Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2018 13:21:30 GMT -5
RFK Assassination Ballistics Fiction: The Great Waldo Pepper Bullets
The trajectory study conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department was so superficial for a case of this enormous magnitude and complexity as to be embarrassing to the professional reputation of that Department. – Paul Schrade3
One of the most ridiculed aspects of the John Kennedy assassination is the preposterous claim that one bullet created seven wounds. In that case, we are asked to believe that a bullet entered Kennedy's back at a downward angle, exited from his neck (at an upward angle), turned around and went back down into Connally's back, exited Connally's chest, entered and exited (and shattered) Connally's wrist to land, in near pristine condition, in his thigh, only to work its way out and to end up, undiscovered until by accident, on a cot in the hall of the hospital. This bullet, known among researchers by its Warren Commission exhibit number, CE399, has been called, appropriately, the "magic bullet." Science had been changed. No longer did bullets fly in straight paths; they imitated instead the paths of stunt pilot barnstormers such as the Great Waldo Pepper of movie fame.
The Robert Kennedy assassination requires not just one but several magic bullets to reduce the bullet count to eight. Without even getting into the evidence that there were more bullets than Sirhan's gun could hold, let's focus first on the route those eight supposedly took, according to the official LAPD summary.
As you will recall, five people were shot besides Kennedy, one of whom was shot twice; Kennedy himself was shot four times. Doesn't that add up to ten bullets? Not if the LAPD could come up with some magic ones.
The bullet that pierced Kennedy's coat without entering him took a path of roughly 80 degrees upwards. The bullet was moving upwards in a back to front path (as were all of Kennedy's wound paths). But the LAPD figures this must be the bullet that hit Paul Schrade. Had Schrade been facing Kennedy, he would still not be tall enough to receive a bullet near the top of his head from that angle. But he was not standing in front of Kennedy. He was behind him by all eyewitness accounts, and as shown by the relative positions where the two fell after being hit.
For Sirhan alone to have made all the shots, we are asked to believe that one of the bullets that entered Kennedy's coat just below the armpit exited up and out of the coat just below the seam on top of his shoulders, and then pulled a U-turn in midair to hit Schrade in the head. Schrade has been one of the most persistent in calling for a new investigation of this case for precisely this reason. He knows the report is incorrect, and if it's incorrect, there had to be at least one more gun firing in the pantry.
Ira Goldstein had been shot twice, although one shot merely entered and exited his pant leg without entering his body. He was less fortunate on a separate shot, which entered his left rear buttock. But since there were no bullets to spare, according to the LAPD's strict adherence to the eight-bullet scenario, the pant-leg bullet was made to do double duty. According to the LAPD, after passing through his pants, the bullet struck the cement floor and ricocheted up into Erwin Stroll's left leg. The only bullet that seemed to take a plausible path was the one that hit Weisel in the left abdomen.
One of the big problems the LAPD had with the crime scene was the number of bullet holes in the ceiling tiles. Based on witnesses' recollections, there were too many holes to account for. There are photos of the LAPD running strings through bullet holes in the ceiling to establish trajectories. Somehow, these had to be accounted for.
Elizabeth Evans had bent over to retrieve a shoe she had momentarily lost. Suddenly she felt something had hit her forehead. Medical reports confirm that the bullet entered her forehead below the hairline and traveled "upward", fitting the scenario she remembers. But because the LAPD needed to account for some of the bullet holes in the ceiling, they decided that a bullet from Sirhan's gun had been fired at the ceiling, entered a ceiling tile, bounced off something beyond the ceiling tile, reentered the room through a different ceiling tile, and struck Evans in the forehead. This bullet must have pulled more of a hairpin turn then a U-turn, if the LAPD's version and the medical reports are to be merged.
This left still one unaccounted for hole in the ceiling. Or rather, at least one. We don't know how many holes there were because the tiles were destroyed. But the LAPD knew that there were more than two holes in the ceiling. One of the bullets that entered Kennedy passed straight through on a near vertical path, parallel to the one that entered the coat, but not the body, of Kennedy (the one that supposedly terminated its path in Schrade's head). This bullet supposedly passed through Kennedy and continued on upwards into the ceiling. Since Kennedy was facing Sirhan, and the bullet entered back to front, that would aim the bullet into the ceiling nearly directly above Sirhan's head, according to witness placements of Kennedy and Sirhan. And indeed, there was a tile removed from that very spot. But Sirhan's arm is not the many feet long it would have taken to reach around Kennedy to shoot him from behind, while standing several feet in front of the Senator.
More than Eight Bullets = Two (or More) Guns = Conspiracy
As we have seen, the official police reports strove to present a plausible scenario for where each bullet went. And even if one accepts the accounts above as legitimate, despite the important difficulties in those trajectories, the problem is bigger still. There is a substantial amount of evidence to show that more than eight bullets had been fired in the pantry that night. And if there were more than eight bullets, Sirhan was not a deranged, lone gunman, but somehow part of a conspiracy which has yet to be officially acknowledged.
