by Lisa Pease
When Kennedy entered the pantry, he went through the propped-open northern swinging door at the western end. DiPierro pushed his way through the southern door, which opened to the inside and had not been propped open. At some point before he shook Kennedy’s hand, he saw Sirhan on the tray rack at the eastern end of the ice machine.
“The same person I had seen standing on the tray rack had come out around Mr. Uecker,” DiPierro said. Howard had DiPierro indicate where this happened and he indicated the westernmost corner of the three steam tables. “At that time … I observed … a flash that came out of the gun.”
Howard asked DiPierro, “Now, how close to the Senator was Mr. Sirhan when he produced the gun?”
DiPierro answered, “I would say within two feet to eight feet.”
If anyone on the jury, which had heard in the opening statement just the day before that the gun had to have been no further than an inch from Kennedy, noted this discrepancy, there is no record of it.
DiPierro confirmed that Uecker grabbed Sirhan after the second or third shot, again, well before Sirhan could fire the four shots that hit Kennedy (one of which passed through his clothing without entering his body).
“Did you see what movement the Senator made…?” Howard asked.
“He threw his head and hands started to go up as if to grab his head. He made a sudden jerking motion and he let go of Karl’s [Uecker’s] hand and I guess it was after the second shot. It would be after the second shot he let go of his hand. The first shot, he still had a hold of his hand and he started to pull and then the second shot was fired and both hands went up.”
“Then what happened to the Senator?”
“He started falling and then the third shot was fired and he hit the ground just prior to the third shot.” (How, then, did Kennedy get shot from close range four times?)
When asked if there was “something about” Sirhan that made DiPierro notice him, DiPierro mentioned that the girl near Sirhan had drawn his attention. In his first interview he described how the two seemed to be together, how Sirhan appeared to say something to the girl that made her smile, and how she appeared to be holding him. Now, many interviews with law enforcement and the prosecution later, DiPierro said the girl who was wearing a “polka dot dress” was “not definitely by him,” but only “in the area of him.”
When Cooper asked if the girl and Sirhan had talked, DiPierro said, “Whether he conversed with her or whether he just looked at her, I could not say. It looked as though he looked over where he could have just been, a natural impulse, by human nature to look at a pretty girl.”
“In other words, he looked toward her?” Cooper asked.
“For a split second,” DiPierro replied.
“Did she look toward him?”
“I believe she did.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then the Senator turned to me and I shook hands with him and I lost sight of her.”
DiPierro reported he stayed focused on Kennedy’s head until he saw a commotion involving Uecker. Then he saw the gun being fired.
Cooper asked DiPierro to describe the color of the dots on the dress. “Black,” DiPierro replied. What color was her hair? DiPierro said he did not “recall,” which is not legally the same as saying “I don’t remember.” You might actually remember something but choose not to recall it at the present moment. Cooper wasn’t going to let that stand.
“Do you remember in a statement you said it was brown…brunette?”
“Brunette, possibly dark brown,” DiPierro acknowledged.
This was important, because in the papers, the police had promoted Valerie Schulte, a blonde in a cast for a broken leg who had been wearing a green dress with yellow lemons on it as “the girl in the polka dot dress.” The prosecution was about to do the same thing here at the trial.
Cooper wanted to damage DiPierro’s credibility, so he quoted from his session with Hernandez where DiPierro had responded to Hernandez’s challenge that “you have told me now that there was no lady you saw standing next to Sirhan?” with “That is correct.”
“Did you so testify?” Cooper asked DiPierro.
“Yes, I did.”
Cooper than quoted Hernandez’s words to DiPierro: “What I think you have told me is that you probably got this idea about a girl in a black and white polka dot dress after you talked to this Sandy Serrano?” “Yes, sir, I did” the transcript of DiPierro’s earlier session read. Cooper seemed as eager as Hernandez to shut down anything that pointed at the suspicious presence of a girl in a polka dot dress in the pantry. Walker allowed Cooper to read the following into the record:
Q [Hernandez] You did not see a girl in a black and white polka dot dress standing beside Sirhan on that evening?
A [DiPierro] No.
On redirect, Fitts, who probably sensed the jury’s likely confusion on this point, asked DiPierro, “Are you telling us in substance there was a girl standing near Sirhan at or near the time of the shooting, sir?”
“Yes, sir.”
“With a polka dot dress?”
“Yes.”
Fitts entered three black and white photos of Valerie Schulte—in a “polka dot dress” says the transcript, but the dress actually showed lemon-shaped objects, albeit in black and white—into the record as Exhibit 10-A. He added four more color photographs of Schulte as Exhibit 10-B.
“Do you recognize that individual as anyone you have ever seen before?”
“Yes, I believe I saw her that night,” DiPierro said truthfully. But Fitts needed a different answer.
“Are you telling us that this appears to be a picture of the girl you saw in the pantry at or near the time of the shooting?”
“Yes, but I believe she had darker hair than that.”
“I didn’t hear the answer, your Honor,” Cooper interjected.
“He said, ‘but I believe she had darkened her hair,’” Judge Walker replied, which was a strange perversion of what DiPierro had said.
