Word: sirhan
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Klaber, a free-lance journalist who designs and builds houses in upstate New York, claims that his program is "the audio equivalent of the Rodney King video." Skeptical listeners may reasonably consider Sirhan's brainwashing by a sex doc rather less plausible than the jury's conclusion that the defendant acted alone. Still, the tapes make a strong case that both the murder investigation by the Los Angeles police department and the subsequent trial were badly botched and left too many questions unanswered...
Take the coroner's autopsy. Dr. Thomas Noguchi testified that Kennedy had been killed by a bullet fired no more than three inches from the back of his head. Sirhan, according to many witnesses, was at least three feet in front of the Senator when he shot all eight bullets from his .22-cal. pistol. What's more, FBI investigators found evidence -- from tiles and door jambs destroyed by the L.A.P.D. shortly after the trial -- that 12 or 13 bullets had been fired in the pantry. According to a weapons expert for the L.A.P.D., DeWayne Wolfer, the bullets that killed...
Then there was the matter of "the girl in the polka-dot dress." Several people remembered seeing her with Sirhan and another man at the hotel before $ the shooting. The RFK Tapes speculates that she was Sirhan's "baby-sitter," or control. The L.A.P.D., while purportedly trying to find the woman, tried harder to browbeat witnesses into changing their stories...
None of this potentially exonerating detail was fully explored in court. In what proved to be an astounding strategic misjudgment, Sirhan's chief attorney, Grant Cooper, did not challenge the prosecution's "facts." The defense relied entirely on a theory of impaired judgment, which the jury had no trouble rejecting. Sirhan's death sentence was subsequently reduced to life imprisonment, which he is serving at California State Prison in Corcoran...
...Klaber, suspicions about the Sirhan verdict are based on fact, not fancy, and others who have followed the case and its aftermath concur. Retired L.A.P.D. sergeant Paul Schraga, the first cop on the scene after the shooting, is convinced that right-wing zealots in his department's elite intelligence unit were involved in the assassination. "Conspiracy?" he says. "You bet your bottom dollar there was a conspiracy." Several celebrities, including Norman Mailer and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., have petitioned a Los Angeles County grand jury to review the L.A.P.D.'s investigation of the younger Kennedy's killing. Alas, considering...