The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 5 -- Sirhan Sirhan

The 1966 Simon and Garfunkel album 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme', ends with a haunting track titled 7 O'clock News/Silent Night. On that track, the pair sing a pretty, though straight-forward, rendition of Silent Night as a sound clip from a 7 o'clock news broadcast plays in the background. The broadcast includes the following:

In Los Angeles today comedian Lenny Bruce died of what was believed to be an overdose of narcotics. Bruce was 42 years old.

Dr. Martin Luther King says he does not intend to cancel plans for an open housing march Sunday into the Chicago suburb of Cicero. Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogleby asked King to call off the march and the Police in Cicero said they would ask the national guard to be called out if it is held. King, now in Atlanta, Georgia, plans to return to Chicago Tuesday.

In Chicago, Richard Speck, accused murderer of nine student nurses, was brought before a grand jury today for indictment. The nurses were found stabbed and strangled in their Chicago apartment.

In Washington the atmosphere was tense today as a special subcommittee of the House committee on un-American activities continued its probe into anti-Vietnam war protests. Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings when they began chanting anti-war slogans.

Former Vice President Richard Nixon says that unless there is a substantial increase in the present war effort in Vietnam, the U.S. should look forward to five more years of war. In a speech before the convention of the veterans of foreign wars in New York, Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.

We know the news broadcast was made August 3rd, 1966 because that is the day Lenny Bruce died. Just two days earlier, Charles Whitman had climbed to the observation deck of the administration building on the University of Texas Austin campus and began a 96 minute reign of terror with a sniper rifle. Two months later, on October 30, 1966, Cheri Jo Bates would be found dead, her neck sliced so deeply that she was nearly decapitated, on the campus of Riverside City College. The murder would later be linked with the Zodiac, though his particular reign of terror would officially begin about three years later. The Riverside Police made the link, noting the similarity between the Bates murder and the Zodiac killing at Lake Berryessa in Napa County September 27, 1969.

Earlier that year, on April 30, 1966, Anton LaVey ritualistically shaved his head and formally declared the founding of the Church of Satan and that day as Year One, Anno Satanas - the year of Satan. Given all of the killing that year, he may have had a point.

The Zodiac wasn't the only one to find his killing stride in 1969. On August 8 and 9 of that year, the Manson "family" committed the famous Tate/LaBianca murders. The combination of the mind numbing gruesomeness of those murders along with the fact that they involved a very beautiful and popular actress, Sharon Tate, has tended to overshadow the other strangeness that went on around the Los Angeles area at the time. The LAPD would find themselves investigating a total of 29 homicides in just four days!

1969 also saw the release of the song The Age of Aquarius, recorded by The Fifth Dimension, stay in the number one position on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks. The Age of Aquarius was a proto-New Age sort of hippie idea that was largely promoted by San Francisco based astrologer and Gay Liberation leader Gavin Arthur. His full name was actually Chester Alan Arthur III. The similarity to the name of the 21st President of the United States is no coincidence. Gavin Arthur was his great-grandson. On an interesting note, Gavin Arthur's great-grandfather was the Vice President under James Garfield until an assassin's bullet made him President. On a bizarre coincidence note, Gavin Arthur is said to have predicted the assassination of John Kennedy before he even entered office. Go figure.

The Age of Aquarius idea would figure prominently in the Santa Cruz mountains, just south of San Francisco, where the Flower Children, disenchanted with the Haight-Ashbury, district would go to set up communes and grow marijuana. These same Flower Children were closely associated with the goings-on in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles around the same time, at least in terms of being considered a part of the same cultural movement. What is curious is that while the Los Angeles area was seeing veritable blood baths, the San Francisco area would become the spawning ground for serial killers, not to mention the home of the People's Temple. To quote from Dave McGowan's brilliantly researched book, Programmed to Kill,

