by Lisa Pease
Wayne may also have hinted at the assassination to someone other than Daniel Hall and his companions. There are several references to the “electrician’s booth” and whether or not Wayne was in it. The police initially thought Hans Bidstrup had talked to Michael Wayne, not Sirhan, in his sound booth. But there are clipped, unclear references that suggest someone had hinted about the upcoming shooting to someone other than Bidstrup in the electrician’s booth. On August 12, the LAPD re-interviewed Wayne on this point, but Wayne “was uncertain and did not recall” if he had been in the electrician’s booth prior to the assassination.
Whether he was or wasn’t the person Daniel Hall spoke to, and whether he did or didn’t say something indicating foreknowledge of the assassination in the electrician’s booth, Wayne provably lied to people all over the hotel that night, raising the very real prospect that he was in some specific way involved in the assassination story.
After visiting the Rafferty Room, Wayne went upstairs to the Kennedy suite, a floor he could not have gotten onto without the press badges. The hotel staff wouldn’t even give out the floor or room number, as it was supposed to be for Kennedy, his associates, and press only. Wayne, however, had no trouble not just getting up there but taking advantage of the situation once he did. At the open bar there he ordered a free scotch and soda. Once there, he recognized Les Gotman, a Kennedy youth coordinator who worked at Kennedy headquarters. Wayne knew exactly where Gotman’s desk was, there—“immediately to the right and in the corner as one would enter the Kennedy headquarters.”
No one asked Wayne why he had taken note of Gotman’s desk. Gotman himself does not appear to have been interviewed. And at no time did Wayne claim to be a volunteer for Kennedy, which is usually the only reason non-staff people enter a political candidate’s campaign headquarters. In fact, Wayne’s politics were the polar opposite. The fact that he knew the man’s name and the precise location of his desk suggests Wayne may have cased the Kennedy headquarters on more than one occasion, which might account for Sirhan sightings at the Kennedy headquarters at times Sirhan could not possibly have been there. In the final days of the campaign, someone had stolen Robert Kennedy’s itinerary, listing the times and locations of all his appearances. One of the people in the campaign office had seen someone who looked like Sirhan there and suggested Sirhan had stolen it. Perhaps Wayne had been the culprit.
On Kennedy’s floor, Wayne talked to a campaign staff member about the special PT-109 pin that he had gotten from Senator Kennedy and talked the staff member into giving Wayne a second PT-109 tie clasp that this staffer was wearing. Most of the people who wore these pins did so in remembrance of John Kennedy. Not Wayne. As you will see, he was of the opposite political persuasion. But looking like a Kennedy loyalist may have gotten him access to places like the pantry.
Was Wayne’s role at the Ambassador Hotel that night to pinpoint Kennedy’s location and flag others to get into position when Kennedy went down to give his speech? The plotters clearly would have wanted to kill Kennedy after his speech because at that point, the cameras would be off. So the plotters would have wanted to know when Kennedy was going to speak so they could plan accordingly. The polls in California closed at 8 P.M. The absolute earliest Kennedy could have given a speech would have been shortly after 8 P.M. But the race was close, so it was a safe bet he wouldn’t talk until much later in the night. In addition, the results came in more slowly than ever before due to the newly installed punch-card-counting IBM machines a block away. Not knowing for sure when Kennedy would reach the Embassy Room, the plotters would have wanted someone on the Kennedy floor to alert them when he started to move. Was that Wayne’s role? Wayne stayed on the Kennedy floor until Kennedy went down to the Embassy Room to give his speech.
When the Kennedy party descended to the Embassy Room floor, Kennedy and his closest associates got in the freight elevator that emptied into the kitchen and Wayne took a separate elevator with the press (thanks to his press badges). The elevators arrived at nearly the same time. As Kennedy walked through the pantry on his way to the stage to give his victory speech, Wayne stopped him and asked Kennedy to autograph one of the two posters he had obtained earlier.
According to Wayne’s account, he waited in the pantry for Kennedy to come back through, but Judy Royer had shooed him out of the area. Wayne told the FBI he left the pantry via the double doors at the east end of the pantry, but as soon as he saw Royer leave, he went back into the pantry.
