(1980)
An introduction to the article:
Jack Newfield, a senior editor at the Village Voice, and a close friend of Robert Kennedy, and the author of ROBERT KENNEDY: A Memoir, put me on assignment in 1979, when I approached him with a way to prove whether or not two guns were firing when the tragic, crossroads for America, assassination occurred: Find an audio tape and analyse it acoustically, as had just been done in the JFK assassination by the special House of Representatives’ Committee on Assassinations. If more than the eight shots that Sirhan’s gun could hold were identified (as shots) a serious investigation of why Robert Kennedy died would likely occur.
Newfield gave me Village Voice stationary, the authorization to say that I was on assignment by Jack Newfield, and the phone numbers of three Kennedy insiders: Pete Hamill, the columnist, who witnessed the assassination, (and who dated Jacqueline Kennedy), Walter Sheridan, Attorney General RFK’s special assistant on the “get Hoffa” squad, with whom RFK shared leads on the death of JFK, and Allard Lowenstein, a close friend and associate of RFK, who initiated the movement within the Democratic Party to run an anti-war candidate against President Johnson, and who had been active in trying to persuade the LAPD to be forthcoming answering important unanswered questions regarding their conclusion that only Sirhan Sirhan fired a gun.
The article was not published, as a tape was not acquired for analysis at that time. However, I joined with a group of Kennedy loyalists, and freedom of information activists who finally persuaded the LA Police Commission in 1988 to force the LAPD to release their previously secret LAPD’s files and evidence to the California State Archives at Sacramento, which revealed their failure to answer crucial questions, and led to the discovery and acoustic analysis of an audio tape, thirty years after my initial proposal.)
“All the eyewitnesses though it was wacky to doubt that Sirhan had killed Kennedy – until they heard what was in the autopsy report.”
Allard Lowenstein – 1977
The publication last spring of the conclusions of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations concerning the murder of President Kennedy represented a major change in the official view of recent American history. Based partly on the successful acoustic analysis of a tape, recorded during the assassination, the Committee concluded that there was a second person shooting a gun at the President when he was killed.
In effect, even the government of the United States has now conceded that there was a conspiracy (whose motives in terms of policy changes desired and/or achieved is still unknown) to change the leadership of the country through assassination in 1963.
Five years later, on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated just after winning the California primary and becoming the front-runner in the race for President. Again, there is very strong evidence that the “lone-nut” was not alone, that there may well have been a carefully considered and completely concealed political purpose behind the elimination of Robert Kennedy from the center of the our country’s power structure. His death, twelve years ago, meant the replacement of Robert Kennedy with Richard Nixon as our leader, our personification of America’s direction and spirit. The lose we suffered in 1968 may have been an even more damaging crossroads for this country than the murder in Dallas.
However, though the evidence of conspiracy is there, the government has not yet been persuaded that it would be worthwhile finding out how and why some unknown group or groups may have thwarted our democratic choice through assassination in 1963 and 1968. We do not know what it was about the policies of John, and later Robert Kennedy, that were unacceptable and had to be stopped at all cost.
In fact, if the House Committee had not taken the steps to analyse the audio taped of the assassination in Dallas, they would have concluded incorrectly that only one assassin was involved. Similarly, a tape recording of the assassination of Robert Kennedy may bear scientifically verifiable proof of a second gunman involved in the murder which cleared the way for Richard Nixon to become President.
A series of gross inconsistencies between the official evidence in the murder of Robert Kennedy and the belief that Sirhan Sirhan alone was firing a gun in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel that night in Los Angeles has never been explained. One of the most important questions is how an apparent total of at least nine bullets could have been fired by Sirhan, whose gun could only hold a maximum of eight shots.
A year ago, a tape was found, recorded by ABC, as part of their coverage of the Presidential campaign of 1968, during the moments when the assassination of Robert Kennedy took place. On it can be heard Howard Smith referring to the sound of, “the first shot”, followed by a sharp knock, and, “the evening shots…” It is reasonable to assume that acoustic science could identify the gunshots, and count them. If more than eight shots are discovered, we know that Sirhan was not alone.
To date, ABC has not taken the first step to find out whether their tape could be the basis of a rather important news item. The tape exists and the acoustic scientists are waiting.
THE JFK ASSASSINATION TAPE
The “discovery” of a second person shooting a gun at President Kennedy resulted from the House Assassinations Committee’s decision to hire the foremost acoustic analysis company in the country to study a police tape recorded in Dallas as the assassination occurred. Bolt, Berenak and Newman, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had previously analysed tapes of the killings at Kent State. Their analysis was accepted as evidence at the trial and established the location from which the first shots were fired.
In Dallas, one of t he motorcycle policemen had inadvertently left his walkie-talkie in the “on” position as he rode in the President’s motorcade. All transmissions from the police walkie-talkies are automatically recorded at headquarters for possible use in police investigations or trials, so the entire acoustic record of the shots fired at John Kennedy sat for years in the possession of the Dallas Police Department.
The analysis of this tape began with the identification of gunshots, as distinguished from other loud sounds, such as a car backfire, through two basic tests. The first employs acoustically sensitive instruments that can register the intensity of the sound (how loud it is) and the duration of the sound (how long it lasts). Gunshots have a distinct “fingerprint” of intensity and duration that either does or does not match a sound on a tape.
The second basic identifying mark of the sound of a rifle firing a bullet is that most rifles fire bullets at speeds above that of sound. This results in the recording of, not one, but two sounds. The first is the explosion of the gunpowder. The second is the sound of the bullet leaving the barrel of the gun. Because the bullet is moving faster than the speed of sound these two noises will reach a microphone at a slightly different moment. In the case of the Dallas motorcade recording, at least four sounds passed these initial tests.
Once it was established that the tape did bear the sound of gunshots the next step was to attempt to find the location of the source of the shots. The analysis was begun by Dr.James Barger, of Bolt, Berenak and Newman, and completed by Prof.Mark Weiss, an acoustics professor, and Ernest Aschkenasy, a computer scientist, both of Queens College.
