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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 12:56 am Post subject: New evidence challenges official picture of Kennedy shooting |
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| Quote: | New evidence challenges official picture of Kennedy shooting
The official record states that senator Robert F Kennedy, like his brother before him, was killed by a crazed lone gunman. But the assassination of a man who seemed to embody so much hope for a bitterly divided country embroiled in an unpopular war still troubles this nation.
Little about the official explanation of the events at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5 1968 makes sense. Now a new forensic analysis of the only audio recording of the fatal shots has given new weight to a controversial theory that there were in fact two shooters, and that the man convicted of Kennedy's killing — Sirhan Sirhan - did not fire the fatal shots.
Following his victory speech to supporters after clinching a tight democratic primary victory in California, Kennedy left the podium in the Embassy ballroom to address a press conference.
Bloody mayhem
But the shortcut he and his entourage took through the hotel's pantry quickly descended into bloody mayhem. As Kennedy turned from shaking hands with two of the kitchen staff, a gunman stepped forward and began firing. Kennedy was hit by four shots including one which lodged in the vertebrae in his neck and another which entered his brain from below his right ear. He died in hospital the following day. Five other people were injured but survived.
Sirhan - a Palestinian refugee who said he wanted to "sacrifice" Kennedy "for the cause of the poor exploited people" - was quickly apprehended. He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.
"Sirhan was apprehended at the scene with literally a smoking gun," said acoustic forensic expert Philip Van Praag of PVP Designs, who has carried out the new analysis. "At the beginning many people looked upon this as an open-and-shut case. It was one man, Sirhan Sirhan, who was observed by a number of people, who aimed and fired a gun in the direction of Kennedy's entourage."
Close range
But the lone gunman explanation has always looked shaky. The autopsy of Kennedy's body suggested that all four shots that hit him came from behind, and powder marks on his skin showed they must have been from close range.
But Sirhan was in front of Kennedy when he fired, and after shooting two shots was overcome by hotel staff, who pinned him to a table. Also, Sirhan fired eight shots in total, yet 14 were found lodged around the room and in the victims.
"There is no doubt in our minds that no fewer than 14 shots were fired in the pantry on that evening and that Sirhan did not in fact kill Senator Kennedy," said Robert Joling, a forensic scientist who has been involved with the Kennedy case for nearly 40 years. He and Van Praag have published a book on the killing this week entitled "An Open and Shut Case".
The inconsistencies in the case have bred numerous conspiracy theories, including the involvement of the CIA and the idea that Sirhan - who claims not to remember the shooting and pleaded insanity at his trial - was a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin who was hypnotically programmed to kill the senator.
Audio recording
Now Van Praag has added new weight to the 'two shooters' theory. He reanalysed the only audio recording of the shooting, which was made by an independent journalist, Stanislaw Pruszynski. "At the time Pruszynski was not even aware that his recorder was still on," said Van Praag.
The recording quality is poor, but it is possible to make out 13 shots over the course of just over 5 seconds, before what Van Praag describes as "blood-curdling screams" obscure the sound. That is more than the eight rounds that Sirhan's cheap Iver Johnson Cadet 55 revolver carried.
Also, there are two pairs of double shots that occurred so close together it is inconceivable that Sirhan could have fired them all. The third and fourth shots and the seventh and eighth were separated by 122 and 149 milliseconds respectively. In tests, a trained firearms expert firing under ideal conditions could only manage 366 milliseconds between shots using the same weapon. And he was not being pinned to a table at the time.
Frequency anomalies
Lastly, five of the shots - 3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 in the sequence - were found to have odd acoustic characteristics when specific frequencies were analysed separately. Van Praag thinks this is because they came from a different gun pointing away from Pruszynski's microphone.
To recreate this he recorded the sounds made by firing the Iver Johnson and another revolver, a Harrison and Richardson 922. At least one member of Kennedy's entourage was carrying this weapon when the killing happened. In the acoustic tests it produced the same frequency anomalies Van Praag had seen in the original recording but only when fired away from the microphone.
He presented his results on Thursday at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington DC.
Paul Schrade, a close associate of Kennedy's who was director of the United Auto Workers union, was at the senator's side in the pantry and was shot in the head. He told the meeting that America lost an outstanding leader and potentially great president that day.
Lost hope
"I think we were in a position of really changing this country," he said. "What we lost was a real hope and possibility of having a better country and having better relations around the world."
He wants to see the case reopened and properly investigated. "We're going to go ahead and do our best to find out who the second gunman was and that's going to take a lot of work," he said.
Van Praag also wants the case reexamined. "We would hope that the evidence that we have uncovered ... would make a strong enough case to get serious consideration once again by the authorities," he said.
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from http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/22/kennedy.assassination |
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major.tom
Macho Business Donkey Wrestler
Joined: 21 Jan 2007
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:22 am Post subject: |
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If it's true that they found 14 bullets, how in the h*ll could they account for the other 6? "Oh, they're from a previous political assassination."
Sure doesn't inspire confidence in the justice system. |
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faceless
admin
Joined: 25 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 12:56 am Post subject: |
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This is a report from NBC about a Forensic Scientists' convention where evidence is shown that the person who shot Kennedy was behind him, not in front as Sirhan Sirhan was.
I just read this theory on another site, but it's not public, so here's the quote.
| Quote: | Ultimately, I don't give a fuck about a guy who ordered and logistically facilitated the wiretaps to be placed on Martin Luther King's phones, but hey a crime's a crime. What I do notice in all of these new reports is how they don't even mention the real shooter Thane Eugene Cesar who was forensically in the prime kill spot. Cesar was a part-time armed security guard escorting Kennedy, a 26-year-old Lockheed aerospace worker named Thane Eugene Cesar who had been called to work at the Ambassador at the last minute by his employer, Ace Guard Services. According to witnesses, Cesar had been standing closest to Kennedy on the Senator's right and slightly to the rear when Sirhan had begun firing. Apparently, Kennedy suddenly grabbed Cesar's clip-on necktie with his right hand when hit as that tie was less than a foot away from the Senator's right hand while he was lying fatally wounded on the hotel's kitchen floor. Interviewed by Los Angeles police detectives shortly after the assassination, Cesar admitted on tape that he had removed his revolver from his holster during the shooting in the pantry but insisted he never fired it.
Cesar also admitted to investigator Theodore Charach that he had owned a .22-caliber revolver similar to Sirhan's, but claimed he had sold the weapon in February 1968, a claim eventually proved to have been false, as it had been later discovered that Cesar had instead sold it three months after the assassination. The buyer of that revolver had later reported it as stolen. The revolver that Cesar had been carrying at the time of the Kennedy shooting was not test-fired by the police.
They also recovered the 9-shot .22 handgun (assassin's and serial killer weapon of choice) allegedly used by Cesar. Charach displayed copies of documents recovered from state archives which bolstered the 1970 testimony of criminalist William Harper. Harper testified that LAPD criminalist DeWayne Wolfer had falsified the results of the test-firing of the gun used by Sirhan. The documents clearly show the serial number of the gun test-fired by Wolfer as H-18602. Yet, the serial number of Sirhan's gun is actually H-53725. Wolfer has always stated (even under oath) this discrepancy was merely a "clerical error."
Charach also revealed that last year (1994) he made a trip to the Middle East. During that trip he met with members of the Israeli Mossad who, Charach implied, had been aware of the CIA's use of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan as a mind-control subject and a programmed assassin. He offered up a film he had made of these discussions with the Mossad agents to any legitimate news service organization for airing and analysis on American television.
Another film he offered to any news service organization was that of an interview of shooting eyewitness Donald Schulman who that night told Jerry Dunphy of KNXT news (now KCBS) that a security guard had fired his gun back at Sirhan and had accidentally shot RFK. Jerry Dunphy and KCBS have denied that this interview ever took place. Of course, since no news organization was represented at the press conference, nobody took Charach up on his offer to air either of these films.
Finally, Ted Charach, who refers to himself as the "Father of the Second Gun Theory" in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, has teamed up with feature film producers, Beaux Carson and Tim Gibbons to tell the story of the search for the second gun and the lives who have been affected by the search.
The project is titled, "Operation Tinker Toy" - Phase I and Phase II. It's the story of how the gun turned up in the possession of certain residents of a little town in Arkansas, and how their lives took rather dramatic turns for the worse under possession of this gun. Their story is told within the backdrop of Charach's 25 year search for it.
At one point during the press conference, Beaux Carson brought in a man toting a metal briefcase and a handcuff attached to his wrist. Inside the briefcase was the nine-shot, .22 caliber revolver, serial number Y-13332, salvaged from a muddy pond in Arkansas after 25 years. This is the gun which was owned by Thane Eugene Cesar and which Charach believes is the second gun used in the assassination. Sirhan's gun was an eight-shot, Iver-Johnson Cadet, .22 caliber revolver, serial number H-53725.
This was the first public display of the gun since its recovery in 1993. Carson announced that tests on the gun and test-firings will be made sometime this year by independent forensic labs. He stated he had also been approached by law enforcement agencies who expressed interest in test-firing the gun using their own forensic experts. He hesitated to identify which law enforcement agencies were interested. |
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