by Ray Black
Although the event was not captured by television cameras, Kennedy’s last seconds were recorded on a piece of 8mm film for a little over twenty seconds before, during and immediately following the shooting. This famous piece of film was taken by an amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder, in what became known as the Zapruder film. This film has been scrutinised many times and in great detail to see if investigators could learn anything more about the assassination of Kennedy.
Ballistics investigations then revealed the possibility of there having been two gunmen at the scene of Kennedy’s assassination and the conspiracy theorists had a field day. In fact many different theories came out regarding the assassination of Kennedy, so President Johnson organised the first official investigation into the shooting, called the Warren Commission. It tried to give details of exactly what happened to try and alleviate further confusion.
The commission also concluded that:
• one shot likely missed the motorcade (it could not determine which of the three),
• the first shot to hit anyone struck Kennedy in the upper back, exited near the front of his neck and likely continued on to cause all of Governor Connally’s injuries, and
• the last shot to hit anyone struck Kennedy in the head, fatally wounding him.
The commission also concluded that it could not find any persuasive evidence of a domestic or foreign conspiracy involving any other person, group or country. They reported that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the murder and that Jack Ruby had also acted alone in his killing of Oswald. However, almost as soon as the commission issued its report, people started to question its conclusions. Many books and articles have criticised their findings and yet subsequent investigations have all come to the same conclusion with the exception of one – the Dictabelt evidence. The Dictabelt evidence relating to the assassination of Kennedy, came from a recording on a police officer’s motorcycle that was escorting the president’s car. This then-common dictation machine recorded sounds in grooves pressed into soft vinyl, and the evidence of which opened the floodgates with conspiracy theorists. They believe that it confirms that Kennedy was shot by two gunmen firing from perpendicular directions because of the force he slumped forward in his seat.
In the four decades since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, many many theories have been published that detail organised conspiracies. These theories implicate, among others, Cuban President Fidel Castro, the Anti-Castro Cuban community, President Johnson, the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA and the Soviet Bloc, and some even mention a combination of these.
Some of these theories claim that not only was Oswald definitely not the lone assassin but that he was not involved at all. One thing that is obvious in all of this is, that it doesn’t matter how many films, books or articles are written about the assassination of JFK (as he became known), doubts will continue to plague regarding what really happened on November 22, 1963. It seems unlikely that we will ever know the full details of the assassination, simply because those involved are dead themselves.
Robert F. Kennedy
President John F. Kennedy had fallen to an assassin in November 1963. His forty-two-year-old brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, seemed set fair to follow him into the White House. In June 1968, Robert Kennedy was in California campaigning to be nominated as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency. Voting took place on June 4 and after a hard-fought campaign Bobby Kennedy spent the day before he died swimming, sitting in the sun, talking to friends, playing with his children and sleeping.
He was so relaxed that he considered not attending his own election night party. He suggested that he and his family and friends might watch the primary results on television. In truth, he did not expect to win the election. Because the television networks refused to haul their equipment out to Malibu, Kennedy reluctantly decided to go into Los Angeles that evening to wait for the election result. Accompanied by John Frankenheimer and other members of his campaign staff, he drove to the Ambassador Hotel for the election night party. Kennedy had a suite reserved there and, with the election result still in doubt and Kennedy running behind, he went to relax in his suite.
It was announced at 11.40 p.m. that Kennedy had won. This was a completely unexpected result, and Kennedy made a short improvised victory speech from the podium in the hotel’s Embassy Ballroom.
He was all too conscious that he could be the target of an assassination attempt, especially after the very high-profile assassinations of his brother and, only two months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. Both had been shot dead in cold blood. Now that Kennedy was emerging as a real presidential candidate he was more at risk than ever. Yet in spite of the high risk, security at the hotel was almost non-existent. The hotel management had taken on eighteen security guards purely for crowd control, and as far as is known there were no police officers on duty. In 1968 presidential contenders were not provided with Secret Service protection, and relations between Kennedy and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) were strained. Los Angeles police officers had found themselves wrong-footed when Kennedy was working a crowd; they had conscientiously tried to protect him and then been abused by his campaign followers for their trouble. A few personal bodyguards had been hired for the occasion from a local firm called Ace Security.