In August 1978, rifles were fired in Dallas from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building, and from the “grassy knoll,” the two alleged locations of the assassins of President Kennedy. Microphones were set up along the motorcade route, and with Dealy Plaza closed to traffic, tapes recorded the unique echo patterns produced as soundwaves from gunshots bounced off the same buildings that were there in 1963. The next step was to compare the echo patterns of the original motorcycle policeman’s tape with those of the newly recorded gunshots from the two locations. When the patterns matched you had found the position of the President’s assassin.
By comparing the intensity and duration of the echoes on the original tape with those recorded in 1978 four “matches” were found. Three of the shots were fired from the Book Depository, the fourth from the grassy knoll.
The work of the scientists was so precise that their hypothesis of the exact location of the motorcade policeman during the assassination, and the fact that his walkie-talkie was hanging upside-down on the left side of his motorcycle, was later confirmed when the committee found a photo of the motorcycle policeman, identifying him by the license plate number, riding in the motorcade.
The fact that there is now proof that President Kennedy was not murdered and replaced by Lyndon Johnson as a result of the actions of a “lone nut” probably did not surprise too many people. Neither does this major revision of American history seem to be of great interest to the mass media. We have yet to see Mike Wallace running through the historic moments of process and discovery with Aschkenasy and Weiss as they show the American people how they did their work and what it means.
A case for conspiracy in the death of Robert Kennedy can be made by considering the official “lone nut” theory in four areas that reveal inconsistency between the evidence and the conclusion that Sirhan Sirhan alone murdered Robert Kennedy:
- The contradiction between the official autopsy report, which unequivocally states that all three bullets that struck Senator Kennedy were fired from within two inches, and the numerous eyewitness accounts of those who stood within a few feet of the shooting, indicating that Sirhan’s gun never got closer to the Senator than 2-3 feet.
- The photographic evidence contradicting the official version of the path of a bullet which is claimed to have both passed through Senator Kennedy’s jacket and struck another victim, Paul Schrade, in the forehead. The disputed path of this bullet I s essential to the police version of the assassination because if it was actually two separate bullets, as seems likely, then there were a total of nine shots accounted for, from the eight-shot gun Sirhan used.
- The photographic evidence of other “ninth” bullets (there were probably at least twelve shots in all) taken by the FBI, and the Los Angeles Police as well as UPI.
- Evidence concerning another man who was in a “better” position vis-à-vis the autopsy findings concerning the source of the bullets, to have been the man who actually killed Robert Kennedy.
The conclusions of the official autopsy report by Dr. Thomas Noguchi, L.A. County Coroner (upon whom the TV series “Quincy” is based) and chief surgeon in the Senator’s autopsy, simply do not fit with what the witnesses saw when Sirhan approached Kennedy and commenced firing. In order to fully understand the import of the inconsistencies between the eye-witness accounts and the autopsy results a review of Dr. Noguchi’s findings is necessary.
Figure #1 shows the locations of the three wounds that Senator Kennedy suffered. Another bullet, known as the Schrade/shoulder pad shot, passed through Kennedy’s suit jacket but did not enter his body, is not shown here. Its trajectory angle, however, is consistent with the other three shots, and its location falls near the center of a one foot circle that encompasses all four shots. The Schrade/shoulder pad shot is listed as bullet #2 in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Employees Report (figure #2).
The fatal wound, bullet #1 in the LAPD report, was fired from about one inch away from the Senator’s head entering just behind his right ear. It travelled at an upward angle of 15°, in a right to left angle of 30°.
A second wound (bullet #3) entered about seven inches below the top of the Senator’s right shoulder and was recovered from the sixth cervical vertebra, in his neck. It entered at a 59° angle, at a right to left angle of 33-35°.
The third shot that struck the Senator (bullet #4) entered 1 ½ inches below the other shoulder wound, but it travelled through the Senator’s body, and exiting the right front chest, was lost in the ceiling interspace. It entered at a 67° upward angle, and just as with the other bullets it was moving at a 30° angle, right to left. It is plain that the assassin was just behind and to the right of Kennedy when he fired his gun. Sirhan, however, was never in that position.
The autopsy report also found that, based on analysis of the gun-powder burns, the fatal bullet that entered behind the right ear was fired from “between contact and 1 ½ inches.” So the many eye-witnesses should have seen Sirhan put his gun right up against Kennedy’s head, but no one saw the gun that close. If it had happened that way, the witnesses should have seen it because all eyes were focused on the space between Kennedy and Sirhan from the moment before he started shooting. Sirhan had first drawn attention to himself by shouting, “Kennedy, you son-of-a-bitch!”
The average distance reported by those who stood stunned and horrified, but fully focused on the scene just feet in front of them, was that at the closest point Sirhan’s gun was two to three feet away. Dr. Noguchi, whose conclusions have not been challenged in this case, is positive that two to three feet is far beyond the outside limits of error of the tests he conducted, tests that established the distance of “contact to one inch and a half” from the gun to the Senator’s head.
Equally damaging to the theory that Sirhan was the only person firing at Kennedy is the result of LAPD’s chief criminologist DeWayne Wolfer’s “Walker’s H-Acid Test,” performed on the Senator’s suit jacket. His conclusion was that the three bullets that pierced the jacket were fired from within two inches away.
Dr. Nogucki’s conclusions on the critical issue of distance became part of the public record during Sirhan’s trial when he responded to a prosecution question by stating that the wounds were inflicted from “very close range.”
The questioning continued:
- When you say “very close” what do you mean? What are some of the outside limits?
A: When I said “very close” we are talking about the term of either contact or a half an
inch in distance.
The import of the autopsy findings is that though there are about 15 people who had a good view, no witness saw Sirhan with his gun up against the Senator’s body firing four shots, and no one saw Sirhan get behind the Senator, though that was where the autopsy dictates the bullets had to have been fired from.
In fact, Sirhan was blocked off from the right side of the Senator’s back by Carl Uecker, the maitre d’ of the Ambassador. Hotel, who was leading Kennedy by the Senator’s right hand as Sirhan attacked (figure #3).