Robert Klase was also there when Royer asked Wayne to leave the pantry. He told the LAPD that Wayne had told Royer “he had part of an autograph of Senator Kennedy and the Senator told him he would finish signing it when he came back through the kitchen. Judy made him leave the pantry area at that time.” Presidential candidates don’t sign “half” an autograph and promise to “finish signing” a poster. Did Klase misspeak, or had Wayne lied?
A note in one of Wayne’s LAPD interviews states, “Mr. Wayne was brought to our attention by Mr. Charles Winner, who stated a Michael Wayne had spoken to him, in the kitchen area, prior to Senator Kennedy being shot.”430 Charles Winner worked for a PR firm that was supporting Hubert Humphrey, and Wayne tried to get Winner to give him a Humphrey tie clasp. Why did Winner mention Wayne at all? We can’t know, because that part of Winner’s interview does not appear to exist anymore. The only mention of it is in Wayne’s, not Winner’s, file. But a clue may exist in the lie detector questions proposed for Wayne. The first question to be asked was, “Did you have prior knowledge that there might be an attempt on Senator Kennedy’s life?” This question was not included during the polygraph exam Hernandez gave Wayne. Whether to an electrician, Winner, or someone else, it’s clear the police had reason to believe Wayne had made a comment to someone that appeared to indicate foreknowledge of the assassination.
Someone who was not Wayne may have used his name in the pantry, or Fred Droz talked to two men and got the names mixed up, or the LAPD put some false information in an interview report, and these options are not mutually exclusive. Droz told the LAPD that while he was in the pantry he “had a conversation with Michael Wayne. He was wearing a beige, gold sweater and light pants and a Kennedy tie clasp.”431 But this statement about a man in a gold sweater is nowhere to be found on the tape of Droz’s interview provided to me by the California State Archives, while everything else in the summary of the interview accurately reflects Droz’s taped comments. So either: 1) the tape was edited to exclude this, 2) Droz said this after the tape had been turned off, or 3) Droz never said any such thing, and the LAPD put a deliberate fiction in the record, possibly to attempt to explain away the man in the gold sweater that Sandra Serrano had reported seeing with Sirhan and the girl in the polka dot dress. If Droz talked to anyone in a gold sweater, it was definitely not Wayne, as pictures taken just minutes before and after this conversation show Wayne in a white button-down shirt with the collar open, covered by a dark sweater and light-colored trousers. But if Wayne were part of the plot, someone else involved might have used Wayne’s name instead of his own to deflect suspicion. In the Watergate episode, E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis shared an “Edward Hamilton” alias. E. Howard Hunt and James McCord shared the alias “Eduardo” in the anti-Castro community. This is a common intelligence technique to make it harder for others to identify separate individuals in an investigation.
Robert Healy, a reporter for the Boston Globe, told the FBI that although he didn’t see Sirhan at any point that night, during Kennedy’s speech he met someone whose actions he found worth noting. He was approached from inside the Colonial Room by a young white male, 19 years old, 5’8”, 135 pounds, with curly dark brown hair. His skin was dark, “possibly of Mexican extraction.” The man had a PT-109 clip and wore several badges, including a McCarthy badge and a Peace badge. Despite the man wearing several badges already, Healy said the man was “very persistent” about wanting to get Healy to give him the press badge Healy was wearing around his neck. Healy was surprised
that the man had been able to get into the Colonial Room because “security men were positioned at the room’s entrance.”432 Healy’s description closely matches Wayne. But Wayne didn’t need more badges at that point, and as you’ll soon see, his claim to be a collector appears phony. Was he asking for co-conspirators? Was this someone else?
Wayne told the LAPD he was in the pantry, standing between the ice machine and the east end of the pantry, when the shots started. Wayne heard noises he did not immediately realize were gunshots and then heard someone say “He’s been hit.” He suddenly became “aware of the shots. I turned and saw him beginning to move, and men falling on top of a man in a blue shirt.” At this point, Wayne ran out of the pantry. Did he hit Virginia Guy on his way out, or did someone else?
