A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  141 The medical report M. Bowles in the LAPD files states the autopsy finished at 9:05 A.M. An FBI memorandum of 6/6/68 states it ended at 11:05 A.M., which is incorrect.

  142 All quotes in this section come from the Grand Jury transcript unless otherwise noted.

  143 Moldea, p. 92.

  144 Some authors have quoted Lisa Urso, who said Sirhan fired his gun at “point blank range.” But in a reenactment for the LAPD, Urso made clear that her definition of “point blank range” meant a few feet, not an inch.

  145 Testimony of Thomas Noguchi at a Los Angeles Board of Supervisors hearing, May 13, 1974.

  146 In his book, Noguchi said the tests occurred “the next day.” They did occur the day after the pigs’ ears arrived. But in DeWayne Wolfer’s log, the muzzle test preparation happened on June 10, and the shooting test conducted with Noguchi occurred on June 11.

  147 Noguchi and DiMona, Coroner, p. 103.

  148 Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972) pp. 20–21.

  149 James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba and the Garrison Case (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1992, First Edition), pp. 27–30.

  150 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 481.

  151 Testimony of Richard Bissell to the Church Committee, June 11, 1975, p. 60.

  152 David Pallister, “Leaders on the CIA’s hit list,” The Guardian, March 20, 2003, via www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/21/usa.davidpallister, accessed September 16, 2015.

  153 LAPD interview of Inspector Powers, 10/2/68.

  154 Isabella Ginor, “How Six Day War almost led to Armageddon,” The Guardian, June 9, 2000, via www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/10/israel1, accessed September 16, 2015.

  155 Ibid.

  156 Press release “Untold Nuclear Dimension of the Six-Day War,” issued 6/7/07 from the Arms Control Association, citing Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 1998).

  157 I know this personally because Paul Schrade took my hand and placed it on his wound, which was just forward of the center of the top of his head, well back from the hairline. That’s not the “forehead,” which is characterized in Medscape Reference as “the upper third of the face.” See emedicine.medscape.com/article/834862-overview, accessed 2/8/13. The wound Schrade had me touch was at the vertex, just as Dr. Bazilauskas had said.

  158 The LAPD later said the lock in Gindroz’s car was defective and that any number of keys could have opened it.

  159 Oddly, when the FBI examined these two “expended slugs” the following day, they came to a different conclusion:

  “Regarding the two spent bullets found in the vehicle registered to Sirhan Sirhan, one is not capable of being examined as it is flattened out, appearing to have hit a piece of metal or rock. The other one has not been subjected to ballistics examination but from visual observation indicates that it had been removed from its casing without being fired.” FBI report of 6/8/68, LAFO #56-156, Sub File X-1, Volume 4, p. 1082.

  160 Greg Roberts, “Police Supress [sic] LAPD Intelligence Records,” Hollywood Press, dated “9/10–9/20/76” per the notation on the clipping in the FBI’s LAFO file, Sub-H, Volume 6 and Greg Roberts, “County Supervisors Ward and Hahn to Visit Sirhan in Soledad,” Hollywood Press, 5/27/77. Greg identifies the photographer as “Dick,” and other records identify the photographer as Richard Fernandez. Most authors on this case have mistakenly credited Greiner for the photos.

  161 Greg Roberts, “County Supervisors Ward and Hahn to Visit Sirhan in Soledad,” Hollywood Press, 5/27/77.

  162 This is deduced from the fact that the LAPD photo list included pictures of the wood frame facings, but the FBI photo list did not. The facings were known to have removed and placed in LAPD custody. The absence of photos of the molding in the otherwise comprehensive FBI list is circumstantial evidence that the moldings were removed from the scene before June 7. They do not appear in any of the FBI photographs in this set.

  163 Lynn Mangan, Sirhan Evidence Report, p. 20. On June 16, 1971, Mangan found that Wolfer told Commander Beck for a Board of Inquiry that he had stored the test bullets in “a paper bindle” in his pocket until he got back to his office, at which point he put the bindle in his desk drawer and locked it. But a few days later, on June 29, 1971, Wolfer told John Howard, also for the Board of Inquiry, that he had placed the test bullets in “a plain envelope.” On September 9, 1971, Wolfer told Barbara Blehr in a legal case the bullets were placed in a “plain manila envelope.”