Evidence of additional bullets surfaced nearly immediately. On June 5, an AP photo was published showing two police officers pointing at something in the center frame of the swinging doors that led into the pantry. The caption read, "Bullet found near Kennedy shooting scene". In 1975, Vincent Bugliosi, who was then working with Schrade to get the case reopened, tracked down the two police officers depicted in the photograph. To that time their identity had been unknown. Bugliosi identified the two officers as Sgt. Charles Wright and Sgt. Robert Rozzi. Both Wright and Rozzi were sure that what they observed was not only a bullet hole, but a hole containing a bullet.
If the hole contained a bullet, then it would have been the ninth bullet, since seven bullets had been recovered from victim wounds and the eighth was to have disappeared into the ceiling (necessary to account for acknowledged holes in the ceiling tiles). So any additional bullet presented a serious problem for those wishing to state there was no conspiracy.
In a declaration filed with the courts, Bugliosi stated:
Sgt. Rozzi had told me and he told me unequivocally that it was a bullet in the hole and when I told him that Sgt. Rozzi had informed me that he was pretty sure that the bullet was removed from the hole, Sgt. Wright replied "There is no pretty sure about it. It definitely was removed from the hole, but I do not know who did it."
Shortly after the assassination, the LAPD removed the doorjambs and ceiling panels in the Ambassador Hotel and booked them into evidence. One has to wonder why someone would tear off a doorframe or book a ceiling panel into evidence if it contained no evidence of bullets.
Investigative reporter Jonn Christian found a Chicago Tribune article authored by Robert Weidrich. Weidrich had evidently been in the pantry as the doorjamb was being removed, for his account contained the following information:
On a low table lay an 8-foot strip of molding, torn by police from the center post of the double doors leading from the ballroom. These were the doors through which Sen. Kennedy had walked....Now the molding bore the scars of a crime laboratory technician's probe as it had removed two .22-caliber bullets that had gone wild.4
Philip Melanson contacted Weidrich in December of 1988. To that point Weidrich had not been aware of the controversy surrounding the number of bullets in the pantry. He told Melanson that the police in the room had been "amazingly cooperative", answering his questions and allowing him access. At that point, neither the police nor any reporters present could have known how significant additional bullet holes would be.
Amongst a great deal of additional evidence that will not be discussed here, perhaps the strongest piece supporting the contentions of Rozzi and Wright came from the FBI. The FBI had taken their own photos of the pantry after the assassination. Three photos in particular have been particularly important to this discussion, photos E-1, E-2, and E-3. The official FBI report of these photos labels them as follows:
E-1 View taken inside kitchen serving area showing doorway area leading into kitchen from the stage area. In lower right corner from the photo shows two bullet holes which are circled. The portion of the panel missing also reportedly contained a bullet.
E-2 A close up view of the two bullet holes of area described above.
E-3 Close up view of two bullet holes which is located in center door frame inside kitchen serving area and looking towards direction of back of stage area.
Bullets do not create bullet holes in wood frames behind victims, exit those holes in the reverse direction, and then circle around to enter victims from the front! There is no way to account for these holes using the existing victim wounds. Two bullet holes in the doorframe would make 10 bullets overall at a minimum.
This particular point so worried the County of Los Angeles that in 1977, Investigator Robert Jackson, writing for Chief Administrative Officer Harry L. Hufford, asked the FBI for any clarification they might offer regarding these photos. The full text of this interesting letter is included here:
Dear Sir:
In the course of an inquiry by the Los Angeles Count Board of Supervisors into certain aspects of the physical evidence at the Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassination, questions have arisen concerning certain FBI photographs. These photographs, purportedly taken by Special Agent Greiner and numbered E-1, E-2, E-3 and E-4, are captioned "bullet holes".
If these were, in fact, bullet holes, it could be inferred that more than one gun was fired in the pantry during the assassination. Mr. Allard Lowenstein, Ambassador to the United Nations, among others, has maintained that a possibility exists that another assassin was present. Mr. Lowenstein and other critics of the official version have referred to the above photographs as representing the official opinion of the FBI inasmuch as the captions are unequivocal in stating "bullet holes".
If the captions had said possible, probable, or apparent bullet holes, one could assume that no precise examination had taken place at the time the photographs were taken. However, the captions would lead one to believe that a determination had been made by someone with the requisite knowledge and skills.
The dilemma we are faced with is that the photograph captions are being used as evidence of the official FBI position in the absence of any other official stated position.
If more bullets were fired within the pantry than Sirhan Sirhan's gun was capable of holding; we should certainly find out who else was firing. If, in fact, the FBI has no evidence that the questioned holes were bullet holes, we should know that so that the air may be cleared.
It is therefore requested that the official position of the FBI regarding these bullet holes be relayed to this office.
Thank you for your cooperation.5
To date, no record of any formal reply to this appears to have surfaced. In addition, new corroboration for this evidence came in 1975, when Vincent Bugliosi tracked down Martin Patrusky, a waiter at the Ambassador and an eyewitness to the shooting. Patrusky gave Bugliosi a signed statement describing all the events he could recall that related to the assassination and its aftermath. He recounted being at the hotel when a few days after the assassination, the LAPD arrived to do a reconstruction of the crime. Patrusky wrote, "Sometime during the incident, one of the officers pointed to two circled holes on the center divider of the swinging doors and told us that they had dug two bullets out of the center divide."6
One final witness whose credibility is hard to shake is FBI agent William Bailey, who stated in an affidavit that he and several other agents of the FBI noted at least two small caliber bullet holes in the center divider. He added, in refutation to the hilarious claim that these holes were made by food carts, "There was no question in any of our minds as to the fact that they were bullet holes and were not caused by food carts or other equipment in the preparation room."
Inexplicably, not only has the LAPD denied that there were additional bullet holes in the pantry, they destroyed the evidence that could have proven their claims true! On June 27, 1969, a destruction order was issued for the ceiling panels and doorjambs which had been removed from the Ambassador and booked into evidence.7 Given that the AP photograph was circulated on June 5, 1968, it seems beyond the realm of plausibility that such an order could have been given in ignorance of the suspicions that would surely surround the doorjamb and ceiling panel evidence.
Ten bullets (and likely more) would indicate that at least two guns were being fired in the pantry that night, and that a conspiracy had been at work. But if more guns were firing, why didn't anyone report this? Or did they?
Multiple Gun Sightings
Contrary to popular belief, there were witnesses who indicated that more than one gun had been present in the pantry that night. Consider the following statements:
"It sounded as if there was more than one gun being used at that point." – Booker Griffin to the LAPD, 7/25/68.
"After the shots, I saw to my left a guard holding a revolver." – Statement attributed to Richard Lubic in a manuscript analyzed in the LAPD files.
"But the security guard had a gun and I think he went like this [drawing a gun] or he put it in a holster or something..." – Lisa Urso to Dr. Phil Melanson.
"I'm pretty doggone sure he fired his gun." – Don Schulman to the DA's office in 1971, reiterating his earlier comments to a reporter on 6/5/68.
"TV reportsÖ.suspect shot at guard, guard shot suspect in the leg." – Intelligence Division log entry from 6/5/68, LAPD.
"Two or three seconds after Kennedy entered the kitchen, he heard 8 or 9 shots in quick succession. (He thought there had been two guns.)" – LAPD interview of Roy Mills, 8/9/68.
"The guy with the gun could have left. No one seemed to pay any attention." – Darnell Johnson to LAPD, 7/24/68.
"My God, he had a gun and we let him go by." – Joseph Klein, referring to a man leaving the pantry in the hurry while Sirhan was being subdued, to LAPD, 7/3/68.
"We had reports from two of the eyewitnesses that there were two assailants involved." – Larry Scheer, KTLA live broadcast footage from 6/5/68.
This is by no means intended to represent a comprehensive list of such statements, but is included here to show that the LAPD had no reason to assume from the start that Sirhan was the only person firing in the pantry that night.
There were Ace Security Guards in the room that night. One of them, Thane Eugene Cesar, told the LAPD the morning of June 5th that when he saw a gun in an extended arm, he reached for his own gun. Incredibly, no one from LAPD asked to see Cesar's gun, or even inquired as to what kind of gun he had on him! If it was not standard procedure, then someone should have followed up with Cesar as to just why he did have a gun that night. If it was standard procedure for guards to carry guns, then the LAPD should at least have questioned each of the guards about their guns, and perhaps should have confiscated and tested them. Cesar once told Ted Charach, "there were three of us [guards who] had their guns out [when the shooting began.]"8
Those who have wished to refute the evidence of conspiracy in this case just choose to ignore statements such as those shown here. People were just confused, or mistaken, and even if Cesar had his gun out, there is no evidence that he fired. Those people should remember, however, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and it would have been prudent for the LAPD to thoroughly investigate these claims if only to refute them. Cesar, for example, claimed to have a .38 on him. But the police never asked to see the gun, never fired any test shots, never followed up on the evidence of too many bullets that necessitated the presence of at least one additional gun.
The perplexing lack of curiosity is amplified by the fact that at least for the next several days, LAPD officers were far from sure that Sirhan was acting alone. In fact, even before Sirhan was taken to the Rampart Station, an APB had been put out on two very different suspects: a man in a gold sweater and a girl in a polka-dot dress.
