by Lisa Pease
If Sirhan had been in a trance before, during and after the shooting, that would explain the behavior that others witnessed. To most people, he seemed normal, but to a few who got close to him during or in the hours immediately following the shooting, something seemed terribly off.
Sergeant William Jordan, who saw Sirhan the most in the hours following the shooting, said: “I was impressed by Sirhan’s composure and relaxation. He appeared less upset to me than individuals arrested for a traffic violation.”593
Remember how Assistant District Attorney John Howard found it necessary to ask Sirhan if he knew where he was or that he had been booked? Sirhan had answered, “I don’t know.” When Howard asked Sirhan “Do you understand where you are?” Sirhan had responded strangely: “As long as you say it.” Sirhan then asked if he had been before a judge, and Howard told him he had not, yet. Was Sirhan programmed to respond a certain way until after he had been before a judge? How would one not know if he had been before a judge or not unless there was something seriously wrong with his mind at that point?
Remember too how Sirhan refused to reveal his identity but talked about many other subjects, as if he had been given a post-hypnotic instruction not to divulge his identity (perhaps until after he had seen the judge). Remember how Sirhan was unable to answer if he were married or not.
Sirhan showed abnormal strength in the pantry, which can also be a sign of a hypnotized state. Without the intervention of conscious thought, sometimes the body is capable of extraordinary acts. Remember how Sirhan could tell time, without a watch or any visible clock. All of those are signs one would expect to find in one in a hypnotic state.
In the pantry, during the struggle, several people commented on how unnatural Sirhan’s calm demeanor seemed relative to the shooting. George Plimpton, the famous writer (and, as we learned in later years, a CIA asset),594 was one of the men who tackled Sirhan. In his first interview after the shooting, he said that he couldn’t be certain of anything the shooter was wearing, but that he could “tell you all about his eyes,” which he described as “dark brown and enormously peaceful,” which seemed incongruous in the pandemonium in the pantry.595
Vince DiPierro thought Sirhan had a sickly smile. Other witnesses, like Yoshio Niwa, were disturbed that Sirhan was smiling during such a heinous event. Sirhan’s unnatural strength—being able to hold off about six men and keeping the gun from professional football player Rosey Grier as long as he did—was also an indicator of hypnosis. Under hypnosis people have demonstrated the ability to do things physically they would not be able to do under ordinary circumstances.
One of the tests to see whether someone is faking being hypnotized or not is to see if the pupils are dilated. People who are faking hypnosis can’t make their pupils dilate. But dilated pupils happen naturally under hypnosis. Remember that when Officer Placencia first reported on Sirhan’s condition, he had said “His pupils were real wide,” a statement he confirmed under oath during the trial.
Not long after Sirhan had seen the judge, in his new cell at the County Jail, Sirhan told Dr. Marcus Crahan that he felt a chill.596 He later experienced similar chills coming out of Dr. Bernard Diamond’s hypnosis. Had Sirhan been given some sort of post-hypnotic command to forget who he was until he was arraigned?
After talking to Sirhan the morning of his arrest, Sheriff Peter Pitchess said Sirhan was “a very unusual prisoner, a young man of apparently complete self-possession, totally unemotional.”597
One incident often cited as evidence that Sirhan was in a hypnotic trance was when Sirhan gazed unspeaking at a teletype machine. Mary Grohs told Robert Kaiser that Sirhan was:
Just staring. I’ll never forget his eyes. I asked him what he wanted. He didn’t answer. I asked him again. No answer. I said that if he wanted the latest figures on Senator Kennedy, he’d have to check the other machine. He still didn’t answer. He just kept staring.598
When Kaiser asked Grohs if she thought Sirhan was in a trance, she said, “Oh, no, he wasn’t under hypnosis,”599 which we just saw is a pointless observation as you cannot always tell. Kaiser hadn’t mentioned hypnosis. He wondered if Grohs had read something about Sirhan being hypnotized during the trial or if she’d been coached. Kaiser said Grohs offered that she thought maybe Sirhan didn’t speak English and that’s why he didn’t respond. Kaiser pointed out Sirhan spoke English just fine at the trial. When he asked again why she thought Sirhan didn’t answer, according to Kaiser, Grohs asked, “What was your name again? I want to talk to the police about you. They told me not to say anything about this.”600
At the trial, Sirhan had an explanation for his behavior, which matched my own experience of the first time I saw a teletype. He was in awe of a typewriter typing by itself. I had a similar experience the first time I saw one, so personally I found that explanation plausible. In addition, Sirhan truly seemed to have no memory of what he did in a hypnotic state, but he remembered the incident with Mary Grohs. So I’m not convinced that incident was evidence of a hypnotic state. But it’s interesting that the police were intent about keeping Mary Grohs silent about the incident.
In their attempt to save Sirhan’s life, the defense team argued Sirhan was a paranoid schizophrenic who fell into a self-induced trance due to the lights and mirrors in the Ambassador Hotel, a scenario Diamond described to the jury as “absurd, preposterous, unlikely and incredible.” How would you like to be defended from the death penalty by a team of lawyers who called their own explanation for your innocence “absurd, preposterous, unlikely and incredible”?
The medical and psychological professionals who examined Sirhan’s test results in a battery of psychological tests believed Sirhan had killed Senator Kennedy, so they were predisposed to find signs of a sick mind. Not one expert before the trial was given the results without being told they were Sirhan’s, which would have been the only way for someone to have made an unbiased determination. And despite the lengthy presentation of these experts, the jury remained unconvinced that Sirhan was mentally ill. When Sirhan’s Rorschach ink blot test results were given to a qualified professional decades later without the results being identified as Sirhan, the professional found no indication of mental illness.601
Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas was the head of the psychological testing program at San Quentin, where Sirhan was initially incarcerated. After spending time with Sirhan, he realized that Sirhan was not schizophrenic and suspected he might have been hypnotically programmed. But prison officials stepped in when they felt Dr. Simson-Kallas was “making a career out of Sirhan.” The interference prompted a frustrated Dr. Simson-Kallas to resign, saying “A medical doctor spends as much time with a patient as the disease demands. So does a psychologist.”602
Dr. Simson-Kallas was also not impressed with Sirhan’s defense team’s analysis, as Turner and Christian reported:
Simson displayed equal indignation when he talked about the testimony of Dr. Diamond and other psychiatrists at the Sirhan trial, which he labeled the “psychiatric blunder of the century.” He scoffed at Diamond’s self-induction theory, pointing out that it is utterly impossible for a person to place himself in such a deep trance that he suffers an amnesia block.603
Simson-Kallas reported that Sirhan was “easily influenced, had no real roots and was looking for a cause,” and that the Arab-Israeli conflict could have been used to manipulate him.604
Sirhan’s original defense team approached his defense backwards. They assumed Sirhan was guilty and tried to build an explanation for his guilt that would protect him from the death penalty. Had the defense dealt honestly with the ballistics evidence first, had they realized that not only was Sirhan too far away to have killed Kennedy, but that Sirhan’s gun fired none of the bullets recovered from victims in the pantry, necessitating the switching of several bullets, they could have presented an entirely different defense. And that’s the generous spin to put on the horrible defense Sirhan was given.
