by Lisa Pease
Despite the intense psychological pressure, Serrano continued to fight back. “I don’t feel I’m doing anything wrong.”
“Well maybe you don’t feel it, but when you get older you will. And you see here, you see here, Sandy, not to get sentimental, but I personally loved Kennedy as a man. … I knew the man. I had lunch with him. He gave me a commendation that I relish very much. It’s one of my most favorite mementos now, one of my more prized mementos.”
“Uh huh.”
“So don’t have these fellows that are investigating this thing looking for somebody that you know you didn’t see. We have enough of a problem nationally to determine what actually happened, and we can’t be putting that power chasing this thing that you say you saw. Probably somebody else saw something, I don’t know, but what you’re talking about, what you say you saw is not true. And I can guarantee you this, Sandy, and believe me, and I’m talking to you with complete honesty, that after you leave this room, if you want to tell me why it is that you made up this story, I can assure you that nobody else will talk to you about anything.”
For over an hour, Serrano gamely hung on. “I know what I saw.”
“You might want to be pushing it off with a smirk on your face, with a smile,
but you know that deep inside—”
“I remember seeing the girl!”
“No. No, I’m talking about what you have told here about a person tell you ‘We have shot Kennedy.’ And that’s wrong.”
“That’s what she said!”
“No it isn’t, Sandy.”
Can you imagine what it would be like to hear a policeman tell you, at 20 years old, with alcohol in your system, at a late hour, strapped into a lie detector, with the only person you trust locked outside, without a lawyer or anyone else present, that you didn’t hear and see what you actually saw and heard? Would you have had the guts, the moral courage to hold on?
“Lookit, lookit, I love this man!” Hernandez said, his temper showing.
“Don’t shout at me,” Serrano bravely asserted.
“Well, I’m trying not to shout. But this is a very emotional thing with me too, you see.”
Hernandez was struggling but Serrano still had the upper hand. He tried again to play on her emotions: “If you love the man, the least you owe him is the courtesy of letting him rest in peace, and he can’t rest. I don’t think I could rest knowing … do you think maybe he could watch us right now?”
“No.”
Hernandez tried to offer her a way out. “I think probably somebody misquoted you from the beginning, is what I, I don’t know. Somebody misquoted you, one thing led to another, before you knew it, maybe it wasn’t even your fault that somebody put, started putting this thing on the television and everything. But if that is the case, well tell me about it. It’s very easy to redeem, but it isn’t easy to redeem something that’s like a deep wound that will grow with you like a disease, a cancer.”
“Uh huh.”
“So did somebody misquote you…?”
“Yes and no. There was this girl coming, and she was coming down the stairs and she had said, ‘We shot him, we shot him.’”
“Sandy, don’t. It’s like a disease, I know what I am telling you. … I am saying that nobody told you, ‘We have shot Kennedy.’”
“Yes, somebody told me that ‘We have shot Kennedy.’”
“No,” Hernandez bizarrely insisted. He wasn’t there. How could he know? Anyone interested in an honest investigation would have stopped arguing with Serrano and started looking in earnest for the girl she had clearly seen and heard. Anyone even half honest would at least have suggested simply that she had misheard and left it at that. But Hernandez had something far more sinister planned.
“I’m sorry, but that’s true. That is true.”
“Let this thing that is gonna grow with you and is gonna make an old woman out of you before your time come out of you before it is…Look, I’ll tell you something, I personally have talked to many people, and I respect, it takes a hell of a lot of person, a lot of guts, for an individual to say, ‘Okay, I’m sorry that I did this.’”
The wine, the dinner, the hour, the restraints, and the big man in front of her who made it clear that the session would not end until she changed her story started wearing on Ms. Serrano. She sighed audibly, looking for a way out.
“It’s, it’s…it’s a whole mess of things…”
Hernandez encouraged her to go on.
“It’s too messed up, even I can’t remember what happened anymore.” She was willing to concede to being confused, but Hernandez wanted more.
