Who shot Robert F. Kennedy? Five conspiracy theories

Former senator’s son is leading calls for a
new investigation into the 1968 assassination

In Depth

Fifty years after the assassination, his son is calling for a
new investigation, as Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of his
father’s murder, remains in prison serving a life sentence.

Last year Robert F. Kennedy Jr met Sirhan “face-to-face”,
reports CBS News. He left that meeting believing
the gunman had been “falsely accused”.

Kennedy Jr told The Washington Post that once he saw the
autopsy report, “I didn’t feel it was something I could dismiss. I
was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of
killing my father.”

So what are the theories surrounding Robert F. Kennedy’s
death?

Sirhan Sirhan

A jury convicted Sirhan of first-degree murder and sentenced him
to death in 1969. This was commuted to a life term in 1972.
Sirhan’s appeals have been rejected “at every level”, according to
The Washington Post. They were rejected as recently as two
years ago, “even with the courts considering new evidence that has
emerged over the years that as many as 13 shots were fired when
Sirhan’s gun held only eight bullets”.

There’s plenty of “damning evidence” against Sirhan, adds the
paper. This includes his confession at trial, the hours of target
practice with his pistol earlier in the day and taking the gun into
the Ambassador Hotel that night.

Immediately after his arrest, following the shooting, Sirhan
told his captors that he’d made the decision to kill Kennedy only
three weeks earlier, reports the Israeli news organisation Haaretz. “On the radio, he had heard a speech
delivered by the candidate during a visit to a synagogue, in which
Kennedy promised to arm Israel with dozens of warplanes, calling it
the lesson he’d learned from the Six-Day War a year earlier.”

Sirhan is now 74.

The second shooter theory

One of the driving forces behind the belief that there was a
second gunman is the testimony of Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas
Noguchi. He maintained from the start that Kennedy was shot from
behind and at a closer range, which witnesses said Sirhan could not
have done.

The Los Angeles Times reported Noguchi’s findings in 2005:
“Eyewitnesses put Sirhan no closer than 18 inches from Kennedy, but
Noguchi testified that when the fatal wound was inflicted the gun
was 1 inch to 1 1/2 inches from Kennedy’s ear. His testimony fed
conspiracy theories that Sirhan had not acted alone.”

Witness Paul Schrade, who is supporting Sirhan’s ongoing appeal,
said: “I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted
Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second
gunman.” 

Fellow witness Nina Rhodes-Hughes told CNN in 2012: “What has to come out is that
there was another shooter to my right.”

Security guard as second shooter

Thane Eugene Cesar was the security guard who was standing
behind Robert F. Kennedy when the presidential candidate was
assassinated.

“There were dozens of articles that have come out saying that I
carried a second gun, and that I possibly could’ve been the person
who shot Bobby Kennedy – because the bullet entered the back of his
head,” Cesar told author Dan Moldea for
the book The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of
Motive, Means, and Opportunity.

Cesar was standing directly behind Kennedy and gave “different
versions of his movements” – and different accounts of when he drew
his gun – the Moldea book says. The security guard was a
supporter of 1968 American Independent Party presidential candidate
George Wallace and “made no secret of his hatred” of the
politics of both John and Robert Kennedy.

Multiple witnesses saw Thane Cesar “pull out his gun, but only
one accused him of firing it, which Cesar has denied over the
years”, says Heavy magazine.

The key witness cited by many believers of the second gunman
theory is a man named Don Schulman, who was then a runner for
KNXT-TV.

Hypnosis

Though Sirhan admitted at his trial in 1969 that he shot
Kennedy, he claimed from the start that he had no memory of doing
so.

More recently, Sirhan’s lawyers have explored whether he was
“hypnotised to begin shooting his gun” when given a certain cue,
hiring an expert in hypnosis from Harvard to meet him, says The
Washington Post.

In 2016, the US magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich dismissed
the suggestion.

CIA

In 2006, filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan stated that while
researching a screenplay based on the hypnosis theory for the
assassination of Robert Kennedy, he uncovered “new video and
photographic evidence” suggesting that three senior CIA operatives
were behind the killing.

“I did not buy the official ending that Sirhan acted alone, and
started dipping into the nether-world of ‘assassination research’,
crossing paths with David Sanchez Morales [a CIA operative who died
in 1978],” O’Sullivan told The Guardian.

“When the subject of the Kennedys came up in a late-night
session with friends in 1973, Morales launched into a tirade that
finished: ‘I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was
in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.’”

Since 2006, a number of people have discredited O’Sullivan’s
theory, including David Talbot who wrote the book
Brothers about RFK and JFK. Talbot discovered that one of
the three senior CIA operatives supposedly behind the killing had
died six years earlier.