To briefly recap, no fewer than six serial killers/mass murders--Charles Manson, Stanley Baker, Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, John Lindley Frazier, and the Zodiac--were all spawned from the Santa Cruz/San Francisco metropolitan area in a span of just over four years, at a time when 'serial killers' were a rare enough phenomenon that they hadn't yet acquired a name. And another serial killer was said to be at work not far away during the same time frame. As [Ted] Bundy chronicler Richard Larsen recounts, the bodies of at least fourteen young women and girls were found, nude and with their belongings missing, in Northern California between December 1969 and December 1973. In the immediate vicinity of each of the bodies "was found an elaborate witchcraft symbol of twigs and rocks." Remarkably enough, the crimes collectively attributed to these men did not even account for all the ritualized homicides that occurred in the Bay Area during that time. For example, the murder of Fred Bennett, the captain of the Oakland chapter of the Black Panthers whose mutilated remains were found scattered in the Santa Cruz hills, was never solved. And many of the young students who were reported missing from local campuses were never found, either dead or alive, and were therefore never listed as homicide victims.

It is interesting to note that Ronald Reagan held the office of Governor of California between the years of 1966 and 1974. During those years, he would completely dismantle the California Mental Health System and turn mental health patients out into the streets.

Notice in the above quote that Fred Bennett's mutilated remains were found scattered in the Santa Cruz hills. I would leave open the possibility that Bennett was killed in a fit of rage. Rumor has it he had an affair with Bobby Seale's wife while Seale was in jail. However, something just doesn't feel right about the killing being an inside job. The Panthers were not known for that kind of behavior. Admittedly, the Panthers were armed and militant. They had a good reason for it, though. They had suffered at the hands of an armed police force that thought nothing of killing black people and walking away with a shrug of the shoulders. One could easily imagine a police officer in Oakland, after killing 16 year-old Bobby Hutton, unarmed and with his hands in the air, brushing the whole thing off with a disgusting remark like, "No big deal, just a dead nigger."

As a matter of fact, according to Terry Cotton, a Black Panther member who was there that day, the police did make statements like that. As he wrote on the website It's About Time, the police made statements like, "you niggers just lost Martin Luther King and if you make one move we will not hesitate to blow your heads off." Charming.

What the Black Panthers actually stood for was positive action to make life in the black community in the U.S. better, through programs such as the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which started in January, 1969 at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland, California, then spread across the country. It is because of that program, and what the Panthers really stood for, that I point out the killing of Fred Bennett. Following Anton LaVey's declaration of 1966 being Year One Anno Satanas, it seemed as if what could well be described as a satanic rage was let loose in the U.S., much of it focused on those who worked for peace.

Before we return to the story of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, I'd like to point out one other very curious case of a serial killer. This one was not in California but, rather, in Texas. His name was Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas claimed that he had been responsible for literally hundreds and murders, that he worshiped Satan and was part of a Florida Everglades cult called The Hand of Death. There is some controversy over whether Lucas was telling the truth or just saying these things for the attention he would receive. Whichever is the case, Lucas was clearly not the sort of guy you'd want your daughter dating.

Lucas was sentenced to death in Texas. His sentence was to be carried out under then Governor, now President George Bush. Bush, as is well known, holds the U.S. record for the death penalty, having presided over a grand total of 152 deaths. His unwillingness to commute the death penalty to life imprisonment is the stuff of legends. He refused to commute the sentence of an octogenarian woman who had killed her chronically abusive husband. He refused to commute the sentence of a mental retarded man who was, by Texas law, not eligible for the death penalty. According to Tucker Carlson, conservative journalist and the last person you'd imagine making this stuff up (aside from someone like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly), Bush even mocked Karla Faye Tucker when he was asked about her interview with Larry King. According to Carlson:

In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them", he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?'" "What was her answer?" I wonder. "'Please,'" Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "'don't kill me.'" I must look shocked - ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel - because he immediately stops smirking.

In fact, out of a total of 153 death sentences that crossed Governor Bush's desk, exactly one was commuted to life in prison. That one was, if you hadn't guessed already, Henry Lee Lucas.

That, my friends, has got to make you scratch your head and wonder just how wide this web really is.

The California death toll continued to climb well into the 1970's with Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, known as the Hillside Stranglers, allegedly killing prostitutes in Los Angeles. I say allegedly because, as is the case with so many of these things, there was quite a bit of contradictory evidence. Neither of these two were exactly stand-up guys, so getting a jury to believe their guilt wouldn't be difficult. They probably were actually closely involved. The problem is, many people gave eye witness accounts of seeing a man who did not fit the description of either of them. And that is a common element in case after case. Someone who's life history and rap sheet make them an easy fall guy takes the blame for everything while others walk away.

