Legacy of Secrecy (128 page)

arranged. That test asked many key questions, like “Were you involved

in a plan to shoot Robert Kennedy?” Cesar passed with flying colors, so

Moldea no longer considers him a suspect.17

One person that many find suspicious is the infamous “girl in the polka-

dot dress” who crops up in so many witness accounts of that night, as

well as in sightings on previous days with Sirhan. At least fourteen wit-

nesses provided accounts of the attractive young woman. Their recol-

lections of her appearance were generally consistent, except that some

said she had dark-blond hair, while others said it was brown. While TV

footage shows many women in polka-dot dresses at the Ambassador

on the night Bobby was shot, this particular one is suspicious because

she was usually seen with Sirhan prior to the shooting and/or fleeing

with a taller man after the shooting.18

Four witnesses said she yelled something like “We killed him!”

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and seemed happy about it. Why would an accessory to murder have

boasted about such an act while fleeing? Some have speculated that

the young woman was a gleeful white supremacist in the same vein

as Kathy Ainsworth, mentioned in Chapter 45 and described by Pulit-

zer Prize–winning reporter Jack Nelson as an attractive young “school

teacher by day and ruthless Klan bomber by night.” Otherwise, it’s dif-

ficult to imagine a murderess happily touting her crime in public unless

she were on drugs, intoxicated, or psychotic.19 Innocent explanations

have been offered, ranging from far-right Republicans, attending other

parties at the Ambassador, gloating over Bobby’s death to someone’s

meaning “we” as a symbol of collective guilt for America at the time.20

The LAPD tried to come up with innocent candidates in or near the

pantry. But the main one they found, Valeria Schulte, had worn a dress

nothing like the one witnesses described—and, Philip Melanson points

out, “her leg was in a cast from hip to ankle, and she walked with a

crutch” the night of Bobby’s shooting. Melanson observed that not

only did none of the witnesses note that prominent fact, but the cast

would have prevented Schulte from running in the way the suspect

was described.21

The LAPD seemed to wish the whole “girl in the polka-dot dress”

angle would go away. But Sandra Serrano had given a television inter-

view about the girl before she went to police headquarters, so the news

was already out and had to be dealt with. The LAPD questioned Serrano

extensively, possibly more than it did any other witness, interviewing

her twice on June 5, then again on June 7, when she also reenacted

what she’d seen for the Secret Service and the FBI. Serrano was then

reinterviewed on June 8 by the FBI, and on June 10 by the LAPD. All the

while, she remained consistent. At that time, apparently only a few in

the LAPD knew there were so many other witnesses who had seen the

mysterious polka-dot-dress girl, and those officers and detectives were

in a tight-knit group created just to investigate Bobby’s murder, Special

Unit Senator (SUS).22

Sandy Serrano stuck to her story, so on June 20, the only SUS poly-

graph examiner, Lieutenant Hank Hernandez, took Serrano out for a

friendly dinner. Then he gave her two polygraph tests. The first lasted

an hour. As Larry Hancock points out, “current guidelines for poly-

graph testing . . . specify that the examiner is required not to display or

express bias in any manner regarding the truthfulness of the examinee

prior to the completion of the testing, as failure to do so may generate

false positives.”23

The following are samples of Hernandez’s techniques with Serrano,

as he tried to get her to change her story before polygraphing her:

HERNANDEZ: Be a woman about this . . . don’t shame his death

by keeping this thing up. . . . I want to know why you did what you

did.

SERRANO: I seen those people!

HERNANDEZ: No, no, no, no, Sandy. Remember what I told you . . .

you’re shaming him!

SERRANO: Don’t shout at me!24

After browbeating Serrano like that for an hour and fifteen minutes,

Lt. Hernandez gave her the first polygraph test and Moldea notes that

Hernandez “determined that the badly shaken Serrano had lied about

the entire matter.” She was then reinterviewed and finally, grudgingly,

recanted what she had seen, saying she’d heard about the polka-dot-dress

girl at the police station. Hernandez and the SUS were satisfied with her

statement, though it ignored the fact that Serrano had told her story to

the assistant district attorney even before she went to the police station.

In addition, Hernandez and at least some in SUS knew that other wit-

nesses supported Serrano’s story.

In some ways, Serrano’s treatment typified that of witnesses who didn’t

support the official “lone nut” version of Bobby’s murder. Among those

subjected to similar intense pressure was one of Sirhan Sirhan’s brothers,

though he had a criminal background and Sandy Serrano was simply a

witness. Other witnesses weren’t treated as badly, as far as we can tell

from the files and tapes that weren’t destroyed, but those who reported

anything indicating that Sirhan had confederates were often subject to

repeated questioning or harsh tactics. They were also frequently poly-

graphed by Lt. Hernandez, a procedure that witnesses supporting the

“lone nut” scenario rarely underwent.25

The “lone nut” version was becoming the LAPD’s official story less

than an hour after Bobby had been shot, as demonstrated by the cancel-

lation of the radio broadcasts of Sgt. Sharaga’s description of the two

suspects. The idea that the shooter had no confederates was apparently

being set in stone before police officials even knew Sirhan’s name, let

alone what associates he might have.

Even as the official focus narrowed to an unaided Sirhan Sirhan, wit-

nesses to the contrary were giving their accounts to the LAPD. Appar-

ently, instead of keeping an open mind and trying to determine whether

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those reports were accurate, at least some LAPD officials decided to not

run down, or to discount, leads that pointed to a conspiracy. Though

key LAPD files, interview tapes, and photographs were later destroyed,

many were preserved and released years, sometimes even decades, later.