  PREPARATION

  “It’s unbelievable how many damn holes there are in that kitchen ceiling.”

  AS THE COUNTRY—AND INDEED, THE WORLD—REMAINED RIVETED on how tragedy had hit the Kennedy family yet again, the LAPD scrambled to figure out how to conduct such a large investigation. The FBI, on the other hand, showed no hesitation, having been through this before. Within a few days, the FBI had flown more than one hundred agents to Los Angeles to jump-start their KENSALT inquiry.164

  The FBI was pulling triple duty, as it was concurrently investigating not only Robert Kennedy’s assassination but also those of his brother John and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well. The same day that thousands of people waved Robert Kennedy’s funeral train a last goodbye, James Earl Ray, the alleged killer of King, was apprehended at the London Heathrow airport.165 And although the Warren Commission had issued its report four years earlier, the FBI was, at the moment, tracking New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw, a New Orleans resident and former Army major,166 whom Garrison believed had played a role in President Kennedy’s assassination. Garrison’s growing thesis was that the CIA worked with Clay Shaw, anti-Castro Cubans and others in New Orleans and Dallas to kill President Kennedy and blame Oswald for the deed.

  The FBI wasn’t the only agency tracking Garrison’s investigation. The CIA was sending agents to infiltrate Garrison’s office in New Orleans as well. The only reason we know this is that in the 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had open access to CIA records relating to the assassination of John Kennedy, and some very good investigators did some incredible work. There has been no such access to or investigation of CIA records relating to the Robert Kennedy assassination. We do know, however, that the LAPD and CIA were in communication about the case, as you will see later.

  Several LAPD leaders commented about how they wanted their investigation to stand up to historical scrutiny. They fully expected either a “Warren Commission” type of body to be appointed or a future Congressional committee investigation. They wanted to leave no stones unturned, no witnesses uninterviewed. But was this evidence of the LAPD’s diligence in getting to the bottom of what happened? Or was this effort aimed at discovering evidence of conspiracy before anyone else did so that the LAPD could either disprove it or cover it up? It’s not a wild question. Cover-ups are as American as apple pie. Teapot Dome. Watergate. Iran-Contra.

  To some, the notion that Sirhan acted alone seemed incongruent with the known facts. Concerned citizens wrote the FBI, asking questions such as this one:

  How did Sirhan know that Sen. Kennedy was going to go out through the kitchen…? Had this been planned? Apparently, Sirhan was waiting in the kitchen so he must have expected the Senator to go that way. He was ahead of him, not following him.

  This seems to point to someone in the hotel organization who could have suggested to a Kennedy aide that this route would be a good one for the Senator to take. Perhaps you can find out from the aides who suggested that Kennedy take that way out of the hotel? [Emphasis in the original.]167

  Some witnesses, some of Sirhan’s lawyers and family, and government officials had their lives threatened. In a few cases you’ll read about later, witnesses were shot at. After California Attorney General Thomas Lynch criticized Mayor Yorty for making claims about Sirhan before he had been tried, five threats were made on his life: one to his office, three to th
e Los Angeles office of Governor Ronald Reagan, and one to the District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles.168 When death threats are made it doesn’t matter to whom they are made. Ronald Reagan and everyone in the chain of command between Los Angeles and the Governor’s office got the message: look too closely into this case and you could die. That is one possible explanation for the cowardice government officials exhibited when confronted with evidence of conspiracy in this case.

  What follows is only a short summary of what the LAPD and FBI did during this period. Similarly, the defense team’s efforts will be told only in the broadest outline. Many problematic details from their efforts, as well as the CIA’s subterranean role in this investigation, will be examined in more depth in later chapters.

