A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  The man in the maroon coat

  SERRANO NEVER SAID THE MAN IN THE GOLD SWEATER SHE SAW on the stairs was wearing a blue coat, so we have to assume that, after leaving the kitchen, the girl went one way and the tall man another. Sandra Serrano saw a woman in a polka dot dress and a man in a gold sweater run out the back fire escape after the shooting. Both of these people had to have run right by the man in the maroon coat who appeared to be holding a radio to his cheek as witnessed by the wives of two television producers.

  Serrano had reported hearing six sounds she assumed were backfires from a car until she learned of the shooting. The police conducted tests to show she could not have heard any gunshots from her location. But what if the man in the maroon coat who appeared, according to a witness, to have a radio, was near the outside door? What if she heard the shots over his radio? What if he was their contact at the southwest exit? That might explain why the girl was already shouting “We shot him” before Serrano asked “Who did you shoot?” Maybe the girl was telling their contact in the maroon coat that the operation had been successful. Was the maroon-coated man another helper, making sure the southwest fire escape exit remained open all night, listening to events by radio or coordinating with the team? Someone had to monitor that door to ensure the conspirators could get in and out from that exit. That would explain why the man turned to the two wives of NBC executives to say, “you have seen me here all night,” as if trying to establish an alibi.

  The man in the gold shirt

  SERRANO WASN’T THE ONLY ONE TO SEE A MAN IN A GOLD TOP with Sirhan and a girl in a polka dot dress, as we saw earlier. Jeanette Prudhomme, Irene Gizzie, Kathy Lentine and Katherine Keir all saw a male who looked Latin or Hispanic in a gold-colored top with light pants in the company of Sirhan. The man, like the woman in the polka dot dress, caught their eye because he was not dressed appropriately for the event.

  Keir had been standing outside the Sunset Room, which was below the Embassy Room at the south end of the hotel when she saw a young white female “dressed in a polka dot dress, black and white, run from the Sunset Room and down the stairway. The young female was yelling, ‘We shot Kennedy.’”553 As we saw earlier, Keir had also seen Sirhan, or someone who looked just like him, in the company of a man in a short-sleeved, buttoned-down “goldish-colored shirt.”

  When I talked to Keir in 2016, she confirmed this to me:

  What I remember is my best friend and I were there, and I had seen the woman in the polka dot dress prior to the running down the stairs thing. We had seen her with two guys.554

  The trio caught her attention because they were shabbily dressed. The guys were in jeans. But everyone else, Keir told me, was “dressed to the nines.” Nowadays, Keir said, at political events, people show up in jeans and a T-shirt. “But back then, it was a big deal. I remember some women being dressed in gowns.” She and her friend Jeanette Prudhomme (now Jeanette Graves) noticed these people. “We were just being little bitches,” Keir joked, explaining that she and her friend made catty comments about their shabby attire, as teenage girls sometimes do.

  “I remember walking around and then at some point seeing her [the girl in the polka dot dress] with the two guys. Again, it was the dress. The guys were in jeans and all the men were in suits.” I asked Keir if by “Victory Room” she meant the room where the victory party was being held, and she said yes. To my knowledge, there was no room officially named the “Victory Room” at the Ambassador Hotel. The private victory party was being held in the Embassy Room upstairs. The public victory party was being held downstairs in the Ambassador Ballroom.

  When I asked Keir if she remembered if the woman was running toward her or away from her, she said she had the impression the woman had been running parallel to her, which would make sense if Keir was standing on the platform outside the Sunset Room facing the 8th Street parking lot (which was up a hill and not well lit, from that angle.) If she were standing at the place where the stairs turned south after first running west, then the girl would have run beside her in a parallel direction.

  When she talked to the LAPD, Keir told me she didn’t feel that they were taking her seriously about seeing the girl in the polka dot dress: “I definitely had the impression that they didn’t believe anything regarding this woman in this dress.”555 Keir remembered being shown mug shots and identifying Sirhan as one of the two men she had seen.