It was Uecker who testified at the trial that he grabbed Sirhan, wrestling him down onto a nearby serving table, after the assailant had fired the gun no more than twice, and when Sirhan’s gun was at a distance of no less than two feet from the Senator’s head. And yet Robert Kennedy was hit by four bullets all fired from within two inches.
Uecker’s testimony that Sirhan did not fire more than two shots in close proximity to Kennedy is particularly significant because Uecker was both the only person standing between Sirhan and Kennedy and the person who first grabbed Sirhan. Uecker was questioned on this point at the trial:
Q: Before you grabbed his arm of his hand (sic) with the gun had the gun been shot before that?
A: Yes.
Q: About how many times did that gun go off before that?
A: Twice.
Carl Uecker’s assertion that Sirhan only got off two shots in close proximity to Kennedy is supported by other close eye-witnesses.
Just after Sirhan yelled, “Kennedy, you son-of-a-bitch,” Richard Lubic, the president of a cable TV station in L.A., heard, “two shots, which sounded like shots from a starter pistol at a track meet.”
Boris Yaro, a news photographer, has stated that he “was trying to find his (Kennedy’s) head in my view finder when I heard what I thought were two explosions. My first thought was some jerk had thrown some firecrackers in here’.”
Edward Minasian, who was on Kennedy’s right and a few steps in front of Carl Becker, saw a flash and heard two shots. Then he saw Uecker grab Sirhan and he (Minasian) “pushed the two of them (Uecker and Sirhan) against the serving table…” further away from Robert Kennedy, who was falling backward in the opposite direction.
Not only didn’t the witnesses see Sirhan’s gun any closer than two to three feet from Kennedy, many of them assert that Sirhan had been pulled substantially further from the Senator by the third shot. And yet Robert Kennedy was hit four times from within two inches.
Uecker’s testimony came up during the interview with the late Allard Lowenstein, a friend of Senator Kennedy’s, on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show in 1976. Snyder had arranged to have them L.A. District Attorney Joseph Busch on the phone for a discussion of the “problem” fitting the eye-witness testimony with the Coroner’s autopsy and the LAPD Walker’s H-Acid test:
Snyder: …the eye-witness testimony does not seen to match up with the Coroner’s report that the gun that fired the shot was an inch or maybe two inches away from Kennedy’s head, but no eye-witness can place it closer than eighteen. How would you account for that seeming discrepancy?
Busch: Well, that’s not true. It was a point blank, right into the right ear of the Senator. The gun was right there. The bullet that killed him entered right there, and we can show it.
Lowenstein: Now who has said that, that saw it? Just name one witness that said they saw a gun, point blank, fired into Senator Kennedy’s ear? Tell us one.
Rusch: Would you like Mr. Uecker, the man that grabbed his (Sirhan’s) arm? Would you like any of the 55 witnesses?
Lowenstein: Yes, Mr. Busch, I would, because Mr. Uecker swears that it was two feet.
Busch: Oh, come on Mr. Lowenstein.
A few weeks after this dialogue on national television, Busch was into viewed by reporters for the German magazine Der Stern, which was doing an investigative story on the case. Describing the two gun theory as “pure nonsense”. Busch again named Uecker as his prime witness supporting the one gun theory. He refused, however, to say where Uecker could be found. But when the magazine located Uecker, he issued a statement that left no further room for doubt about what he saw:
I have told the police and testified during the trial that there was a distance of at least 1 ½ feet between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. After Sirhan’s second shot, I pushed his hand that held the way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. When I told this to the authorities they told me that I was wrong. But I repeat now what I told them then Sirhan never got close enough for a point blank shot, never.
As recently as 1977, L.A. authorities were still interested in getting witness on the record who would state that Sirhan had his gun directly up against Senator Kennedy’s head. According to Baxter Ward, L.A. County Supervisor, a re-enactment of the shooting took place at the Sheriff’s facility on Beverly Boulevard, in L.A.
Word had passed to the D.A.’s office that Lisa Urso, a Kennedy worker who witnessed the murder, had said that the fatal shot was fired “point-blank.” She was flown in from Hawaii.
Last year, Supervisor Ward, who was present at the Sheriff’s facility, explained to reporter Kevin Cody, “…in the re-enactment, those who played the various parts stationed themselves so that Sirhan’s hand and gun were point-blank to the Senator. She (Urso) had Sirhan back up so his hand and gun were at least three feet from the head of the Senator. They questioned her about her point-blank statement, and she said, ‘Not that point-blank!’”
THE FIRST OF THE “NINTH” BULLETS
The Los Angeles Police Department Employee’s Report (figure #2) filed by Lt. D. W. Mann, of the Criminalistics Section, is a clear outline of the official version of the trajectories of the eight bullets Sirhan is alleged to have fired into Robert Kennedy and the five other victims also wounded during the assassination. It accounts for all the bullets that Sirhan’s eight-shot snub-nosed Iver-Johnson. 22 pistol could possible fire.
However, one of these bullets (#2 on Lt. Mann’s report), known as the Schrade/shoulder-pad shot, could not have done all the damage attributed to it. This is clear when we examine two LAPD photos (figures #4 and #5), one of the entry and exit holes in the Senator’s suit jacket, and the other of police officers determining the trajectory of the bullet that caused these holes. In the second photo, the officers can be seen passing a probe through the holes in the Senator’s jacket, worn by another officer, and a second parallel line is drawn to further clarify the trajectory the bullet had to have followed through the coat.
According to the LAPD’s report bullet #2 passed “through the right shoulder pad of Senator Kennedy’s suit coat (never entering his body) and struck Paul Schrade in the center of his forehead.” However, the improbability of one bullet both piercing the jacket at such a steep angle that it didn’t even touch the Senator, and striking Mr. Schrade, becomes clear immediately when we try to imagine it. Paul Schrade would have to have either been nine feet tall, and facing Senator Kennedy, or he would have to have had his forehead resting on the Senator’s shoulder to have been struck by this same bullet.