  On June 8, DeWayne Wolfer’s top priority was proving that Sandra Serrano couldn’t have heard gunshots from the fire escape at the back of the Ambassador Hotel. Never mind that Serrano never claimed she heard gunshots, but had only acknowledged the possibility when the police suggested that’s what she had heard. She thought she had heard backfires. But that wasn’t the point. Her story of seeing a woman in a polka dot dress fleeing out the back of the hotel was already featured in papers across the country. The quickest way to stop that story would be to shoot down Sandra’s credibility on any point, however small. So this straw man was created, which Wolfer sought diligently to demolish.

  Wolfer took a gun to Long Beach State College, fired it at various distances and measured the decibels. He determined, easily, that Serrano could not have heard gunshots from where she sat. Which gun he used for this test, however, would later become a matter of surprising importance.

  In the early hours of June 9, Chief Houghton, Inspector Powers, Wolfer, and other LAPD leaders prepared for the interagency meeting that was to immediately follow. Houghton asked Lieutenant Charlie Hughes to brief them on the case so far.

  Hughes spoke of the enormous backlog of interviews: thousands of witnesses known to be at the hotel that night had yet to be identified. Despite there being approximately four thousand people the police had yet to interview, Hughes evidenced the sentiment of all when he said, “I don’t expect we’ll have much trouble proving who did the killing—it’s finding out why he shot the Senator, and whether there was more than one man responsible.”169

  Hughes went through some of the initial evidence that appeared to suggest a conspiracy. The fact that the key in Sirhan’s pocket fit Gindroz’s car was dismissed as “one of those crazy coincidences.” Sandra Serrano’s story was dismissed primarily on two issues: she had not mentioned the girl in the polka dot dress when she had called her mother right after the crime, and, thanks to Wolfer’s experiment the day before, she couldn’t have heard shots from her distance from the pantry. Based on those points, and the general unbelievability of a woman running out yelling “We shot him,” Hughes concluded Serrano’s story “looks pretty thin, so far.” But, Hughes noted, the FBI had was still interested because another witness, Vincent DiPierro, had placed a girl in a polka dot dress with Sirhan moments before the shooting. “That’s what’s convincing the Bureau” that there might be something to Serrano’s account, Hughes explained.170

  Houghton asked what had caused Mayor Sam Yorty to state, the morning of the shooting, that Sirhan was a Communist. McCauley explained that he had been at Rampart when Yorty had come in mid-morning on June 5. He described how Yorty had flipped through one of the notebooks found in Sirhan’s bedroom, found a comment in there that looked like a statement from Karl Marx, about workers having nothing to lose but their chains, and took that as proof that Sirhan was a Communist. In addition, Sirhan’s car was frequently seen near the DuBois Club, which the police had deemed a Communist outpost. But it turned out the car was parked there by Sirhan’s brother Adel, who borrowed it when he played music at a club nearby. And the text was likely related to one of Sirhan’s college courses, like most of the other entries in his notebook.

  In fact, no evidence ever surfaced, then or later, that Sirhan was in any way a Communist. But at that point in time, little was known with certainty, and despite the fact that such an accusation was guaranteed to prejudice potential jurors, Yorty’s statement hung out there in the public mind, unchallenged.

  Due in part to Yorty’s outburst, Judge Arthur Alarcon had issued an order that the defense and prosecution must refrain from making any evidence public in order not to prejudice potential jurors. The order only applied to attorneys for the defense and prosecution, police, grand jurors, subpoenaed witnesses and others connected with the case in an official capacity. It was never meant to keep witnesses from talking to the media, although the police told witnesses they couldn’t talk to anyone about what they knew. The “Alarcon order” effectively silenced witnesses, even long after the order had served its original purpose.

  At 10 A.M. on June 9, the five-hour interagency meeting commenced. Ten LAPD members joined William Lynch; Matt Byrne; Evelle Younger’s deputies Buck Compton, John Howard, John Miner, and George Stoner; Captain Clifford Montgomery of the Sheriff’s office intelligence division; Stewart Knight from the Secret Service; and William Nolan from the FBI. Lieutenant Hughes recapped his earlier summary, then Wolfer took the floor.