“You know nobody told you, ‘We have shot Kennedy.’”
“No,” Serrano contradicted emphatically. “Somebody told me, ‘We have shot Kennedy’. … I’m not going to say, ‘No, nobody told me,’ just to satisfy anybody else.”
“No, just the truth to satisfy yourself. No one else,” Hernandez said, immediately contradicting himself with “To satisfy the family, the remaining family.” He played the emotional card over and over. “The Kennedys have had nothing but tragedy here since first President Kennedy and now Senator Bobby Kennedy…now, what next? They have enough, at least it’s a consolation to them and I’m certain, and you mark my words, that one of these days, if you’re woman enough, you will get a letter from Ethel Kennedy,” Hernandez lied again, promising things that would never happen. “Personal. Thanking you for at least letting her rest on this aspect of the investigation. There’s somebody told me that, honest. No, really.” Hernandez tried pathetically to bribe her with something he could never promise. “No, no, look, Sandy. And I’m not going to put words in your mouth,” Hernandez lied again, trying desperately to do just that. “But I want you to tell me the truth about the staircase. Nobody on that staircase, what you’re telling me here, told you that there was a woman that told you that ‘We have shot Kennedy.’”
Serrano sighed but refused to give in.
“A woman told me, ‘We have shot Kennedy.’”
Hernandez had just run what could best be described as an interrogation session and the woman had not budged. Serrano 1, Hernandez 0. So Hernandez essentially started the session over, from the top, as if working from a script. She was an “intelligent woman,” he told her again. Her whole life lay ahead of her. He had interviewed 19 girls and two had finally been brave enough to say they had made it up. If she really loved the Kennedys, she would stop telling “this lie.” And a second time, nothing he tried worked.
“It happened,” Serrano persisted.
“No, it didn’t happen,” Hernandez asserted.
“Maybe not all of it, but it happened.”
He tried to suggest she had gotten this statement from someone else. She refused that as a possibility as well. Serrano 2, Hernandez 0.
Hernandez paused for a smoke. He offered her a stick of gum, which she refused. “How about some Sen-Sen” (mint candies). He pushed hard. “Come on, let me give you something.”
“I don’t want any, now don’t bug me. … Leave me alone.”
“The only time that you will be left alone,” Hernandez started belligerently, then interrupted himself, perhaps remembering he was being taped. “You tell me what happened out there and I can assure you that nobody else will—”
“I don’t know what happened,” Serrano said.
Now that she was thoroughly tired, upset, and rattled, Hernandez ran the session a third time.
“When did you first hear that Kennedy had been shot? Let’s start there.”
“I was outside.”
“Who told you?”
“A girl!”
“What did she say?”
“We shot him.”
“No, that’s not the truth, Sandy.”
This is what psychological torture looks like. You don’t have to abuse someone physically to torture them mentally and emotionally. Under the pen name of George Orwell, in 1984, Eric Blair wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say two p
lus two is four.” Serrano was given no such freedom. She knew what she had seen and what it meant. And Hernandez was not going to stop until she gave him a full retraction.
Frustrated and tired himself, Hernandez called Sandra Serrano “Cathy” at this point, by mistake. Serrano thought he was referring to Cathy Fulmer, a 19-year-old girl who had worn an orange scarf with white polka dots on it at the hotel the night Kennedy was killed. Fulmer had been seen by several witnesses emerging from the west end of the pantry after the shooting saying “they shot Kennedy” or “they killed Kennedy.” Fulmer had offered herself up to the police as the possible lady in the polka dot dress the media had mentioned. But a scarf is not a dress, and when Serrano was taken to view Fulmer, Serrano instantly confirmed Fulmer was not the girl she had seen.
“It wasn’t Cathy Fulmer. But it was a Kathy,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez may have been thinking of Kathy Lentine, who had come to the hotel as part of the Students for Kennedy group with six other teenage girls: Karen Pasalich, Liza Miller, Terri Trivelli and Jeanette Prudhomme and Irene Gizzi and 14-year-old Katherine “Katie” Keir. What these girls saw gave enormous credence to Serrano’s account.
