by Lisa Pease
268 Tony Rennell, “Was John Lennon’s murderer Mark Chapman a CIA hitman? Thirty years on, there’s an extraordinary new theory,” Daily Mail.com, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1335479/Was-John-Lennons-murderer-Mark-Chapman-CIA-hitman-Thirty-years-theres-extraordinary-new-theory.html. The article reviews the book John Lennon—Life, Times and Assassination, by Phil Strongman from The Bluecoat Press. Contrary to the article’s headline, Strongman’s theory was hardly new. Fenton Bresler had promoted the same theory 11 years earlier in his book “Who Killed John Lennon,” published by St. Martin’s Press. The scope of this book does not allow a serious discussion of the Lennon case, but there are substantial issues that are not adequately addressed by the official story.
269 Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1991), p. 80.
270 Statement of William Harper, taken in the Los Angeles County D.A.’s office, on June 10, 1971.
271 Dave Smith, “Sirhan Case—Was there a 2nd Gunman?” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1971.
272 See Rose “Lynn” Mangan’s self-published Sirhan Evidence Report, www.sirhansresearcher.com, for a copy of the relevant autopsy page (p. 17 of the full autopsy report on p. 311 in Mangan’s downloadable PDF—marked page 305 by Mangan).
273 LAPD interview of Officer C.C. Craig, September 24, 1968.
274 Court of Appeal, Second District, Division 3, California, Jamie Scott ENYART, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. CITY OF LOS ANGELES et al., Defendants and Appellants, No. B108348, Decided: November 29, 1999, caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1223691.html.
275 AP, “Robert Kennedy Assassination Photos Burned,” The New York Times, April 21, 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/04/21/us/robert-kennedy-assassination-photos-burned.html.
276 Ibid., p. 12.
277 Ibid., p. 3.
278 Blehr’s letter was reprinted in full in the Los Angeles Free Press, June 11, 1971.
279 Lynn Mangan, Sirhan Evidence Report, transcript from the Board of Inquiry, June 16, 1971.
280 Log of DeWayne Wolfer, LAPD. The entry, which can be viewed at www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99847#relPageId=313&tab=page, reads: “Chronograph tests on mini-mag ammunition — 2” Iver Johnson — California State College at Long Beach.”
281 Although Noguchi did not mention working with Wolfer on these tests in his own book, Wolfer indicated in his log that he conducted these tests with Thomas Noguchi (which Wolfer misspelled “Noguchii”).
282 “Dismissal of Suit Ordered,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1973.
283 Letter from Marshall Houts to Evelle Younger, June 26, 1971, found in Harold Weisberg’s archive in the “Blehr” folder.
284 Ibid.
285 Ibid.
286 Conversation with Fernando Faura, December 19, 2015.
287 Memo from Sgt. Dudley Varney to Lt. Charles Higbie re Charach, August 2, 1968. The LAPD did have a strong interest in Garrison’s case. One pantry witness, Richard Lubic, was encouraged to go on at length about what he had learned from a visit to Garrison in New Orleans. Garrison predicted that it would be found that Sirhan had fired “exploding” bullets, as those were rarely used by regular people but were used on John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Garrison predicted the pattern would hold with Robert Kennedy, and he was correct. For this and many other reasons, Garrison felt the same group had taken out all three leaders. For more information on Jim Garrison’s courageous struggle to bring the conspiracy in the JFK case to light, against impossible odds, see Jim DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1992, first edition, as the second edition represents an extensive rewrite that is less about Garrison and more about other aspects of the case) and Garrison’s own book On the Trail of the Assassins (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988). Oliver Stone’s film JFK is based largely on Garrison’s account in the latter.
At a conference on the RFK case at Duquesne University in 2008, Charach said from the stage that he had worked in intelligence. I went up to him later and asked him what intelligence service he had worked for. He looked at me and thought for a minute before saying, “I don’t think I should say.”
288 Varley Brogan, “Suppressed Evidence: Who Killed Bobby?” Los Angeles Free Press, July 3, 1970.
289 Ibid.
290 Taped interview of Donald Schulman, July 23, 1971, from the California State Archives.
291 LAPD interview summary of Don Schulman, August 9, 1968.
292 Predictably, the tape of O’Steen’s interview is no longer in the record, as I confirmed with the California State Archives. This begs the question of how many other witnesses saw evidence of conspiracy that was simply omitted from the interview summaries, which, along with only a few tapes, are all that remain from the LAPD’s extensive investigation. Only a few witnesses’ statements were transcribed in full. Most were summarized, making it impossible to know what was left out of the witnesses’ original statements. (If anyone reading this was a witness to any evidence of conspiracy in the pantry, to a girl in a polka dot dress, or to someone other than Sirhan firing, please contact the California State Archives to see if your witness report is in the record.)
293 Taped interview of Donald Schulman, October 24, 1975, California State Archives.
294 Taped interview of Donald Schulman, July 23, 1971, California State Archives.
295 Schulman made this point in both his 1971 and 1975 taped interviews.
296 David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 374.
297 The taped interview by the LAPD of Queen Rutledge, June 5, 1968, available from the California State Archives, as well as the FBI interview report of the reporter she apparently talked to, Bob Funk, dated June 24, 1968, puts the lie to the LAPD’s interview summary of a follow up interview of Queen E. Rutledge on August 15, 1968. The August LAPD interview report however does note that a picture existed of Rutledge on the table in the pantry. There does not appear to be any sinister motive for leaving her off the list. Rutledge saw nothing that indicated a conspiracy. Her omission appears to be the result of a simple error.
298 Said K. Aburish, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000), pp. 58–59. McHale’s brother, Don McHale, was a high-level CIA official, per Aburish. McHale was killed in the plane crash of Enrico Mattei, an Italian oil magnate who challenged the power of the “Seven Sisters” of the Standard Oil empire. Kaiser told me he had originally been scheduled to be on that flight, but that at the last moment he had been pulled from the assignment and the magazine sent McHale instead.
299 Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
300 Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
301 Thomas Fox, “Robert Blair Kaiser dies at 84 on Holy Thursday,” National Catholic Reporter, April 3, 2015.
302 A copy of the lawsuit was reprinted in the August 1970 issue of Computers and Automation. The section of the California Code cited was from the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act (Section 11120).
303 Computers and Automation, August 1970.
304 Turner and Christian, p. 165.
305 Turner and Christian, p. 165.
306 William Turner and Jonn Christian, “The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Is Bobby’s Killer Still Loose?” Hustler, January 1979. Turner and Christian wrote that the point of the charge of evidence tampering was to discredit not only the evidence but Christian as well. They note “Busch’s fall guy was to be Christian, who two years earlier had merely looked at Sirhan’s notebooks and other printed documents. The D.A.’s investigators confronted Christin with the exhibit-request slips, but Christian noticed that several exhibit numbers had been added in a different hand. He emphatically pronounced them a ‘crude forgery.’” In their book on the case, Turner and Christian made clear it was Bob Kaiser who had tried to implicate Christian in this evidence tampering, but the evide
nce against Christian had clearly been forged.
307 Bob Baker and Paul Lieberman, “Faulty Ballistics in Deputy’s Arrest: Eagerness to ‘Make’ Gun Cited in LAPD Lab Error,” Los Angeles Times, 5/22/89, via articles.latimes.com/1989-05-22/news/mn-411_1_firearms-lapd-lab-error-police-officers/2, accessed 6/6/14. I left out the seemingly obligatory phrase “even though the guilt of Sirhan Sirhan was never in doubt” at the end of this quote because it is an uninformed statement, as this volume amply attests.
308 Myrna Oliver, “LAPD Suspends Forensic Chemist: Aide Reprimanded, 6 Others Face Hearing Chief LAPD Chemist Suspended,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1980.
309 Lisa Pease, “Arthur Bremer and George Wallace—It’s Déjà Vu all over again,” Probe, May-June 1999.
310 Ibid.
311 That was how Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press secretary, tried to wave away initial reporting of the Watergate break-in. “The Watergate Story,” washingtonpost.com, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/timeline.html.
