A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  EVERY TIME I SIT IN A COURTROOM FOR JURY DUTY, THE JUDGE admonishes us not to dismiss circumstantial evidence, but to treat it the same way we would direct evidence. Several judges have given an example of seeing someone come in from the outside carrying an umbrella and wearing a wet raincoat. It would be reasonable to assume the person had come in from the rain. While it was possible that the person had jumped, fully clothed, into a shower to construct an elaborate ruse, without any additional evidence, the reasonable conclusion was that the person had just come in from the rain. You didn’t have “proof” that the person had been out in the rain, but you could make a logical deduction based on the evidence presented.

  In this case, ask yourself if it is reasonable to believe every witness to evidence of conspiracy was simply mistaken? That not one of the additional bullet holes reported in the pantry were actually bullet holes? That although the shooter had to have been behind Kennedy and all the witnesses who saw both Kennedy and Sirhan during the shooting put them from three to six feet apart, all the witnesses were mistaken? It’s possible that all the other witnesses were randomly mistaken all in the same direction, but it is not reasonable.

  Each judge has also admonished the would-be jurors that we were to decide for ourselves what the facts of the case were. We were to examine the evidence and testimony presented to determine the facts of the case. The judge stressed it was not the number or quality of witnesses that mattered. “If you believe a single witness,” one judge told my October 2016 jury pool, “then you can consider that a fact. You don’t judge the evidence by the number of witnesses that report the same thing. If you believe even one of them, that is enough for you to consider their statement a fact.” Witnesses never have perfect recall of a crime. But in the pantry, enough of them told a consistent picture that what happened starts to become clear. Each judge also made clear that a person’s position in life does not matter and should not even enter our minds. A criminal could be telling the truth. A policeman could be lying.

  The “official” eight bullets

  ONE BULLET LODGED IN EACH OF THE FIVE SHOOTING VICTIMS NOT named Kennedy in the pantry. Kennedy had been shot three times under the arm—one bullet lodged at his spine in the back of his neck, one bullet passed through his chest and exited, and one entered the back of his coat and exited the shoulder without breaking skin. One more bullet entered his head. Seven bullets were recovered from the six victims. But there were three holes in the ceiling that had already been photographed with probes running through them. So Wolfer, the LAPD criminalist, had to do some gymnastics with the bullets to make it so 12 points of entry could be explained by a mere eight bullets. Wolfer claimed that the bullet that exited Kennedy’s chest went into the ceiling space and was lost. Wolfer posited that one of the bullets entered the ceiling, hit something, and then ricocheted back down to hit Elizabeth Evans in the forehead. Wolfer claimed the bullet that passed through Kennedy’s jacket entered Paul Schrade’s head, even though Paul Schrade was behind Kennedy when they were both shot and the bullet passed in a back-to-front trajectory through Kennedy. That’s how 12 entry points became eight bullets.

  But there was a serious problem, as we’ve already seen. All the witnesses who saw both Kennedy and Sirhan during the shooting put Sirhan in front of Kennedy. Several witness saw Kennedy put his hands up in front of his face. Clearly, Kennedy himself perceived a threat from the front because he threw up his hands to shield his face. It’s possible that all the witnesses—including Senator Kennedy himself—were wrong on every piece of evidence that put Sirhan in front of Kennedy, but for that many people to be wrong all in the same direction is neither logical nor reasonable. What is reasonable is to believe that the police and other governmental authorities, having uncovered a conspiracy that put them in a difficult position, chose instead to bury it. And the cover-up started taking place nearly immediately, as we saw when Inspector Powers told Sergeant Sharaga to stop seeking other suspects.

  Five more bullets for a total of 13

  WE’VE SEEN HOW WITNESSES WITH EVIDENCE OF CONSPIRACY were coerced into changing their statements to conform to the official story of Sirhan as the lone assassin. And most physical evidence that indicated conspiracy was either destroyed or altered. But there is one piece of evidence that just couldn’t be explained away, even by the Kranz Report. It concerned Los Angeles County’s Chief Administrative Officer, Harry L. Hufford, so much that he wrote the FBI about it in late 1977.

