The RFK Conspiracy: Part Two

Cracks in the Wall

Lillian Castellano had been interested in the John F. Kennedy assassination for years. She had been a member of the John Kennedy Assassination Truth Action Committee in Los Angeles before the trial of Sirhan Sirhan. She had followed that trial and she knew what the evidentiary points were for the prosecution.

After the trial was over, there was a mix up between Judge Herbert Walker and County Clerk William Sharp. Therefore, for two years, private persons were allowed to visit the Exhibits Room in Sharp’s offices. (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby?, p. 352) In other words they could actually have access to much of the original evidence used, or unused, at the trial. Within weeks after the jury convicted Sirhan, Castellano and Floyd Nelson published the first article that began to deconstruct the prosecution’s open and shut case.

Their milestone piece appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press which, for an alternative publication, had a rather large circulation of about 250,000 readers. Their work was inspired by two pictures of what appeared to be bullet holes at the crime scene. The telling point was that they had gone unaccounted for at Sirhan’s trial. (Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, pp. 44-45)

One picture looked like it demonstrated two bullet holes in the center divider between the swinging double doors at one end of the pantry. There was a witness who said these had been circled and the circles contained numbers and letters. This strongly indicated that they had been noted by the investigators. Castellano secured a statement from one of the amateur photographers who took a picture of the divider. John Shirley wrote that there appeared to be an attempt “to dig the bullets out from the surface.” But the divider was loose and it appeared that it had been taken off its hinges so the bullets could be removed from behind. Shirley also said that it also appeared that one other bullet had hit one of the swinging doors. The carpenters who helped remove the door jamb agreed that there were bullet holes present. (Ibid, Melanson)

A second picture showed 2 LAPD officers--Robert Rozzi and Charles Wright-- in a corridor leading into the pantry. In the photo the officers are kneeling down with flashlights examining another bullet hole. (O’Sullivan, p. 352) LAPD listed two pieces of wood from the kitchen doorway frame and also two pieces of ceiling insulation in their property inventory. But there was not a chemical analysis accounting for these in LAPD’s ballistics expert DeWayne Wolfer’s work product--even though he was testing for holes. Sirhan’s handgun contained 8 bullets. Wolfer had accounted for those, without mentioning this other evidence. Which meant that there was now evidence of a second gun in the pantry. About one month after the Castellano/Nelson article was published the door frame wood, and two ceiling tiles were destroyed. This was before Sirhan even began his appeals process. And the destruction was kept secret until 1975. (Ibid, p. 353)

Due to the fact that they had not been identified in the photo, Rozzi and Wright had remained elusive for a number of years. But, in 1975, attorney Vincent Bugliosi managed to locate them. Rozzi issued an affidavit to the famous lawyer in which he said there was a hole about a foot and a half above the floor in the door behind the stage. From his observation that hole appeared to contain the base of a small caliber bullet.

Bugliosi then phoned Wright. He said that a bullet was removed from the hole but he did not know who did the removal. Wright was then placed under stress from both the LAPD and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. So he refused to confirm the call and would not provide a statement. But after he retired, Wright finally said that you cannot be 100 per cent sure, “but I would say it would be as close to a ten as I’d ever want to go without pulling it out.” (O’Sullivan, pp. 372-73)

The journalist who began to disturb the open and shut case was Fernando Faura. Fernando worked for a small newspaper called the Hollywood Citizen News. While the police were doing all they could to discredit Sandy Serrano, Faura was discovering a witness who—if he did not strictly corroborate Sandy—certainly complemented her. His name was John Fahey. Fahey told his story to Faura on June 12^th, a week after the shooting. Fahey had already talked to the FBI by then. Faura was impressed by Fahey, finding him a compelling witness. (Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File, pp. 35-55. These pages contain the transcript of Faura’s taped interview with Fahey.)

Fahey was a salesman who had arranged to meet a professional colleague at the Ambassador Hotel on the day of the California primary. He missed that appointment, but he did meet up with a woman in the coffee shop. The woman was from the Middle East and she came into the USA through New York. Fahey asked what she was doing there and she replied that she would not tell him since she did not want to get him involved. When Fahey asked her what she meant she replied that she was not sure she could trust him, plus “they are liable to be watching me.” (ibid, p. 36). She then admitted she had given him a false name and she said there was a reason why she had to give out a phony name.

She now added something that was freighted with mystery and danger. She said they were going to take care of Mr. Kennedy tonight. (Faura, p. 37) This gave Fahey the inclination to leave right then and there. But he sensed she was troubled because she next said that she was now certain they were being watched. Indicating she wanted to get away, the girl asked him what he was doing that day; he said he was going on the road for work. She said she could join him but she had to be back at the hotel that night. The girl offered to pay for breakfast and pulled a wallet out of her purse. Fahey noted she had large denominations of currency: fifties and hundreds. But he insisted on paying. As they left for the parking lot, she said she new a shortcut to get there. When he asked her how she knew she added something that made it all the more provocative: she was not staying at the Ambassador.

