Post by Rob Caprio on Nov 3, 2018 22:17:42 GMT -5
All portions are ©️ Robert Caprio 2006-2025
i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/9e/d7/d49ed712560ea57543ccb3423fb82fb8.jpg
Sadly, the Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) assassination does not get the coverage or intense research the John F. Kennedy (JFK) case does, but to see the seeds of November 22, 1963, fully bloom one must look at the RFK and MLK assassinations to see the same forces at work.
For those not familiar with the RFK shooting it was done by a supposed "lone nut" by the name of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel. RFK had just won the California primary and had given his speech to enthused campaign workers and began to walk through the back pantry area surrounded by a throng of well-wishers and reporters. Then he was to go to another ballroom where more people were waiting. Just like the JFK case, the route was changed last minute (in JFK's case it may have been 3 days before, but the two turns were NOT included in the planning stages earlier on) by Bill Barry. It needs to be pointed out that Barry was an ex-FBI man, and he said too many people had figured out the route that was planned so they headed left instead of right through the pantry.
Recently I have heard that there might have been multiple women wearing, or about to wear, polka-dot dresses so it may not have mattered which direction RFK went as they were waiting everywhere. A bag with a polka-dot dress in it was found. For more details on this please see this article.
jfkconspiracyforum.freeforums.net/thread/1630/woman-polka-dot-dress-mystery
It was in the pantry area that the convicted assassin, Sirhan, opened fire at close range with a .22 caliber pistol. A number of people were hit and RFK fell to the floor with head and body wounds. Sirhan was immediately apprehended. RFK died the next day and Sirhan went on to be convicted as the sole assassin. Despite the conviction, a great deal of controversy remained. In an extraordinary feat of investigative journalism, researcher Theodore Charach compiled a large body of evidence indicating that a second hidden gunman, not Sirhan, had fired the shot which killed Kennedy.
Mr. Charach used his evidence to create an astonishing feature-length documentary film entitled The Second Gun. The movie enjoyed a short theatrical release in the 1970’s and has recently been made available on home videotape. Mr. Charach’s research was picked up by others and it eventually brought about the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors hearings into the assassination.
The RFK “second gun” case rests on a great deal of fascinating ballistics evidence and eyewitness testimony. For example, the Los Angeles County coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, performed an analysis of the gunpowder burns on RFK’s head and clothing. The burns revealed that the muzzle of the gun was not more than one to three inches from Kennedy’s head when it fired the fatal bullets; i.e., the muzzle was at point blank range.
For more on RFK's wounds, please see this article.
jfkconspiracyforum.freeforums.net/thread/1634/rfks-wounds
All eyewitnesses, however, reported that Sirhan’s weapon was never closer than twelve inches and that Sirhan was always in front of RFK; a significant difference as far as powder burns are concerned.
The Second Gun suggests that the fatal bullet may have been fired from the gun of a uniformed security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, who was holding RFK by the right arm when the shooting started. The guard admitted pulling out his gun during the melee but denied firing it. An eyewitness on the scene, Don Schulman, however, did testify to seeing the guard fire. He was also accurate about the number of shots (3) and the wounds RFK received (also 3) when no one else was accurate on this matter. There is no record that the police ever examined the guard’s pistol. In fact, Cesar refused to testify and was a devout Republican. He said in an interview that the "Kennedys were destroying the country by giving rights to minorities."*
[*Note: In 1971 testimony Cesar denied that he was a right-winger as Charach stated. He said that he was a Democrat, but that he did not vote for Democratic candidates. He had issues with both RFK and President John F. Kennedy (JFK) but said that he liked them personally.
He also said that he volunteered to testify but was not called during the trial.]