Further, Mr. Schrade remembers that he was following “about three or four feet behind Kennedy” when they were shot. This is confirmed by eye-witnesses, none of whom reported seeing Sirhan behind Kennedy at any time.
Sirhan and Kennedy had been walking towards each other from opposite ends of the kitchen, with Schrade following the Senator. When Sirhan reached out, facing Kennedy, many thought it was to shake hands with the candidate until the gun began going off and the five other victims, including Schrade, who were in a straight line of fire (figure #3) as they followed Kennedy were hit and fell. It is very likely that Sirhan’s eight shots all passed just to the left of the Senator, one going over his shoulder and striking Schrade in the middle of the forehead, as three other bullets fired from a second position just behind Kennedy, struck him, and a fourth passed through his suit jacket never entering his body, but continuing upward into the ceiling.
In short, if the bullet that struck Schrade and the one that passed through the jacket were two separate bullets then the theory that only Sirhan fired a gun in the Ambassador Hotel that night cannot be true. Sirhan’s gun could only hold eight bullets and yet at least nine have now been accounted for.
THE OTHER “NINTH” BULLETS
Another well-documented “problem” in accepting the one-gun theory concerns evidence of other “ninth” bullets, the existence of any one of which would be proof of a ninth bullet and a second gun. Eye-witnesses saw and new agencies, the LAPD and the FBI photographed, what officials have stated were bullet holes caused by shots not accounted for in the police inventory of the eight bullets Sirhan was alleged to have fired.
Seven bullets were removed from the bodies of the victims. Only the eighth bullet, which the police records indicate passed through Senator Kennedy’s body and “disappeared” in the ceiling interspace, could have caused a bullet hole anywhere in the kitchen. Any other bullet hole would be evidence of a ninth bullet and a second gun, which would disprove the one-gun theory.
The first “extra” bullet we will consider was seen and photographed the morning of the shooting. Figure #6 is a LAPD photo of this bullet still sticking in the wood of a doorframe in the room adjacent to the kitchen. It is located in a direct line from Sirhan, past William Weisel, one of the victims. Figure #7 shows two police officers (Robert Rozzi and Charles Wright) inspecting this bullet. As LAPD office Rozzi explained in a signed statement given to former Asst. DA Vincent Bugliosi on 11/15/75:
During the night one of the investigators for the LAPD suggested that we look for bullets and bullet holes …. Sometime during the evening when we were looking for evidence, someone discovered what appeared to be a bullet a foot and a half or so from the bottom of the floor in a door jamb on the door behind the stage. I also personally observed what I believed to be a bullet in the place just mentioned. What I observed was a hole in the door jamb, and the base of what appeared to be a small calibre bullet was lodged in the hole. I was photographed pointing to this object….LAPD officer Charles Wright, also of the Wilshire Division, is holding a ruler next to the object. (figure #8) 6
Figure #9 shows two bullet holes that were circled and numbered by the FBI as part of their “reconstruction” of the shooting. They were in the same line of fire as the one which stuck in the door-jamb, but they hit the center doorframe of the double doors that Senator Kennedy had just used to enter the kitchen.
William A. Bailey was a special agent for the FBI LA office in 1968 when he was ordered to come to the Ambassador Hotel to interview witnesses present at the time of the shooting. After hearing for the first time that questions were being raised about the case, he immediately came forward and signed an affidavit on 11/14/76 stating that:
I was also charged with the responsibility of recreating the circumstances under which the same (the assassination) took place. This necessitates a careful examination of the entire room and its contents.
At one point during these observations I (and several other agents) noted at least two (2) small calibre bullet holes in the center post of the two doors leading from the preparation room. There was no question in any of our minds as to the fact that they were bullet holes. (see figure #9)
Bailey was not the only authority who made out a statement concerning these bullet holes in the center divider of the double doors. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Coroner of LA County, gave a signed statement to former Asst. DA Vincent Bugliosi on 12/1/75 which said that he made an “on scene” investigation of the homicide on June 11, 1968, 5 days after the assassination, with LAPD criminologist DeWayne Wolfer, who was handling forensic aspects of the case, Noguchi states:
I asked Mr. Wolfer where he had found bullet holes at the scene. I forgot what he said, but when I asked him this question, he pointed, as I recall, to one hole in the ceiling panel above, and an indentation in the cement ceiling. He also pointed to several holes in the door frames of the swinging doors leading into the pantry. I directed that photographs be taken of me pointing to these holes. (see figures #10 & #11)
One witness who has come forward to confirm what Dr. Noguchi has stated, Martin Patrusky, was a waiter at the Ambassador Hotel. He was present during the “on scene” investigation by Dr. Nogudhi and had participated in a video-taped reconstruction of the shooting because he had been a witness to the assassination. Patrusky’s statement reads in part:
The reconstruction incident took about an hour or so. Sometime during the incident, one of the officers pointed to two circled holes on the center divider of the swinging doors and told us that they had dug two bullets out of the center divider….A man (Noguchi – see figure #10) is pointing to the two circles holes. I am absolutely sure that the police told us that two bullets were dug out of these two holes. I don’t know the officer’s name who told us this, but I remember very clearly his telling us this when they were recreating the scene, and I would be willing to testify to this under oath and under penalty of perjury.
So, not only does Petrusky confirm the existence of the ninth bullet, but he also confirms that the police had dug out the tenth as well.
Finally, Bugliosi has a statement from a witness who saw one of the bullets still stuck in the center divider the morning of the shooting before it was removed by the police. Angelo Di Pierro, an employee of the Ambassador Hotel, was escorting Ethel Kennedy as the Senator preceded them by about twenty feet. When the shooting began Di Pierro and Mrs. Kennedy were just about to go through the double doors into the kitchen. In the statement he relates that:
After Senator Kennedy had been removed from the pantry…many people, including the police and myself, started to look over the entire pantry area to piece together what had happened. That same morning, while we were still looking around, I observed a small calibre bullet lodged about a quarter of an inch into the wood on the center divider of the two swinging doors. Several police officers also observed the bullet. The Bullet was approximately 5 feet, 8 or 9 inches from the ground. The reason I specifically recall the approximate height of the bullet location is because I remember thinking at the time that if I had entered the pantry just before the shooting, the bullet may have struck me in the forehead, because I am approximately 5 feet 11 ½ inches tall….I am quite familiar with guns and bullets, having been in the Infantry for 3 ½ years. There is no question in my mind that this was a bullet and not a nail or any other object. The base of the bullet was round and from all indications, it appeared to be a .22 caliber bullet. A day or so later, the center divider that contained the bullet was removed by the LAPD for examination.
Within a year of the assassination the door frames had been destroyed. This is highly unusual since Sirhan’s appeal for a new trial had not yet been turned down, and the door frames might well have been material evidence in a new trial. A Los Angeles police officer and an FBI agent were ready to testify that they had seen evidence of what had to have been the ninth bullet, proof of a second gun used in the assassination. The County Coroner, also while on official business examining the murder scene, was ready to testify that the Police Department’s Chief Criminologist had told him that there were holes in the door frames caused by what had to have been “extra” bullets, not accounted for in the official conclusions published for consumption by the general public. And there were other witnesses, who either saw the bullets or would have testified that they were told of their existence by police officers discussing what had been found during their official examinations, the day after the murder. Most of these people are alive, and should be questioned by a new grand jury.
THE SECOND GUNMAN?
Since Sirhan was never in the position from which the bullets that killed Robert Kennedy were fired, a natural question arises: why didn’t Sirhan’s lawyers raise this issue at the trial. The reason is that it was assumed by all concerned that Sirhan was solely responsible. Everyone had seen him shooting at Senator Kennedy. The fact that there were security guards in the kitchen, carrying guns, was not an issue in the case, or it was flatly denied by the authorities. As late as 1975, the District Attorney of Los Angeles insisted publicly that there were no other guns in the vicinity of Senator Kennedy, although statements to the contrary were in the public record.
At least one armed security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, had admitted that he accompanied the Senator as they proceeded through the kitchen, his left hand on the Senator’s right arm, and that “I was there holding his arm when they shot him.”
Further, the DA’s office issued a written claim that “no gun other than Sirhan’s had been observed by any witnesses,” although a number of eye-witnesses had made statements to the contrary.
“I was kneeling at Senator Kennedy’s right side after he fell to the floor, “eye-witness Richard Lubic recalled. “I saw a man in a guard’s uniform standing a couple of feet to my left behind Senator Kennedy. He had a gun in his hand and was pointing it downward.” Lubic added that he had told these facts to the authorities at the time of the original investigation.
Others saw this gun as well. After helping subdue Sirhan, Kennedy’s bodyguard, Bill Barry, saw the guard with a drawn gun and told him to put it away. Carl Uecker also saw it, and he mentioned that he was glad that the gun hadn’t been fired, since it might have hit him.
The guard himself admitted drawing his gun, asserting in his initial statement that he had reached for it at once as soon as he saw Sirhan’s arm reaching out. This version of his actions was reiterated by Cesar a year later when he was interviewed by journalist Ted Charach. In two other interviews the guard admitted drawing his gun, but only after the shooting had ended.
By November 3, 1972, according to Jonn Christian and William Turner, co-authors of The Assassination of Robert Kennedy (Random House, 1978), Sirhan’s chief trial lawyer, Grant B. Cooper wrote that if he knew then what he knew now, “My approach to his defense would have been materially altered.” Now we must ask, if Sirhan, based on the autopsy and the Walker’s H-Acid test, was never in the position to have inflicted the wounds that killed Senator Kennedy, was there someone else in a “better” position?
A short review of the autopsy will reveal where such a second gunman would have had to have been located. All four of the bullets that struck Senator Kennedy entered his b ack, so the gunman should have been behind him. And all four entered the right side of his body and travelled toward the Senator’s left side, so the gunman should have been just to the right of Kennedy as he shot his victim. Finally, all four of the shots came from a gun that was no more than two inches away, so the gunman should have been in direct body contact with Senator Kennedy.
Thane Eugene Cesar, an armed guard, hired for the night through the Ace Security Agency, was walking just behind the Senator, with his left hand holding Robert Kennedy’s right arm, as the shooting began. A taped interview by KFWB reporter John Marshall, recorded within minutes of the assassination, included this exchange:
Marshall: …officer, can you confirm that the Senator has been shot?
Cesar: Yes, I was there holding his arm when they shot him.
In another interview Cesar said that as the shooting began he “ducked, because I was as close as Kennedy was. When I ducked, I threw myself off balance and fell back and when I hit…I fell against the ice-boxes and the Senator fell down right in front of me.”
Four bullets struck Robert Kennedy in the right side of the back of his body, all fired from point blank range. Thane Cesar’s statements that he was “holding Kennedy’s arm when they shot him,” and that “Kennedy fell down right in front of me” places him in direct body contact of Senator Kennedy, just behind and to the right of him, as the shooting occurred, and he was also seen to have drawn his gun.
Don Schulman, an employee of KNXT-TV was interviewed live, minutes after the assassination, by Jeff Brent, a reporter for the station. Both had been in the kitchen. Schulman stated that he saw both Sirhan and a security guard firing their guns:
Brent: I heard about six or seven shots in succession. Now, is this the security guard firing back?
Schulman: Yes, the man who stepped out fired three times, and the security guard then fired back…hitting him.
While most of the people in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel stood dumbstruck, in horror and disbelief, their attention caught by Sirhan’s voice yelling, “Kennedy, you son-of-a-bitch,” and their eyes focused a moment later on the space between Robert Kennedy and the flaming gun pointing in his direction it is understandable that perhaps only one person saw that other gun firing.
When Schulman later told police authorities what he saw he was simply informed that he was wrong. He was never called to testify at the trial, and most mysteriously, he and Jeff Brent were left off the official list of persons in the kitchen at the time of the murder.
All this and more was known to authorities, but although 14 lie detector tests were used in the investigation, Cesar never had to take one. If Cesar did fire his gun, it may well have been in defense of Kennedy, as Schulman thought, but Cesar was never made to account for his actions under the scrutiny of a lie detector test. Even when the police had evidence that Cesar had lied to them about a critical element of his story – when he sold his .22 caliber pistol – a lie detector test was still not ordered.
