Robert F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories

The conspiracy theories relating to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a United States Senator and brother of assassinated President [[John F. Kennedy] relate to non-standard accounts of the assassination that took place shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968 in Los Angeles, California. Robert F. Kennedy was killed during celebrations of his successful campaign in the Californian primary elections while seeking the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. The perpetrator was a twenty-four year old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, who remains incarcerated for this crime as of 2009. Nonetheless, as with his brother's death, Robert Kennedy's assassination and the circumstances surrounding it have spawned a variety of conspiracy theories, particularly in relation to the existence of a supposed second gunman. Such theories have also centred around the alleged presence of a girl wearing a polka dot dress claiming responsibility for the crime and the purported involvement of the CIA. Many of these theories were examined and debunked during an investigation ordered by the United States Senate and carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

CIA involvement

In November 2006, the BBC's Newsnight program presented research by filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several CIA officers were present on the night of the assassination. Three men who appear in video and photographs from the night of the assassination were positively identified by former colleagues and associates as former senior CIA officers who had worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's main anti-Castro station based in Miami. They were JMWAVE Chief of Operations David Morales, Chief of Maritime Operations Gordon Campbell and Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations George Joannides.

The program featured an interview with Morales's former attorney Robert Walton, who quoted him as having said, "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard". O'Sullivan reported that the CIA declined to comment on the officers in question. It was also alleged that Morales was known for his deep anger toward the Kennedys for what he saw as their betrayal during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

After further investigation, O'Sullivan produced the feature documentary, RFK Must Die. The film casts doubt on the earlier identifications and ultimately reveals that the man previously identified as Gordon Campbell may, in fact, have been Michael D. Roman, a now-deceased Bulova Watch Company employee, who was at the Ambassador Hotel for a company convention.

Second gunman

The location of Kennedy's wounds suggested that his assailant had stood behind him, but some witnesses said that Sirhan faced west as Kennedy moved through the pantry facing east. This has led to the suggestion that a second gunman actually fired the fatal shot, a possibility supported by coroner Thomas Noguchi. Other witnesses, though, said that as Sirhan approached, Kennedy was turning to his left shaking hands, facing north and so exposing his right side. As recently as 2008, eyewitness John Pilger asserted his belief that there must have been a second gunman. During a re-examination of the case in 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered expert examination of the possibility of a second gun having been used, and the conclusion of the experts was that there was little or no evidence to support this theory.

In 2007, analysis of an audio recording of the shooting made by freelance reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski appeared to indicate, according to forensic expert Philip van Praag, that thirteen shots were fired, even though Sirhan's gun held only eight rounds. While this would strongly indicate a second gunman, independent analysis by other experts indicated that there are only eight shots recorded on the tape.

The security guard

For decades, researchers have identified Thane Eugene Cesar as the most likely candidate for a second gunman in the RFK assassination. Cesar had been employed by Ace Guard Service to protect Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. This was not his full-time job. During the day he worked as a maintenance plumber at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank, a job that required a security clearance from the Department of the Defense. He worked there from 1966 until losing his job in 1971. According to researcher Lisa Pease, Cesar had formerly worked at the Hughes Aircraft Corporation, but author Dan Moldea wrote that Cesar began working at Hughes in 1973, a job he held for seven years and a position Cesar said required the second highest clearance level at the plant.

Cesar was a Cuban American who supported segregationist George Wallace for President. He appeared to have no specific job at Lockheed and apparently had "floating" assignments and often worked in off-limits areas which only special personnel had access to. According to some researchers , these areas were under the control of the CIA.

When interviewed, Cesar admitted that he pulled a gun at the scene of the shooting but insisted the weapon was a Rohm .38, not a .22, the caliber of the bullets found in Kennedy. He also claimed that he got knocked down after the first shot and did not get the opportunity to fire his gun. The LAPD, which interviewed Cesar shortly after the shooting, did not regard Cesar as a suspect and did not ask to see his gun.

Cesar admitted that he did own a .22-caliber H & R pistol, and he showed it to LAPD sergeant P. E. O'Steen on June 24, 1968. When the LAPD interviewed Cesar three years later, however, he claimed that he had sold the gun before the assassination to a man named Jim Yoder. William W. Turner tracked down Yoder in October, 1972. Yoder still had the receipt for the H & R pistol, which was dated September 6, 1968, and bore Cesar's signature. Cesar therefore had sold the pistol to Yoder three months after Kennedy's assassination despite Cesar's claim in 1971 that he had sold the weapon months before the murder. Author Dan Moldea wrote that that Cesar submitted years later to a polygraph examination performed by Edward Gelb, former president and executive director of the American Polygraph Association. Moldea reported that Cesar denied any involvement in Kennedy's assassination and passed the test with flying colors.

Pruszynski recording

Decades after the assassination, it was discovered that the shots in the kitchen pantry had been recorded on audio tape by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a freelance newspaper reporter who was covering Senator Kennedy's presidential campaign for the Montreal Gazette and today resides in his native Poland. Pruszynski had made the recording with a battery-powered portable cassette tape recorder and an attached microphone. Pruszynski's tape is the only known sound recording of the assassination, and analysis of it has only just begun.

At the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on February 21, 2008, Philip M. Van Praag of PVP Designs in Tucson, Arizona, presented his conclusions concerning the Pruszynski tape, which he asserted provides a record of a second gun being fired in the assassination. the Academy plans to publish Van Praag's paper later in the year.

On June 6, 2007, the newly-discovered Pruszynski recording was the centerpiece for a television program about the Kennedy case on Discovery Times Channel, now known as Investigation Discovery Channel. The one-hour documentary, entitled Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination, provided evidence from the recording that convicted gunman Sirhan Sirhan had not acted alone. Pruszynski's audio tape, which had never been broadcast in the 39 years since the murder, was aired for the first time during the Discovery Times program. According to three out of four audio experts interviewed for the documentary, the reporter's recording reveals that a second gun was fired in the Bobby Kennedy shooting.

Stanislaw Pruszynski and his recording equipment were approximately 40 feet southwest of Senator Kennedy when the shots erupted inside the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry. Pruszynski was unaware that his portable machine was still operating as it captured the sounds of the Kennedy shooting. Pruszynski also was unaware of the shooting itself because it was taking place amidst the various sounds of celebration, some distance away inside another room and outside the reporter's purview.

At that moment, Pruszynski was about to enter a narrow back corridor leading into the pantry from the hotel’s Embassy Room, a ballroom where Kennedy had just delivered his victory statement following the Tuesday, June 4 California Democratic primary election. When the shooting commenced, Pruszynski was at the north side of the ballroom and descending a small set of steps at the east end of the ballroom's makeshift stage where the Senator had spoken. Although he did not know his recorder was still recording at that point, Pruszynski just happened to be holding his microphone tilted upward and pointed toward the pantry, and above the heads of the crowd on the ballroom floor beneath him. Doors between Pruszynski and the shooting were open at the time.

Film and video shot by more than one camera in the Embassy Room—in particular, an ABC-TV black and white video-relay camera—captured pictures of Pruszynski, his recorder and microphone in hand, as he descended the ballroom platform's east steps, departed the steps and proceeded toward the kitchen pantry precisely while the shooting was taking place off-camera, inside the pantry. As the Kennedy shooting continued in the pantry, Pruszynski continued moving in the ballroom toward the corridor that accessed the pantry, getting his microphone closer to the shooting but still unaware of the shots erupting in that other room.

Pruszynski's audio recording captured a number of rapidly occurring sounds, each one very short in duration and with something of a popping or even clapping quality. "Conspiracy Test" quoted four audio experts who analyzed the Pruszynski recording: Philip Van Praag and Wes Dooley in the United States, Eddie Brixen in Denmark and Philip Harrison in the United Kingdom. Van Praag, Dooley and Brixen determined that the tape had captured at least 10 gunshots—and possibly as many as 13 shots—in the RFK assassination; all other possible sources for the sounds, including popping balloons, ricochets, echoes, etc., were ruled out. The presence of at least 10 shots is highly significant because Sirhan's handgun could fire no more than eight shots at a single time. Sirhan possessed only the one revolver and had no opportunity to reload his weapon once the shooting erupted in the pantry. If the Pruszynski recording does indeed reflect more than eight shots fired, it establishes the existence of a second gunman.

