RFK Assassination Conspiracy

Introduction

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy — having just won the California Democratic presidential primary — was shot in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died the following day, June 6, 1968, at Good Samaritan Hospital. He was 42 years old.

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian-American, was tackled at the scene with a .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver in his hand. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1969 and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court temporarily invalidated the death penalty in 1972. Sirhan has remained imprisoned at various California state prisons since 1969.

The case is unusual in that Sirhan has never denied being at the scene and firing his weapon. The conspiracy question does not hinge on Sirhan's innocence but on whether he was the sole shooter and whether he fired the fatal shot.

The Physical Evidence Problem

The fatal wound in Kennedy's case was controversial from the outset. The coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, concluded from powder burns and wound characteristics that the fatal shot was fired from approximately one to one-and-a-half inches behind Kennedy's right ear. Multiple witnesses placed Sirhan in front of Kennedy at a distance of several feet — never behind him, and never within one to two inches.

This discrepancy is the core of the physical-evidence challenge to the lone-gunman conclusion. It has been documented and discussed by investigators sympathetic to the official account and those skeptical of it; the discrepancy itself is not in dispute, only its interpretation.

Bullet Counts and the Polka-Dot Dress Witness

A secondary issue involves the bullet count. Sirhan's revolver held eight rounds. The official evidence showed Kennedy shot four times, with several additional bullets found in the ceiling, doorframe, and pantry woodwork. Some witnesses and investigators, including criminalist William Harper, asserted the total bullet evidence exceeded eight rounds — implying a second weapon. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) disputed this count; the recovered bullets were destroyed or lost before full independent analysis, which became a source of ongoing controversy.

Sandra Serrano and other witnesses reported seeing a woman in a polka-dot dress running from the hotel shouting "We shot Kennedy." The LAPD investigated and concluded the accounts were mistaken or fabricated; critics argued the investigation of this lead was inadequate.

Acoustic Evidence and Paul Schrade

Paul Schrade, a Kennedy friend and campaign aide who was himself shot at the Ambassador Hotel that night, has been among the most credible voices calling for re-examination of the evidence. Schrade was shot in the head and survived. He has publicly argued that Sirhan could not have fired the bullet that hit Kennedy given his documented position, and that a second gunman fired the fatal shot.

In 2018, a federal court rejected Sirhan's appeal for a new trial. The court examined the acoustic evidence submitted by Sirhan's legal team, which claimed to show a second gun firing in an audio recording of the scene, and found the evidence insufficient to warrant a new trial.

Sirhan's Memory Claims and Hypnosis

Sirhan has at various points claimed no memory of the shooting, suggested he was programmed or hypnotised, and raised "Manchurian Candidate"-style claims. These claims have not been substantiated. Mental-state evidence presented at trial showed Sirhan understood what he was doing; his notebooks, recovered from his home, contained written statements expressing hostility toward Kennedy over US support for Israel. The hypnosis framing has been a persistent element of Sirhan's legal strategy but has not prevailed in any court.

RFK Jr. and the 2022 Parole Proceedings

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the senator, has publicly stated his belief that Sirhan did not act alone and that his father's case should be reinvestigated. RFK Jr. met with Sirhan in prison in 2018; he later made public statements calling for a reinvestigation. His views are not shared by all Kennedy family members; his sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has disagreed publicly.

In 2022, the California Board of Parole Hearings recommended parole for Sirhan. Governor Gavin Newsom reversed the recommendation in January 2023, citing the premeditated and violent nature of the crime. Sirhan remains imprisoned.

The LAPD and Evidence Handling

Critics of the official account have pointed to evidence-handling problems: photographs of bullet holes in pantry doorframes that the LAPD subsequently destroyed or failed to preserve; the destruction of Sirhan's gun shortly after initial testing; and what critics describe as a rushed investigation by a department with institutional interests in closing the case quickly amid the trauma of 1968.

The evidentiary gaps are real, though they cut in multiple directions: poor evidence preservation can reflect either cover-up or institutional incompetence, and 1968 forensic standards were substantially below contemporary ones.

What Would Change Our Verdict

• Full independent re-examination of surviving physical evidence with modern forensic techniques
• Declassification of any withheld investigative or intelligence records
• Corroboration of a second shooter from named witnesses or physical evidence

Verdict

Ongoing investigation. Sirhan Sirhan's conviction stands and he was undeniably present at the scene firing his weapon. The physical-evidence discrepancy between the coroner's wound findings and witness accounts of Sirhan's position is documented and unresolved. The acoustic evidence for a second gun has not prevailed in court. RFK Jr.'s calls for reinvestigation reflect legitimate questions that have not been definitively answered. The case remains open as a matter of historical inquiry.

The Pruszynski Recording: A New Piece of Evidence

For decades, no audio recording of the RFK shooting was known to exist. That changed in 2004, when CNN International senior writer Brad Johnson located a reel-to-reel tape in the California State Archives made by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a Polish freelance radio reporter who had left his recorder running while covering Kennedy's victory speech and had followed the senator's entourage toward the hotel pantry. Pruszynski was reportedly roughly 40 feet from the shooting when it happened, and his recorder appears to have kept running through the gunfire, capturing what is the only known audio document of the shooting itself.

The rediscovery of the tape reopened the bullet-count question in a new form. Rather than relying on the memories of witnesses or the physical count of recovered slugs and holes, investigators now had an acoustic record that could, in principle, be counted directly.

Van Praag's Acoustic Analysis and the Thirteen-Shot Claim

In 2005, forensic audio engineer Philip Van Praag — a former senior instructor in commercial audio-video systems for Ampex Corporation — began analyzing the Pruszynski tape together with Robert J. Joling, a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. They presented preliminary findings at the AAFS annual meeting on February 21, 2008, and later that year published their conclusions in the book An Open and Shut Case (2008).

Van Praag and Joling concluded that the recording captured approximately thirteen gunshot-like impulses within about five seconds — five more than the eight rounds Sirhan's Iver Johnson Cadet revolver could hold without reloading, which witnesses agreed he did not do. Van Praag further argued that five of the impulses carried an acoustic "signature" distinct from the other eight, which he attributed to a second firearm of a different make firing in a different direction than Sirhan's gun. He also identified what he called "double shots" — pairs of impulses spaced too closely together, he argued, for a single revolver's trigger mechanism to have produced them. Joling stated publicly that, in his view, "Sirhan did not shoot Senator Kennedy... not only did he not do it, he could not have done it." A Discovery Channel documentary broadcast in mid-2008 aired a version of this analysis and reported its own experts had found somewhere in the range of ten to thirteen shot sounds.

This is a materially different kind of claim than the bullet-count dispute already documented in this case: it is not a matter of physical evidence going missing or being poorly preserved, but a specific technical assertion that the sound of a second gun is embedded in a surviving recording.

The Rebuttal: Competing Experts Find No More Than Eight

Van Praag and Joling's conclusions have not been accepted by the audio-forensics community at large, and the case for a second gun on tape is far from settled in the analysts' favor. Historian and author Mel Ayton — whose 2007 book The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy argues for Sirhan's sole guilt — published a detailed critique in November 2007 (updated after the 2008 broadcast) arguing that the Discovery Channel documentary had used unscientific methods to dramatize an unproven claim. Ayton's critique noted that Van Praag's findings were not submitted as a peer-reviewed written report before being aired publicly, and that even Discovery's own retained experts disagreed with one another — one team counting roughly thirteen shots, another, led by audio engineer Wes Dooley, counting closer to ten.

Separately, according to reporting on the dispute, a group of five other acoustics experts in the United States and United Kingdom who examined the same Pruszynski recording found acoustic evidence of no more than eight shots — consistent with Sirhan's revolver alone and inconsistent with a second gun. Ayton's later edition of The Forgotten Terrorist added a further technical rebuttal by analyst Michael O'Dell disputing the two-gun reading of the tape.

This dispute reached a court in 2018, when a federal court considered acoustic evidence submitted on Sirhan's behalf in support of a new trial and found it insufficient to overturn the conviction — the same 2018 ruling already noted elsewhere in this article. The acoustic question therefore sits exactly where the rest of this case does: a specific, technical anomaly has been raised by named researchers using a real recording, it has been publicly and substantively disputed by other named researchers using the same recording, and no court or independent forensic body has resolved which side is correct. It is neither proof of a second gunman nor a debunked fringe claim — it is a live, adversarial forensic dispute.

The Wound, Revisited: What a 2018 Medical Review Added

Separately from the acoustics dispute, in June 2018 — the fiftieth anniversary of the shooting — a team from Duke University School of Medicine (Jordan Komisarow, Theodore Pappas, Megan Llewellyn, and Shivanand Lad) published a peer-reviewed clinical review in the Journal of Neurosurgery re-examining Kennedy's injuries and the medical care he received. Drawing on the original medical records, eyewitness accounts, and the autopsy, the review documented extensive damage to Kennedy's right cerebellum and right occipital cortex, brainstem involvement, and bullet and bone fragments scattered through brain tissue, consistent with a shot fired at very close range from behind. The authors noted that his care followed reasonable standards for 1968 given roughly 45 minutes of pre-hospital transport time, and that a comparable wound would still carry a very poor prognosis today.

The Duke review does not take a position on the second-gunman question — it is a clinical, not investigative, analysis — but it is worth including here because it independently corroborates, from a medical rather than a ballistics standpoint, the severity and back-of-the-head trajectory of the fatal wound that Noguchi's original autopsy described. It neither strengthens nor weakens the conspiracy claims; it simply confirms, from a separate professional discipline decades later, that the wound characteristics investigators have argued over since 1968 were real and severe.

Family Division Over Sirhan's Parole

The RFK Jr. reinvestigation calls documented elsewhere in this article are only part of a wider and more public family split that played out during Sirhan's parole proceedings. On August 27, 2021, at his sixteenth parole hearing, a two-person California parole board panel recommended Sirhan, then 77, for release after 53 years of imprisonment. Two of Robert Kennedy's sons spoke in favor: Douglas Kennedy told the board he was moved by Sirhan's expressions of remorse, saying he was "grateful today to see him as a human being worthy of compassion and love," and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. submitted a letter arguing his father "would strongly encourage this board to release Mr. Sirhan."

Six of Robert Kennedy's nine surviving children took the opposite view. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Joseph P. Kennedy II, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Christopher G. Kennedy, and Rory Kennedy signed a joint statement opposing release, writing that Sirhan "took our father from our family and he took him from America." This is a genuine, sourced disagreement within the Kennedy family itself — not just between RFK Jr. and outside investigators — and it underscores that even people with direct personal stake in the case do not agree on what the outcome should be. In January 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom reversed the parole board's recommendation, writing in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that Sirhan had not developed "the accountability and insight required to support his safe release," citing what Newsom described as Sirhan's shifting account of the assassination and his continued refusal to accept full responsibility for it. A subsequent parole hearing in March 2023 again ended in denial. Sirhan remains incarcerated.

Why This Still Counts as Ongoing, Not Resolved

None of the material above changes the verdict on this case. The acoustic dispute is a genuine forensic disagreement between named experts examining the same physical recording, not a fringe claim invented after the fact — but it has been substantially challenged, was found insufficient by a federal court in 2018, and has not produced a second weapon, a second shooter's identity, or physical corroboration of any kind. The Duke medical review adds independent confirmation of the wound's severity and trajectory without adjudicating who fired it. And the Kennedy family's own division over parole shows that even the people closest to the victim read the existing evidence differently. Taken together, this is exactly the profile of an unresolved case: documented anomalies that keep the door open, propagated by credentialed people making falsifiable claims, met by equally credentialed rebuttals — with no new physical evidence, confession, or court finding on either side since 2018.