by Lisa Pease
One of Fahey’s employers referred to the fact that Fahey’s “honesty was unquestioned.” The man does not seem capable of having invented the story he told.
9 Transcript of interview of John Henry Fahey by journalist Fernando Faura, 6/12/68.
10 At this point, the LAPD and FBI versions of what Fahey and the girl did for the next seven hours diverge. They converge again at about 7:15 P.M. that night. Fahey’s day-long encounter with this girl will be detailed in depth in a later chapter.
11 Theodore White, The Making of the President 1968 (New York: Atheneum Publisher, 1969), p. 210.
12 SUS records list him as both Crosson and Crossen. The correct name is Crosson. Army rank and information comes from his 1969 obituary listed at www.locategrave.org/l/416580/William-Frederic-Crosson-CA, accessed 1/9/13. Comments from Farrar and Reinke come from SUS interviews of Farrar and Reinke. The SUS cardfile for Crosson has mistaken information in it, as is shown by cross-referencing with the other records. “Farrar got the impression …” from LAPD interview of Reinke and Farrar on June 8. Both of them correctly identified Crosson from his photo.
13 Farrar’s impression was noted in SUS I-85, which was Reinke’s interview summary. The person who wrote the report noted: “Photos of Wm. Crossen [sic] were taken to witnesses (Reinke, Donald and Farrar, Gail) and both identified Crossen as the man who had left the floor plan. … Miss Farrar states (Crossen [sic]) gave her the impression that he knew something was going to happen.”
14 “He is going to die” statement from Officer T.B. Roberts in his property report, where he quoted Reinke’s recollection of what Crosson had said.
15 Goodwin, p. 535.
16 Newfield, p. 31.
17 Newfield, p. 286.
18 Goodwin, p. 536.
19 Philip H. Melanson, Ph.D., The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1991), p. 85.
20 Robert Blair Kaiser, “R.F.K. Must Die!” : A History of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination and Its Aftermath (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970), p. 15.
21 Schlesinger, p. 913.
22 Pete Hamill, “June 5, 1968: The Last Hours of RFK,” New York Magazine, May 18, 2008, nymag.com/news/politics/47041/, accessed November 29, 2015.
23 Ibid.
24 Newfield, p. 291.
25 Quotes are excerpted from Mudd’s CBS footage of the interview, June 4, 1968.
26 Goodwin, p. 538.
27 FBI interview of Michael Wayne, 7/8/68.
28 LAPD interview of Conrad Seim, 7/1/68.
29 LAPD taped interview of Eve Hansen, 6/17/68.
30 Schlesinger, p. 791.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Schlesinger, p. 914.
34 Pete Hamill, “June 5, 1968: The Last Hours of RFK,” New York Magazine, May 18, 2008, nymag.com/news/politics/47041/, accessed November 29, 2015.
35 This moment is captured in news footage and in a photo available at the California State Archives. See also Houghton, p. 153.
36 FBI transcript of Serrano’s televised interview with Sander Vanocur on 6/5/68.
37 LAPD interviews of Sandy Serrano on 6/5/68 at 2:35 A.M. and 4:00 A.M.
38 FBI 2/25/68 Airtel from SAC, New York to Director, concerning the 6/19/68 FBI interviews of Felicia Messuri and Mary Whalen.
39 While campaigning in Oregon a little over a week earlier, McCarthy had launched into a challenge regarding Freckles, Kennedy’s beloved spaniel. “I have a dog. I think he’s a better dog than his. My dog’s name is Eric. I think that’s a better name for a dog. There was another cocker spaniel that got involved in politics,” McCarthy said, alluding to Checkers, the dog Nixon referenced in his famous 1952 speech. “Cocker spaniels have a hard time getting to the White House.” New York Times, 5/26/68. Kennedy felt the need to respond in his victory speech. “Franklin Roosevelt said, ‘I don’t care what they say about me, but when they start to attack my dog ….’”
40 Vincent DiPierro told me of his interest in politics and how he had once interviewed President Kennedy for his school paper.
41 Kaiser, p. 25.
42 All witness comments in this chapter are taken from interviews they gave the LAPD and/or the FBI, unless otherwise noted.
