by Lisa Pease
The suspect the police had been interviewing had been apprehended wearing a light blue velour shirt that zipped at the neck over a light shirt, with light blue denim pants.
Jesus Perez had seen the suspect in the pantry for about a half-hour before Kennedy had walked through there en route to the stage. The suspect had asked several times whether Kennedy would be coming through there, but Perez couldn’t answer because he didn’t know.
Perez said the gun he had seen was quite large. When Calkins and McGann showed him the gun and asked if that was the size he remembered, Perez said, “No, I think it’s bigger than that.” He indicated with his hands how big the gun had looked.
“You thought it was about a foot long, a foot?”
“Yeah.”
Perez described the suspect as a bit taller than himself. Perez was only 5’2”. When the police asked Perez if he’d recognize him if he saw him again, Perez said, “I don’t want to get involved because, you know, I don’t have no [protection] in the street…You get me in the street, they are going to [unintelligible] me.”103 Apparently, Perez feared retribution from some unidentified conspirator.
Elsewhere at Rampart, Sergeant Jack Chiquet and Sergeant Henderson of the homicide division interviewed Sandra Serrano about the girl in the polka dot dress. Serrano described how she had been standing on the fire escape stairs outside the southwest exit from the Embassy Ballroom, when “a girl in a white dress, a Caucasian, dark brown hair, about five-six, medium height” with “black polka dots on [her] dress” walked up the stairs past her. With the girl was “a young man” about 23 years old “who had on a white shirt, a gold sweater, and he was of Mexican-American descent.” A third man “had on rather messed-up clothes” and “a lot of hair. He looked like he needed a haircut or something. And to me he looked like … somebody who, you know, just never looks right.” She described the third man as Mexican-American, between 5’2” and 5’5” tall.
Serrano described how, about 15 to 20 minutes later,104 the girl and the male in the gold sweater came running back out with the girl saying “We shot Kennedy.” Serrano described calling her parents and how she didn’t know if Kennedy had really been shot until she heard people in the hallway outside her phone booth confirm that Kennedy had been shot and was in critical condition. She ended the call with her mother abruptly to find out about Kennedy’s condition.
Henderson asked if she had heard gunfire. “Yes,” she said, adding immediately, “I didn’t know it was a gun. I thought it was the backfire of a car.”
Henderson asked for more details on the girl. Serrano said the girl had a “funny nose,” “turned up like…a pixy [sic] nose.” She appeared to be 23–26 years old, 5’6” inches tall, 122–127 pounds, with short hair and brown eyes. She didn’t seem to be wearing a lot of makeup. Serrano was very specific about the dress: it was a “white voile dress with black polka dots on it and a bib collar.”
Henderson asked for more details on the man in the gold sweater, Serrano remember his hair was “greasy,” “long on top,” and “combed straight. It was very straight….” The sweater was a cardigan, he was wearing dark pants. His height was about five-five or five-six, and she guessed his weight to be around 160 pounds.
After her interview concluded, an All Points Bulletin (APB) was issued to all agencies requesting information on a “female Caucasian 23–27, 5’6”, wearing a white voile dress with small black polka dots, three-quarter sleeves, and wearing heels” and a “male, Mexican-American, 23, wearing a gold sweater.”105 As word of this female suspect spread, the LAPD and FBI began asking all witnesses if they had seen a girl in a polka dot dress.
As Robert Houghton, the LAPD Chief of Detectives, would later note, this information made the suspect’s silence even more disturbing:
The first four hours are the most crucial in any homicide investigation; if the guilty are not apprehended or identified by then, they may never be found. It has proven true in case after case.
[Captain] Brown knew very well that the “polka-dot girl” and her “boy friend” [sic] could be north of Santa Barbara by now, or heading toward the Arizona line, or within the time factor, already across the Mexican border. The All Points Bulletin would reach agencies in every direction, covering California and parts of Arizona and Nevada.”106
Brown’s and Houghton’s professed concerns didn’t manifest, however, in what followed. Within a few hours, the APB regarding the girl in the polka dot dress and the male in the gold sweater had been altered. The reference to a young man in a gold sweater disappeared. The APB for the girl in the polka dot dress, however, would remain in effect for two more weeks.107
At 3 A.M., Howard rushed back to Central Jail. The suspect had asked to talk to him. Howard was hoping the suspect was ready to reveal his identity. The suspect, however, simply wanted to talk more about the Kirshke case. The suspect was interested not in the specifics but in the philosophical issue of how the man had found himself at the end of the same law he had used to convict others. He discussed this question with Howard and Jordan:
“When you are the prosecutor and you want the other man’s life—you’re thirsty—you’re hungering for his blood, and yet you are thrown in his position…how would you want… the man that’s prosecuting you to react?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’d—let me ask you this. How much do you think?”
“I asked the first question,” the suspect replied, seizing control of the conversation. “You answer first.”
Jordan said people expect fairness and justice. The suspect went on to ask another extraordinary question: “Supposing a defendant was in fact innocent of an accusation of—whatever you call it, and Jack Kirschke demanded his life as restitution for his crime or the thing—the wrong he did…Would you consider…that a request for his life would in some way recompense the innocent lives that he had requested?”
Jordan and Howard both recognized that something extraordinary was going on here. The suspect, who had ostensibly just killed the second Kennedy with presidential aspirations in five years, was calmly discussing the philosophy of justice. Something about all of this prompted Howard to switch gears and ask a very different question of the suspect.
“You know where we are now? I’ve told you you’ve been booked.”108
“I don’t know,” the suspect responded, justifying Howard’s question.
“You are in custody. You’ve been booked. You understand what I’ve been—”
The suspect interrupted with something unintelligible, followed by, “I have been before a magistrate, have I or have I not?”
“No, you have not,” Howard responded. “You will be taken before a magistrate as soon as possible. Probably will be tried. … You’re downtown Los Angeles in the Central Jail. … This is the Main Jail for the L.A. Police Department. You’ll be booked into a cell…. Do you understand where you are?”
“As long as you say it,” was the suspect’s strange response.
Howard tried a last time to elicit the man’s name. “If I were going to call you something, what would I call you? George, or Pete, or what?”
The suspect said to call him John Doe, having learned of that generic name from one of his LAPD guardians. The suspect asked about Howard’s daughter and if she would attend Vassar. Howard, however, was only interested in getting on with the case, and left, saying he was going to go back to sleep “because I am inherently lazy.”
“Inherently,” the suspect echoed, teasing, “You shouldn’t be a D.A.’s assistant.”
The suspect asked Howard if he ever played the stock market. “Tell me about it, you seem to be wealthy enough to … want to speculate in it.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Howard responded.
“Really?” the suspect asked. “Gee, I mean in legal cases, how—I mean, doesn’t the stock or the finances come in at all?”
“There are much darker things than that that come in,” Howard said cryptically. “You’d be surprised.�
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Howard prepared to leave, making certain that the suspect had his number, but also making clear he didn’t want to come back for no reason. “As I told you, I’m that lazy….”
“Inherently,” the suspect remembered.
“Inherently,” Howard reiterated.
“Really, how would you, say, judge a man who is inherently lazy and yet so thriving and wanting to be on the job to impress his superiors? … And yet this guy claims and professes to be inherently lazy. He should go out and exercise—you’ve got a lot of it here,” the suspect said, apparently referring to Howard’s rotund gut.
“He knows how to hurt a guy,” Jordan said to Howard.
At Good Samaritan, Dr. Cuneo and others began a surgical attempt to clean Kennedy’s brain of bullet fragments and to restore what mental and physical functions they could. The surgery would last just over three hours.
Outside the hospital, a growing contingent of supporters prayed that the Senator would live.
At Rampart, Sergeants Chiquet and Henderson interviewed Los Angeles Rams tackle Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier, who had been functioning as an unofficial bodyguard for Kennedy.
“When I located him he wasn’t firing.” Grier saw a gun was beside the suspect on the steam table. “I don’t know if it was another weapon, or the same one,” Grier said, raising an interesting issue that neither Chiquet nor Henderson showed any interest in pursuing. Chiquet was preoccupied with another question.
“Did you at any time see a female near him wearing—also of Latin extraction—wearing a polka dot dress?”
“No, I didn’t see her.”109 Like Rafer Johnson, Grier hadn’t been looking around. Grier had been focused on keeping the suspect from killing anyone and keeping anyone from killing the suspect.
Officer Frank Foster tried his hand with the suspect whose life Rosey may well have saved. The suspect had turned to a new topic: the “Boston Strangler,” the nickname given to a man who confessed to strangling several women to death between 1962 and 1964, and the title of Gerold Frank’s 1967 book about the case.
“Well, I’m only topically familiar with that, with the whole story about him, not with the individual himself; so how does it go?” the suspect asked. “Have they found out his name? I mean the guy who done this?” Foster told him the man’s last name was DeSalvo.
It’s odd that the suspect seemed not to know the name of the guy who did it, since “Di Salvo,” ostensibly a phonetic version of DeSalvo, was written in an odd, repeated manner on a page in a notebook belonging to the suspect that the police would soon confiscate.
McGann and Calkins interviewed Martin Patrusky, a hotel waiter who had been in the pantry when Kennedy came through. He shook Kennedy’s hand and saw him shake the hands of his friend and fellow waiter “Vincent” (DiPierro), a girl in a white dress (Robin Casden), a busboy (Juan Romero), and then “all of a sudden, there was just a matter of maybe four or five feet from us, I heard like somebody throwing firecrackers, and all that I seen was this guy standing from—there’s a tray rack on the opposite side of the steam table and all I seen was the guy moved over and he looked—there was like two people in front and the guy looked like he was smiling and he looked like he was going to shake hands with him and he reached over like this and then the firing just started and the next thing I know I looked at Vincent and I seen Kennedy starting to go down on his knees and I looked at Vincent and his glasses all of a sudden come up with blood.”
Patrusky thought the suspect’s pants were “black with blue checks in them.” (DiPierro would describe the pants as light blue with black checks in them. The suspect in custody was wearing blue jeans.) “I think he had a blue jacket but when I seen him later when they were pulling him away, all I saw was the white shirt. He thought the shooter was 28 to 30 years old, “Mexican or Puerto Rican or Cuban” and a little taller than himself. Patrusky was 5'4". The suspect in custody was 5'4½" but only 24 years old.
As the morning ticked by, the witness accounts continued to paint a strange picture. Sergeants Chiquet and Henderson interviewed Freddy Plimpton, wife of George Plimpton, a famous writer and Kennedy supporter who had become the first editor-in-chief of The Paris Review, a European literary magazine that the CIA had funded in the hopes of persuading the continent to support the American establishment’s point of view on foreign affairs.110 Freddy described hearing “what sounded like yesterday in Chinatown,” referring to the firecrackers that scared the Kennedy group in Chinatown in San Francisco two days earlier. She described how she was ahead and to the right of Kennedy, saw him shake a busboy’s hand, and saw someone push in close and fire a gun, who was then pushed down on the steam table nearby. She thought the suspect might have been Filipino and in his early thirties. She thought he had been wearing white, like so many of the kitchen staff, but she was told by others the shooter had not been in white, and she was “just very confused about that right now.”111 She had not actually seen the shooting, “but from his position and his posture,” she “just assumed that he was the guy that fired.”
McGann and Calkins interviewed Michael Lawrence Wayne, the man caught running from the pantry with a rolled-up poster in his hand that some witnesses thought concealed a gun.
Wayne described how Kennedy had signed a poster for him when Kennedy had passed through the pantry to get to the stage to give his speech. He was still in the pantry when Kennedy came back through after his speech.
“And I heard a sound, I guess like backfires. I wasn’t quite aware of it until I heard some more of them and there was a commotion. ‘He’s been shot. He’s been shot.’ And I saw the—I believe he was wearing, I can recognize if I saw it, he was wearing like a blue jacket.” Wayne described how a group descended on the suspect and pushed him onto the steam table. “I was in shock for a minute, and then I ran into the Press Room, which was the Colonial Room. … And I tried to call an operator to call the police, what have you, and all the phones had the lights on, you cannot call out, so I ran outside the Colonial Room this way to go ask what happened, you know—so I can’t talk about it so I don’t, you know—in other words, not out of fear, but I just thought it would be best rather than that to cause panic.”
“Uh hum.”
“So I ran out towards—I believe there’s another room on this side—that was not the main room. And there was a waiter there and I asked him, ‘Where’s the telephone?’ And he pointed it out so then I ran out and there was a security guard and I asked him, ‘Can you get me to the telephone, can you get me to the telephone?’ and he cuffed me, thinking I may have been the suspect, and I was detained by security for about an hour and a half.”
McGann asked if he was with Scott—he couldn’t remember the last name, and thought it might have been Egert. He was referring to Scott Enyart, who had taken pictures in the pantry. Wayne remembered speaking to Scott but didn’t know him. McGann asked Wayne if he had taken any pictures. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t have my camera tonight.”
“No pictures, huh?” McGann queried again.
“No, sir.”
“Hum, he seemed to think you took some pictures down there.”
“No, it was the other guy that did.”
“Who was that?”
“That was another guy downstairs, downstairs right now.”
“That took some pictures, huh?”
“Yes. I believe they have his roll of film out here.”
“Other than this Scott?”
“I don’t know his name, like I said. There was at least one person that took photographs.”
McGann returned to the main subject. “Can you identify this suspect again?” Yes. “What kind of gun would you say it was?” Wayne said “maybe it was a .22.” He knew it was a handgun of some sort.
“A small gun or a large gun? In other words, a long barrel or a short barrel?”
“I think it was a short barrel. I remember about three years—more than that—about five years ago, I went with a friend to the Las Vegas Poli
ce Rifle Range and I did some—I shot a few shots with a .38. I remember the sound was rather loud.”
“Uh huh.”
“And when I was in the Boy Scouts they had a .45 exhibition once and it was fantastically loud.”
“Uh huh.
“Yet these shots were not really loud. I was right on top of it, but they didn’t sound that loud. I would assume, you know, if I was to make assumptions, it was a smaller size gun, which is confirmed, I guess.”
McGann asked if he could describe the suspect. He said he could identify him if he saw him in the same clothes. McGann pressed for details. What nationality did he appear to be?
“Well, they said on the radio, and I would concur, he was a Mexican.”
About what age? Wayne “really couldn’t say,” adding, “Young. I mean I’ve heard things on the radio.”
“About how tall?”
“About my height.”
“How tall is that?
“I’m 5'8". Probably, maybe a little taller.” That was odd. Wayne was at least four inches taller than the suspect in custody. While he described the suspect as having dark and curly hair, he couldn’t remember the color of his eyes.
“How about the shirt or upper clothing?”
“Well, I saw the photograph out here, but I’d have to see a color shot of what he was wearing to be positive. … I think I could be positive if I saw it on him.”112
Around 4 A.M., Jordan returned to the suspect’s cell and performed the role of official taster, taking a sip of coffee in front of him to prove it was safe to drink. Jordan knew enough not to ask the suspect any more about the crime. The suspect simply shut down and refused to say anything when asked about those topics. But Jordan and the rest hoped in casual conversation the subject would divulge something that might enable them to ascertain his identity. Jordan asked if he could discuss the Kirschke case a bit more.
“Surely, surely. … I’ll hear anybody,” the suspect said. “I’m a good listener but a hell of a lousy talker.”