The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  The irony—and tragedy—that the same doctor, by chance, might participate in the autopsies of two Kennedys was not lost on me. Nor was another irony. Six years before, I had performed the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe. And now I might perform the death examination of her alleged lover, Kennedy.

  It was a strange turn of fate, but I had no time for thoughts of the past. Although I still devoutly hoped they would not be necessary, the first steps in my preparation for a historic autopsy had been accomplished. My invitation to AFIP had ensured that there would be total concurrence, and openness, at this autopsy, should it take place. My every move would be monitored by professional observers, every step corroborated. But the television reports of the girl in the white polk-dot dress and another young man running out of the hotel still worried me. What had she meant, shouting, “We killed him”? It seemed inevitable that we would have to investigate the possibility of conspiracy.

  So I placed my last telephone call to Dr. Cyril Wecht, coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, an expert on political assassinations and the leading proponent among medical men of the theory of a second gunman in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Ten years later, in 1978, he would appear before Congress’s assassination committee with charts and scientific evidence to demonstrate that four bullets had been fired at the President. As Lee Harvey Oswald had fired only three times, that meant, according to Wecht’s evidence, that there had to be another gunman. The congressmen listened to Wecht politely but indifferently, and then called Wecht’s fellow scientists on the panel, who blandly refuted his evidence in their testimony. It was only later, a few days before the assassination hearings concluded, that an acoustics scientist analyzed an auditory tape of a Dallas police radio broadcast during the assassination and announced that there were four shots, which meant there was a second gunman in Dealey Plaza. Thus Wecht may have been proven right.

  But Wecht, although a feisty, articulate advocate, was not in any way a “fanatic.” He went by the evidence, and he was politically astute. “Make certain you have full liaison with the political people,” he told me. “If you don’t, they’ll blind-side you later if something comes up. Appoint a liaison with the U.S. Senate, because Bobby is a senator. And in Los Angeles, cooperate in every way you can with the Kennedy campaign staff.”

  Then, at 8 A.M. on June 5, after having been up all night, I reported to my office in the Hall of Justice and studied the step-by-step plan for the medical-examination procedure which I had prepared earlier. Still there was hope. The news bulletins from the Hospital of the Good Samaritan that morning were more optimistic. The main concern of the surgeons was not that Kennedy would die, but that his brain would be irreparably damaged. Horrible enough—but he would live.

  Meanwhile, the people in sprawling Los Angeles were living their normal lives—and dying their too-often sudden and unexpected deaths. The daily influx of suicides, accident casualties, ODs, battered children and homicide victims was pouring into our department. And that terrible surge of death was still our prime responsibility.

  I lost myself in the work process all that day. But then, at 8:30 P.M., the liaison officer at Good Samaritan called with the news I had dreaded to hear. “Senator Kennedy’s brain waves have gone flat.”

  My hand went cold on the telephone. I knew that all hope was gone for this great American leader.

  I called the AFIP experts in Washington immediately. They informed me that the Washington Post had a telephoto camera trained on the plane assigned to them at Andrews Air Force Base. When the aircraft took off, the Post would be the first newspaper to know that Bobby Kennedy was actually dying.

  So far no official news of Kennedy’s deteriorating condition had been disclosed. But all of my experience told me that now was the time for decision. Flat brain waves after a gunshot wound in the head can mean only one thing.

  It would take the AFIP experts hours to fly across the country. I told them, “Go,” and to hell with the Washington Post.

  Outside Good Samaritan Hospital, at 3 A.M. on June 6, the crowds still stood in mute grief, their banners which read “PRAY FOR BOBBY” lowered. It was official. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was dead.

  I remember the despairing mood of that crowd—the stricken faces of the young, a nun in tears holding a rosary—as I was ushered into the hospital. A security guard at the door to the autopsy room said hello to me and my two deputies in a low voice. Earlier, at 2 A.M., I had dispatched the first team from our office, including the investigator, the chief autopsy assistant and the photographer, with instructions to secure an autopsy room and make sure the hospital charts and X rays to be reviewed would be available, along with the surgeons who had tried to save Kennedy’s life. The members of my staff, as well as the observers from the DA’s office and Dr. Henry Cuneo, head of the neurosurgical team that had operated on Kennedy, were already assembled in the autopsy room when I arrived.