They drove to the Oxnard/Ventura area, which is about 30 miles west of the city. Fahey was quickly aware that they were being followed, since when he slowed down the following car slowed down. The girl realized this also. And she again told him she could not tell him why they were being followed. In order to test if it was really a tail, Fahey turned into a parking lot and, sure enough, the car followed him. (Faura, p. 40)

They stopped at a restaurant called Trancas. They had brunch and she said teasingly that if he came to the Ambassador that evening she would find out why she was there. She then asked him to take her back to the hotel. They arrived back at about 7 PM. (Faura, p. 42). To those who doubt this strange story, Faura and Jordan Bonfante of Life magazine, found the restaurant, they found the bill and they found the waitress. (Faura, pp. 171-72)

The third person who began to expose the crevices in the prosecution’s case against Sirhan was William Harper. Harper was a well-respected criminalist with a 35 year career; he consulted on over 300 cases, and served as criminalist to the Pasadena Police Department for seven years. Even before the trial began, the very experienced forensic scientist had called lead defense lawyer Grant Cooper and told him to beware of DeWayne Wolfer. Wolfer was the ballistics expert for the police who Harper was familiar with from past encounters. He told Cooper quite simply and directly, “Beware of Wolfer. He gives the prosecution what they want.” (O’Sullivan, p. 259).

In fact, in a previous case Wolfer had worked on, Harper had found, not just mistakes and overstatements of evidence, but one instance where Wolfer had clearly misrepresented a photographic exhibit in order to create a ballistics match. An attorney who filed a formal complaint against Wolfer described his work in that instance as follows: “His testimony combined with his very esoteric photographic manipulations, label his work in this instance nothing but perjury.” (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 555)

Because of the Sharp/Walker miscommunication mentioned above, and with the permission of Sirhan’s appeals lawyers, Bill Harper spent months reviewing the forensic aspects of the RFK case. This included all the firearms materials, the autopsy report and trial testimony. On one of his several visits, Harper brought with him a Balliscan camera, which takes close up photos of a bullet as it is rotated in front of the lens. He focused his attention on two bullets which were the least mutilated. One of these came from Kennedy’s body and one from another victim named William Weisel. After a minute examination and comparison of the two projectiles, Harper came to a startling conclusion. In a sworn affidavit he later described his findings.

Harper wrote that due to his minute examination of the characteristics of both bullets he found no shared characteristics between the two. In fact he wrote that the Kennedy bullet had a significantly greater rifling angle than the Wiesel bullet. Therefore, he concluded that they had come from different guns. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 556)

Further, Harper then said that with two different guns, there were two separate firing positions. One was in front of the senator, the other was from behind and to his right, and that position was in very close proximity to RFK. Elucidating further, he wrote that four shots were fired from that spot: three of which hit Kennedy’s body, one of them was fatal since it penetrated the brain. Another passed through the cloth of his jacket. These shots from behind all produced powder burns, which meant they were expelled from a close distance. Kennedy was not hit from the front. (O’Sullivan, p. 356)

Harper’s affidavit sent shockwaves through the Los Angeles legal establishment: both the police department and the DA’s office. In his affidavit, Harper specifically criticized the rush to judgment of both agencies:

“When all recovered bullets are the same caliber, the conclusion that a single gun is involved must not be hurriedly reached. The capture of Sirhan with his gun at the scene resulted in a total mesmerization of the investigative efforts….The well established teachings of criminalistics and forensic pathology were cast aside and then bypassed in favor of a more expedient solution, and unfortunately, an erroneous oversimplification.”

Later, Harper implicitly criticized the LAPD’s work again: “It will be indeed a very dark day in the history of criminalistics if the RFK-Sirhan case is laid to rest shrouded in the clouds of technical uncertainties, of which there are many—far too many.” He even made fun of the position Sirhan would have had to have been in to deliver the fatal shot. He said maybe Rudolf Nureyev could have achieved it. (O’Sullivan, p. 359, p. 363)

Clearly, Harper had the authorities on the run. There had been malfeasance and perhaps negligence in the RFK case. The new DA, Joseph Busch, announced a press conference to contest Harper’s accusations. But he postponed it twice. (Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, p. 219) Finally, Busch tried to insinuate that what had really happened was that the exhibits in the County Clerk’s office could have been tampered with by those impish RFK researchers. Busch then hired Robert Blair Kaiser as a consultant. Kaiser had served on Sirhan’s hapless defense team and written the first full length book on the case. Kaiser took the position that if Harper was correct, then the evidence had been tampered with by unauthorized persons. There was a serious problem with this charge: neither Busch nor Kaiser could ever prove such a thing happened.

The combination of too many bullets, the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, and two firing positions with different weapons, all these had struck a body blow against the official story. A Pandora’s Box had been opened. And it was about to get worse.