by Lisa Pease
“Just a minute,” the Foreman interjected. “He first called it a Chrysler. Now it’s a De Soto. Which is it?”
“It is a De Soto,” Hegge replied.
Hegge’s testimony shows how easy it is, even for the police, to mix and match evidence, even when testifying under oath on the stand. This, too, would happen repeatedly in this case.
Along with the wallet, Hegge found a box of Mini-Mag ammunition, as well as two “expended” slugs. Howard asked him “When you say ‘expended slugs,’ what does that mean?’”
“This is the lead portion of the bullet from a—that has been fired.”159
Why would anyone fire a bullet and then retrieve the bullet and put it in their car? It’s not like it could be used again, and Sirhan was no bullet collector. Had someone planted bullets retrieved from the pantry doorframes in Sirhan’s car in the hopes of tying him to the shooting?
A couple of miles from the courthouse, FBI photographer Richard “Dick” Fernandez160 and FBI Special Agent Al Greiner were busy at the Ambassador Hotel. Frans Stalpers, the Assistant Manager of the Ambassador Hotel, had arranged for them to photograph interiors and exteriors of the Ambassador Hotel. At this time, Greiner was the Los Angeles Photographic Squad Supervisor. Greiner would eventually become the number three man in the Los Angeles office.161 Under Greiner’s supervision, each photo was captioned with a letter and a number, and a map of the hotel was marked and inserted in sequence to indicate exactly what portion of the hotel was depicted in each photo.
By the time Fernandez took the pantry photos, the wood facing that had been in front of the doorframes had been removed not just from the doorframe but from the pantry altogether, leaving the FBI without crucial evidence.162 Even so, Fernandez took close-up photos of the four holes in the doorframes—two in the center divider and two more on the left side of the southernmost door at the west end of the pantry. The photos were captioned—unequivocally—“bullet holes.”
But the Grand Jury wasn’t told that in addition to the seven bullets recovered from the five shooting victims, four bullet holes had been found in the doorframes. They also weren’t told that the LAPD had already identified at least three additional bullet holes in ceiling tiles. And the one man in a position to know about all of these bullets and holes did not tell them this when he testified.
Under Fukuto’s questioning, DeWayne Wolfer provided his background. “I am a police officer for the City of Los Angeles, assigned to the Scientific Investigation Division, Crime Laboratory, where I act as a criminalist, and among my criminalistics duties is that of firearms and ballistics expert.” He received a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Southern California, where he was a pre-med student. He had a background “in the field of chemistry, physics, and all types of laboratory technique courses.”
Wolfer described how, after being assigned to the SID Laboratory in January 1951, he went to “all of the major firearms factories” to study weapons. He “manufactured barrels and all parts of guns to study the basis of—upon which we make our identifications.” He made “similar and like studies at all of the major ammunition factories.” He was also a part-time assistant professor at California State College at Long Beach, where he taught criminalistics. He also taught “the criminalistics subject matter” at USC, UCLA, and a number of smaller colleges.
“I have testified hundreds of times involving firearms and ballistics matter in our courts here in the State of California,” he added. He had “published papers” regarding these matters.
Fukuto asked Wolfer to describe how he could tell a particular bullet came from a particular gun. Wolfer explained:
In the barrels or the rifling of the weapon there is what we call imperfections which scratch the bullet as they cross these imperfections. These imperfections produce in the bullet a series of valleys and ridges which we call striation marks …
We would take and fire the gun into a water recovery tank so that the bullet entered the water and was stopped with little or no damage. We would then recover that bullet and place it under what we call a comparison microscope, which is simply two microscopes with one eye piece. We place the bullet that we test fire through the suspected weapon on one stage of the microscope and the bullet, such as the—such as a Coroner’s bullet or the evidence bullet on the other stage of the microscope.
Then, as we look through the common eye piece at both of these bullets, we would be able to see lines on one bullet, on one side of the microscope, and lines on the other.
We would try to line them up … if we can line up a majority of the lines, we can say it was fired from this revolver and no other.
