Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: "Questions, Still..."

“Like the murder of his brother John almost five years earlier, Bobby's shooting was a watershed for America. Most people believe a lone assassin - a Palestinian refugee Sirhan Bashara Sirhan - was responsible for his death. I shared that assumption until my continued involvement in political debate brought the real questions about Bobby's killing to my attention. After studying documents, talking to experts and interviewing a crucial witness, I believe there is strong evidence that Bobby's killing was carried out by more than one gunman.

This is not to say there is no evidence linking Sirhan to the crime. He was seen by many people at the Ambassador Hotel firing his .22 pistol at Kennedy as the Senator walked through the kitchen on a shortcut between meetings. Sirhan was arrested, charged and convicted of the crime. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair. But California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and today, 40 years on, Sirhan is still serving a life sentence.

So was Bobby Kennedy's shooting a non-controversial, open-and-shut case with a single, obvious suspect? Here's a summary of the facts: Firstly, Sirhan was apparently not in the right place to fire the bullets that killed Kennedy. The autopsy shows Kennedy was shot from behind, from below, from the right and with a gun positioned no more than three inches from his head. Yet all the eyewitnesses said they saw Sirhan between one-and-a-half and five feet in front of Kennedy - a completely different location to the one he would have needed to be in to fire the fatal shots. This information was withheld until after Sirhan's lawyers conceded his guilt.

Using the US Freedom of Information Act, Bernard Fensterwald, a Washington lawyer, obtained an FBI report on the shooting in 1976. It indicated that at least 12 bullets were fired in the hotel kitchen that evening. Two were recovered from Bobby's body and five from the bodies of wounded bystanders. Two more passed through Kennedy's body, while three were found lodged in ceiling panels. Yet the Sirhan theory relies on the notion that his gun, which held a maximum of eight bullets, was the only one fired. It just doesn't add up. What's more, criminologist William Harper swore in an affidavit that the bullets that killed Kennedy could not have been fired by Sirhan's pistol because the ballistic characteristics did not match.

Finally, there are reasons to believe the Los Angeles police obstructed or neglected aspects of the case. For example, although an armed security guard stated he was standing behind Kennedy at the time of the shooting - the location from which the fatal shots must have come - and even admitted dropping down and pulling his gun when the shooting began, his weapon was never checked to see if he might have fired any of the bullets that killed Kennedy, whether deliberately or accidentally.

New evidence has recently come to light. Dr Robert Joling, a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, and sound expert Philip Van Praag concluded that, based on exhaustive analysis of audio tapes from that fateful night, at least 12 shots were fired using at least two guns.

What about the mental state of Sirhan? Is it possible he could have been programmed to take the fall for Bobby's murder? This may sound implausible, but Dr Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University and is considered an expert on hypnosis, supports this theory. He believes Sirhan was probably acting in response to hypnotic directives when he fired at Kennedy. Sirhan appeared badly disorientated after his arrest, and when he was given a psychiatric examination before his trial, he was found to be susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, even climbing the bars of his cell like a monkey upon command. In all probability, Dr Spiegel suggests, Sirhan was still in a state of hypnotically induced amnesia.

These questions continue to attract interest from a few intrepid researchers. Was there a second or even a third gunman? If so, who was it? Could the security guard behind Kennedy who admitted pulling his gun have had something to do with the killing? And, assuming that more than one gunman was involved, who was the mastermind behind the plot? Even those most eager to blame the crime on Sirhan do not pretend he had the intellect, resources or the organisational ability to pull together an assassination conspiracy.”

- Robert Vaughn, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1111444/I-know-Bobby-
Kennedys-murder-actor-friend-Robert-Vaughn.html

What does your common sense tell you? What does that same common sense tell you about the assassination of Robert's brother John F. Kennedy, during which only 3 bullets were "officially" fired? See a pattern?
The "lone nut" theory has served the doers so well...

Share this post