Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (46 page)

VICTIM:

SENATOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY

Cause of Death:

MULTIPLE GUNSHOTS

Official Verdict:

Senator Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who fired from a distance, not at Official Verdict point-blank range, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Sirhan was found guilty “alone and not in concert with anyone else” of Murder in the First Degree.

Actual Circumstances:

Shot three times from behind, bullets traversing body at an upward angle, back-to-front. Coroner determined that the kill shot came from directly behind the right ear and at point-blank range. Defendant was never anywhere near enough to the victim to have fired the kill shot and, furthermore, shots from the Defendant could not have left a back-to-front bullet path, because Defendant was in front of the victim. Therefore, bullet trajectory would necessarily have been front-to-back.

Inconsistencies:

1.Sirhan was not at any point close enough to Senator Kennedy to have fired the kill shot. Coroner determined that the shot was fired from within one to three inches away from left ear. About the only thing that everybody in that room agreed with was that Sirhan was never that close.

2.Bullet trajectories indicate that primary shooter was at close range, behind target, and to his right. Sirhan was in front of Senator Kennedy and to his left, walking towards him. So it is not possible for bullets fired from his gun to have entered Senator Kennedy from behind and then traversed back-to-front.

3.Sirhan held his gun parallel to Senator Kennedy, therefore the trajectories traversing upwards are also totally contradictory to his actual position.

4.Sirhan’s gun held only eight bullets but fourteen bullets were fired, necessitating at least two shooters.
At least
fourteen shots were identified.

5.Psychiatrists determined that Sirhan was the most easily hypnotizable subject they’d ever seen; his notebooks contained repetitious entries such as “RFK must die” that were determined to have been written as post-hypnotic suggestion; conditions indicate that he was in a trance state during the murder.

6.Investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department acknowledged that they were completely unable to document any of Sirhan’s actions during a six-week period prior to the assassination which they labeled his “White Fog” period. They also acknowledged that such a complete disappearance was extremely unusual.

7.Sirhan Bishara Sirhan has been imprisoned since 1968 for a crime he did not commit because he was convicted of “Murder in the First Degree” and did not meet the requirements of that charge; he did not possess conscious intent at the moment of the crime, therefore, the act was not premeditated; nor did he possess malice aforethought. The evidence proves conclusively that the defendant was never at any point close enough to the victim to have fired the fatal shot. It has also been proven that the trajectories of the shots that hit Senator Kennedy could not have come from the defendant’s gun. Those facts mandate a verdict of “Not Guilty” when a person is accused of “Murder in the First Degree.” Therefore he should be a free man and, technically, never should have been convicted on that charge in the first place.

“There is no doubt in our minds that no fewer than 14 shots were fired in the pantry on that evening and that Sirhan did not in fact kill Senator Kennedy.”

—Robert Joling, forensic scientist who examined the case for decades.

If you believe that an alleged assassin could have fired fourteen bullets from an eight-shot gun then the official version probably won’t keep you up at night. ... but it
has
kept a lot of other folks up at night—especially those who believe in concepts like innocent until proven guilty, fair trials, and a justice system that should at least have the appearance of actually being just.

In addition to the aforementioned impossibility, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan also allegedly fired the kill shot from point-blank range—even though in reality (confirmed by multiple eyewitnesses) he was never at any moment anywhere near enough the victim to have fired such a shot.
³⁹⁴

In addition, the angles of the shots are all off. way off. The shots that struck Senator Kennedy traversed his body from back-to-front (per the experts).
³⁹⁵
 
If those shots had been fired from the alleged assassin, then they would have, by necessity, traversed the victim’s body front-to-back; because one thing that everybody agrees upon is that Sirhan was in front of RFK.

The shots also traversed the body (also per the experts) in a downward direction, entering, for example, above the ear and then traveling downward.
³⁹⁶
Had they come from Sirhan’s direction, they would have been, by necessity, traveling upward—his gun was not held in a location and angle from which the shots could have been going downward in the victim.

The bullets clearly traversed in directions and at angles that were not physically possible given the alleged assassin’s location at the crime scene.
³⁹⁷
So if the shots that hit Senator Kennedy actually
had
come from Sirhan’s gun, then they would have had to defy the laws of physics—and bullets don’t do that.

