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Disputes and Contentions

There seems to be no dispute that Sirhan fired his revolver, and Sirhan is alleged to have admitted as much privately. What is disputed is whether any of Sirhan's bullets actually hit Senator Kennedy, whether Sirhan had planned and acted alone or was assisted by another gunman at the scene, and whether Sirhan fired bullets or blanks. As with Robert's brother John's assassination in 1963, the Senator'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.

Autopsy

Forensic experts agree that the autopsy performed on Robert Kennedy was one of the finest autopsies ever performed on a public figure. Rather than resolving all doubt, however, the RFK autopsy raises questions for those who study the assassination. First, there was the location of the wounds on Kennedy's body. Despite the fact that one bullet entered Kennedy's head behind his right ear and two entered at the rear of his right armpit, most witnesses recalled that Sirhan was facing Kennedy when he fired. As is often the case in events such as this, however, eyewitnesses gave differing and contradictory accounts. Many of those present recall that Kennedy stopped and shook hands with people just before the shooting, but some recalled that he then resumed walking. Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers, who was wounded in the shooting and came to believe that Sirhan had not acted alone, was a few feet behind Kennedy and remembered both Kennedy's shaking hands and his then moving towards the nearby steam table. On the other hand, Valerie Schulte, the blonde best known for her green and yellow polka-dot dress and her crutches, told KABC's Carl George on ABC little more than 30 minutes after the shooting that she was two feet behind Kennedy and to his right as Kennedy moved through the pantry area. She said that Kennedy stopped and turned to his left to shake hands with waiters when an assailant approached from the direction in which Kennedy had been walking. Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, himself a prime suspect for many conspiracy theorists, told police in a recorded interview shortly after the shooting that Kennedy, walking next to Cesar, had turned to his left to shake hands when the shooting started. KNBC's Piers Anderton reported on NBC about 35 minutes after the shooting that busboy Juan Romero said he was shaking Kennedy's hand when Kennedy was shot. Sirhan is alleged to have told Michael McCowan, an investigator for Sirhan's defense team, that he was unable to shoot Kennedy between the eyes because Kennedy turned his head at the last second, a remarkable confession if true but not entirely consistent with any of the accounts above.

Second, Sirhan's gun was placed by all witnesses at between 2 and 5 feet from the Senator when he fired his revolver. 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 (3.8 cm). (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

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. In any case, none of the witnesses whose recollections are credited with establishing the distance between Kennedy and Sirhan's gun reported seeing anyone else's gun 1.5 inches from Kennedy's head. Thus, there are three possibilities: (1) the autopsy's estimate of the distance between Kennedy's head and the gun from which the bullets came was inaccurate, (2) the memories of eyewitnesses were inaccurate, or (3) someone other than Sirhan fired a gun 1.5 inches from Kennedy's head without being seen by the approximately 30 people in the room.

Pruszynski recording

Decades after the assassination, it was discovered that the shots in the kitchen pantry had been recorded on audio tape by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a freelance newspaper reporter who was covering Senator Kennedy's presidential campaign for the Montreal Gazette and today resides in his native Poland. Pruszynski had made the recording with a battery-powered portable cassette tape recorder and an attached microphone. Pruszynski's tape is the only known sound recording of the assassination, and analysis of it has only just begun.

At the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on February 21, 2008, Philip M. Van Praag of PVP Designs in Tucson, Arizona, presented his conclusions concerning the Pruszynski tape, which he asserted provides a record of a second gun being fired in the assassination. the Academy plans to publish Van Praag's paper later in the year.

On June 6, 2007, the newly-discovered Pruszynski recording was the centerpiece for a television program about the Kennedy case on Discovery Times Channel, now known as Investigation Discovery Channel. The one-hour documentary, entitled Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination, provided evidence from the recording that convicted gunman Sirhan Sirhan had not acted alone. Pruszynski's audio tape, which had never been broadcast in the 39 years since the murder, was aired for the first time during the Discovery Times program. According to three out of four audio experts interviewed for the documentary, the reporter's recording reveals that a second gun was fired in the Bobby Kennedy shooting.

Stanislaw Pruszynski and his recording equipment were approximately 40 feet southwest of Senator Kennedy when the shots erupted inside the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry. Pruszynski was unaware that his portable machine was still operating as it captured the sounds of the Kennedy 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.

At that moment, 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 the Senator 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. Doors between Pruszynski and the shooting were open at the time.

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, departed the steps and proceeded toward the kitchen pantry precisely while the shooting was taking place off-camera, inside the pantry. As the Kennedy shooting continued in the pantry, Pruszynski continued moving in the ballroom toward the corridor that accessed the pantry, getting his microphone closer to the shooting but still unaware of the shots erupting in that other room.

Pruszynski's audio recording captured a number of rapidly occurring sounds, each one very short in duration and with something of a popping or even clapping quality. "Conspiracy Test" quoted four audio experts who analyzed the Pruszynski recording: Philip Van Praag and Wes Dooley in the United States, Eddie Brixen in Denmark and Philip Harrison in the United Kingdom. Van Praag, Dooley and Brixen 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. Sirhan possessed only the one revolver and had no opportunity to reload his weapon once the shooting erupted in the pantry. If the Pruszynski recording does indeed reflect more than eight shots fired, it establishes the existence of a second gunman.

