Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (47 page)

The chart that follows proves that there must have been a second gun. But prior to reading that, bear in mind that they
never established linkage of the first gun.

The Firearms Panel that examined the evidence concluded as follows:

“The examiners found that the Sirhan gun cannot be identified with the bullets from the crime scene.”
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Obviously, in a case where the U.S. government’s official version is that there was
not
a conspiracy, proof that there had to be a second gun proves that there
was
a conspiracy and that the official version that it was a “lone nut” is the nuttiest thing out there.

“The specter of a second gun changes most everything.”
⁴⁰⁹

Findings of Prominent Ballistics Expert William W. Harper

A review of the ballistics evidence by noted Criminalist and Ballistics Expert, William W. Harper, was very revealing. Harper studied the bullets in evidence, the autopsy, and the police trajectory diagrams and then constructed an affidavit to serve as legally sworn testimony to his findings. His conclusions from that affidavit follow:

▸ PRINCIPAL FINDING:

“Robert Kennedy was fired upon from two distinct firing positions.

Firing Position A, the position of Sirhan, was located directly in front of the Senator, with Sirhan face to face with the Senator. This position is established by more than a dozen eyewitnesses. A second firing position, Firing Position B, is clearly established by the autopsy report. It was located in close proximity to the Senator, immediately to his right and rear. It was from this position that 4 (four) shots were fired, three of which entered the Senator’s body ... It is extremely unlikely that any of the bullets fired by Sirhan’s gun ever struck the body of Robert Kennedy.”
⁴¹⁰

It should also be noted that after Sirhan was convicted and sentenced, Harper later proved to a scientific certainty that the bullets removed from Senator Kennedy and the bullet removed from newsman William Weisel were
fired from two different guns.
⁴¹¹

Harper’s findings were later corroborated by an LAPD document, kept secret until its release in 1988 from LAPD to the California State Archives where the document can currently be viewed. The document confirms that LAPD ran its own independent analysis of the two bullets using a Hycon Balliscon camera. The following are the verbatim critical conclusions of LAPD Criminalist Larry Baggett:

▸ HYCON BALLISANIC CAMERA

DIFF. OF 1/2 DEGREE IN RIFLING ANGLES KENNEDY BULLET FIRED FROM BARREL WITH SHARPER RIFLING THAN WEISEL

▸ CONCLUSION

1.KENNEDY AND WEISEL BULLETS NOT FIRED FROM SAME GUN.

2.KENNEDY BULLET NOT FIRED FROM SIRHAN’S REVOLVER.”
⁴¹²

Later research has also revealed that LAPD used a substitute gun (not the gun that Sirhan had actually fired) in its test comparisons that were used as evidence at trial, apparently to attempt to establish linkage to the bullets which hit the Senator.
⁴¹³

Three audio tapes recorded that night were examined and tested by top foren- sics acoustics expert, Dr. Michael H.L. Hecker of the
Stanford Research Institute.
Dr. Hecker’s study determined that a
minimum
of ten gunshots were fired (the gun of Sirhan was only capable of firing eight rounds):

“On the basis of auditory, oscillographic and spectrographic analyses of these three recordings, it is my opinion, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, that no fewer than ten gunshots are ascertainable following the conclusion of the Senator’s victory speech until after the time Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was disarmed.”
⁴¹⁴

The LAPD adamantly maintained their official position that, other than Sirhan’s, there were no guns fired in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel during the shooting of Senator Kennedy. Clearly
there were
other guns fired, as we know that Sirhan’s .22 only held eight shots and that more than that were fired.
⁴¹⁵

In addition, several eyewitnesses testified that they saw men in plainclothes with their weapons drawn at the time of the assassination. The obvious assumption is that they were Secret Service, but
there were no
Secret Service agents protecting Robert Kennedy in 1968. The next most obvious assumption is that they were LAPD or off-duty officers working security for the Senator. But Kennedy
did not have
any armed bodyguards and LAPD said they were not theirs either. Yet
there they were:
The terminology that one eyewitness used was that he was “absolutely positive” that there were other men in plainclothes with guns drawn at the time of the shooting.
⁴¹⁶

When Sirhan was arrested he appeared normal but his complete disorien- tation and disassociation with the events that had taken place were noted by authorities and the issue came up at his trial. The Prosecution asked:

“Do you remember later on in that same conversation you said to Mr. Howard, ‘I have been before a magistrate, have I, or have I not?’ Mr. Howard said ‘No, you have not. You will be taken before a magistrate as soon as possible. Probably will be tried.’ ... You didn’t ask Mr. Howard at that time, ‘Tried for what?’ did you?”

