by Lisa Pease
At hospitals from Huntington Beach to Encino, the other shooting victims were being treated. Bullet fragments were removed from the heads of Elizabeth Evans and Paul Schrade and given to the LAPD. Dr. Max Finkel removed a bullet from Ira Goldstein’s thigh, marked its base with an “X” and placed it in a glass jar, which was later given to the LAPD. An “identifiable lead bullet”117 was removed from Bill Weisel’s stomach and given to LAPD Officer L.M. Orozco, who marked the base with his initials, “LMO.” Officer E. Kamidoi collected a bullet removed from the middle of Irwin Stroll’s lower left leg. According to the LAPD evidence log, the bullet was “not marked for ID due to odd shape but traced in Kamidoi’s notebook.” Miraculously, after all those shots, everyone was still alive, for the moment.
“I thought this place was bugged,” the suspect said. Jordan and Murphy had confirmed to the suspect earlier that all his conversations were being recorded, and that the mirror in the interview room was a two-way mirror. Foster did not know of those conversations, however, and lied.
“Not this place. You try to imply too many things. You’re trying to think … you’re the big notorious criminal.”
“No, no, please forgive me if I give you that kind of implication,” the suspect said, confounding Foster’s expectations. There would be no Sic Semper Tyrannis here.
The suspect shifted painfully in his seat.
“Your leg hurt you?” Foster asked.
“Kind of.”
“How did you hurt it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you fall down or something?”
“No.”
“When did it happen?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?” Foster asked again, clearly disbelieving him. The suspect had been caught in the act of firing a gun. His leg had been hurt in the struggle. How could anyone not remember that? It’s not like he had anything to gain by lying about that—there were plenty of witnesses to the struggle that injured him in the pantry. Yet, throughout every discussion that night, the suspect evinced a genuine hole in his memory not just for the events of the night, but even, to some degree, about who he was.
“You from the L.A. area?” Foster asked.
“I don’t know,” the suspect replied.
“What are you going to do when you get out of this deal?”
“I don’t know. Try to correct whatever I work for.”
Foster and the suspect chatted about the law, the need for justice to be delivered equally to the lowliest as well as the mighty (at which point the suspect asked to shake Foster’s hand) and of the need to be gentle in one’s authority. Like Murphy and Jordan, Foster was impressed with the man’s intellect. “You’ve had … more education than just high school, haven’t you? … I mean … you’re not any person that is of low intelligence.”
“Thank you, thank you. Well, really, you’re too generous,” the suspect replied, deferring modestly.
“Well, maybe … you’re just the victim of circumstances,” Foster offered.
“Beautiful,” the suspect replied.118 The suspect noted that Foster didn’t fit the stereotype of a policeman.
“I hope you think of me as just another human being,” Foster said.
“We’re all puppets,” the suspect replied, with more truth than he could have understood in that moment.
When District Attorney Evelle Younger learned that the suspect had asked for an attorney, he told Inspector Powers and Police Chief Tom Reddin that the suspect should not be questioned further.119
Back at the Ambassador Hotel, reporter Robert Wiedrich examined the pantry. The Chicago Tribune had flown its 20-year veteran crime reporter Wiedrich to Los Angeles immediately following the shooting. When he entered the pantry in the wee hours of the morning, he found MacArthur and others from the LAPD still examining the scene. To his surprise, the police were uncharacteristically chatty. The police pointed him to Karl Uecker, whom he interviewed.
Uecker told Wiedrich how he had led Kennedy through the pantry, how he kept breaking away, and how Uecker kept retrieving his hand to pull him eastward. Just before the shots, Uecker had retrieved his hand and turned to go, “and then it happened. I heard a pop, I saw what looked bits of paper flying [sic].”120
Wiedrich added: “MacArthur said what Uecker thought was paper probably was ceiling insulation scattered by a first wild shot.” That was a bizarre comment to interject, especially since it didn’t match a single witness statement. The few witnesses with a clear view of the subject and his gun said the gun was pointed straight at Kennedy’s face when the first shots went off, before Uecker grabbed the gunman. Perhaps MacArthur was as aware as Calkins had been of what “bits of paper” in the air indicated: that the suspect had been firing blanks, not bullets. But Uecker said that after the first shot, he had grabbed the suspect around the neck and hurled him to the right, away from Kennedy, who was falling to the ground on his left. If Kennedy or, as some witnesses asserted, Schrade had been hit by the first shot, the first shot could not also have hit the ceiling and caused the tile to crumble.
Wiedrich noted a wooden strip of molding with holes in it that had been pulled off the door jamb and asked the policemen about it. He recorded their answers in his article:
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, smiling in his moment of victory.
Now the molding bore scars of a crime laboratory technician’s probe as it had removed two .22-caliber bullets that had gone wild.121
No one could have known, at that early point, that had even a single additional bullet been found; that meant at least two guns had to have been fired. No one knew yet that seven bullets would be recovered from six victims and that multiple holes would have to be accounted for in the pantry’s ceiling. So the police told Wiedrich, accurately, that two bullets had been removed from the wood molding.
It would be ridiculous to assert that the police were lying or mistaken about bullets being recovered from the center divider. Wiedrich could see the holes with his own eyes. The police knew that anything they said would be repeated. They knew they were talking to a reporter. It’s likely the police told Wiedrich the truth simply because they didn’t understand at that point that they should have lied. They didn’t know yet that two bullets in the molding were two bullets too many to have been fired from the suspect’s gun.
Kennedy’s surgery ended at 6:20 A.M. on June 5, 1968, and the long wait began. Dr. Cuneo told Frank Mankiewicz and Steve Smith that the next 24 to 36 hours would determine whether he’d live or not.
Mankiewicz asked what Kennedy’s condition would be if he lived. Cuneo told them there had been damage to the brain. He would likely be deaf in one ear, his vision would be affected, his face might be partially paralyzed, but “the higher centers of his brain” seemed unaffected. “He would still be able to think and reason.” Kennedy was taken from surgery and laid on an ice blanket designed to lower his temperature to reduce the stress on his heart and lungs. At lower temperatures, the body needed less oxygen to survive. Ethel sat at Kennedy’s side, holding his hand.122
Chief Reddin scheduled a press conference for 7 A.M. The police had little to report. They did not know the suspect’s identity. The point of the press conference, however, was not to inform the press but to create a diversion so that the suspect could be transported to the Hall of Justice nearby. The specter of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination while in police custody was ever-present.
At 7 A.M., the still unidentified suspect was booked as “John Doe” and charged with six counts of “Assault to Commit Murder.” Judge Joan Dempsey Klein set the bail at $250,000 but ordered the suspect held without bail until identified. The suspect was then turned over to the Sheriff’s Department.
Chief Reddin told the media, who did not realize the suspect was no longer in the building, that the suspect was �
��extremely articulate,” had “an extensive vocabulary,” and expressed himself well. Asked what he meant by “extremely articulate,” Reddin slightly misquoted the suspect. “I prefer to remain incommunicado,” Reddin said, which caused a follow-up question of whether that was a quote from the suspect or Reddin’s comment on the matter. The room rang with laughter.123
Reddin described the man in custody as “Very cool, very calm, very relaxed.” Asked if the man was mentally stable, Reddin replied, “Oh yes,” adding, “He’s very calm and relaxed and quite lucid in what he talks about, but he won’t talk about the case.”
Someone asked if the man was under the influence of anything whatsoever. “Absolutely not,” Reddin replied. Asked specifically whether there was any evidence that the suspect was on drugs or under the influence of alcohol, Reddin reiterated, “No narcotics, no evidence of any type of narcotic use, no evidence of any use of alcohol.”
Asked whether there had been other shooters, Reddin wouldn’t rule out the possibility of conspiracy, but said that no one else was being sought (which wasn’t true, as the APB for the girl in the polka dot dress was still in force and would be for nearly three more weeks).
Throughout the press conference, Reddin’s delivery was calm, articulate, and professional, until he came to one particular question. He had just explained that the LAPD was checking with other agencies for any information they might have on the suspect—“the immigration service, the CIA, the Bureau of Customs, Social Security, the Post Office department—”
“Why the CIA, Chief?” a reporter asked.
Suddenly, Reddin became visibly rattled and nearly choked as he tried to get the agency’s name out. “The C-A … the C-A … the C-I-A has types of information that might help us identify who the person might be. We’ll give them his picture.” Reddin regained his composure shortly after, but it was a bizarre break—and the only such break—in an otherwise seamless presentation.124
At the nearby Hall of Justice, Chief Public Defender Richard Buckley talked briefly to the suspect. The suspect asked to speak to someone from the ACLU. In fact, the ACLU was already on the case. Shortly after the shooting, the president of the Los Angeles branch of the ACLU had woken Abraham Lincoln Wirin and urged him to police headquarters to talk to the suspect. Wirin had sent a telegram to Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief Tom Reddin to request access.
As the LAPD’s press conference was winding down, over at Good Samaritan Hospital, about halfway between downtown and the Ambassador Hotel, Frank Mankiewicz addressed the media, who were clamoring for an update on Kennedy’s condition. He didn’t tell them all he knew. If he died, what did it matter if he might have been cognitively or physically impaired?
Further down Wilshire Boulevard, LAPD photographer Charles Collier completed his work at the Ambassador Hotel and returned to the SID photo lab. Officer DeWayne Wolfer returned to Parker Center for more equipment. At 10:30 A.M., the floor of the pantry was swept for debris related to the crime.
The floor may not have been swept very carefully, because the next day, Robert Alfeld, an assistant sound man for the Cocoanut Grove, found three shell casings under the ice machine. They were long rifle expended shells. He knew a lot about guns and noted the shells had firing pin indentation marks on their bases. He showed them to his boss, the head electrician, Paul Dozier. Alfeld thought perhaps someone had been playing a morbid joke. Alfeld put them in a drawer of a desk he shared with Dozier and promptly forgot all about it. When the FBI questioned him a couple of weeks later, distracted by the shooting itself and his father’s recent death, he didn’t think to mention them. It wasn’t until he saw a news article years later indicating there might have been two shooters that he realized the significance of this. He gave a deposition regarding the shells to Vincent Bugliosi.125 The shells disappeared into history. If the shells weren’t planted as a joke, that was three more shells than the suspect’s gun could have held, as all eight shells were still in the gun when it was turned over to the police.
The search for the suspect’s identity was starting to bear fruit. The gun that had been taken from him at the scene was traced to a man named Albert Leslie Hertz. Albert’s wife told the police Albert had given the gun to their daughter, Dana Westlake. Dana had, in turn, given the gun to George Erhard, her neighbor in Pasadena at the time, somewhere between December of 1967 and February of 1968. The police caught up with Erhard in the early morning hours of June 5 and asked him what had become of the weapon. He told the police he had sold it to a guy he knew as “Joe” who worked at Nash’s Department Store in Pasadena.
At Nash’s Department Store, the young man Erhard thought of as “Joe,” whose real name was Munir Sirhan, stopped into the employee breakroom before work and caught the end of a brief report on the Kennedy assassination. When a picture of the suspect flashed, Munir thought that could be his brother Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, whom he hadn’t seen since the previous morning. Munir, who had taken the bus to work, asked his boss if he could borrow his car to go to the police. He drove home and woke his brother Adel, and together they drove to a Pasadena police station and asked for a newspaper. The station didn’t have one, so they picked one up at a newsstand a couple of blocks away. There, on the front page, was a picture of their brother.
Munir dropped Adel back at the station to identify the suspect and got permission to return his boss’ car to Nash’s. An investigator met Munir when he arrived.126 The gun had just been traced to him. Munir asked to be taken to the same station where Adel was. They arrived just after the police had taken Adel to the Sirhan home. The police did not arrest Adel, but they had read him his rights, which unnerved him.127 Adel gave them permission to search the premises, which was not his to give, as his mother, not Adel, owned the house.
