The tall young man in the gold shirt

What seems to reinforce the possibility that Tarrants was involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy is an intriguing statement made by Mrs Bernstein, who, as readers will recall, spoke to Sergeant Paul Scharaga in the carpark of the Ambassador Hotel only minutes after she saw the polka dot girl and the young man fleeing. According to Scharaga, Mrs Bernstein 'said that they were coming out of the Ambassador Hotel by the Embassy Room, when a young couple in their late teens or early twenties, well dressed, came running past them.' If by the phrase 'young couple' Mrs Bernstein intended to convey the impression that the two seemed to her to be romantically involved (could they have been holding hands, perhaps?), this would match the description of Tarrants and Ainsworth. For, at the time of the assassination, the pair WERE romantically involved. Not only was Ainsworth pregnant with Tarrants' child, they were planning, after the Meridian bombing of Meyer Davidson's home, to drive to Miami together. They were, very definitely, a couple in the romantic sense. If Ainsworth was the polka dot girl, and the polka dot girl was with someone with whom she was romantically involved, the likelihood is that he was her boyfriend, Tom Tarrants. If so, Tarrants was the tall young man in a gold coloured shirt who actually shot RFK (or shared the job with Michael Wayne).

BELOW: Tom Tarrants in 1967 (police photo).



When I started researching the possibility that Ainsworth was the polka dot girl, I gave little thought to Tarrants, who I viewed simply as her accomplice. However, that was because at that stage I thought the man who actually shot RFK had to be either Thane Eugene Cesare or the man in the blue suit who closely resembled Sirhan (the man we now know was Michael Wayne). Yet Lisa Pease's important two-part article on the assassination forced me to confront the fact that the shooter was probably a tall young man wearing a gold shirt with what Irene Gizzi described as 'dark sun bleached hair.' If Ainsworth was the polka dot girl, the question had to be asked whether this man was Tarrants. What made this seem possible was that Tarrants was, at the time of the RFK slaying, 21 years of age - which is exactly right for the LAPD description of the tall young man (20-22). What's more, Tarrants was an outstanding shooter. He was, according to Jack Nelson, 'a marksman capable of hitting a plastic milk jug at one hundred yards with a machine gun.' (p. 21)

A difficulty was admittedly presented by the fact that Tarrants had (and apparently still has) black hair. Yet hair colour is one of the easiest of physical characteristics to alter. There is no reason to assume that it would not have occurred to any of the conspirators to change their appearance in some way, and it may well be that Tarrants chose to affect a Californian 'look' while he was in Los Angeles. A perm plus some colouring work would have been all that was required to make his hair conform to witness descriptions.

The question of identification therefore depended crucially on Tarrants' height and build. Witness descriptions were clear that the young man in the gold shirt was extremely tall, with the earliest police description giving a height of 6 foot to 6'2". The man in the gold shirt was also described as very slim. It was with considerable trepidation that I opened my copy of Terror In The Night in search of a description of Tarrants. Of course, like all researchers who are afraid of seeing a lot of hard work go down the drain, I was afraid that I would very soon learn that Tarrants was of average height and that would be the end of my theory. But, to my astonishment, the very first page of Nelson's book supplied a description of Tarrants. 'He was tall and trim,' writes Nelson. '[A]bout six feet three and 170 pounds' (which is of course very slim for someone so tall). In short, there is no reason why Tarrants could not have been the young man in the gold coloured shirt who shot RFK. His relationship with Ainsworth - the girl in the polka dot dress - his propensity for violence, including a plan to assassination Martin Luther King, and his appearance all make it a virtual certainty that he was.

But what clinches my identification of Ainsworth and Tarrants as the key members of the conspiracy to kill RFK lies not in the description of either individual alone, but the conjunction of two descriptions. One thing I have learned in life is that women rarely become involved with younger men. They tend to go for men the same age or older. I consider it striking that Ainsworth and Tarrants were in age terms an 'odd couple' - a 26yo female with a 21yo male. When you add in the height factor (and not many people are 6'3" tall), as well as the violent racial politics they shared, you have a pairing that seems beyond statistical probability. The chances, in short, of a mid-twenties female answering the physical description of the polka dot girl being involved in a relationship with a 21yo male answering the physical description of the tall young man in the gold shirt being anyone OTHER than Ainsworth and Tarrants seem astronomical.

What's more, this pairing has the distinction of being lured by the FBI into a death trap only 3 weeks after Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Given that in their entire career as KKK terrorists Tarrants and Ainsworth hadn't actually killed anybody (at least according to the official account of their crimes), the Meridian set up seems like a case of extraordinary overkill. We should note that not even Sam Bowers, the man the FBI claimed had masterminded 9 murders and 300 bombings, burnings and beatings, was subject to such treatment. Given the circumstances, the question, surely, is what Tarrants and Ainsworth had done to deserve entrapment and instant execution? Although they could have been involved in a great many crimes that remain unknown, the fact their physical descriptions match those of the young man in the gold coloured shirt and his girlfriend in the polka dot dress suggest that the FBI and the ADL were anxious to discard two individuals who had served their purpose.

Leaving aside the RFK assassination to refer to the general context in which it occurred, the following seems significant. In the 1960s, the FBI was ostensibly concerned as much with fighting the extreme rightwing as the extreme left. Yet, as Brian Glick points out, the FBI's COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE programme - which ran from 1964 to 1971 - was actually 'a cover for covert aid to the KKK and similar right-wing vigilantes, who were given funds and information, so long as they confined their attacks to COINTELPRO targets.[My italics] FBI documents also reveal covert action against Native American, Chicano, Phillipine, Arab-American, and other activists, apparently without formal Counterintelligence programs.' (NOTE 3) The background to the Meridian shootout fully suggests the use of COINTELPRO agents provocateurs (Danny Joe Hawkins?) to use KKK shooters to kill progressive political figures like RFK and Dr King, and then to use their rightwing links to set them up afterwards for elimination. A tentative conclusion, therefore, is that the Meridian shootout represented an attempt by the ADL and the FBI to get rid of two Klansmen it had used to execute Bobby Kennedy (if not Martin Luther King as well). While author Jack Nelson has been concerned with the flagrant injustice of the ADL/FBI set up at Meridian, he has utterly failed to unravel its mysterious logic. By omitting to pursue such important matters as why it was necessary to kill Tarrants and Ainsworth, despite the fact that they had apparently killed nobody, and why Danny Joe Hawkins did not accompany Tarrants on the fateful night of June 29, 1968, he has given the world the erroneous impression that nothing was wrong other than the illegality of the methods used to snare Tarrants and Ainsworth. But the question that cries out for an answer is, Why this particular pair? Answering that question is the focus of the following webpage.

BELOW: Tarrants at his November 1968 trial.

This website argues that there was more to the Meridian shootout which left Tommy Tarrants severely injured than Jack Nelson suspects. Whether he is aware of the possibility or not, there are holes in the story he relates, as well as holes in his account of Tarrants' biography, that indicate that Tarrants may have been involved in far more serious crimes than those that ostensibly prompted the set up.

NOTES

(1) http://www.clarionledger.com/news/miss/reports/preacher/pkep.html
(2) http://www.natvan.com/free-speech/fs9811a.html
(3) http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/gjp3.html

For information about the RFK assassination: