by Lisa Pease
Berman summarized Sirhan’s upbringing in Palestine. He was only three years old when war broke out in the wake of the United Nations resolution to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab portions. The Jews agreed to the UN plan, but the Arabs did not, and the day after the Jews declared their new state of Israel, the Arabs launched an attack. Sirhan’s street, Berman told the jury, “became the dividing line between the Jews on one side and the Arabs on the other.” Berman described to the jury how Sirhan and his family were driven from the place of his birth:
One night, the very building he lived in became a machine gun nest, and on another night, his very home was bombed.
On the Saturday before Easter of 1948, Sirhan and his mother, father, brothers and sister crawled out of their home in the early dawn, with gun shots echoing all about them, to a temporary safety in an Orthodox Christian Convent in another part of the city.
They never went back.
He described how the impressionable three-year-old Sirhan saw “a little girl’s leg blown off by a bomb” and “went into a spell. He stiffened. His face became contorted. He was out of contact with reality and lost all sense of where he was or what was happening to him.” He described another time when a bomb exploded and Sirhan went into a trance from which he did not return for four days. Sirhan went to the Lutheran Church School run by Arab Christians. He came to America, Berman told the jury, with his family when he was 12 years old.
Then it was Berman’s turn to tell an untruth. He said Sirhan always felt and reacted like he was an outsider. But Sirhan had previously told his defense team, “I was raised here. My whole mind is engulfed in the American way of life, American line of thinking…I’m a Christian. Their language [Arabic] I don’t speak very well. Hell, I’m an American. That’s the way I look at myself.”238 One of the psychologists brought in by the prosecution to evaluate Sirhan’s responses to various psychological and intelligence tests would concur with Sirhan, testifying that his responses were more American than foreign.
Berman told the jury Sirhan wanted to be a diplomat, but he didn’t get the necessary grades and was dismissed from college. Berman did not tell the jury that Sirhan was dismissed from college because of numerous absences incurred while he took care of his older sister who was dying of leukemia, or that the failing grades were a result of his absences, not his scholarship.
Berman described how, without a college education, few avenues for employment were open to Sirhan. He worked a night job at a gas station and bet some of his earnings at the racetrack in the hopes of striking it rich. He got a job as an exercise boy at a thoroughbred ranch near Corona, California. He hoped to become a jockey, but he had a horrible accident where he was thrown from a horse and injured.
“He complained about headaches, became more irritable, brooding, quick to anger, and preoccupied with fanatical obsessions of hatred, suspicion and distrust,” Berman said, stretching the truth far beyond what any witness had said or would ever say.
Berman described how on June 2, 1967, just three days before a war broke out in Israel, Sirhan had written something Berman believed showed Sirhan to be crazy. The jury likely found it evidence of something else. Berman quoted a “Declaration of War Against American Humanity” from the very notebook Cooper had, the day before, tried to suppress:
The victims of the party in favor of this declaration will be or are now the President, Vice-President, et cetera, down the ladder. … The author of this memorandum expresses his wishes very bluntly that he wants to be recorded by history as the man who triggered off the last world war to ever be.
“And there were such other writings, clear evidence of diminished capacity,” Berman said before Judge Walker cut him off.
“Mr. Berman, you are getting into argument now.”
“We expect to prove this,” Berman replied, but Walker told him now was not the time for argument.
Berman then revealed the essence of the defense’s case: Sirhan, upset by the war in the Middle East, turned inward, seeking an internal power that could be manifested physically. “For example,” Berman told the jury, “he would concentrate on a hanging lead fishing sinker and make it swing back and forth with the power of his mind. He would concentrate on a candle flame and make it dance, first to the right and then to the left.” While this may seem like a bizarre claim to make in the present era, in 1968, the question of whether some people could move objects with their minds was the subject of Soviet experiments,239 CIA curiosity and public credulity.
“Then came another heavy shock. In late May and early June of 1968,” Berman told the jury, “Senator Kennedy, whom he admired and loved, said during the campaign, in essence, that if he were president, he would send 50 Phantom jets to Israel.”