Harrison dissented on the issue of number of shots, reporting that he was able to confirm only seven or eight shots in the Pruszynski recording. The Discovery Times program explained that Harrison had not been provided all of the information and materials that had been made available to the other three experts. While all four experts bypassed a crude cassette copy of the Pruszynski recording that had been created years before by the California State Archives in Sacramento, only the first three experts worked directly from several high-quality digital and analog master dubs of the recording. Harrison relied on a digital copy of just one of those master dubs. Unlike at least two of the other experts, Harrison did not know where Pruszynski and his microphone were located during the Kennedy shooting and was unaware that Pruszynski and his microphone were moving toward the shots as they were being fired. In the Discovery Times TV program, Harrison conceded, "Any information relating to where Mr. Pruszynski was standing at the time or any movements he made during the sequence of shots would, to some degree, have been of assistance."

The Pruszynski recording's importance rests not only upon the number of shots fired but also upon two additional evidence: the intervals between the shots and differing acoustic characteristics.

Two of the four audio experts reported that the Pruszynski recording contains evidence of a second gunman firing virtually simultaneously with Sirhan. They determined—and a firearms expert concurred—that there was at least one set of so-called "double-shots," and possibly two sets. In the one set of "double-shots" that these experts confirmed for "Conspiracy Test", the set's twin shots were fired too close together for both to have come from Sirhan's revolver. The shooting's two separate sets of "double-shots"—that is, the third and fourth shots in the first set and the seventh and eighth shots in the second set—were separated by 122 and 149 milliseconds respectively. In field tests, a trained firearms expert firing under ideal conditions could only manage 366 milliseconds between shots using the same weapon. The dissenting Philip Harrison did not address this key issue of shot intervals.

In addition to the "double-shot" findings, one of the Discovery Times audio experts, Philip Van Praag, reported to the AAFS in 2008 that five of the shots heard in the recording—3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 in a sequence of 13 shots—had odd acoustic characteristics which the expert attributed to their being fired from a second gun pointing away from Pruszynski's microphone. In his scientific paper on the Pruszynski recording, Van Praag reported to the AAFS that a forensic investigation had matched the anomalous acoustic characteristics to those of a Harrington & Richardson .22 firearm known as the H&R Model 922. Sirhan's weapon in the pantry was a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet.

The significance of the Pruszynski recording was unknown for 36 years until early 2004, when an American journalist obtained a copy of the California State Archives's crude cassette dub of the original recording. The original is the only audio recording known to have captured the actual Robert Kennedy shooting. Two other sound recordings made that night by newsmen Andrew West of Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate KRKD and Jeff Brent of the Continental News Service did not capture the shooting itself but recorded only the shooting's immediate aftermath.

Discovery Times's "Conspiracy Test" concluded by posing this question: "Will the continuing respect for Robert Kennedy and the new evidence of a second gunman lead to a re-opening of the RFK assassination?" One of the program's audio experts answered it this way: "My feeling about the evidence that's come up here is that you can't back away from real stuff. It merits closer examination. And as a citizen of this country, [I believe] it has to be looked at."

The woman in the polka-dot dress

Kennedy campaign worker Sandy Serrano claimed a young Hispanic man and a young Caucasian woman wearing a "polka dot" dress burst from a southwest exit of the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room ballroom moments after the shooting, giggling and exclaiming, "We shot him." When she asked them "Who?" the young woman answered, "Senator Kennedy!" The two then walked into a hotel parking lot where an elderly couple named Bernstein saw them, still laughing and saying, "We shot Kennedy." The Bernsteins flagged down LAPD officer Paul Sharaga, who issued an all points bulletin for the young couple but this was canceled without explanation by his superiors. Serrano said she was later coerced by police into changing her story. Researchers have pored over photographs and television pictures from the scene and found women wearing dresses that might be perceived as bearing polka dots, but no likely assassin has been identified.