I spent an afternoon talking to Paul Schrade recently, who was one of RFK’s campaign workers and who was with him in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and was also wounded during the shooting. Paul has been an advocate for paroling Sirhan along with RFK’s son Robert Kennedy Jr.. Schrade is not a “conspiracy nut” but rather a very thoughtful and logical eye witness/victim to the actual assassination. He acknowledges that Sirhan was shooting at Kennedy - no one debates that. But he argues that Sirhan did not actually kill Kennedy. Schrade believes that there was another shooter in the kitchen and there is evidence to support that - Coroner Thomas Noguchi’s analysis of the four wounds on RFK was that they were contact shots, meaning the barrel of the gun was touching or no more than an inch away from RFK and witnesses argue that Sirhan was never closer to RFK than 3 feet, the fact that more than 8 bullets were found in bodies of victims, door jambs and walls and Sirhan was firing an 8 shot Ivor Johnson 22, So where did the other bullets come from? And then other things that undermine the official version - Security Gurad Thane Cesar’s clip-on tie, the fact that Cesar was carrying an Ivor Johnson eight shot 22 - an unusual sidearm for a security guard, the fact that Cesar was standing inches behind Kennedy on the same side as the fatal wounds with his gun drawn, the Canadian photographer whose photos were “lost” by LAPD, the fact that LAPD destroyed and threw out forensic evidence of one of the most important crimes of the century. There’s so much about this story that doesn’t support the official version. After extensive research and years of sifting through all the evidence that still exists, Robert Kennedy Jr. publicly named Thane Cesar as his father’s murderer and said, among other things, “Cesar waited in the pantry as my father spoke in the ballroom, then grabbed my father by the elbow and guided him toward Sirhan.” RFK Jr then gets into what Cesar did with the murder weapon and his motive for the murder. “Cesar sold his .22 to a co-worker weeks after the assassination warning him that it had been used in a crime. Cesar lied to police claiming that he'd disposed of the gun months before the assassination,' claimed RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. then revealed that he had even planned to meet Cesar last June in the Philippines, but said that the planned sit-down was canceled at the last second.
Okay, this happened 53 years ago and many people say “Who cares?” Well, I care. I cared about the JFK assassination and Martin Luther King’s assassination and RFK’s assassination too. I believe violent acts like this change the course of history and I always wonder what things might have been like if they had never happened.