The Strange Case of Sirhan Sirhan
A Paranoid's History of the United States #8
On June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. While Sirhan was immediately apprehended and later convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy theories have persisted for over five decades. These theories center on apparent inconsistencies in the official investigation, including FBI reports suggesting more bullet holes than Sirhan's eight-shot revolver could have produced, autopsy evidence indicating Kennedy was shot from behind at point-blank range while witnesses placed Sirhan in front of him, and claims that Sirhan was "hypno-programmed" and has no memory of the shooting.
Dan Moldea is an investigative journalist who spent years investigating the case — conducting polygraph tests, prison interviews with Sirhan, and meticulous examination of the evidence that had fueled conspiracy theories for decades. What he discovered about the supposed "extra bullets," the ballistics inconsistencies, and the flawed original investigation would fundamentally change his understanding of what really happened that night at the Ambassador Hotel.
For more info, check out Dan’s book The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity.
And be sure to sign up for Dan’s newsletter, Mobology.
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TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
NEWS FOOTAGE:
RFK: “So, uh, my thanks to all of you, and now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”
REPORTER: “Oh my God! Senator Kennedy has been shot. I am right here. Rayford Johnson has a hold of a man who apparently has fired the shot. He still has the gun. The gun is pointed at me right this moment, I hope they can get the gun out of his hand.”
WALTER CRONKITE: “Senator Kennedy was a very happy man as he made his way out of the crowd into the hotel kitchen, into the range of a young swarthy assailant. The senator was hit by two bullets. Five other persons were also wounded as bullet sprayed the kitchen. Only the senator was critically hurt. Police later identified the alleged assailant as 24-year-old Sirhan Sirhan, a native Jordanian who came to this country 11 years ago.”
WALTER CRONKITE: “Among the things discovered in a search of Sirhan’s personal effects was a newspaper clipping criticizing Senator Kennedy’s support of United States Aid to Israel. And a notebook with scribbled lines saying Kennedy must be killed before June 5th.”
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: On June 5, 1968, the Kennedy family — and the nation — experienced another tragedy.
At approximately 12:15 a.m., Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Just moments earlier, the 42-year-old senator had departed a celebration following his victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. Among the crowd of seventy-plus people in that pantry area, 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Bishara Sirhan opened fire with an eight-shot revolver, striking Kennedy three times. Kennedy succumbed to his wounds the following day. Five other people were also shot, but they survived.
Sirhan was apprehended at the scene and later charged with the murder of Senator Kennedy, and five counts of assault with intent to commit murder. In April 1969, Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder. He was initially sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to life imprisonment when California repealed the death penalty in 1972.
THE CONSPIRACY
ARCHIVAL: ”Programmed Killers For The Communist Party”
HOST: “What is your definition of a Manchurian Candidate?”
COLIN ROSS: “A Manchurian Candidate is an artificially created multiple personality where the person’s subjected to a whole bunch of procedures, including hypnosis, and a new personality is created, so the ‘out front’ person has no knowledge of the assignment or the activity of the implanted personality who’s controlled by a handler.”
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Sirhan’s conviction has been questioned for over five decades due to apparent inconsistencies in the official investigation. The main doubts stem from evidence suggesting multiple guns were fired that night, with FBI reports identifying bullet holes beyond what Sirhan’s eight-shot revolver could have produced.
Additionally, autopsy evidence indicated Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind his right ear, but witnesses placed Sirhan in front of Kennedy at a distance that would have made this impossible. Some theories suggest Sirhan was “hypno-programmed” and in a hypnotic state during the shooting, which aligns with his consistent claims of having no memory of the event.
In recent years, there’s been a resurgence of support for Sirhan and the idea of his innocence. This movement gained significant momentum around 2018, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly entered the discussion. Perhaps most surprisingly, Paul Schrade, one of the five surviving victims shot that night and a close friend of Senator Kennedy, became Sirhan’s biggest advocate. At a 2016 parole hearing, Schrade even apologized to Sirhan, believing he was not responsible for Kennedy’s death.
DAN MOLDEA
DAN MOLDEA: I was living in Los Angeles in 1985 writing what became my third book, DARK VICTORY: RONALD REAGAN, MCA AND THE MOB, about the mafia in Hollywood, and I was approached by two scholars on the RFK murder case, Greg Stone and Phil Melanson. And they were supported by Paul Schrade, who was one of the five other victims that night at the shooting scene.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Dan Moldea is an investigative journalist who has been on the mob beat since 1974. Moldea says that organized crime itself is inherently “conspiracy crime” — enterprise crime, or crime by association. His work in this area is extensive. His books include THE HOFFA WARS and INTERFERENCE: HOW ORGANIZED CRIME INFLUENCES PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.
Here, Dan is telling me how he came to write the book THE KILLING OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY.
DAN MOLDEA: When Greg and [...] Phil first approached me, they made a very persuasive case that more than one gun had been fired at the crime scene. And the information they gave me wasn’t some conspiracy theory written by some conspiracy nut, it was an FBI report. And what had happened was the FBI had gone in — the LAPD ran the investigation, they owned the investigation, and the FBI went in with sort of a shadow investigation, and they did a an investigation of the crime scene, and they issued a report, and in the report — and this is what put the hook in me. And they had pictures. They had pictures of what they claim were not alleged bullet holes, not um, uh, not possible bullet holes, but bullet holes — four, and then there were circles, and then there was scribbling and a number in the, in the holes. So somebody had marked this evidence, and the FBI assumed that these are bullet holes. So that makes — Sirhan had an eight-shot Iver Johnson revolver. He’s got three shots that hit Kennedy. He’s got five other victims, you know, here, and here’s the FBI, the greatest law enforcement agency in the world, saying that four bullets exist at that crime scene that couldn’t possibly exist. I mean, I’m not a ballistics expert or a firearms identification expert. I don’t know a land from a groove, but I do know this, Joe: an eight shot revolver can’t fire more than eight bullets, that I know. And so I was interested.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Moldea has long maintained a belief in a mob conspiracy behind the assassination of Robert Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy. He was the first journalist to allege in print that Mafia bosses Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santo Trafficante of Tampa, along with Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, had arranged and executed the murder of JFK in 1963.
When he first approached the RFK assassination, Moldea likewise believed it might involve a conspiracy.
PART 1
THE SUSPECT: THANE EUGENE CAESAR
ARCHIVAL — ”The Second Gun”
NARRATOR: “To develop further his alternate theory of the assassination, Charach needed to establish at least one other gun in the pantry besides Sirhan’s.”
PERSON #1: “There was a security man somewhere behind me, I don’t know how far away from me [on what side?], somewhere around right on the left side, you know, right behind Kennedy’s—”
PERSON #2: “I see. Well, that would be say Eugene Cesar, according to an official police diagram.”
DAN MOLDEA: And so I said, Who do you think was behind all this? What’s your theory? And they said a guy named [...] Thane Eugene Cesar. He was a security guard who was hired for the night. He was with an agency, and the agency was hired for crowd control by the Ambassador Hotel, and he was among those security guards hired.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Moldea identified Thane Eugene Cesar as the principal suspect because he was positioned directly behind Kennedy when the shooting occurred, matching the bullet entry locations. Multiple witnesses saw Cesar with a drawn gun after the shooting, and he admitted drawing his weapon. He also had powder burns on his face. Cesar owned a .22-caliber revolver similar to Sirhan’s, which later disappeared after he made false statements about selling it. He also had a potential motive, being a right-wing George Wallace supporter who openly expressed hatred for the Kennedys.
DAN MOLDEA: And so I called a friend of mine in the DA office in LA and I said, you know, tell me about this Gene Cesar guy. So he’s dead. He told me he was dead. So I figured I’d just go do a public record search on him and see what I could find out. So I did, and I found this guy was alive and well, living in Simi Valley, California.
So I interviewed Cesar. I thought I was going to make history that day. I thought I was going to beat this guy into the ground, until he confessed to me that he was the second gunman at the senator Kennedy murder scene. And no, he, you know, he was, he was, he had changed considerably when when Ted interviewed him back in, I think it was ‘69, he was a racist and a, you know, hated Kennedy, and he was talking about race wars and things like this. When I met him, he had changed considerably. He was no liberal. This wasn’t a guy that was working on the the protest lines and the civil rights movement. But he had changed considerably, and later on, even in his own life, he married, his third wife was a woman of color, and so I interviewed him. I interviewed him again, all on tape again. I would call him. And it came to a point where I don’t know what to think. His lawyer said, you know, you just look so puzzled. And I said that the problem here is, I will talk to Gene and he will, he’ll give me an answer to a question, and then I interview him again, and he gives me another answer to the same question.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Moldea was repeatedly struck by Cesar’s constantly conflicting versions of key events surrounding the shooting. He gave inconsistent accounts to authorities and Moldea regarding when he drew his weapon and where he fell during the incident. He initially claimed he didn’t see Kennedy get hit because he fell “instantaneously,” but later stated he witnessed Kennedy fall.
Despite being confronted with these inconsistencies and other evidence pointing suspicion at him, Cesar consistently denied shooting Robert Kennedy. He maintained this denial throughout Moldea’s intense questioning.
THE POLYGRAPH TEST
DAN MOLDEA: And I said to Gene, I said, are you willing to be hypnotized or polygraphed? And he said, ‘either one.’
So I found the best polygraph operator I could find [...] Ed Gelb was the president of the American Polygraph Association, a former cop, good guy, very talented.
So we go to Ed’s office over on Sunset, and we go in and and I had briefed Ed Gelb, like the day before, and he was excited. He thought we were going to make history that day, just as I did the first time I interviewed Gene. And so he took, he took Cesar in by himself.
We had breakfast, and then we came back, and Gene was sitting there, and he said, ‘you know, I didn’t kill Kennedy, but I’m thinking about killing you,’ he says to me. And I said, you passed, right? [...] Ed, he says, passed with flying colors, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And so I said, Geez, you know, that’s tough. That really kind of blows up about four years of work that I’ve done on this case.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: This was a significant turning point. Moldea’s perspective on Cesar fundamentally changed. He concluded that Cesar was “an innocent man who since 1969 has been wrongly accused.” The intensive effort to pressure Cesar into confessing ended. Moldea decided to start treating Cesar just like another eyewitness, rather than a suspect. With Cesar effectively cleared in Moldea’s mind, the central question became: “Then, who really did kill Senator Kennedy?”
We’ll be right back.
PART 2
FACE TO FACE WITH SIRHAN
ARCHIVAL — ”Sirhan says he doesn’t remember killing RFK”
PAROLE BOARD: What do you remember about the shooting, if you’re willing to talk about that?
SIRHAN: Obviously I was there. But I don’t remember the exact moment. I don’t remember pulling my gun out of my body or whatever it was located, and I don’t remember aiming at any human being. I don’t remember any of that, when they started imprisonment. And I’ve said that from the get-go.
PAROLE BOARD: I understand, let me just ask you a question. When did you start remembering things after the shooting? When was, what was the first thought that you had?
SIRHAN: Everything was always hazy in my head about that.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: That was Sirhan Sirhan, speaking to the Parole Board in 2011.
After the polygraph test led Moldea to conclude that Thane Eugene Cesar was not the second gunman, his focus shifted to understanding Sirhan Sirhan’s role. Moldea needed to interview Sirhan himself to gain further insight, so he sought an interview through his older brother, Adel Sirhan.
DAN MOLDEA: So Adel and I and another reporter, Bill Claver, we drove up together. The three of us drove up together to Corcoran State Penitentiary, and we went in and we saw Sirhan.
I sort of went after Sirhan, but I was still kind of skeptical [...] I still was believing that FBI report, and so Sirhan’s a very nice guy, very articulate. He and I are the same religion. We’re both Eastern, Orthodox, and I liked the guy, personally. [...] I wear a scapular around my neck. It’s a Catholic thing. Even though I’m Orthodox, and I still wear it. I always wear this scapular. It’s two pieces of cloth. And it says on the end, ‘whoever dies clothed in this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.’ And I gave one to Sirhan. And he was moved by that, and he and he held it up to the prison guard, because the prison guard, I couldn’t just hand him something. The prison guard had to clear it. And the prison guard said, no, Sirhan couldn’t accept it. And Sirhan got kind of pissed off at the prison guard. I saw flashes of his temper.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Moldea ultimately conducted three interviews with Sirhan at Corcoran State Prison, where Sirhan was incarcerated. At Sirhan’s insistence, the meetings occurred on weekends when family and friends visited, rather than during the week when Moldea, a credentialed journalist, could record the interviews. They spoke for 14 hours total.
At first, Moldea believed he was speaking to a patsy. However, Moldea’s perspective began to shift. After the first interview, Moldea knew Sirhan had lied about several things. The second interview the following month made Moldea even more uncomfortable with his story.
DAN MOLDEA: So for the third interview, while Adel and I were driving up there again, just the two of us, I said, I’m going to get in his face today. He said, ‘Go for it.’ So I did. And I really, I really, really got in his face and Sirhan sort of changed.
I’m convinced that he’s lying to me. He says to me, he says, Listen, Dan. He says, As long as you’re coming up with all this exculpatory evidence that I didn’t do it, why should I admit that I did it? You know, just keep going. Keep going. And then I [...] got what he was doing, he was playing me and, and at that point I just refused to be played any longer. It sort of hit me what was going on. And so, because, according to Sirhan, he had never been Hypno-programmed. He had, there was no, no one behind him. There was, I mean, he keeps saying, I mean [...] his statement from the outset was that he was drunk that night. He says that after being at the shooting range, you know, firing his little cap gun, his Saturday Night Special, eight shot Ivor Johnson revolver, at this shooting range at San Gabriel, he meets some friends at a Bob’s Big Boy in Pasadena, and then he goes downtown. There was some sort of a Middle Eastern demonstration going on down there, as I recall. And he went down there to see what was going on. And then he winds up at the Ambassador [...]
And somebody asked him if he wants a drink, and the drinks are free. And so he drinks a Tom Collins, and it tastes like lemonade, he says. And he has three of them. [...] He says that he doesn’t remember what happened at the exact moment of the shooting. He does remember running into a woman in a plain white dress, not a polka dot dress, but a plain white dress, who was at the coffee urn, and she said, Would you like a cup of coffee? And he goes, Yes, I want my coffee with cream and lots of sugar. And so she gives it to him. And then he finds his way into the crime scene, into the kitchen pantry, where the shooting occurs. So what I had to do, what, what I believed is, what I believed is that I had been wrong. I believed Sirhan had done it, but that means I’m going to have to go back on some of this evidence that I had been sort of playing.
DEBUNKING THE “EVIDENCE”
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: After clearing Cesar, Moldea examined evidence that initially suggested conspiracy. A 1975 court-authorized panel of firearms experts found the three victim bullets matched each other but couldn’t conclusively match them to Sirhan’s gun — contradicting the LAPD criminalist DeWayne Wolfer’s original testimony claiming a positive match “to the exclusion of all other weapons.” The panel attributed their inability to match the bullets to factors like “barrel fouling” and “impact damage and distortion,” raising the question: Was the right gun identified?
DAN MOLDEA: So I went back and I started interviewing cops again, and I had talked to one of the firearms examiners, a guy named Bradford, really outstanding guy, true expert in his field. And I said to him, what could account for this? You know, it’s the same gun, same serial number and everything else. Why did they not? Why could we not match the bullets from ‘75 to the ‘68 bullets? He said, ‘Oh, there’s a number of reasons that, you know, one, there could have been, you know, extra firings of the gun.’ [...] So I’m interviewing one of the guys from the crime lab, a Medal of Honor winner for the LAPD in the Bomb Squad, and he was a firearms identification expert as well. And I was talking to him about the bullets, and he’s, he was talking to me about, ‘yeah, we all had our souvenirs from that killing and this, we do this for all of them.’ I said, What do you mean, souvenirs? And he said, ‘Well, you know, we would each go and we’d re-fire the gun, and we would take souvenir bullets. You know, we’re all firearms identification experts. We’d take bullets. And so there was a lot of guys [laughs] in the crime lab, and they would, and what they did was they took Sirhan’s gun, they went to the water tank, and they would each have bullets, you know. A group bullets from Sirhan’s gun [...] you know, there could have been 100 shots fired from this. So after ‘68, when Sirhan’s convicted, and he goes to his appeals, these guys take Sirhan’s gun and BLAM, BLAM, BLAM, for their souvenirs without telling anybody. And so in ‘75, when they re-fire the gun, they can’t make a map because the grooves and the [gabrled] and everything else have changed in the barrel the gun.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: The second major piece of evidence suggesting a conspiracy was the FBI report documenting four bullet holes beyond the shots that struck Kennedy and the other victims. Given that Sirhan’s gun could only fire eight shots, these extra holes meant there had to be a second gun.
DAN MOLDEA: I was shocked that no one had ever done this. There was scribbling on the holes. And so I got a magnifying glass, and I looked in the pictures, the FBI pictures of the holes. And I saw up and down, up and down, up and down. And then there was a number 723, and then there was L, A, S, O, kind of scratched in there. I had a friend who was a deputy at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, LASO. And I said, do me a favor. See who had badge 723, on June 4, 1968 [...] my friend comes back back to me, and they put me on a phone with this guy, and I said, Who is it? He says his name’s Walt Tew. I said, spell it, W. Tew, up and down, up and down. [...] And he was badge, 723, that night, with the L, A, S, O. I said, where is he? I’d like to talk to him. He said, he’s gone. He died 18 months ago. So I said, can you give me the number of his widow? I’d like to talk to her. And so they gave me the number, and I talked to her. She was a very sweet lady, very nice. And I said, so, you know, so was he a firearms identification expert who could identify things? She said, no, no, no. I mean, he had a gun, she said, but he was a motorcycle cop. I said he wasn’t a firearms identification expert or a ballistics expert? No, no. He was just, he was just a motorcycle cop. That’s where he spent his entire career. So here I got a motorcycle cop identifying bullet damage in the walls and door frames in Sirhan’s line of fire.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Through the state archives, Moldea identified the FBI special agent who authored the section of the report documenting these “bullet holes” as Alfred Greiner from the FBI’s photography lab.
When Moldea tried to interview Greiner, he refused to discuss the case. Moldea then found an FBI 302 form revealing that when Greiner arrived at the crime scene, it was unguarded by LAPD. Most importantly, the person who showed them the supposed "bullet holes" wasn't a law enforcement officer or forensics expert, but an employee of the hotel.
Moldea concluded that the FBI’s official report, which flatly stated “bullet holes” and fueled years of conspiracy theories, was based on the untrained opinion of an assistant hotel clerk — an opinion which Agent Greiner, who was a photography expert but not a firearms expert, accepted and reported as fact.
THE SIMPLE TRUTH
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Based on his extensive investigation, Moldea concluded that there were no extra bullets at the crime scene beyond the eight accounted for by Sirhan’s gun.
The evidence that had initially suggested a conspiracy – the ballistics discrepancy and the FBI’s quote-unquote “bullet holes” – could be explained by human error, poor practices, lack of expertise, and inadequate documentation or communication within and between law enforcement agencies.
CONCLUSION
SIRHAN ACTED ALONE
ARCHIVAL — ”Sirhan did it alone.”
DAN MOLDEA: “Trying to get simple solutions to complicated situations when none seems to be available. I think it’s uh it’s an easy way out, and so people look at conspiracies — The Sirhan case, the Oswald case, the OJ Simpson case — which the defense is playing that card, clearly. They’re playing the conspiracy card and I think in all intents and purposes it’s hurting the country, and what we have to do is examine these cases, and try to stick to the evidence and not to our gut feelings that something broader has to be involved.”
JESS MARLOW: “I’m Jess Marlow, welcome to the channel 4 news conference. Today our guest is the author of THE KILLING OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY. He is investigative reporter Dan Moldea.”
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Moldea’s ultimate conclusion, reached after years of extensive investigation, is that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan consciously and knowingly murdered Senator Robert Kennedy, and that he acted alone. Moldea also concludes that Thane Eugene Cesar is an innocent man who had been wrongly accused of being involved in the murder.
While Moldea believes the LAPD “solved the murder” in 1968 by identifying Sirhan as the killer, he argues that they botched the original investigation in several crucial ways. Law enforcement officials misrepresented key facts, destroyed material evidence, and obstructed independent attempts to resolve critical issues in the case.
I don’t like the term conspiracy theory because, like, I use it because I don’t know what else to call them, but [...] It’s inaccurate. [...] It’s casting aspersions without, like, looking at the actual story you’re talking about. It’s dismissing it. And it sounds like the lesson is [...] all of these stories need to be taken on their own merits.
DAN MOLDEA: I agree with that.
That’s what happens when there’s not full disclosure. When you don’t have full disclosure, when the authorities aren’t disclosing, you’re going to get civilian investigators like me who are going to come into the situation, probably with some pre-judgment as to what they believe happened, and then they’re going to try to make the evidence fit their conspiracy theory. I’ve seen that happen with me. It’s it’s something that happens when you’re a civilian investigator with limited access and resources and and I have to catch myself doing that. I did that to the Robert Kennedy case where I spent an enormous amount of time trying to prove there were two guns in there.
ARCHIVAL — “Robert F. Kennedy Jr on Speaking to His Father’s Killer”
HOST: “Sirhan Sirhan did an interview in 1980. He said that it was a combination of liquor and anger over the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that triggered what he did he said that night I went to observe the Jewish Zionist parade in celebration of the June 5th 1967 victory over the Arabs that was the catalyst that triggered me on that night. In addition there was a consumption of liquor, and I want the public to understand that so he felt that it was the Arab-Israeli conflict and a whole lot of liquor that kind of caused that. But you actually flew down and talked to him in prison at one point, right?”
RFK Jr: “Yeah.”
HOST: “And what did he tell you?”
RFK Jr: “He said about that night, he said the same thing that he’s consistently said for you know what, 50 years, that he has no memory of what happened that night.”
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: That’s Kennedy’s son RFK Jr, in an interview published in 2023
DAN MOLDEA: It’s what catapulted Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. It was that series. There were eight articles in the WASHINGTON POST written by this disgraceful reporter. It was eight articles with headlines such as: Were there 13 shots fired at the crime scene? Was the CIA involved? You know, where he put Mayhew and Gene on the hook. You know, in his way. I mean, to me, the WASHINGTON POST completely debased themselves with that eight part series that they did. But it was that series, in which Bobby Kennedy Jr. was the featured guy. That’s what catapulted him into the public eye, into a national spotlight.
JOSEPH L. FLATLEY: Despite rejecting conspiracy theories about RFK's assassination, Moldea strongly believes the JFK assassination involved organized crime figures like Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, as well as Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. His reasoning stems from Robert Kennedy’s relentless war against organized crime as both Senate Rackets Committee chief counsel and U.S. Attorney General, during which Kennedy successfully prosecuted and imprisoned his arch-nemesis Hoffa, prompting threats against the Kennedys.
Sirhan Sirhan remains incarcerated. Although he has been eligible for parole since 1975 and has expressed regret for killing Senator Kennedy, he maintains he does not remember the key events of the shooting.
The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy remains one of America’s great tragedies. Through Moldea’s painstaking work, we have perhaps the clearest picture of what truly happened in that kitchen pantry on that fateful June night in 1968. It’s a reminder that the truth, while sometimes elusive and often complicated, is worth pursuing — even when it challenges our own preconceptions.