As the shooting began, Virginia Guy saw someone she assumed was Sirhan running toward her. Guy was a reporter for Flare News in Washington, DC. Due to the crush of people when Senator Kennedy entered the pantry, rather than walking backward to take Kennedy’s picture, as she had planned, she walked away from Kennedy. When she heard what “sounded like firecrackers … like little pops,” she turned back to see “people running” and Kennedy “slumping” to the ground.
Then she saw someone “running toward” her who hit her in the mouth with something so hard it chipped her tooth. “He had something dark in his hand,” Guy said. “This man was apprehended by Mr. Barry and some other men,” Guy said in her June 6 LAPD interview. But in her first interview on June 5, just hours after the shooting, Guy said something different.
“The person was coming toward me and went some way in front of me, and I don’t see how he could have done it. But anyway, somehow he like passed in front of me and it was during that time and [sic] I was knocked out of the way and spun around.”
The transcript of Guy’s interview makes it clear this could not have been Sirhan. She heard something she didn’t recognize at first as shots—just little popping sounds. But she turned back to look and saw Kennedy “slumping” to the ground. Someone came hurtling toward her, as she told Sergeant Jack Chiquet:
Guy: [I]t seemed like he passed in front of me, and it was during that time, and I was knocked out of the way and spun around.
Chiquet: By whom or what?
Guy: I thought it was his hands, because it broke my tooth. But I remember that there was something in his hand, but, you see, at that point I wasn’t thinking of him being the suspect …. I was just thinking this was some person hurdling [sic] toward me, and I thought they were trying to get me out of the way, because by this time … it was registering that there was something very radically wrong, but he hurdled [sic] toward me and it was like he was, you know, it seemed like he was hitting at [me when he] probably was pushing … me out of the way. And I remembered something that appeared to my sight to be dark in his hand.433
She said the man “appeared to be Latin,” about 22 years old, not “terribly tall” and he looked “crouched in a running position.” But Sirhan had stood still, fired, and then been apprehended by Uecker according to DiPierro and Urso as well as Uecker. At no time had he been free to run through the pantry to Guy’s position, which she said was at least 10 or 12 feet in front of Kennedy.
Clearly, Guy saw someone who was not Sirhan running toward her, who pushed her out of the way. She was about 10 to 12 feet in front of Kennedy at the time of the shoots. That put her several feet from Sirhan, and he had no such wingspan, even if he was wrestling with people and being thrown around.
Chiquet asked if Guy could say “whether or not it was a gun” and Guy replied, “Well, now that I think back on it, yes, I would say it was a gun.” She recalled that the dark thing in his hand may have been “more like silver.” Guy was certain Sirhan was the guy who hit her in the mouth, but so many people mistook Michael Wayne for Sirhan she may well have been describing Michael Wayne. And the person she had seen had come diagonally from Kennedy’s right side—where Wayne described he had been. Sirhan was to Kennedy’s left.
Guy saw something else interesting. As she tried to recreate what she had seen, she said, “I do remember somebody moving off to the right [of Kennedy—her left, as she clarified]. I seem to get an impression of gray. … [I]t was just a blur of gray moving off to the right ….”434 Thane Cesar, the guard who had holding Kennedy’s right elbow as Sirhan stepped out and fired, was wearing a gray uniform.
By his own admission, Wayne ran out of the east end of the pantry, which would have put him directly in line to collide with Virginia Guy. But this brings up a curious point. No one reported seeing a man carrying a poster or his book in his arms in the pantry at the time of the shooting. If Wayne had all this on him, wouldn’t Guy have noticed and commented on this? Given how much Wayne was carrying a few minutes later when apprehended and arrested, one wonders why no one saw that unless Wayne had set those down somewhere, either inside or outside the pantry, when Kennedy crossed the pantry for the last time.
A few witnesses reported seeing a man who wasn’t Sirhan or Michael Wayne running out of the pantry with something that looked like a mostly concealed gun under something draped over his arm. But that’s getting ahead of the story.
After he left the pantry, according to Wayne, he picked up several phones in the Colonial Room but couldn’t get a line. Oddly, not one of the many press people in the room reported seeing Wayne come in and pick up the phones. Not one of them reported a problem getting a line out. Several heard the shots in the pantry and ran across the hall, so you’d think if someone came running into the press room and started picking up phones, someone would have asked Wayne what had happened. And if Wayne were truly trying to help Kennedy, wouldn’t he have asked for help? Wayne said told Sergeant McGann in his first LAPD interview he didn’t want to cause a panic.435 But if the choice is between alerting everyone so everyone can try to help at once, or try to reach the police by yourself, which makes better sense?
Wayne said he next rushed across the Embassy Room foyer to the Gold Room. As Wayne ran across the foyer, according to Wayne, people asked him what had happened and he shouted “I can’t say!” Why couldn’t he say? If his point was to call for help for Kennedy, why not tell everyone you encountered that Kennedy needed help?
Wayne claimed that in the Gold Room, he asked a busboy where a phone was but the busboy didn’t know. Finally, according to Wayne, he ran up to a “Negro security guard,” and asked him where a phone was. Augustus Mallard, an African-American guard for Ace Security, was stationed at the Venetian Room at the southeast end of the lobby. According to the FBI’s interview summary of Wayne:
The guard wanted to know why he wanted to phone, and he replied that Kennedy had just been shot, and he wanted to summon aid. The guard appeared to Wayne not to believe what he had heard, and he handcuffed Wayne and took him to some security office in the hotel. Wayne, at this point, was very emotional and crying. The Security Guard advised him of his legal rights, and he remained in the security office about an hour ….436
Mallard, who handcuffed Wayne, had a very different account of what happened. According to Mallard,
After midnight, while on duty outside the Venetian Room, Mallard observed an individual come crashing through the crowd, pushing people down, and he heard shouts of “Stop that man.” Upon hearing these shouts, Mallard apprehended the individual, who was the source of most of the confusion in the hallway outside the Embassy Room and handcuffed him. Mallard advised the individual turned out to be a reporter for a Los Angeles paper who was trying to get to a telephone and that after he turned this individual over to the Los Angeles Police Department officers, he went home.437
Wayne was not a reporter for any Los Angeles paper. Either Wayne lied to Mallard, Mallard lied or misremembered, or someone else had lied or misspoke by volunteering this inaccurate information.
Los Angeles Times photographer Steve Fontanini saw Wayne leave the Colonial Room and run out a short hallway (the hall between the pantry’s east end and the Colonial Room’s
west end) and thought he might be a suspect getting away, so he ran after him. Fontanini was joined in the chase by Mallard. Fontanini said Wayne ran toward the Lautrec Room restaurant, which was south of the Colonial Room and east of the Gold Room. “At this location,” Fontanini’s LAPD interview report states, “Mr. Wayne ran into a large mirror and was caught by the guard.”438 A young Rafferty supporter named George Clayton also gave chase with Fontanini and tackled Wayne.
So Wayne apparently lied to his FBI interviewer about the way he was apprehended, claiming he ran up to the guard to ask for help when in fact he was apprehended trying to escape the people chasing him. FBI investigators are federal officials. It’s actually a very serious crime to lie to a federal official. Wayne could have been charged on that count alone.
And these were hardly Wayne’s only lies. Earlier in the night, Betty Barry, wife of the actor Gene Barry (who was also at the Ambassador), noticed a young man with dark curly hair who “was carrying what appeared to be campaign posters or literature.” He was trying to get into the Embassy Room from the main entrance. A “Negro uniformed policeman,” likely Mallard, “would not let him in.” The young man then asked Mrs. Barry if she would help him get into the party in the Embassy Room. When she turned him down, Wayne asked her if he would go to Dick Kline and tell him that Wayne was there, saying “Kline would get him in.” Mrs. Barry found Kline, who was Kennedy’s Los Angeles area press secretary, but “Kline said he did not know a Wayne and took no action to aid Wayne.”439 In addition, Judy Royer, who knew Wayne by face, if not name, was working with Kline. If Kline and Wayne were in cahoots, surely Kline would have told Royer not to shoo Wayne from the pantry. Clearly, Wayne lied about Kline as well.