Cesar had told the police that his special nine-shot II and R pistol, which used the same calibre bullets as Sirhan’s Iver-Johnson pistol, had already been sold before the assassination occurred. However, Jim Yoder, who bought the weapon from Cesar, has a receipt, signed by Cesar, dated 9/6/68, three months after the killing.
The ten-year investigation by William Turner, an ex-FBI agent, and Jonn Christian, a journalist, resulted in their book The Assassination of Robert Kennedy, which first alerted me to the “problems” with the official version of the assassination. It was Mr. Christian who went to Blue river, Arkansas, to see if there was some documentary evidence of the later sale of Cesar’s gun. Along with the receipt, for $15.00, Mr. Yoder, who had been a co-worker with Than Cesar at a Lockheed plant, had some interesting details to reveal about Cesar and his gun.
Yode related that the Lockheed plant was a U-2 spy-plane facility and that Cesar had floating assignments that allowed him to be in off-limits areas, usually areas that only special personnel had access to. Yoder also told Christian that the LAPD had questioned him and that he had told them about the sale of the pistol, specifically mentioning his receipt and its date. The most unsettling aspect of Yoder’s statement is that the Cesar gun was stolen during a burglary shortly after his interview with the police.
The loss of that gun became important in 1974 when one of the other victims of the shots during the assassination, Paul Schrade, forced L.A. authorities to refire Sirhan’s weapon, and to reanalyse the ballistics data. Schrade, and anyone who doubts that Sirhan’s gun could have been solely responsible for all the wounds to all the victims, was in effect challenging the sworn testimony of DeWayne Wolfer, the LAPD ballistics authority who stated that he had matched all the bullets from all the victims to Sirhan’s gun “to the exclusion of all other guns in the world.” This analysis by Wolfer is, of course, a very important underpinning to the one-gun theory.
The conclusion of the nine nationally respected experts, empanelled under the Schrade lawsuit, was that there was no evidence upon which Wolfer could have made his claim of matching Sirhan’s gun to all the bullets. Further, none of them ruled out the possibility of a second gun. Unfortunately, with Cesar’s gun stolen, and missing, it could not be refired and either found to have been the gun or not to have been the gun that fired some of the bullets.
There is another element in the Cesar mystery that is startling in relation to the police’s tunnel vision concerning their consideration of the possibility that Cesar might have played a part in Kennedy’s death. Robert Houghton, who served as Chief of Detectives, and was in over-all command of the LAPD’s investigation, dubbed Special Unit Senator, stated in his book (known as the Warren Report of the RFK case because of its combination of factual error and logical inconsistency) with a tone of absolute authority, that:
On July 13, 1969, I held a final Special Unit Senator meeting asking 10 last questions…to the absolute possibility of any person with right-wing connections being in the kitchen or pantry the night of June 4-5, 1968….Within a week, all of them had been answered satisfactorily.
However, Ted Charach, who was present at the assassination, later produced “The Second Gun,” with French journalist Gerald Alcan, a documentary which graphically detailed and recorded the “problems” with the official version of the murder. They found Cesar living and working in the San Fernando Valley. In his interview, which took place on October 7, 1969, Thane Cesar, whose political passions should have been first on the list of Chief of detectives Houghton, outlined his political ideas.
According to Charach, Cesar was a supporter of George Wallace, who hated the Kennedy family for allegedly giving everything to black people. Further, Thane Cesar was among those armed Americans who in the late sixties and early seventies were preparing for the imminent race war. One final piece of evidence concerning Cesar that at the very least backs his own statement that he was standing in direct body contact with Robert Kennedy as the Senator was shot concerns Thane’s clip-on tie that was a standard part of the Ace Security Guard’s uniform. About a foot from Robert Kennedy’s clenched right hand, as he lay mortally wounded, was Cesar’s tie (figure #12), and another photograph (figure #13), taken minutes after the assassination, shows Cesar standing with another guard, his tie missing from his neck. Did Robert Kennedy grab that tie from Cesar in a vain attempt to defend himself from the bullets hitting him from behind?
Thane Eugene Cesar may not have fired his gun at all that night, or he may have done so in an attempt to protect Senator Kennedy. But it is clear that there are many serious questions still to be answered if we think it is important to know for sure by whose actions one likely President, Robert Kennedy, was eliminated from our lives and history, to be replaced by another, Richard Nixon, and all his leadership brought us.
When the House of Representatives’ Assassinations Committee issued its finding concerning a second person shooting at President Kennedy, it also recommended that a special prosecutor be appointed in the case. The Committee passed along evidence of what they considered to be valuable leads to the Attorney General’s Office. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it seems that after a two year immersion in the question of how President Kennedy was killed and by whom, the Committee thought that it was quite possible for a serious investigation to find and prosecute the others responsible for the murder sixteen years earlier.
As outlined in this article, a strong case for conspiracy can be made in the death of Robert Kennedy. Very important inconsistencies exist between the evidence and the conclusion that Sirhan Sirhan alone was responsible.
Critical questions have been left unanswered by the record of Sirhan’s trial and the statements of Los Angeles authorities.
Why is it that the official autopsy report and the Walker’s H-Acid test indicate that the bullets which struck Robert Kennedy were all fired from within two inches of his body while the witnesses are uniform in their statements that the distance was two to three feet? Isn’t this evidence that there was a second person firing from another position just behind Senator Kennedy?
After seeing photographic evidence of the very steep, back to front trajectory of the bullet fired through Senator Kennedy’s suit coat, now can we believe that it also struck Paul Schrade in his forehead when he and other witnesses state that he was three feet behind Kennedy, and the bullet clearly had to have gone straight up into the ceiling? If these were indeed to separate bullets, then doesn’t one of them have to be the first of the “ninth” bullets fired from a second gun?