Fukuto directed Wolfer to Exhibit 5-A, the bullet Noguchi had retrieved from the back of Kennedy’s neck and on the base of which Noguchi had inscribed his initials. Had he seen that before? Wolfer answered yes, he had seen that bullet the day before.
When asked when he had seen the gun presented as Grand Jury Exhibit 7, Wolfer responded:
“I first saw this revolver on or about June the 6th of this year.”
“That’s yesterday, too?”
“That’s yesterday, too.”
Wolfer may well have inadvertently told the truth here, for reasons that will become clear in a later chapter. But if that were the truth, then the gun the Grand Jury was looking at wasn’t the one Rafer Johnson had brought to the police after the shooting, as Wolfer had first seen that gun on June 5. As Fukuto started to ask the next question, Wolfer suddenly realized his serious mistake.
“Actually, no, I saw it in the latter part of June the 5th, in the afternoon.”
Fukuto asked Wolfer if he had made test shots from Grand Jury Exhibit 7.
“I did.”
“Do you have the test shots with you?”
“I have some of the test shots, but not all of the test shots.”
Wolfer handed Fukuto an evidence envelope with test bullets in it. This item was marked as Grand Jury Exhibit 5-B. What was in evidence envelope 5-B? Four spent slugs, Wolfer told him.
Were markings found on them? Yes. Did Wolfer compare these markings to the bullet labeled 5-A, the bullet retrieved from Kennedy’s neck?
“I did.”
“And from your comparison of the two bullets, were you able to form any opinion as to the bullet 5-A?
“I was.”
“What is that opinion?”
“That the bullet in People’s 5-A here, marked the bullet from Robert Kennedy, was fired in the exhibit, the revolver here, People’s Exhibit Number 7 at some time. Yes, it was fired in the weapon.”
“Any question about that?”
“No.”
“So that the gun that fired Exhibit 5-A was Grand Jury Exhibit Number 7, is that right?”
“That’s correct.”
But that was misleading, if not outright perjury. In 1971, under oath, Wolfer would reveal that none of the four bullets he submitted to the Grand Jury as Exhibit 5-B had been successfully matched to the Kennedy neck bullet.
Wolfer claimed other bullets not submitted to the Grand Jury did match the Kennedy bullet, despite the lack of evidence of that in any of Wolfer’s detailed logs. Wolfer would testify that Fukuto had given him permission to keep some of the bullets, and that Wolfer had put those bullets—which he alleged did match to the bullet from Kennedy’s neck—in a manila envelope, a plain envelope or a paper bindle, depending on which of these conflicting answers Wolfer gave you wish to believe.163 He then returned to his office, where he put this all-important evidence in his desk drawer, locked only with his desk drawer lock. And the kicker? Those three remaining bullets would be placed at some later date in an envelope dated June 6 but marked with a gun number that did not match Sirhan’s gun. The gun with that number wouldn’t officially enter the case, according to Wolfer, until June 11.
But the Grand Jury would learn none of this. Their session concluded just before 4 P.M. The Grand Jury issued an indictment of Sirhan Sirhan, and the scramble to prepare the case
s for the prosecution and the defense began in earnest.
On the East Coast the next morning, June 8, a mile-long line of mourners waited to say their final goodbye to Senator Robert Kennedy. Kennedy family, friends, and politicians of various stripes, including ex-Vice President Richard Nixon and current Vice President Hubert Humphrey, gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York as friends and strangers were allowed to file past the casket. The ceremony was broadcast live.
Ted Kennedy, who had lost all three of his older brothers, gave a moving eulogy. He opened with a short statement of his own:
On behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, her children, the parents and sisters of Robert Kennedy, I want to express what we feel to those who mourn with us today in this Cathedral and around the world.
We loved him as a brother, and as a father, and as a son…Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust, or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and he lived it intensely.
Ted quoted from a eulogy Robert had given at their father’s memorial service to show the true nature of Robert Kennedy:
What it really all adds up to is love—not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order and encouragement, and support. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength, and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it. …
[My father] tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off.
