The RFK Conspiracy, Part 4

Was Sirhan a Manchurian Candidate?

Grant Cooper, Sirhan’s lead lawyer, was rather solicitous to the prosecution and-- to put it mildly--a rather less than zealous defense counsel. For example, the defense did not get the autopsy report until the trial had already commenced. Can one imagine starting a murder trial without the pathologist’s report in hand? (James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 573). As we have seen, Grant Cooper also agreed to stipulate to most of the evidence, including ballistics and Sirhan’s notebooks, the latter which were likely illegally seized. (ibid, p. 577) Cooper had DeWayne Wolfer on the stand in front of him. This should have been a long and devastating cross examination. Here is how it began:

Q: Office Wolfer, let me ask you, what time are you leaving?

A: When we get through. Then I will go over and make my reservations for the first flight I can get on.

Q: We won’t keep you. (ibid, p. 624)

But that was not enough of an accommodation for Cooper. He essentially wanted to give away the store. Consider this patty cake with Wolfer:

Q: Let me ask you this. With your experience in firearms…a weapon like this can cause death, and it did cause death, is that true?

A: Yes.

Q: And it can cause death from one inch, two inches, three inches, six inches, one foot, three feet, six feet….It could cause death if it were the in the right place.

A. Yes.

When coroner Thomas Noguchi was on the stand, Cooper feigned little interest. He stated,

Is all this detail necessary? This witness can certainly testify to the cause of death, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go into the details. I think he can express an opinion that death was due to a gunshot wound. (Monika Wiesak, Echoes of a Lost America, p. 183)

One wonders: did Cooper ever read the autopsy report?

But even that was not enough. Cooper’s defense had their hypnosis expert, Dr. Bernard Diamond, try to say that no one had hypnotized Sirhan for the crime, but he had hypnotized himself. (DiEugenio and Pease,p. 579) Then what was the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress doing there; pouring coffee with him, then standing right next to Sirhan before the shooting, and running off after the shooting?

This rather startling incompetence, revealing an almost spectacular lack of familiarity with the facts of the case, have caused some observers to look elsewhere for the causes of Cooper’s utterly failed performance.

Cooper was a rather high paid attorney in the Los Angeles area, who had no prior known record of being a man who took on lost causes or did much pro bono work. He did both in this case. But he wanted to delay his entry since he had another legal matter before him. Cooper was involved in the famous Friars Club Case. He was defending an associate of Johnny Roselli. Roselli found out that the club was fixing high stakes card games, and he wanted part of the action. The cheating was discovered and the participants were indicted, including Roselli. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 575) The defense team bribed the court reporter to get grand jury testimony to its attorneys.

During the trial, Cooper was discovered with grand jury pages on his desk. That is illegal and Cooper knew it and later admitted he lied about it. (NY Times, 1/11/69, story by Douglas Kneeland) He could have been indicted and this would have led to his disbarment. But disciplinary action was delayed until after the Sirhan trial. At that time U. S. Attorney Matt Byrne, who was overseeing an inter-agency task force on the Sirhan trial, made no recommendation for sentencing for Cooper. He was eventually allowed to plead guilty to two counts of contempt, and his penalty was a thousand dollar fine. In other words, he got a slap on the wrist. As many observers have speculated: was this gift a quid pro quo for his abysmal performance in the Sirhan trial? (See Lawrence Teeter’s, online essay, Sirhan Sirhan: A True Manchurian Candidate)

Another indication that Sirhan’s defense might have been rigged is this: it appears that their hesitation to use Sandy Serrano as a witness was due to Michael McCowan. Who was one of their own investigators. There have been many writers who have expressed reservations about McCowan. (DiEugenio and Pease, pp. 629-31). But the point is that there was independent corroboration for Serrano. This was through Sgt. Paul Sharaga. He encountered an elderly couple who said they overheard just what Serrano heard. A young woman in a polka dot dress accompanied by a man ran past them near the rear stairs, and she blurted out “We shot him! We shot him!” Someone asked, ‘Who did you shoot?” The girl replied “Senator Kennedy.” (Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, p. 99).

Sharaga took the names and addresses of the witnesses and put out an APB. He was then asked to cancel the bulletin. He refused. The message came across, ”…they only have one man and don’t want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy.” (ibid) The APB was cancelled anyway. A year later, Sharaga left the LAPD. (Melanson, p. 100). A department summary credits him with the APB and states that he handed the names and addresses of his witnesses to the Rampart detectives. For the record, Sharaga said he did not see the Serrano broadcast, never heard her story until much later, and was never involved in the Special Unit Senator inquiry. (Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, p. 223)

Were there others who were discernible suspects in the RFK assassination?

Michael Wayne was a 21 year old who worked at the Pickwick Bookstore on Sunset Boulevard. That night he had gained entry to the pantry by somehow getting a press pass. He found out where Kennedy was staying and asked him for an autograph on his way down the stairs. He then followed him down to the Embassy Room where RFK made his speech. Spotted waiting in the kitchen, he was asked to leave, then returned shortly before the shooting. All of this was suspicious in itself and the proposed first question for Wayne was: ”Did you have prior knowledge that there might be an attempt on Senator Kennedy’s life?” Yet, that question does not appear on the official list. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 597)

When the shots were fired, Wayne was one of the few who hightailed it out of the east end of the pantry and then cut through the Embassy Room. Witness William Singer described him as pushing his way through the crowd, saying, “Pardon me please.” Wayne had a rolled up placard in his hand and Singer thought he saw something black inside. Two men chasing him shouted out “Stop that man!” (ibid)

Gregory Ross Clayton also reported this apparent escape attempt to the LAPD. Clayton tackled the man and held him while a hotel security guard handcuffed him and escorted him out. (ibid, p. 598) Wayne was screaming, “Let me go! Gotta get out of here! Let me go!” Clayton remembered seeing the man with a girl in a polka dot dress earlier and another man who might have been Sirhan. (Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File, p. 153) There was a difference of opinion as to what the black object inside the rolled up placard was. But witness Jospeh Klein said as he pursued Wayne, “My God, he had a gun and we let him get by.” (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 598)

What made Wayne even more interesting was this. At the time he was apprehended, he was in the possession of the business card of Keith Gilbert. Gilbert was a rightwing extremist Minuteman who was a racist, dealt in illegal firearms and was involved before in a plot to kill Martin Luther King. (The Seattle Times, May 4, 2007, story by Christine Clarridge) Wayne denied knowledge of the Minuteman and failed to recall having his card. There was a problem with that. When the police checked Gilbert’s file it contained Michael Wayne’s business card. (DiEugenio and Pease, p.599)

Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar was right behind and to the right of the senator as he was moving through the pantry. In other words, he was in perfect position to be the assassin. But beyond that, there have always been questions about Cesar and his honesty. For instance, he said that he had worked for Ace Guards Services for about six months prior to the RFK murder and worked the Ambassador several times prior. When investigator Betsy Langman went to the company and had someone look up the records, it turned out that he was hired in May of 1968 and his first assignment was in the last week of that month. (Melanson, p. 85)

Cesar was asked by the LAPD if he owned a .22 handgun--the caliber of Sirhan’s--the night of the assassination. He said he used to own such a handgun but had sold it to Jim Yoder before the RFK murder. LAPD gave Cesar the benefit of the doubt by not checking with Mr. Yoder at that time. It turned out that, to be kind, Cesar was wrong about this important issue also. When the police finally did track down Yoder, he had maintained a receipt for the transaction. Cesar had sold the gun to him on September 6, 1968, three months later. (Melanson, p. 83)

These are important points. Because the first would suggest that Cesar might have sought the position to be there the night of the primary. The second would indicate that he had a gun that was similar to that of the accused assassin and could have been shooting from the opposite direction. Which is the direction the projectiles entered Kennedy’s body. Finally, one should note the rather disturbing irony that DeWayne Wolfer eventually became president of Ace under its newer name Ace Security Services. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 606)

