The Sirhan enigma

The assassination of presidential aspirant Senator Robert F. Kennedy in an ambush in the crowded kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, is memorable as the most impeccably executed of the politically-motivated murders that rocked the 1960s. Unlike the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which has generated sufficient leads to inspire several hundred volumes, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, which has largely been unraveled by William Pepper (with the exception of the name of the shooter himself), the RFK assassination is a conspiracy that seems to have left researchers virtually nowhere to turn.

Leaving aside the matter of the destruction of evidence by Los Angeles police, the impenetrableness of the conspiracy to kill RFK can largely be attributed to the fact that the putative assassin, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, carried out the crime while in an hypnotically-induced trance. He seems quite genuinely to possess no memory of killing Robert Kennedy. He remembers nothing between having coffee with a pretty girl 'with brown hair' a couple of hours before the shooting and the moment shortly afterwards when he was subdued by Rafer Johnson and Karl Uecker. (NOTE 1)

Sirhan does not even remember why, around 12.15 am, he shot at Kennedy. Curiously, he recalls having been a Kennedy supporter. An American of Palestinian origin, he now believes that he must have turned against Kennedy when he promised to sell fifty bombers to Israel. However, this seems to have been a theory suggested to the highly suggestible Sirhan after the assassination by those complicit in the plot who realized that the public would not swallow another motiveless patsy like Lee Harvey Oswald. Sirhan was therefore retrospectively endowed with a motive for his act, one that even Sirhan himself considers plausible. Unfortunately for the theory, Kennedy said little, either on or shortly before May 18, that would offend a supporter of the Palestinian cause. There is still no explanation why, on that day, Sirhan wrote in his notebook that Kennedy should be assassinated.

Sirhan's hypnoprogramming was so successful that he also has no recollections of the other individuals involved in the conspiracy. We simply do not know who hypnotized him - although it is sometimes stated that Dr. William Joseph Bryan, Jr., President of the American Institute of Hypnosis, has taken the credit in a number of private conversations - or who the other four persons were that he was seen with when he gatecrashed the Kennedy event at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of June 4-5, 1968. We only know that on at least two earlier occasions he was seen in the company of two men in a San Gabriel gun store, the Lock, Stock 'n' Barrel, while on two other occasions he was seen in the company of an attractive girl at RFK campaign-related locations.

This website sets out a theory of who the attractive girl was. Known to history as the 'girl in the polka dot dress,' she was Sirhan's handler. Establishing her identity is virtually the only means we have of generating new leads in this 36-year old case.

NOTES

(1) The chief source of my information for the assassination of Robert Kennedy is William Klaber and Phillip H. Melanson, Shadow Play: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, The Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American Justice, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997. Further information has been gleaned from a major essay by Lisa Pease, "Sirhan and the RFK Assassination." This two-part essay, which appears in full in Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease (eds.), The Assassinations, Los Angeles, Feral House, 2003, can be read in part at http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr398-rfk.html and http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr598-rfk.html A presumably unauthorized complete version - although one that contains many typos - can be read at http://scribblguy.50megs.com/illusion.htm and http://scribblguy.50megs.com/illusion2.htm

BELOW: Sirhan Sirhan being led away from the scene of the crime he still does not remember having committed.



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