by Lisa Pease
Sergeant Sharaga had stronger words for Serrano’s treatment at the hands of Pena and Hernandez when I talked to him: “They should have gone to jail for what they did to her.”210
Hernandez conducted a similarly bizarre lie detector session with the young Vincent DiPierro on July 1, 1968. DiPierro had reported a girl in a white dress with dark polka dots “holding” Sirhan just before Sirhan stepped out and fired his gun. Hernandez got DiPierro to say he had not seen a girl in a white dress with dark polka dots next to Sirhan, despite the fact that DiPierro had told that to the police in his first interview and had repeated it many times since, including to me when I interviewed him in 2006.
I won’t quote his session here. It would be redundant. Suffice it to say the 17-year-old DiPierro was no match for the heavily experienced Hernandez. Interested parties should listen to the audio, which is available at the California State Archives. I took a tape of this session to DiPierro in 2006 and played a particular section for him. “They’re putting words in my mouth,” he said, clearly surprised. He had never heard the tape before. “I did not know that,” he said, shaking his head and repeating, “I did not know that.”211 The teenage DiPierro didn’t know he had been manipulated, but the adult DiPierro spotted it right away.
Hernandez’s goal was made clear in the entry for this day in the official SUS Daily Summary: “Vincent DiPierro broken down on polka-dot story.”
The police didn’t stop there. They wanted to put the story of the girl in the polka dot dress to permanent rest. DiPierro was shown pictures of various women and had him pick out the one who looked most like the girl in the pantry. DiPierro picked out Valerie Schulte, who didn’t match DiPierro’s original description in any way. She was blonde, not brunette. She was on crutches, something DiPierro would have noticed. And she was wearing a green dress with yellow lemons of increasing size, not polka dots. But Pena and Hernandez told everyone they had “found” the girl in the polka dot dress.
When I interviewed DiPierro years later, I showed him his original description of the brunette in the white dress with dark polka dots, which he confirmed. Then I showed him a picture of Valerie Schulte. He readily acknowledged that that was not the dress of the girl he had seen in the pantry. But that’s what Schulte had worn in the pantry. In other words, DiPierro confirmed, clearly, she was not “the girl in the polka dot dress” he had initially reported. He said he picked her out only because her face was similar, and he had been shown only headshots. He said that Deputy D.A. Howard had told him that if he said Schulte was the girl with Sirhan in the pantry, “we’ll stand by you.” DiPierro seemed proud that he had picked out a girl who had actually been in the pantry, saying words to the effect that the other women pictured might have been policewomen, and that he was pleased he had successfully chosen an actual pantry person. But it was equally clear this was not the girl he had originally seen. In fact, when I showed him a picture of an attractive, voluptuous woman from behind, in a fitted white dress with black polka dots, with shoulder-length hair, who much more closely matched his original description, he literally shuddered in front of me, as if recalling something unpleasant. (This photo was staged by journalist Fernando Faura and ran in his paper, the Hollywood Citizen News, with one of his stories. When I showed DiPierro a drawing Faura had made from John Fahey’s description of the girl, DiPierro had no visible reaction at all.)
DiPierro told me he passed two lie detector sessions and didn’t break down until the third. At that point, he said he was in tears and just said whatever they wanted to hear.
DiPierro told me he believed Sirhan acted alone. But everything else he said belied that. He had been very fearful of meeting me in person. DiPierro told me he had carried a gun for protection for ten years after the assassination. It took several phone conversations before he finally agreed to meet with me in a public place. When we met, he said his girlfriend had been afraid I might kill him and had urged him not to see me. If he really believed Sirhan had acted alone, why was he so fearful? Sirhan was in jail. Who would want to kill him?
As we discussed the pantry events, he was noticeably shaken, and even teared up a few times. It’s still a difficult moment for him to relive, something I’ve noticed with the other pantry witnesses I have talked to. He had nightmares about the shooting for ten years after the event. The police wouldn’t even let him wash the blood off his hands before they interviewed him. He had to sit for hours with blood caked on him. He expressed a sense of guilt, as if there was something he could have done, should have done, to prevent Kennedy from being killed. I assured him that of course he couldn’t have known what was about to happen, that it was not his fault.