  Hufford understood that the excuse that pantry carts had caused the holes in the doorframes would not stand up to historical scrutiny. And any actual bullet hole in the pantry was conclusive evidence of a ninth bullet, one more than Sirhan’s gun could hold, which necessarily proved at least two shooters. The pantry doorframes had four holes from something that had passed through the doorframe paneling and directly into the doorframe posts. And the official FBI record of the crime scene indicated these were “bullet holes.”

  Author Dan Moldea has suggested that the only reason these holes were photographed and labeled by the FBI “bullet holes” was because a kitchen worker said these were bullet holes. This despite Moldea’s interview with Maynard Davis, a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office (LASO), who discussed a photo in which LASO’s Walter Tew had circled and initialed a hole in the doorframe behind molding that had been pried off. Davis told Moldea that was “SOP” (standard operating procedure) “for officers to identify bullet holes in that matter.”363

  But even if we accept Moldea’s strange theory that the FBI would send an amateur photographer who couldn’t tell a bullet hole from a dent to the scene of Senator Robert Kennedy’s assassination, a case the FBI knew would be scrutinized closely for the next several decades, would that make the kitchen worker’s identification any less credible? If at your workplace, after a shooting, fresh holes appeared on a doorframe that you walked through many times a day, wouldn’t you be highly qualified to state those were bullet holes formed during the shooting? You might never have seen a bullet hole in your life before or been any kind of an expert. But you would surely recognize a fresh hole where none had previously existed.

  To orient you to the items Hufford refers to in his letter, review Figures 5 through 8.

  Figure 5: Drawing of the bullet holes in the pantry doorframes after the wood facing on the doorframes was removed

  Source: Drawing by Lisa Pease

  Figure 6: Drawing overlaid with FBI photos E1 and E2 (after the wood facing on the doorframes was removed). Note that a member of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office told Dan Moldea it was “standard operating procedure” to circle and initial “bullet holes.”

  Source: FBI photographs E1 and E2 from the California State Archives overlaid on a drawing by Lisa Pease

  Figure 7: Drawing overlaid with FBI photograph E3 and Coroner’s photograph

  Source: Portions of FBI photograph E3 and a photo from the SUS files showing Thomas Noguchi pointing at the two holes in the center of the doorframe, both from the California State Archives overlaid on drawing by Lisa Pease

  Figure 8: Portion of the FBI document showing the captions for photographs E1 through E4 (pictures E1–E3 are shown in the pictures above)

  Source: FBI files, Los Angeles Field Office #56-156: Sub File X-1, Volume 1, p. 48.

  To reiterate, E-1 and E-2 were photographs of the two bullet holes in the left-hand side of the doorframe. E-3 was a photograph of two different bullet holes in the center doorframe.

  On November 2, 1977, Hufford, with investigator Robert H. Jackson, tried to quietly close the door on this most obvious evidence of conspiracy. Hufford and Jackson wrote the following to Special Agent Hal Marshall in the FBI’s Los Angeles office on Wilshire Boulevard:

  In the course of an inquiry by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors into certain aspects of the physical evidence at the Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassination, questions have arisen concerning certain FBI photographs. These photographs, purportedly taken by
Special Agent Greiner and numbered E-1, E-2, and E-3 and E-4, are captioned “bullet holes.”

  If these were, in fact, bullet holes, it could be inferred that more than one gun was fired in the pantry during the assassination. Mr. Allard Lowenstein, Ambassador to the United Nations, among others, has maintained that a possibility exists that another assassin was present. Mr. Lowenstein and other critics of the official version have referred to the above photographs as representing the official opinion of the FBI inasmuch as the captions are unequivocal in stating “bullet holes.”

