by Lisa Pease
A: Yeah.
Q: Did you ever see the face, connect the face with the arm and the head and the gun?
A: Oh, yeah, I saw it afterwards.
Q: But that was after you ducked and went over?
A: Yeah, when I was down here, I could see him very—
Q: What was he doing then?
A: He was still shooting the gun.
Q: Oh, okay. In other words you saw—you could identify that he was the one that had the gun?
A: Sure, he still had the gun in his hand because then they jumped on him … You could tell that it was him. I mean I could tell you right now that, you know, the first shot I couldn’t tell; but after the crowd started to move and I went down, then you could see him standing right there.
Sirhan had a long-sleeved jacket on, and it is possible he could have pushed up his sleeves before firing. But no other witness reported him having a bare arm when firing. By his own account, Lubic just assumed Sirhan and the gunman were one and the same. It was a logical assumption—Sirhan was provably firing, so it was natural to assume the guy on the table had been Sirhan. But as we just saw, the credible reports from Lisa Urso, Ed Minasian and Karl Uecker dispute this. Uecker talks about pushing Sirhan up against the table when he put him in a headlock after the second shot. He couldn’t have pushed Sirhan up against the table if Sirhan was already on the table. The four witnesses who saw Sirhan at the moment of the initial firing, Lisa Urso, Ed Minasian, Karl Uecker and Vince DiPierro, all have Sirhan on the ground in front of Kennedy when he began firing.
Perhaps the most straightforward witness to a table-top shooter was Harold Burba, the man who testified about Michael Wayne, thinking he was Sirhan, during the Grand Jury. Burba told the FBI in a formal, signed statement:
I heard what sounded like three shots fairly close, followed by several more at random intervals. They sounded like they came from a cap pistol. I also saw what appeared to be flashes from the shots. At this time I had the impression of someone standing on a table and firing a gun at a downward angle.390
George Green, in his live, on-camera televised interview on CBS immediately after the shooting, also said unequivocally the shooter was standing on the table. I must emphasize again: all the witnesses who were able to ID Sirhan correctly as a shooter in the pantry put him on the floor, not on the table.
Ronald Panda saw something similar. “It seemed to him that the suspect was standing on something and he was pointing down.”391 Panda was just days shy of his 13th birthday. When I reached him in 2012 by phone, I asked the now significantly older Panda if he remembered saying the shots had come from an elevated position. “Yes, yes I do,” he told me. I asked why he thought the shots had come from an elevated position. Besides having that visual impression, he told me there were other indications. For example, a person next to him had been hit in the upper part of the body, but that person had appeared surrounded such that the shot could only have reached the person via a downward angle.392 Panda, Lubic and others clearly thought this was Sirhan. But Sirhan was not on any table or tray stacker at the time of the shooting.
Rhodes-Hughes told me the guy in the powder-blue coat she had seen on the table sort of swirled down off the table, turning and covering his face as he rapidly descended from the table. Rhodes-Hughes, like Lubic, had not seen the face of the person on the table. Dick Aubry also had the impression that someone had, as he put it, “jumped” off the table and into the crowd:
A [Dick Aubry]: I saw two people standing, looked like there was standing on top of the seat, you know how people get on top of things?
Q [Sergeant Calkins]: On top of the table?
A: I thought he had jumped—I thought he was just a guy that had jumped down on, you know, fell into the crowd. But then I thought he was being pushed, just everything came into my mind.
In his earliest interview, Aubry made reference to the possibility of an accomplice, even while discounting it:
Q: [D]id you get any indication at all, think about this before you answer it, any indication at all there was anybody helping this assailant that shot the Senator? Was there anybody there? Did you get any indication? Stop and think real—
A: Not—Booker Griffith [sic – should be “Griffin”] asked me, should we take after the other cat like this, and my first impulse was to say “yes” but I said—I had come out of the press room then though.
Q: By then it was all over?
A: [Unintelligible, then] oh yes. But Booker said, “Did they get the other guy?”