Kathy Lentine was separated from Miller and the group when she saw at the Ambassador Hotel “someone who resembled Sirhan Sirhan” with dark curly hair, jeans and a light blue top talking to a man who looked similar, but a little taller with a stockier build, who was wearing a “gold” or “toast” colored top.205 This sounded just like the man Serrano had seen with the girl in the polka dot dress and Sirhan.
Jeanette Prudhomme told the LAPD that while in the Sunset Room she had seen two “grubby-looking” men sitting together, one of whom looked like Sirhan. The second man was wearing a gold shirt. They caught her attention because they did not appear to be properly attired for the event. Later that night, she saw the man in the gold shirt talking to a girl in a “white dress with black polka dots approx. one inch in size” who was about 5’6”, with brown “shoulder-length” hair.206 Again, this backs up what Serrano had seen.
Irene Gizzi had also noticed a trio of two males and a female because they didn’t seem properly attired and “didn’t seem to fit the exuberant crowd” as they stood and talked together in the lobby of the hotel off to the right in an area that was “lesser lit.” One of the males looked like Sirhan and wore blue jeans and a light top. The second male was a “possible Latin” with a medium build, “dark sun-bleached hair,” and a “gold-colored shirt.” The girl, whose dark hair was combed up and hanging down in love locks, wore a white dress with black polka dots.207
Four of the girls had separately described seeing a man who looked like Sirhan in the company of a man in a gold sweater or shirt. Three had mentioned seeing a girl in a white dress with black polka dots in the company of the same two men.
One girl in this group, however, would add the most important detail.
Katherine McKensie “Katie” Keir was interviewed on June 5 by Van Nuys detectives. She told them she had seen Sirhan and “one male Caucasian, approximately 22 years old, 5'11"/6'0" tall, sandy hair, medium olive complexion,” in a short-sleeved “goldish colored” shirt, who looked “grubby,” and a light-skinned female in a white dress with black polka dots, with her dark brown hair “fixed in love locks all around” in the Sunset Room, which was one floor down from the Embassy Ballroom. “They were walking around looking at everyone and were quite obvious to others in the room, due to their dress.” Keir lost track of them for a bit, “then observed them when another room was opened for air.” After losing them a second time, Keir walked outside the Sunset Room and stood on a platform next to “an adjoining stairway,” the very fire escape stairs where Sandy Serrano was sitting, when Keir saw “the girl in the white with black polk-a-dot [sic] dress running down the stairs” yelling “We shot Senator Kennedy.”208
Serrano was never told that other witnesses had corroborated her observations of the trio of men, or that one in particular had witnessed her exchange with the girl in the polka dot dress.
“I thought that’s what she said. I’m sure that’s what she said. I mean, maybe they, she said, ‘They shot him, they shot him.’ I don’t know.” Serrano was starting to crack under the pressure.
“If you don’t tell me the truth, Sandy, they’re gonna want to talk to you again and again.” Hernandez’s point was clear: these sessions would never end until Serrano changed her story.
“I’m ready to tell everybody to go to hell,” the strong young woman defiantly said. But after more questioning, Hernandez finally got her to slip up.
“I was outside and some girl with a white dress on—”
Hernandez jumped on the “white dress” even though Serrano tried to add that “I think it did have polka dots on.”
One last time, Serrano said the girl said “We shot him.” “And that’s the honest-to-God-truth,” Serrano emphasized, adding, “and you can put it on your thingamajig machine and—”
“All right, you say a girl with a white dress told you—please, please don’t make yourself a liar, don’t have this piece of machinery here—”
And then Hernandez claimed that the test had not actually started. Of course it had started. Several times. He just wasn’t getting the responses he needed. Now that he had her thoroughly upset, guaranteeing the machine would indicate extreme stress, which is read as a deceptive response, he asked her more formal questions. When he asked her, “Did a girl in a white dress tell you, ‘We have shot Kennedy?’” she still answered yes, adding later, “I’m sure there was a girl in a white dress.”