Berman explained that’s when Sirhan turned back to his mental powers as a way to express himself through mental acts, not physical ones. “Sirhan will tell you himself from this witness stand that he never thought he ever would kill Kennedy,” but in a “disturbed mental state, intoxicated and confused,” he did.
“There is no doubt, and we have told you this from the beginning, that he did in fact fire the shot that killed Senator Kennedy,” Berman told the jury inaccurately, adding,
The killing was unplanned and undeliberate, impulsive and without premeditation of malice, totally a product of a sick, obsessed mind and personality.
At the actual moment of the shooting, he was out of contact with reality, in a trance in which he had no voluntary control over his will, his judgment, his feelings or his actions.240
Berman told the jury he did not expect them to take his word at face value, but that he would bring forth experts to support this assertion. “Sirhan did not have the mental capacity” under California’s legal definition of premeditation to have committed this crime with “malice aforethought,” a legal requirement.
Berman closed by reminding the jurors that the prosecution gets to present all its witnesses first, and asked them to keep an open mind and wait for the defense to present its case before making up their minds.
The trial was organized by the prosecution and the defense into essentially four segments: the crime and arrest, acts of apparent premeditation, Sirhan’s life to that point, and the evaluation of Sirhan’s’ mental state by psychological and medical professionals.
The People’s first witness was Sergeant Albert La Vallee, who took the jury through the scale model he had built of the Ambassador Hotel so they could get a sense of the layout and pantry area. I drew the picture in Figure 1 (not to scale) to similarly orient the reader.
Karl Uecker was called to the stand to confirm the model’s layout, and established that television cameras were along the southern side of the Embassy Ballroom.
He told the jury how he’d been leading Kennedy by hand, how Kennedy turned, breaking his grip, and that Uecker grabbed Kennedy’s right hand with Uecker’s left and started forward. As he turned forward, he felt someone between him and the first steam table. He heard what he thought was a firecracker and looked back at Kennedy and saw him falling away as he heard a second shot. “And then I realized someone was following me with a gun,” Uecker said. Uecker placed himself “two feet” from Kennedy at this point, which puts Sirhan at least two feet away since Sirhan was parallel to Uecker at the time of the first shot. When Sirhan slid between him and the table and fired his gun, Uecker threw his arm around him in a headlock.
Howard had Uecker examine the gun. “I recognize the number, yes, H58725.”
H58725. That’s what the official transcript says. Both the prosecution and the defense reviewed these transcripts daily and made numerous, detailed corrections of each day’s testimony. They were especially meticulous with physical exhibits. Did no one notice that the actual gun recovered from Sirhan, according to the contemporaneous police records, was H53725, not H58725? Several witnesses were asked by the LAPD to read, on tape, the gun’s serial number, so we know for certain the gun turned in after the shooting was gun H53725.
Three and eight don’t sound the same, nor are they near each other on the keyboard, so it’s hard to explain that as a mere “typo.” Was the number correctly recorded? Had a different gun been used at the trial? Amazingly, Wolfer’s testimony, as you’ll see later, would support that notion. Recall too that Uecker had said he hadn’t paid much attention to the gun. So if the gun at the trial was not the one in the pantry, that would explain why Uecker, who barely noticed it, was asked to identify it instead of Rafer Johnson, who had it on his person for some time before he gave it to the police.
Cooper cross-examined Uecker briefly to establish the presence of large mirrors in the Embassy Ballroom foyer. The mirrors would play a role in the defense’s case. Uecker established there were floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the south wall of a little foyer that led from the lobby into the Embassy ballroom.
