Assassination of
Robert F. Kennedy

On June 5, 1968, moments after giving a speech declaring victory in the California Democratic primary, Robert Kennedy was shot down in a pantry in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Caught red-handed firing a .22 Iver Johnson revolver was a man named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Sirhan was convicted of the crime and remains as of 2006 in prison in California. More than the murders of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., this seems to most like an open-and-shut case.

But the medical and ballistics evidence tells a different story. Seven bullets were recovered from the bodies of victims, and added to these are photographs of numerous bullet holes in the pantry, circled, initialed, and pointed at in photographs by LAPD. More damaging still to the lone-gunman solution is the autopsy report, which shows that the 3 bullets which struck RFK were all fired from behind at upward angles. All witnesses put Sirhan in front of Kennedy, firing from a few feet away on a level plane. Further, based on powder burns the coroner determined that the fatal shot was fired from a couple of inches away.

Did Sirhan have accomplices? Or was he even a "Manchurian candidate" as evidenced by his dabbling in hypnotism and the "automatic writing" in his notebook, where he wrote over and over again variations of "RFK must die," along with other intriguing phrases such as "Pay to the order of of of?" Many witnesses placed Sirhan in the company of a young woman in a polka-dotted dress that evening (often along with another man). And both a campaign worker and an elderly couple claimed to have seen the woman and another man gleefully shouting "We shot Senator Kennedy!" as they ran from the hotel after the shooting.

Some researchers focus on security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, who was in the right position to fire the fatal shots, was seen with his gun drawn, and made conflicting statements to police (in particular about a .22 he owned). But the case suffers from the LAPD's over-zealous handling, which included the destruction of the doorframes and ceiling tiles featured in the photographs noted above. Tapes and transcripts of LAPD interviews also show aggressive questioning of witnesses who told them stories which didn't fit the lone gunman scenario.

Would RFK have won the Presidency? With the California victory, he was building momentum for the Democratic nomination, though was still behind Vice-President Hubert Humphrey in the vote tally. Assuming a victory at the convention, Kennedy seems likely to have beaten Republican candidate Richard Nixon, whom his brother John had defeated in 1960 with RFK as campaign manager, and whom the lackluster Humphrey nearly defeated. Thus the bullets which took Robert Kennedy's life, from whatever direction, profoundly altered the political course of U.S. history.

Source:
www.maryferrell.org