Led by LAPD Sergeant William E. Brandt, the police found a handbill to a McCarthy rally, information about the Rosicrucians and the occult, a brochure advertising “mental projection” and a 4"×9" envelope from the U.S. Treasury on which someone had scrawled “RFK must be disposed of like his brother was” and a second handwritten comment that said, simply, “Reactionary.” They also found three spiral-bound notebooks filled with handwriting and doodles, most of which pertained to his classwork at Pasadena City College.
Scrawled all over one of the pages in a bizarre, repetitive fashion, were the words “RFK must die,” followed by “I have never heard” and “pay to the order of.”
Munir was taken to Rampart Station for questioning. There, Munir explained that his brother had been a member of ROTC in high school, so he was accustomed to using guns. He said Sirhan wanted to practice shooting a gun but didn’t want to borrow one at a shooting range. Munir quoted his brother as having said “I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want a signature,” which was odd, because one day prior, Sirhan’s name had been logged into the registry at a shooting range in San Gabriel, where several witnesses would report having seen Sirhan firing a handgun throughout June 4, the day of the primary.
Munir and Adel gave officers the broad strokes of Sirhan’s life. He had been born in Palestine, moved with the family to Pasadena, and attended high school and junior college in Pasadena. He had worked with a horse trainer as an exercise boy but left after a bad fall from a horse that resulted in an injury. He had worked as a clerk in a health food store in Pasadena.
The notebooks and other items from the Sirhan residence were taken to Rampart Station and booked into evidence right after bullet fragments recovered from Kennedy’s head during surgery. The bullet fragments and notebooks were turned over to FBI Special Agent E. Rhoad Richards at 3 P.M. by Sergeant Brandt.128
At Parker Center, Wolfer spent the day examining the gun and the recovered bullets. Earlier that morning, Wolfer and his crew had run string through several bullet holes in the ceiling, attempting to determine bullet trajectories. After these were photographed, Wolfer’s team removed some of the ceiling tiles and took them to Parker Center, where Wolfer’s log indicates that he perfo
rmed chemical and microscopic examinations of them.
Dr. Marcus Crahan examined Sirhan, who was now back in his cell. The suspect was shivering. Dr. Crahan asked Sirhan if he was cold.
“Not cold,” Sirhan replied.
“You mean you’re having a chill?” Crahan persisted.
“I have a very mild one,” Sirhan said.129
Sirhan would later experience a similar chill coming out of hypnosis induced by a member of his defense team.
Sheriff Peter Pitchess dropped by to see Sirhan the morning of June 5. He wanted to ensure Sirhan understood that his complicity with procedures was necessary for his safety. Sirhan asked what rights he had, beyond his Miranda rights. After a brief conversation, the Sheriff left, but something stuck with him enough to express to Undersheriff William McCloud that their “very unusual prisoner” was “a young man of apparently complete self-possession, totally unemotional.”130
All day, the FBI and LAPD heard from a number of witnesses with many strange stories to tell of people who had seen or heard something relating to the assassination. The only thing that was immediately clear is that this case would take months to investigate. There were literally thousands of witnesses to be interviewed. Yet the police were already telling everyone that Sirhan was the sole participant in the crime.
As night fell on June 5, Kennedy seemed to be stabilizing. But by the end of the night, his “heart tones had weakened.” Friends and family conducted a grueling watch as the life slowly ebbed from the man intimates called “Bobby.” By 1:27 A.M. on June 6, Kennedy had no pulse, no heart sounds, and was not breathing. Tubing to assist his breathing was removed.131
At 1:44 A.M., Robert Francis Kennedy, at the young age of 42, officially passed away.
Jackie Kennedy came out first, with “this terrible unreal smile,” supported by a man at each elbow. “He had to improve after surgery,” Mankiewicz explained, but “He never did.” With tears in his eyes and still wearing his blue Kennedy button, Mankiewicz added, “But God, he gave it a fight. Twenty-five hours. God he gave it a fight.”132