There are numerous photographs of evidence of other “ninth” bullets. These photos are backed up by statements from responsible authorities including FBI and police officers, along with the Coroner of Los Angeles County and others who were present as the police first reconstructed the shooting in the kitchen during the days after the murder. Why should we now believe that all concerned were mistaken? And if they were not mistaken, then didn’t there have to have been two guns in order to have evidence of nine (or more) bullets?
Finally, in as much as all the bullets which struck Senator Kennedy were fired from a gun held up against the right side of his back, and there was ample reason to place Thane Cesar in that position during the assassination, why wasn’t his involvement, if only in a vain attempt to stop Sirhan, seriously considered? If no witnesses saw Sirhan close enough to have fired four shots from within two inches of Robert Kennedy, who other than Cesar was that close and had a gun?
These, and other glaring questions, which I have omitted in the interest of space, should be answered by the work of a special prosecutor, appointed by the Attorney General who would be armed with the power to subpoena witnesses to testify under oath. Most of the witnesses are still alive, and sufficient physical evidence is available, in the public record, to reconstruct the assassination in a way that fits the facts. The next step would be to follow the leads, already uncovered and discussed thoroughly in both The Assassination of Robert Kennedy, and Allard Lowenstein and Dr. Robert Joling’s unpublished book.
A case for conspiracy in the death of Robert Kennedy is strong, and a tape recording exists which could prove the case if its owners would allow it to be properly examined or if they were forced to release it by the court. An acoustic analysis of a tape recording of the murder of the John Kennedy changed the official view of American history last year. The same could be true in the murder of Robert Kennedy.
THE RFK TAPE
Chapter 12 of The Assassination of Robert Kennedy, by Christian and Turner, (“Too Many Guns – Too Many Bullets”) dealt in part with the pattern of the sounds of the shots reported by the witnesses in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. The eye-witness statements were not, in and of themselves, very convincing, but they did bring to my mind a way to prove, one way or the other, how many shots were fired. Of all the radio and TV companies that were covering the California primary that night, at least one station might have still had an “open” mike just thirty seconds after the Senator had finished his victory statement. Some station might still have been doing a wrap-up, or perhaps there was a stray mike somewhere that was not turned off, which recorded the sounds of the shots.
If a seventeen-year-old police recording picked up from a through-the-air transmission from a motorcycle policeman, recorded while his motor was running, could be analysed, then it seemed likely that a successful attempt to “find” the sound of the shots recorded by professional broadcasters would be possible, and the shots could be counted.
After a few weeks I found a clue when I watched a 16 mm color film clip, with magnetic sound, of an ABC television outtake at the Grinberg Film Library, in New York. It showed the end of the victory speech and the Senator disappearing behind a curtain as he left for the kitchen, followed by the milling crowd that soon became a screaming, crying mob, as people became aware of what was happening behind the curtain.
I also heard what sounded like shots, to which individuals in the crowd reacted anxiously, before they realized what those sounds meant. The only problem was that the film was spliced between the first apparent gun shot sound and the last, so a full record of all the shots was not there.
I told Jonn Christian about the ABC tape and he said he had once heard it, but with Howard K. Smith’s voice-over on top of it, talking about and counting the shots. Christian knew a man named Floyd Nelson, in Hollywood, who was in possession of Lillian Castellano’s archives of information concerning the RFK murder. (Ms. Castellano and Mr. Nelson wrote the first article on the inconsistencies in the one-gun version of the murder, back in 1969.) Christian was correct in his hunch that their archives would have the tape he once heard.
In a couple of weeks Christian sent a cassette copy of it to me, so I could approach the same acoustics people who did the analysis of the JFK tape. Once ABC had given the go-ahead, if they could not find the original, Christian would send along the original Castellano tape for the acoustic analysis.
Ms. Castellano had recorded her tape directly off the air the night of the assassination. It is the coverage of the aftermath of the assassination by ABC, as it happened that night and morning. Smith talks with eye-witnesses, police, and other reporters as he airs up-to-the minute information. Then, twice he plays a tape that ABC recorded, which includes the end of the victory speech, the sound of a crowd chanting “We want Bobby, we want Bobby” and then…according to Smith, the sound of the “first shot, the ensuing shots” etc.
Having received the tape I called one of the scientists from Bolt, Berrenak and Newman, the acoustics company the House Assassinations Committee had hired. I described where the open microphone was in relation to where the shots were fired to see if it might be possible to “find” the shots through the use of acoustics science, and then to count them. If nine shots or more were found, then proof, which could stand up in court, existed that at least two persons had fired guns when Robert Kennedy was killed. The scientist said that without actually testing the tape he could not be sure, but that it seemed probable that the bullets could be “found” and counted.
My next step, of course, was to inform ABC News that they had in their sole possession, a tape which might be of historic interest. I wrote a letter to Roone Arledge, President of News, Jeff Gralnick, V.P. and Executive Producer of News and Special Events, and both Avram Westin and Al Ittleson of ABC’s news magazine 20/20. In it I outlined some of the reasons to question the one-gun theory, and included some photographic and documentary evidence to back up the outline. I also threw some names at them, including Jack Newfield, Allard Lowenstein, Dr. Robert Joling (Chief Medical Examiner in Detroit), Vincent Bugliosi (former Assistant District Attorney in Los Angeles), and Dr. Thomas Noguchi (Coroner of Los Angeles County), all of whom cared enough to look into and eventually catalogue the “problems” with the official version of the assassination.
Some months earlier, Jack Newfield had given me a series of phone numbers, one of which was that of Al Lowenstein. Lowenstein was very familiar with all aspects of the case and Mr. Newfield was certain he would want to be of help. Mr. Lowenstein met with me and in the course of our meeting gave me the phone number of Greg Stone, who he said was “the central hero of the effort to bring to light the truth about the death of Robert Kennedy.”
Greg introduced me to his archives of documents at his home in Virginia, helped me to find all the other tapes that might be relevant, and explained what had so far been attempted and accomplished. He also told me that for some reason the “powers that be” did not want the facts to come to light, and that I shouldn’t expect ABC to help me.