Shortly after midnight on June 5, Kennedy ended his speech with the words, ‘And now its on to Chicago - and let’s win there!’ He started to make his way from the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel to give a press conference in the Colonial Room. He moved forward through the crowd towards the front door, but then his Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz turned him round and diverted him through the kitchen pantry, apparently because it was slightly less crowded and would therefore be a quicker and easier route.
He was led by one of the hotel staff, Karl Uecker, and followed by an Ace Security guard, Thane Cesar. A brown-skinned man of obvious Middle Eastern descent was pushing a steel food trolley towards the advancing crowd. When he was close enough, he shouted and began to fire a .22 revolver, apparently at Kennedy. He fired eight rounds, but a ballistics investigation showed that none of them hit Kennedy. All eight went wildly into bystanders, walls and ceiling. There was chaos as bullet after bullet whizzed around the confined space. Sirhan Sirhan, the man with the food trolley and the gun, was quickly restrained and disarmed, but Kennedy and five other people were wounded. The wounded were taken to the nearest hospital, the Central Receiving Hospital, but Kennedy was taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital for brain surgery. He had a three-hour operation and was thought to have a chance of surviving, but he died about twenty-five hours after the shooting.
Sirhan Sirhan was arrested immediately, and later charged and convicted of first degree murder. He was sentenced to death, but the US Supreme Court declared the death sentence unconstitutional before it could be carried out. Since then, Sirhan has been incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison, California. Sirhan was born in 1944, of an Arab family living in Jerusalem. When the state of Israel was created in 1948, the family became refugees. When he was twelve years old, he moved with his family to California. Sirhan continued to be deeply interested in the politics of the Middle East, inevitably empathizing with the Palestinian cause. He was outraged when the media and political leaders in the United States celebrated the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War in 1967. He began to see Robert Kennedy as a hate figure when he realized that Kennedy saw Israel as the injured party in the conflict. Sirhan himself said explicitly that he killed Kennedy to punish him for supporting Israel. With his biography and political background, Sirhan Sirhan looked like a perfect suspect for the assassination. Yet there were always some who doubted whether Sirhan was really the lone crazed gunman presented in court.
This was an assassination that took place in the close proximity of a great many witnesses; perhaps as many as seventy-six people saw it ‘live’ from close quarters and twenty million saw it on television. The problem is that the assassination happened with such speed, in such a melee and i
n such an emotionally charged context that people could not be sure what they saw or heard. On the face of it, the killing of Robert Kennedy looks like a lone gunman assassination, and there is much to recommend this interpretation. On the other hand there are reasons for doubting it. The physical evidence and eyewitness reports seem to show that Sirhan was forensically incapable of inflicting all of the wounds.
Thomas Noguchi, the Coroner, produced a post mortem report which showed that Senator Kennedy was shot three times. One shot entered the head behind the right ear, a second shot near the right armpit and a third roughly one and a half inches below the second. All the bullets entered the body at a sharply upward angle, moving slightly right to left. These are hard to square with the eyewitnesses’ accounts of Sirhan’s shooting.
Sirhan’s .22 revolver contained just eight bullets and he had no chance to reload. This limit to the number of bullets caused a problem for the official version of the assassination. One bullet was lost in the ceiling space; two were lodged in a wooden door jamb. Five or six ceiling tiles were removed for tests. Los Angeles Police Department criminologist DeWayne Wolfer was quoted as saying ‘it’s unbelievable how many holes there are in the kitchen ceiling.’ This strongly suggests that the LAPD found traces of more bullets than could have come from Sirhan’s eight shot revolver. This in turn suggests that there were two or more people firing in the pantry.
There were reports of suspicious people in the area at the time of the assassination. The first police officer on the scene, Sergeant Paul Schraga, was approached by a couple who told him that they had seen and heard a young man and woman running out of the Ambassador Hotel shouting, ‘We shot him! We shot him!’ When asked whom they had shot, the young woman replied, ‘Senator Kennedy!’ Schraga sent out an All Points Bulletin on the two suspects. This was the start of what became known as the ‘Polka-dot Dress Girl’ controversy.
Within minutes of the crime the LAPD quixotically declared that Sirhan was the sole assassin, which was premature. Many observers were staggered that the police were so adamant; the official line from the beginning was, ‘This is a solved case.’ Schraga was asked to cancel his bulletin regarding two more suspects and when he refused it was cancelled by his superiors. The couple’s story was plausibly explained by the LAPD as a case of mishearing, stating that the young woman must have said, ‘They shot him!’ Nevertheless, a young woman sitting on a staircase outside the Ambassador Hotel, Sandra Serrano, told the same story. Two witnesses in the pantry also saw armed men, quite apart from Sirhan and the security guard Thane Eugene (‘Gene’) Cesar. Lisa Urso noticed a fair-haired man in a grey suit putting a gun into a holster. Another witness saw a tall, dark-haired man in a black suit fire two shots and run out of the pantry. These men could have been assassins; they could alternatively have been Kennedy’s bodyguards.
As the case was the responsibility of the LAPD, there was no pressure to release their findings. Researchers into the assassination finally forced the release of the report and the police department’s files in 1988, a full twenty years after the assassination. This was extraordinary; the Warren Commission Report had been published in 1964, the year after JFK’s assassination. After the long-delayed release of the files, it became clear that a huge amount of evidence contradicting the official version had gone missing, including 2,400 photographs, the ceiling tiles and the door frame from the pantry, and transcripts of over 3,000 interviews, including those for the fifty-one key ‘conspiracy’ witnesses.
Scott Enyart, a resourceful teenager who managed to take a sequence of photographs of the assassination, successfully won a lawsuit to have his photos returned in 1988. The courier who was returning the pictures to him in a rented car was involved in a minor accident; in the aftermath of the accident the envelope containing the pictures was stolen. They have never been seen since. One of the photos was taken at the moment when Kennedy dropped to the floor, and may show the smoking gun behind him.
Suspicion grew that the LAPD report was a cover-up. Files released to researchers in 1985 by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office included a box of tapes, videos and documents. This box is said to have contained some of the evidence which conflicted with the official version, most conspicuously the filmed re-enactments that were staged in 1968 and 1977, which proved that Sirhan could not have inflicted the wounds found on Senator Kennedy’s body. He was standing in the wrong place, too far away from Kennedy and on the wrong side of him, too. It was carefully selected stills from the reconstructions that were used to support the official version. If a deliberate cover-up was the result of the LAPD’s investigation, it was almost certainly because the truth of what happened was beyond reach. The LAPD ‘lone gunman’ version of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination seemed such an open and shut case that the House Select Committee on Assassinations did not even trouble to investigate it. Given the questions that have arisen subsequently, it looks as if there is a case for a re-investigation of the assassination.
Here are the reasons for believing that there was at least one other assassin besides Sirhan:
1. The powder burns on Kennedy’s clothing show that all three shots came from a gun fired less than four inches away from him. The witnesses say that Sirhan’s gun was never closer than twenty inches away. The assassin was standing very close indeed to Kennedy. Sirhan was simply too far away to have fired the fatal shots.
2. Sirhan’s gun held a maximum of eight bullets. Seven bullets were found embedded in human tissue, in Robert Kennedy and the other victims in the pantry. An eighth bullet passed through two ceilings into an air space. A ninth and a tenth were lodged in the pantry door frame. Inexcusably, from the forensic point of view, the two expended bullets were dug out of the door frame, and the frame itself was burnt. In any case, Sirhan cannot have fired more than eight bullets; at least two must have been fired by someone else. Some analysts thought there had been as many as thirteen bullet holes, so there must have been at least one more gun.
3. The three bullets found in Robert F. Kennedy and the fourth, which grazed his suit jacket, were fired almost vertically upwards. All the witnesses testified that Sirhan was not holding his gun vertically but completely horizontally for the first two shots, after which his gun hand was repeatedly slammed down on a table by Karl Uecker, who had been leading Kennedy forward by the right hand. It was not possible that Sirhan fired the third shot into Kennedy, because by then he was being tackled by Karl Uecker.
4. The four bullets which touched Kennedy all hit on his back right side, travelling forward in relation to his body. Kennedy was walking towards Sirhan, facing Sirhan while the shots were fired. Even when he fell, he fell backwards, and was therefore still facing Sirhan. It was not possible for any of Sirhan’s shots to have hit Kennedy in the back. In a nutshell, Kennedy was shot from behind, and Sirhan was in front of him.
Obviously Sirhan was there; that has never been in question. Irrefutably he fired gunshots in the general direction of Kennedy, but someone else was firing too. Once a second assassin is established, the complexion of the event is changed. Not only was a conspiracy involved, but it looks as though the second gunman, standing a little behind Kennedy and to one side, was given powerful and effective protection. Sirhan was allowed, perhaps even set up, to take the blame for the murder, while the other man was allowed not only to escape punishment but identification. Indeed, a second assassin strongly implies that a powerful US Government department was behind the murder itself – after the assassination, the evidence was consistently manipulated to keep the decoy, Sirhan, as the one conspicuous figure in the foreground while the other gunman was airbrushed from the background. New York Congressman Allard Lowenstein went public with the forensic information about the eleven or thirteen bullets in 1970, in an attempt to get the case re-opened. He was later shot dead in his New York office by ‘a disgruntled client’.
Sirhan had his contacts. On June 2, 1968, Sirhan went into Kennedy’s Campaign headquarters, where Larry Strick a
sked him if he needed help. Sirhan pointed at one of the volunteer workers and said, ‘I’m with him.’ At the time it seemed an insignificant remark, but the volunteer worker in question, who was only there for a few days, turned out to be a high-level international secret agent.
So – who was the second gunman? Who was it who was in the right position to have fired the three bullets into Bobby Kennedy? Thane Eugene Cesar, the Ace security guard, is known to have been pressed up against Kennedy’s back right side and holding Kennedy’s right arm in his left hand as Sirhan jumped out and fired his first two shots at Kennedy from several feet away. Don Schulman, who was the only eyewitness to observe accurately that Kennedy had sustained three bullet wounds, not two, saw this guard pull his gun and appear to fire back at Sirhan. Gene Cesar’s clip-on bow tie, which was knocked off in the scuffle and lay near Bobby Kennedy as he died, was in just the spot where the gun needed to be located to deliver the fatal bullet up and forwards into Kennedy’s brain. Gene Cesar owned a .22 (the same calibre as Sirhan’s gun), but said he sold it before the assassination. Later he said he sold it after the assassination.
What of the couple seen running out of the hotel? Sandra Serrano was on the back stairs at the time of the assassination. She saw Sirhan walk up the stairs with a woman in a polka-dot dress and another man, and later saw the woman and man coming down the stairs without Sirhan, the woman saying, ‘We shot him!’ Captain Lynch later claimed that he was on the back stairs at the time and that no one was there; this cast Sandra Serrano in the role of non-credible witness. The LAPD subjected Sandra Serrano to a lengthy and gruelling lie detector test in what looks like an attempt to intimidate a witness into backing off. The interviewer tried to persuade Serrano that the polka-dot woman did not exist – even though she was mentioned in the LAPD’s teletype announcement of Sirhan’s arrest.