Possible identifications

Despite numerous sightings and highly specific descriptions, the polka dot girl remains elusive. During Sirhan's trial in early 1969, the LAPD came up with the preposterous theory that she was Kennedy campaign worker Valerie Schulte. However, Schulte, who in any case has blonde hair and nothing peculiar whatsoever about her nose, was never seen standing near Sirhan. What's more, she was wearing a green dress with yellow splotches that she admits she never thought of as polka dots until the idea was suggested by the LAPD! Schulte was also getting around that night on crutches. If anyone had seen her with Sirhan, it is surely the crutches that would have been her most memorable feature.

BELOW: Valerie Schulte, the RFK campaign volunteer that the LAPD claimed was the polka dot girl, wearing the dress the LAPD claimed was the polka dot dress.



Valerie Schulte quite clearly was not the infamous polka dot girl. More plausible is the theory that she was Shirin Khan, daughter of Khaibar Khan, an Iranian who, presumably not by coincidence, was seen at RFK campaign headquarters in the days immediately prior to the assassination. According to campaign worker Eleanor Severson, Khan, who claimed to be a Kennedy supporter from New York, appeared in the office every day between May 30 and June 2. Most significantly, Severson claimed that on June 2, Khan appeared together with four other foreigners of Middle Eastern appearance, including Sirhan. Her claims were corroborated by her husband, as well as fellow campaign worker Larry Strick. Estelle Sterns, another Kennedy volunteer, claims that on June 4, she saw Sirhan, three other men of Middle Eastern appearance, and the polka dot girl at campaign headquarters. She says that Sirhan and one of the other men were carrying guns. She also says that the day after the assassination, she 'received a phone call from a man who sounded muffled, as though he was speaking through a towel, telling her "Under no circumstances give out any information to anybody as to the number of people or their activities at your desk on Tuesday."'

There is a prima facie reason to admit that an Iranian origin for the RFK conspiracy is possible. The Shah of Iran was bitterly opposed to Robert Kennedy's brother, President John F. Kennedy, and is reputed to have indulged in a celebratory tipple when he learned of JFK's death. The Shah might well have taken steps to preclude the possibility of another Kennedy reaching the White House. Yet there are problems with the Khaibar Khan story that suggest that the Middle Eastern connection could be a hoax. First of all, Khaibar Khan registered at the Kennedy HQ in his own name and, moreover, does not deny that he brought his daughter there on June 3. If Khaibar Khan and his daughter were involved in the conspiracy, it stands to reason that he would have used a pseudonym and would not have drawn attention to his daughter, which he did not need to do, since her visit to the RFK campaign HQ does not seem to have been registered or recalled by anyone else. Since Khaibar Khan was an intelligence figure with past links to both British and Iranian intelligence (he was apparently involved in the CIA coup which overthrew Mossadegh in the early 1950s), Khan would have known how to hide his tracks if he wanted to. It was also very strange for such men to have unnecessarily displayed their guns. Such recklessness could have attracted attention that might have unravelled the conspiracy.

A further problem is that there was no sense among eyewitnesses in the Ambassador Hotel that the group as a whole presented a Middle Eastern appearance or, indeed, a homogeneous ethnic appearance of any kind at all. The same is true of those who saw Sirhan in the company of two other men at the Lock, Stock 'n' Barrel. Although one or two witnesses at the Ambassador Hotel suspected that the group consisted of Latins, the only individual who is consistently referred to as foreign looking - apart from Sirhan himself - is that of the man who seems to have functioned as Sirhan's double. Interestingly, by far the most likely identification for this individual is, as Pease relates, Michael Wayne - a 21-year old Englishman! However, Wayne's links turned out to be with Keith Duane Gilbert, an 'extremist and militant who has previously been involved in a dynamite theft,' rather than Iran. (In fact, LAPD Sergeant Manuel Gutierrez discovered that Gilbert was a 'radical Minutemen activist.')

Finally, it should be emphasized that the polka dot girl and the tall young man with sunbleached hair who probably was Kennedy's real killer are generally referred to as Caucasian. What's more, no one who overheard the girl shouting 'We killed him!' recalled an accent - nor did witnesses who actually spoke with her in more normal circumstances on earlier occasions. It seems hard to believe that a foreign accent went unnoticed by so many people. The likelihood, in fact, is that she did not have a foreign accent.

My own conclusion is that the participation of Khaibar Khan and a few other Iranians was linked to the conspiracy, but it was part of a sophisticated charade designed to lead conspiracy researchers in the wrong direction - the Middle East. Since Khan and his friends seem to have been concerned with drawing a great deal of attention to themselves at RFK HQ, not least by displaying guns on the day of the assassination itself, the most reasonable conclusion is that they went there precisely to get noticed. If their purpose had only been to get hold of a copy of Kennedy's itinerary, it would have been far more effective to have sent an inconspicuous plain American to do the job. Instead, the RFK staff encountered obvious foreigners. What's more, nothing could be more designed to inflame suspicions than a phone call ordering someone not to reveal information about 'the number of people' and 'their activities' the preceding Tuesday." If Estelle Sterns had not found anything suspicious about events on Tuesday before, she certainly would have done so now. Clearly, the idea was to intensify suspicion as much as possible. But why? The only reason why I can see why such individuals would have wanted to court attention would be to foster a 'safe' conspiracy theory, one that helps to perpetuate American illusions that everything bad that happens in the country is the work of foreigners (or, in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, disloyal Americans who have enlisted in foreign causes).

As has been the case in American history since the Red Scare - when a wave of bombings probably orchestrated by the young J. Edgar Hoover were blamed on foreign-born leftists - violence has been depicted by the American government as a kind of foreign contamination. In the same spirit, the RFK assassination was represented as the extension of a foreign conflict. Sirhan is depicted as having assassinated Kennedy because of his stance he took on a question relating to his own Middle Eastern background.

This has never been plausible, however. Although of Palestinian origin, there is no hint in Sirhan's background of active support for the Palestinian cause. In any case, Robert Kennedy was one of the more even-handed American politicians in relation to the Zionist conflict. The Sirhan scenario is as inherently misleading as the Oswald scenario. In this respect, Sirhan's double is the 'Rosetta Stone' of the case. Michael Wayne's 'Arabic' appearance - which turned out to be due to Jewish ancestry - seems to have been exploited by the conspiracy as a means of masking the domestic origins of the conspiracy which lay with the extreme right.

Since the Iranian connection seems contrived to mislead - and because no photos of Shirin Khan have turned up that would allow us to form our own opinion as to whether she could have been the polka dot girl - the question of the girl's identity remains open. The real problem is whether it can be possible after 36 years to ascertain her true identity. To my knowledge, no one has come forward with a plausible identification for the mysterious polka dot girl besides Shirin Khan. But, as I will proceed to relate in the remainder of this essay, there is a strong domestic contender for the part. Although (as yet) no role can be assigned to Keith Duane Gilbert, we will see that both the Minutemen and dynamite form part of the story.

This website sets out a theory of who the polka dot dress girl was. She was not Valerie Schulte, while the view that she was Shirin Khan seems part of a 'suspicious foreigners' hoax. Yet there is an alternative candidate, a girl who was murdered by the FBI in suspicious circumstances only a few weeks after RFK himself.

For information about the RFK assassination: