A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  White said that in the car, Sirhan had appeared to White to be “very frightened. He was in terror.” But after a few minutes, “he regained his composure and he was quite calm.”

  White claimed that after he and his partner brought Sirhan into the Breathalyzer room, he darkened the room and then passed a flashlight across first Sirhan’s eyes, then Placencia’s eyes. White thought the pupils contracted at the same rate, and was of the opinion that Sirhan was not under the influence of alcohol.

  White’s memory was clearly muddled for this period. He first testified that Sirhan had been placed in Interrogation Room A, where he conducted the eye test, after which he went in search of a key to Interrogation Room B, where Sirhan was ultimately moved. But a couple of minutes later, White said Sirhan was first placed in Interrogation Room B, and then moved to A.

  When Cooper asked him what Placencia had said after his own eye test, White said that Placencia told him “he thought that his pupils were unusually large.” Cooper also elicited that White had not made a mention in his only report on the incident that he had conducted an eye test at all. Cooper also pointed out Lieutenant William Jordan’s report, written after an interview with White in August, two months after the events, that “White believes that he checked Sirhan’s eyes with his flashlight,” an odd wording, as if Jordan himself didn’t believe White had performed the test. Cooper read into the record the following exchange between Jordan (Q) and White (A):

  Q By the look on his face, being that of terror, to use your adjective, would you describe that for me?

  A Well, when we first encountered him, he was laying on his stomach on the preparation table for food; and myself, I can tell when a person is in just sheer terror, his eyes are widened, he had a pale look to his face. …

  Q You say his eyes were widened?

  A Yes. I mean they were wide open, not in a relaxed manner at all. They were very alert at this point.

  Q Did you take a close look at his eyes at any time?

  A I believe it was either at the arrival at the station or in the station itself that I took, I checked the reaction of his pupils.

  Q How did they react, Officer?

  A They were very near normal at that point because I meant to check him later, after he was able to calm down. Lots of times when a person is frightened or surprised they don’t have normal reactions to their pupils. They dilate automatically, and he—I was meaning to go back and check them after he was able to calm down, but I was never able to. He was transferred to Central Jail before I was able to recheck them.245

  Cooper pressed: “When you said this statement on September 13th, Officer, that they were very near normal, I take it you meant by that, did you not, that they weren’t completely normal?”

  “Yes, sir,” White responded.

  “And because they weren’t completely normal, you attributed the reaction you got to his fright, is that right?”

  “To the experience he had just gone through, yes.”

  “In other words,” Cooper pressed, “they didn’t react the way a normal person’s eyes would react, did they? … They were ‘very near normal’ but they weren’t normal, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why did you feel it was necessary to check his eyes again?”

  “For a double check.”

  “As a matter of fact, you didn’t give him any eye examination on that morning, did you?”

  “Yes I did.”

  Cooper had no further questions, and Fitts declined the opportunity to reexamine White.

  The prosecution moved to witnesses they felt showed premeditation on Sirhan’s part. Of course, if someone was controlling Sirhan through hypnosis at the scene of the crime, someone was likely controlling Sirhan before the crime as well, creating a pattern of activity designed to produce the appearance of premeditation and guilt.

  This isn’t just idle speculation. In a footnote at the end of his chapter on the CIA’s known experiments with hypnosis in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, former State Department officer John Marks related the comments of a CIA veteran of the agency’s MKULTRA mind control program. The veteran CIA officer described how easy it would be for a hypnotist to set up someone to be a patsy. The hypnotist would offer suggestions that seemed innocuous, out of context (go to a range, do some target practice, go to a party at a hotel). “The purpose of this exercise,” the anonymous informant told Marks, “is to leave a circumstantial trail that will make the authorities think the patsy committed a particular crime.”246

  Fitts questioned Everett Buckner (misspelled Edward Buckner in the transcript) to establish Sirhan’s presence at the firing range on June 4. Buckner said Sirhan had asked to buy “some shells that will not misfire” at the range. Buckner sold him “one box.”

