Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Sirhan and the RFK Assassination Part I: The Grand Illusion

From the March-April, 1998 issue (Vol. 5 No. 3)

Sirhan and the RFK Assassination
Part I: The Grand Illusion

By Lisa Pease
This is the first of a two-part series dealing with Sirhan Sirhan’s current efforts to win an evidentiary hearing before the California State Supreme Court, and the evidence upon which that request is based. This part will focus on the evidence in the case, particularly as it relates to the gun, the bullets, and a little-known item referred to as Special Exhibit 10. The second part will deal with the question that must logically follow: If Sirhan didn’t kill Kennedy, then who did?

"If he isn’t guilty, it’s the sweetest frame in the world." – Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney John Howard, 1975

The Grand Illusion

Have you ever seen a master magician? Have you found yourself gasping in amazement asking half-aloud, "How did he do that?" You see a man step into a box on a hollow platform that’s immediately hoisted into the air. Within seconds, the man you saw get into a box that still hangs in front of you appears from behind you in the audience, walking down the aisle. Your eyes have convinced you this is not possible, because you saw the man get into the box. Yet there he is, the impossible made real. Such a trick is called a grand illusion, designed to confuse and deceive. Most enjoy being deceived in this manner; few want to puzzle the evidence through logically to the only possible conclusion of how such a trick has to be done. After all, the man cannot both be in the box and on the ground at the same time!
The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is also a carefully constructed illusion, designed to confuse and obfuscate. Imagine what the eyewitnesses in the crowded pantry saw. Robert Kennedy had obviously been shot, and Sirhan was firing a weapon. Sirhan must have killed Kennedy. And yet, the physical evidence does not support this conclusion. Sirhan cannot have killed Kennedy any more than the magician could be both in the box and in the audience. It is not physically possible. And just as only another magician or an extremely perceptive observer can tell you the truth behind the box illusion, only the conspirators themselves or perceptive observers can throw light on the events of June 5, 1968.
The quantity of people who have seriously investigated the RFK assassination is surprisingly small, given the large number of people who have at some point or another devoted time and energy to learning the facts surrounding the assassination of Bobby’s older brother John. But what this small, dedicated group of citizens has uncovered is astonishing. The evidence they have uncovered deserves to be dealt with honestly in a court of law. In fact, a writ has been filed on Sirhan’s behalf and is before the California Supreme Court at the time of this writing. Sirhan’s family and legal representatives are asking the court to hold an evidentiary hearing, based on newly discovered evidence.
As this article will show, justice in this case has yet to be served. This author is aware that an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. Tireless researchers such as Bill Turner, Jon Christian, Greg Stone, Philip Melanson, Ted Charach, Rose Lynn Mangan and Sirhan’s own family have discovered much over the intervening years. Mangan in particular has come up with evidence that should properly cause any court to doubt the legitimacy of the case against Sirhan. This article owes much to her guidance through the snaking paths of contradictory evidence, and her assistance has been both generous and exacting.
In the case of Watergate, Deep Throat advised Bob Woodward to "follow the money." If Deep Throat had anything to say about this case, it would be "follow the bullets." Nothing is more important in a murder conviction than establishing that a certain person, by means of a certain gun and certain bullets, caused the death of another. The chain of evidence is critical in any such case. As will be shown, the chain of evidence here resembles not a chain at all, but a patchwork quilt made from squares of dubious origin. Hitler once wrote that the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it, since few people can imagine telling so gross a lie. It is perhaps the size and nature of the lies in this case that have made the fictitious version of the event seem more plausible than the real one.
There is no quick way to tell the incredible story of this case. It defies abbreviated summation. Those who wish to learn the truth must first find within themselves the requisite patience and interest necessary to discover it.

June 5, 1968

Not long after midnight, on the morning of June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy finished up his victory speech at the historic Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. He had just won the California primary in his effort to secure the Democratic nomination to be that party’s presidential candidate in November. As Kennedy was about to leave the stage, a fateful event occurred. LA Rams tackle Roosevelt Grier, who had been working with Kennedy’s California campaign, would tell the LAPD:

Well, first of all, we were up on the stage, and they said they was going off to the right of the stage, and at the last minute ... Bill Barry decided to change and go a different direction because people had found out which way the senator was going to go, and we had to go downstairs to another ballroom where people were waiting. This was a press gathering here, and so Bill Barry and someone else took the senator down and I was lifting Mrs. Kennedy down from the stairs and we started walking....1

As Kennedy left the podium, he walked down a ramp and entered a pair of swinging doors, heading east. Between the stage and the press area was the kitchen pantry, where food for guests at the Ambassador was prepared.
Maître d’ Karl Uecker gripped Kennedy’s right wrist with his left hand. Ace Guard Service employee Thane Eugene Cesar joined Kennedy as he went through the double doors into the pantry, touching his right elbow. Bill Barry, an ex-FBI man who was ostensibly serving as Kennedy’s bodyguard had fallen behind Kennedy as he entered the pantry.
As they headed east through the room, Kennedy stopped every few feet to shake the hands of hotel workers. The last hand he shook was that of busboy Juan Romero. Uecker pulled Kennedy as he moved forward. The tiny kitchen held, by official count, 77 people (including Sirhan and the shooting victims) who were possible witnesses to what happened next.
Uecker related that with Kennedy still in hand, he felt someone sliding in between himself and the steam table about two feet away from where he stood. Busboy Juan Romero and waiter Martin Patrusky saw Sirhan approach Kennedy, as did Lisa Urso, a San Diego high school student. Urso saw Sirhan push his way past her towards the Senator. She thought he was going to shake his hand, then saw a movement that made her stop in her tracks in frightened anticipation. Vincent DiPierro, a waiter who had observed Sirhan standing and talking to a pretty girl in a white, polka dotted dress earlier that night, heard someone yell "Grab him" a split second before the shots were fired. Somebody reported Sirhan saying, "Kennedy, you son of a bitch," and then firing at Kennedy with his hand outstretched.
Uecker felt Kennedy slip from his grasp as he fell to the ground. Screams were heard as bystanders Paul Schrade, William Weisel, Ira Goldstein, Erwin Stroll and Elizabeth Evans were hit by flying bullets. Kennedy suffered gunshot wounds in three different places, with a fourth bullet passing through his coat without entering the skin.
Uecker immediately grabbed Sirhan’s hand and forced it down onto the steam table. A swarm of men descended upon Sirhan, surrounding him, holding the gun. Decathlon champion Rafer Johnson, Grier, George Plimpton and others formed a barricade around Sirhan, one holding his head, another with a finger in the trigger to prevent additional shots, another grabbing Sirhan in a crushing bear hug.
Uecker and DiPierro reported initially hearing two shots, followed by a flurry. DiPierro told the LAPD, "I saw the first two go off. I saw them actually." Several witnesses reported hearing one or two shots, and then a pause. Then all hell broke loose. Witnesses not within eyesight of what was happening thought they were hearing balloons popping or firecrackers. Los Angeles photographer Boris Yaro, in a phone interview with Robert Morrow, recounted his memory of the event:

There was either one or two shots fired. O.K. And then, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There was a pregnant pause between those two because my initial impression was some jackass has set off firecrackers in here; because I got hit in the face with debris...And then it hit me. Oh, my God, it’s happened again.2

Sirhan was eventually subdued, and taken into police custody.
The police created a unit—originally named "Special Operations Senator," and renamed a week later "Special Unit Senator"—to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assassination. The unit put together the evidence that became the basis of the prosecution’s case against Sirhan.
Sirhan’s defense team stipulated to his guilt. The trial of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was a trial solely for the purpose of determining his sentence, not whether or not he really was guilty of the crime. Sirhan himself, to the belief not only of his defense team but to the belief of the prosecution as well, truly could not remember the incidents of that night. His defense only offered that he had not been in control of his senses at the time of the killing. Not surprisingly, given such a defense, Sirhan was sentenced to death, a sentence which was commuted by the abolishment of the death penalty in California. The illusion was complete. A deranged lone gunman had killed another Kennedy. Most people, even those fairly knowledgeable about the John Kennedy assassination, assumed that this time, the truth was self-evident.
It is due to the success of this grand illusion that to date, there has never been a serious official investigation of the strange facts surrounding this case. It is the most politically incorrect of all cases. So many people saw Sirhan firing, and Kennedy fell just a short distance away. How could the truth be other than what it seemed? Could that many people have misrepresented the case to us, including Sirhan’s own defense team? Could officials now serving at the higher levels of our state government have really been accessories after the fact to a deliberate cover-up?
Ironically, as this article will show, it was the efforts of those who—by any means necessary—strove most to prove Sirhan guilty, who created the evidence that may yet serve to set him free.
Police, FBI and press photographers swarmed into the pantry, each recording in their own way what had transpired that night. The photos told a story that was opposite what the police and the District Attorney’s office was telling. There were too many bullets to be accounted for. To limit the record to the maximum number of bullets Sirhan’s gun could have fired, eight, the official account of what transpired had to be stretched in some extraordinary—and ultimately dishonest—ways.

The Great Waldo Pepper Bullets

The trajectory study conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department was so superficial for a case of this enormous magnitude and complexity as to be embarrassing to the professional reputation of that Department. – Paul Schrade3

One of the most ridiculed aspects of the John Kennedy assassination is the preposterous claim that one bullet created seven wounds. In that case, we are asked to believe that a bullet entered Kennedy’s back at a downward angle, exited from his neck (at an upward angle), turned around and went back down into Connally’s back, exited Connally’s chest, entered and exited (and shattered) Connally’s wrist to land, in near pristine condition, in his thigh, only to work its way out and to end up, undiscovered until by accident, on a cot in the hall of the hospital. This bullet, known among researchers by its Warren Commission exhibit number, CE399, has been called, appropriately, the "magic bullet." Science had been changed. No longer did bullets fly in straight paths; they imitated instead the paths of stunt pilot barnstormers such as the Great Waldo Pepper of movie fame.
The Robert Kennedy assassination requires not just one but several magic bullets to reduce the bullet count to eight. Without even getting into the evidence that there were more bullets than Sirhan’s gun could hold, let’s focus first on the route those eight supposedly took, according to the official LAPD summary.
As you will recall, five people were shot besides Kennedy, one of whom was shot twice; Kennedy himself was shot four times. Doesn’t that add up to ten bullets? Not if the LAPD could come up with some magic ones.
The bullet that pierced Kennedy’s coat without entering him took a path of roughly 80 degrees upwards. The bullet was moving upwards in a back to front path (as were all of Kennedy’s wound paths). But the LAPD figures this must be the bullet that hit Paul Schrade. Had Schrade been facing Kennedy, he would still not be tall enough to receive a bullet near the top of his head from that angle. But he was not standing in front of Kennedy. He was behind him by all eyewitness accounts, and as shown by the relative positions where the two fell after being hit.
For Sirhan alone to have made all the shots, we are asked to believe that one of the bullets that entered Kennedy’s coat just below the armpit exited up and out of the coat just below the seam on top of his shoulders, and then pulled a U-turn in midair to hit Schrade in the head. Schrade has been one of the most persistent in calling for a new investigation of this case for precisely this reason. He knows the report is incorrect, and if it’s incorrect, there had to be at least one more gun firing in the pantry.
Ira Goldstein had been shot twice, although one shot merely entered and exited his pant leg without entering his body. He was less fortunate on a separate shot, which entered his left rear buttock. But since there were no bullets to spare, according to the LAPD’s strict adherence to the eight-bullet scenario, the pant-leg bullet was made to do double duty. According to the LAPD, after passing through his pants, the bullet struck the cement floor and ricocheted up into Erwin Stroll’s left leg. The only bullet that seemed to take a plausible path was the one that hit Weisel in the left abdomen.
One of the big problems the LAPD had with the crime scene was the number of bullet holes in the ceiling tiles. Based on witnesses’ recollections, there were too many holes to account for. There are photos of the LAPD running strings through bullet holes in the ceiling to establish trajectories. Somehow, these had to be accounted for.
Elizabeth Evans had bent over to retrieve a shoe she had momentarily lost. Suddenly she felt something had hit her forehead. Medical reports confirm that the bullet entered her forehead below the hairline and traveled "upward", fitting the scenario she remembers. But because the LAPD needed to account for some of the bullet holes in the ceiling, they decided that a bullet from Sirhan’s gun had been fired at the ceiling, entered a ceiling tile, bounced off something beyond the ceiling tile, reentered the room through a different ceiling tile, and struck Evans in the forehead. This bullet must have pulled more of a hairpin turn then a U-turn, if the LAPD’s version and the medical reports are to be merged.
This left still one unaccounted for hole in the ceiling. Or rather, at least one. We don’t know how many holes there were because the tiles were destroyed. But the LAPD knew that there were more than two holes in the ceiling. One of the bullets that entered Kennedy passed straight through on a near vertical path, parallel to the one that entered the coat, but not the body, of Kennedy (the one that supposedly terminated its path in Schrade’s head). This bullet supposedly passed through Kennedy and continued on upwards into the ceiling. Since Kennedy was facing Sirhan, and the bullet entered back to front, that would aim the bullet into the ceiling nearly directly above Sirhan’s head, according to witness placements of Kennedy and Sirhan. And indeed, there was a tile removed from that very spot. But Sirhan’s arm is not the many feet long it would have taken to reach around Kennedy to shoot him from behind, while standing several feet in front of the Senator.