  If the captions had said possible, probable, or apparent bullet holes, one could assume that no precise examination had taken place at the time the photographs were taken. However, the captions would lead one to believe that a determination had been made by someone with the requisite knowledge and skills.

  The dilemma we are faced with is that the photograph captions are being used as evidence of the official FBI position in the absence of any other official stated position.

  If more bullets were fired within the pantry than Sirhan Sirhan’s gun was capable of holding; we should certainly find out who else was firing. If, in fact, the FBI has no evidence that the questioned holes were bullet holes, we should know that so that the air may be cleared.

  It is therefore requested that the official position of the FBI regarding these bullet holes be relayed to this office.364

  Hufford and Jackson had essentially passed the buck from the County to the FBI, putting the Bureau in an untenable situation. The FBI would either have to deny the expertise of their own employees and go along with the lie, or they’d have to tell a most uncomfortable truth: that the FBI had evidence of a conspiracy but hadn’t pursued it. And if they told that truth, the FBI would also be in the position of challenging not just their partners at the LAPD and in the County of Los Angeles but the CIA, which had been acting as a covert partner in the assassination investigation, as you’ll see later. From that point of view, the obvious choice seems to be the one they took: silence. Professor Philip Melanson and other researchers have sought in vain an official response to Hufford’s request, but none has ever surfaced.

  By this point, it must be clear to any honest observer that at a bare minimum, 12 bullets had to have been fired in the pantry. Even if we accept Wolfer’s scenario that seven bullets entered which victims and the eighth was lost in the ceiling space, we are still left with these four additional “bullet holes.”

  That these were bullet holes was confirmed by a video I stumbled upon while looking for something else in UCLA’s video archives. In a piece of silent footage from a news organization, taken in the pantry in the early hours of June 5, a hand points to two holes in the door post.365 Leaning next to the post in the video is a piece of the southwest doorframe’s molding that had been pried off the post. This is the molding the LAPD later destroyed, so I paid close attention to the few seconds of video showing it. To my knowledge, this is the only picture or video of the doorframe molding in existence. After pointing at the two holes in the door post, the hand pulls the molding before the camera, positions it so the outer portion faces the camera, and points to a third dark spot that also could be a bullet hole with a bullet still in it, as the finger points there for some time, indicating it is important. It is clearly not a nail, as the nails in the doorframe are visible in the film along the edges of the wood paneling, and stick out through the back. This dark spot is near the center of the wood, not where a carpenter would place a nail, and whatever is there does not stick out the back. There does not appear to be a hole in the same spot on the wood post behind it, which is also visible in the video as well as in LAPD and FBI photos, so if it were a bullet, it penetrated into the ¾-inch frame, but not into the door post behind it.

  Although the possibility of another bullet there is intriguing, what matters is right below that third spot. Two small holes appear in the molding that exactly correspond to the two larger holes in the pantry doorframe. In other words, the video shows clearly that something small enough to be a .22 caliber bullet passed through the wood molding of the doorframe and into the post behind. The holes in the door post are bigger than the holes in the paneling that had been on top of the post, indicating someone had dug bullets out from those holes, enlarging the holes in the process.

  See Figures 9 through 11 below to see screenshots captured from the author’s licensed copy of this video.366 In Figure 9, note the paneling removed from the doorframe. That wood was ¾” thick, according to the records of Thomas Kranz’s investigation. Neither a pencil nor a pantry cart could have penetrated the tiny holes in the wood paneling to create the larger holes found in the doorposts. And whatever entered the posts had to first have passed through the tiny holes in the doorframe. The size of the holes indicates the holes were enlarged, which makes perfect sense if bullets were dug out of them.

  Figure 9: A hand points to a possible bullet located in the wood paneling pulled from the southwest door jamb. Circled below the hand are the entry points for the two bullets that penetrated the southwest door jamb.