There were two witnesses that saw Judith Ann Miller, murdered on October 31, 1977, get into a car with a man just before her death. The first witness who, interestingly, had worked as the subject of a stage hypnotist, described the man as black with light skin. The other witness was a bounty hunter named Marcus Camden, whose description of the car definitely did not match Bianchi's car. He described the driver as dark with curly hair.

Why we care about conflicting reports of an abduction and murder that happened nine years after the RFK assassination is this: after Camden gave his description of the car and the driver, one of the LAPD investigators on the case had him checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital for tests. That is a strange enough thing for an investigator to do with a crime witness. Even stranger, though, is that Camden much later altered his testimony by positively identifying Angelo Buono. This happened while Camden was a voluntary resident at a state psychiatric hospital in Indiana.

Now, here is the weird and coincidental part of it all. The hospital Camden voluntarily checked himself into was Richmond State Hospital, in Richmond, Indiana. In case you don't remember from Part 3, Richmond just happens to be the home of that most notorious CIA agent Dan Mitrione, and the founder of The People's Temple, Jim Jones.

Now, back to our story.

Sirhan Sirhan

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Sirhan Bishara Sirhan

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born March 19, 1944 in Jerusalem. Three years later, the state of Israel was created, turning Sirhan's childhood, along with many others, into a living hell. According to interviews with Sirhan and his family, Sirhan was only 4 years old when he first witnessed a bomb leave "the street strewn with the bloody, mutilated bodies of Arab victims." His childhood went downhill from there. He remembers seeing an explosion that resulted in "a little girl's leg blown off, and the blood spurting from below the knee as though from a faucet." His mother, Mary, and brother, Adel, remember Sirhan once screaming as he ran into the family apartment carrying a bucket half full of water with a human hand floating in it.

On top of this daily horror, Sirhan was regularly beaten and abused by his father. His father had been witnessed many times beating Sirhan with his hand and with sticks, calling Sirhan "too emotional." The family managed to emigrate to the United States in 1956. After seven months, Sirhan's father abandoned the family there and returned to the Middle East.

In an interview with documentary filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan for his film RFK Must Die, Sirhan's brother Munir describes Sirhan as being an incredibly gentle soul, the sort who would literally lead a fly out the door of the house rather than kill it. His career goal was to be a United Nations translator until, inexplicably, he suddenly found an interest in horses around 1965 and decided he wanted to be a jockey. That dream ended in September of 1966 when Sirhan fell, causing an injury to his head and the loss of nerve around horses that is required of a jockey.

Following his fall from the horse, Sirhan's personality seemed to change. The once sociable Sirhan became something of a recluse. In 1967, Sirhan mysteriously disappeared for three months without telling his family where he had gone. When he returned, he had developed a strong interest in the occult.

No one has ever been able to prove or even produce direct evidence of Sirhan being a victim of the CIA's MKULTRA mind control program. What we do know of Sirhan is that he would be an ideal candidate for hypnotic suggestion and the sort of mind control that the CIA claimed they only investigated with MKULTRA but, most assuredly, actually practiced. A childhood filled with shocking violence combined with an abusive father left Sirhan an almost uniquely talented hypnotic subject by virtue of the fact that dissociation had become a well established defense mechanism for him. This was noted by Dr. Bernard Diamond, who was called to hypnotize Sirhan in his jail cell following the assassination in the hope of eliciting a remembrance of the events and a confession from Sirhan. Diamond noted that Sirhan achieved a deep trance almost instantaneously, suggesting that Sirhan had been hypnotized many times before.

While under a trance, Sirhan was asked to climb the bars of his cell like a monkey. He dutifully obeyed. He was asked to recreate pages from his journal. Again, he dutifully obeyed, writing over and over, "RFK must die." He could remember every detail of that evening, including talking to the woman in the polka dot dress, but could not be induced to remember actually shooting Bobby Kennedy. Diamond even attempted implanting the memory in Sirhan's mind via a post-hypnotic suggestion. Even that failed with this amazingly adept hypnotic subject.

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Sketch of Sirhan being hypnotized in his jail cell. Even under deep trance, he could not remember details of the shooting

The fact that Sirhan had disappeared for three months in 1967, a time in which he was working with horses and was, according to witnesses, likely spending time with Jerry Owen, puts Sirhan in a position to have been intensively worked on by a hypno-programmer. The fact that Jerry Owen and William Bryan, the self-confessed CIA mind control expert, both worked the same fundamentalist preaching circuit, along with the fact that Sirhan seemingly makes reference to Albert DeSalvo, the alleged Boston Strangler and one of Bryan's most famous subjects, in his journal would make the connection between Bryan and Sirhan not unlikely at all.

George Plimpton, the journalist famous for, amongst other things, donning a Detroit Lions football jersey and actually taking part in a NFL game, was one of the men who helped subdue Sirhan the night of the assassination. He described Sirhan as having a very peaceful look in his eyes and a sickly smile on his face. Rosey Grier, part of the "fearsome foursome" which was arguably one of the best defensive lines in professional football history, had a difficult time getting the gun out of Sirhan's hand. This peaceful, detached look and the amazing feats of strength Sirhan displayed are classic signs of a deep hypnotic trance.

So, it appears quite possible that Sirhan could well have been hypno-programmed by William Bryan, having been brought to Bryan by fellow fundamentalist preacher Jerry Owen. Even if those links in the web were to be proven, the question would still remain as to whether Sirhan actually fired the bullets that killed Bobby Kennedy.

As Kennedy entered the pantry area of the Ambassador Hotel he stopped to shake hands with staff members who lined up to meet him. The last person he was to shake hands with was busboy Juan Romero, who's face has been memorialized cradling Kennedy's head after having placed a rosary in his hand following the shooting. According to multiple witnesses, including Romero, Kennedy had finished shaking Romero's hand and was moving on when Sirhan appeared, raised his .22 caliber Iver Johnson eight shot revolver and fired two of those shots toward Bobby Kennedy. The first shot seems to have hit Paul Schrade in the head. In fact, Bobby Kennedy seemed to have been well aware of the fact that Schrade had been hit as multiple witnessed claimed that, while on the floor in a pool of his own blood, Bobby asked, "How is Paul?" If Schrade had not been hit first and Bobby hadn't witnessed that fact, it seems very unlikely that Bobby would have been asking about him particularly. I have spoken with Schrade, personally. He has no memory of seeing Bobby getting shot, giving further credence to the idea that Schrade was shot first.

Three bullets entered Bobby Kennedy's body. A fourth passed through his clothing. The bullet that killed him was fired into the right side of his head at point blank range, as evidenced by the power burns on his skull. The bullet that passed through his clothing was also shot at point blank range as evidenced by the powder burns at the entrance point of the bullet. Yet, not a single witness at the time of the shooting would put Sirhan any closer than about 1 ½ feet from Kennedy. Even if, as Dan Moldea has hypothesized, Sirhan was able to fire point blank into Kennedy's head due to Kennedy being pushed by the crowd toward Sirhan following the first shot, we would still be left with the inexplicable point blank shot through his jacket.

We are also left to ponder the question of why Sirhan would have been in the pantry, of all places, waiting to murder Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy was not originally scheduled to pass through the pantry. The decision was made at the last minute to go through the pantry, apparently by aide Fred Dutton. There is no way that Sirhan should have known that he would be able to shoot Bobby Kennedy in the pantry, yet that is where he had placed himself. And, according to John Pilger - a man who has been very outspoken in his criticism of Kennedy and, so, would seem to clearly have no vested interest in promoting a conspiracy theory concerning the assassination - stated in an interview with Democracy Now that he and other reporters were told before the decision would have been known that Kennedy would go through the pantry that the kitchen staff had reported Sirhan's presence in the pantry area.

As it happened, however, there is one recording of the assassination, an audio recording, that was inadvertently made and has survived to this day.

Stanislaw Pruszynski was a freelance reporter covering the Kennedy victory in California that night. His Telefunken Model 4001 tape recorder was on the podium as Kennedy spoke his last words in public, "Now it's on to Chicago and let's win there." As Kennedy was lead into the pantry area, Pruszynski gathered up his recording gear and followed, slightly behind the entourage. Fortunately, for the sake of historical evidence, Pruszynski forgot to turn off his recorder, leaving us with the only record of the actual shooting.

Unfortunately, Pruszynski's recording is of very poor quality. His recorder was not professional grade and he was approximately forty feet from the scene when the shooting began. A casual listening of the recording reveals what sounds like eight shots being fired. That would be completely in line with the official account of Sirhan being the lone gunman and firing all eight shots from his Iver Johnson revolver. No doubt, it is because of this apparent confirmation of the official account that the recording was allowed to reach public hands. However, a more careful and scientific examination of the recording reveals something else entirely.

Philip Van Praag was given permission from the California State Archives to make duplicate copies of the Pruszynski recording for analysis. The very thorough work he conducted to verify the authenticity of the recording, calibrating his tests using an identical model of recorder and precisely timing the moment of the apparent gun shots recorded by matching Pruszynski's recording to overlapping timestamped network video is covered in his book An Open & Shut Case, coauthored with past President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Robert Joling. What Van Praag and Joling found shoots holes (pardon the pun) with solid forensic evidence in the official story of the assassination.

Van Praag's analysis reveals a total of thirteen shots that can be positively identified on the tape. It is possible that there were more, but the noise of the crowd following the shooting would rule out identification of them. Two pairs of shots, shots 3-4 and 7-8, come only 149 milliseconds and 122 milliseconds apart, respectively. To put this in perspective, the world record for quick shooting is 140 milliseconds between shots. That record was set using a competition grade firearm. The Iver Johnson Sirhan used was a very cheap, heavy triggered revolver. In tests conducted by Van Praag and Joling on a firing range with a world class shooter firing a revolver identical to Sirhan's was 366 milliseconds between shots. That is three times slower than the pacing of shots 7 and 8 in the Pruszynski recording.

Already, with the identification of thirteen shots fired, we can see that it is not possible for Sirhan to be the sole shooter that night. From the data gleaned from the recording, it would appear that Sirhan fired eight shots and someone else fired five. The next question would be, does the count of thirteen shots make sense given the other evidence? It does.

As mentioned before, the LAPD destroyed critical pieces of evidence before they could be critically examined by experts. Key amongst that evidence were pieces of a door jamb that had clear bullet holes in it and two tiles from the drop ceiling which had also clearly been pierced by bullets. While the destruction of that evidence made any direct analysis impossible, enough information from the evidence collection was left intact to correlate with Van Praag's findings.

Remember that three bullets entered Kennedy's body, all from behind, while Sirhan was shooting from in front of the Senator. Another bullet passed through Kennedy's jacket, fired from point blank range. It was clear from analysis at the crime scene that two bullets entered the ceiling space and one ricocheted out. The other was never recovered. At least, not officially.

According to the official account, naturally, the two bullets that entered the ceiling space were fired from Sirhan's gun. Even a cursory analysis of that account reveals how ridiculous it is. Sirhan was subdued after firing only two shots, one of which hit Paul Schrade in the head. His remaining eight shots were fired with multiple men holding his hand against the steam table in the pantry. It would have been impossible for him to have twisted his hand upward enough to shoot into the ceiling. A deeper analysis virtually proves the presence of a second gunman.

The police records of the crime scene show detailed analysis of exactly where everyone was standing as Sirhan began to fire. Reenactments of the crime, placement of the victims and eye witness testimony were all used to precisely mark the position of Sirhan as he began firing. Of course, his positioning in the LAPD analysis necessarily has him close enough to potentially fire at least one shot at point blank range. And therein lies the rub, because police photographs taken at the crime scene also show the precise location of the bullet ridden ceiling panels in relation to Sirhan.

The panels were behind Sirhan.

In other words, it was physically impossible for Sirhan to have both shot Bobby Kennedy from point blank range and, while subdued, fire bullets into the ceiling where bullets had clearly penetrated. There was another gunman. Further, the math works out perfectly. Van Praag found thirteen shots recorded on the Pruszynski tape. Eight shots were fired from Sirhan's gun, three bullets entered Kennedy from behind and two bullets entered the ceiling behind Sirhan - a total of thirteen bullets.