It still took many more minutes before Hernandez could coax her into the statement he was looking for. He started telling the story for her.
“First, you tell them that the person said ‘We shot Kennedy,’ and now you say you don’t know whether they said ‘we’ or ‘he.’”
“Uh huh.”
“You say that girl was wearing a white dress with black polka dots. Now you know it was a white dress. That’s number two. Then you said you saw two people coming down. … But there were more than two people coming down.”
Hernandez was telling the story the way he wanted to hear it. Under duress, Serrano starting caving in. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened.”
Hernandez then went in for the kill.
“When this publicity was put out initially didn’t you say, wait a minute, that’s not true? Why? I know the answer, but I want you to tell me.” He was basically saying that Serrano had lied, but he wanted the explanation for the lie in her own words.
Serrano started blaming the police for having “messed” her up, including Ambrose. Hernandez encouraged her, telling her she was being a “woman about this” now. “I’m proud of you,” he said as Serrano finally started backpedaling. She mentioned how “some boy” (Vince DiPierro) had said something about a girl in a polka dot dress.
During her “confession,” however, Serrano revealed something interesting: while she was at the police station “until six o’clock the next morning,” someone tried to break into the house where she lived. “That really convinced me, you know.”
Now that, at 10:15 P.M., Serrano was clearly willing to say anything to get free and go home, Hernandez once again indicated that the actual polygraph session hadn’t started yet. He wanted to bring in a stenographer. Serrano clearly didn’t want to rely on a police stenographer and insisted on a tape recorder, not knowing everything she was saying was already being taped. Hernandez made a show of bringing in a recorder and tried to get her to drink something, offering her a coffee or a Coke.
“I don’t drink Cokes, just milk. … Let me out.”
Then the transcriber records an unintelligible whisper ending with “home.”
But home was still a few lies away. Hernandez wasn’t letting Serrano go until she not only retracted what she said but “explained” why she had changed her story. He homed in on the dress.
“Did you
describe this person as being a female in a white dress?
“Right.”
“And then sometime later, you heard some kid mention something about a white dress and polka dots—is that right?”
“Right.”
“Was this where you got the idea or where somebody misquoted you?”
“I don’t know. I guess. I don’t know.”
“No earlier, you said, somebody had quoted as you as saying that you had seen this same woman, who you saw with the white dress, that then was described as a white dress with black polka dots and which, in fact, was only a white dress that you saw?”
“Uh huh,” Serrano said noncommittally.
“Right. Is that right?” Hernandez had to force the issue.
“Yes.”
“And then somebody misquoted you or stated that you had said that this girl had told you to the effect, ‘We have shot him.’”
“Uh huh. Right.”
Then Hernandez told a whopper of a lie. “And in effect what you have told me previously is that this person told you ‘he shot Kennedy’ or ‘they shot Kennedy’; is that right?”
Serrano was unwilling to flat-out lie, but she tried to play along. “Uhm, something about shooting Kennedy, yeah.”
In the end, Serrano was willing to say only that having heard what other witnesses had said might have confused her or polluted her memory. But she had told an incredibly consistent story to each person she talked to—to Ambrose, to Sander Vanocur, to officers of the LAPD and agents of the FBI.
Hernandez insisted she had gotten the idea that the woman was in a polka dot dress from DiPierro.
He would next force DiPierro, through a similar session, to admit he had gotten the idea that the woman was in a polka dot dress from Serrano.
Any honest person would have to find Hernandez’s treatment of Serrano unprofessional and not an effort to determine the truth about what Serrano had seen. Author Robert Blair Kaiser noted that “Hernandez was too eager. … It was poor police work simply to wish [the girl in the polka dot dress] away, but that is exactly what the LAPD was doing.”209