A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  “And I know them personally, at least two, for 30 years. I am not saying that you are going to go to the gas chamber. You are not going to go to the gas chamber unless that is the determination of the jury, and even then, I have an opportunity to set it aside if it is warranted. … [G]uide yourself by your attorneys…. They are doing you an excellent job.”

  “I understand that.”

  “So keep that in mind before you come in here and say these things to the court.”

  “Well, I wanted to say it here because I didn’t want to say it in court last night, and I almost blew up.”

  “I know you did. That is why we recessed early,” Walker explained. “I want you to understand that if you plead guilty, before I take a plea from you, I would examine you for at least 20 minutes, and I have to under the law, and you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have it all worked out, four pages of questions that I will ask you before I will even accept a plea and that is what the law requires.”

  After the notebooks were introduced, Sirhan was again visibly disturbed, and his upset grew when a superintendent was brought in to testify to Sirhan’s failing grades. As mentioned previously, Sirhan had been taking care of his sister, who was dying of leukemia. His failing grades were due to absences, not his classwork.

  When Sirhan’s lawyers wanted to call Sirhan’s mother Mary to the stand, Sirhan again objected. Mary was so distraught herself that Judge Walker ended her testimony early and let her continue the next morning, when she could be more composed.

  The final straw came when Parsons showed Sirhan a list of 31 witnesses to be called on his behalf, two of which were two women that Sirhan had appeared to have a crush on, Gwen Gumm and Peggy Osterkamp, as their names appeared frequently throughout his notebooks. Kaiser reported in his book R.F.K. Must Die that Sirhan was in some disassociated state at this point, accusing two girls in the courtroom of being Gumm and Osterkamp who were provably not those girls. Regardless, Sirhan blew up. He said he did not want those women inconvenienced on his account.

  Cooper told Sirhan if they wouldn’t let him give him the defense they felt he needed, they would withdraw from the case. Sirhan was fine with that, as he didn’t like the direction his defense was going anyway. Cooper told Judge Walker,

  As a result of this conflict with my client … I should ask to be relieved of this case. Except … believing as I do that he has diminished capacity—not that he’s insane—I don’t think he is in a position to exercise judgment and therefore I owe him a duty.

  But in view of the fact that he has blown up in the courtroom before … in my opinion if we call these witnesses [he] will blow up again….

  In his book on the case, Kaiser noted the irony of Cooper arguing his client suffered from diminished mental capacity while expecting him to maintain total decorum during the court proceedings.

  Compton warned if Sirhan did this in open court, it could backfire because Sirhan might feel he had won, that he had gotten Cooper off his case. Cooper suggested the Judge could lecture Sirhan, but the Judge had done that and it appeared to have little effect.

  Cooper added something else.

  “Your Honor, please, there was something I omitted. He said that if we read those exhibits out loud, he would get up and plead guilty, but since they weren’t read out loud, he didn’t.”

  The judge didn’t want to make a decision on this. It was a no-win situation. Nearly anything that happened next could be grounds for a mistrial, and that was the last thing any of them wanted. “Give yourself some time to think about it with your conferees,” Judge Walker advised Cooper. Sirhan was a ticking time bomb and they all knew it.

  Sirhan’s control didn’t last much longer. After lunch on February 28, Sirhan had had enough, and asked to address the Judge “in chambers,” a request Judge Walker declined. But the jury was cleared from the room, and Sirhan spoke.

  “I at this time, sir, withdraw my original plea of not guilty and submit the plea of guilty as charged on all counts. I also request that my counsel disassociate themselves from this case completely.”

  “Do I understand—stand up,” the Judge admonished Sirhan. “Do I understand that you want to plead guilty to murder in the first degree?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “All right, and what do you want to do about the penalty?”

  “I will offer no defense whatsoever.”

  “The question is, what do you want to do about the penalty?”

  “I will ask to be executed, sir.”

  Many authors have misrepresented this as a “confession of guilt” from Sirhan. But this was clearly Sirhan’s attempt to control the proceedings. He had conceded his guilt from the start, because he had no memory that might clear him of involvement. Everyone said he did it, and he saw no evidence to the contrary, so he believed them. Sirhan wanted to end the trial. He didn’t want his mother to suffer. He didn’t want people saying he was crazy. He thought by pleading guilty he could end the proceedings and spare the girls the indignity of being questioned. But Sirhan didn’t have the power he thought he had.

  “Now, I know of nothing in the law that permits a defendant under any circumstances to enter a plea of guilty to murder of the first degree and ask for execution,” Judge Walker told him.

  “Well, I have, sir,” Sirhan responded.

  “Well, now, just a minute. Why do you want to do this?”

  “I believe, sir, that is my business, isn’t it?”

  “You just believe it is your business?”

  “That is my prerogative.”

  “No, it isn’t. Now, when we come to accepting a plea, you have to give me a reason.”

  Sirhan, drawing a line from the testimony about his childhood in Palestine to exaggerate how ridiculous he felt his defense was, responded, “I killed Robert Kennedy willfully, premeditatedly, with 20 years of malice aforethought: that is why.”

  Of course he hadn’t planned to kill Kennedy as a four-year-old. Even Judge Walker knew this claim was ludicrous. “Well, the evidence has to be produced here in court,” he told Sirhan.

  “I withdraw all evidence, sir.”

  “There is no such procedure.”

  “To hell with it!” Sirhan exploded in frustration.

  Judge Walker told Sirhan if he could not refrain from interrupting the proceedings he would be physically muzzled and strapped to his chair in front of the jury.

  Sirhan did not appear to understand and persisted. Kaiser noted that Sirhan appeared to be in some sort of dissociative state throughout this exchange.

  “I understand. However, sir, I intend to defend myself pro per. I don’t want to be represented by these counsel.”

  “You have trained counsel. Counsel is staying in the trial.”

  “What I have said, I don’t want anyone to have a trial shoved down my throat, sir, in any way you want. [sic]”

  Judge Walker asked Sirhan to describe the elements of a crime of murder and its defenses to prove to Sirhan he did not know enough to represent himself pro per.

  “I don’t know,” Sirhan conceded.

  “I find you incapable of representing yourself. Sit down and keep quiet, and if not, I intend to keep you quiet.”

  “No, sir. I still maintain my original point. I plead guilty to murder and ask to be executed.”

  “I thought I made it clear. The court will not accept the plea.”

  “I am sorry,” Sirhan said. “I will not accept it.”

  Sirhan begged the Judge to allow him to talk privately to him in chambers. Judge Walker refused. Cooper then asked if he and counsel could be dismissed: “None of us have any desire to continue representing a client who does not desire our services.”

  Cooper explained further that Sirhan seemed completely capable of understanding the communications from his defense team. “It is just that there is a very violent difference of opinion as to how the defense should be conducted,” Cooper continued. He explained how t
he defense had enlisted friends, family and Arabic-speaking individuals to attempt to influence Sirhan to accept their advice, to no avail.

  “Since the defendant does not desire us to represent him, we are perfectly willing, as a matter of fact, I might say anxious, to withdraw from the case and let him either represent himself or be represented by other counsel.”

  Perhaps suddenly realizing how that might sound to history, Cooper said “I want to hasten to add this: Neither one of us wants to desert him.

  “We are still willing, if your Honor please, to represent him as conscientiously as we know how. With that, I must leave it up to the court.”

  Judge Walker refused to allow them to withdraw. Walker added, “I think you have prepared a good defense, if not the only logical defense that could be presented.” Given that a clearly conscious decision had been made to avoid all facts that pointed to conspiracy, perhaps that was the only logical defense left.

  But if Sirhan’s defense team could be excused for ignoring evidence of conspiracy for fear that would further risk their client’s life, what excuse can we give the prosecution for not only failing to find and prosecute the guilty coconspirators, but provably conspiring to conceal that evidence from the future historical record? That’s what happened at a private meeting between the Judge, Fitts and Deputy Chief Robert Houghton of the LAPD five days before Walker made his final ruling on this case.

