by Lisa Pease
The photograph is an overall photo not shot for striation detail.
The photograph is of a groove made by a Land in the barrel of the gun; the principal area of the photo is referred to as “one Land width.” The area on either side of this Land width depicts a partial groove marking.
The fuzzy area on the left side of the photo is due to a deficiency in the optics of the microscope. This defect has existed since the Department first received the microscope and efforts to correct the defect have been unsuccessful.
The defect was a subject in the Kirschke case. The photograph shows identical Land widths between the Kennedy and test bullet. It also shows a comparison area between the shoulders of the Land widths. This comparison area is located approximately in the center of the shoulders.
The existence of this photograph is believed to be unknown by anyone outside of this Department. It should be rebuttal evidence were this case ever to be retried. However, the release of this information at this time would be susceptible to criticism because lay people would in all probability have difficulty deciphering this photograph. The issue as to its not being revealed at an earlier time may further make its authenticity suspect, particularly to the avid, exact assassination buff.347
Translation: We have secret evidence we have withheld from the public so we can use it to put calls to conspiracy to rest if the case is ever retried. But people paying attention will challenge its authenticity.
This photograph was presented to Wenke’s panel as a comparison of the Kennedy bullet and a test bullet from Sirhan’s gun. To a nonexpert who had no access to the physical evidence, this could have been enough to convince the public that Robert Kennedy had been killed by a bullet from Sirhan’s gun.
But the experts soon found a serious discrepancy in that assertion. The panel found this photomicrograph, “Special Exhibit 10,” showed the Kennedy bullet and the Goldstein bullet together, not the Kennedy bullet and a test bullet. At best, this only proved that the two bullets came from the same gun, but not necessarily Sirhan’s gun.
Was the assertion that one of the bullets was a test bullet a mistake or a lie? One need look no further than Wolfer’s log. The day this photo was made, Wolfer logged a “comparison” (meaning photomicrograph) of the Kennedy and Goldstein bullets. The photomicrograph would have been done under the same equipment with which the photograph was ultimately made. There was no log entry for a “comparison” between the Kennedy bullet and a test bullet. And as we saw earlier, Wolfer was deemed by the California Supreme Court to have “negligently presented false demonstrative evidence,” so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest Wolfer knew it was a lie. Wolfer even admitted in a case referenced by Blehr above that he had physically altered ID markings on a cartridge case (and Blehr suspected he had altered more than the one he admitted to).
The panel was proud to have unmasked this deception of trying to pass another victim bullet off as a test bullet to show a match between the Kennedy neck bullet and Sirhan’s gun. But they hadn’t looked nearly closely enough, as there was a far more sinister deception they all missed.
Perhaps the panel had been distracted, as September 1975 was an extraordinary month in a year of unusual events. President Gerald Ford survived not one but two close-range assassination attempts just 17 days apart, in California. Charles Manson devotee Squeaky Fromme tried to kill him in Sacramento, and FBI informant (and last-minute Secret Service detainee) Sara Jane Moore tried to kill him in San Francisco. The success of either attempt would have finally put a Rockefeller in the White House. Ford’s appointed Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, had tried and failed to win the Republican nomination for president in 1960, 1964, and 1968.348
Nelson Rockefeller had been particularly close to the CIA. They worked closely together in Latin America, as detailed in the excellent book Thy Will Be Done. In fact, our tax dollars, which pay for the CIA, provided security vetting services to a Rockefeller-owned oil company in Venezuela. And The Rockefeller Brothers Fund helped pay for some of the CIA’s worst mind control experiments conducted by Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
And on September 18, 1975, Patty “Tania” Hearst, who had been kidnapped and seduced (the official story) or brainwashed (Hearst’s claim) into becoming a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was arrested for a robbery in San Francisco after having been kidnapped the year before. Theories that the SLA was a false flag operation by the CIA to discredit the antiwar left were already in circulation, and with some evidence to support them.349
But if the panel had been distracted, Sirhan’s neighbor Rose “Lynn” Mangan was fixated. She spent years studying the ballistics evidence in this case. Mangan had befriended Harper, who spurred her curiosity when he told the 1975 panel was a “fix” and that the bullets had been switched.
