[1] June 5, 1968

Fifty years ago, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, moments after winning the California Democratic primary. A lone gunman was captured at the scene, pistol in hand. Police said the case was open and shut. But was it? Meet Bill Klaber (author, Shadow Play) - a researcher who has a very different idea of what happened on June 5, 1968.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
My name, Sergeant Jordan is his Rampart detectives. What is
your naswer? No comment? This is an LAPD Pleae state
from June fifth, nineteen sixty eight. It's the middle of
the night in an interrogation room at the Ramparts Division
in downtown Los Angeles. All right, I have to advantise

(00:32):
you that you have a right romain silent, and if
you give up the Sergeant Jordan speaks to a young
man early twenties. Short, he's a little beat up and
breathing heavily. You understand this now you're you're shaking your head.
You do understand me? All right? Now, would you tell
me what your name is. I want to abide by

(00:53):
your first admonishment keep I want to abide your first
admonishment to the right of keeping silent. Demand whispers by
this not only wish to remain silent as to any
part of this case, but you do not wish to
identify yourself. He won't reveal his name, all right, sir?
That is your privilege. And what's so strange about that

(01:17):
is that this quiet young man has just inserted himself
into American history in the most explosive and public way. Imaginable.
He's been arrested for something that you only do if
you want everyone to know your name. Is this all
your property here? I mean, is there any outside? I
don't want it to get lost. Sergeant Jordan catalogs the

(01:38):
items found on the suspect at the time of his arrest,
also a comb, but key and clipping. Here you and
your friends are cordially invited to come and see and
hear Robert Kennedy on Sunday, June second, nineteen sixty eight,
at eight pm the Coconut growth, the ambassador, thank you

(02:02):
very much. Ye have two unexpended cartridges which appear to
be twenty two caliber. All right, now, would you tell
me about your name? Maybe what we're hearing here is
someone who just wants to relish his last moment of anonymity.

(02:23):
I'm gonna find anything We'll have to do is branch
you Mabel told. Or maybe what we're hearing is someone
who has no idea what he's just done. From Crimetown.

(02:45):
You're listening to the RFK tapes. I'm Zack Stewart Pontier.
Over the next ten episodes, we're going to plunge into
the vaults of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination. It's a
murder that changed the course of American history and a
case authority have claimed for the last fifty years was
open and shut. When Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot

(03:15):
at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles minutes after winning
the nineteen sixty eight California Democratic primary, Dallas was on
everyone's mind. Dallas was where Bobby's older brother, President John F. Kennedy,
had been assassinated less than five years earlier. There a
sloppy investigation and the murder of the only suspect in

(03:37):
the case had left public doubts and swirling conspiracy theories
about who had really killed JFK. And so after RFK
was shot in the early morning hours of June fifth,
nineteen sixty eight, the date is June fourth, nineteen sixty eight,
they recorded everything Peen sixty eight at the time as

(04:01):
two thirty five am. This would not be another Dallas.
Come we get scover what what you saw. On What Happened?
Olympic track star raypher Johnson describes the scene at the
Ambassador Hotel just before the election results came in. Team
and camera set up back here high and just people everywhere.

(04:22):
All of these were filled with people. We have a
call here for Senator Kennedy, that Senator Kennedy will be
the victor in California. Jolie is now he's entering the
ballroom and you can hear the choose from the support.
The senator made his way to the podium and quieted

(04:43):
down the crowd. Thank you very much, Thank you very much,
Thank you very much. I want to express my gratitude
to my dog Freckles, who's been the line. And it's
not I'm not doing this in the order are importance,
but I also want to thank my y Vessel. Supporters

(05:08):
were celebrating what they hoped would be the beginning of
a new era of healing for a deeply divided country. Now,
what has been going on within the United States over
the period of the last three years, the divisions, the violence,
the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between
black and Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis
just two months earlier, between age groups or on the