  Cooper wanted to establish that Sirhan was at the gun range until 5 P.M., but Buckner said Sirhan came in at 9:30 A.M. or 10:30 A.M. and was only there “two or two and a half” hours. Cooper didn’t like that answer, and kept pressing.

  “Isn’t it true, sir, that he arrived about noon and remained until five o’clock in the afternoon? And remained there until you closed?” Cooper said.

  “He did not remain there until we closed,” Buckner said.

  “All right. And I take it then that he didn’t arrive about noon?”

  “As near as I can remember, he arrived about ten or ten-thirty.”

  Cooper continued to needle him, pointing out any discrepancy in this statements regarding the time. Then he revealed perhaps the true reason for his heckling.

  “Now, you have a kind of vivid imagination, do you not, sir?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, let me ask you this,” Cooper said. “Didn’t you tell the police at one time that there was some lady with him?”

  “No, sir. I said that some lady came and he helped show her how to shoot.”

  “And didn’t you say that that lady had said to him, ‘Get out of here, God damn you, somebody will recognize us’?”

  Buckner said he wasn’t sure what she had said, but “it sounded like that.”

  Cooper then brought out the report from Hernandez on Buckner’s lie detector session. This was the prosecution’s witness being attacked, but Fitts didn’t object initially. Neither did Judge Walker, although lie detector evidence is not admissible in California courts. It seems all three forces—the defense, the prosecution and the Judge—wanted to discredit Buckner on the record regarding that one statement that lent credence to a conspiracy. This incident showed again the real purpose of the trial: to attempt to introduce and then explain away any evidence of conspiracy that had already been made public. Buckner’s comments had been quoted in the media, so they needed to be put to rest, even if it required using the dishonest Hernandez to do it.

  Fitts let Cooper point out to the jury that Buckner had “lied” (per Hernandez) on the question about the woman’s statement. Buckner said that was the only question he was deemed to have “flunked.” Once that was in the record, Fitts objected and Judge Walker added, “certainly, any testimony about lie detector tests is objectionable and the objection will be sustained.” Fitts asked why Cooper was even bringing this up, since the prosecution had no plans to introduce that statement. It was a direct question to which Cooper had no direct answer. Given how Cooper’s own legal troubles were hanging over his head like a dagger throughout the trial, the simplest explanation could be that Cooper was following someone else’s orders on this point. Although Cooper wanted to establish Sirhan was at the range until 5 P.M., and Buckner was interfering with that, Cooper had other ways to challenge that witness rather than bringing up the woman and her alleged conversation with Sirhan, something Fitts clearly would rather have left off the record entirely. But if Cooper’s goal was not so much to defend Sirhan as to discredit any evidence of conspiracy, his continued questioning along this line made sense.

  Cooper asked Buckner about the statement and how when talking to Hern
andez, he “admitted that statement wasn’t made.”

  “I didn’t admit it wasn’t made,” Buckner said correctly. “I admitted I could have misunderstood it, the conversation.”

  And with that, Cooper was done. Buckner’s statement about the woman had been reported in the papers. It seemed Cooper really wanted the media to hear that Buckner had, if not retracted it, significantly watered it down.

  Two shooters from the range on June 4, Henry Adrian Carreon and his friend David Montellano, testified about encountering Sirhan there. Carreon described how the firing range was laid out in a straight line, broken by the range office. To the left of the office, facing the targets, was the pistol range. To the right of the office was a rifle range. Carreon heard someone shooting “rapid fire” which “was abnormal” so he walked over to see who was doing it. “I expected the range officer or someone working there in the place to come over. They usually come up and stop them, as you are not supposed to shoot like that.”

  Carreon described how his friend David came over from the rifle range and the two of them approached Sirhan. David asked Sirhan what kind of gun he was using, but Sirhan didn’t respond initially. Carreon asked him a second time “and he didn’t [answer], I wondered what the story was on the guy, if he was trying to avoid us.” Cooper moved for that to be stricken and Judge Walker agreed. Carreon said something similar and again the Judge struck it and asked the jury to disregard Carreon’s conclusions about why Sirhan responded the way that he did.