  Senator Kennedy’s body lay on a table, covered with a sheet. I removed the bandages on his head, then turned to the surgeons who had operated on Kennedy. The first thought in my mind was, Where are the hair shavings?

  I knew that the scalp hair around the wound area which they had shaved off Kennedy’s head before the surgery might contain critical evidence. So I instructed one of my investigators to rush to the operating room to see if the hair shavings were still there. They were found in little clumps which had been retained by the hospital staff. My investigator carefully placed them in a coroner’s evidence envelope.

  With the hair shavings retrieved, I was ready to turn my attention to the body. But my emotions at that moment led me to make an extraordinary request, surprising my fellow pathologists, who knew it was not normal procedure. It would be the only instance in the thousands of autopsies I have performed when I asked that the deceased’s face be covered with a towel. Only then could I perform my work professionally, unshaken by my feelings for Kennedy. And I observed a moment of silence, head bowed, a Japanese custom showing respect for the deceased.

  We began the autopsy at the feet and worked up to the head, instead of the reverse procedure, which is more common. I believed that this methodology, conducted slowly and patiently, would result in a more complete and thorough examination of the victim. Sometimes too much attention is paid to the wound area, and important evidence elsewhere may be overlooked.

  In fact, the first wound I found was an old one. The chief radiologist at the hospital, Dr. Robert Scanlan, told me that Kennedy’s medical records showed that he had fractured his left leg while skiing. And as I noted that fracture, a picture flashed through my mind of the vibrant, active Kennedy, climbing rugged mountains, skiing snowy slopes, shooting turbulent rapids in a Colorado river with his family. He had loved life so much.

  The first fresh wound I studied was what we call a through-and-through gunshot wound. The entry was underneath and slightly to the back of the right armpit. The bullet had traveled at an angle, exited through the front right shoulder and been lost.

  The second wound I examined was also under the armpit, about an inch from the first. But, surprisingly, this bullet had not traveled in the same direction as the other, which had exited from the front. Instead, it had traversed the back, side to side, and had lodged in the soft tissue of the paracervical region at the level of the sixth cervical vertebra (the spinal column at the back of the lower neck). With my right index finger and thumb I removed a deformed .22-caliber bullet. I had retrieved the first tangible evidence that police could use to identify the gun.

  But I was not so fortunate in probing the path of the all-important bullet that had caused Kennedy’s death. The bullet had entered the skull an inch to the left of Kennedy’s right ear, in what is known as the mastoid region, and shattered. The tiny fragments could be analyzed to reveal what type of ammunition had caused the wound, in this case, a .22. But such small metallic bits could not be matched definitively to Sirhan’s gun. That meant that other evidence would be needed to establish that Sirhan Sirh
an was in fact the assassin.

  Under the watchful eyes of my associates and all the other observers in the room, I completed the most meticulous autopsy I had every performed. But in Kennedy’s death, in one of the most ironic twists in my career as a medical examiner, the very thoroughness of my tests served only to give credence to a conspiracy theory. As John McKinley later wrote in Assassination in America: “Compared with … conjectures, the riddles of the physical evidence weighed heavy as gold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi’s thorough autopsy provided the most basic data, which paradoxically gave impetus to several questions about the assassination.”

  And in another ironic twist, it was those clumps of hair retrieved only at the last minute from the operating room that would lead in part to conjecture that Sirhan Sirhan had not fired the fatal bullet.

  The day after the autopsy, a criminalist from the Los Angeles Police Department appeared at my office door. “Dr. Noguchi, we’ve found something in those little hair shavings.”

  “What?”

  “Gunpowder residue. Not only metallic elements, but what could be soot.”

  “Soot?” I sat straight up. Only that morning, the police had informed me that all the witnesses to the assassination had reported that Sirhan Sirhan had been at least a yard away when he fired at Kennedy. But if there was soot in the scalp hair, that meant a gun had been triggered within inches of the head.

  When a gun is fired, many different substances are discharged from its muzzle: the bullet and metallic fragments, unburned grains of powder, and burned grains of powder which we call soot, followed by a metallic spray of primer. The gas which contains the soot (carbon particles) is extremely light. It travels only a few inches. The unburned powder grains, which are heavier, travel farther, from one to two feet. And the bullet and metallic elements, naturally, travel a great distance because of their weight.

  I examined carefully the infrared photographs of the hair shavings which the criminalist from the LAPD now showed me. They revealed a dust made up of metallic elements, with some carbon particles too—the telltale soot. But was there any other evidence to indicate that the fatal shot had been fired only a few inches away? I remembered that unburned powder grains were tattooed in a circular pattern on Kennedy’s right ear. But if there had been soot on his ear, it was washed away when a surgical nurse scrubbed it.

  Because of the soot in the hair, I believed that the muzzle distance of the fatal shot had been from one to three inches away. But I decided that a ballistics test would be necessary to determine the precise distance. And I conceived a test that would attempt to duplicate the tattoo pattern of unburned-powder stains on Kennedy’s right ear.

  That afternoon, a lab technician was startled by my request. “Seven pigs’ ears?”

  Explaining the reason for my request, I then asked him to affix the pigs’ ears to padded muslin configurations, each simulating a skull. We would then take the “skulls” to the Police Academy shooting range for a unique ballistics test which I would supervise.

  The next day at police headquarters, a plainclothes officer approached the “skulls.” I asked him to fire at each of them, beginning with a firm contact shot, then moving back to a quarter inch, a half inch, one, two, three and four inches. I put on earmuffs while one of my staff measured the distance for each shot. Every time the marksman pulled the trigger and a bullet plowed through a muslin “skull,” the sharp sound pierced the protection over my ears. Crack! Crack! Crack! The marksman moved down the line, carefully, until he had completed seven shots.

  At three inches from the right mastoid area, I discovered we had a perfect match of the tattoo pattern of unburned-powder grains on Kennedy’s right ear. At that distance, the shape of the entrance wound was also duplicated, and it accounted for the carbon particles found in Kennedy’s hair. I now knew the precise location of the murder weapon at the moment it was fired: one inch from the edge of his right ear, only three inches behind the head. But I also realized that this evidence seemed to exonerate Sirhan Sirhan. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, but this time their sheer unanimity was too phenomenal to dismiss. Not a single witness in that crowded kitchen had seen him fire behind Kennedy’s ear at point-blank range.

  But even apart from the autopsy findings of a close-range wound, there was other evidence to challenge the belief that Sirhan Sirhan had acted alone. For example, four bullets were fired at Kennedy; three of them struck him, and one passed harmlessly through his clothing. Five persons behind Kennedy were also struck by bullets, which were recovered in their bodies. And three bullet holes were found in the ceiling. Thus, the tracks of twelve bullets were found at the scene, and Sirhan’s gun contained only eight. Police believed that the extra tracks could be accounted for by ricochets. But to the day he died (the victim of an assassin’s bullet himself), Allard Lowenstein, one of Senator Kennedy’s strongest supporters for the Presidency, said that Sirhan had not acted alone. And such professional homicide investigators as Vincent Bugliosi, the deputy DA who convicted the Manson killers, insisted there was a second gunman in the room.

  What was the truth?

  There was excitement in the kitchen of the Hotel Ambassador, crowded on the night of June 4, 1968, not only with hotel employees but with young Kennedy campaign workers—and strangers. Word had just flashed from the ballroom that Senator Kennedy was going to pass through the pantry on his way to the rear exit of the hotel, instead of leaving through the ballroom.