(05:30):
war in Vietnam happened. The Vietnam War was sending thousands
of young Americans home in bodybags, a country wants to
move in a different direction. We want to deal with
our own problems within our own country, and we want
peace in Vietnam. For many, Robert F. Kennedy was the
answer that we can start to work together. We are
a great country and a compassionate country, and I intend

(05:51):
to make that My basis were running and over the
period of when he finished, just ask of people moving
up was pressed on around him. He was surrounding. He
went through a door on this side and behind the
stage into what looked like the kitchen. Rapher Johnson tells

(06:11):
the cops that he followed Kennedy into the kitchen pantry.
This is one big room, like a kind of a
hallway through. There's a big table here in the chefs
running back and forth of the food and everyone through
this hallway. A young security guard named than Caesar had
Kennedy by the arm. I had a hold of his
arm here and I was pushing people at by other arm.
And at that moment when we got to the edge

(06:33):
of the steam table, he had reached out and sort
of turned to shake hands with somebody. People were pressing
in right clothes. Now at that time I just hadn't
look up and that's when I seen. All I could
see was an arm and a gun. Send and Kennedy's
been shot. Is that possible? Oh my god, Senator Kennedy's

(06:55):
been shotting shot in the head. The Senator slumped to
the ground as kennedy supporters pounced on the shooter. Gun
my gun, pointed moment, get my gun, get my gun,
Get my gun. George Plimpton, Pimpte and George Plimpton, the
famous writer, explains to the cops how he grabbed the gunman.

(07:18):
I grabbed it on and had the gun in it
and Bennimo was his steam table here and the persons
or other people that grabbed him after Rosie Grant and
came and helped. Rafa Johnson then came and helped get it.
We had his hand with a gun. Had to kept

(07:38):
waving around like this. He was very strong for a
small man. Only Raper. We don't want another on WHI
Raper keep people away from him. To get the gun away.
It takes a crowd of people, including a famous writer,
an Olympic athlete, and a former NFL lineman is on
with on the steam table and the gun. Pinty was
popped out of his head. Wai, gentleman, they have I

(08:00):
got away from the back. It was handed to Rayam
and now you understand you you have possession of the gun.
Will take possession of it. Here at the station, the
officers get their first look at the murder weapon. It
must be twenty two damn things. And I ever Johnson

(08:24):
could deader model number fifty. I would guess that most
of the shots are fired three six, eight, eight shots
expended fired everyone on them. I wonder everybody's laying on
the ground. Then Clinton offers the police a description of
the young man with the gun. Could you describe him

(08:45):
by the Filipino Mexican back? And I would guess do
we call it here? Dog? Here? Either small? He was
a small man, slight man, small face, and a thin
small amount. I can tell you balled about his eyes.
They were Doc Brown enormously peaceful. Back in the interrogation room.

(09:11):
From the top of the show, Sergeant Jordan's still can't
get the young man with the peaceful eyes to tell
them his name. You are in here as a suspect,
and we are attempting good information from you. I mean
you know that we know that we're laying archives on
the table as we get them many hours. How you are?

(09:32):
Who the hell are you? Sorry? Show? This star of
the show has become one of the most notorious political
assassins in American history, joining the likes of John Wilkes,
Booth Lee, Harvey Oswald, and James Earl Ray, men normally
known by all three of their names. But this man

(09:53):
his name only two years to be well, actually man
just one. Sir Han Shan charged in the assassination of
Senator Robert Kennedy in his twenty four year old sir
Han Sirak, the young Arab who er it in the crowd,
unnoticed until he fired the father pulletive of the senator's
brain and of the trial, sir Han Sirhan told his

(10:16):
side of the story for the fourth straight day. Sir
Han Sirhan took the witness stand to day at his
trial for the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy. CBS News
correspondent Bill Staff reports from Los Angeles today, for the
first time, sir Han Sirhan told his version of the
murder of Robert Kennedy. He cursed the Lake Senator, saying
Kennedy had betrayed him by urging the sale of US
jets to Israel. He told Chief Prosecutor Lencompton, I have