Mangan carefully traced the chain of possession of the Kennedy neck bullet and the Goldstein bullets. She noted when Noguchi recovered it, he had marked the base with his initials and the last two digits of the autopsy case number, TN31. The marking of TN31 on the bullet appears in both the autopsy report and the Grand Jury transcript of Noguchi’s testimony.
But when Mangan looked at the markings Patrick Garland had carefully detailed in his inventory list for the panel, she found the “Kennedy” bullet the panel examined was not from Kennedy at all, as the base was marked “DWTN.”
One of the reasons to believe Wolfer, and not anyone else, switched the bullets was this marking. Wolfer apparently created the photomicrograph using this bullet. It makes sense he would put his initials on it. It doesn’t make sense he wouldn’t have noticed that someone else had put his initials on that bullet.
Similarly, Mangan traced the Goldstein bullet through the LAPD’s records and found the doctor who removed it had marked it with an “X” on the base. Mangan even called the doctor, and he confirmed to her personally that he had put an “X” on the base of the bullet.350 But the “Goldstein” bullet the panel examined had no marking on its base, so a “6” was added to mark it for the panel’s purposes. It strains credulity that someone was able to successfully turn an “X” into a 6 such that no one noticed. Clearly, both the “Kennedy” and “Goldstein” bullets the panel examined were not the Kennedy and Goldstein bullets originally recovered.
When Mangan first told me the bullets had been switched, I didn’t want to believe it. Such an act was such an incredible cheat, so egregious. So I reviewed the documents in SUS and retraced Mangan’s information to confirm this for myself. Yes, Noguchi had listed his marking of TN31 in the autopsy report. Yes, he had confirmed that marking at the Grand Jury hearing. Yes, the panel’s version of that bullet was marked DWTN, not TN31. Yes, the Goldstein marking of X by the doctor was right there in the SUS files. But the panel’s bullet had a 6 where the X should have been. Mangan was right about the markings at all points. That meant the bullets the panel had investigated were not the bullets they had been purported to be. Someone, most likely Wolfer, had faked the bullets and then took a photo of the fake bullets with a built-in lie.
Intelligence operatives well know that if you bury one lie inside another more easily exposed, most people stop digging when they hit the first lie, figuring that was the thing you were trying to hide, so the second lie remains protected. The lie was that it was a match between the Kennedy neck bullet and a test bullet. But the deeper lie was that they weren’t even the original bullets. Since neither bullet matched its original markings, we can only accurately say the bullets in the photo were a fake “Kennedy” bullet and a fake “Goldstein” bullet.
That meant the panel’s findings were irrelevant, and that the taxpayers paid for a sham investigation, with one exception. Even the substituted bullets had not matched Sirhan’s gun. Why?
Under questioning in connection with the Wenke panel’s findings, Wolfer stated that he had tried but failed to get the original Sirhan gun back for further testing, as it was securely in the custody
of the Grand Jury.351 So clearly, Sirhan’s gun had been sealed into the evidence envelope and sent to the Grand Jury before the bullet mismatch was discovered.
Supporting this is the evidence envelope Garland recorded for the gun. The date on the envelope is June 5, 1968, and the charge was (correctly, at that time) listed as 217 P.C. (the penal code for attempted murder). Kennedy did not die until the wee hours of June 6, after which all records refer to the charge as 187 P.C., the code for homicide. Since Wolfer did not receive the Kennedy neck bullet to compare to other bullets until June 6, he could not have found the discrepancy until then. In other words, he probably would have simply refired Sirhan’s gun to make all the fake bullets, but he was unable to because the evidence was no longer in his possession, a good argument for getting the gun away from the police and the crime lab as soon as possible in any shooting.
Could there be an alternative explanation? Dan Moldea has suggested that Patrick Garland’s inventory list wasn’t meant to list every marking on the bullet. But that is simply not true, as the carefully detailed and extensive notes Garland made demonstrate. That was the precise reason for the exercise of creating the inventory—to ensure all bullets were fully and completely identifiable as that bullet and no other bullet.