  “I’ll give you all I have … there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ve been over the kitchen area twice, and we’re going at least one more time. It’s unbelievable how many damn holes there are in that kitchen ceiling.” (A few photographs from the LAPD’s investigation show at least five ceiling tiles had been removed, presumably for further investigation.) “Even the doors have holes in them,” Wolfer continued, “which can be mistaken for bullet holes.”171

  It must be noted that there is no evidence to support Wolfer’s assertion that the holes in the pantry doorframes were not bullet holes, as the doorframes with the holes in them were destroyed after the trial, and Wolfer kept no notes of the investigations he claimed to have performed on them. He noted in his log that he performed “X-rays of door-jam,” [sic] but no X-rays were ever presented, nor does the log indicate what the results were. This is problematic, because as we’ve already seen, several members of the LAPD and FBI noted bullet holes in the pantry doorframes. One LAPD officer even saw someone dig a bullet out of a hole with a knife. If there was even just one bullet hole in the pantry doorframes or walls, that meant a second gun had been used. Wolfer had already accounted for the eight bullets Sirhan’s gun could hold. Two bullets were found in Kennedy, and five other bullets were removed from the other five pantry victims. Wolfer also had to explain the three bullet holes found in the pantry ceiling tiles. He concluded that two bullets had entered the ceiling, and one of them had hit something and ricocheted back down into one of the victims. But a third bullet had evidently entered the ceiling and stayed there. This bullet was never recovered.

  The LAPD’s and County’s entire case for Sirhan being the lone shooter hangs on Wolfer’s credibility in this regard. So it’s important to consider his credibility on this matter before continuing.

  If Wolfer told the truth when he said no bullet holes were found in the pantry, then the Sheriffs who had first circled and labeled the holes had been fooled, veteran Chicago Tribune crime report Robert Wiedrich’s account of bullets having been removed from the doorframes—provided to him by experienced members of the LAPD in the pantry immediately after the shooting—had been incorrect, the FBI photo captions that indicated those holes were bullet holes were incorrect, and the statements of FBI and LAPD officers—who described seeing not just bullet holes but a bullet in one of the holes and a bullet being removed by a man in a suit—were also incorrect. Were all these people, whose accounts were entirely consistent with each other despite having never met or talked to each other, incorrect? Either all those highly qualified witnesses were wrong, or Wolfer was.

  For those who cannot fathom that a member of the LAPD could be so dishonest, consider the Rampart Division scandal that erupted in the late 1990s. A group of officers from
the same Rampart Division that handled the initial investigation into Robert Kennedy’s assassination were found to have committed perjury on the stand and planted evidence on people to obtain, in some cases, false convictions. The wrongdoing was eventually found to have spread far beyond the Rampart Division. Members of the LAPD’s crime lab were also implicated. The scandal was so big and represented such entrenched corruption that eight years of court-ordered federal oversight of the LAPD ensued.

  How, then, are we to assess Wolfer’s credibility, given how all-important his assertion regarding the pantry bullet holes is to this case? Fortunately, we don’t have to. The California Court of Appeals already did that for us. The Court railed against Wolfer’s actions and testimony in the Kirschke case, stating he had “negligently presented false demonstrative evidence in support of his ballistics testimony,” that “Wolfer’s acoustical testimony was false,” and that “his testimony on qualifications as an expert on anatomy was also false and borders on the perjurious.”172 In other words, the Court of Appeals stopped just short of calling Wolfer a liar. I believe the Court chickened out and should have said what the evidence clearly shows. Bear that in mind with everything Wolfer said and did over the course of this case. In the law there’s the principle, “false in part, false in whole.” And given Wolfer’s long tenure with the LAPD, as well as his engagements as an instructor of crime scene forensics, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to argue that if he were wrong, he was simply mistaken. It makes more sense that Wolfer was deliberately lying in the Kirschke case to gain a conviction.

  So it would hardly be out of character for Wolfer, a member of the LAPD’s crime lab, to dissemble about what he knew in the Robert Kennedy case as well. We saw in the previous chapter how he essentially told an untruth to the Grand Jury about the bullets he had turned in, claiming to have made a match between test bullets and the Kennedy neck bullet, a match he would later deny regarding those same bullets.