Figure 1: Drawing of the pantry area
By getting Uecker to say it took all his strength to subdue Sirhan, Cooper established something else the defense hoped to prove: subduing the little would-be jockey Sirhan required all of the 190-pound, five-foot-ten Uecker’s strength. In other words, Sirhan exhibited an unnatural level of strength, relative to his small size, in the pantry. Despite laying this foundation with several witnesses throughout, none of the defense team would make this point strongly in their closing arguments, that the fact that this small man could hold off Rosey Grier, a football player, Rafer Johnson, an Olympic athlete, and others much taller and heavier than Sirhan, was a strong indicator that Sirhan was in a hypnotic state. Feats of superhuman strength under hypnosis have been routinely noted.
Had Cooper wanted to challenge the notion that his client killed Senator Kennedy, Uecker gave him an opening. When Cooper asked for Uecker’s “best estimate” of how many shots had been fired before Uecker deflected Sirhan’s gun, Uecker said “three shots” (after originally telling the police he grabbed Sirhan’s gun hand and swung it out of the way after the first or second shot). But Kennedy had been shot four times from behind (with one of those passing through his suit without entering his body), and, as Wolfer would soon testify, at a distance of not more than a few inches at best, meaning at least one of the close-range shots that hit Kennedy had to have come after Uecker grabbed Sirhan, a fact neither the defense nor the prosecution pointed out to the jury. Uecker had, by all witness accounts, pulled Sirhan’s gun further away from, not closer to, Senator Kennedy.
Howard questioned Maître D’ Ed Minasian. Minasian had been walking just to the right of Kennedy, when he felt him pull away to shake hands with people. He saw “the arm extended with a revolver and he had reached around Mr. Uecker. … I saw the explosion of the shells and I saw the Senator raise his arm practically in front of his face and then the second shot went off…” After that shot, Minasian tried, with Uecker, to grab hold of Sirhan. Minasian was certain Uecker grabbed Sirhan after the second shot. Minasian clarified that it was the second shell that he saw “explode.” Minasian described how the first shots “were in a bang-bang cadence.” Then there was “a pause” of “possibly two or three seconds,” and then more shots. “I would say a total of five or six shots.”
Under cross-examination, Cooper had Minasian read his original statement to the LAPD to refresh his memory and got Minasian to admit he had not seen Sirhan fire a gun—he had seen an arm reaching around, and “personally saw two shots fired,” a contradiction from what he had said just a short time earlier about seeing only the second shot’s “explosion.”
Minasian made clear, under Cooper’s questioning, that Sirhan never “dropped” the gun. “It was taken out of his hand” during the struggle but Sirhan grabbed the gun (or at least a gun) again during the struggle.
Cooper also pointed out how, in his initial statement to the police, Minasian had described the suspect as “running” toward himself, something that would have been physically impossible for Sirhan, since Sirhan had been witnessed walking to his spot, standing still and firing at Kennedy when Uecker put a headlock on him.
Minasian was not the only witness to have seen someone he thought was the shooter running in the pantry. Virginia Guy, a reporter in the pantry, had her tooth chipped by something in someone’s hand who came running from Kennedy’s direction past her. Both Guy and Minasian assumed this was Sirhan. But this person was not Sirhan, as you’ll learn in a later chapter.
Cooper and Fitts both realized Minasian’s remembrance opened the door to conspiracy rather than closing it. Cooper asked Minasian hadn’t he “just assumed that he [Sirhan] came running? Because you weren’t able to see, were you, sir?”
“As I say, through my peripheral vision. If I said ‘running,’ I was mistaken; I obviously couldn’t see anyone; but I saw a dart or another quick movement from the side, from my side.”
This raised a second problem. Sirhan wasn’t to Minasian’s side. He was in front of him. Minasian was walking forward with Kennedy to his left, so the person had to be running at Minasian from his right to appear in his “peripheral” vision. Yet witnesses who had a clear view of Sirhan said he walked over as if to shake Kennedy’s hand and then stopped and fired. If someone ran up to or darted at Kennedy, it wasn’t Sirhan.
Fitts asked, “This darting, do you have anything in mind other than a gun being outstretched when you describe a darting motion?”
“No sir.”
“I think that clears that up,” Fitts said. But it didn’t. Holding a gun in an outstretched fashion has nothing to do with running or darting.