As we were finishing our conversation, he mentioned how he was afraid that the mob might have wanted to take him out, another indicator that he believed Sirhan wasn’t the only party involved. He said that FBI people had come to his home and said they’d protect him, which made him feel safe. Late in the conversation, DiPierro mentioned something about his personal data not being easily findable on the Internet at that time, and said that was part of “my deal with the FBI.”
“What deal with the FBI?” I asked him in amazement.
He was silent for a few moments, perhaps realizing he had said something he shouldn’t have. Then he changed the subject. I didn’t press. I don’t know what it’s like to be in the shoes of someone who witnessed something like that and I refuse to pass judgment on people’s choices in that regard. We parted shortly after that.
Hernandez had been gentler with DiPierro than with Serrano and some others because the police needed to preserve DiPierro’s credibility so he could identify Sirhan as the shooter at the trial. And few witnesses put up Serrano’s level of resistance. John Fahey was one of the rare exceptions. He was the one who had driven up to Oxnard with a girl who told him “they” were going to “take care of Kennedy” at “the winning reception” that night. He reported how, as he had driven this woman up the coast, his car had been followed. At one point he pulled off the road and one of the cars pulled off with him. He started to get out of the car to confront his follower when he saw the girl eyeing his car keys. Afraid she might steal his car, he got back in. Fahey told a consistent story several times over a period of months. The journalist Fernando Faura even arranged to have Fahey polygraphed by Chris Gugas, who said Fahey passed the test with flying colors. But this was a problem for the LAPD, which had to quash all evidence of conspiracy. So the LAPD insisted Fahey submit to Hernandez’s polygraph. As with Serrano, Fahey eventually told Hernandez what he wanted to hear so he could end the process. Hernandez, of course, deemed Fahey a liar, even though no reasonable person who listened to Fahey on tape could come to that conclusion.
When Hernandez took on Everett Buckner, the range master from the gun range where Sirhan had been seen firing a gun the day of the primary by several witnesses, Buckner buckled faster than most, and Hernandez embellished the rest. Like Serrano, DiPierro and Fahey, Buckner’s story indicated a conspiracy.
Ten days after the Grand Jury hearing, Buckner told the LAPD that Sirhan had arrived at the gun range at about 9:30 A.M. the morning of June 4 and taken up a position at the pistol range at the far west end of the range. After firing nearly one hundred rounds, Sirhan walked back to the control tower and asked Buckner for some .22 caliber ammunition that would not misfire. Buckner sold him some hollow-points. At some point after Sirhan returned and was firing, he saw Sirhan engage a white female, 5'7" to 5'8", 130–140 pounds, with shoulder-length blonde hair in conversation. She was wearing a light-colored “one-piece dress” with a full skirt. To the FBI, Buckner described her as attractive with a rather husky build.
Buckner told the LAPD the woman had arrived at the shooting range with a slim man more than 6' tall, and that the two had gotten into an argument, with the tall man saying to the woman, “Goddamn it, you’ve got to learn how to fire this gun today.” Buckner told the FBI that the woman had a pistol and the man had a rifle. Buck
ner walked over to tell the man with the rifle he had to go to the rifle area, that he couldn’t stay in the pistol area. Buckner said he asked the tall man, “Aren’t you going to help your wife set up her target?” The tall man replied angrily, “She’s not my Goddamn wife” and walked off to the rifle range.
The woman asked Buckner to assist her with firing, saying something like “This is the first time I have shot this gun, but I have to shoot it today.” Buckner said she had a very small gun which he thought was a .22, with a pearl handle. Buckner declined to help, explaining it was against the rules for the range master to assist customers. A little while later, he saw Sirhan appeared to be assisting the woman, making gestures with his hands, pointing at the sight, for a few minutes. Suddenly Buckner heard the woman say, “God damn you, you son of a bitch. Get out of here or they will recognize us.” Then he lost track of Sirhan.
The LAPD’s contempt for Buckner shows on the cover sheet to his interview, which states “Buckner…has been running off the mouth [sic] to Time Magazine.” Buckner was shown the Alarcon order and told, essentially, to shut up.