Lisa Pease makes a good case in her book A Lie Too Big to Fail that Sirhan had been hypnoprogrammed to do what he did that night. For instance, defense expert Dr. Bernard Diamond once noted that:

Let me specifically state that it was immediately apparent that Sirhan had been programmed….His response to hypnosis was very different…strange, in many respects. And he showed this phenomenon of automatic writing, which is something that can be done only when one is pretty well trained.(Melanson, p. 167)

In other words: someone had previously hypnotized Sirhan. And make no mistake, Sirhan was an easy subject to hypnotize. Dr. Daniel Brown, who hypnotized him for attorney Wiliam Pepper, once said the problem he had with Sirhan was getting him out of the trance state. Brown wrote that, “While in this altered personality state Mr. Sirhan shows both a loss of executive control and complete amnesia.” (Pease, p. 416) He continued by writing that Sirhan was one of the most susceptible people he had ever met. Considering the fact that Brown had hypnotized over 6000 subjects over a 40 year career, that was a considerable distinction.

As many authors have indicated, including Pease, Sirhan showed a symptom of being programmed called “blocking”. This trait entails a pause before replying to a question. The pause demonstrates a conflict between what the subject wants to say and what a hypnotic command had ordered them to say. With Sirhan they would last between 3-5 seconds. (Pease, p. 418)

After studying the record and spending 60 hours with Sirhan, Brown concluded that Dr. Diamond was unduly suggestive with his subject. That instead of drawing out a submerged memory, he was attempting to fill in the gaps for the day and evening of the crime. As Brown wrote, “Such interviewing methods would not meet any current standard of non-suggestive interviewing.” (Pease, p. 420). Brown concluded that the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress was instrumental in leading Sirhan to the pantry and he was cued by her into what Brown called “range mode”, that is he was firing at a target range’s circle targets. Which this author thinks was the reason she wore that particular dress. (Pease, p. 421) As Pease noted in her book, hypnotist Darren Brown did a similar demonstration for British TV--using a girl in a polka dot dress as a cue --where the programmed shooter was firing blanks. (Pease, p. 413)

The man most often named as the probable programmer was and is Dr. William J. Bryan. Bryan was a sexaholic who bragged to a couple of call girls that he had hypnotized Sirhan. On the night of the shooting, he went on a talk radio program and said that the crime showed signs of the assassin being a Manchurian Candidate. (Pease, p. 443). There is also evidence that the LAPD knew of this Bryan connection and deliberately erased it from an interview transcript.

In addition to the defense expert, the prosecution’s, Dr. Seymour Pollack, was even more suggestive than Diamond. He should not have been allowed to interview Sirhan, but somehow he did for hours--at times with Diamond. (Melanson, p. 151; Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? pp. 241-42) Pollack was allowed to try and make the trial into political theater; with Sirhan representing the Arab plight, all the displaced Arabs and how American policy helped cause that plight. (Melanson p. 152).

As Philip Melanson pointed out there is no mention of any jets or bombers to Israel in Sirhan’s notebooks. There are also no references to Zionism, to Israel or Palestine. There are only six references to anything Arab, and four are to Egypt’s Nasser-- but even those fail to link to Israel or a military conflict. Sirhan did not remember writing the notebooks, or when he wrote “Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968”. Which was the date of the 1967 outbreak of war in the Middle East. (Melanson, p. 156)

So how did the sale of jets to Israel surface as a motive for the shooting? At his trial he was asked to explain the above quote. And Sirhan replied that it must have been when he saw this special on TV about Robert Kennedy, which had one scene of Bobby being in Israel in 1948. As Robert Kaiser noted, the problem here is that the notebook entry is dated May 18^th, but the program did not show on local TV until late on May 20^th. It was then repeated five days later. And Kennedy did not come out for the sale of fifty jets to Israel until May 26^th. (O’Sullivan, p. 104)

To put it mildly, Sirhan was not served well by his defense team.