  Sirhan did talk to them a bit, but he seemed to answer some questions and ignore others. David wanted to know why he had a box of Mini-Mag ammunition on his bullet stand. “David said, ‘Well isn’t it for better accuracy at long range?’ And he didn’t say anything. At times when we were speaking, he just didn’t answer us.” Was Sirhan in a trance state at the range?

  Under cross-examination, Parsons got Carreon to recall that his friend David had said that Sirhan wasn’t a very good shot. David testified right after, and confirmed that Sirhan wasn’t hitting his target.

  Twice, David alluded to Sirhan’s gun holding nine rounds. But the gun Rafer Johnson had taken from the pantry to the police could only fire eight rounds. If Sirhan had used a different gun at the range, that would explain why nearly 40,000 shells from the range could not be matched to the gun with the serial number H53725, the gun Rafer Johnson turned over to the police after the shooting.

  Ronald Williams was next. He claimed his wife Claudia was the woman who had a discussion with Sirhan. He claimed that Buckner, the range master, was there until closing at around 5 P.M., and that Sirhan was, too. So either Buckner was incorrect or Williams was, as they could not both be accurate. Curiously, one of the main FBI Special Agents on the case, Amedee Richards, wrote a report of this event for the FBI that supports Buckner, not Williams. Richards’ report put Sirhan at the range between roughly 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.247 The FBI had interviewed 20 people from the range that day, including Claudia, before Richards came to that conclusion.

  Williams testified that he arrived about an hour before closing, which, if Richard’s report is correct, means he couldn’t have run into Sirhan. Claudia Williams said essentially the same thing when she followed her husband on the witness stand—that they had arrived about 4 P.M. and that she had had an innocuous conversation with Sirhan. Is it possible she had talked to someone who merely looked like Sirhan? Is it possible she wasn’t the woman Buckner was referring to?

  Claudia said Sirhan was firing rapidly. In direct contradiction to what David Montellano had said, Claudia said Sirhan was a good shot, that his shots were hitting close to the target, and that his gun was easy to shoot. Sirhan would later testify that his gun’s sight was off and he had to adjust for that when shooting. Sirhan would also testify that the man next to him was the one rapid-firing, that it took him time to press and release the gun. Sirhan didn’t know what time he left the range.

  Michael Saccoman had also been at the range that day, and testified that Sirhan’s gun had a “black plastic grip” and “a cheap paint—very little finish on it.” (Other range witnesses described Sirhan’s gun handle as black or blue.) He identified the gun in court as the gun he had seen at the range. Oddly enough, on color video of the press conference on June 5, 1968, where the gun was shown, the handle of the gun retrieved from the pantry was clearly brown.248

  Saccoman said he and Sirhan talked for about 45 minutes. They fired each other’s guns. At one point, Saccoman reported Sirhan told him he was planning a hunting trip, and Saccoman said you couldn’t use a pistol for hunting because it was against the law to use pistols for hunting. “He asked me why, and I said to the best of my knowledge and belief, it is because of the accuracy. And then he said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that. It could kill a dog.’”

  Sirhan would vigorously deny having said that, although he did remember a casual conversation about hunting small animals. If Sirhan said that, it appears he meant it quite literally, and not as a reference to Senator Kennedy.

  Previous to June 4, Sirhan had apparently been to the Corona Police range. The prosecution called Officer Harry C. Starr, the assistant to the range master at the Corona Police pistol range, which was open to the public for one dollar. Starr confirmed that Sirhan’s name appeared on the register there. (People’s Exhibit 70). The date appeared to be “6/1,” i.e., Saturday, June 1, 1968. The shooter had clocked in around 12:15 P.M. and left about 3 P.M. Starr was at the range at that time. Starr had spoken to the shooter by that name, but when Sirhan was pointed out to him in the courtroom, like Juan Romero and Valerie Schulte before him, Officer Starr failed to identify the Sirhan in the courtroom with the Sirhan he had talked to at the range: “I can’t truthfully say that that is the man, that is, I picked out a picture that resembled the man, but I cannot say that he is the man.”