312 The Watergate committee devoted a portion of its time to investigate the CIA’s apparent role in Watergate, as several of the burglars were current and former CIA operatives. The other four investigations were the Rockefeller Commission (formally, the President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States), the Church Committee (formally, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence), the Pike Committee (the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence), and the HSCA (the House Select Committee on Assassinations). The last committee focused on who killed President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Allard Lowenstein tried mightily to get the committee to investigate the Robert Kennedy assassination as well, but that effort fell short.
313 LAPD interview of Paul Sharaga, September 26, 1968, SUS files. In a notarized statement obtained by Jim DiEugenio from Bill Turner’s files on the case, Sharaga stated that “The LAPD report on the reverse side is not based on any interview of me by any officials in the LAPD at any time. Further, it also contains false and deliberately misleading statements. It is obviously derived from a much longer report personally prepared by me in September of 1968, which disappeared from LAPD files later on under entirely suspicious circumstances.” Sharaga was clearly upset by the following statement in the report: “[Sharaga] believes that due to the noise and confusion at the time what was said was misinterpreted, and what was probably said was, ‘they shot him.’” As you saw in the passage to which this footnote is attached, that was not what Sharaga believed they had said. Like Serrano, Sharaga recalled the couple had heard the girl say “we shot him, we shot him.”
314 Phone interview of Gilman Kraft, supplied from Bill Turner’s files to Jim DiEugenio, who in turn gave it to me. The interviewer is not listed but was attached to a document signed by Floyd Nelson and Jonn Christian. Given Christian’s relationship to Bill Turner (they wrote a book together which was reissued in the wake of the film JFK), it appears this interview of Kraft was conducted by Christian. The date of the interview is October 9, 1992.
315 Jim DiEugenio gave me a “Sharaga” file from Bill Turner’s files that contained the Gilman Kraft interview.
316 Darnell Johnson’s death threat came from a note by the investigator who interviewed him on his July 24, 1968 SUS interview report, signed by Lt. Manny Pena. The writer tried to dismiss Darnell’s observation as being out of whack with other witnesses, but my own research shows Darnell’s information lines up neatly with that of several other witnesses, as you will see in a later chapter. The writer added this note: “He states that he has received threatening phone calls and that someone has tampered with his vehicle brakes which caused him almost to have an accident.”
317 LAPD notes of an interview with Jerry Owen, SUS Conspiracy Investigation Files, www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99850&relPageId=94.
318 Turner and Christian, p. 158.
319 Statement of Lynn D. Compton, May 13, 1974.
320 Allard Lowenstein, “The Murder of Robert Kennedy: Suppressed Evidence of More than One Assassin?” Saturday Review, February 19, 1977.
321 Lowenstein’s unpublished manuscript, pp. 12–13.
322 Allard Lowenstein, “The Murder of Robert Kennedy: Suppressed Evidence of More than One Assassin?” Saturday Review, February 19, 1977.
323 Ibid.
324 Ibid.
325 Ron Kessler, “Expert Discounts RFK 2d-Gun Theory,” The Washington Post, December 19, 1974.
326 Letter from Bill Harper to Harry Rosenfeld, December 31, 1974.
327 Emily Greenhouse, “Was Ron Kessler a CIA journalism asset?” Bloomberg, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-11/was-ron-kessler-a-cia-journalism-asset, December 11, 2014
328 Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
329 Lowenstein manuscript, p. 29.
330 Lowenstein manuscript, p. 29.
331 Larry DuBois and Laurence Gonzales, “The Puppet And The Puppetmasters Uncovering the Secret World of Nixon, Hughes and the CIA,” Playboy, September 1976.
332 Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), p. 144.
333 When I asked Dan for a copy of his remarks at Duquesne, Dan sent me an article he wrote which, at the time of this writing, had not been published, titled, “The View from the Trenches,” © 2013. The text quoted is from that article, which he provided to me by email.
334 Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), pp. 239, 375.
335 Phil Agee, CIA: The Pike Report (New York: Spokesman Books, 1977), p.26.
336 Gary Abrams, “For years, he had his mind on one thing: the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He spent almost every waking hour studying the case, and his apartment was a cross between an RFK shrine and archive. Then, last month, apparently despondent over his failure to reopen the case, Greg Stone killed himself. “The Obsession,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1991, articles.latimes.com/1991-02-17/news/vw-1850_1_jennifer-stone/2.
337 Ralph Blumenfeld, “The Death of RFK,” San Antonio Express, July 20, 1975.
338 Washington Post Service, “Architect says Dem break-in figure sought meeting hall data,” Arizona Republic, June 26, 1972.
339 Myrna Oliver, “Bugliosi Claims Conspiracy in Robert Kennedy Slaying,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1975.
340 Turner and Christian, p. 181.
341 Stanton O. Berg, untitled history of the AFTE, afte.org/uploads/documents/berg.pdf, accessed September 6, 2016.
342 Stanton O. Berg, untitled history of the AFTE, afte.org/uploads/documents/berg.pdf, accessed September 6, 2016.
343 Turner and Christian, p. 177.
344 Turner and Christian, p. 176.
345 FBI copy of the Kranz Report, Part 2 of 3, p. 13, vault.fbi.gov/Robert%20F%20Kennedy%20(Assassination)%20/Robert%20F%20Kennedy%20(Assassination)%20Part%202%20of%203/view, accessed September 11, 2016. The two experts unable to make the match were, perhaps predictably, the two chosen by Sirhan’s lawyers and Paul Schrade: Charles Morton and Ralph Turner. All five chosen by CBS and the government entities felt a match could be made.
346 Turner and Christian, p. 189.
347 “Confidential Addenda to the Lowenstein Inquiry,” SUS files, viewable at www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99861&relPageId=74&search=addenda, accessed August 25, 2016.
348 Squeaky Fromme attempted to kill President Ford in the California State Capitol of Sacramento on September 5, 1975. Sara Jane Moore shot at Ford on September 22, 1975, outside the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco.
349 Peter M. Shane, “The SLA: Revolutionary Irresponsibility,” The Harvard Crimson, May 29, 1974; Mae Brussell, “The SLA is the CIA,” The Realist, February 1974. See also Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA by Brad Schreiber (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).
350 Mangan, p. 30.
/>
351 FBI’s copy of the Kranz Report, Part 2 of 3, p. 3, vault.fbi.gov/Robert%20F%20Kennedy%20(Assassination)%20/ROBERT%20F%20Kennedy%20(Assassination)%20Part%202%20of%203/view, accessed September 11, 2016. There were multiple revisions to this report over a two-year period. This appears to be the final version.
352 Mangan, postscript in a letter from Sirhan’s attorney Luke McKissack to Sirhan, May 31, 1971.
353 Mangan, from Captain G. Campbell’s report of a phone call with Grant Cooper, June 8, 1971.
354 Robert Harris, “The Connally Bullet,” jfkhistory.com/bell/bellarticle/BellArticle.html, accessed September 16, 2016.
355 Roger M. Grace, “District Attorney Busch Dies, Supervisor Ward Calls Upon Acting D.A. to Resign—Or Else…,” Metropolitan News-Enterprise, www.metnews.com/articles/2008/perspectives122208.htm, accessed September 11, 2016. According to the article, Howard had recently been charged in a drunk driving incident that had originally been reported as a hit-and-run.
356 The Kranz Report, via the FBI at vault.fbi.gov/Robert%20F%20Kennedy%20%28Assassination%29%20/Robert%20F%20Kennedy%20%28Assassination%29%20Part%201%20of%203, accessed September 23, 2016.
357 The Kranz Report.
358 Lowenstein manuscript.
359 Allard Lowenstein, “The Murder of Robert Kennedy: Suppressed Evidence of More than One Assassin?” Saturday Review, February 19, 1977.
360 Allard Lowenstein, “The Murder of Robert Kennedy: Suppressed Evidence of More than One Assassin?” Saturday Review, February 19, 1977.
361 Joe Klein, “A Protégé’s Story,” New York Times, June 13, 1982.
362 Robert Vaughn, A Fortunate Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), p. 258.
TOO MANY HOLES
“Police officers framed innocent individuals by planting evidence and committing perjury to gain convictions. Nothing is more inimical to the rule of law than police officers, sworn to uphold the law, flouting it and using their authority to convict innocent people. Innocent men and women pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit and were convicted by juries because of the fabricated cases against them.”