A bizarre diary reportedly written by Sirhan, and discovered in his apartment after the shooting, seems to lend weight to the conspiracy theory. In that diary, Sirhan wrote several times of the need for RFK to die in connection with Sirhan receiving large sums of money. One entry mentioned $100,000. The most interesting diary entry is that one in which Sirhan, who seemed to relish the thought of receiving large checks made payable to him, appears to repeat an instruction that he had never heard, a promise that he would receive money for RFK’s death, which needed to happen by June 5, 1968 — the date of the California primary.
Sirhan’s alleged diary contained the following words:
"Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June ‘68 Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of of."(Kaiser, Robert Blair, R. F. K. Must Die! (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970), p. 550.)
The Second Gun points out how different the writing was in the diary and this would not be possible IF it had been written by one person as claimed.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) considered the diary entries to be nothing more than the rantings of a mentally-deranged lone assassin. If that truly was Sirhan’s writing, his references to money would certainly provide an additional motive for him to take shots at RFK, whom he greatly disliked anyway. The question is: who offered Sirhan the apparent money and did Sirhan believe that he would still receive it if he is finally released from prison?
If a security guard fired the shot which killed RFK, it is possible that he did it accidentally? The guard may have drawn his gun from his holster in an effort to defend RFK without even realizing it. The police, however, never even considered this possibility despite the powerful evidence that Sirhan’s gun did not fire the fatal bullet. It is unlikely since RFK was shot FOUR times from behind with three hitting the body.
The LAPD was instead very one-minded in its “lone assassin” theory and, as pointed out by a Los Angeles Times article, badly mishandled some of the key physical evidence. The mishandled evidence included ceiling panels from the pantry area that may have contained bullet holes indicating the presence of a second gun. Incredibly, the panels were destroyed by the police. According to LAPD chief Daryl Gates, the destruction of the panels had been done routinely. Mr. Gates said that this did not constitute destruction of evidence because the panels had not been introduced as evidence at Sirhan’s trial. He added, however:
"... I just think that it [destroying the panels] was lack of judgment. It was a lack of common sense and inexcusable because the case had worldwide magnitude. More importantly, Sirhan had been convicted and his appeal was not even in prospect yet. Potential evidence should never be destroyed until the entire case has run out. What the hell were these things destroyed for? That borders on Catch 22 insanity. It was just like they were opening up the doors to total criticism and doubt. There’s no way it can be explained." (Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, Otis Chandler), March 1, 1976, part I, p. 14.)
Amazingly, even the alleged murder weapon, Sirhan's .22 revolver, was destroyed BEFORE the trial. What reasonable answer could be given for this? Wouldn't this nullify the State's case? I would think so, but it didn't. NO big deal. Nothing to see here.
Rumors again abounded of a possible Mafia and/or CIA involvement in the RFK shooting, but no coconspirators were ever arrested in the case.
The part I wanted to cover in this post was the absurd fashion in which they accounted for the bullets. In a few cases they make the Single Bullet Theory (SBT) sound sane. The main issue for the LAPD was the fact that Sirhan's pistol held only 8 shots at most, but when they looked at the crime scene, they found that there were more bullet holes than this to account for.
Further complications arose with the fact that you had five people wounded in addition to RFK, one twice and RFK four times. So if you take 4 and add 2 and then add 4 you have 10 bullets needed to account for the 10 wounds. Not possible for an eight shot gun to do this. So the SBT thought process was pulled out of cobwebs and updated. New and improved if you will.
The JFK case had one "magic bullet" but the RFK case would require many more. In Lisa Pease's article, "Sirhan and the RFK Assassination", she highlights these magic bullets for us, and if the topic wasn't so somber it would be hilarious (okay, it is pretty funny anyway). She uses the term "Great Waldo Pepper" bullets in honor of the old barnstormer who could move up, down, and sideways so easily.