Allard Lowenstein told me the same thing when I visited him. He said that ABC would simply not be interested, but gave me the name of a friend who he felt would want to help (and did), wished me well, and offered further assistance from him whenever I should need it. But Lowenstein had tried what I was trying before, and he related a ted series of events to me to show me to what lengths one of the networks had gone to discredit the two-gun evidence at a time that seemed most ripe for real progress in opening up the case.
In 1975, Lowenstein had represented Paul Schrade as his attorney, in his attempt to find out if anyone else than Sirhan was responsible for his injuries.
Although there had been many aspects of the case ruled out of bounds by the judge, a panel of ballistics experts was allowed to examine the bullets in an attempt to match them to Sirhan’s gun. Lowenstein and the others had been elated when the conclusions of the panel were released, since they contradicted the LAPD expert who had testified at Sirhan’s trial that all the bullets matched Sirhan’s gun.
However, the report of the experts began with words to the effect that they had found no evidence linking the bullets to a second gun…at which point the media representative ran out of the court and headlines appeared across the country that read, “No Evidence of a Second Gun in RFK Case. The real scoop was that a crucial part of the case against Sirhan as lone assailant had gone down the drain because not one of the experts was able to make a positive identification of the bullets, linking them all to one gun. All agreed that they had not ruled out a possibility of a second gun.
Strangely, CBS, which had been a party to the Schrade suit, was one of the worst offenders in misreporting the conclusions of the ballistics panel. Lowell Bradford, the CBS expert on the panel, was shocked when he saw the segment on the evening news that dealt with the findings. He threated to call a news conference the next day to charge CBS with deliberate distortion, but was appeased, when in a rare correction of a major news story, Walter Cronkite clarified the actual conclusions reached by the panel the following night.
Even though Lowenstein was someone who knew far more than I about what the networks would be interested in reporting, and even though I had seen year after year of cover-up in the reporting of the JFK murder, I felt that ABC might well jump at the chance to quietly analyse the tape that they alone had access to, and perhaps to come forward with unassailable evidence of a second gun in the RFK murder. A major network such as ABC certainly has more than enough money to gamble on acoustic tests to see if they may possibly have an important story on their hands. They also have a social responsibility to do so. I thought that the House Committee’s recent conclusion that there was a second gunman in the JFK murder might have given some new legitimacy to the possibility of a similar conspiracy in Robert Kennedy’s death.
But, it seems I was wrong. Having first contacted the heads of the news division of ABC, I though perhaps it would be different when I presented what I knew to Geraldo Rivera’s office. At least he might be interested enough to listen to the tape, and consider its possible meaning. However, the result of my efforts was the same. I was told by his office in November that all the segments for 20/20 had already been scheduled, which was not true. To date I have only the assurances of the Manager of News Information that ABC still hasn’t decided what it should do many months after I first contacted them.
Perhaps the importance of the tape is clear to ABC executives because I did not properly explain the “problems” with the one-gun theory. Will someone at ABC read this article and decide that an analysis should be done? At this point I am doubtful. The most definitive statement of ABC’s position came in a conversation I had with Joseph Keating, the V.P. of the ABC Radio network, on 6/20/79, when I was trying to convince the network to analyse the tape:
DM: … but you’re assuming that there’s nothing wrong with the official version. Why not let The Voice analyse the tape and see?
JK: No, we’re not – we just choose not to get involved. It’s a free country and we don’t have to do anything.
DM: Well, can we at least screen the tape?
JK: I thought you said it was audio?
DM: Well, audio-visual. You have an audio track that is on the film footage.
JK: No, you can’t listen to it. We’ve decided it’s unavailable.
DM: Well, I hope you’ll analyse it.
JK: We’ll do what we want with it – you’re guessing there’s something of value on it.
DM: We won’t know until someone checks. Jack Newfield feels that this could be of importance and should be checked.
JK: Well, you run your news-shop your way, and we’ll run ours our way.
The use of assassination to carry out political aims should not be underestimated. It is quicker and surer than taking a chance in an election. By eliminating the living symbol of a movement for change, assassination is highly effective. It stems the growth of the political movement by removing the one person who really could make a difference, the leader who is capable of standing in the energy-charged center of the powerful forces for change and by acting as a catalyst transforms hopes and dreams into reality. The Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and even George Wallace were each in his own way and time that kind of person. But each was shot down in time to prevent them from bringing about the changes in social, political and economic reality they desired and promised.
All these shootings occurred under suspicious circumstances and many Americans, though less well known, have become targets of bullets in recent years when their activities became politically sensitive. Does this mean that the assassination of a national leader has not happened recently only because none have risen to positions which threatened change?
As I compiled the publically-available information on the Kennedy murders, and read the report of the House Committee on Assassinations, or thought back to the years during which many laymen were saying that the truth was not known about the death of President Kennedy, one thought kept coming up. If laymen such as myself know these things, surely the professional intelligence agencies know far more. How much more do they know?
In the conclusion of an article of Allard Lowenstein’s published by the Saturday Review, about his efforts to force a re-opening of the RFK murder, he wrote:
Sensible people keep asking if it is really worth the time and effort to dig into the difficult past in this difficult way. Some time ago, near the beginning of this long journey, I tried to explain my own reason for pressing ahead. ‘Assassinations of national leaders are not ordinary murders,’ I wrote. ‘When bullets distort or nullify the national will, democracy itself has been attacked. When a series of such events changes the direction of the nation and occurs under suspicious circumstances, institutions seem comprised or corrupted and democratic process itself undermined.’ It was Robert Kennedy’s special gift that he understood the new realities of power in this country and could make people believe that if they roused themselves to the effort they could, as he like to put it, “reclaim America.” Perhaps that helps explain why the pain of his loss remains so great after so long a time.
We have made a good start toward preventing the repetition of some past abuses of power, especially government abuses, because we have learned about those abuses and have set out to guard against them. But there are other abuses we cannot yet guard against because we do not yet know enough about them to know how to guard against them. It seemed elementary, for example, that if groups do exist that can eliminate national figures and get away with it, they are unlikely to spring into existence only on occasions of state murders: how are they occupied between-times?