(10:39):
a bug, a built in bug in this brain of
mind against the Jews, the Zionist, the Israeli. At another point,
he told Chief Prosecutor Lincomton of an Arab proverb, any
friend of my enemy is my enemy sir Han. Sirhan
admitted to killing RFK, saying he did it for political reasons,
and his habit of seizing on specifics, reciting dates and places,

(11:01):
gave way to a total blank when it came to
the night of the shooting. He remembers, he said nothing.
The prosecution didn't buy it. Well, I think he remembers
the things that he thinks he can safely try to
comfortably answer, and he has to hide bline he's lying.
Then you say he's lying on the stand, Oh yeah,
I think the question my mind about him and for

(11:23):
the defense team who was fighting to save sir Han
from the gas chamber. This blind spot in his memory
was a problem. From my experience, the average juror does
not like to hear that they don't buy that kind
of a story. I would much have preferred that he
remembered everything came there to blast, but Sir Han wouldn't budge.
He insisted that he couldn't remember. This is his story,

(11:45):
this is what he tells, and I've got to put
on what he remembers and what he knows about it.
Are you confident with your case so far that you
will cite sir Han's wife. I'm confident that we have
done the very best we know how. That's all I
can say. Sir Han Surhan was sentenced to death, which
was later commuted to life in prison. Which first thing

(12:11):
I said when Senator Kennedy was killed was that we
are not going to have another Dallas share. Now, this
was obviously an open and shut case right from the beginning.
For law enforcement, the case was a triumph. They had
successfully closed a major political assassination without any lingering questions
or public doubts. We are satisfied that Sirhan Bschera Saran

(12:34):
is the murderer of Senator Robert Kennedy and only he
alone is the murderer. Photographs, physical evidence, and all the
tapes the police recorded. It was all locked away. We've
interviewed four thousand people, and we've done it because someday
somebody for purposes best known of themselves is going to
try to prove that Sarahan didn't do it, that this
list a conspiracy, that this is some big, mysterious plan

(12:57):
that in spite of all the investigation we have na uncover,
we knew what had happened, and it did happen. It
absolutely did. That person that the district attorney predicted might
come along one day to try to poke holes in
his perfect open and shut case, he showed up one
afternoon in the tape deck of my parents' car. Good evening,

(13:25):
I'm Bill Claiber, and tonight we were going to take
another look at the assassination of Robert Kennedy. It was
the nineties. I was ten years old. My dad was
the editor of the local paper in our small town
and upstate New York, and a family friend named Bill
Claiber had given my dad a tape of a radio
show he'd made. Thought it might make for a good
print feature. My dad put it on in the car.

(13:47):
Was her hands her hand, as we were told, really
a fanatical Arab nationalist? Or whoosee? As some think a
robot assassin? Did her hand even murder Robert Kennedy? Or
did someone else did the Los Angeles police conduct an
honest investigation or was there a massive cover up. My
dad ended up passing on the story. He thought it

(14:09):
was kind of out there, But I was taken with
this tape. I didn't know who Robert Kennedy was. I
didn't really know what a conspiracy theory was either, But
this idea that it was possible to uncover hidden stories
and unanswered questions just beneath the surface of history that
was big and scary and kind of exciting. Historians a

(14:31):
century from now will not have to examine these events
through the filter of political expedients. They will see a
conspiratorial mosaic, incomplete but unmistakable. For w JF in Jeffersonville,
New York, this is Bill Clapper reporting A couple of
years ago. As the fiftieth anniversary of rfk's assassination approached,

(14:54):
I thought about Bill again. I wanted to find out
what would make him see such a seemingly simple case
in such a different and complex way. So I tracked
him down, went to go see him. That's coming up
after the break, Chick, Chick, Chick. I've come back to

(15:21):
my hometown in upstate New York and I'm sitting in
Bill Claib's house. Where was the concert? I'm here to
talk to Bill about a radio documentary he made in
the nineties about the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Considering the
temperatures outside, a lot of people showed up, so good.
Bills in his early seventies. He plays softball and volleyball,

(15:42):
and he looks like, well, if this was a movie,
he'd probably be played by Sam Waterston, you know, that
guy from Law and Order. We sit down to talk
in his home office, surrounded by books, files, and of
course tapes. All the tapes you've been hearing throughout this episode,
they all came from Bill. Where are you right now?

