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Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

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Robert Kennedy

The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy occurred on June 5, 1968. Kennedy, New York's junior United States Senator and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was fatally wounded by gunshots at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at approximately 12:16 a.m. PDT; he died more than 25 hours later at Good Samaritan Hospital.

It is disputed whether the convicted assassin, 24-year-old Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan, was acting alone. A diary alleged to have been penned by Sirhan seemed to attribute the killing to Kennedy's support for Israel during and after the Six-Day War. On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles court, Sirhan admitted that he had killed Kennedy. Sirhan has since recanted, and as late as 1998 has sought a new trial. [1]

Background

As a United States Senator, after having left his previous post as Attorney General of the United States in the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations, Robert Kennedy focused on issues of social reform and increasingly came to identify with the poor and disenfranchised. He reached out to members of minority groups and formed relationships with many of them. The evening he was shot, Kennedy had won the June 4, 1968 Democratic presidential primaries in South Dakota and California, somewhat boosting -- but not at all securing -- his chances of winning the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in August and the presidential election in November.

Assassination

Kennedy addressed his presidential campaign supporters shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. At 12:15 a.m. PDT, he and his entourage walked from the lectern to a back corridor behind the ballroom and then through a kitchen pantry, shaking hands with well-wishers and hotel staff. The small pantry apparently was crowded when, at 12:16 a.m., a 24-year-old man named Sirhan Sirhan stepped in front of Kennedy and purportedly exclaimed "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!"[2] before firing an eight shot, .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver toward Kennedy and his entourage.

Hotel assistant maître d' Karl Uecker, writer George Plimpton, Olympic gold medalist decathlete Rafer Johnson and professional football player Rosey Grier helped detain Sirhan, with Grier jamming his thumb behind the trigger of the revolver to prevent further shots from being fired, as he had no way of knowing in the confusion if all the shots had been fired.

As Kennedy lay wounded on the floor of the hotel kitchen pantry, busboy Juan Romero cradled his head and placed a rosary in his hand[3]. This became the iconic image of the assassination[4]

Television coverage

The shooting was not broadcast live on television or radio but, decades later, it was discovered that the shots had been recorded on audio tape by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a freelance newspaper reporter. The Pruszynski recording has become the only known sound recording of the Robert Kennedy assassination and analysis of it has only just begun. However, back in 1968, the only tape widely associated by the public with the assassination at that time was an audio recording of the shooting's aftermath made by reporter Andrew West of KRKD, a Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate in Los Angeles. Although West's recording captured the sounds of only the immediate aftermath and none of the shots, the radio newsman provided an on-the-spot account of the struggle with Sirhan Sirhan in the hotel kitchen pantry, memorably shouting at Rafer Johnson to "Get the gun, Rafer, get the gun!" and telling others to "get ahold of [Sirhan's] thumb and break it, if you have to! Get his thumb!" [5].

Earlier, while still on the ballroom stage just after Kennedy's speech, Andy West had briefly asked the Senator how he would go about overcoming Vice President Hubert Humphrey's lead in obtaining delegate commitments to the Democratic National Convention; in a response that seems somewhat garbled in West's recording, Kennedy indicated he knew that a "struggle" still lay ahead of him in his quest for his party's presidential nomination. Following the Senator's response to West's question, the radio reporter switched his tape recorder off. Moments later, as he was following the Kennedy party into the kitchen area, West heard what sounded like balloons popping, followed by a scream and then shouts that Kennedy had been shot; he quickly turned his tape recorder back on, recording the immediate aftermath of the assassination but missing the actual shots that had just been fired.

CBS Television continued feeding live pictures of the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room ballroom in the moments after Kennedy had left the ballroom's lectern. By that time, though, not all CBS affiliates were still airing the network's feed of live pictures from the hotel. For the next 2 minutes, CBS cameras panned the crowd in that ballroom as well as another crowd of supporters downstairs in the hotel's Ambassador Room ballroom. The Embassy Room crowd was dispersing following Kennedy's victory statement, while the Ambassador Room crowd was chanting, "RFK! RFK! RFK!" in anticipation that the Senator was about to come downstairs to address them as well.

As microphones picked up the sound of supporters in the lower Ambassador Room chanting "Kennedy, Kennedy, rah, rah, rah! Kennedy, Kennedy, shish, boom, bah!", a CBS camera upstairs showed supporters in the Embassy Room reacting to the shooting that had just taken place, off-camera, in the kitchen pantry just off the Embassy Room.

While CBS's audio feed switched from the Ambassador Room to match the pictures of alarm in the Embassy Room, the upper ballroom's northside service doors leading to the pantry could be seen swinging open and the sounds of screaming and chaos could be heard. It was clear that the joyous crowd was now overcome with confusion and, in some cases, panic.

CBS News correspondent Terry Drinkwater, standing at the lectern where Kennedy had just spoken, asked someone what happened. An unidentified man answered, "Somebody said he's been shot". Drinkwater then advised his CBS colleagues to make sure they were rolling videotape. From the lectern, supporters called out for doctors, and Kennedy's brother-in-law Steven Smith (with wife Jean Kennedy Smith at his side) calmly asked the crowd to leave the room.

On ABC, the network was in the process of signing off when word of the shooting arrived. A staff announcer awkwardly advised stations to stand by for further word while Howard K. Smith and political analyst Bill Lawrence received confirmation in New York concerning the situation in Los Angeles.

Eventually, ABC aired a live audio report from KABC TV reporter Carl George, inside the kitchen pantry, beginning just before Kennedy was wheeled from the kitchen on a gurney. A visibly shaken ABC News Correspondent Dave Jayne provided details on the wounds to his colleague Bill Weisel, the ABC employee who had been among bystanders also shot. Both Jayne and Weisel had been standing near the pantry's swinging doors, several feet from Kennedy, at the time of the shooting.

ABC's primary correspondent at the Ambassador, Bob Clark, had heard the shots from the Embassy Room and rushed to the pantry, where he observed a wounded Robert Kennedy lying on the pantry floor. Clark then rushed back to the ballroom to call his network's headquarters in New York. Ironically, Clark had been the reporter riding in the Dallas motorcade for ABC during the assassination of John F. Kennedy and became the only person to see both Kennedy brothers just moments after each was shot. After speaking by phone with ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith, Clark was dispatched to Central Receiving Hospital much as he had been rushed to Parkland Hospital in his press follow-up car five years earlier. After Senator Kennedy was transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital, less than an hour after the shooting, Clark began providing live reports on Kennedy's condition from Good Samaritan.

CBS newsman Roger Mudd, who also had been at the Ambassador covering the California primary with Drinkwater, followed the ambulance to Central Receiving Hospital where Kennedy had been first taken, then to Good Samaritan Hospital to continue his on-the-spot coverage. Initially reporting from the CBS newsroom in New York in the first hours following the shooting were Joseph Benti and, briefly, Mike Wallace. Walter Cronkite eventually joined Benti on the network's anchor set.

Kennedy was shot twice in his back and once behind his right ear at very close range. A fourth shot grazed Kennedy's clothing. As television film cameras captured the images of the bleeding Kennedy lying on the kitchen pantry floor, reporters tried to learn how many other people were hurt.

Other victims

Initially, there were conflicting reports as to the total number of bystanders shot. Eventually it was confirmed that five other people were wounded: William Weisel of ABC News; Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers; Democratic Party activist Elizabeth Evans; Continental News Service reporter Ira Goldstein; and Kennedy campaign volunteer Irwin Stroll.

At least two other persons were accidentally injured by being struck in the face by camera equipment. Although not physically wounded, singer Rosemary Clooney, a great supporter of Kennedy's, was present in the ballroom during the shooting in the pantry and suffered a nervous breakdown shortly afterward [6]; two of Clooney's children also witnessed the shooting aftermath in the ballroom, including Hollywood actor Miguel Ferrer who was 13 at the time.

Over the next 25 1/2 hours, television and radio broadcast live coverage as Kennedy aide Frank Mankewicz provided several updates at Good Samaritan Hospital on the Senator's condition. TV and radio aired live Mankiewicz's announcement, at 1:59 a.m. PDT on June 6, that Kennedy had died only 15 minutes before at 1:44 a.m. PDT.

Disputes and contentions

There seems to be no dispute that Sirhan did fire his revolver. What is disputed is whether Sirhan planned and acted alone, whether there was another gunman at the scene, and whether Sirhan fired bullets or blanks. As with his brother John's assassination in 1963, Robert's death has been analyzed by many who have developed various alternative scenarios for the crime, or who argue there are serious problems with the official case. One theory is that the same people who orchestrated John F. Kennedy's assassination were behind his younger brother's murder 4½ years later.

Autopsy

Sirhan's gun was placed by all witnesses at between 2 and 5 feet from the Senator when he fired his revolver. [7] All witnesses seemed to agree Sirhan was facing Kennedy when he fired.

In conducting the autopsy on Kennedy, Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on Kennedy's ear and gunpowder residue in his hair. Noguchi said this indicated that Kennedy was shot from a distance of, at most, 1.5 inches (37 millimeters.) (When a firearm is discharged, the powder residue travels only a few inches because the material is very light.) Noguchi's conclusions led to speculation that Sirhan was too far from Kennedy and in the wrong position to have administered the fatal shot (also fired from a .22 caliber handgun, one which had apparently been fired into Kennedy's head at point-blank range from behind his right ear) and that a second shooter must have been present. Dr. Noguchi wrote years later that:

Until more is precisely known…the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus, I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.

— Dr. Noguchi [8][9]

Independent testing (shown in a 2004 "Unsolved History" series program on the Discovery Channel) indicates that gunpowder residue can easily travel over 15 inches (38 cm), but that the stippling effect observed requires that the gun must have been less than 2 inches (5 cm) away.

Allegations of suppression or coverup

James Scott Enyart has said he was actively photographing the inside of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry at the moment of the shooting. Furthermore he contends that his three, 36-exposure rolls were confiscated by the LAPD and sealed by court-order for 20 years, and never returned in full which resulted in a lengthy court battle, from 1989 to 1996. The most important piece of photographic evidence, allegedly featuring the scenes of the Senator falling and bullet holes in the door frame and ceiling, were confined in 10 pictures found to be missing from the third negative. The Enyart trial was, from the start, surrounded by a series of blunders, including tampering with evidence in the archives, in addition to the disappearance of a large amount of related court files, and ultimately the missing negative and stolen first-generation prints. [10] Enyart eventually won the trial against the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD and was consequently granted a financial settlement of $450,000. Among Enyart's principal witnesses were Sirhan’s official researchers such as Lynn Mangan and Ted Charach. [11]

Sandy Serrano said that during questioning, she was intimidated by police and forced to change her story. The official LAPD transcript of her polygraph interview seems to show that she was pressured to change her statement. [12]

Additional bullet holes or gunshots

Sirhan's .22 revolver held eight cartridges. The official conclusion is that Sirhan fired all of his cartridges and all eight projectiles were recovered. Others have suggested there were more than eight shots fired. A police officer watched police criminalists dig two bullets out of a door frame in the pantry area, bringing the total number of shots that were fired during the attack to 10. FBI documents describe holes depicted in the pantry door frame as "bullet holes", and William Bailey, the first FBI agent on the scene, has stated that he saw a bullet in one such hole. An AP photograph shows a bullet lodged in a door frame.[citation needed][citation needed][citation needed]

In addition, most of the witnesses in the pantry thought the gun looked and sounded like it was firing blanks. Rafer Johnson said it looked like a cap gun throwing off residue. [citation needed]

21st Century Discovery: The Pruszynski recording

On June 6, 2007, the Discovery Times Channel presented a television program on the Robert Kennedy case entitled Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination [13] [14], which provides evidence that convicted gunman Sirhan Sirhan did not act alone. The centerpiece of this one-hour documentary was the only known sound recording of the Bobby Kennedy shooting—an audio tape that had not been broadcast in the 39 years since the murder—and which, according to three out of four audio analysts featured in the program, shows that a second gun was fired in the Senator's assassination.

The audio recording was made by freelance newspaper reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski, who was covering Senator Kennedy's presidential campaign for the Montreal Gazette and today resides in his native Poland. Pruszynski made the recording with a battery-powered portable cassette tape recorder and an attached microphone. At the time, Pruszynski was unaware that his machine was still recording as it captured the sounds of the Senator's shooting.

Pruszynski also was unaware of the shooting itself because it was taking place amidst the various sounds of celebration, some distance away inside another room and outside the reporter's purview. He and his recording equipment were approximately 40 feet southwest of Senator Kennedy when the shots erupted inside the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry. At that time, Pruszynski was about to enter a narrow back corridor leading into the pantry from the hotel’s Embassy Room, a ballroom where Kennedy had just delivered his victory statement following the Tuesday, June 4 California Democratic primary election. When the shooting commenced, Pruszynski was at the north side of the ballroom and descending a small set of steps at the east end of the ballroom's makeshift stage where Kennedy had spoken. Although he did not know his recorder was still recording at that point, Pruszynski just happened to be holding his microphone tilted upward and pointed toward the pantry, and above the heads of the crowd on the ballroom floor beneath him. All doors between Pruszynski and the shooting were open at the time.

As the Kennedy shooting continued in the kitchen pantry, Pruszynski continued moving toward the pantry, getting somewhat closer to the shooting but still unaware of the shots erupting in that other room. Film and video shot by more than one camera in the Embassy Room—in particular, an ABC-TV black and white video-relay camera—captured pictures of Pruszynski, his recorder and microphone in hand, as he descended the ballroom platform's east steps and proceeded toward the pantry precisely as the shooting was taking place off-camera, inside that pantry.

It is clear to the average listener that Stanislaw Pruszynski's audio recording captured several rapidly occurring sounds, each one very short in duration and with something of a popping or even clapping quality. "Conspiracy Test" quoted four audio analysts who examined the Pruszynski recording: two experts in the United States, a third in Denmark and a fourth in the United Kingdom. Three of them determined that the tape had captured at least 10 gunshots—and possibly as many as 13 shots—in the RFK assassination; all other possible sources for the sounds, including popping balloons, ricochets, echoes, etc., were ruled out. The presence of at least 10 shots is highly significant because Sirhan's handgun could fire no more than eight shots at a single time and because Sirhan possessed only the one revolver and had no opportunity to reload his weapon once the shooting erupted in the pantry. Thus, scientific confirmation of more than eight shots being fired in the RFK assassination would be strong evidence of a second gun being fired by someone other than Sirhan.

The fourth audio expert dissented on the issue of number of shots, reporting that he was only able to confirm seven or eight shots in the Pruszynski recording. However, the Discovery Times program made it clear that the fourth expert had not been provided all of the information and materials that had been made available to the other three experts. While all four experts bypassed a crude cassette copy of the Pruszynski recording that had been created years before by the California State Archives in Sacramento, only the first three experts worked directly from several high-quality digital and analog master dubs of the recording; the fourth expert had to rely on a copy of just one of those master dubs. Unlike the first three experts, the fourth expert also did not know where Pruszynski and his microphone were located during the Kennedy shooting and was unaware that Pruszynski and his microphone were moving while the shots were being fired. In the TV program, the fourth expert conceded, "Any information relating to where Mr. Pruszynski was standing at the time or any movements he made during the sequence of shots would, to some degree, have been of assistance."

The Pruszynski recording's importance rests not only upon the number of shots fired but also upon another key issue: the intervals between the shots. Accordingly, two of the four audio experts reported that the Pruszynski recording contains evidence of a second gunman firing virtually simultaneously with Sirhan. They determined—and a firearms expert concurred—that at least two of the shots captured on Pruszynski's sound recording were fired too close together for both to have come from Sirhan's revolver[15]. The dissenting fourth expert did not address the key issue of shot intervals.

The significance of the Pruszynski recording was unknown for 36 years until early 2004, when a journalist obtained a copy of the California State Archives's crude cassette dub of the recording. It's the only audio recording known to have captured the actual shooting. Two other sound recordings made that night by newsmen Andrew West of Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate KRKD and Jeff Brent of the Continental News Service recorded only the shooting's immediate aftermath.

Discovery Times's "Conspiracy Test" concluded by posing this question: "Will the continuing respect for Robert Kennedy and the new evidence of a second gunman lead to a re-opening of the RFK assassination?" One of the program's audio analysts answered it this way: "My feeling about the evidence that's come up here is that you can't back away from real stuff. It merits closer examination. And as a citizen of this country (I believe) it has to be looked at."

Conspiracy theories

Los Angeles police sergeant Paul Sharaga and a young Kennedy campaign worker named Sandy Serrano both claimed a young Hispanic man and a young Caucasian woman with blonde hair (the latter wearing a "polka dot" dress) quickly burst out of a rear service exit of the Ambassador Hotel's kitchen moments after the shooting exclaiming, "We shot him." When asked "who?", the young woman responded, "Senator Kennedy!" [citation needed]

Sgt. Sharaga was made aware of the suspicious duo by a middle-age married couple who had frantically flagged him down shortly after he had pulled his squad car into one of the hotel's parking lots. Sharaga immediately issued an all points bulletin for the young couple, one soon canceled without explanation by his superiors. Serrano said she was later coerced by police into changing her story.[citation needed]

A San Diego high school student, Lisa Urso, who also was present in the hotel kitchen pantry when Kennedy was shot, claims she saw a young blond man in a gray business suit place a revolver in a holster under his jacket when Sirhan began shooting and that she also saw a dark-haired man in a black business suit fire a handgun into the ceiling and then run away from the scene.[citation needed]-->

CIA operatives

On November 20, 2006, BBC's Newsnight presented research by Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several CIA agents were present on the night of the assassination.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction, and some of the officers were based in Southeast Asia at the time, with no apparent reason to be in Los Angeles. Three of those accused were former senior officers who had worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's main anti-Castro station based in Miami.

JMWAVE Chief of Operations David Morales, Chief of Maritime Operations Gordon Campbell and Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations George Joannides were identified by former acquaintances in photographs taken at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968. Among those acquaintances was Congressional investigator Ed Lopez, who worked with Joannides while the latter was serving as CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

According to O'Sullivan, Morales was known for his deep anger with the Kennedys for what he saw as their betrayal during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. O'Sullivan quoted Morales as having said, "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." O'Sullivan reported that the CIA denied that the officers in question were present and declined to comment further.

O’Sullivan interviewed David Rabern, a freelance mercenary and private investigator who had been contracted by the CIA to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Rabern had been in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on the fateful night in 1968. While Rabern did not know Morales and Campbell by name, he had noticed them talking to each other in the hotel lobby prior to the assassination. He also noticed Campbell in and around several police stations on U.S. soil over which the CIA had no jurisdiction. [16][17][18]

Sirhan's motivations

According to author Loren Coleman, [19] the date of the assassination is significant, because it was the first anniversary of the first day of the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors that began on June 5, 1967. Sirhan Sirhan's shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, Coleman writes, has been characterized as one of the first acts of Palestine or Arab terrorism to take place on American soil. Coleman suggests Sirhan saw himself as a Palestinian militant.

In a diary police found at Sirhan's home, Sirhan had written, "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more and more of an unshakable obsession. RFK must die. RFK must be killed. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated. .... Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 1968."

The 2006 film Bobby, directed by Emilio Esteves, depicts the fictional lives of 24 characters in the Ambassador Hotel on the day that of the assassination.

Legacy

The assassination of Robert Kennedy is part of a sequence of tragic events in the 1960s that led to the demoralizing and alienation of many people in the political centre-left in the United States. [citation needed] These events began with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and included the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, culminating in the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where police brutally assaulted anti-Vietnam war demonstrators. [citation needed] It is unclear whether Robert Kennedy, had he not been assassinated, would have gone on to become the Democratic presidential nominee. At the time of his death, Kennedy was far behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey in convention delegate support which Humphrey had gathered through commitments from party bosses outside the presidential primary system. [citation needed] This fact however has not deterred a good number of people, many of them Kennedy romanticists, from stubbornly clinging to the fiction that Kennedy somehow had the nomination wrapped up by his victory in the California primary; and for some of them, this myth has been part of what has driven their alienation. [citation needed] Following the June 1968 assassination in Los Angeles, Humphrey continued gathering delegate commitments from the party bosses and, not surprisingly, was nominated in Chicago despite not having run in most of the primaries; he went on to lose a very close 1968 presidential election to Republican Richard Nixon.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Lawrence Teeter, Attorney for Sirhan Sirhan (June 5, 1998). "Sirhan Sirhan and the 30th Anniversary of the Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy" (HTML). jfk-info. Retrieved 2007-08-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help)
  2. ^ Thom White (2005). "RFK Assassination Far From Resolved". CITIZINEmag. Retrieved February 16. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); External link in |work= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  3. ^ Steve Lopez (1998). "Guarding the Dream". TIME. Retrieved August 16. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); External link in |work= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ "title" (PICTURE). american history. 2007. Retrieved 2007-08-19. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
  5. ^ Andrew West of KRKD (June 5, 1968). "Hear it Now! RFK ASSASSINATED" (AUDIO). Hear it Now!. Retrieved 2007-08-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help)
  6. ^ "Rosemary Clooney: 1928-2002" (HTML). cincy post. 2007. Retrieved 2007-08-19. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
  7. ^ Shane O'Sullivan Film-maker of Who shot Bobby Kennedy? (post 75 - At 08:12 p.m. on 22 November 2006). "title" (HTML). pub. Retrieved 2007-08-19. We interviewed Frank Burns, for instance. He was standing one foot behind and to the right of Kennedy. He re-enacted the shooting for us in his living room and placed Sirhan three feet away. I would ask Mr Ayton to provide a witness closer to Kennedy who can place Sirhan's gun one inch behind.

    A dozen witnesses place Sirhan's gun several feet away and in front of Kennedy, not one inch behind. Sirhan's firing trajectory fits the wound patterns of the four other victims and other bullet-holes found in the pantry door-frames.     {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  8. ^ Joseph Geringer (2007). "The Autopsy" (HTML). Crime Library. Retrieved 2007-08-19.
  9. ^ Thomas Noguchi (December 3, 1985). Coroner. Pocket. ISBN 0671624938. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  10. ^ EMI ENDO and ERIC MALNIC TIMES STAFF WRITERS (Thursday, January 18, 1996). "New Twist in Kennedy Mystery" (HTML). Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2007-08-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  11. ^ Rose Lynn Mangan (2007). "Sirhan's Researcher" (HTML). www.sirhansresearcher.com. Retrieved 2007-08-19. Photos of the RFK assassination. Jamie Scott Enyart, who was behind and to the left of RFK during the shooting, took a series of photos of the event. His film was immediately confiscated by L.A.P.D. officers and was sealed for 20 years. When the seal was lifted in 1988, Enyart applied for the return of his film and was only given prints of photos from the same roll that were taken before he entered the pantry. The ten photos that he took in the pantry during the assassination were reported to be lost. I testified at Enyart's trial on his behalf (see p. 36 of Special Exhibit 10 Report), and I clearly demonstrated the flat out falsification of evidence by the L.A.P.D. The jury later awarded him a settlement of $450,000. A letter of from Scott's attorneys expressing thanks for my help is on p.35 of the Special Exhibit 10 Report. For more details, I refer you to pp.245-246 of William Turner's book, "Rearview Mirror," published by Penmarin Books, 2001, ISBN #1883955211. The chapter referenced in this book also contains a conclusion by top forensics acoustics expert Dr. Michael H. L. Hecker of the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, that his analysis of three audio tapes recorded that night indicate that "no fewer than ten gunshots are ascertainable following the conclusion of the Senator's victory speech until after the time that Sirhan was disarmed." Sirhan's gun was only capable of firing eight rounds. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
  12. ^ Joseph Geringer (2007). "title" (HTML). [1]. Retrieved 2007-08-19. Because Serrano was the most adamant about the existence of the phantom lady, she was turned over to a Sgt. Enrique Hernandez for in-depth questioning on the topic. The interview lasted more than an hour and, badly shaken from the almost-accusatory nature of the interview, she took and failed a polygraph (lie detector) test. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
  13. ^ [2]
  14. ^ [3]
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference Yahoo-Discovery was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ "CIA role claim in Kennedy killing". Newsnight. BBC News. 2006-11-21. Retrieved 2006-11-21. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  17. ^ O'Sullivan, Shane (2006-11-20). "Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2006-11-21. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  18. ^ http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/112206CARMICHAEL.html
  19. '^ The Copycat Effect New York: Paraview Pocket-Simon and Schuster, 2004, ISBN 0-7434-8223-9

Ayton, Mel 'The Forgotten Terrorist - Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Washington DC Potomac Books 2007

34°03′35″N 118°17′50″W / 34.0597°N 118.2971°W / 34.0597; -118.2971

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