“I don’t remember, sir, if I did or not.”

“Sirhan had not said, ‘Tried for what?’ to Mr. Howard, but his question as to whether or not he had been before a magistrate was a clear indication that he was disoriented. He appeared to be normal, yet he did not know if he had been before a judge. Had Grant Cooper been running an aggressive defense, Mr. Howard would have been on the witness stand explaining what in Sirhan’s behavior just hours after the murder had caused the assistant DA to repeatedly ask the prisoner if he knew where he was.”
⁴¹⁷

No one has been more at a loss to describe Sirhan’s motive for the act than has Sirhan himself:

“If I had wanted to kill him,” says Sirhan, again questioning whether he ever had planned to murder Robert Kennedy in the first place, “would I, sir, have been so stupid as to leave that notebook there, waiting for those cops, sir, to pick it up?”
⁴¹⁸

The
LAPD Summary Report
of the eyewitness statements to the RFK assassination contained blatant and total fabrications. Take the case of Booker Griffin, director of the
Negro Industrial and Educational Union.
Griffin, as he himself pointed out, was a perfect witness:

“I am a trained newsperson and I had been taught to watch details ... I was not there with a lay eye, I had covered, you know, shooting stories and others, and I was raised in a neighborhood situation where seeing people shot and being around bullets was something I was used to, and I was always taught to keep a kind of cool head. I’m not blind. I’m not a dishonest person. I know what I saw.”
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Evidence Exonerating Sirhan Bishara Sirhan of Murder in the First Degree

1.Ballistics-testing by noted criminalist and ballistics expert, William W. Harper, determined that the bullets that hit Senator Kennedy did not come from Sirhan’s gun.

2.The defendant was never at any point close enough to the victim to have fired the fatal shot. It was determined that the kill shot came from within less than three inches from the victim’s head. Every witness places the defendant much farther away.

3.All the bullets that hit Senator Kennedy traversed his body in a back-to-front direction. All witnesses placed the defendant in front of the victim. Therefore shots from the defendant’s gun hitting the Senator obviously would have traversed the victim’s body in a front-to-back trajectory, not back-to-front.

4.The trajectories of the bullets hitting Senator Kennedy’s body were all at downward angles. From the placement of the defendant by all witnesses, shots hitting the Senator would have necessarily had trajectories at upward angles.

5.The crime was not premeditated because the accused did not possess conscious intent at the moment of the crime; he does not even remember the crime, even under sodium pentothal and intense psychiatric sessions involving hypnotic regression. The last thing in the defendant’s memory is having coffee with a girl. His next memory—quite literally—is being in police custody.

6.The defendant did not possess malice aforethought and, indeed, how could he have? Through months of interrogation, hypnotic regression and even truth serum, no one was ever able to unearth a serious possible motive as to why he would shoot the Senator. The defendant has no memory whatsoever of planning to kill the Senator.

7.No motive existed or has ever been identified. The police and prosecution tried to assert that RFK’s intention of providing fifty jets to Israel was what caused Sirhan to kill him. That is simply impossible because Sirhan started his programmed writing in his notebooks about killing RFK on May 18, prior to the press coverage and the first public statement by RFK supporting the sale of jets, which was on May 21.

8.No memory of crime. Police were baffled by the fact that, even after months of intensive and expert interrogation, Sirhan had no recollection whatsoever of committing the crime, nor had he any coherent explanation of why he would commit the crime. Zero motive. Zero memory.
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9.Police procedures determined that the defendant was clearly operating under the influence of a drug, of which the defendant had no recollection whatsoever. Police shined a flashlight into Sirhan’s eyes after his arrest, which is standard procedure to determine if a suspect is under the influence of drugs. The officer who conducted that check, LAPD Officer Arthur Placencia, testified under oath that his pupils did not react to the light, “indicating that he was under the influence of something.”
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10.Sirhan volunteered to undergo multiple psychiatric examinations, hypnosis, and even volunteered for “truth serum” which was administered to him. Testing and extensive interrogation revealed that he had been “programmed” without his own conscious knowledge of the event.

11.There are also other blatant signs that the defendant had been programmed. Under hypnosis, he could be instructed to climb the bars of his cell like a monkey, would perform the instruction by acting it out, and then, after being brought out of hypnosis, would have no recollection at all of what had taken place. He was considered by experts to be the most easily hypnotizable subject they had ever encountered. The repetitious writing of “RFK must die!” in Sirhan’s notebook was a clear example of what is termed “automatic writing”: Under hypnosis, Sirhan would go into a deep trance and then would automatically begin writing “RFK must die! RFK must die!” over and over on the page of paper in front of him (and this is later, while in custody!).