In addition, the end of a .22 bullet is tiny—about the size of the eraser on a Number 2 pencil. If TN31 were inscribed there, it was likely with TN on top and 31 underneath. Similar, DWTN would likely have been inscribed DW on top and TN underneath because it’s tough to even write that small on the base of a bullet. So it’s not possible the bullet read DWTN31 and that Garland had just missed the 31 at the end. And this would have required Noguchi to have left room for Wolfer to add a “DW” before his own remarks.
Switching bullets is a completely illegal act of evidence tampering, but that misses the point. Bullet switching should have been unnecessary. If Sirhan had been the lone shooter, all the bullets should have matched each other and the gun. There would have been no reason to switch any bullets if Sirhan had fired them all. The very fact that any had been switched indicates at least one of them came from a gun other than Sirhan’s.
Mangan had clearly shown me that two bullets had been switched. But five of the seven panel members had matched three bullets together (that they couldn’t match to Sirhan’s gun). That left only two possibilities: either the police had in their custody a gun, not belonging to Sirhan that had been used to shoot Weisel, from which fake Kennedy and Goldstein bullets were later fired, or the Weisel bullet, like the Kennedy and Goldstein bullets before it, had also been switched.
Technically there was a third possibility—the bullets really didn’t come from the same gun, and the panel was mistaken in saying they did, which would also prove a conspiracy. Let’s rule that out, even though several on the panel had ties to the National Security state. Let’s assume these seven experts were honest and factual with the evidence they were presented, and that it was the evidence itself that wasn’t factual. Why switch the bullets at all if not to make a match?
So which was it? Did the LAPD have a gun that had been used in the pantry in its possession, or had the Weisel bullet, too, been switched? I dug into the records to find this answer for myself.
In Patrick Garland’s bullet inventory, the Weisel bullet had “LM” inscribed in its base. One of the panelists, however, noted what appeared to be an “O” on the base of the bullet following the “L” and “M.” In the evidence log, the Weisel bullet was recorded as showing a marking of “LMO” on it. So it was at least possible that the Weisel bullet hadn’t been switched.
But was that the original marking? Examine the evidence log page pictured in Figure 3. Note how the bullet marking “LMO” seems to have been added after the fact between the words “marked” and “for ID.” The writing is not in the same size or style as the text immediately before and after it. Note how the “M” is written differently from the other “M”s in this paragraph, suggesting it was entered by a different hand.
Figure 3: Evidence log page except for the Weisel bullet
Source: Scan of the evidence log page from the California State Archives
Note a similar mismatch of M’s at the bottom of this same page, as shown in Figure 4. The “M” of LMO is angular, but the “m” of “marked” is rounded.
Figure 4: The bottom of the Weisel bullet evidence page currently in evidence
Source: Scan of the evidence log page from the California State Archives
In addition, the archivist who sent me a photo of the actual log page at my request noted this page “appears to be a copy as the bottom portion of the document is cut off at the left signature.” Why would someone store a copy of the original instead of the original, unless the point was to hide an alteration?
In addition, if the Weisel bullet had not been switched, one would expect to find a straightforward chain of possession. Instead, this bullet has an inexplicable gap in its evidentiary record.
The SUS summary of Dr. William Neal’s interview states that the Weisel bullet was retrieved by Dr. Neal at 2:30 A.M. on June 5 and handed over to Detective Leroy Matthew (L.M.) Orozco of the LAPD an “identifiable lead bullet” on the same day, June 5. There are multiple records indicating Orozco picked up the bullet on June 5. But the bullet wasn’t logged into evidence, as item 56, until 5:25 P.M., June 6.
The June 6 date is not a mistake. The evidence log pages before and after this entry were also dated June 6 and in chronological order by time. And another bullet Orozco retrieved, the Kennedy neck bullet, which wasn’t pulled from Kennedy’s body until June 6, was logged several items earlier, as item 53 with a note that Orozco received it at 9:30 A.M. Orozco signed both sheets—which contained both the date and time of recovery—of the sheets with the Kennedy neck bullet and the Weisel bullet.
Did Detective Orozco hold back the bullet until he could compare it to the one from Kennedy? Had he turned it in on the 5th and the Property Division just sat on it? Could it be that the evidence booking person was simply backlogged? That doesn’t seem to be the case, as the Kennedy neck bullet was recovered at 8:40 A.M., given to Orozco by Jordan at 9:30 A.M., and logged into evidence a few minutes later at 9:45 A.M., which makes sense given how close the coroner’s location was to Parker Center (a five-minute drive). Everything about that chain of possession seemed legitimate. There was even a note in the evidence log that the crime lab had been contacted so a bullet comparison could be made with the suspect’s gun. That is unlikely. I’ve talked to a few officers from the LAPD and all have assured me that evidence—even in large crimes—is logged immediately and a receipt issued.
Why then did the Weisel bullet, which Orozco appears to have had in his possession before the Kennedy neck bullet, not get entered into the log until 5:26 P.M.? Did Detective Orozco realize that a conspiracy had transpired? Might he have been able to tell by a quick visual comparison that the bullets did not match? Is that why the (apparently substituted) Weisel bullet was logged into evidence about an hour and a half into a five-hour silence in Wolfer’s log entries on June 6 between 4 P.M. and 9 P.M.? Did Wolfer fire a new bullet that became the “Weisel” bullet?
There is no log entry to show that Wolfer ever compared the Weisel bullet to test bullets or to the Kennedy neck bullet or any other victim bullet, for that matter. I believe from sheer curiosity, at the very least, he would have. But what if all that needed, too, was an eyeball comparison to note that they didn’t match?
Similarly, Wolfer received the Kennedy bullet from “Rampart Detectives” at 3:15 P.M. At 4 P.M. he indicated “End of watch.” Then, five hours later, he logged “9 P.M. – Comparison of Kennedy and Goldstein bullet.” The only entry following that was his 1 A.M. “End of watch” recorded (again) on the morning of June 7.
Given that the photomicrograph the panel received was dated June 6, it appears that someone, likely Wolfer, knew that the actual Kennedy and Goldstein bullets didn’t match, so he fired two bullets from a gun—and it c
ouldn’t have been the Sirhan gun since it had gone to the Grand Jury—and pretended those were the Kennedy bullet and the Goldstein bullet, and then took a picture of them to spring on unsuspecting investigators in some distant year to come. Remember that test bullets had also already been given to the Grand Jury, so those couldn’t have been substituted without showing a direct mismatch. The Weisel bullet may also have been forged at this time.
Understand that the Warren Commission’s investigation was being questioned seriously at this point in time. Anyone with a brain had to know the assassination of the President’s brother would also come upon some vigorous scrutiny within a few years. What better to have in your back pocket than evidence that convincingly, at least to the undiscerning, seemed to dispel notions of conspiracy?
Wolfer may well have ate and napped or run errands during the 4 P.M. to 9 P.M. gap. But he did have five hours to create new bullets, and he had access to another gun, a gun “with a very close serial number,” H58725.
If you believe H58725 was just a typo of the Sirhan gun number of H53725, consider the following two pieces of correspondence Lynn Mangan dug up. When Luke McKissack was Sirhan’s attorney for a time, he wrote in a letter to Sirhan:
In case you heard about the fact that the ballistics expert in your case used a different gun for [trial] testimony which was subsequently destroyed and the LAPD is investigating this fact, this is correct, and we are following up on that point.352
And a phone report from Captain G. Campbell of his call with Grant Cooper in 1971 reads:
Cooper stated that to the best of his recollection the gun used by Sirhan to commit his crime was not produced during Wolfer’s testimony in the trial ….353
If Wolfer were going to forge bullets from another gun, it makes sense he’d try to get a gun with a “very close serial number” to Sirhan’s so that the markings would be very similar. While any gun barrel could have anomalies that made it unique, you would think two guns manufactured close to each other in sequence would be more similar in terms of the barrel than those manufactured far apart in sequence.