  Source: UCLA Film & Television Archive

  Figure 10: In the bottom left photo of this composite image, while the finger points toward a third spot on the wood paneling, two spots below it directly line up with the two holes in the door jamb. The top photo on the left shows the paneling that was pulled away from the southwest door jamb leaning against the door jamb from which it was pried.

  Source: Composite of images from the UCLA Film & Television Archive and a drawing by the author.

  Figure 11: Composite of screenshots from the news footage with the drawing and FBI photos. The top left photo shows the doorframe post. The bottom left photo shows the 4'×6' wood paneling that was pulled from the southwest door jamb. The FBI photos E1 and E2 show the exposed door jamb after the wood paneling was pried off.

  Source: Composite of images from the UCLA Film & Television Archive (left) and California State Archives (right) and a drawing by the author.

  Clearly, there were at least two bullet holes in the left side of the southwest pantry doorframe, bringing the provable count of bullets to ten. Let’s ignore the possible additional bullet the finger was pointing at for now.

  Regarding the two bullet holes in the center post, in addition to the FBI photos and captions, we have the word of FBI Special Agent William Bailey of the Los Angeles office. After Bugliosi gave a talk about the Charles Manson case at a college in New Jersey, Bailey, who was then an assistant professor of political science at a nearby college, asked to speak privately to Bugliosi about what he had seen in the pantry. Bailey signed a declaration for Bugliosi stating he and other agents had seen “at least two small caliber bullet holes in the center post of the two doors” in the pantry. “There was no question in any of our minds as to the fact that these were bullet holes and were not caused by food carts or other equipment in the preparation room.”367

  So we have strong evidence that at least 12 bullets had been fired in the pantry. If you add in the bullet that so interested Congressman Lowenstein and Vincent Bugliosi, found by Officers Rozzi and Wright in the doorframe behind the stage, which, being “uphill” from the pantry would have been in line with a shot fired from the pantry, the bullet count reaches 13.

  Thirteen shots on tape

  AN AUDIO TAPE REDISCOVERED BY BRAD JOHNSON, A CNN INTERNATIONAL producer, was made at the time of the shots by freelance reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski, who had inadvertently left his tape recorder on after Kennedy’s speech. Johnson sought an audio expert to analyze the tape, and found Philip Van Praag, who had written a book about magnetic media and knew a great deal about various recording equipment. Van Praag analyzed the tape with the help of a computer and found not only 13 distinct shots on the tape but at least two times where two shots came too close together to have been fired by a single gun. After a witness screamed and the overall pantry noise level rose, there may have been more shots, according to Van Praag, but the computer was unab
le to distinguish them after that point due to the overall noise level.

  Other audio experts have disputed Van Praag’s findings, and Dan Moldea in particular has ridiculed the notion that 13 shots were fired, but given the rest of evidence, it appears Van Praag’s estimate was, if anything, too low, not too high.

  Evidence of more than 13 bullets

  IN ADDITION TO THE FOUR “BULLET HOLES” IN THE FBI’S PHOTO captions already accounted for, a statement in the description of photograph E1 suggests what would be a 14th bullet: “The portion of the panel missing also reportedly contained a bullet.” The “portion of the panel missing” appears to refer to the paneling shown in the bottom left corner of Figure 11 that had been attached to the leftmost or southernmost door post, which had been pried off after the shooting, likely by the Sheriff’s deputies, who were the first on the scene, presumably so they could dig bullets out of the posts behind the paneling.

  The pantry footage appears to show this 14th bullet still in the 4×¾” molding. The hand in the pantry footage pauses at the dark spot in the paneling above the two holes that line up with the holes in the post as if to indicate something important. There is no corresponding hole in the door post like there is for the two holes below this dark spot. That the molding was still present indicates the pantry film was taken before the FBI made its photos, because the doorframe molding pieces had been removed by the time the FBI photographed the pantry. It’s also possible that “the portion of the panel missing” refers to the wall covering, a portion of which had been inexplicably cut away. This is visible in the full “E-1” FBI photo (not shown here).