Lawrence Teeter
The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Panel was held on Sunday morning. Several speakers emphasized their view that, as Sirhan Sirhan is still alive, exposing the RFK conspiracy could be the catalyst for exposing the other major political murders in the United States in the 1960s.
There seem to be two basic issues in demonstrating the official story of RFK's murder is false. First, both the number of bullet holes in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel where RFK was shot, and an acoustical analysis of a tape that recorded the sounds of the assassination, indicate more bullets were fired than the alleged murder weapon could hold. Second, the fatal wound was in the back of RFK's head, while virtually all eyewitnesses say Sirhan Sirhan was in front of Kennedy, and never positioned to shoot him from behind.
"So somebody shot the Senator point-blank, execution style, from the rear," said William Turner, the first panelist that morning. "I think right there, we have an open-and-shut case for conspiracy."
The LAPD investigation was controlled by an elite squad called Special Unit Senator, Turner said, which was run by Lt. Manual Pena and Enrique Hernandez. Both of these men had been on detached duty with the CIA in Central and South America. "Special Unit Senator became a kind of Bermuda Triangle for disappearing documents and reports," Turner said. It is safe to assume, he added, that these documents and reports were destroyed.
Turner was involved in a private investigation, and "saw signs that Sirhan was a Manchurian Candidate hypnoprogrammed to shoot," he said.
In his conference abstract, which closely paralleled his COPA speech, Turner said: "After the shooting a fundamentalist preacher named Jerry Owen, who billed himself as The Walking Bible because he had memorized all 3,600 verses, surfaced to say that he had picked up Sirhan hitchhiking the day before [the assassination], arranged to sell him a horse and was told to be at the back entrance of the Ambassador Hotel the following night at 11:30 with the horse for delivery.
"I interviewed Owen and concluded his story was fictitious, that he was telling it to put an innocent face on a pre-existing relationship with Sirhan.
"Our investigation verified that Owen and Sirhan had been seen together at the preacher's ranch. One of these witnesses reported Owen as saying RFK had to be killed because he would stop the Vietnam War and God would be angry."
It is well-known that Sirhan's notebook had the repeated entry, "RFK must die." That, Turner told the COPA audience, was part of the hypnoprogramming. "We developed a suspect as the programmer. He was Dr. William Joseph Bryant Jr., a former CIA consultant on mind control and a fundamentalist preacher, like Owen.
"He had boasted to two call girls that serviced him --- and I find in my career as an FBI agent that prostitutes were very reliable, I would tend to trust what they say in situations like this --- boasted to two call girls that serviced him that he had hypnotized Sirhan. He had a monumental ego, he couldn't stop bragging."
Turner and other investigators were pointed toward Bryant by Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a leading authority on hypnoprogramming, who explained to them how powerful hypnotic suggestion is. Sirhan's current attorney, Lawrence Teeter, has a petition before the California Supreme Court seeking an evidentiary hearing for a new trial; Dr. Spiegel has promised to testify that Sirhan was under posthypnotic suggestion at the time of the RFK shooting.
The next speaker, Probe co-editor Lisa Pease, said there are four cornerstones to the RFK case. "This case really rests on the medical evidence, the ballistics evidence, eyewitness evidence, and the fact that there were always, from the beginning, other suspects. The LAPD had plenty of other suspects. There was no reason to assume, right from the start as they did, that Sirhan was acting alone."
She considered the medical evidence first. "According to the coroner's report, as Bill Turner just told you, Kennedy was shot from point blank range right behind the right ear. And again, Sirhan's in front of him ... not only that, but Sirhan was a little bit to Kennedy's left, by all accounts. So that would mean not only would he have to be closer, he'd have to be reaching around at quite an awkward angle, with his right hand, to hit Kennedy from there. It just doesn't seem possible." Moreover, Pease said, RFK was shot four times from behind, and at a steep upward angle.
The autopsy report which supported the contention that Sirhan was not positioned to shoot RFK was kept from the jury, Pease said. "It was actually kept from the jury by Sirhan's own defense attorney, Grant Cooper. Just when [coroner Thomas] Noguchi was testifying, and was about to get into the distance issue, it was Grant Cooper who stood up and said, 'We don't need to know that.'"
Not one bullet, Pease said, was ever matched to Sirhan's weapon. "There has never been any proof that the bullets found in the pantry came from the gun that was turned into evidence, and called the Sirhan gun. And in fact, bullets from different victims don't even match each other, all right? There were five people wounded in the pantry that night, and there were a lot of bullets. There were seven bullets recovered, one bullet lost, and as Bill Turner mentioned, there was plenty of evidence of more bullets than the eight that Sirhan's gun could hold."