Howard questioned tall young Juan Romero next, the busboy who had been captured in a photograph by Boris Yaro kneeling next to the wounded Kennedy in the pantry. He described shaking Kennedy’s hand and then catching sight of a person he thought “couldn’t wait to shake his hand.” But then the person put his arm up and fired. “I seen he was right in front of him,” Romero said. He dropped down to help Kennedy “and put my hand to the back of his head and tried to give him some, whatever I could, aid, some aid; that is about all I could do.”
“But you saw someone coming toward the Senator; was this a male or a female?” Howard asked.
“It was a female,” Romero replied in his instinctive response.
“A man?” Howard prompted quickly.
“It was a man,” Romero said.
Romero told Kennedy, “Come on, Senator, you can make it; Mr. Kennedy, you can make it.” Romero said Kennedy tried to respond, and Romero thought he said, “Everything is all right, everything is okay.” (This may be an error in the transcription. To reporters, Romero had said he thought Kennedy had asked, “Is everyone okay?”) Someone came up and put his coat under Kennedy’s head. Someone handed Romero a rosary, which he pressed into Kennedy’s hand.
When Ethel came up, Romero got out of the way and went to see what had happened to the shooter. “I couldn’t tell right away, because everybody had covered his body, including his head.”
When the two previous witnesses had been asked to identify the shooter from the pantry, both had pointed to Sirhan. But when Juan Romero was asked to identify the shooter, Romero said he didn’t think he saw the shooter in court. Cooper said, “Stand up, Mr. Sirhan,” clearly trying to cue Romero that this was the guy on trial for shooting Kennedy, but Romero held firm. “I don’t believe that’s him.”241
Neither the defense nor the prosecution brought up the fact that right after the shooting, when Sgt. Calkins asked if Romero would be able to identify the shooter if he saw him again, Romero had said, confidently, “Yes, I would.” No one dared consider that perhaps Romero could identify the shooter he had seen, and that it was not Sirhan.
Parsons cross-examined Romero. “What happened when you heard the shot?”
“Well, at first I thought it was something outside like a firecracker or somebody busted a balloon, then I felt the powder burning here.”
“The side of your face?”
“Yes. Then I saw the guy and I pushed him around. Then I had him on the table, so then I went down to
try to protect him [Senator Kennedy].”
No one asked whom Romero pushed down on the table, since he had already failed to identify Sirhan twice in the courtroom.
“How many shots did you say you heard?” Parsons asked.
“Approximately four shots,” Romero responded.
“Did they all happen one right after another?”
“Well, they were less than three seconds apart.”
“And when you looked around, you saw a man lying on the counter, did you not, on the steam table?”
“Yes.”
Romero saw a man being held on the third steam table from Kennedy at that point. “This person, Mr. Sirhan, when you saw him there, did he appear to be smiling?” Parsons asked.
“He was smiling or either was just making a face,” Romero responded.
No one followed up to ask why, since he clearly recognized Sirhan as the guy under the pile of bodies on the steam table, he hadn’t identified Sirhan as the shooter. Perhaps both the prosecution and defense realized that was a door better left unopened.242
Vince DiPierro mentioned how he was stopped at the swinging doors to the pantry by a security guard, but was let in when a fellow kitchen employee told the guard DiPierro could come in. DiPierro crossed through to the little area between the pantry and the stage and waited for Kennedy with Martin Patrusky, his fellow waiter, “and a gentleman with dark glasses” (he likely meant dark glass frames, as he had said in an earlier interview) standing “on the other side.”
“Did he appear to be a Kennedy worker?” Howard asked.
“Yes, sir, he had a badge.”
Having a badge did not indicate the person was a legitimate member of Kennedy’s staff. Michael Wayne had obtained Kennedy badges even though he was not a member of the staff. Clearly, others could have obtained Kennedy credentials as well. And there was no Secret Service protection for candidates in 1968. It was Robert Kennedy’s assassination that changed that policy.