43 Jerry Oppenheimer, The Other Mrs. Kennedy, (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 439.
44 In later years, Juan told reporters he had the rosary in his pocket, but in his FBI statement, which he signed, he said “A white man, age unknown, handed me a rosary and said, ‘Keep this, Mr. Kennedy.’” FBI statement of Juan Romero, 6/7/68.
45 Juan Romero’s numerous statements and Vince DiPierro’s FBI statement of 6/7/68.
46 David Talbot, Brothers, p. 374. When Lubic later expressed concern to the LAPD that the guard had his gun pointed at the floor and not at the shooter, Lubic was cut off, told it was none of his business, and told not to talk to anyone else about this.
47 FBI 2/25/68 Airtel from SAC, New York to Director, concerning the 6/19/68 FBI interviews of Felicia Messuri and Mary Whalen.
48 LAPD transcript of West’s broadcast.
49 Excerpted from the LAPD’s transcript of the call, which the author checked against an audio recording of the call. In his book The Killing of Robert Kennedy, Dan Moldea mistakenly records the officer’s name as “G.W. Hathaway,” but the LAPD’s cardfile shows him as Wayne G. Hathaway. Moldea also attributes the whole call out to Ruby Ford, but the LAPD’s Final Report attributes the first half of the call to switchboard operator Lillian Mary Butler.
50 LAPD Interview of Don Weston, 9/12/68.
51 Communications between Sharaga, other officers and LAPD HQ are taken from the LAPD radio transcripts.
52 LAPD interviews of Richard Rittner on June 6, 1968 and August 21, 1968.
53 SUS Final Report. The initial report from these witnesses appears to be missing from the record, and a later account from these witnesses appears to have been, if not altered, at least edited.
54 Dan Moldea, The Killing of Robert Kennedy (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, 2006 edition), p. 47.
55 Moldea, pp. 47–48.
56 SUS Final Report, 194. If the quotation is accurate, and not everything in the Final Report is, the punctuation is odd. If another question mark is added, i.e., “You think I’m crazy? So you can use it against me?” the double question implies that the person knew he was guilty and chose to remain silent. If no question marks had been used, the statement indicates that the suspect feared people would think he was crazy and therefore blame the crime on him. Punctuation matters, and without a recording, it’s impossible to state with surety whether the ending question mark belonged there. With only the ending question mark, the meaning is unclear.
57 SUS Final Report, p. 27.
58 Kaiser, p. 52.
NIGHTMARE
“I was concentrating on him because I saw the gun going like that, so I didn’t really look around at that point. If I hadn’t seen the gun, I probably would have looked a little more.”
THE PROSPECT OF A SECOND KENNEDY ASSASSINATION WAS A nightmare. People were spread out all over the grounds of the hotel screaming and crying. Crowds of people gathered at the fountain the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, sobbing and praying. Some dipped their hands in the water from the fountain and crossed themselves in the Catholic tradition.
Inside the Rampart Station, Sergeant William Jordan, the Night Watch Detective Commander, was dealing with a different kind of nightmare. He had been utterly unable to identify the suspect in custody. The dark, young, curly-haired “Suspect No. 1” had no identifying information on him—no business card, no wallet. And the suspect wasn’t helping.
“What is your name, sir?” Sergeant William Jordan, the Night Watch Detective Commander, asked the suspect. The suspect did not answer.
Unable to determine if the suspect had been read his rights, Jordan gave the suspect the official admonition required in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Miranda v. Arizona in 1966.
&n
bsp; “I have to advise you that you have the right to remain silent; that if you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law; you have a right to an attorney and have an attorney present during any questioning; and if you desire this and cannot afford one, one will be appointed for you without charge before any questioning. Do you understand your rights?”
“Is this of the—what the officers told me in the car?” the suspect queried.
“I have no idea, sir, at this point, what you were told.”
Jordan started to repeat the Miranda admonition but was interrupted by another officer on an administrative matter. The suspect asked Jordan to start afresh a third time. Jordan obliged. The suspect also asked Jordan for his name, even though Jordan had already given it. It was as if Jordan’s words were simply not being recorded in the suspect’s brain.59 The suspect finally said he wished to remain silent. Jordan said he’d count the money from the man’s pockets but the suspect did not wish to speak even to confirm the count.
At the Ambassador Hotel, Lieutenant Robert Sillings, the watch commander, arrived at Sergeant Sharaga’s command post and assessed the situation. Many of the evening’s guests wanted to leave, but the police wanted to talk to everyone, so Sharaga ordered arriving officers to create a perimeter around the hotel. Arrangements were made to bus witnesses to the Rampart Station for interviews.
Two members of the LAPD’s Intelligence Division tried to segregate witnesses who had seen or heard something in the pantry from the rest of the witnesses. They took Juan Romero, Vince DiPierro, and other pantry witnesses to the Gold Room, a small room adjacent to the large Embassy Room.
Confusion reigned. According to a contemporaneous LAPD log, at 12:50 A.M., Lieutenant Sillings said on TV that the suspect, a 6’4” male Caucasian, was in custody.60 The suspect Jordan was interviewing, however, was a foot shorter. Another log item stated the suspect had been shot in the leg. The suspect taken from the pantry had not been pierced by any bullet, although his ankle had been twisted in the struggle.
According to someone from Administrative Services at the Rampart Station,61 there were “several suspects in custody.” For the next 20 minutes, repeated references to the “other suspects” in custody were broadcast over police radio.62
LAPD Captain Hugh Brown and Detective Inspector John Powers arrived at the Rampart Station at 1 A.M. to find the suspect still unidentified. This troubled them:
Thoughts of accomplices were much on the minds of both Brown and Powers. Had the man they were holding really been alone? Could it possibly be a foreign conspiracy? Could it be the first in a series of assassinations planned in the midst of national election campaigns in order to paralyze the entire nation? Or was this perhaps the second? Just two months had gone by since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered. As yet, there was no suspect in that killing. Could it possibly be the third? Dallas, Memphis, Los Angeles?63
Jordan was arranging to transfer the suspect from Rampart to the newly opened Parker Center downtown when he was handed a note with Sharaga’s description of a 6’2” blond suspect. Jordan wondered if the suspect he had been questioning was, in fact, the actual—or only—shooter.64
At Rampart, LAPD detectives Michael McGann and Robert Calkins, who had only just arrived themselves, interviewed Rafer Johnson:
I thought it was a balloon, the first shot, because I didn’t see anything. I looked and then the second shot, I saw smoke and I saw like something from a—like a—the residue from a bullet or cap, looked like a cap gun throwing off the residue. And when I saw that I … fought my way through …. By the time I got there … the fellow had—I don’t know how many shots. I couldn’t count them, to tell you the truth, but I know it was like four or five.65
Sergeant Calkins asked Rafer where the guy was shooting from. “The guy was standing right in front of him,” Rafer answered. This information caused a stir in the room,66 presumably because the police knew by this time that Kennedy had been shot from behind.
McGann asked for the gun. Calkins inspected it. “Fired every one of them,” he said. “No wonder everybody’s laying on the ground.” McGann and Calkins focused on the type of gun:
McGann: We have an Iver—
Calkins: Iver-Johnson—
McGann: Iver-Johnson Cadet, model 55-A
Calkins: More of these goddamn guns kill more people—
McGann: Model number 50—number 56-SA. The serial number is H53725—
Calkins: Eight shots expended.67
Calkins asked Rafer, “Everybody’s interested—real, real big. Now, is this conspiracy? Is there more than one guy, and what do we have to prove it? That’s the big deal now, so—”
“In other words, is there anything to make you believe there was another person there?” McGann interrupted.
“No,” Rafer said, but he immediately qualified his answer:
I wouldn’t—not me. See, maybe—Rosey’s a little taller than I am and was a little closer to the Senator. … I heard the second shot and I saw people start to move and I just pushed my way through … I was looking at the guy at this point and I didn’t notice what was around. I was just trying to get to him. … I really … couldn’t tell you anything about the people around at that point. I just wasn’t looking.68
McGann took him through the whole event again, right up until he saw the second shot. “And then you immediately saw this cloud of smoke coming from where this suspect, who you ultimately took the gun away from, was standing?”
Rafer repeated that he had seen smoke as well as something else. He reported seeing “these particles flying in the air like, you know, expended—”
Calkins cut him off before Rafer could finish with the likely word “caps.” From Rafer’s description, it sounded as if the suspect was firing blanks, not bullets. When a blank is fired, a wad of paper—the “cap” that seals in the gunpowder—burns quickly, creating a little shower of paper ash residue from the expended cap. “It was your opinion at that time that somebody was firing a gun, is that right?” Calkins asked in an apparent effort to eliminate that possibility.
“Yeah, I thought it was a gun at that point,” Rafer responded. “I still wasn’t sure, but I just wanted to get up there, you know, and see what was going on.”
“Anything else at all that you can think of that happened regarding the suspect or possible other suspect, or—anything that was said that led you to believe that there would be another suspect possibly involved?
“No, nothing,” Rafer responded, but again, he qualified his statement: “I was concentrating on him because I saw the gun going like that, so I didn’t really look around at that point. If I hadn’t seen the gun, I probably would have looked a little more.”69
At the Ambassador Hotel, KTLA reporters Larry Scheer and Stan Chambers described the scene. Scheer told the camera, “I understand—and it is purely hearsay—that there were…four men back there that were apparently waiting for the group to come out. Whether they were caught or escaped, I do not know.”
Chambers reported: “Out here on the floor of the ballroom, we did not hear the shots, but we were told that there apparently were four men back there. One man who was standing near me a few minutes ago indicated that he saw four flashes—he thought there were flashbulbs. They may have been shots from a gun.”70
On NBC, Joseph LaHive described what he heard: “I was directly behind the Senator, about three or four people behind him, when I heard the firecracker barrage of shots come off. We knew that it wasn’t balloons cracking or anything—it was drastic—so we plowed through.” He joined in the struggle with the suspect. “We wanted just to make sure that the suspect was not hurt any more than being held so he would be available for questioning rather than the incident that happened before,” LaHive said, referring to the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had been murdered while in police custody.
LaHive thought the shooter might have been Filipino and 30 years old. “I didn’t even see th
e other suspect,” he said, referring to reports of others. “I only saw the one suspect.”
“It was almost like rapid fire. The guy must have just squeezed them off as fast as he could. … [I]f there were two people, that would account for the seemingly [sic] sequence of shots.”71
At 1:30 A.M., Cartha DeLoach, Assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, responded to a request from Ted Sorenson and Pierre Salinger to provide protection to the Kennedy family at their home. DeLoach also advised Los Angeles FBI Supervisor William Nolan that under no circumstances should the FBI “give the impression that we are investigating this matter,”72 an odd statement for a high-level crime in which the suspect hadn’t even been identified. That position would change in a few hours. Attorney General Ramsey Clark asked the FBI to investigate the crime under the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. An FBI codename of KENSALT (“Kennedy Assault”) was designated for their investigation.
At Good Samaritan, X-rays were taken of Kennedy’s head, neck, chest and right shoulder, all of which had been penetrated by bullets. One bullet had passed harmlessly through his clothing at close range at a steep upward angle. Another had passed through his chest from back to front at a similarly steep upward angle and exited his body.73 A third bullet had entered his right armpit and lodged in the base of his neck. But the fourth bullet was the one that was worrying the doctors: it had shattered in his brain.
Kennedy’s prognosis was “extremely poor,”74 and the doctors knew they were dealing with an “absolute disaster.”75 Nonetheless, they began to prep Kennedy for surgery.
Outside the hospital, people gathered, holding signs, praying that Kennedy would recover.
Two miles away, Sergeant Robert E. Lindblom76 of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office led a squad of deputies, which included Lieutenant Beto Kienast, Sergeant John Barber, Deputy Walter Tew, and Deputy Tom Beringer, into the Embassy Ballroom. There, they met LAPD Sergeants Jones and Rolon. Together, these LAPD and LASO officers “formed a ‘wedge’ and … cleared the crime scene. Newsmen and their equipment were moved only by the sheer number of officers and deputies.”77