Because numerous studies have shown t
he brain is still recording during hypnosis, even when amnesia is present, Dr. Diamond hypnotized Sirhan for the defense team in a number of sessions to attempt to get him to recall what happened. The problem was that Diamond believed Sirhan had killed Kennedy, and all his questions had that as an assumption. As a result, Diamond’s work on Sirhan was designed to produce a specific result. He wasn’t interested in an open-ended investigation into what might have been in Sirhan’s mind during the period of the shooting. So Diamond very nearly induced a memory in Sirhan through his work. And Diamond, if he were still alive, would be hard-pressed to deny that, given that he wrote a paper for the California Law Review in 1980 that became widely cited in court cases that one can be made to say false things under hypnosis and that courts should bar witnesses who had been hypnotized:
I believe that once a potential witness has been hypnotized for the purposes of enhancing memory his recollections have been so contaminated that he is rendered effectively incompetent to testify. Hypnotized persons, being extremely suggestible, graft onto their memories fantasies or suggestions deliberately or unwittingly communicated by the hypnotist. After hypnosis the subject cannot differentiate between a true recollection and a fantasy or a suggested detail. Neither can any expert trier of fact. This risk is so great, in my view, that the use of hypnosis by police on a potential witness is tantamount to the destruction or fabrication of evidence.605
In a footnote to his landmark article, Diamond noted that he was not discussing anything related to the Sirhan case. But it’s hard not to listen to the tapes of Diamond and Sirhan and recognize that Diamond should have taken considerably more care with Sirhan.
Whether organically or at the direction of someone else, by 1968, Sirhan had developed a strong belief in the power of the mind. During the 1960s, stories appeared in magazines and newspapers about “psychokinesis,” a power to move an object solely with the mind, known colloquially as “mind over matter.” Sirhan tried, in his home and out in the world, to affect the actions of inanimate and animate objects.
Sirhan read in a publication from the Rosicrucians that “if you want something, write it down,” and you will get it. That became Sirhan’s explanation for the appearance of “R.F.K. must die” in his notebook. On the day he wrote that page, he said, he had just learned that Kennedy supported sending bombers to Israel, and that really made him mad. Sirhan claimed he had seen a program on TV about this, but no news or TV show has ever surfaced that could explain where Sirhan got that information on that particular day. Was that the real explanation? More likely, someone induced him to write that through a hypnotic suggestion, and Sirhan tried to explain it after the fact. After that day, though, Sirhan said, “I forgot it all. The idea of killing Kennedy never entered my mind, sir. I just wanted, sir, to stop him from sending planes to Israel,” Sirhan told his defense team.606
Sirhan didn’t understand why he would have focused so much attention on Kennedy in his notebook, rather than what he had always really wanted. Sirhan had always been interested in becoming rich. He’d never expressed an interest in becoming a political martyr until after the assassination, and then he only chose that when the alternative was to say he was crazy.
Sirhan had only questions as to how he happened to be at the hotel that night with a loaded gun:
“Why did I not go to the races that day? Why did I not like the horses? Why did I go to that range? Why did I save those Mini-Mags? Why did I not expend those bullets? Why did I go to Bob’s? Why did Mistri give me that newspaper? Why did I drink that night?” As Sirhan rattled this litany of deeds, he clenched his fists and planted his feet solidly on the floor as if protesting and resisting—what? “It was,” he said, “like some inner force. [Emphasis added.]”607
What Sirhan described sounded like a textbook case of hypnotic compulsion. While experts agree that about 20% of the population is highly hypnotizable, a subset of these people can be manipulated in unsettling ways. University of California at Berkeley Professor John F. Kihlstrom noted that “Among those individuals who are most highly hypnotizable, these alterations in consciousness are associated with subjective conviction bordering on delusion, and an experience of involuntariness bordering on compulsion.”608 And this compulsion doesn’t just persist in the hypnotic state. The compulsion happens even when the subject is awake, after having received a post-hypnotic command or trigger.
George Estabrooks, one of the preeminent authorities on hypnosis in the twentieth century, wrote in his 1947 book Spiritism about how difficult it is for subjects to resist post-hypnotic suggestions, even when the subject suspects the origin. Estabrooks described an experiment which demonstrated this effect:
One peculiar thing about these post-hypnotic suggestions is their compulsive force. One of our greatest modern authorities tried the following experiment. He suggested to a subject that after he awoke [from hypnosis] and on a given signal he would go to the window, cut a pack of cards which was placed there, select the ace of spades and give it to the hypnotist. He was then awakened and the signal was given.
Now, as it happened, the subject was a graduate student in psychology at one of our large universities and so was perfectly familiar with every phase of hypnotism. On the signal he started for the pack of cards and then suddenly stopped.
