonerating the security guard who had been walking next to Kennedy at the moment of attack. Moldea seems to be swayed toward Cesar's innocence but the reader is not necessarily so convinced. (Moldea's book is not unlike the current one of Michel and Herbeck re. McVeigh and OKC, attempting to persuade the reader toward the government's side at every opportunity.) Cesar seems to have altered his story at some place every time he was interviewed. He also requested not to be called to the witness stand, and the prosecutors mysteriously honored that request.

Early in 1968, Thane Eugene Cesar, 26, had applied for the position of security guard at Ace Guard Service because he was desperate to earn extra money and the $3.00 an hour was enticing. In recent months he had worked part time on occasion. But it was not until late in the afternoon of June 4th that Gene received a call from Ace Guard to report to the Ambassador Hotel for duty. He says that he was called late because another guard was not able to show up at the last minute, and that he was not there as a Kennedy bodyguard but for "crowd control." At 11:15 p.m. he was assigned to check credentials at the doorway of Colonial Room (where the press conference was to be held) and was to clear the way for the Kennedy entourage en route. As the crowd entered through the kitchen pantry swinging doors, he took up his duty and followed closely behind and to the right of Senator Kennedy.

Seconds later when the shooting broke out, Cesar hit the floor and admitted drawing his weapon. Although two witnesses, one a newsman, said they saw the security guard fire, Gene says that he did not do so. He successfully passed a polygraph test organized by Dan Moldea in 1994. An LAPD polygraph was set up for him in 1968 but was cancelled for unknown reasons by authorities the day before it was to take place.

However, as Moldea also points out, Cesar was standing directly behind Kennedy when Sirhan began firing and, according to his own statements, was in a position to shoot Kennedy at a point blank range.

A total of five witnesses saw him draw the gun, and Cesar gave contradictory statements to police about exactly when he drew the weapon. (He also had been on guard duty in the pantry an hour earlier when Sirhan reportedly slipped into the area.)

The trajectory of the shots from the back, which went through Kennedy's coat as well as into his head, were perfectly aligned with where Cesar said he was on the floor. If he did not fire, then he should have been right next to whoever did shoot and witnessed the activity. He was never asked and never volunteered that information during the polygraph.

Cesar admitted owning a .22 caliber handgun but insisted that he did not carry it - even as a backup weapon -- that night, and that he had sold it in February. However, the sales slip showed that he had not actually sold it until three months after the murder. It was never tested by LAPD for ballistics, and it subsequently disappeared. The buyer later reported it as stolen.

Gene Cesar somehow lost his clip-on necktie during the confusion. In the famous photo of a dying RFK sprawled on the pantry floor, a stray clip-on tie lies just a foot from Kennedy's clutched right hand. Did he momentarily grapple with Cesar when he saw the drawn gun aimed at him? Could Cesar have then crouched down behind and to the right of Kennedy and pumped several shots into his back at point-blank range while Sirhan fired wildly into the crowd behind the senator, drawing all the attention of the witnesses in the pantry?

The evidence suggests but does not prove that the only armed man seen by witnesses close enough to Kennedy to fire and provoke powder burns was Cesar. Did he quickly shoot the senator point blank behind the ear while they both were still standing, then fall to the floor and fire three more times? Kennedy was hit four times with shots that were impossible for Sirhan to have fired. Two entered his head (back and right side), one in his right armpit, and the fourth went harmlessly upwards through the tufted shoulder of his suit coat from right to left, also leaving powder burns and (the last two) lodging in the ceiling, indicating that they were fired from below. All seem to implicate Cesar or, at the very least, someone who would have been close enough for Cesar to have witnessed.

MK-Ultra?

Former Time correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser, who had worked for Sirhan's defense team as an investigator and knew the case better than anyone else, posed the possibility in his book, RFK Must Die, that Sirhan was "programmed to kill Bob Kennedy and was programmed to forget the fact of his programming."

Dr. Eduard Simpson, who examined Sirhan in prison for twenty weeks in a row, called it the "psychiatric blunder of the century." He believed that even the incriminating notes found in Sirhan's home ("RFK must die!" etc.) were a forgery. Indeed, the handwritings are different.

Former FBI agent-turned-investigative reporter William Turner and his co-auther Jonn Christian believe that Sirhan was a Manchurian Candidate assassin, "the robot of another," firing at Kennedy as a result of a posthypnotic suggestion. Simpson and other doctors who examined Sirhan said that he was easily hypnotizable and unusually susceptible to post-hypnotic suggestion. Sirhan's memory has always been totally blank for a two-plus hour period after 10:00 p.m. that night. He remembers nothing about it and only the evidence presented against him had convinced him of his own guilt.