“In any event,” Fitts said, before losing the jury’s comprehension on this thread, “she seems to be a pretty blonde in the pictures, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, she does.”
Fitts and Cooper both then suborned perjury from DiPierro.
“Other than the difference in the color of the hair that you noticed, does she seem to be the girl?”
“Yes, I would think she would be.”
Cooper asked, “Is that the girl you think you saw in the pantry?”
“I believe it was,” DiPierro said.
“And is that the dress she was wearing at the time?”
“As to the dress, I do not recall. I can say it was, but I’m not sure.”
“You have described a dress with black polka dots, is that correct?
“Yes.”
“This picture,” Cooper pressed, holding up a color photo of Schulte in her green lemon-decorated dress: “this particular picture that has the colored photographs…what color would you say it is?”
“They are yellow polka dots on a green background.”
By no stretch would anyone in fashion call those obviously lemon-shaped ovals “polka dots.” Cooper understood this, and showed the photo to the jury. But he did not explain what this meant to the jury. Nor did he explain his reason for wanting to discredit DiPierro. He had already admitted Sirhan was guilty. The only reason to discredit DiPierro would be due to his public profile regarding the girl in the polka dot dress.
For his part, DiPierro knew Schulte was not the girl he had seen with Sirhan, as he made clear to me when I interviewed him years later in Toluca Lake, a modestly upscale suburb in the San Fernando Valley. He told me flat out that was not the dress of the woman he had seen with Sirhan, nor did Schulte have the brunette hair he had seen. Looking similar is not the same thing. He told me, however, that Howard had said he would fully support DiPierro if he identified the blonde Schulte as the girl in the polka dot dress.243
Jesse Unruh, like most other
witnesses, thought firecrackers were going off at first, not a gun. “It seemed to me there was a little pause between the first crackle explosion and the later crackle, but it would have been relatively close…it seems to me that there was a momentary pause between the first three and the last five or the first four and the last four.”
Fitts prompted Unruh, “And you indicated you heard some eight reports?”
“I couldn’t count them. It could have been six, eight or ten, but it seems to me a relative definite string of explosions and then a short pause, and then another string.” Ten, of course, was too many for Sirhan’s gun to have held. But no one told the jury this.
Fitts prompted Unruh to say he had heard Sirhan say “I did it for my country” by referring him to his FBI report.
Under cross-examination from Berman, Unruh said the shots sounded like firecrackers. Berman reminded him he had told the FBI the shots sounded like balloons popping. Why Berman felt it was important to get that into the record isn’t clear. For some reason, Berman also felt it was important to establish that Unruh never saw Sirhan with the gun in his hand.
On redirect, Fitts asked Unruh if he thought at any point Sirhan appeared intoxicated. Berman objected, feeling Unruh was not qualified to make an opinion, but the Judge allowed the question. “Mr. Unruh, you have on some occasions in your life perhaps observed some people who are under the influence of intoxicating drink, that sort of thing?”
“The defendant seemed as normal as you would expect one to be under such anguishing circumstances. I thought later on during the course of the evening he was considerably calmer,” Unruh said, an important observation that was corroborated by other witnesses.
The defense was planning to argue that Sirhan was—as incredible as it sounds—both drunk and in a state of self-induced hypnosis at the time of the shooting. Unruh’s observation was a supporting piece of data that Sirhan was indeed in some kind of hypnotic trance.
Judge Walker, perhaps understanding this, derailed this track immediately. “The question was with respect to his sobriety. Did you believe him to be under the influence of intoxicating liquor or did you not believe him to be under the influence of intoxicating liquor?”
“I didn’t even think about it at the time. In observation now, I would have to conclude that the evidence I observed would lead me to believe he was not.”
Despite the fact that arguing Sirhan was drunk was a key tenet of the defense’s case, the defense team was unable to find a single witness who could attest that Sirhan was in a drunken state. At best, they found only people who saw him with a drink in hand, without knowing what was inside the glass or how many he had. Sirhan believed he had drank four Tom Collinses. But the defense was unable to find anyone who could corroborate more than seeing him with a Tom Collins glass in hand with a milky liquid and some red item that looked like a candy or a cherry inside.
Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier was called next. Fitts showed him the gun H58725, (which, if the number was accurately recorded, was not the gun taken from Rafer Johnson at the police station after the shooting), People’s Exhibit 6, and asked if it was similar to the one Grier remembered seeing.
“Yes, but it doesn’t, the gun—it looked like it was older than this one.”
Fitts claimed he didn’t hear Grier and asked him to answer again.
“I said, ‘It is similar, sir.’ Of course, I wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was the identical gun.”
“But does it look different?” Fitts asked, still hoping for a better answer.
“Other than it is clean, and this other one looked like it was dirty.”
Grier was not making a positive identification. And guns are not supposed to be cleaned when taken into evidence. Evidence should be sealed and left untouched until the trial. But Fitts couldn’t let Grier’s lack of an ID stand. “In any other respect except cleanliness, it doesn’t seem to be any different?”
“It doesn’t seem to be any different,” Grier repeated.
Having finally gotten the answer he wanted, Fitts moved on and asked if Grier could identify the shooter in the courtroom. Grier said “Yes,” but before he could point him out, Cooper interjected, “Stipulate it is the defendant, your Honor.” Cooper was clearly hoping to avoid another Juan Romero situation. Cooper also said he would so stipulate to any witness, going forward, but Judge Walker didn’t like that and told Cooper to let the prosecution try its case the way it wanted.
Grier testified that he gave the gun he took from Sirhan’s hand to Rafer Johnson.
Cooper had only one goal on cross-examination. He established that Grier was a 6'5" defense tackle, roughly 290 pounds, and a “pretty strong fellow.”
Jesus Perez told the jury something that would have supported the case for Sirhan’s innocence, had anyone dared to follow his testimony where it led. Perez heard the first shot coming from approximately the position of 17-D. Kennedy was at about 13-E, and each grid square represented two feet. There were three squares between 13-E and 17-D. Perez essentially put the first shot at a minimum of six feet from Kennedy, yet Kennedy was shot four times from a distance not greater than six inches (and not more than an inch for the fatal shot). Given that Perez was nearly shaking hands with Kennedy and had a clear view of Sirhan, his testimony on this point should be given significant weight. The jury, of course, was likely not doing the math, and no one pointed the problem out to them.
Frank Burns told the jury he had gotten just past Kennedy when Kennedy stopped to shake hands with two people in white kitchen uniforms. Burns was looking back to his left when he heard “the noise, a ripple of what was a gun, and it sounded like firecrackers.” A “string of shots,” Burns said, “without any real long pauses in between.”
“When you heard the sound of gunfire, what did you do?”
“The first thing I did was to look toward the sound, the noise, and at that time, all I really saw that I recall was an arm holding a gun. There … was a hand stretched out with the gun in it and I very vividly recall seeing that. I immediately looked in the direction of the Senator and he had thrown up his head and was falling and spinning at that time.
“I then glanced back and at that time, that was the first time I saw the person.”
What neither the defense nor the prosecution pointed out to the jury was that Burns essentially just said he turned his head three times—once to see the gun and an arm (but not the shooter), once to look back toward Kennedy, and a third time, at which point he saw the shooter fully. If the gun had been the inch from Kennedy’s head necessary to create the powder burns found on his scalp by Coroner Noguchi, Burns would not have had to look in two different directions to see both the gun and Kennedy. Clearly, there was some space between Kennedy and Sirhan during the first two shots, after which Karl Uecker and others grabbed Sirhan.
“He was aiming the gun down at the Senator as he was falling.” When Kennedy collapsed backward, Sirhan was still in front of Kennedy. Kennedy fell on his back, not his stomach, so at no point was his backside exposed to Sirhan. Yet all the shots in Kennedy and through his clothing were made in a back-to-front and right-to-left fashion. Sirhan was ahead of Kennedy and slightly to Kennedy’s left, making those angles impossible.
When Fitts questioned Valerie Schulte, the girl the police and prosecution tried to paint as the girl in the polka dot dress, he asked her something that wouldn’t have helped the prosecution’s case had the jury been paying close attention. Fitts asked where she was standing, where Kennedy was standing, and where the shooter was standing. Valerie said the arm with the gun was “approximately three yards, something like that, from the Senator.” Three yards is nine feet away. She saw the man “from his shoulders up.” She had seen his face, but she did not feel she could make a positive identification of the man she had seen with the gun. Like Romero, Schulte, too, refused to identify Sirhan as the man with the gun that she had seen, even when he was pointed out to her in the courtroom.
Cooper cross-examin
ed Officers Placencia and White pretty hard about their respective tests of Sirhan’s eyes. When Placencia said he “couldn’t recall” whether Sirhan’s eyes were dilated or not, Cooper handed him a copy of his original statement “for the purposes of refreshing your recollection” and asked him again, “Did you not observe that his pupils were real wide?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When you flashed the light in his eyes, did the pupils react to the light?”
“I can’t recall, sir.”
Cooper then read Placencia’s earlier statement into the record that Sirhan’s pupils “didn’t” react to the light at all and that “His pupils were real wide.”
Dilated pupils that don’t react to light can be a physical indicator of a hypnotic state.244 But Cooper did not make that point to the jury.
“Did you make that statement in response to those questions at that time?” Cooper asked.
“Yes, sir,” Placencia responded.
“In other words then, his pupils did not react to the light, did they?”
“No, sir.”
“All right. Now what did that mean to you as an officer?”
“That he was under the influence of something.”
“In other words, it meant to you that he was under the influence of a drug or alcohol, isn’t that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
Howard asked on redirect, “Did you ever smell any odor of alcohol on the defendant?”
“No, sir.”
Cooper asked a barrage of questions about why Sirhan was put in the Breathalyzer room if no test was to be performed there. But it appears that no tests were done because no tests needed to be done. Had Sirhan been intoxicated, surely at least one witness would have noticed and commented on this to the police. But not one witness mentioned smelling alcohol on his breath, seeing him stumble or maneuver clumsily. Not one witness said Sirhan appeared red-faced or had bloodshot eyes. And on redirect, Howard established Placencia smelled no alcohol on Sirhan.