“You know,” he said, “I believe that’s a post-hypnotic suggestion.”
“What do you want to do?” asked the operator.
“I want to go to that pack of cards, select the ace of spades, and give it to you.”
“You are right. It is a post-hypnotic suggestion. What are you doing to do about it?”
“I’m not going to carry it out.”609
The hypnotist then bet the subject 50 cents he would not be able to resist the post-hypnotic suggestion. For the next two hours, the subject found himself wandering over to the deck, realizing what he was doing, and stopping himself. By the end of the afternoon, he found himself unable to concentrate on anything else. He went back to the deck, pulled out the ace of spades, and gave it to his hypnotist along with a dollar. “He could obtain no peace of mind,” Estabrooks said, “until he had obeyed the suggestion.”610 And this was someone who was fully aware that he had been hypnotized and recognized the source of his compulsion. How much more quickly would an unsuspecting subject have given in to the suggestion?
A disturbing phenomenon of hypnosis is how few people, unlike the trained psychological student in the example above, will be unable to attribute their compulsions and actions to the actual cause, because the conscious mind is unaware of suggestion made under hypnosis, as Estabrooks explained:
One of the most astounding things about the post-hypnotic suggestion is the subject’s conviction that he is acting of his own free will. For instance, I tell a subject that he will repeat the alphabet to me backwards on a given signal after awakening. Then I say to him, “Allen, why did you repeat the alphabet to me?
For a moment he is puzzled and then he replies, “Why, as a matter of fact I heard you say about a month ago to someone that the average person couldn’t do it backwards and I just wanted to show you I could.”611
There are numerous examples of this sort in the literature on hypnosis. Unaware of the true source of their behaviors, hypnotized subjects will invent explanations to justify those behaviors.
Sirhan demonstrated this behavior in front of his defense team. At one point, Dr. Bernard Diamond hypnotized Sirhan in his prison cell to demonstrate to his defense attorneys how suggestible Sirhan was. Diamond told the hypnotized Sirhan that when Diamond blew his nose with a large white handkerchief that Sirhan would climb the bars of this prison cell “like a monkey.” Diamond brought him out of hypnosis, but the suggestion had been successfully implanted. After a few minutes of discussion, Sirhan suddenly “started climbing the bars of his cell,” just as Diamond had suggested he would. Kaiser saw Diamond putting his handkerchief away and knew the signal had been given. Diamond then asked Sirhan what he was doing. Sirhan re
sponded that he was just getting some exercise. Kaiser said it was a plausible enough explanation out of context, but having just seen the suggestion implanted, it seemed undeniable that Sirhan was, in fact, acting out Diamond’s suggestion in a post-hypnotic state.
That’s why we can’t take any of Sirhan’s statements about why he did anything at home, at the range, or at the Ambassador Hotel or frankly anywhere in the last few months before the assassination, at face value. Maybe Sirhan really had been mesmerized in a normal sense upon seeing a teletype machine typing by itself. But maybe that was just Sirhan’s after-the-fact justification for trance behavior. Without more evidence, it’s hard to tell if an explanation is real or a false justification to explain away hypnotically induced behavior. Similarly, we have to wonder about all of Sirhan’s writings that have been used against him. Any one or many of them may have been written under hypnotic instruction and may not reflect anything within Sirhan’s original mind but something planted there by someone else.
The most inexcusable mistake reporters and authors have made has been quoting Sirhan’s so-called “courtroom confession” out of context as if it were a true expression of guilt. When Sirhan said in chambers with the Judge and his attorneys that he had killed Robert Kennedy “with 20 years malice aforethought,” that emotional outburst, which had no basis in reality, appeared to have been inspired by the appearance of two women at the trial, which threw Sirhan into a dissociative state. There were a number of references in Sirhan’s notebooks to Peggy Osterkamp, an attractive young blonde woman, and another woman named Gwendolyn Gumm. For some reason, Sirhan thought these two women had appeared in the courtroom, as Kaiser described:
