by Lisa Pease
“You’re a lousy talker,” Jordan repeated as the room erupted in laughter at the irony. The chatty suspect had expounded at length on a number of subjects, just not the one the police most wanted to discuss.
The suspect, Jordan, and Murphy discussed the philosophy of prosecution, how far you can go with the evidence, how you try to avoid prosecuting innocent people. Jordan asked the suspect if he would work hard to convict a person he really believed to be innocent. The suspect’s answer was strange:
“I don’t really know. You’re asking me this question as if you’re putting me—you’re giving me the responsibility of something so fantastic that it’s beyond my mental and physical ability to—to—to cope with, really.”
Jordan responded, “I don’t think it’s beyond your mental ability. I think you’ve got a lot of mental ability. I think you have been putting us on a little bit here.”
The suspect turned to Murphy. “What’s he talk about, Mr.—”
“See, right now, … you’re doing it. You’re very sharp.”
“Well, if you mean that as a compliment or a—”
“I mean that as a compliment.”
The suspect complained about his knee hurting. It had been injured during the struggle. Murphy suggested the suspect put his foot up on the table, where his own apparently were. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry, your relaxation is my desire,” the suspect said, causing some laughter.
As the conversation regarding the need to find out if people were innocent or guilty before prosecuting, as a matter of conscience, was winding down, Murphy offered, “I can assure you, you’re going to get a fair shake. … Your treatment has been all right up ’til now?”
The suspect joked, “I was lavished with your company. … I would say most merrily entertained, in this whole building, maybe.”
Murphy replied, “Well, you’re the star of the show.”
“Better take acting, no?” the suspect joked back.
Jordan chimed in. “Well, what is it—who was it? Shakespeare said the whole world is a stage.”
“That’s right,” the suspect said, “And everybody—”
“—everybody’s an actor,” Jordan paraphrased, before excusing himself to check on something.
The suspect described to Murphy how people can’t really play a part, how eventually they will be found out, an odd thing to say for one who was at that very moment playing a part, trying to avoid being found out. He then talked about whether juries could be fair or not, without discussing how or why he would soon be facing one.
When Jordan returned, the suspect asked why Jordan had been gone for so long. Murphy replied that it was a mystery and that in investigations, sometimes things got tedious. The interesting part, continued Murphy, was finding out “exactly who John Doe is. That’s what we’re really interested in.”
“Really, you know, that’s beautiful. Beautiful. Maybe we should keep it interesting.”
“We have to, I guess. … You’re just sort of matching wits with us.”
“You know, there’s a horse named that,” the suspect said, dropping the first genuine clue to his identity.
“What?” Murphy asked.
“Matching Wits.”
Given the slight size of the suspect, the police could have considered that the young man in front of them had been a jockey or, in this case, an exercise boy.
Howard, who was not the least bit lazy that night, inherently or otherwise, ducked into a room at Parker Center where Sergeants Patchett and Melendres were asking more questions of Serrano regarding the girl in the polka dot dress. Was the dress tight-fitting? No. What kind of gold was the girl’s male companion’s sweater? “Autumn gold,” Serrano replied. Her description of the third man closely resembled the suspect in custody.
After listening to what Serrano had to say, Howard stepped into another room, where Sergeants Patchett and Melendres were interviewing the 19-year-old Vincent DiPierro.
DiPierro said there were two people between him and Kennedy, and Patchett asked if, just before the shooting started, there were still two people between him.
“No, at this time … there was no one in front of me.”
“You were on Mr. Kennedy’s left side or right?”
“Right side, near the ice machines.”
Patchett then asked a question that indicated he knew Kennedy had been shot from behind. “And who was to your left?” If DiPierro had been facing east, he would have likely been right next to the actual shooter.
“Oh, a crowd of people,” Vince said, indicating the people crowded into the area behind a white divider with plastic flowers on it behind the west end of the ice machine. Vince had been facing north, not east, so the shooter would have been more ahead of him than to his left.
DiPierro noted that the suspect caught his attention when he crossed toward Kennedy. He figured he was going to shake Kennedy’s hand, but instead the man “kind of swung around and he went up on his—like on his tiptoes—and he stuck over with the gun and he shot, you know, and the first shot I don’t know where it went, but I know it was either his second or third one that hit Mr. Kennedy and after that I had blood all over my face from where it hit his head.”
Vince described seeing the suspect before the shooting, a young man (23 to 28 years old), “an ordinary Latin,” approximately 5'4", slender, with dark, wavy hair. “I didn’t really take notice of his hair. All I could see was the gun, you know, and he had a stupid smile on his face.”
Could he recognize him again if he saw him?
“Yes, definitely.”
Was there any question in his mind?
“No, none at all, because I’ll never forget the way he looked at me,” DiPierro said. “When I saw him first, there was a girl behind him, too. I don’t know if you need that. There were two people that I saw.”