More than Eight Bullets = Two (or More) Guns = Conspiracy

As we have seen, the official police reports strove to present a plausible scenario for where each bullet went. And even if one accepts the accounts above as legitimate, despite the important difficulties in those trajectories, the problem is bigger still. There is a substantial amount of evidence to show that more than eight bullets had been fired in the pantry that night. And if there were more than eight bullets, Sirhan was not a deranged, lone gunman, but somehow part of a conspiracy which has yet to be officially acknowledged.
Evidence of additional bullets surfaced nearly immediately. On June 5, an AP photo was published showing two police officers pointing at something in the center frame of the swinging doors that led into the pantry. The caption read, "Bullet found near Kennedy shooting scene". In 1975, Vincent Bugliosi, who was then working with Schrade to get the case reopened, tracked down the two police officers depicted in the photograph. To that time their identity had been unknown. Bugliosi identified the two officers as Sgt. Charles Wright and Sgt. Robert Rozzi. Both Wright and Rozzi were sure that what they observed was not only a bullet hole, but a hole containing a bullet.
If the hole contained a bullet, then it would have been the ninth bullet, since seven bullets had been recovered from victim wounds and the eighth was to have disappeared into the ceiling (necessary to account for acknowledged holes in the ceiling tiles). So any additional bullet presented a serious problem for those wishing to state there was no conspiracy.
In a declaration filed with the courts, Bugliosi stated:

Sgt. Rozzi had told me and he told me unequivocally that it was a bullet in the hole and when I told him that Sgt. Rozzi had informed me that he was pretty sure that the bullet was removed from the hole, Sgt. Wright replied "There is no pretty sure about it. It definitely was removed from the hole, but I do not know who did it."

Shortly after the assassination, the LAPD removed the doorjambs and ceiling panels in the Ambassador Hotel and booked them into evidence. One has to wonder why someone would tear off a doorframe or book a ceiling panel into evidence if it contained no evidence of bullets.
Investigative reporter Jonn Christian found a Chicago Tribune article authored by Robert Weidrich. Weidrich had evidently been in the pantry as the doorjamb was being removed, for his account contained the following information:

On a low table lay an 8-foot strip of molding, torn by police from the center post of the double doors leading from the ballroom. These were the doors through which Sen. Kennedy had walked....Now the molding bore the scars of a crime laboratory technician’s probe as it had removed two .22-caliber bullets that had gone wild.4

Philip Melanson contacted Weidrich in December of 1988. To that point Weidrich had not been aware of the controversy surrounding the number of bullets in the pantry. He told Melanson that the police in the room had been "amazingly cooperative", answering his questions and allowing him access. At that point, neither the police nor any reporters present could have known how significant additional bullet holes would be.
Amongst a great deal of additional evidence that will not be discussed here, perhaps the strongest piece supporting the contentions of Rozzi and Wright came from the FBI. The FBI had taken their own photos of the pantry after the assassination. Three photos in particular have been particularly important to this discussion, photos E-1, E-2, and E-3. The official FBI report of these photos labels them as follows:

E-1 View taken inside kitchen serving area showing doorway area leading into kitchen from the stage area. In lower right corner from the photo shows two bullet holes which are circled. The portion of the panel missing also reportedly contained a bullet.
E-2 A close up view of the two bullet holes of area described above.
E-3 Close up view of two bullet holes which is located in center door frame inside kitchen serving area and looking towards direction of back of stage area.

Bullets do not create bullet holes in wood frames behind victims, exit those holes in the reverse direction, and then circle around to enter victims from the front! There is no way to account for these holes using the existing victim wounds. Two bullet holes in the doorframe would make 10 bullets overall at a minimum.
This particular point so worried the County of Los Angeles that in 1977, Investigator Robert Jackson, writing for Chief Administrative Officer Harry L. Hufford, asked the FBI for any clarification they might offer regarding these photos. The full text of this interesting letter is included here:

Dear Sir:
In the course of an inquiry by the Los Angeles Count Board of Supervisors into certain aspects of the physical evidence at the Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassination, questions have arisen concerning certain FBI photographs. These photographs, purportedly taken by Special Agent Greiner and numbered E-1, E-2, E-3 and E-4, are captioned "bullet holes".
If these were, in fact, bullet holes, it could be inferred that more than one gun was fired in the pantry during the assassination. Mr. Allard Lowenstein, Ambassador to the United Nations, among others, has maintained that a possibility exists that another assassin was present. Mr. Lowenstein and other critics of the official version have referred to the above photographs as representing the official opinion of the FBI inasmuch as the captions are unequivocal in stating "bullet holes".
If the captions had said possible, probable, or apparent bullet holes, one could assume that no precise examination had taken place at the time the photographs were taken. However, the captions would lead one to believe that a determination had been made by someone with the requisite knowledge and skills.
The dilemma we are faced with is that the photograph captions are being used as evidence of the official FBI position in the absence of any other official stated position.
If more bullets were fired within the pantry than Sirhan Sirhan’s gun was capable of holding; we should certainly find out who else was firing. If, in fact, the FBI has no evidence that the questioned holes were bullet holes, we should know that so that the air may be cleared.
It is therefore requested that the official position of the FBI regarding these bullet holes be relayed to this office.
Thank you for your cooperation.5

To date, no record of any formal reply to this appears to have surfaced. In addition, new corroboration for this evidence came in 1975, when Vincent Bugliosi tracked down Martin Patrusky, a waiter at the Ambassador and an eyewitness to the shooting. Patrusky gave Bugliosi a signed statement describing all the events he could recall that related to the assassination and its aftermath. He recounted being at the hotel when a few days after the assassination, the LAPD arrived to do a reconstruction of the crime. Patrusky wrote, "Sometime during the incident, one of the officers pointed to two circled holes on the center divider of the swinging doors and told us that they had dug two bullets out of the center divide."6
One final witness whose credibility is hard to shake is FBI agent William Bailey, who stated in an affidavit that he and several other agents of the FBI noted at least two small caliber bullet holes in the center divider. He added, in refutation to the hilarious claim that these holes were made by food carts, "There was no question in any of our minds as to the fact that they were bullet holes and were not caused by food carts or other equipment in the preparation room."
Inexplicably, not only has the LAPD denied that there were additional bullet holes in the pantry, they destroyed the evidence that could have proven their claims true! On June 27, 1969, a destruction order was issued for the ceiling panels and doorjambs which had been removed from the Ambassador and booked into evidence.7 Given that the AP photograph was circulated on June 5, 1968, it seems beyond the realm of plausibility that such an order could have been given in ignorance of the suspicions that would surely surround the doorjamb and ceiling panel evidence.
Ten bullets (and likely more) would indicate that at least two guns were being fired in the pantry that night, and that a conspiracy had been at work. But if more guns were firing, why didn’t anyone report this? Or did they?
....

The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.

(Go to Part II of this Article)

Notes

1. Robert A. Houghton with Theodore Taylor, Special Unit Senator (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 42
2. Robert Morrow, The Senator Must Die (Santa Monica: Roundtable Publishing, Inc., 1988), p. 279. Morrow was sued by a person he claims in this book was the real killer, using a special camera that was rigged to fire bullets (Morrow is himself an ex-CIA operative who claims to have known of such weapons). Morrow lost his suit. I viewed footage of the Ambassador from that night and found that Morrow’s suspect did not even enter the pantry at the time of the shooting, but was clearly visible on the stage the Senator had left, with camera still in hand. As a result of this lawsuit, the judgment required Morrow to destroy all remaining copies of this book. I am including the quote here on the assumption that Morrow has accurately represented Yaro’s comments to him in the transcript included in his book, and primarily because Yaro’s statements correspond to the record of that of other witnesses at this moment.
3. Paul Schrade in a 1975 petition to the Superior Court of California.
4. Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (New York: SPI Books, 1994) p. 55.
5. This letter, dated November 2, 1977, appears on the last microfilm reel of the SUS files from the California State Archives (SUS hereafter.) I have yet to find any official response in any of the files I have viewed. Philip Melanson discovered this letter and wrote about it The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (pp. 46-47). He pursued this by writing the FBI in 1985. He received a response from Assistant Director William M. Baker, who stated, "Neither the photographic log nor the photographs were ever purported to be a ballistics report," an interesting non-denial of the evidence.
6. Turner and Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), p. 350.
7. Turner and Christian, p. 178, citing LAPD Deputy Chief Daryl Gates in an August 22, 1975 NBC network interview.
8. From Ted Charach’s video, The Second Gun.
9. LAPD Interview of Sandy Serrano, 4:00 a.m., June 5, 1968, p. 12. On p. 15 she explains that by "boracho" she didn’t mean he was drunk, but that he "looked messy" and "he looked like he didn’t belong there."
10. LAPD Interview of Sandy Serrano, 2:35 a.m., June 5, 1968, p. 27.
11. Dan Moldea, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 40.
12. APB from SUS files. This one was dated 6/5/68, and was not cancelled until 6/21/68.
13. Telephone and Radio Transmissions Log (H-XIII), Radio transmission, reel 6 from the California State Archives SUS Files Microfilm Collection (SUS hereafter). The man who knocked over the people while running out of the room was Michael Wayne, a curious figure to be discussed in the second half of this article (to follow in the next issue of Probe).
14. Houghton, p. 32.
15. Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, p. 33.
16. Turner and Christian, Copy of Patrusky’s signed statement, p. 350.
17. Klaber and Melanson, Shadow Play: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, the Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American Justice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 96.
18. The New York Times (2/15/69), p. 12.
19. Klaber and Melanson, p. 96.
20. LAPD Interview of Richard Aubrey, June 5, 1968, p. 16.
21. Melanson, p. 33.
22. Klaber and Melanson, p. 96.
23. LAPD case summary, p. 25.
24. As a side note to those who follow the John Kennedy assassination, it’s interesting to find the reappearance of Pierre Finck, one of the autopsists in the John Kennedy assassination, as well as Russell Fisher. Fisher was the Maryland Coroner who made the preposterous claim that a bound, gagged, and weighted man found in the ocean was really a suicide victim, the sensitively positioned CIA officer William Paisley. Fisher’s improbable verdict of suicide prevented what would have led to an uncomfortable examination that could have embarrassed the CIA. Fisher, in 1968, was part of the Clark Panel, a panel convened to examine the autopsy photographs from the John Kennedy assassination. The Clark panel had suspicious origins, and was timed to discredit the growing voices critical of the Warren Report, as well as the investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Both Finck and Fisher provided advice and assistance in the autopsy of Robert Kennedy.
25. Klaber and Melanson, p. 94.
26. New York Post¸5/21/75.
27. Klaber and Melanson, p. 102, citing Sir Gerald Burrard, The Identification of Firearms and Forensic Ballistics (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1962), pp. 154-155.
28. Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. III, p. 494.
29. Houghton, p. 266.
30. Houghton, p. 266.
31. Jack Gallivan’s Testimony, Sirhan Trial Transcript, p. 3351.
32. Bill Barry’s Testimony, Sirhan Trial Transcript, p. 3451.
33. Ibid.
34. Morrow, p. 279. No fingerprints of any kind were recovered from the gun, despite it having been held by Sirhan, Grier, Johnson, Barry, and others at the shooting range earlier that day.
35. Roosevelt Grier’s Testimony, Sirhan Trial Transcript, p. 3310.
36. Mangan’s record of a conversation she had with Rafer Johnson during a chance meeting. He told her he had the gun number, and gave her his unlisted number, saying if she called he would read to her the number. Mangan called many times after that, but Rafer’s mother always answered, and always told her he was not available, but that she would take a message.

the gipster

Tuesday, October 9, 2012