Harrison dissented on the issue of number of shots, reporting that he was able to confirm only seven or eight shots in the Pruszynski recording. The Discovery Times program explained that Harrison 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. Harrison relied on a digital copy of just one of those master dubs. Unlike at least two of the other experts, Harrison did not know where Pruszynski and his microphone were located during the Kennedy shooting and was unaware that Pruszynski and his microphone were moving toward the shots as they were being fired. In the Discovery Times TV program, Harrison 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 two additional evidence: the intervals between the shots and differing acoustic characteristics.

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 there was at least one set of so-called "double-shots," and possibly two sets. In the one set of "double-shots" that these experts confirmed for "Conspiracy Test", the set's twin shots were fired too close together for both to have come from Sirhan's revolver. The shooting's two separate sets of "double-shots"—that is, the third and fourth shots in the first set and the seventh and eighth shots in the second set—were separated by 122 and 149 milliseconds respectively. In field tests, a trained firearms expert firing under ideal conditions could only manage 366 milliseconds between shots using the same weapon. The dissenting Philip Harrison did not address this key issue of shot intervals.

In addition to the "double-shot" findings, one of the Discovery Times audio experts, Philip Van Praag, reported to the AAFS in 2008 that five of the shots heard in the recording—3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 in a sequence of 13 shots—had odd acoustic characteristics which the expert attributed to their being fired from a second gun pointing away from Pruszynski's microphone. In his scientific paper on the Pruszynski recording, Van Praag reported to the AAFS that a forensic investigation had matched the anomalous acoustic characteristics to those of a Harrington & Richardson .22 firearm known as the H&R Model 922. Sirhan's weapon in the pantry was a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet.

The significance of the Pruszynski recording was unknown for 36 years until early 2004, when an American journalist obtained a copy of the California State Archives's crude cassette dub of the original recording. The original is the only audio recording known to have captured the actual Robert Kennedy 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 did not capture the shooting itself but 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 experts 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."

Suppression or coverup?

James Scott Enyart has claimed 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. 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.

Sandra Serrano, a young Kennedy campaign worker, 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.

Conspiracy theories

Although no one has found evidence of a link between Sirhan and any co-conspirator, the circumstances of the assassination have given rise to beliefs in some quarters that someone else must have been involved. If someone other than Sirhan fired the bullet that killed Kennedy, who was it?

The security guard

For decades, researchers have identified Thane Eugene Cesar as the most likely candidate for a second gunman in the RFK assassination. Cesar had been employed by Ace Guard Service to protect Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. This was not his full-time job. During the day he worked as a maintenance plumber at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank, a job that required a security clearance from the Department of the Defense. He worked there from 1966 until losing his job in 1971. According to researcher Lisa Pease, Cesar had formerly worked at the Hughes Aircraft Corporation, but author Dan Moldea wrote that Cesar began working at Hughes in 1973, a job he held for seven years and a position Cesar said required the second highest clearance level at the plant.

Cesar was a Cuban American who supported segregationist George Wallace for President. He appeared to have no specific job at Lockheed and apparently had "floating" assignments and often worked in off-limits areas which only special personnel had access to. According to some researchers , these areas were under the control of the CIA.

When interviewed, Cesar admitted that he pulled a gun at the scene of the shooting but insisted the weapon was a Rohm .38, not a .22, the caliber of the bullets found in Kennedy. He also claimed that he got knocked down after the first shot and did not get the opportunity to fire his gun. The LAPD, which interviewed Cesar shortly after the shooting, did not regard Cesar as a suspect and did not ask to see his gun.

Cesar admitted that he did own a .22-caliber H & R pistol, and he showed it to LAPD sergeant P. E. O'Steen on June 24, 1968. When the LAPD interviewed Cesar three years later, however, he claimed that he had sold the gun before the assassination to a man named Jim Yoder. William W. Turner tracked down Yoder in October, 1972. Yoder still had the receipt for the H & R pistol, which was dated September 6, 1968, and bore Cesar's signature. Cesar therefore had sold the pistol to Yoder three months after Kennedy's assassination despite Cesar's claim in 1971 that he had sold the weapon months before the murder. Author Dan Moldea wrote that that Cesar submitted years later to a polygraph examination performed by Edward Gelb, former president and executive director of the American Polygraph Association. Moldea reported that Cesar denied any involvement in Kennedy's assassination and passed the test with flying colors.

The woman in the polka-dot dress

Kennedy campaign worker Sandy Serrano claimed a young Hispanic man and a young Caucasian woman wearing a "polka dot" dress burst from a southwest exit of the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room ballroom moments after the shooting, giggling and exclaiming, "We shot him." When she asked them "Who?" the young woman answered, "Senator Kennedy!" The two then walked into a hotel parking lot where an elderly couple named Bernstein saw them, still laughing and saying, "We shot Kennedy." The Bernsteins flagged down LAPD officer Paul Sharaga, who issued an all points bulletin for the young couple but this was canceled without explanation by his superiors. Serrano said she was later coerced by police into changing her story. Researchers have pored over photographs and television pictures from the scene and found women wearing dresses that might be perceived as bearing polka dots, but no likely assassin has been identified.

CIA operatives

On November 20, 2006, the BBC's Newsnight presented research by Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several CIA officers were present on the night of the assassination. On November 20, 2007, O'Sullivan released a video documentary entitled RFK Must Die, providing an update on his investigation and findings.

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 close associates of Morales, he was known for his deep anger with the Kennedys for what he saw as their betrayal during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Morales' former attorney Robert Walton 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 declined to comment on the officers in question.

O’Sullivan interviewed David Rabern, a freelance undercover operative and private investigator who 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 in Los Angeles prior to the assassination - a state over which the CIA had no jurisdiction.

At the end of his documentary, however, Mr. O'Sullivan casts some doubt upon his own presentation up to that point, and reveals that the two men who were previously identified in the documentary as "Campbell" and "Joannides" were in fact two now-deceased Bulova Watch Company employees, at the Ambassador for a company convention. They are further revealed in other footage of the ballroom on the night of the assassination, in various social situations, laughing, talking with others, etc., prior to the shooting of Senator Kennedy. After the shooting, they are shown in television news footage, listening to witnesses, unabashedly wandering before presumably openly visible television cameras, generally looking quite casual and not in any hurry to depart the area. Footage of "Campbell" in particular had been shown several times earlier in the documentary in seemingly suspicious movements, appearing hurriedly to depart the ballroom after the shooting, touching his chest furtively as if concealing a gun, etc.; the later footage in the documentary shows he was still in the ballroom at the time of the shooting and not directly involved.

Moreover, the impressively positive identifications by CIA operatives and acquaintances over time of "Morales" as being a man in the ballroom footage, (and equally at home casually appearing several times in front of obviously placed television cameras after the shooting, including once during an interview of a witness in the kitchen pantry where the shooting took place), were called into question also by O'Sullivan's revelation of new, recently-discovered photographs to add to the 1959 photo used through most of the documentary for viewer comparison to the man in the film footage. The latter photograph indeed greatly resembled the man in the Ambassador ballroom footage; but the new photos, taken between 1966 and 1971, show a man with less resemblance to the man in the Ambassador footage of June 5, 1968.

O'Sullivan himself expresses doubt in the end that the "Morales" in the film footage at the Ambassador and the man positively identified as Morales in the 1966-71 photos are the same man.

O'Sullivan also indicates, without any substantiation, that the Bulova Watch Company was a "well-known cover" for the CIA, according to "several people" to whom O'Sullivan talked off-camera, and attempts by implication to confirm that link by the fact that World War II General Omar Bradley was the chairman of Bulova at the time and also advised President Johnson on Vietnam; nowhere, however, is Bradley linked with the CIA. Bulova did make bomb fuses for the government during the Cold War, but there is no documented historical link with the CIA.

O'Sullivan concludes by asking rhetorically whether the two employees, named by their Bulova employee names in the documentary, based on their being labeled on the back of L.A.P.D. evidence photos demonstrating they had been investigated and interviewed briefly by the police at the time of the assassination, could have been using other names, "Campbell" and "Joannides", in their supposed CIA roles, with the Bulova jobs as cover. The documentary also reveals, however, that the man identified as "Campbell", under his real name, advanced to become a "well-respected" and well-known man in Bulova and the watch industry generally by the late 1970's.

In the end, O'Sullivan's documentary is inconclusive about a CIA presence at the hotel. Whether Sirhan, however, was "handled", brainwashed, manipulated or hypnotized as a "Manchurian candidate", is extensively explored by the documentary, but in the end is loaned no more than speculation by the effort. The analysis, however, is at once intriguing and even plausible.

Robert Kennedy, ironically, had spent the previous night before the shooting at the home of supporter and friend, director John Frankenheimer, director of both "Seven Days in May" and "The Manchurian Candidate".

Sirhan's motivations

Consider the possibility that the man grabbed at the scene firing a gun was responsible for Kennedy's death. What could have motivated a young man to alter history in such a horrible way? A diary police found at Sirhan's home, allegedly penned by Sirhan himself, had stated, "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." According to author Loren Coleman, 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. Kennedy had voiced support for Israel, and Coleman suggests Sirhan saw himself as a Palestinian militant. Sirhan's shooting of Kennedy, Coleman writes, has been characterized as one of the first acts of Palestine or Arab terrorism to take place on American soil.

Legacy

The assassination of Robert Kennedy is part of a series of events in the 1960s that led to the demoralizing and alienation of many people in the political centre-left in the United States. 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. 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. This fact, however, has not deterred many from the belief that Kennedy had indeed wrapped up the nomination by his victory in the California primary. Following Kennedy's June 1968 assassination in Los Angeles, Humphrey continued gathering delegate commitments from the party bosses and was nominated in Chicago. Humphrey went on to lose a very close 1968 presidential election to Republican Richard Nixon.