Patchett stopped DiPierro. He wasn’t interested in hearing about the girl yet. He wanted to hear about the male that DiPierro had seen shoot Kennedy. DiPierro described the suspect in custody. The clothing he described was not an exact match, although it was close. DiPierro said the man had a powder-blue sport coat on that buttoned. The suspect in custody had worn a light blue velour top that zipped at the neck.
Vince described a small gun—not more than an inch longer than a ballpoint pen, that was “not black, but blue … it’s a real dark blue.” When DiPierro first saw the man, he thought he was sick in some way. He was bent over. “He looked as though he were crouched.” He was standing on a tray rack, about four inches off the ground. “The only reason he was noticeable was because there was this good-looking girl in the crowd there.”
“[W]as the girl with him?”
“It looked as though, yes.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, she was following him.”
“Where did she follow him from?”
“From—she was standing behind the tray stand because she was up next to him on—behind, and she was holding on to the other end of the tray table and … it looked as if she was almost holding him.”
DiPierro said the guy got off the tray stand and approached the Senator, but the girl stayed with the tray stand. “I glanced over once in a while. She was good-looking so I looked at her.”
“What was it in your mind that makes you think they were together …?”
“He turned when he was on the tray stand once and he had the same stupid smile on, you know, and then he kind of turned and said something. I don’t know what he said.”
Howard asked, “You did see him speak to her?”
“He turned as though he did say something, whether he said anything—”
“Did she move her mouth like she was speaking to him?”
“No, she just smiled.”
Howard asked if she was smiling from what the man had said to her or whether she was smiling because she saw the Senator approach. DiPierro said yes to the former and no to the latter, adding, “she looked as though she was si
ck, also.” Howard didn’t ask if she, too, was bent over, holding something, the explanation DiPierro had just given when he said the other man looked “sick.”
DiPierro’s description of the girl was very close to the description Sandra Serrano had just given: a Caucasian girl in her twenties, with brunette hair that fell just above her shoulders, a “good figure,” a “nice dress” that was white with “either black or dark violet polka dots.” and “a kind of a bively [sic] like collar.”
“A what kind of collar?”
“A thing that goes around like that. I don’t know what they call it,” DiPierro said, describing a bib-like collar.113
DiPierro noted that her hair was “puffed up a little.” She seemed to be the only person with the suspect at that moment. He hadn’t noticed what she did during the shooting because he “forgot about her and everything else but the gun.”
DiPierro described seeing the flash of the first two shots and how “after the second one, I couldn’t see, because I had blood all over my face.…I got smashed up when the guy fell on me, when he fell down right on top of my hands.”
Vince was certain the man he had seen on the tray stand was the same one caught in the act of shooting at Kennedy.
Patchett ended the interview, but after a “discussion off the record,” Patchett asked a few more questions. “Okay, just to sum this up. What’s the first thought that comes in your mind as far as the appearance of this man that had the gun?”
“The stupid smile … It was kind of like an envious smile, like ah, you know, villainous—I don’t know how to describe it.”
Vince wasn’t the only one to notice a smile on the suspect’s face during the shooting. At Rampart, Yoshio Niwa told Sergeants McGann and Calkins the suspect was smiling. “I was so excited and upset, and he was smiling.”
“That’s hard to understand, isn’t it?” Calkins asked Niwa.
“I don’t know why,” Niwa responded, clearly disturbed by the incongruity.
“Can you think of anything else … that might help?”
“That’s all I could think I think [sic]. I didn’t see the other two, the one woman and a guy I didn’t see at all.”
“How do you know there was another woman?”
Niwa explained he had heard second-hand that there had been a woman and another man with the shooter. He thought he had heard it on the news.
McGann and Calkins spoke next to 17-year-old “room service bus boy” Juan Romero. Romero was the last to shake Kennedy’s hand. Kennedy then took two steps away, and “all of a sudden I just seen somebody jumping up, no jumping, you mean, you know, just going over, reaching over … I felt something like burning, like, you know, like when you throw out firecrackers and some—”
“Powder burns?” Calkins interrupted.
“Powder burns, something like that. I see it burn there, I saw it all.”
McGann and Calkins showed him the gun Rafer had given them. “Yes, it looked something like that.”
“Did you miss me?” Jordan asked as he returned, joking that the suspect likely didn’t, which appeared to offend the suspect, as the suspect clearly liked Jordan.
Jordan asked if the suspect’s name might be Jesse. There was radio chatter that a suspect named “Jesse Greer” had been picked up and was on the way to Rampart just before Jordan’s anonymous subject was captured.114 The suspect was happy to adopt the name Jesse in place of John. Neither matched his real name, but his captors didn’t know this yet.
The suspect asked for more coffee, adding, “Please … if it’s no inconvenience at all.”
“What could be inconvenient at 4:30 in the morning?” Jordan responded dryly.
“Is it 4:30 or 5:00, quarter to 5:00?” “
Quarter to 5:00,” Murphy responded.
“Are you sure it’s a quarter to 5:00? I had that feeling,” the suspect said.
“You mean you can tell what time it is?” Murphy asked, surprised. There were no clocks in the room and the man wore no watch.
Jordan and Murphy separately asked what kind of work the suspect did. “Oh, whatever you want me to do,” the suspect answered. “Really, everything fascinated me in life, you know. … [By] trying to specialize in one thing … you’re just jeopardizing your knowledge and appreciation of whatever else there is … When … I watch a barber, sir, I just stand and watch that barber for hours. I—from the time I’m watching him I want to be nothing but a barber. You know, if I’m watching a dentist, boy, he fascinates me, and I want to be him. I was talking to Frank [Foster, an LAPD officer] here a while ago. The way he talked, you know … I was very fascinated, and, you know, I was sort of superimposing myself in his position for temporarily.”
The suspect was describing a strangely permeable mental state, one in which an external reality merged with his own, but the officers didn’t pick up on this. Their sole focus remained on identifying the suspect.
Jordan was called away and learned that a key found in the pockets of the suspect opened a car parked nearby that belonged to Robert Gindroz, a chef at the Ambassador Hotel.115 He returned, certain he finally had the man’s correct identification.
“You have been through Jesse; you have been through John [Doe]. What about Robert Gene Gendroz or Jendroz?”
“Hell, that’s a good name. Jendroz.”
“It’s a nice name. And your car?”
“Cadillac?”
“No.”
“Rolls-Royce?”
“You’re in the general area,” said Jordan wryly. “How about a Chrysler?”
“Beautiful.”
The suspect owned a 1956 De Soto, but Jordan had no way of knowing this yet, and he thought he had him, this time. He asked the suspect if he recognized Gindroz’s address, noting that it was just off Mulholland.
“Where’s Mulholland?” the suspect asked. Mulholland Drive is a famous ridge-top road that separates Beverly Hills from the San Fernando Valley. Most people who live in the central part of Los Angeles would have used or crossed that road at some point, so Jordan found this answer not credible.
“Come on now, you’ve been real good up to now, but I think you’re—I’m going to charge you with overacting a little bit.” But the suspect lived in Pasadena, as Jordan would eventually learn, which is nowhere near Mulholland Drive. The suspect did recognize the person with that name, though.
“Mulholland, there was a hell of a civic leader in his day, wasn’t it? … Wasn’t he the founder of the water project? … I read it one time in Griffith Park….”
“This guy misses nothing, you know,” Jordan said to Murphy. “I tell you he’d be a hell of a partner to have.” Jordan was only partly buttering him up. In the trial that would follow, Jordan described him as “extremely intelligent.”
Murphy was more interested in finding out if the suspect was Gindroz. “Do you drive a ’58 Chrysler?”
“Do I drive one? I can drive any car you want to put me in.” Imagine the cops’ frustration at a suspect who parried every question in this manner. It is to the credit of all the LAPD officers who interacted with the suspect in these first few hours that none of them lost their temper.
Jordan tried a different approach to the question. “Have you driven one, let’s say, in the last 12 hours?”
“A—that make of car? I don’t really know. I don’t remember. I don’t know.”
“You are being truthful with me now?” Jordan asked.
“I swear to God—I swear to God on that.”
Jordan explained to Murphy. “[He’s] been very truthful. … If … he doesn’t like the question, he won’t answer me, but he’s truthful when he does answer, I’ll say that.”
A few minutes later, Jordan asked the same exact question again. “You’re repeating the question, sir. Please don’t,” the suspect said. Repeating a question is a standard interrogation tactic because it literally bores the subject into answering “fully and candidly.”116 Had the suspect been taught to resist interrogation?
Jordan didn’t want to let the possible Gindroz identification drop. “Robert Gene Gendroz [sic]… do those three names together ring a bell with you as anybody you know or have met?”
The suspect answered in a strange way: “I honestly don’t know. I don’t think so. I might meet in the future. [sic] I might never, you know, or I might have met him, you know, but forgot that I met him.”
I might have met him but forgot that I met him. The suspect had just succinctly described how one might behave under the influence of hypnosis.
“I doubt if you have forgotten too many meetings in your life,” Jordan said.
“Now why do you say that?”
“Well, just because you don’t strike me as the kind of person that forgets.”
“Well, I don’t forget. I don’t forget,” said the man who just a short time earlier couldn’t remember if he had been before a magistrate or not, or what kind of car he had driven in the last 12 hours.
After Murphy and Jordan left the suspect, Frank Foster returned and conversed with him some more. “Are you married, were you married?”
“I don’t think so,” the suspect said.
“Oh, you’re not divorced, huh?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you mean you don’t know?”
Incredibly, the suspect truly didn’t seem to know at that moment whether he was married or not. It was as if he wasn’t so much keeping his identity hidden as he was trying to hide the fact that he truly didn’t remember, at that moment, who he was.