Not only were the bullets different, Pease continued, but the shell casings were different too. Even LAPD investigators and the FBI couldn't make a match, she said.
"The eyewitness evidence is very telling," she said next. "By all accounts --- and even the LAPD's, what they call 'the best witnesses' --- their best witnesses do not place Sirhan close enough to have made the shots. His gun muzzle was never closer than about two feet. There was one person who said one [foot], and he had a foreshortened view through a camera eye. So I don't give him much credibility. Most people put the gun muzzle itself at least three feet back." And all four shots that hit Kennedy, she reiterated, came from behind him.
"The reason we don't think Sirhan is guilty is not only that he couldn't have made the shots, but he seemed to be in a dazed state. He had unnatural strength." Not only did a prominent expert like Herbert Spiegel say it appears likely, Pease said, but defense attornies at the time of his trial had him hypnotized to see if it would help him remember a period of blackout. He hypnotized so easily, Pease said, that it may be a sign of prolonged conditioning.
Early press reports indicated there were two gunmen --- one being Sirhan, and the second a security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar. "But there was another man who was said to have had a gun. All right? He was caught by a guard, who by the way worked for the same security service as Thane Eugene Cesar, as he ran from the room. A couple of people thought he had a gun rolled up in a poster. He was arrested but then he was let go. His name is Michael Wayne. You don't see much about him in the literature, but he's all over the files."
An early report on TV, Pease went on, had several witnesses saying they'd seen a group of five people --- four men and one woman. One of the men was Sirhan, and most appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent; the woman was apparently the infamous "girl in a polka dot dress" who was seen fleeing the Ambassador after the shooting, saying "We shot him! We shot him!"
In an interesting note, Pease said witness Sandy Serrano described the polka-dot girl as having a "funny nose." This comment was broadcast nationally, and it triggered something in the mind of a cop-turned-reporter in New York City. He sent film and still photographs of a woman to LA Police, who logged these items into evidence. The images, Pease said, were of the daughter of Khaiber Khan. "It's a very interesting possibility that she was, in fact, the girl in the polka-dot dress."
Khaiber Khan is described by Philip Melanson as "A CIA-linked Iranian espionage master working in the RFK campaign in Los Angeles." Khan presented himself to FBI agents who interviewed him as a reluctant witness, an Iranian exile who had been harrassed by the Shah and feared more reprisals. He linked Sirhan to the polka-dot girl, saying he'd seen them together at RFK campaign headquarters late on the afternoon of June 4, primary election day. Khan's own activities on the night of the election are not known, but he insisted he was not at the Ambassador Hotel at the time of the assassination.
"I don't know how many of you are aware, Sirhan is still alive," Pease said, after expressing belief in his innocence. "Lee Harvey Oswald is dead. James Earl Ray is dead now. Sirhan is still alive. If we can free him, we can get the government to open a whole bunch of information about all three of these cases. If this one caves, the others will surely follow. I hope you'll help me bring more visibility to this case."
This set the stage for Lawrence Teeter, who is the current attorney for Sirhan Sirhan. Obviously, all of his statements must be considered with that in mind. Teeter is seeking a retrial for his client.
He began by calling Sirhan "the seventh victim of the conspiracy to assassinate Robert Kennedy. The LAPD began a coverup from the minute this assassination took place. It almost looks as though they were prepared in advance for the assassination.
"When victims were taken to a hospital, they weren't taken to, initially, hospitals where they could get treatment. They were taken to Central Receiving Hospital, where they were x-rayed, and then sent out to other places.
"Central Receiving was an LAPD triage center. There were only two operating rooms there. There were six victims. There were two x-ray rooms, six victims. Time was taken up x-raying these victims.
"What did this do for the LAPD? It gave them a bullet count. By the time these delays in patient treatment took place, and two of the patients suffered head shot wounds, one of them a fatal one, the LAPD at least had what it wanted in the case, which was not treatment for the victims, but a bullet count. That gave them the information they would need to floor manage the manipulation of the crime scene."
From the beginning, Teeter said, LAPD agents descended on the crime scene. "David Butler, an LAPD officer, has stated in tape recorded interviews that he saw two LAPD criminalists extracting bullets from a door frame at the crime scene. That's important, because the bullet count that the LAPD got at Central Receiving disclosed that seven bullets would have been withdrawable from the victims.
"The Sirhan gun held eight bullets. So, if there were extra bullets on the crime scene, and the LAPD said that one bullet was lost in what they called a ceiling inner space, that would prove multiple gunmen --- prove a conspiracy."
Teeter said that Butler's observation that two officers withdrew extra bullets from the crime scene proves that from the beginning, within hours of the assassination, the LAPD conclusively knew that there was a conspiracy in this case ... the cover-up began from Day One. Those bullets were never disclosed."
He said that the door frame and ceiling panels were removed from the crime scene. And this "gutting" of the crime scene, Teeter continued, happened in the Martin Luther King Jr. case, when bushes were cut down, and the JFK case, when the Simmon Freeway sign was removed, sidewalk sections removed, and the windshield disappearing. "Gutting and vandalization of the crime scene is a feature that's common to all these cases, and the police can do it because they manage the crime scene."
Teeter brought up a subject Lisa Pease had mentioned, that Sirhan was not positioned to shoot RFK the way the autopsy shows he shot. "That's absolutely true. And this is a really critical area.
"Sirhan was standing in front of Robert Kennedy, who was shot in the back. Sirhan's gun, according to all witnesses, was betwen one-and-one-half and five feet away. The gun was that far away --- not Sirhan --- the gun. The testimony is unanimous on this point.
"The autopsy report," Teeter continued, "and the testimony of Dr. Noguchi, collectively indicate that the distance between the gun and Senator Kennedy's body, in the rear, was somewhere between actual physical contact, and absolutely no more than three inches. So Sirhan never got close enough." Moreover, Sirhan's weapon was held horizontally, while the gun that killed him was firing "at a sharp upward angle."
So if Sirhan was not positioned to shoot RFK, Teeter wondered, who was? "Lisa's already told you about him. That was security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, who acknowledged to the LAPD, quite frankly, in an interview --- again, I think it was June 6 --- right from the beginning the police knew what had happened in this case --- acknowledged that he led Senator Kennedy into the pantry --- by the arm, he had hold of his arm, so he was in direct physical contact with him --- and when Senator Kennedy turned to his left to shake hands with a busboy --- Mr. Cesar grabbed his arm and pulled him back around, before bringing him forward.
"When the shooting began, Cesar acknowledges he dropped to the ground --- which put him in a position to [fire at an upward angle] --- and he pulled his gun. Not only that, he acknowledges that after the shooting, after the shooting had finished, he advanced on Sirhan with his gun drawn. Rosie Grier ordered him to put it away, so he did. What was he planning to do to Sirhan?"
One witness saw Cesar fire his gun, Teeter said. But the LAPD and the DA's office didn't want to deal with that. Teeter said that the authorities interviewed Cesar, and knew he was an employee of Lockheed Aircraft, "a defense contractor that stood to make billions of dollars in superprofits from the continuation of the war in Vietnam, which Senator Kennedy had promised to discontinue as President."
The authorities also knew, Teeter said, that Cesar was a right-wing racist who supported the candidacy of George Wallace. "Did they consider him a suspect? Not in the slightest! What they did was, at the end of this interview in which he implicates himself ... is they told him, 'Take a hike. Take a vacation. We don't need to see you around for a while.'"
Teeter said that the autopsy report, which would seem to be a key to any defense of Sirhan Sirhan, was withheld from the defense at the time of Sirhan's trial. The trial began in January 1969; in February, the defense still did not have the autopsy report.
They didn't get it, Teeter said, until the testimony of Thomas Noguchi and LAPD investigator DeWayne Wolfer. "But by that time, the defense had already advised the jury, 'We don't contest that Sirhan was the assassin. We acknowledge it. The only issue you'll have to decide is his state of mind.'"
The DA's office is mostly responsible for suppressing the autopsy report, Teeter said. "They sat on this report which blows away their case, which exonerates Sirhan, which implicates somebody else, and which establishes that a conspiracy was at work."
This and other issues are now pending before the California Supreme Court, Teeter said. "Just this one should be enough, if there's equity and justice at work here, to get Sirhan a new trial. Just this one."
Teeter reiterated what Bill Turner had said about Dr. Herbert Spiegel. "He has stated categorically, in his opinion, that to a reasonable medical certainty, in all probability, Sirhan was acting under hypnotic programming when he walked into the pantry. That he was not conscious at the time. That his amnesia is genuine. And that he was programmed to walk in, fire a gun without knowing what he was doing, not be able to recall that he was programmed, and have no memory of events that could implicate anybody else."
This is the only case of its type, Teeter said, in that the patsy is still alive. "That gives it extra importance. On the other hand, support is very slow in coming, because it does look like an open and shut case. But it's not."
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