  White-hatted chefs, Mexican busboys, and college students, alerted by the news, pushed and shoved their way into the serving pantry, a closed hall six feet wide and about fifteen feet long. A steam table with stacks of trays dominated one side of the room; a large ice machine stood across from it. The employees and the campaign workers arranged themselves roughly in two lines, between which Kennedy would walk.

  “Here they come!” someone shouted.

  Karl Eucker, a burly maitre d’, was the first man to appear. He led Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, into the pantry, and Kennedy grinned shyly as he acknowledged the applause. There were no security guards; all had been taken by surprise by Kennedy’s decision to leave the hotel through the back door and had been left behind in the ballroom.

  A kitchen chef in the row of spectators to Kennedy’s left said, “You’re going to win, Mr. Kennedy!”

  Kennedy smiled, stopped to shake the chef’s out-thrust hand …

  BANG!

  The sound of a shot cracked through the room. What was happening?

  First, what did the eyes of the onlookers see? Kennedy threw up his right arm. More shots were heard. Then witnesses observed a young, dark-complected man half crouching in front of Kennedy from three to six feet away, firing a pistol with two hands.

  “Kennedy backed up against the kitchen freezer as the gunman fired. He cringed and threw his hands up over his face.” That was the eyewitness report of Boris Yaro, a Los Angeles Times reporter, and it almost perfectly matched the image that all of the other witnesses observed: Sirhan shot and fatally wounded Kennedy openly and brazenly from in front.

  But forensic evidence suggested that the shooting occurred in a different way. An instant after Kennedy entered the pantry, a gun appeared three inches from the back of his head, fired, then disappeared. Kennedy threw up his right arm and started to turn. Other shots were fired, and one bullet plowed through the clothing over his shoulder, missing flesh. Two more missiles struck his right armpit, but traveled in different directions, because he was turning. One traversed back to front at an angle; the other passed side to side, lodging in the back of his neck.

  That slow-motion forensic re-creation of the scene could mean only one of two things: (1) either Sirhan lunged toward Kennedy and fired, a move unseen by anyone, and then, as Kennedy spun, lunged back to fire from farther away, a second move also invisible to all, or (2) a second gunman triggered the first shots up close, ducked away, and then Sirhan fired the other bullets from three feet away as Kennedy turned.

&nbs
p; I have always believed it is perfectly possible that Sirhan could have made that lunge back and forth without being seen by any of those witnesses. My experience with homicides as a medical examiner has shown me over and over again how, and why, witnesses in a crowd in such a situation don’t always see the truth. Their eyes are totally glued to the celebrity. It is only reluctantly, and as realization of something wrong sets in, that they move their eyes away from the celebrity and look elsewhere. In other words, the witnesses may not have seen what actually happened that night. But there are two factors that challenge that supposition—one forensic, the other the testimony of a particular witness.

  Forensically, we see, after the fatal shot, three bullets traveling in different directions through Kennedy’s body. That means that Kennedy was spinning. But it also means that time was consumed as he turned. Witnesses had more seconds than usual to take their eyes off the celebrity to observe Sirhan shooting. And within that extended time span, when they did see him, he was already three feet away from Kennedy, not lunging from behind him.

  Secondly, the testimony of the most strategically placed witness is daunting. Karl Eucker, the maitre d’, led the Kennedys into the pantry. He was the man actually standing between Sirhan and the Senator. In fact, it was Eucker, not Roosevelt Grier or Rafer Johnson, who actually grabbed Sirhan and first wrestled him onto the steam table. Eucker was perfectly placed, and even years later he insisted, “I told the authorities that Sirhan never got close enough for a point-blank shot. Never!” Then he warned that an investigation of a second-gunman theory would get nowhere. “It was decided long ago that it was to stop with Sirhan,” he said, “and that is what will happen.”

  If, in fact, Sirhan did not lunge at Kennedy, unseen by anyone, and then draw back to continue shooting, is it possible that there was a second gunman and that Sirhan, consumed with hatred for Kennedy, had agreed to jump into the middle of the room and start firing wildly to divert attention from the real killer?