First up is Paul Schrade, and he has been very vocal about re-opening this case. Author Lisa Pease has written, "One of the bullets that hit RFK did not penetrate him but instead went through his jacket cleanly. The bullet that pierced RFK's coat without entering him took a path of roughly 80 degrees upwards. The bullet was moving upwards in a back to front path (as were all of RFK's wound paths). But the LAPD figures this must be the bullet that hit Paul Schrade. Had Schrade been facing RFK, he would still not be tall enough to receive a bullet near the top of his head from that angle. But he was not standing in front of RFK. He was behind him by all eyewitness accounts, and as shown by the relative positions where the two fell after being hit.
For Sirhan alone to have made all the shots, we are asked to believe that one of the bullets that entered RFK's coat just below the armpit exited up and out of the coat just below the seam on top of his shoulders, and then pulled a U-turn in midair to hit Schrade in the head. Schrade has been one of the most persistent in calling for a new investigation of this case for precisely this reason. He knows the report is incorrect, and if it's incorrect, there had to be at least one more gun firing in the pantry."
Pretty bad, huh? A bullet that does U-turn tricks. A new and improved "Magic Bullet" indeed. Ira Goldstein was hit twice and Pease describes his wounds, "Ira Goldstein had been shot twice, although one shot merely entered and exited his pant leg without entering his body.
He was less fortunate on a separate shot, which entered his left rear buttock. But since there were no bullets to spare, according to the LAPD's strict adherence to the eight-bullet scenario, the pant-leg bullet was made to do double duty. According to the LAPD, after passing through his pants, the bullet struck the cement floor and ricocheted up into Erwin Stroll's left leg. The only bullet that seemed to take a plausible path was the one that hit Weisel in the left abdomen."
The ceiling tiles had a bunch of holes, too many to account for based on a eight-shot scenario. They had to get real creative, and they did. "Elizabeth Evans had bent over to retrieve a shoe she had momentarily lost. Suddenly she felt something had hit her forehead.
Medical reports confirm that the bullet entered her forehead below the hairline and traveled "upward", fitting the scenario she remembers.
But because the LAPD needed to account for some of the bullet holes in the ceiling, they decided that a bullet from Sirhan's gun had been fired at the ceiling, entered a ceiling tile, bounced off something beyond the ceiling tile, reentered the room through a different ceiling tile, and struck Evans in the forehead. This bullet must have pulled more of a hairpin turn then a U-turn, if the LAPD's version and the medical reports are to be merged." Not your father's SBT, huh?
But we are not done as there was still one hole in the ceiling to account for, or at least one. We don't know how many holes there were in total because the tiles were destroyed. Sound familiar? It was admitted at the trial that only 6 of the 8 rounds in Sirhan's gun were fired, but at least 12 rounds were fired. Where did the other rounds come from since Sirhan could NOT have fired them all?
The bullet taken from RFK's head could NOT be matched to Sirhan's gun either as it was too mangled. This was the kill shot and it could not be matched to the alleged murder weapon (where have we seen this before?) and in any legitimate court case this would have exonerated Sirhan all by itself of murder, but not in this case. Why? Sure, he could have been tried for discharging a firearm in a building and possibly attempted murder as he wounded others, but it would have be shown that he tried to kill those individuals. Otherwise, he could have been charged with manslaughter.
Here we go, "One of the bullets that entered Kennedy passed straight through on a near vertical path, parallel to the one that entered the coat, but not the body, of Kennedy (the one that supposedly terminated its path in Schrade's head). This bullet supposedly passed through Kennedy and continued on upwards into the ceiling. Since Kennedy was facing Sirhan, and the bullet entered back to front, that would aim the bullet into the ceiling nearly directly above Sirhan's head, according to witness placements of Kennedy and Sirhan. And indeed, there was a tile removed from that very spot. But Sirhan's arm is not the many feet long it would have taken to reach around Kennedy to shoot him from behind, while standing several feet in front of the Senator."