Sirhan's attorneys did not challenge the prosecution with any of the exonerating evidence presented here but rather agreed with the prosecution of their client's guilt and attempted to show a "diminished mental state" in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. They failed.

Then we are faced with the Orwellian question (dwelling on the fringes of conspiratorial paranoia) of whether or not Cesar also was somehow under some kind of mind control. He certainly appears to believe that he his telling the truth, which is all it takes to pass a polygraph. But if "they" got to him. how and when did they do it?

The Polka-Dot Dress

In addition to the discrepancies of too many bullets and Kennedy being hit from behind in the back, there was another important piece of evidence pointing toward conspiracy. There were at least five witnesses who saw a woman in a polka-dot dress fleeing the assassination scene and gleefully shouting, "We shot him!"

A Kennedy campaign worker named Sandra Serrano was sitting on a stairway and asked of the mystery woman whom she meant that they had shot. "Senator Kennedy," the woman replied and continued to hurry out with a young Mexican/American man. Serrano was too far away from the assassination scene to have heard the shots and was not aware of the chaos in the kitchen at the time.

A couple identified in the police report only as "the Bernsteins," who were interviewed briefly by a patrolman, told the same story. But the Bernsteins were outside the hotel, about 100 feet down a staircase from Serrano's position when they had a brief exchange with the same woman who was still exuberantly screaming, "We shot him! We shot him!" They also inquired, "Who was shot?" and received the same reply. The Bernsteins have never been heard from again.

Sirhan has always maintained that the last thing he remembers that night is drinking coffee with a young woman. Serrano and another witness, hotel waiter Vincent DiPierro, reported seeing Sirhan in the company of the woman in the polka-dot dress before the shooting. Was it the same woman? No could ever be certain.

However, the whole incident seemed to be a thorn in the side of the cover-up corps and one that needed to be handled. The LAPD responded to their statements by sending Enrique "Hank" Hernandez to administer polygraph examinations designed not to ascertain the truth but to browbeat them into recanting. The following is from the official transcript of the preliminaries of the Serrano polygraph that was concealed for twenty years:

HERNANDEZ: I think you owe it to Senator Kennedy, the late Senator Kennedy, to come forth, be a woman about this. If he, and you don't know and I don't know whether he's a witness in this room right now watching what we're doing in 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.

SERRANO: I seen those people!

HERNANDEZ: No, no, no, no, Sandy. Remember what I told you about that. You can't say something when you didn't see it.

SERRANO: Well, I don't feel I'm doing anything wrong. . . I remember seeing the girl.

HERNANDEZ: No, I'm talking about what you have told here about seeing a person tell you, `We have shot Kennedy,' and that's wrong.

SERRANO: That's what she said.

HERNANDEZ: No, it isn't, Sandy.

SERRANO: No! That's what she said.

HERNANDEZ: Look it! Look it! I love this man!

SERRANO: So do I.

HERNANDEZ: And you're shaming him!

SERRANO: Don't shout at me.

HERNANDEZ: Well, I'm trying not to shout, but this is a very emotional thing for me, too. If you love the man, the least you owe him is the courtesy of letting him rest in peace.

This flavor of interrogation of Sandy Serrano went on for over an hour. When Hernandez finally administered the polygraph test, he concluded that the badly shaken Serrano had lied about the entire matter. Under Hernandez's relentless and often abusive pressure, both Serrano and DiPierro did finally back down.

Many months later, LAPD produced Valerie Schulte, a young Kennedy groupie who had witnessed the murder in the pantry, as being the girl in the polka-dot dress. It was another weak imitation of truth. Schulte was a blond wearing a dark dress with white polka-dots that night. Serrano saw just the opposite: "She was a Caucasian. She had on a white dress with polka dots. She was light skinned, dark hair. She had on black shoes, and she had a funny nose."

Pictures of Schulte clearly show that she was an attractive blond who also lacked "the funny nose." Not only that but Schulte was on crutches that night at the Ambassador, which certainly would be the most outstanding feature of identifying her by anybody. Nevertheless, it was one more case of "That's our story and we're sticking to it." Serrano's eyewitness report was discounted forever.

Who Killed Robert Kennedy? Continued, Convincing Evidence of cover-upclick  NEXT >>

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