(16:04):
Where are we? Where are we? Physically? We're in Acid Dalia.
It sounds like it's flower, right, but it's it's you know,
like a sweet little thing. No. It's named after the
acid factories that were here in you know, like around
the time of the Civil War, and they were taking
stripping the bark off the hemlock trees to make the

(16:25):
acid that they could tan the leather that they could
make saddles and boots for guys to go to the
war and kill each other. Wow. Yeah, that's cool. Well, no, no,
how cool it is, but you know, we think the
water is safe to drink. He said. It's a big
thought when you start to leave a conspiracy and when

(16:45):
you start to think that maybe the version of the
story that you've been taller than true. Yeah, saying about that, well,
I think. Um. I went to my fiftieth college reunion
this year and a couple of times I had the
opportunity to speak about the RFK case and could just
watch people just glass over and these are smart guys,

(17:09):
these are really smart guys. And yet somehow the thought
is too big that the government would actually or elements
of the government would actually conspire to murder Robert Kennedy.
Is the thought beyond what their head can handle. I
know how that feels, because I was the same way,
and I'd look at people saying, oh, Grassy Knoll, Grassy Knoll,

(17:31):
and I'd like, oh God, just get over it. You know,
they talk about conspiracy theorists. Well I'm not. I'm a researcher.
I look at evidence, but they term everybody conspiracy theorists,
as though you sort of sit around and invent conspiracies
in the air. And that's not how it goes. You

(17:53):
look at the evidence sitting here in Bill's home, I
can see that he's spent a staggering amount of time
looking at evidence from the case. That radio show that
I heard as a kid, it was just the beginning
for Bill. Since then, he's collected more tapes, He's tracked
down and interviewed more people who are involved. He wrote
a whole book about the assassination called shadow Play. New

(18:14):
additions out now. So if for you the term conspiracy
theorist conjures up images of someone casually retweeting poorly researched
articles from the darkest corners of the Internet, I get that,
But that's not Bill. What do you think happened? What's

(18:34):
your theory of the case. It's a tough one. Everybody
believes Sirhan when he offers a motive. Suppose atly Sirhan
is protecting his people from the jets that Kennedy is
going to send to Israel. That's the motive. But Sirhan
doesn't remember the crime, and almost everybody's reaction to that is, well,

(18:59):
he's just saying that because he wants to get out
of it, and that's the natural reaction. All by itself. Okay,
you went and shot the guy you don't remember. I'm sorry,
but it's not all by itself. And that's when Bill
takes a hard left onto conspiracy Street. Kennedy has shot
four times at a close range in the back at

(19:21):
a steep upward angle. Sir Hand is never really in
a good position to do that. First, Bill says, the
positioning is all. It turns out that there are more
bullets fired in the pantry thence her hand has in
his gun, and he says there were too many bullets
to a virtual certain So if two guns are firing
now on the pantry, there's a substantial evidence that none
of the bullets from Sir Hand's gun ever struck Robert Kennedy,

(19:43):
there must have been someone else involved. Quite a few
people see a woman in a polka dot dress with
Sir handing we shot him, we shot him, and she
runs down a girl in a polka dot dress. They
went around and appeared to erase all traces of the
co conspiracy was an investigation at all, We're going We
interviewed thousands. If they covered up the tracks of the

(20:03):
people who did the murder, that's bullshit. Excuse me, you
can see how they cook the books, which is not
what they're supposed to be doing. So larger forces must
have been at work. There are people saying, well, you know,
the Mob had it in for Bobby Kennedy. The Mob
would probably put them up to it. I don't know
if any cases were the Mob Hypno program divers assassins.
They don't. They didn't really do business that way. So

(20:25):
if the Mob didn't Hypno program Sir Hans, Sir Han,
then who There were several doctors in California at that
time who were working with intelligence agencies on Hypno programming
projects to try to figure out how to create a

(20:46):
robot assassin. This is certainly a case where that really
might have happened. This is a lot of fun good So, yeah,
there's a lot there. Yeah, big thought. Yeah, most people

(21:07):
came out. Yeah, because an order in order to score
any points, you have to get someone to sit down
and actually look at it. It's hard to do um
and I wonder if maybe we might go back and
explore this thing together, Hypno programming robot assassins. I was

(21:29):
kind of feeling like one of Bill's incredulous former classmates
at his fiftieth college reunion. But then he played me
this tape a tape made in nineteen sixty nine by
psychiatrists who hypnotize Sir Han. Five. At the end of

(21:49):
the five were gon behound this play one, two three five.
Maybe hypnotizing Sir would unlock his memory of the murder.
You're at the Ambassador Hotel. I remember this is Tuesday night.
You're at the Kennedy reception. He gives her hand a

(22:11):
notebook and a pencil and start asking him questions. I
want you to write about Kennedy. Open your eyes and
write about Kennedy. Suddenly, Sir Han's hand comes to life
and he begins scrawling RFK RFK RFK over and over again.
Tell us more than his name, Sir Anne, write more

(22:32):
than the name. What's going to happen to Kennedy? What's
going to happen to Kennedy? Arne rf camus die rf
camus die rf ca mus die rf CA must die,
he said, rf cam must die. But when must he die?
When is Robert Kennedy going to die? He writes, Robert

(22:55):
Kennedy is going to die. Robert is going to die,
Robert is going to die. Sir Haun Sir Hant, Robert
is going to die? Who killed Kennedy? Who killed Kennedy?
He writes, who killed Kennedy? You're writing the question? Write
the answer, Sarah Gold not a lot. Is this crazy, Sara?

(23:20):
Is this crazy? Right? Yes? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes
writing yes yes, yes yes yes. Are you crazy, Sarah?
Are you crazy? He writes no, no, no, no, no
no no. You wrote no. That's a no, Sarah. If

(23:43):
you are not crazy, why are you writing crazy? Practice
Practice for what, sarahm practice for what? Write it down,
sir Am, practice for what? Mind control? Sir An has

(24:10):
written mind's control. Before Bill would answer any of my
questions about mind control, he wanted to tell me how
this whole conspiracy thing got started. For Vern for him

(24:32):
is firing as the result of being part of a conspiracy.
I want to know. It turns out the person who
first started asking questions was a friend of Bobby Kennedy's,
and I want to find out who those people are
and I want to get them. That's next week on
the RFKA tapes, Crimetown is me, Zach Stewart, Pontier and

(24:54):
Mark Smiling. The RFKA tapes is made in partnership with
Cadence thirteen. This show is produced by Jesse Rudoi, Bill Claiber,
Ula Culpa, and Ryan Murdock. Our senior producer is Austin Mitchell,
editing by Mark Smirlin, fact checking by Mick Rousse. This
episode was mixed, sound designed and scored by Kenny Kusiak

(25:18):
with additional music by John Kuciak. Our title track is
Maria Tambien like Krumman music supervisioned by Josh Kessler and
Dylan Bostick at Heavy Duty Projects. Archival footage is courtesy
of the California State Archives. Thank you, Beth. Archival research

(25:40):
by Brennan Reese. Our intern is Kevin Shepherd. For more
information on the Robert Kennedy murder, pick up a copy
of Bill's book shadow Play from Saint Martin's press special
thanks to Gene Claiber, Emily Wiederman, Green Card Pictures, Alessandro Santoro,
Judith Farrar, Grad Johnson, Paul Schrade and the team at cadenceeen.

(26:00):
Guys are the best. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at the RFKA Tapes. For a full list
of credits and for additional content, visit RFKA tapes dot com.
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(26:21):
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