To me, the key to solving the JFK case lies in learning everything we can about the Martin Luther King (MLK) and RFK cases, as the same pattern that was developed on November 22, 1963, was used in these two cases, and who knows how many smaller, lower profile assassinations. They are linked, not independent acts of "lone nuts."
i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/9e/d7/d49ed712560ea57543ccb3423fb82fb8.jpg
Sadly, the Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) assassination does not get the coverage or intense research the John F. Kennedy (JFK) case does, but to see the seeds of November 22, 1963, fully bloom one must look at the RFK and MLK assassinations to see the same forces at work.
For those not familiar with the RFK shooting it was done by a supposed "lone nut" by the name of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel. RFK had just won the California primary and had given his speech to enthused campaign workers and began to walk through the back pantry area surrounded by a throng of well-wishers and reporters. Then he was to go to another ballroom where more people were waiting. Just like the JFK case, the route was changed last minute (in JFK's case it may have been 3 days before, but the two turns were NOT included in the planning stages earlier on) by Bill Barry. It needs to be pointed out that Barry was an ex-FBI man, and he said too many people had figured out the route that was planned so they headed left instead of right through the pantry.
Recently I have heard that there might have been multiple women wearing, or about to wear, polka-dot dresses so it may not have mattered which direction RFK went as they were waiting everywhere. A bag with a polka-dot dress in it was found. For more details on this please see this article.
jfkconspiracyforum.freeforums.net/thread/1630/woman-polka-dot-dress-mystery
It was in the pantry area that the convicted assassin, Sirhan, opened fire at close range with a .22 caliber pistol. A number of people were hit and RFK fell to the floor with head and body wounds. Sirhan was immediately apprehended. RFK died the next day and Sirhan went on to be convicted as the sole assassin. Despite the conviction, a great deal of controversy remained. In an extraordinary feat of investigative journalism, researcher Theodore Charach compiled a large body of evidence indicating that a second hidden gunman, not Sirhan, had fired the shot which killed Kennedy.
Mr. Charach used his evidence to create an astonishing feature-length documentary film entitled The Second Gun. The movie enjoyed a short theatrical release in the 1970’s and has recently been made available on home videotape. Mr. Charach’s research was picked up by others and it eventually brought about the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors hearings into the assassination.
The RFK “second gun” case rests on a great deal of fascinating ballistics evidence and eyewitness testimony. For example, the Los Angeles County coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, performed an analysis of the gunpowder burns on RFK’s head and clothing. The burns revealed that the muzzle of the gun was not more than one to three inches from Kennedy’s head when it fired the fatal bullets; i.e., the muzzle was at point blank range.
For more on RFK's wounds, please see this article.
jfkconspiracyforum.freeforums.net/thread/1634/rfks-wounds
All eyewitnesses, however, reported that Sirhan’s weapon was never closer than twelve inches and that Sirhan was always in front of RFK; a significant difference as far as powder burns are concerned.
The Second Gun suggests that the fatal bullet may have been fired from the gun of a uniformed security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, who was holding RFK by the right arm when the shooting started. The guard admitted pulling out his gun during the melee but denied firing it. An eyewitness on the scene, Don Schulman, however, did testify to seeing the guard fire. He was also accurate about the number of shots (3) and the wounds RFK received (also 3) when no one else was accurate on this matter. There is no record that the police ever examined the guard’s pistol. In fact, Cesar refused to testify and was a devout Republican. He said in an interview that the "Kennedys were destroying the country by giving rights to minorities."*
[*Note: In 1971 testimony Cesar denied that he was a right-winger as Charach stated. He said that he was a Democrat, but that he did not vote for Democratic candidates. He had issues with both RFK and President John F. Kennedy (JFK) but said that he liked them personally.
He also said that he volunteered to testify but was not called during the trial.]
A bizarre diary reportedly written by Sirhan, and discovered in his apartment after the shooting, seems to lend weight to the conspiracy theory. In that diary, Sirhan wrote several times of the need for RFK to die in connection with Sirhan receiving large sums of money. One entry mentioned $100,000. The most interesting diary entry is that one in which Sirhan, who seemed to relish the thought of receiving large checks made payable to him, appears to repeat an instruction that he had never heard, a promise that he would receive money for RFK’s death, which needed to happen by June 5, 1968 — the date of the California primary.
Sirhan’s alleged diary contained the following words:
"Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June ‘68 Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of of."(Kaiser, Robert Blair, R. F. K. Must Die! (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970), p. 550.)
The Second Gun points out how different the writing was in the diary and this would not be possible IF it had been written by one person as claimed.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) considered the diary entries to be nothing more than the rantings of a mentally-deranged lone assassin. If that truly was Sirhan’s writing, his references to money would certainly provide an additional motive for him to take shots at RFK, whom he greatly disliked anyway. The question is: who offered Sirhan the apparent money and did Sirhan believe that he would still receive it if he is finally released from prison?
If a security guard fired the shot which killed RFK, it is possible that he did it accidentally? The guard may have drawn his gun from his holster in an effort to defend RFK without even realizing it. The police, however, never even considered this possibility despite the powerful evidence that Sirhan’s gun did not fire the fatal bullet. It is unlikely since RFK was shot FOUR times from behind with three hitting the body.
The LAPD was instead very one-minded in its “lone assassin” theory and, as pointed out by a Los Angeles Times article, badly mishandled some of the key physical evidence. The mishandled evidence included ceiling panels from the pantry area that may have contained bullet holes indicating the presence of a second gun. Incredibly, the panels were destroyed by the police. According to LAPD chief Daryl Gates, the destruction of the panels had been done routinely. Mr. Gates said that this did not constitute destruction of evidence because the panels had not been introduced as evidence at Sirhan’s trial. He added, however:
"... I just think that it [destroying the panels] was lack of judgment. It was a lack of common sense and inexcusable because the case had worldwide magnitude. More importantly, Sirhan had been convicted and his appeal was not even in prospect yet. Potential evidence should never be destroyed until the entire case has run out. What the hell were these things destroyed for? That borders on Catch 22 insanity. It was just like they were opening up the doors to total criticism and doubt. There’s no way it can be explained." (Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, Otis Chandler), March 1, 1976, part I, p. 14.)
Amazingly, even the alleged murder weapon, Sirhan's .22 revolver, was destroyed BEFORE the trial. What reasonable answer could be given for this? Wouldn't this nullify the State's case? I would think so, but it didn't. NO big deal. Nothing to see here.
Rumors again abounded of a possible Mafia and/or CIA involvement in the RFK shooting, but no coconspirators were ever arrested in the case.
The part I wanted to cover in this post was the absurd fashion in which they accounted for the bullets. In a few cases they make the Single Bullet Theory (SBT) sound sane. The main issue for the LAPD was the fact that Sirhan's pistol held only 8 shots at most, but when they looked at the crime scene, they found that there were more bullet holes than this to account for.
Further complications arose with the fact that you had five people wounded in addition to RFK, one twice and RFK four times. So if you take 4 and add 2 and then add 4 you have 10 bullets needed to account for the 10 wounds. Not possible for an eight shot gun to do this. So the SBT thought process was pulled out of cobwebs and updated. New and improved if you will.
The JFK case had one "magic bullet" but the RFK case would require many more. In Lisa Pease's article, "Sirhan and the RFK Assassination", she highlights these magic bullets for us, and if the topic wasn't so somber it would be hilarious (okay, it is pretty funny anyway). She uses the term "Great Waldo Pepper" bullets in honor of the old barnstormer who could move up, down, and sideways so easily.
First up is Paul Schrade, and he has been very vocal about re-opening this case. Author Lisa Pease has written, "One of the bullets that hit RFK did not penetrate him but instead went through his jacket cleanly. The bullet that pierced RFK's coat without entering him took a path of roughly 80 degrees upwards. The bullet was moving upwards in a back to front path (as were all of RFK's wound paths). But the LAPD figures this must be the bullet that hit Paul Schrade. Had Schrade been facing RFK, he would still not be tall enough to receive a bullet near the top of his head from that angle. But he was not standing in front of RFK. He was behind him by all eyewitness accounts, and as shown by the relative positions where the two fell after being hit.