Just as he had with Serrano, when Hernandez polygraphed Buckner, Hernandez told Buckner he could not have heard what Buckner was certain he had heard.
“Why did you say to all these other people … that the woman had told Sirhan something to the effect, ‘Get away from me…somebody will recognize us.’ Why did you say this before?”
“Because I thought that’s what she said.”
“But you know that’s not what she said; is that right?”
“That is true. I don’t know what she said.”
In his summary of his session with Buckner, Hernandez wrote that Buckner “admitted that he never heard any woman saying anything to Sirhan at the range on June 4, 1958,” which is not at all what Buckner had said, according to the transcript. Buckner had insisted many times during his questioning that the woman really had said something like “get away, they’ll recognize us.” “I think she said that. I still think she said that,” he reiterated in his session.
The day after he talked to the LAPD, Buckner, who had been the range master for the past two months, was suddenly fired for allegedly drinking on the job. Nonetheless, the prosecution would find him credible enough to put on the stand as a witness.
There was another witness that partially backed up what Buckner had reported. A note in the LAPD’s case preparation files states the following:
On 6-28-68, Officer Thompson interviewed James J. Thornbrugh. His statement substantiates statements of others witnesses with one exception—Thornbrugh stated he thought Sirhan was with a girl and was showing her how to fire. He describes this female as Mexican or Latin descent, 22 to 23, 5-2 to 5-4, dark brown, shoulder-length hair, dark complexion. He was uncertain if it was Sirhan giving her this instruction or another male standing near Sirhan’s position.
A re-interview is to be scheduled with Thornbrugh and if necessary a polygraph examination will be requested.212
During Thornbrugh’s polygraph session, he noted that he hadn’t recognized Sirhan at first due to his messed-up, bruised appearance right after the shooting. but “after he had cleaned up and bruises or whatever was on his face was gone, then he looked exactly like the person I saw out there.” At the start of the session, Hernandez didn’t seem to know what information he was there to test. When Thornbrugh said he could not be sure Sirhan had been talking to the woman, rather than probing Thornbrugh’s memory to seek out the truth of what had happened, Hernandez let Thornbrugh go.213 Hernandez’s sole purpose, it seemed, was to get witnesses to reject anything they said that suggested a conspiracy.
The LAPD would later claim Sirhan had talked to a woman named Claudia Williams. But Claudia and her husband had not gone to the range until late afternoon, and both Buckner and Thornbrugh had seen Sirhan with the girl much earlier. In fact, Thornbrugh left the range a couple of hours before Claudia showed up.
Perhaps the most damning evidence against Hernandez is his uncharacteristically friendly treatment of Michael Wayne, the man who had been handcuffed after fleeing the pantry immediately after the shooting.
As you’ll learn in a later chapter, Wayne lied to various parties throughout the night about who he was, who he knew, and what he was doing at the hotel that night. If anyone deserved a harsh session, it was Wayne. But Hernandez bent over backwards to let Wayne off the hook. He asked Wayne if he had ever been arrested, and when Wayne said yes, Hernandez told him that, since it happened when he was a juvenile, he could say “no.”
When Hernandez asked if Wayne was running for a phone booth when he made his hasty exit from the pantry, Wayne answered “no” during the test. But after the test, when the polygraph was no longer tracking his responses, Wayne said he answered “no” because he wasn’t looking for a “phone booth,” just a phone. Someone then falsely typed in the transcript of his session that Wayne had answered the question “yes,” which he didn’t, according to the tape of his session.
Hernandez declared from the test results that Wayne had told only the truth. But if Wayne had said no because he was uncomfortable with the wording, 1) why didn’t he speak up at the time, as others did when asked something they wanted clarified, and 2) why didn’t that show up as deception in his results? And if his answer did indicate deception, why did Hernandez so readily accept Wayne’s weak explanation after the fact? It makes more sense that Wayne told the truth the first time, leaving no reaction on the machine, and then lied about his reason after the test ended. Either way, the LAPD should not have rewritten the test answer to “yes,” since that’s not what Wayne actually said.