  On May 16, at 1:30 P.M., Fitts, Judge Walker and the LAPD’s Chief Houghton met with Emery Hatcher (Chief Deputy, County Clerk’s Office), Peter Talmachoff (Division Chief, Criminal Division, County Clerk’s Office) and Alice Nishikawa (Clerk for Department 107, where the trial had been held) in the Chambers of Assistant Presiding Judge Charles A. Loring. The goal of the meeting was bizarre. They met to decide which evidence should be kept from the public. If there was nothing to hide, why go to such lengths?

  Walker opened the proceedings. “First, perhaps we better take up the [autopsy] photographs.”

  “There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 130,” Fitts said. They weren’t entered into evidence but offered for identification only.

  “I am willing to seal those subject to order of court, and I think I can put it on some kind of ground,” Walker said. “I am going to look at it and find myself some ground to do it.”

  “I don’t think there is going to be too much demand to see these,” Fitts responded. “The only people that could do anything are going to be cranks in the first place.” “Cranks” was the word Fitts assigned to people who cared enough about history not to trust the victor alone with the telling of it. “Cranks” were those who invested their own time and money to conduct honest investigations into the evidence, without fear or favor. “Cranks” were those who were mentally courageous enough to follow evidence of conspiracy wherever it led.

  “Well, those are the people I am worried about,” Walker said.

  “Well, I sort of thought these people would be the cranks and they want to see them so they can start cranking.”

  “I will agree with that,” Houghton said.

  The Clerk pointed out that there were two groups of photos, “one consisting of 166 and the other 127 photos.”

  Houghton offered that “There was a set of photographs of the autopsy which Noguchi’s people took, and then there was about half a dozen, it seems to me, of photographs taken by the Los Angeles police officers over there at the Good Samaritan Hospital and you remember those. They were taken prior to any surgery or cutting on the wound, on the head wound, and I think they ought to be categorized in the same group.”

  Walker was also concerned that the photos were “extremely valuable” and he wanted to ensure they didn’t get in any way “mutilated.” He worried that if the photos had any damage, it could affect the case on appeal.

  Walker then turned to “our second problem. We have got these bullets, we have got the gun, and I have even had a request from some woman that got hit with one of those bullets [Elizabeth Evans]. She wanted it for a souvenir. I have already told her where she can get it.”

  “What I am trying to do,” Walker continued, “is to set up something like this, that the actual exhibits are not exhibited to these people in some manner, so they are not mutilated or lost or anything else, because it is easy for those exhibits to get lost in your office and everybody is in a mess. I understand that maybe you could have copies that the public could see.” Was Walker suggesting the public be allowed to see a gun that wasn’t Sirhan’s? Copies of bullets rather than actual bullets?

  “I was going to wait until you got through with those exhibits and then we can talk about this other,” Houghton said. “We have done a lot of investigating of cases which were not subject to testimony and I think you put in Owens [sic].” Houghton was concerned that the testimony of one strange Reverend Jerry Owen, nicknamed “The Walking Bible” because he claimed he could recite any and every passage from the Bible (a claim he was never able to actually demonstrate). Owen had injected himself into this case by telling the police after the assassination that he had picked up a hitchhiking Sirhan on June 3, 1968, the day before the primary election. For whatever reason, during the trial, although the prosecution and defense discussed Sirhan’s activities on June 2 and June 4, they both studiously avoided mention of June 3. According to Owen, Sirhan was accompanied by two others and wanted to buy a horse. The two others later approached Owen, paid him $100 and said bring the horse to the Ambassador Hotel and the rest of the money would be delivered. Owen went instead, he said, to Oxnard to preach that night, taking their money with him and not delivering a horse. (No witness placed Owen in Oxnard that night, and a church he said he was preaching at was closed at that time.) Houghton described the preacher Owen as “one self-seeking son-of-a-bitch.” Fitts mentioned that Owen may have had a “kick-back sheet” in the Criminal Investigation and Identification (CII) files, as did witnesses Enrique Rabago, who claimed Sirhan made a derogatory remark about Kennedy the night of the assassination, and Delgado, a name that does not appear in the LAPD’s cardfile of the people interviewed. Owen may have played a significant role in these events, as will be discussed in a later chapter.

  Walker allayed Houghton’s fears that Owen might be exposed. “It was not even put in for identification,” Walker clarified. Neither apparently knew that a journalist named Jonn Christian and a former FBI agent named Bill Turner were already hot on Owen’s trail.

  Houghton then talked of evidence of conspiracy. “There was the Cuban, Duarte, who you are not familiar with, but he got in and he even went on TV [to allege, apparently falsely, that Sirhan had attended a meeting of anti-Castro Cubans and accused Duarte of being with the CIA]; and Jerry Owens [sic], the self-styled preacher; John Fahey—and I think he got some publicity… and I think one or two others, and they might have Virginia Teresi [misspelled Teresa in the transcript].” Teresi had reported having seen Sirhan, or a lookalike, standing at the corner of Melrose and St. Andrew’s Place, less than two miles from the Ambassador Hotel, on June 3, the day before the primary, talking to three men in a car, one of which was wearing a holster with a gun. She also saw two rifles leaning against the back seat. But unlike the other witnesses to conspiracy, Teresi admitted right away, when confronted, that she had made the story up. She said she was worried the police wouldn’t look into evidence of conspiracy so she provided some herself.

  After a discussion about other evidence in the case, Walker returned to the question of making copies of documents available. Hatcher said “Our office could duplicate every single exhibit that could be duplicated and only those that could be duplicated.”

  “Well, that is all right with respect to physical exhibits like papers all things like that, but we have got the coat [that was cut off of Kennedy], we have the bullets, we have got expended shells, unexpended, and so forth, which are physical.”

  Judge Loring suggested putting those in “some kind of a plastic or cellophane container that can be seen through without
being able to touch them.”

  “There aren’t going to be many people who want to look at those bullets anyway. What can they do with it?” Fitts asked Judge Loring.

  “Could your office make copies of all of the other exhibits?” Walker asked Loring.

  When assured that was no problem, Walker made it clear this time he wasn’t just talking about copying documents. “How about the bullets, guns and other physical things?”

  “We could have them photographed, if you would like. We could arrange to have it done,” Hatcher told Walker.

  “Well, we don’t want any of the originals available except to attorneys of record,” Walker said, as if he knew there was something to hide.

  “Or upon order of court,” Loring responded. “If somebody comes in with a valid reason as to why they should see it, and they are responsible people, then we could order it.”

  Fitts, too, seemed nervous about what people might uncover if they had access to the exhibits. He suggested that “rather than having anybody willy-nilly walking in off the street and coming up and pestering the clerk, it would be nice somehow if they obtained a kind of clearance through the court. I know I am posing a sort of onerous burden,” Fitts added.

  Loring clearly didn’t understand there was anything to hide. “Well, as long as you are dealing only with copies such as photographs of the original documents, what risk is there? Why shouldn’t they see copies?”

  The clerk mentioned Dr. Pollack’s interview with Sirhan. There was no written copy of the interview—only a tape of it, and Pollack’s comments on the stand about it.

  “Anything not in evidence, I don’t see why we have to make it available,” Judge Walker said. They discussed protecting not Sirhan’s reputation or privacy, but Pollack’s. Fitts was also concerned someone might erase it: “If it ever got close enough to a magnet, we don’t even have the words.”

  Houghton had his own concerns. There were a large number of files. “We interviewed a lot of people and you never knew who they were going to talk to. I am sure some of it will leak out. The majority of it has not. Much of it has. Now, we think that nothing in this case should be withheld from the public.”