Die-Hards Are at It Again on Kennedy Death

The die-hard doubters, conspiracy buffs and second-gun theorists are at it again. They’re sniffing like long-eared hounds through the files of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination in the state Archives in Sacramento.

Somewhere in the 50,000 documents collected by the Los Angeles Police Department they are hoping to find the track of a phantom gunman hidden from public view for almost 20 years.

They were eagerly waiting when the records, maintained in secrecy for a generation, were made public last week. And, once again they speculated that Sirhan B. Sirhan may not have been the only gunman in the Ambassador Hotel’s pantry when the New York senator was shot.

Never mind that Sirhan, now 42 and hoping for parole from Soledad Prison, said in a telephone interview two years ago, “. . . I killed the senator and acted alone. That is true and I have admitted that.�

Never mind that the LAPD formed Special Unit Senator and conducted a yearlong investigation, interviewing nearly 5,000 individuals as it tracked down conspiracy theories in the most extensive probe in department history.

Never mind that Los Angeles city and county authorities conducted investigations of the original investigation without finding much more than some mislabeled bullet evidence at Sirhan’s trial and the LAPD’s destruction of door jambs and ceiling tiles, which were not introduced as evidence.

Never mind that the LAPD and FBI, and who knows how many other government agencies, would have had to engage in a grand conspiracy for some unknown motive to conceal the existence of a second gunman.

The doubters are undeterred.

They still talk about the LAPD’s destruction of bullet-punctured ceiling panels, about seeming discrepancies between the physical evidence and eyewitness accounts, about the paucity of scientific reports and about “sloppy� work by an LAPD criminalist.

And, they seemingly ignore the implications of an unique “second gun� discovery hearing held in Los Angeles Superior Court nearly 13 years ago. Here’s the way it unfolded:

Seven noted ballistics experts were brought to Los Angeles at county expense in 1975. They fired Sirhan’s gun, exhaustively examined bullet evidence introduced at Sirhan’s trial and later responded that:

“There is no substantive or demonstrable evidence to indicate that more than one gun was used to fire any of the bullets examined.�

At least three of the criminalists came close to positively identifying Sirhan’s .22-caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet as the weapon used in the assassination attack, but ultimately, each panelist decided that there simply were not enough identifying marks on the bullets to do that.

The skeptics called a press conference and said, in effect: Ah, ha! since the experts failed to positively identify Sirhan’s gun, then the question of a second gun remains open. Strictly speaking, that’s true.

But what if you relate another of the panel’s findings to Sen. Kennedy’s assassination? The experts discovered that the muzzle of Sirhan’s .22 had been damaged in a way that marked bullets with a double-furrowed gouge.

They found that characteristic gouge on bullets taken from Kennedy and two other victims, Ira Goldstein and William Weisel, and on test bullets fired by the LAPD in 1968 and by the experts themselves.

Also, five of the experts found--directly or inferentially--that bullets recovered from the three victims came from the same gun. However, they declined to identify Sirhan’s revolver as that gun because of the possibility that another weapon exactly like it might exist somewhere.

But, consider this:

For a second gunman to have shot Kennedy or the others, the invisible assassin would have had to fire a revolver exactly like Sirhan’s, down to the damaged barrel, while using the same copper-coated, mini-mag, hollow-tip ammunition and shooting at the same time as Sirhan. And, without being seen by people closest to Kennedy in a pantry crowded with 70 people.

Now, what are the odds of a second gun? You’d have a better chance of winning the California Lottery.