If Hernandez’s motive was to prevent a conspiracy from being revealed, all of his sessions, including his softball one with Wayne and his tough ones with Serrano, DiPierro, and others with evidence of conspiracy, make sense. Without that motive, it’s hard to find any reasonable explanation for Hernandez’s selective treatment of witnesses or inaccurate reporting of what they said.
Pena, too, was less than honest in the way he handled the evidence. There were over 20 witnesses to a girl in a white dress with dark polka dots acting suspiciously, frequently in the company of someone who looked like Sirhan. But rather than trying to follow these leads, after Serrano was forced to retract her statement, Pena went through his stack of files on the girl and wrote, with his thick black pen on the interview cover sheets, “Polka Dot Story Phony” and “No further Int.” (“no further interviews”).214
Another common notation found on the cover sheets of interviews that had allegations relative to conspiracy: “Do Not Type.” The LAPD sent officers with tape recorders hidden inside suitcases into the field for interviews (which explains the low sound quality of many of the interviews). Not all of these were transcribed, and in a disturbing pattern, several of the interview cover sheets or cardfile notations marked “Do Not Type” no longer have corresponding tape or paper interviews on file.
The FBI, too, was not above covering up or simply altering what witnesses had said in their interview summaries. Nina Rhodes-Hughes, one of the pantry witnesses, had told Professor Philip Melanson that her FBI statement was filled with lies. She reiterated this point to me in 2012 when I showed her a copy of her statement at a little café near Beverly Hills. She assured me she had told the FBI she heard 12–14 shots, but her FBI interview summary said she had heard only eight.215 Rhodes-Hughes also told me she had heard shots coming from two different places in the pantry, one ahead of her to her left and another to her right, a point to which we’ll return in a later chapter.
Similarly, after FBI agents interviewed Darnell Johnson on June 6, he told them he saw a girl in a white dress with black polka dots standing with four guys who appeared to be together, one of which Darnell identified as Sirhan from photos the FBI showed him. The FBI’s response? At the bottom of this interview report, William Nolan wrote, in capitalized letters, “DO NOT COVER THIS LEAD AGAIN.”216
While the authorities
were busy explaining away, burying and avoiding evidence of conspiracy, Sirhan’s defense team started to coalesce. The ACLU’s Chief Counsel in Los Angeles, Abraham Lincoln (A.L.) Wirin had first asked that the chief public defender, Wilbur Littlefield, take over for Sirhan’s initial public defender. But Wirin also asked that a private attorney be assigned to represent Sirhan. Judge Alarcon would not assign one.
Wirin was considering asking Grant Cooper, a high-profile Los Angeles attorney, to represent Sirhan when Robert Blair Kaiser, a stringer for Time magazine who had covered the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (more commonly known as “Vatican II”), called to ask Wirin if he could speak to Sirhan. Kaiser mentioned that he had recently spoken to Grant Cooper. Wirin asked Kaiser if he would ask Cooper to take on Sirhan’s defense.
Seeking help from Cooper seemed a no-brainer. He was a well-known, highly esteemed lawyer in the Southern California area. Not one of his clients had ever been put to death. He was a former president of the California Bar.
The choice not to use a public defender seems equally obvious to anyone who has not been inside the justice system. After all, isn’t the fact that an attorney is highly paid a sign of their competence? Not necessarily. A public defender has an advantage that the private attorneys often do not: they know the habits of each Deputy D.A. they face, as they encounter them almost daily in the course of their work. Private attorneys don’t usually have that level of familiarity. The public defenders also know the judges and the police department, what kind of evidence a certain judge is likely to allow, and how best to present a case such that it gets a fair hearing.217
Of course, Sirhan had no idea that a public defender might be better than a private one, so he did what most people would have done: he took Cooper.
Cooper, however, was busy defending a man involved with mobsters in a card-cheating scandal at the Friars Club. And one of the men involved in the Friars Club case was not just any mobster. He was Johnny Roselli, who had worked with the CIA on plots to kill the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Cooper agreed to take Sirhan’s case and to work for free on the condition that someone else represent Sirhan until Cooper’s Friars Club case concluded.