A frequency analysis of those thirteen shots also shows the grouping of eight from one gun and five from another to be correct. Van Praag developed a specialized forensic technique that he called frequency selected integrated loudness envelope analysis. In essence, what Van Praag did was to look at the sound of the gun shots at discrete frequencies (in this case, you can think of frequency a bit like a note on a piano, each note being a distinct frequency) to get a picture of the loudness of the shot sounds at each frequency. What he found was that in exactly five of the shots, including one each of the doubles, the volume of the sound noticeably jumped up at 1,600 Hz - Hz, or Hertz, being a measure of frequency. So, here we still have a group of eight shots that display one set of frequency characteristics and five that display another.

Test firing a weapon identical to Sirhan's and recording that firing with various equipment, including a recorder identical to Pruszynski's did not reveal a spike at 1,600 Hz. However, they did find a .22 handgun that showed exactly that frequency characteristic. They also found something else interesting about that particular firearm: it's rifling characteristics.

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Rifling in the barrel of a gun and the corresponding marks left on the bullet

Rifling refers to helical grooves cut into the inside of the barrel of a gun that will cause a bullet to spin. The spin imparted adds stability to the bullet and improves accuracy, much the way a quarterback will put spin on a football as he throws it. In general, the rifling of each make of firearm is unique. This makes it often possible (assuming the bullet isn't too damaged) to identify the make of gun that fired a particular bullet by comparing the rifling characteristics with the known characteristics of various firearms. Typically, this is most difficult to do with .22 caliber bullets, yielding an accuracy of only 20-30%, which is why the .22 is the preferred weapon of professional killers. It has the least traceability. Still, 20-30% of the time it is.

The distance between the grooves in a bullet due to the rifling of an Iver Johnson Cadet Model 55-SA, the gun Sirhan used, is .054". At least until 1975, the Crime Laboratory Information Service, or CLIS, reported that the only handgun with those rifling characteristics was that particular model Iver Johnson. However, by 1987, the CLIS database had been updated and now included a second handgun with precisely the same rifling characteristics. It happened to also be a handgun that produced a frequency anomaly at 1,600 Hz. That gun is a Harrington & Richardson (H&R) Model 922, a nine shot .22 caliber revolver.

To save you the time of looking back, allow me to reproduce for you here the text of the sales slip for the gun Thane Eugene Cesar claimed to have sold to Jim Yoder three months prior to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy but actually sold three months after the assassination. "On the day of Sept. 6, 1968 I received $15.00 from Jim Yolder [sic]. The item involved is a H&R pistol 9 shot serial no. Y 13332. Thane E. Cesar."

Before we close the matter of the Bobby Kennedy assassination for now, we need to tie up one glaring loose end. In part one, I said that there was evidence pointing to the possibility that Sirhan was firing blanks the night of the shooting. Indeed, that evidence does exist. Yet, that evidence is clearly contradicted by the audio analysis made by Philip Van Praag. For the number of bullets fired that night to correspond to the number of shots he can identify on the Pruszynski tape, Sirhan must have been firing live rounds.

In short, the evidence for the blanks is this. It has been shown that Sirhan had spent several hours firing at a shooting range the day Kennedy was shot. The bullets recovered from the scene of the crime were copper coated bullets. Hence, the ballistics expert employed by the LAPD, DeWayne Wolfer, to examine Sirhan's gun and the bullets found also fired copper coated bullets in his test firing.

On June 11, 1968, Wolfer noted in his Analyzed Evidence Report a gun with the serial number H18602 as Sirhan's gun and the gun he had test fired. Later evidence documents would assign a different serial number to Sirhan's gun. According to Wolfer, the original H18602 serial number was simply a clerical error.

A July 1968, LAPD teletype tells an interesting story of bizarre coincidence and happenstance, however. It reads as follows: BUR FILES REVEAL A .22 CAL IVER JOHNSON SERIAL H18602 REPORTED DESTROYED 7-00-68 BY PD LOS ANGELES. In other words, an Iver Johnson revolver with the precise serial number that Wolfer claimed was Sirhan's gun in a "clerical error" was destroyed the following month, a full nine months prior to Sirhan's trial.