When Aubry was interviewed again by SUS on July 19, 1968, Aubry’s interview summary noted Aubry “noticed a man kneeing [sic—kneeling] on the metal table. He was getting down as I passed him. I bumped his knee.” According to an SUS progress report’s summary of one of Aubry’s interviews,
As he [Aubry] walked through the kitchen, he observed a man on the table kneeling; described as a male Caucasian, 25 to 26, small, dark sport coat. This person was getting down from the table as Mr. Aubry walked past him. He was approximately eight feet in front of the Senator when he heard a shot, a pause, then five shots.393
In the July interview, Aubry passed the man getting off the table, then heard a shot and turned back to see Kennedy falling. “Two girls in Kennedy dresses brushed by me from between the tables,” Aubrey added. He heard only six shots in total: “one shot, a pause, and then five rapid shots.”
On NBC’s live footage, many witnesses gave indications of two or more gunmen, comments that were not adequately reflected in the FBI’s and LAPD’s records or later press reports. And several of them thought someone was shooting from an elevated position. As NBC unit manager Jim Marooney reported during the first hour after the shooting:
I’m getting this from several sources… there were at least five shots fired by a man standing on one of those service trays, which stood about 50 inches off the ground, and he fired down into the Senator. When I finally got up to that point, there was a body behind the Senator, and the Senator was lying in a pool of blood, conscious. … While this was going on, there were at least ten people holding this man … At the same time, someone else was trying to get out the other end, with people running, screaming and chasing after him. I don’t know what happened to the one who was running in the other direction but the man who was held against the tray was taken into custody.394
Vince DiPierro had reported seeing Sirhan standing on the service tray with a girl in a polka dot dress “holding” him before the shooting, but DiPierro saw him get off the tray stand and walk over to the north side of the room near the steam tables, where Lisa Urso saw him and Karl Uecker captured him. There was only one service tray rack reported in the room, and it was positioned at the southeast end of the ice machine, not near the north side where Kennedy was shot. If someone were firing from the service tray rack, it was not Sirhan. If Marooney had confused the steam table with a serving tray, his witnesses were still not describing Sirhan, as Sirhan was on the floor before he was grabbed and thrust onto the table by Karl Uecker and the rest.
Seven years after the shooting, the San Antonio Express published a drawing of the pantry that included a caption that read “Gunman stood here on the table.” According to the official record, not one gunman was seen on the table until Sirhan was pushed there, and he was not standing there but being piled upon by several men. But as we just saw, there were several witnesses who thought there was a shooter on the table. From where did the San Antonio Express of July 22, 1975, get that information?
Another NBC newsman reported that busboy Juan Romero “said that a man whom he described as short, about 5’4”, about 35 years old, with curly brown hair, jumped in the air, and fired his handgun down into Kennedy.” That description does not match Sirhan. But it did match someone others reported seeing in the pantry, as you will see in the next chapter.
How could someone firing from atop a steam table go unnoticed by all but the small number of witnesses just mentioned? A friend did a magic trick
for me once in a restaurant that may have provided the answer. He took a paper napkin, wadded it up, hid it in the palm of his hand, waved his hands around, then opened his hands—both of them. There was no paper in either hand, and he had no sleeves. I felt I’d watched his hands carefully the whole time. Where did it go?
A waiter came by and my friend asked me to stand to his side as he did the same trick for the waiter. After taking the paper, he waved his hands above his head and just threw the paper backward to get rid of it. “But that’s so obvious,” I said afterwards, asking how I could have missed that. He explained that peripheral vision doesn’t extend very far upwards of our normal line of sight. He’d simply put his hands at the highest point above his head, out of my peripheral vision, and disposed of the napkin.
By putting a shooter on the table, you’d almost guarantee that few, if any, witnesses would see the shooter. People were looking straight ahead or down at their feet. Few would have a reason to look up as they crossed the pantry. From a conspirator’s point of view, that would be an excellent place to fire from, especially if you could put a shooter there who looked like Sirhan and wore a similar color.
Hidden guns
MOST PEOPLE WHO LOOK INTO THIS CASE ASSUME IF THERE WERE other guns in the pantry, more people would have seen them. Therefore, since only Sirhan’s and Cesar’s guns were seen (by all but Shulman, who was certain he had seen at least three guns out), there couldn’t have been more guns in the pantry. But there are many reasons other guns wouldn’t have been seen. What if the gun was in, say, a rolled-up poster? What if the gun were hidden under a busboy’s towel? Hidden in a pocket? Fired from within a purse?
What if the gun were disguised in another object? The CIA and other intelligence services around the planet have developed all kinds of guns that do not look like guns. I saw a gun disguised as a cigarette case at the CIA Museum in Washington, D.C., and you can find several variations of a gun hidden in a suitcase on the Internet. The Navy, in World War II, produced a gun hidden inside a glove, triggered by pushing a plunger on the weapon up against the victim’s body.395 In the CIA’s now declassified manual of trickery and deception, the CIA’s staff magician John Mulholland wrote:
The objective of the trickster is to deceive the mind rather than the eye. … Even when eyes are misled, the memory may hold something that will permit working out how the mystery was accomplished after it is over. When the mind has been deceived, it is almost impossible to work backward and discover the deception.396
Guns can also be hidden in cameras. In 1960, a report from the Swiss branch of a Russian trading company alleged that former Gestapo agents, “posing as newspaper men,” planned to assassinate the Soviet leader Khrushchev with “a gun hidden in a camera or microphone.”397 The famed filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock used such a device in his 1940 film Foreign Correspondent. A man posing as a news photographer kills a dignitary using a gun that looks like a big flash camera. Nina Rhodes-Hughes told me the shots she heard sounded like camera light bulbs popping, and she was not the only witness to say that. Might one of the cameras near Kennedy have concealed a gun?
Hidden or disguised guns aside, several witnesses did see not just other guns but other gunmen and reported them, as you’ll see in the next chapter.
What did Sirhan fire?
THERE’S ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH THE SHOOTING THAT HAS, TO date, not been adequately addressed. If you were planning a conspiracy, would you even want Sirhan to be firing real bullets? Sirhan was not a marksman. A few days at a firing range is not enough to qualify one as an expert. If you were an assassin, would you take a gig if you knew some guy off the street was going to be shooting in your direction? One could argue that the assassination sponsor may simply have not told the shooter behind Kennedy that other people would be firing. But that scenario makes no sense. If you were planning an assassination and knew you’d only have a few seconds to get the job done, would you put one shooter in a position to kill the other shooter before your ultimate target was taken out?
No. A two-shooter scenario is not a reasonable explanation for the evidence. What does make sense, however, maps closely to what witnesses both saw and heard.
A surprisingly large number of witnesses in the pantry thought Sirhan was firing a cap gun, or that balloons were breaking or firecrackers going off. You don’t need a cap gun to fire “caps,” as Turner and Christian explained in their book. You could use “slugless cartridges,” cartridges designed to carry paper that flash-burns, not bullets.
Very few people identified the initial sounds as gunshots. It came to them more as a realization as people were hit and blood appeared.
Robin Casden told the police, “It sounded like cap gun shots to me.”398 Richard Drew, a local reporter, told the LAPD, “I heard firecrackers, looked up and saw smoke.”399 Evan Freed heard a “pop noise” like a balloon, then the sound of firecrackers going off.400 Richard Tuck “heard the sound of what sounded like cap pistols or firecrackers.”401 Virginia Guy, another reporter, thought they sounded “like firecrackers. They sounded like little pops.”402 David Jayne thought the noises were “a flurry” of what “sounded like a string of firecrackers—no pause in the sequence.”403 Irwin Stroll, one of the people wounded during the pantry shooting, remembered seeing the Kennedy procession of people stop. Then “there was [sic] six firecrackers, and I remember screaming out ‘Firecrackers,’ and then there was smoke.”404 Bob Funk, part of CBS’ television crew, had followed Kennedy off the stage, although they were pretty far behind him. “At approximately the swinging doors he heard what sounded like paper cups popping when someone stomps on them. He first realized it was gunfire when he saw plaster fall from the ceiling where a bullet hit.”405
Booker Griffin heard two sounds he didn’t think were shots, and then more than eight shots.406 A number of qualified witnesses had similar reactions. Even when people knew intellectually they had to be gunshots some were still confused by the sound. One of these was Fred Dutton, who told the LAPD’s Captain Hugh Brown,
My main impression was less the shots than what a small noise they made. As you probably heard, that day before we had big firecrackers thrown onto the car in San Francisco, and that really—I was in the infantry in World War II and I know gunshots, but that was something scary, those damn things. My first reaction was a gun, and then, well, it couldn’t be. It’s not loud enough. And then I accepted that it was.
Remember how judges routinely admonish would-be jurors that if they believe even one witness, that is enough to establish a fact in a court of law? There are two extremely credible witnesses who thought Sirhan was firing blanks or a cap gun, who were very familiar with guns.
Norbert Schlei had received a law degree from Yale, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. He had been a naval officer before being appointed Assistant Attorney General of the United States by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. He was the principal author of the Civil Rights Act. Schlei was a very intelligent, respected person, who was in a position to know about guns. In an on-camera interview broadcast soon after the shooting by local Los Angeles station KTLA, Schlei reported, “It didn’t sound like gun shots to me, and I’ve heard a lot of gun shots. It sounded like a cap pistol or somebody cracking a balloon.”407
The other highly qualified witness on the point of cap guns was Rafer Johnson, who, as an Olympic Decathalon champion, knew well what a fired cap or blank looked and sounded like. So we should give considerable weight to what Rafer reported right after the shooting. “I thought it was a balloon. I heard the first pop and then I heard about three or four just right after another….I looked, and then the second shot, I saw smoke and saw like something from a—like a—the residue from a bullet or cap, looked like a cap gun throwing off residue.”408
What kind of residue does a cap gun throw off? Paper residue. A blank or slugless cartridge will give the same result. In both cases, the flame of the paper burning as it comes out of the muzzle is visible, as are tiny bits
of paper. Karl Uecker, the maître d’ who caught Sirhan in a headlock within the first two or three shots, described seeing nearly exactly that to the Grand Jury: “I saw some paper flying. I don’t even remember what it was, paper or white pieces of things.”409
Supporting the notion that Sirhan was firing blanks was Dick Aubry: “I just saw this blue…like a flash, like maybe something from a firecracker…flash, like a little spark from a….it was just the flashes I saw, I thought somebody threw a firecracker right at him….”410
Several other witnesses also thought Sirhan was firing was a cap gun or blanks by the sound alone. Dick Tuck heard “what sounded like cap pistols or firecrackers.” He heard at least five shots and then a commotion broke out.411 Valerie Schulte thought the gun sounded like a “cap gun.” Richard Lubic told the FBI he heard two shots “which sounded like shots from a starter pistol at a track meet.”412 And this is still not a complete list of such statements.
The simplest explanation for this is also the best explanation: Sirhan was actually firing blanks, not bullets, in the pantry. This explanation fits everything witnesses saw, felt and heard. And if Sirhan were firing blanks, everything else starts to fall into place.
Knowing Sirhan was going to be firing blanks, other conspirators simply had to wait until Sirhan fired his first shot. Then, while everyone else in the pantry froze in shock and fear, assassins moved quickly to get the job done.
This scenario fits all the known evidence. Sirhan was like a magician’s assistant, providing the distraction by firing blanks. All eyes went to his gun, leaving the actual assassins to do their job. The actual shooters could have used suppressors and kept their weapons well hidden, perhaps in rolled-up posters or under a newspaper or a busboy’s towel. With several people firing at once, it became impossible to tell how many shots are fired. That explains why the shots sounded like firecrackers to such a large number of witnesses.