Who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy? Five conspiracy theories

Five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed in Dallas, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic primary on 5 June 1968.

In the half-century since his death, Bobby Kennedy (as he was known) “has come to embody the Democratic Party’s lost dream”, says Politico’s Joshua Zeitz. He alone, it seemed, “could draw working-class white, black and Latino voters into an umbrella coalition”.

He was an “activist champion of the country’s disinherited”, Chris Matthews, the MSNBC host and longtime political observer, tells Zeitz. He “seemed uniquely capable of preaching a message of reconciliation in a country violently torn at the seams in 1968”, adds Zeitz.

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But others suggest Kennedy’s path to the presidency wasn’t so clear cut. Even one of his aides, Jeff Greenfield, who wrote an alternative history account of a Robert F. Kennedy presidency, “concedes that on this day 50 years ago the path to that actually happening was rocky and uncertain”, says New York magazine.

“We were losing altitude,” de facto campaign manager Fred Dutton told Greenfield. In fact, the day of Kennedy’s death, Dutton “was sceptical enough of our chances to suggest that RFK would take the vice-presidential slot if offered”, says Greenfield.

In the end the world was robbed of even that possibility. But, 50 years after the assassination, Kennedy’s 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.