“The four bullets which touched Kennedy all hit on his back right side and were traveling forward relative to his body. Kennedy was walking towards Sirhan, his body was always facing Sirhan during the shots, and afterwards he even fell backwards before saying his last lucid words, (‘Is everyone all right?’)—at each and every moment facing toward Sirhan. It is impossible for bullets out of Sirhan’s gun to have hit Kennedy’s backside and been traveling forward unless Kennedy was almost entirely turned around.”
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“The upward angle of every shot was so steep as to be much closer to straight up than horizontal (80 degrees). And yet, all witnesses claim Sirhan’s gun was completely horizontal for his first two shots, after which

his gun hand was repeatedly slammed against a steam table (and now so far away from Kennedy that any errant shots of such upwardness would have been twenty feet high before reaching Kennedy, as opposed to entering Kennedy’s backside as they did).”
³⁹⁹

“According to the autopsy all the wound tracks were upward: the Kennedy head wound was at a mild 15 degrees off the horizontal, but the three back shots were described as at a steep 59, 67 and 80 degrees, as though a gun had been pressed to the senator’s back and pointed up so as not to protrude. In contrast, Sirhan was said to have fired with his gun parallel to the floor.”
⁴⁰⁰

Forensic expert Dr. Robert J. Joling, J.D., was also a Professor of Medical Law, as well as a judge and attorney. He conducted extensive scientific testing of the evidence in this case. Accompanied by Forensic Acoustic Expert Phil Van Praag, they undertook a comprehensive study of all evidence. Their study determined that a total of
at least
fouteen gunshots were fired at the time of the murder. When the bullets taken from the various victims in the room are added to the bullets that lodged elsewhere in the room, guess what folks?—The total isn’t the eight in Sirhan’s eight-shot gun, the total is fourteen. The acoustic evidence confirms it:

“There is no doubt in our minds that no fewer than fourteen shots were fired in the pantry on that evening and that Sirhan did not, in fact, kill Senator Kennedy.”
⁴⁰¹

They reach that conclusion for an extremely important reason; because it is
scientifically impossible
that Sirhan killed him:

DR. JOLING:

“It can be established conclusively that Sirhan did not shoot Senator Kennedy. And in fact not only did he not do it, he could not have done it.”
⁴⁰²

Actor Robert Vaughn was a close friend of Senator Kennedy and has closely followed the development of evidence in the case, not briefly, but over a period of several decades. As Vaughn notes with importance:

The results of the study “present indisputable scientific data that leads to the inescapable conclusion that two guns were fired from two different locations and two different directions on that fatal night.”
⁴⁰³

On top of all that, here’s another very interesting point: the Defendant doesn’t remember any of it. We don’t mean he’s a bit foggy from all the adrenaline and that there are a few little things that he can’t remember—we mean he can’t remember
any
of it.
⁴⁰⁴

Then there was the alleged assassin’s “White Fog” period: LAPD investigators were amazed to find a six-week period prior to the assassination of Senator Kennedy where the suspect could not be accounted for at all. He had simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Combine that with the fact that the man, even under hypnotism, cannot recall his own life during that period, and it’s not too big a leap to get to
Manchurian Candidate
scenario, is it?

“Meanwhile, Special Unit Senator, the LAPD’s assassination task force, had constructed a meticulous timetable of Sirhan’s activities prior to the shooting. “We took him back for more than a year with some intensity—where he’d been, what he’d been doing, who he’d been seeing. But there was this ten—or twelve-week gap, like a blanket of white fog, we could never penetrate, and which Sirhan himself appeared to have a complete amnesia block about,” says Bill Jordan, the night watch commander at Ramparts detectives who was Sirhan’s first interrogator.”
⁴⁰⁵

Chief Psychiatrist Bernard Diamond noted immediately that Sirhan had been previously programmed under hypnosis:

“Earlier, when Diamond saw how quickly Sirhan could be hypnotized, and realized that he had been hypnotized frequently before, Diamond put him into a light trance, gave him a yellow legal pad, and told him to write something about Kennedy. Sirhan wrote “RFK RFK RFK RFK RFK.” Diamond asked him to write more than Kennedy’s name, and Sirhan wrote, “Robert F. Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy.” What about Kennedy? Sirhan wrote. “RFK RFK RFK RFK RFK must die RFK must die RFK must die,” nine times, until Diamond told him to stop.

The experiment, witnessed by Kaiser and Dr. Seymour Pollack, director of the University of Southern California’s Institute of Psychiatry and Law, who represented the district attorney’s office, had been continuing along these lines for a while when Diamond asked whether Sirhan thought he was “crazy.”

“No no no no,” wrote Sirhan, still in a trance. If he wasn’t crazy, why was he writing in such a crazy fashion? “Practice practice practice practice practice,” Sirhan wrote. Practice for what? “Mind control mind control mind control mind.”
⁴⁰⁶

A thorough study of Sirhan’s notebooks, which it was professionally ascertained were clearly written while in a hypnotic trance, also made many suspect that money had changed hands at some point:

“The same question was also troubling defense team investigator Bob Kaiser, who suspected that the answer might be linked to the references to money in Sirhan’s notebooks. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that money had changed hands, or been promised, and Sirhan had been hypnotized to forget it. “You wrote certain things over and over and over again,” he pressed Sirhan. “And when you wrote about killing Kennedy, you join it to the unexplainable phrase, ‘I have never heard Please pay to the order of of of of.”‘ But Sirhan stonewalled: He couldn’t remember writing it; he couldn’t even remember the notebooks, he insisted.”
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