  Cooper had offered to stipulate that Starr saw Sirhan at the range, but Howard had rejected it. When Starr failed to identify Sirhan as the shooter from the range, however, Cooper again offered a stipulation, and this time, Howard took it.

  Returning to pantry witnesses, Howard called George Plimpton to the stand. Plimpton did not see Sirhan fire, but he joined the struggle to get the gun from Sirhan. Berman asked didn’t Plimpton believe “for the size of a man he was, that he was showing great strength?”

  “I think it surprised us that we could not remove the gun as easily. Yes, he was very strong.”

  “In connection with that, [what] do you remember saying to the Sergeant or whoever it was that you were interrogated by: ‘Tell us all about his eyes’? Did you go on to say that they were dark brown and enormously peaceful eyes?”

  “Yes, I remember saying that,” Plimpton confirmed.

  Berman asked Plimpton to describe further what he meant by that.

  “He struck me, with a circle of people around him, as compared to the rest of us, enormously composed. The rest of us, of course, given this sudden tragedy were not as composed. His reaction seemed startling to me because in the middle of a hurricane of sound and feeling, he seemed almost peaceful, and I had the sense, if I am allowed to say this sort of thing—”

  “I don’t want to ask you for your sense,” Judge Walker interrupted. “I just want a description.”

  “That is what I mean ‘peaceful.’ He seemed purged.”

  Larry Arnot of Lock, Stock & Barrel testified that Sirhan had bought “Mini-Mag” ammunition from “CCI” that was “.22 Long Rifle HP” on June 1, 1968. Arnot said HP stood for “hollow point.”

  “Approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, three individuals entered the store, walked to the portion of the store where the ammunition was stored. I approached them, asked them if I could be of assistance, and in turn was given the request for ammunition.”

  Fitts interrupted Arnot’s account. “If the Court please, I don’t think I’m going to let this one go any further. If I may take this witness in my own way at this time?”

  Can you guess why Fitts stopped his wi
tness here? That’s right. Fitts wanted to stop and discredit the evidence of conspiracy Arnot had just introduced.

  “Mr. Arnot, do you recall having a conversation with Lieutenant Enrique Hernandez of the Los Angeles Police Department with reference to selling ammunition to three individuals?”

  “Yes.”

  “And isn’t it a fact that Mr. Hernandez had some conversation with you with respect to this business of selling the ammunition as reflected on that sales slip to three persons who walked into the store?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he put you on the so-called polygraph, the lie detector, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he indicated to you with reference to the sale of what is reflected on that slip that you were confused?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you ultimately told Mr. Hernandez that …you had mixed up with a sale to three other people and were in your own mind trying to connect it with the sale to Sirhan. Isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t remember those words.”

  “Did you ultimately tell Mr. Hernandez that so far as that particular transaction reflected People’s 22, that you didn’t remember Sirhan and you didn’t remember anything other than that you had filled out that sales slip with respect to a sale?”

  “Yes.”

  Cooper cross-examined him in a similar vein.

  “Why did you say you sold it [the ammunition] to three persons then?”

  “I didn’t say I sold it to three persons, did I? I just said three persons entered the store.”

  No one asked why he initially felt the three people were together, and the jury was not told that two others, the store owner and his wife, had also thought two men were with Sirhan at the time of this transaction.

  The grilling of Arnot proved once again that the trial wasn’t about the truth of Sirhan’s involvement so much as to attempt to discredit, in the guise of a trial, all public evidence of conspiracy. Had Sirhan had a proper defense, someone would have played the tape of Sandra Serrano’s session with Hernandez for the jury. That would have kept the prosecution from injecting his assessment every time they had a witness they wanted to discredit.