Ted then quoted extensively from Robert’s “Day of Affirmation” address in South Africa, which he gave on June 6, 1966, two years to the day before he died. No other speech so clearly elucidated just who Robert Kennedy was and what he cared most passionately about, and why he had the kind of enemies who would stop at nothing to keep him out of power:
There is discrimination in this world, and slavery, and slaughter, and starvation. Governments repress their people; millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. These are differing evils, but they are the common works of man. … But we can perhaps remember—even if only for a time—that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness ….
Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation; a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth; a young woman reclaimed the territory of France; and it was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who claimed that “all men are created equal.”
These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
The “ripples of hope” quote would eventually be inscribed on a wall near Robert Kennedy’s grave at Arlington Cemetery, where he lay not far from his brother John’s grave. Ted continued, quoting a passage Robert had spoken that described the essence of Robert’s character:
Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this generation, those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe.
Ted quoted Robert’s admonition that “the fortunate among us” needed to resist “the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education” and that we will all “ultimately be judged … on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that event.” Ted finished the long excerpt from the Day of Affirmation address with this passage:
The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society. Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.
“That is the way he lived,” Ted told the crowd in the church and the live television audience all over the world. “That is what he leaves us,” adding, as he started to choke up:
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
Those of us who loved him, and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.
Ted ended his eulogy with a line Robert used frequently in his stump speeches, a paraphrase of a quote from the famous Irish playwright and Socialist George Bernard Shaw:
Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream things that never were and say, “Why not?”
After the ceremony, Kennedy’s casket was placed on a funeral train that proceeded, slowly, to Arlington. The bier was raised onto chairs so the nearly two million people lining the tracks could see the coffin as they waved their last goodbyes.
When President John Kennedy was killed, people expressed immense grief. When Martin Luther King was killed, grief turned in many cases to anger. But when Robert Kennedy was killed, there seemed to be a sort of finality that left only despair. As Jack Newfield poignantly noted:
Now I realized what makes our generation unique, what defines us apart from those who came before the hopeful winter of 1961, and those who came after the murderous spring of 1968. We are the first generation that learned from experience … that things were not really getting better, that we shall not overcome. We felt, by the time we reached thirty, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward, things would get worse: our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope. The stone was at the bottom of the hill, and we were alone.
After Robert Kennedy was killed, the Democratic Party became a shadow of its former self. Six of the next nine presidents would be Republicans. It would be 22 years before a Democrat was elected to two full terms in office. The political left, after the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Senator Robert Kennedy, had been beheaded. After the Democratic Party’s 49-
state loss to incumbent President Richard Nixon in 1972 (in a campaign so deceitful and dishonest that President Nixon was eventually forced to resign), the Democrats abandoned their core base—union laborers, minorities and blue-collar workers—and started catering to the Wall Street crowd instead. It would be 48 more years before an independent Senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders ran on the kind of platform that used to define the Democratic Party in the 1960s.
133 Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1968.
134 Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow, So I was Saying … : My Somewhat Eventful Life (New York: Macmillan, 2016), p. 159.
135 Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1968.
136 Houghton, p. 89.
137 There has long been talk that in some way, Robert Kennedy may have been involved in Monroe’s death. But the facts do not bear this out. Robert Kennedy was at an American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco at the time. Robert Kennedy and Marilyn were friends. They met the night Monroe sang her famous, breathless performance of “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy. As Robert Kennedy’s biographer Arthur Schlesinger explained in his biography of Robert Kennedy, “Robert Kennedy, with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through [to Marilyn Monroe.] She called him thereafter in Washington, using an assumed name. She was very often distraught.”
Lawford dismissed claims of an affair between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe as “garbage.” Even Monroe herself told her masseur Ralph Roberts she’d heard such rumors and that they were not true. “I like him, but not physically.” (Schlesinger, p. 591).
138 Admiral Calvin Galloway was a point of contact for anti-Castro Cubans wishing to join the CIA’s anti-Castro effort, according to Felix Rodriguez in his book Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), pp. 46–48.
139 Thomas T. Noguchi, M.D., Coroner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 94.
140 Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (University Press of Kansas, 2008), p. 282. I was also told this information by a former CIA operative named Carl McNabb years earlier.