For Sirhan alone to have made all the shots, we are asked to believe that one of the bullets that entered RFK's coat just below the armpit exited up and out of the coat just below the seam on top of his shoulders, and then pulled a U-turn in midair to hit Schrade in the head. Schrade has been one of the most persistent in calling for a new investigation of this case for precisely this reason. He knows the report is incorrect, and if it's incorrect, there had to be at least one more gun firing in the pantry."
Pretty bad, huh? A bullet that does U-turn tricks. A new and improved "Magic Bullet" indeed. Ira Goldstein was hit twice and Pease describes his wounds, "Ira Goldstein had been shot twice, although one shot merely entered and exited his pant leg without entering his body.
He was less fortunate on a separate shot, which entered his left rear buttock. But since there were no bullets to spare, according to the LAPD's strict adherence to the eight-bullet scenario, the pant-leg bullet was made to do double duty. According to the LAPD, after passing through his pants, the bullet struck the cement floor and ricocheted up into Erwin Stroll's left leg. The only bullet that seemed to take a plausible path was the one that hit Weisel in the left abdomen."
The ceiling tiles had a bunch of holes, too many to account for based on a eight-shot scenario. They had to get real creative, and they did. "Elizabeth Evans had bent over to retrieve a shoe she had momentarily lost. Suddenly she felt something had hit her forehead.
Medical reports confirm that the bullet entered her forehead below the hairline and traveled "upward", fitting the scenario she remembers.
But because the LAPD needed to account for some of the bullet holes in the ceiling, they decided that a bullet from Sirhan's gun had been fired at the ceiling, entered a ceiling tile, bounced off something beyond the ceiling tile, reentered the room through a different ceiling tile, and struck Evans in the forehead. This bullet must have pulled more of a hairpin turn then a U-turn, if the LAPD's version and the medical reports are to be merged." Not your father's SBT, huh?
But we are not done as there was still one hole in the ceiling to account for, or at least one. We don't know how many holes there were in total because the tiles were destroyed. Sound familiar? It was admitted at the trial that only 6 of the 8 rounds in Sirhan's gun were fired, but at least 12 rounds were fired. Where did the other rounds come from since Sirhan could NOT have fired them all?
The bullet taken from RFK's head could NOT be matched to Sirhan's gun either as it was too mangled. This was the kill shot and it could not be matched to the alleged murder weapon (where have we seen this before?) and in any legitimate court case this would have exonerated Sirhan all by itself of murder, but not in this case. Why? Sure, he could have been tried for discharging a firearm in a building and possibly attempted murder as he wounded others, but it would have be shown that he tried to kill those individuals. Otherwise, he could have been charged with manslaughter.
Here we go, "One of the bullets that entered Kennedy passed straight through on a near vertical path, parallel to the one that entered the coat, but not the body, of Kennedy (the one that supposedly terminated its path in Schrade's head). This bullet supposedly passed through Kennedy and continued on upwards into the ceiling. Since Kennedy was facing Sirhan, and the bullet entered back to front, that would aim the bullet into the ceiling nearly directly above Sirhan's head, according to witness placements of Kennedy and Sirhan. And indeed, there was a tile removed from that very spot. But Sirhan's arm is not the many feet long it would have taken to reach around Kennedy to shoot him from behind, while standing several feet in front of the Senator."
To me, the key to solving the JFK case lies in learning everything we can about the Martin Luther King (MLK) and RFK cases, as the same pattern that was developed on November 22, 1963, was used in these two cases, and who knows how many smaller, lower profile assassinations. They are linked, not independent acts of "lone nuts."