Starting in early 2008, the text of thousands of pages of LAPD (and some

FBI) files about Bobby’s murder can be searched online at the Mary Fer-

rell Foundation’s website in ways not available to investigators in 1968

or to journalists in the 1980s or 1990s. These documents make it crystal

clear that all of the LAPD’s slanting, badgering, and harassment were

geared toward witnesses who didn’t support the “lone nut” conclusion.

The question is—why?

Part of the answer may be the frequent tendency of police to look for

evidence against an obvious suspect, rather than trying to develop evi-

dence and run down leads that defense attorneys could later use to cast

doubt on the prime suspect’s guilt. As we detail later, police might also

informally cover up information to protect city or federal officials. In

Sirhan’s case, it seems beyond coincidence that in the weeks and months

just before Bobby’s murder, the former aspiring jockey had suddenly

developed ties to two of Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty’s good friends. In

addition, at least one lead in a military intelligence file on Sirhan wasn’t

pursued by the LAPD.

Something the released files now show that was rarely fully appreci-

ated in earlier decades is just how large and extensive the entire LAPD

investigation really was. As with JFK’s murder—which spawned

secret investigations by the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and even Bobby

Kennedy—the LAPD did extensively investigate certain conspiracy

allegations regarding Bobby’s death, but only for its own internal use.

The LAPD sometimes withheld the results of these investigations from

the press and the public for decades. For example, unknown to the pub-

lic until recently, the LAPD generated an internal report of more than

nine hundred pages about possible ties between the JFK assassination

and Bobby’s murder. However, since members of the Mafia were not

officially considered suspects in JFK’s murder at the time, that LAPD

report included only a few fringe Mafia associates.26

Yet reading those reports today (or, in the case of those still withheld

or destroyed, their partial summaries or indexes) raises new questions

about leads that weren’t fully explored. Some important leads were

pursued only because of pressure on the LAPD from journalists Peter

Noyes and William Turner. While there were members of the LAPD that

seriously investigated the journalists’ leads, others seem to have just

gone through the motions so they would be able to counter any stories

the journalists might make public.27

Being able to search and review the thousands of pages of LAPD files

about Bobby’s assassination today also reveals key areas that weren’t

pursued, or investigations that were aborted prematurely. The Mafia

was a huge area that wasn’t explored, even when obvious leads pointed

in that direction. Dan Moldea quoted a key LAPD supervisor for SUS as

saying that he “never supervised any phase of [looking into] a conspir-

acy allegation involving the mob.” Related areas that surfaced briefly

in the LAPD investigation but weren’t seriously pursued include drug

trafficking, Sirhan’s gambling with a bookie, and the criminal ties of

some of Sirhan’s brothers.28

Why the LAPD or the FBI didn’t fully explore those particular areas

will become clear as the story of their investigation unfolds. First, how-

ever, it’s important to remember that both agencies were involved at

the same time with another high-profile assassination—that of Martin

Luther King—and it was about to take a dramatic turn.

Congressional investigators found that after James Earl Ray arrived in

London, he exchanged the return portion of his ticket for one to Lisbon,

Portugal. Ray claims he was trying to get to Africa, perhaps Angola, to

find work; if he couldn’t get a job there, then he planned to go to “one

of the English-speaking countries” in Africa, like Rhodesia or South

Africa. But Ray left Portugal and returned to London on May 18, 1968.

He later said he was running low on money and had only about $400

left (almost $2,500 today).29 One of Ray’s brothers said that Ray “didn’t

figure [there would] be that much heat. He was going to [white-run]

Rhodesia. He was desperate in London. Had more heat on him than he

ever dreamed of.”30

In the manhunt for James Earl Ray, the FBI had asked the Royal Cana-

dian Mounted Police (RCMP) to conduct a passport search in an attempt

to match Ray’s photo with those on passport applications. After review-

ing 175,000 applications, finally on June 1, 1968, the RCMP found Ray’s

photo on his April 24 application under the name of “Ramon George

Sneyd.” Ray’s handwriting and a fingerprint also matched. The travel

agency where Ray had filed his application gave Canadian authorities

information about Ray’s airline ticket to London. This allowed authori-

ties to follow Ray’s trail to Portugal and back to London, where Scotland

Yard ordered a passport watch for Sneyd/Ray.31

There is evidence that Ray may have committed a bank robbery in

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London on June 4, 1968.32 The next day, Ray moved to a very small hotel

in the Pimlico area of London. Later, when the hotel’s owner was clean-

ing Ray’s room while he was out, the owner saw newspapers on Ray’s

bed open to articles about Bobby’s assassination. Also, the owner said

she took two phone messages for Ray that have never been explained,

including one from a woman. Though Ray told the owner he was head-

ing to Germany, he was actually planning to go to Brussels, Belgium.

While in London, Ray called a British newspaper reporter and asked

about getting to Belgium. Ray later claimed that he hoped to travel

from Belgium to a white-controlled country in Africa, his ultimate

destination.33

Ray went to Heathrow Airport on the morning of June 8, 1968, with

his Brussels plane ticket, the equivalent of $117 in British currency, and

his pistol. But when Ray presented his “Sneyd” passport on the morning

of June 8, 1968, officials took action. Ray was arrested at 11:15 AM.34

James Earl Ray had come close to getting away with murder. For

someone who had managed to elude authorities in the US, Canada, Eng-

land, and Portugal for sixty-five days during an intense international

manhunt, it seems odd that Ray never bothered to change his appear-

ance by growing a beard or mustache (or lightening his dark hair). Not

only would those changes have seemed logical once Ray’s “wanted”

photo was publicized worldwide, but doing so would also have kept