A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  Witnesses described seeing gunmen other than Cesar and Sirhan, and these are just a few of many such statements in the record:

  “He saw a man with a gun step out from behind a wall and then he heard a shot. … After this first shot, the crowd moved back towards the pantry doors in one wave. Then he heard at least eight shots.” – SUS interview of Ronald John Panda, June 8, 1968

  “The guy with the gun could have left. No one seemed to pay any attention.” – Darnell Johnson to LAPD, 7/24/68

  “My God, he had a gun and we let him go by.” – Joseph Klein, referring to a man leaving the pantry in a hurry while Sirhan was being subdued, to LAPD, 7/3/68

  Dr. Marcus McBroom, a psychologist who was one of Kennedy’s surrogates on the trail, told a reporter at the Los Angeles Sentinel “that he had the distinct impression of a second gunman brushing past him at the same time Sirhan was being pounded into submission by Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson.”382 McBroom stated in an LAPD interview that although he couldn’t see the face of the gunman during the shooting, he saw that the gun was in someone’s left hand. Sirhan was right-handed, and the witnesses who identified Sirhan as a gunman said he held the gun in his right hand.

  In 1986, McBroom told Paul Schrade about a man who ran out of the pantry with a gun under a newspaper, and how a man in a “pale blue security uniform, a private person” had a gun out “which appeared to be smoking.” No guards had pale blue uniforms. But the Ace Security guards had pale gray uniforms.

  Frank Burns could have been describing two or even three different shooters when he described what he saw as he followed Kennedy into the pantry:

  As I walked behind him through the kitchen, my eyes were fixed on his back. There were people about me and the crowd seemed to build as I caught up with the Senator. I was standing behind Mr. Kennedy when I heard the noise. It sounded like a string of firecrackers. I focused on an arm and a gun just to my right. It seemed to be close to Senator Kennedy. I felt a burning sensation on my left cheek, then I saw Senator Kennedy falling, turning to his left and holding his arms up. The suspect moved forward into my full view. His arm was extended and aiming the gun slightly downward, firing it. The shots stopped at that time. A lot of people got hold of him.

  How did Burns get a burning sensation on his left cheek from a shooter to his right? You have to be very near a gun’s muzzle to get powder burns. This would make more sense if there were a shooter to his left that had not pulled his focus because he was focused on the arm to his right. And from Burns’ description, Sirhan moved “forward” into Burns’ view as Burns was “fixed” on Kennedy’s back, so he could not have been the shooter to his right or left. It sounds like Burns assumed the shooter to his right was the same as the man in front of him with a gun, a logical assumption only in the absence of the rest of the data. But given that we know Kennedy was shot at near contact range behind the right ear and under his right arm, the person who shot Kennedy would indeed have been to Kennedy’s right, not where Sirhan was. Burns may have been sandwiched between two other shooters while noticing Sirhan in front of Kennedy.

  Similarly, Boris Yaro was behind Kennedy when he heard the first two shots (after which Uecker and Minasian say Uecker grabbed Sirhan). But Yaro saw “two or three people that had been blocking my view of the Senator disappear, leaving me with a full view of what was happening,” a statement Yaro immediately clarified by adding:

  The Senator and the assailant were little more than silhouettes, but the Senator was backing up and putting both if his hands and arms in front of him in what would be best described as a protective effort. The suspect appeared to be lunging at the Senator. … I didn’t realize it was a gun until he started firing again—this time, I could see the flashes from the short-barreled muzzle—I heard no sounds from either man. I felt powder from the weapon strike my face—I knew it was a gun then. I thought I heard more than three shots, in retrospect I know it is more.383

  Before continuing, the counterargument is that Kennedy was not facing Sirhan but instead facing to the north, exposing his right side to Sirhan. Indeed, Thomas Kranz mistakenly wrote in his report, immediately after quoting Ed Minasian, that “all of these witnesses put Sirhan’s firing position to the right and slightly forward of Kennedy.” But in Minasian’s earliest interview, taken in the wee morning hours after the shooting, Minasian said this:

  I looked up and someone reached around from the—from the front, it would be to the Senator’s left as he was facing him … Then at that time I saw Karl grab him and then I jumped across the table and grabbed him …. [Emphasis added.]”384

  A few sentences later Minasian again reiterated Sirhan came at Kennedy “from his front left.” Minasian saw Paul Schrade fall, and then Senator Kennedy fall. (Several witnesses say Schrade fell before Kennedy, but a few said Kennedy fell before Schrade. Clearly, they went down nearly simultaneously.)

  Kennedy himself obviously felt a threat from his front, because he threw his hands up to shield his face. It makes no sense that, facing friendlies he had just shaken hands with, Kennedy would, for no apparent reason, throw his hands up to cover his face. It makes no sense that he could have thrown his hands up at all if he had already been shot. Clearly, Kennedy saw Sirhan shooting at him from the front and threw up his hands in an instinctive motion to protect himself.

  So how many shooters were there? How did they escape detection? Or did they? Clearly, people did not just brandish guns. Guns were hidden in some manner, and silencers may have been used to mute the number of gunshots heard. Even so, as you will see in the rest of this chapter and in the next, at least four different gunmen were reported in the pantry: Sirhan, Cesar, a third man on a table who escaped during the shooting, and a fourth man behind Kennedy who ran a gun out of the pantry during the shooting. In the next chapter, you’ll meet a possible fifth gunman as well. Remember that once Sirhan fired his gun, all eyes in the room went to his gun, and other gunmen could have been firing without drawing attention. In addition, if they all fired two or three shots at once, it would have been difficult to tell that multiple guns were being fired. It would have sounded like a machine gun, or firecrackers, just as witnesses described.

  A few witnesses saw a gun close to Kennedy’s head, but none of those witnesses could identify that gunman as Sirhan. Some witnesses reported seeing a hand with a gun reach out from between two cameramen, which is similar to how Jack Ruby approached and shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the police garage in Dallas. He had hidden behind two cameramen and then jumped out when Oswald got close. The pantry shooter’s hand was visible, but the face was not, behind the two big men. While witnesses assumed this was Sirhan, Lisa Urso, who was within touching distance of Sirhan, right behind him as he pulled a gun and fired, reported no such cameramen in Sirhan’s vicinity. Who was hiding between cameramen?

  The man to Kennedy’s right and the man on the table

  NINA RHODES-HUGHES TOLD ME WHEN I INTERVIEWED HER IN 2012 that she felt there were two shooters, but from what she told me, she seemed to have described, quite unwittingly and without her knowledge, three shooters.

  Rhodes-Hughes was featured on CNN in 2012 for claiming to have heard 12 to 14 shots in the pantry and for having said that after she told this to the FBI, they altered the shots she heard to eight in her interview summary. Rhodes-Hughes’ statement, which she reiterated vigorously to me when I interviewed her in Los Angeles in 2012, was dismissed by a magistrate of the court in response to a filing by Sirhan’s lawyers because there were no contemporaneous records from 1968 of her saying she heard more than eight. But given how records have been provably inaccurate in other areas of this case, as well as destroyed, it would not be out of character for evidence of conspiracy that had not yet been made public to have been removed from the record. It also would not have been out of character in the 1960s for someone in the FBI to have altered her statement.

  Rhodes-Hughes told CNN and, separately, me, that she heard shots coming from her right, even as she
watched a shooter in front of her. She didn’t see the shooter to her right. But she felt from the sound that shots were also being fired from a position to her right.

  Ronald Panda may have seen this shooter. A few days short of 13 years old, Panda had been a young volunteer for Kennedy. He had been backstage when Kennedy spoke and followed Kennedy into the pantry. He was only 5'2", so he had to jump up to see over the backs of the people around him. Just before he heard the first shot, Panda saw “a man with a gun in his right hand step from behind a wall.”385 The “wall” Panda referred to was likely the dividing wall between the west end of the pantry and the ice machine. There was space between that wall and the ice machine where someone could easily have hid, stepping out when Kennedy got close.

  When Panda first contacted the police after seeing Sirhan on TV, he’s quoted as having said, “I saw him but I didn’t see the gun in his hand.”386 Presumably, this statement referred specifically to Sirhan.

  If you put Panda’s two statements together, Panda apparently saw a man with a gun who wasn’t Sirhan step out from behind a wall. Panda knew which one was apprehended because he followed the police as they escorted Sirhan from the hotel. He never said he saw Sirhan step from behind the wall. Panda also appears to have seen Sirhan’s gun separately from seeing Sirhan, as he described seeing the flame of a gun fired at Kennedy. As discussed earlier, such a flame comes from the burning of paper wads or blanks, not the firing of bullets.387 So he appears to have seen Sirhan without the gun at some point, the firing of Sirhan’s gun at a time when Sirhan’s face was blocked from his view, and a gunman who stepped out from next to the ice machine, which would have put that gunman to Rhodes-Hughes’ right as she stood behind Robert Kennedy.

  When I talked to Rhodes-Hughes shortly after the CNN story aired, she added important information not present in the CNN segment. She was convinced that Sirhan, in a powder-blue suit, was firing while standing on top of one of the steam tables, after which he turned and jumped down off the table in one motion.

  Rhodes-Hughes was not the only one to make this assertion. Other witnesses had claimed someone was firing from an elevated position, with a knee or body up on the steam table. But this could not have been Sirhan. Four credible witnesses put Sirhan on the floor next to the steam table, not kneeling or standing on the steam table. If there was a shooter on the table, and the evidence is strong that there was, as you’ll see, it could not have been Sirhan.

  Sirhan was wearing a light blue velour shirt with a zipper at the neck and blue jeans, not a suit. But several witnesses described a suspicious tall man in a light blue suit in the pantry as well who left the scene in the company of a girl in a polka dot dress. Whatever the case, Sirhan could not have been on the table, because four credible witnesses, Lisa Urso, Ed Minasian, Karl Uecker and Vince DiPierro, saw Sirhan standing on the floor when the shooting began. He was only on the table after being pushed there by Karl Uecker. He was never witnessed by anyone standing and firing on the table.

  Lisa Urso saw Sirhan walk across the pantry from the south side to the north side, in front of Kennedy, and then reach across his body as if to shake his hand before firing at Kennedy instead. She was directly behind Sirhan and close enough to touch him and put Sirhan at least three feet in front of Kennedy, firing slightly upward, which would make sense, as Sirhan was four inches shorter than Robert Kennedy.

  Karl Uecker felt rather than saw Sirhan move in front and to the left of him, sliding between Uecker and the steam table, and grabbed Sirhan in a headlock after what Uecker thought was the second shot or the third at the latest.

  Edward Minasian saw Sirhan reach around Uecker’s left side and fire, just as Urso and Uecker described, at which point Uecker and then Minasian grabbed him.

  Vince DiPierro described seeing Sirhan cross from the tray stand at the east end of the ice machine, where he had been held by the girl in the polka dot dress, to a spot near Kennedy, where reached out as if to shake Kennedy’s hand and then fired instead.388

  I queried Rhodes-Hughes extensively on this point, and she said she had not seen the face of the man on the table, only the blue coat. From her comments it was clear she had only assumed this was the same person as the suspect. Evan Freed, in his taped interview, saw a man in a bright blue sport coat in the pantry that looked remarkably like Sirhan, but was significantly taller. Might Rhodes-Hughes have assumed this was the same man when in fact they were two different people? Rhodes-Hughes was adamant to me about the shots having come from an elevated position, and that is reflected in her contemporaneous FBI interview:

  When the subj [Nina Rhodes] reached the swinging doors to the kitchen from the kitchen anteroom she saw sparking flashes red and orange and heard loud explosions exactly like firecrackers. The subj stated these flashes were approx.. 12 to 16 inches above the level of Senator Kennedy’s head. The subj stated she heard 8 explosions in rapid succession (like a string of firecrackers) [Nina disputes this sentence, saying she heard many more than eight shots – LP]. The subj stated that after approximately the third explosion she observed the Senator start to twist and fall to the floor … The subj stated the flashes were still coming from the high elevation where she first saw them. When the flashes stopped she saw what appeared to her as the back of a man wearing a powder blue jacket with his head ducked forward so his head wasn’t visible to her. This figure was elevated and in the same position and location where she had seen the flashes come from. The subj. stated the person in the powder blue jacket must have been standing on something as he was much taller than the other people in the room and could be seen by the subj over the heads of numerous people in front of her. … The subj stated the Senator was to the right of center in the room and the flashes came from the left of center in the room.

  Richard Lubic thought he saw the shooter with his knee up on the table, but he never saw Sirhan’s face until Sirhan was apprehended. He, too, appeared to have simply assumed this was Sirhan. And Lubic’s statement was also captured nearly contemporaneously in an FBI Airtel from Los Angeles to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dated June 26, 1968. Lubic had entered the pantry just ahead of Kennedy, and was at Kennedy’s right shoulder when Kennedy stopped to shake hands. Lubic continued forward a step or two, and then:

  Lubic heard an unidentified voice saying “Kennedy, you son of a bitch,” and then heard two shots which sounded to Lubic like shots from a starter pistol at a track meet. Lubic did not identify the source of the voice and could not immediately determine the source of the pistol shots. He quickly noted, however, an individual with a gun. This individual was located on the left side of the corridor and had his knee on a small table or air conditioning vent and had lifted himself up on this knee to obtain elevation while shooting. [Emphasis added.]

  Lubic has no recollection of hearing the sounds of additional shots, but recalls seeing the gun and the arm of the assailant and noted the jerk of the gun and the arm apparently caused by the recoil action of this gun. Lubic immediately sought cover behind an ice machine or table in the corridor under the assumption the shooting would continue. Lubic observed the expression in Kennedy’s eyes and assumed he was mortally wounded.389

  After the last sentence quoted above, nearly all of the next 27 paragraphs over six pages are redacted. A few redactions show Lubic’s name and a few words before returning to the full blackout. What had the FBI hidden behind those redactions? Possibly the other gunman Lubic had identified in the pantry, the guard with his gun pointed at the floor, where Kennedy lay, instead of at the suspect. As we saw earlier, Lubic had told the police that he saw a guard with his gun drawn and pointing at the floor and told David Talbot, the founder and original Editor-in-Chief of Salon.com, that the police told him not to talk about that to anyone. There is no mention of this in his LAPD interview, but I suspect it may be present in the redacted portions of the FBI airtel regarding Lubic’s statements.

  Lubic’s later statements continued to support Rhodes-Hughes’ contention that someo
ne was firing from atop or nearly atop a steam table in the pantry. In his August 9, 1968, interview with Sergeants Collins and MacArthur, Lubic thought he saw the shooter on the table as Kennedy turned to “reach across to get that kitchen guy,” meaning, to shake the hand of Juan Romero or Jesus Perez. “That’s what went on,” Lubic said, adding, “Sirhan was on this table,” before clarifying that he never saw Sirhan’s face. And what he saw didn’t match Sirhan’s description:

  Q [Collins]: Well, when were you first aware of Sirhan? Did you see him at all prior to the shot?

  A [Lubic]: No, I was aware of Sirhan when I looked up and saw Kennedy hit. …

  Q: In your original interview I think you said that you actually—you didn’t hear the flash but you heard the shot, and you thought you saw the gun?

  A: No, I could see the gun. I couldn’t see Sirhan’s face though. [Emphasis added.]

  Q: All right, now, when you could see the gun, there was obviously a hand holding it—

  A: Yeah, I saw this.

  Q: Could you distinguish any clothing on it or anything like that?

  A: No I—I think he—I think it was a bare hand. I mean, you know, I think he might have had a short-sleeved shirt on. I don’t think he had a long-sleeved shirt on or a jacket. I don’t know. It looked like he was from behind somebody. There was somebody standing up like this, see, so that to me it looked like he just had, you know, a hand over here. That’s why.

  Q: You say that you think he stepped from behind somebody?

  A: I think—my recollection was that he had one leg on that table like this, on this—one of these tables, because he seemed to be higher than anybody else, and he had a perfect view of everything. [Emphasis added.]

  Q [MacArthur]: You saw the hand out there, but you didn’t see the face, looked like it was coming over somebody?