When Sirhan's gun was reexamined by a panel of ballistics experts appointed by Superior Court Judge Robert Wenke in 1975, they found the inside of the barrel heavily coated with lead, which would have obfuscated any identifying marks. To clear the lead, they fired two copper coated bullets first. Given that the bullets recovered from the Ambassador were copper coated and Sirhan had definitely spent hours firing at a range that day, it would be logical to conclude that Sirhan had been firing uncoated bullets at the range and only blanks the night of the shooting. If he had fired any of the copper coated bullets, the lead would have been cleared from the inside of the barrel of his gun.

There is one answer that matches all of the available evidence. That is simply that the gun provided for test firing by the Wenke experts was simply not Sirhan's gun, that Sirhan's gun had been destroyed, as evidenced by the LAPD teletype above, along with other critical evidence, long ago.

And that ends our story about the assassination of Robert Kennedy. There is far more to tell, but the fact is, there are more important things to discover than who, specifically, murdered Bobby Kennedy on June 5, 1968. I would certainly hope that the man who almost assuredly fired the shot that killed Bobby, Thane Eugene Cesar, could one day be extradited from his current home in the Philippines and brought to trial for this horrific crime. But that won't change the fact that the real criminals, the masterminds behind the assassination of Bobby, John, Martin Luther King and many others, are still at large and will likely never be brought to justice.

Even if some of them were brought to court and convicted, justice would not be served. There is no justice in either locking up or putting to death a murderer or a conspirator in a murder. More will follow in their footsteps. The carnage, the lies and the manipulation will continue. No new evidence, no new trial and no new elected leader will change the fact that these murders have been given tacit approval by us, through our silence, inaction and acquiescence to continue in their murderous ways in perpetuity.

On September 11, 2001 they committed their biggest political assassination to date. Despite a wealth of information that contradicted the official story, we remained silent. We accepted an absurd verdict, turned our heads and told ourselves that everything would just work itself out. Emboldened, they moved on to an even bigger political assassination. They blatantly and demonstrably lied, forging intelligence documents to justify the invasion of a defenseless country, namely Iraq. Again, after a brief whimper of protest, we shut up and continued on with our lives.

The lies and the killing continue, and will continue to continue. Soon, the victims will be you and your children if you dare to utter the obvious truth. There will be no one to come to your defense. Any review of the evidence after the fact will mean as much to you as this series of articles has meant to Bobby Kennedy.

Barack Obama will not change the course of this country. John McCain will certainly not change the course of this country. No leader, even another Bobby Kennedy, can do a single thing to change the course of this country. There is only one hope, and it is a slim one given the evidence of the past several decades. We, the citizens of the U.S., will have to pull our heads from the sand, or some other place where the sun doesn't shine, and look the truth of what we have become straight in the eye.

We must acknowledge certain unassailable facts. First and foremost amongst those is the fact, well established in psychological circles yet virtually ignored in public discourse, that there is a portion of our population that is genetically without conscience. That difference makes them capable of performing acts of unthinkable cruelty, including torture, child abuse and mind control, while maintaining a facade of seemingly complete normalcy.

Another key to the puzzle is the realization that their influence spreads far wider than we have imagined or would really like to allow ourselves to believe. This brief overview of Bobby Kennedy's assassination is only emblematic of a situation that is typical, rather than extraordinary. A nearly identical story can be told from a thousand different starting places, from alleged "serial killers" and child abuse/pornography rings, right up through the events of 9/11 and all that this Pathocracy* has been able to achieve in its wake.

This web stretches through every part of society. The LAPD is notorious for its cover-ups and abuse, but they are hardly alone. The web includes police departments, judges, politicians, celebrities and corporate executives from all over the country and all over the world. What works in favor of keeping this web, and the unbelievable depravity of the actions of its inhabitants, hidden is the incredulity any normal person feels when faced with even a hint of its size.

It is not even remotely possible to see the web for what it is without critical pieces of the puzzle. Yet, if we can't see the web, we will become the spider's next victims. This is the end of the Bobby Kennedy portion of the series, but there is more to come...things you'll have to see for yourself to believe.

* Pathocracy (from Gk. patho "disease" + kratos "rule, strength") According to Andrew M. Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology, "Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies... and turned them into caricatures of themselves."