  Keir told me when Brad Johnson, a CNN International producer, had contacted her, she had neglected to tell Johnson she was on medication and felt mentally “fuzzy.” She remembered reading a report indicating she and her friends had somewhat retracted their statements about the girl in the polka dot dress and told me adamantly that wasn’t true. When I talked to her at the end of 2016, she was off that medication and quite sharp. I pressed her on this point as well, saying the police considered her saying she heard the woman say “they shot Kennedy” in the second interview a retraction of her having initially reported the woman as having said “we shot Kennedy.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t there,” Keir asked, the annoyance palpable in her voice decades later. “And where would I come up with ‘we’?” Keir thought the normal thing would have been to assume the woman had said “they shot Kennedy,” not “we shot Kennedy.” Keir said she didn’t remember now, so many years later, exactly what the girl had said, but she urged me to weight her earliest statement over any subsequent one. I read Keir the document Johnson had probably shown her, where the police said she had “retracted” her first statement and said maybe the girl had said “They shot Kennedy” instead of “We shot Kennedy.”

  “What do you believe you heard?” I asked Keir.

  “I believe whatever I told them the first time,” Keir reiterated.

  Is it possible that Keir heard Serrano’s interview before she spoke to the police? No, Keir assured me. Keir and Prudhomme carpooled with a woman from the campaign. They left about 2 A.M., so they could not have heard Serrano’s account, which was broadcast live on television, not radio, at around 2 A.M.

  Other women

  CLEARLY THERE WAS A WOMAN IN A POLKA DOT DRESS WITH Sirhan and another man for much of the night. No wonder Inspector Powers felt she would have been a principal in the case. But this was not the only interesting woman in the case.

  There were at least five different women who seemed involved somehow in these events. The first was the woman described with Sirhan by Serrano and DiPierro in the company of Sirhan. The second one was the woman that John Fahey spent the day with, whom you’ll soon understand could not be this same woman. The third was a woman who had gone to Kennedy headquarters during the time Fahey was on the road who, like Fahey’s woman, seemed to know Kennedy was about to be killed. There was a fourth woman who was also wearing a polka dot dress, but who was skinnier and younger than the woman DiPierro and Serrano saw, and seemed to be in the company of a Sirhan doppelganger. Lastly, a woman in a polka dot dress was seen conversing with a fifth woman who did not seem to speak English (or French, Spanish, or German) but who may have been part of the plot.

  There was also a sixth woman who seemed to know something about the plot and tried to stop it, as you’ll see in a later chapter.

  Which of these women did Roy Mills and Bernyce Matthews see?

  Roy Mills saw Sirhan in a group in the kitchen area. Around 11:50 P.M., Roy Mills and his friend William Rands wandered into the pantry. Mills noticed a group in the employee dining area just before Kennedy came down to speak. Mills “observed five people in the open room to the left,” but maybe he meant right. If he walked east through the pantry, the employee dining area would have been to his left. Walking west, there was no open room to the left. Mills said that four of the people were males and one was female. Mills described one of the males as “a hotel employee,” but there is no indication of why he knew or thought that, although a clue may have come from his friend. Rands said Mills used to work at the Ambassador Hotel and knew his way around.5
56 Mills was a cook by trade and may well have recognized a kitchen uniform—or perhaps a busboy jacket. But the male Mills noticed the most was the short black-haired male in “very baggy pants.” The only thing he could remember about the girl was that she had a yellow press badge on. After the shooting, when Sirhan was brought out, Mills immediately recognized Sirhan as the man with the baggy pants in the group.557

  Mills remembered seeing Sirhan and a woman talking. “They did not appear to be together, only talking,” read his interview summary. All Mills could remember is her dress seemed to be one-piece. Mills was just outside the west end of the pantry when Kennedy walked past him heading into the pantry. Then Mills heard “8 or 9 shots in quick succession” and “thought there had been two guns.” When Sirhan was taken out, he recognized Sirhan as the person he had seen talking to the woman in the kitchen.558

  Like Mills, Bernyce Matthews saw someone she realized after the fact was Sirhan talking to a woman at the hotel. Around 9:40 P.M., Matthews noticed a man in his “late forties” standing about ten feet from her. “She noticed this man because he appeared very grim and didn’t seem to be enjoying himself.”559 “A few moments later,” Matthews noticed a woman whispering through her cupped hand into Sirhan’s ear as they stood outside the Embassy Room. The girl was talking and the man was nodding. She remembered this because around 10:15 P.M., she saw all three of these people together in the ballroom:

  The two men were squatting on the floor approx. 15 ft south of the entrance to the ballroom. The young girl was standing along approx. 5 ft north of the man. The older man was speaking to the younger man who was acknowledging his conversation by nodding. All three of these persons appeared unconcerned with the activities taking place around them.560

  Matthews described the girl as 18/20, 5’0”, possibly Oriental or Filipino, “very small,” about 90 pounds, with long, straight hair. She thought the Sirhan character was 5’8” or 5’9” because she herself was short (5’3”) and she had to look up to him. While the investigator added that he smelled alcohol on her breath at the time of the interview, which was many months after the event, Matthews had written the police months earlier, in September of 1968, saying she had seen Sirhan in the company of another man and woman. “I shall never forget the male in particular,” Matthews wrote, noting it was “the expression on the man’s face that drew my attention to the three of them.”561 This was clearly not the 5’6” girl with the “funny nose” and “good figure” others had reported with Sirhan. And this man may not have been Sirhan but one of his doppelgangers.

  The girl Matthews saw sounds identical to the girl in the polka dot dress Critcheley had noticed near the Rafferty party in the lobby earlier. He had described the girl as 18 years old, maybe 100 pounds, 5’2”, with straight dark hair.562

  Mary Estrada was interviewed by the LAPD on June 7 and August 22, 1968. In both interviews, she described a group of four males and one female not far from the lobby fountain around 11 P.M. on June 4. She identified one man as Sirhan from a police photo. One of the men was 5’3” and shorter than Sirhan. One was a bit taller than Sirhan but looked very much like him, according to Estrada. (This might have been the man shooting from atop the table that looked like Sirhan.) All were Caucasian and the short one had blond hair. (Could that have been Terry Frasier?) All were dressed too casually for the event. The female, who was wearing a polka dot dress, was leaning her head on Sirhan’s shoulder. The woman kept popping in and out of the “room to her left” which was likely the Embassy Room if she was on the south side of the lobby fountain. All of these people were talking to each other when Estrada noticed them. When she and her daughter left the hotel at approximately 11:45 P.M., these people were still leaning against a wall in the lobby. She noticed them because she had sat with her 12-year-old daughter on the edge of the fountain and expressed embarrassment that they were not more formally dressed. Estrada’s daughter then pointed out the group, which included Sirhan in a white T-shirt and jeans, to show they weren’t the only ones underdressed.

  In her June 7 interview, Estrada said the woman was 5’5” or 5’6”, 23 or 24 years old, with brown hair that was possibly a wig, with a slender build and wearing a lot of makeup. Although the age and dress match, neither DiPierro nor Serrano said the woman had a lot of makeup on, and neither described the woman as “slender.”

  In the summary of Estrada’s August 22 interview (which appears to have been mistakenly dated 1969 at the bottom but correctly dated 1968 at the top of the interview summary sheet), Estrada said the girl in the polka dot dress was 18 years old, 120 pounds, 5’4”, and wore a lot of makeup. If this memory was accurate, this sounds like the younger, slimmer woman that Bernyce Matthews and Frances Critcheley had seen. And although Estrada had picked out Sirhan’s photo as the man she saw with this group, she said he was wearing a dark jacket and denim pants. But Sirhan was wearing a light blue velour shirt over his white T-shirt. Was it possible Estrada had seen both women but only reported one of them each time? Did she really mess up the description in one of these two interviews? Did the police just alter her statements so they wouldn’t match the description of the girl in the polka dot dress that Serrano and DiPierro saw?

  Southeast of the Embassy Room and Gold Room was the Café Lautrec restaurant. Judy Groves, the woman who had identified Khoury at the hotel, had an encounter with Sirhan or a lookalike and a girl in a polka dot dress. Groves had tried to enter the Embassy Room but was turned away by the guards because the room was already at capacity. Upon overhearing that, a 5’6” young man with a dark complexion and dark hair took her to the restaurant entrance and suggested she enter the Embassy Room through the Lautrec restaurant, but they were stopped at the door by a waiter. No one knew until Kennedy came down which way he would enter the Embassy Room. It’s possible someone had scouted Café Lautrec as a possible location to kill and stationed a team there, just in case.

  The man Judy talked to was 23 or 24 years old, had a dark olive complexion, spoke with a slight accent and was “wearing a dark coat that was too large for him. He was wearing a white shirt, definitely button type, and no tie.” Judy Groves also indicated the man had a pronounced “not terrible but not good” acne condition.563 Groves said the man’s white shirt looked “as though he had slept in it.” The man also spoke with a noticeable accent.564 For these reasons, she questioned whether it was Sirhan. Albert Ellis may have seen this man as well. He described a man he thought was Sirhan as having “a fat nose and pimples on his face,”565 but Sirhan had a clear complexion.

  When I read Grove’s description of the oversized coat, I wondered if Michael Wayne had given his coat to this man. Wayne was 5’8” and this man was definitely smaller, so it would make sense that the coat would be too large. Maybe this was the man Daniel Hall talked to who may have been carrying a gun in a suitcase. In any case, this acne-faced doppelganger was soon joined by a woman who sounds all too familiar by now.

  When Groves and Sirhan’s doppelganger stopped at the entrance, they were joined by a girl in a white dress with polka dots and ¾-“inch” (I believe she said or meant “length”) bell-type sleeves, 22 to 24 years old, with dark blonde hair done up in a bouffant hairdo, and a fair complexion. Groves described the girl as well-groomed and attractive in an “all-American way.”566 I am a brunette who has been accused of having brown, light brown, dark blonde and dark brown hair, depending on the light, so I understand why there isn’t a lot of consistency around the girl’s hair color. Different witnesses described her hair color in various ways, but it’s clear she was what most people would call a brunette. The ¾-length sleeves and the age make this sound like the woman Serrano and DiPierro saw. Did the women in polka dot dresses trade off guarding Sirhan during the night?

  According to Groves, a second woman accompanied the first, but she was about 35 years old, shorter, with darker skin, a slender build, and sharp features that were “otherwise unremarkable.” Both women started to talk to the Sirhan doppelgange
r in a foreign language which Groves knew was not Spanish, German or French,567 but something with a “staccato” rhythm. Was it Arabic? The darker, older woman did not appear to speak English but the girl in the polka dot dress appeared to be fluent in both languages. Later, Groves saw the darker woman standing alone looking into the Embassy Room from a window near where the television tables were located.

  Mary Wall saw a line of people that included Sirhan walking through the Lautrec restaurant around 10 P.M. on June 4. She described Sirhan as a “very ugly person,” which could possibly refer to the acne-scarred facial appearance of Sirhan’s doppelganger.568 On the index card entry for Wall in the LAPD files, someone noted that while Mrs. Wall had described clothing that fit what Sirhan was wearing, she had a color TV and might have picked up his clothes from a broadcast.

  Terri Trivelli saw a woman in a polka dot dress and a man with dark, curly hair with “an olive complexion with acne” wearing “a light-colored shirt and blue jeans and a dark jacket” walking together through the “Victory Room” downstairs. “She did not hear them talking” but apparently believed they were together.569

  A couple of people may have seen Serrano’s girl in the polka dot dress with either Sirhan or a lookalike at a Kennedy fundraiser a couple of weeks prior to the California primary. Albert (misidentified in some LAPD records as Gilbert) Le Beau, a bartender at Robbie’s Restaurant in Pomona, reported seeing a couple of people matching their descriptions.

  On May 20th, a fundraiser was held for Senator Kennedy at Robbie’s. Le Beau was asked to check tickets on the spiral staircase that led to the banquet room upstairs where the event was held. Nearly immediately after Kennedy arrived, at approximately 12:30 P.M. Le Beau heard a noise. He turned to his left and saw a young woman standing on the third step of the stairway and a male companion who had evidently just jumped the banister to join her, clanging the railing and making the noise that cause Le Beau to turn around. Le Beau’s FBI report states that “The young man began pushing the girl with his open left hand and or possibly tan poplin material jacket. The right hand was completely covered by the jacket. Le Beau thought at the time it was odd that the man was carrying a jacket as it was a very hot day.” Did the jacket conceal a gun? Le Beau stopped the two and asked for their tickets. The woman responded that they were part of the senator’s party and he had just waved them up. Le Beau let them go up. Le Beau told the FBI the man remained silent while the woman spoke. The FBI noted what happened next: