RFK assassination witness tells CNN: There was a second shooter
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/28/justice/california-rfk-second-gun/index.htmlLos Angeles (CNN) -- As a federal court prepares to rule on a challenge to Sirhan Sirhan's conviction in the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, a long overlooked witness to the murder is telling her story: She heard two guns firing during the 1968 shooting and authorities altered her account of the crime.
Nina Rhodes-Hughes wants
the world to know that, despite what history says, Sirhan was not the
only gunman firing shots when Kennedy was murdered a few feet away from
her at a Los Angeles hotel.
"What has to come out is
that there was another shooter to my right," Rhodes-Hughes said in an
exclusive interview with CNN. "The truth has got to be told. No more
cover-ups."
Her voice at times
becoming emotional, Rhodes-Hughes described for CNN various details of
the assassination, her long frustration with the official reporting of
her account and her reasons for speaking out: "I think to assist me in
healing -- although you're never 100% healed from that. But more
important to bring justice."
"For me it's hopeful and
sad that it's only coming out now instead of before -- but at least now
instead of never," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN by phone from her home near
Vancouver, British Columbia.
Sirhan, the only person
arrested, tried and convicted in the shooting of Kennedy and five other
people, is serving a life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in
Coalinga, California.
The U.S. District Court
in Los Angeles is set to rule on a request by the 68-year-old Sirhan
that he be released, retried or granted a hearing on new evidence,
including Rhodes-Hughes' firsthand account.
At his 1969 trial,
Sirhan's original defense team never contested the prosecution's case
that Sirhan was the one and only shooter in Kennedy's assassination.
Sirhan testified at his trial that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years
of malice aforethought," and he was convicted and sentenced to death,
which was reduced to life in prison in 1972.
After the trial, Sirhan recanted his courtroom confession.
In the recent federal
court filings, state prosecutors led by California Attorney General
Kamala Harris argue that even if there were a second gunman involved in
the Kennedy shooting, Sirhan hasn't proven his innocence and he's still
guilty of murder under California's vicarious liability law.
Sirhan's new legal team disputes Harris' assertion about that state statute.
Their current battle has
prosecutors and Sirhan's new lawyers engaging directly the merits of
new evidence -- as well as witness recollections such as Rhodes-Hughes'
account -- never argued before a judge.
Prosecutors under the
attorney general are contending that Rhodes-Hughes heard no more than
eight gunshots during the assassination. In court papers filed in
February, Harris and prosecutors argue that Rhodes-Hughes was among
several witnesses reporting "that only eight shots were fired and that
all these shots came from the same direction."
Sirhan's lawyers are challenging those assertions.
In a response also filed
in federal court in Los Angeles, the defense team led by New York
attorney William Pepper contends that the FBI misrepresented
Rhodes-Hughes' eyewitness account and that she actually had heard a
total of 12 to 14 shots fired.
"She identified fifteen
errors including the FBI alteration which quoted her as hearing only
eight shots, which she explicitly denied was what she had told them,"
Sirhan's lawyers argued in February, citing a previously published
statement from Rhodes-Hughes.
![In this NBC photo taken in 1965, TV actress Nina Roman, today known as Nina Rhodes-Hughes, left, and her \](http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120429011631-rfk-nina-rhodes-hughes-nbc-story-body.jpg)
In this NBC photo taken in 1965, TV actress Nina Roman, today known
as Nina Rhodes-Hughes, left, and her "Morning Star" co-star Elizabeth
Perry, right, meet Robert F. Kennedy at NBC's Burbank studios. Two and a
half years later, Rhodes-Hughes witnessed Kennedy's assassination.
The FBI and the
California attorney general's office both declined to comment to CNN on
the controversy over Rhodes-Hughes' witness account since the matter is
now being reviewed by a federal judge.
Rhodes-Hughes was a television actress in 1968 who worked as a volunteer fundraiser for Kennedy's presidential campaign.
The FBI report indicates
that Rhodes-Hughes was indeed inside the kitchen service pantry of the
Ambassador Hotel during the crucial moments of the Kennedy shooting, but
she contends the bureau got details of her story wrong, including her
assertions about the number of shots fired and where the shots were
fired from.
Rhodes-Hughes, now 78,
tells CNN she informed authorities in 1968 that the number of gunshots
she counted in the kitchen pantry exceeded eight -- which would have
been more than the maximum Sirhan could have fired -- and that some of
the shots came from a location in the pantry other than Sirhan's
position.
Robert Kennedy was the
most seriously wounded of the six people shot inside the hotel pantry on
June 5, 1968, only moments after the New York senator had claimed
victory in California's Democratic primary election. The presidential
candidate died the next day; the other victims survived.
The Los Angeles County
coroner determined that three bullets struck Kennedy's body and a fourth
passed harmlessly through his clothing. Police and prosecutors declared
the four bullets were among eight fired by Sirhan acting alone.
Rhodes-Hughes tells CNN
the FBI's eight-shot claim is "completely false." She says the bureau
"twisted" things she told two FBI agents when they interviewed her as an
assassination witness in 1968, and she says Harris and her prosecutors
are simply "parroting" the bureau's report.
"I never said eight
shots. I never, never said it," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "But if the
attorney general is saying it then she's going according to what the FBI
chose to put into their report."
"There were more than
eight shots," Rhodes-Hughes said by phone. She says that during the FBI
interview in her Los Angeles home, one month after the assassination,
she told the agents that she'd heard 12 to 14 shots. "There were at
least 12, maybe 14. And I know there were because I heard the rhythm in
my head," Rhodes-Hughes said. She says she believes senior FBI officials
altered
statements she made to the agents to "conform with what they
wanted the public to believe, period."
"When they say only
eight shots, the anger within me is so great that I practically -- I get
very emotional because it is so untrue. It is so untrue," she said.
Contacted by CNN for
comment, Sirhan lead attorney William Pepper called the alleged FBI
alteration of Rhodes-Hughes' story "deplorable" and "criminal" and said
it "mirrors the experience of other witnesses."
Other witnesses also mentioned more than eight shots
Law enforcement
investigators have always maintained that only eight shots were fired in
the RFK assassination, all of them by Sirhan. His small-caliber handgun
could hold no more than eight bullets.
But released witness
interview summaries show at least four other people told authorities in
1968 that they heard what could have been more than eight shots. The
following four witness accounts appear not in FBI reports but in Los
Angeles Police Department summaries:
-- Jesse Unruh, who was
speaker of the California Assembly at the time, told police that he was
within 20 to 30 feet behind Kennedy when suddenly he heard a "crackle"
of what he initially thought were exploding firecrackers. "I don't
really quite remember how many reports there were," Unruh told the LAPD.
"It sounded to me like somewhere between 5 and 10."
-- Frank Mankiewicz, who
had been Kennedy's campaign press secretary, told police that he was
trying to catch up to the senator when he suddenly heard sounds that
also seemed to him to be "a popping of firecrackers." When an LAPD
detective asked Mankiewicz how many of the sounds he'd heard, he
answered: "It seemed to me I heard a lot. If indeed it had turned out to
have been firecrackers, I probably would have said 10. But I'm sure it
was less than that."
-- Estelyn Duffy LaHive,
who had been a Kennedy supporter, told police that she was standing
just outside the kitchen pantry's west entrance when the shooting
erupted. "I thought I heard at least about 10 shots," she told the LAPD.
-- Booker Griffin,
another Kennedy supporter, told police that he had just entered the
pantry through its east entrance and suddenly heard "two quick" shots
followed by a slight pause and then what "sounded like it could have
been 10 or 12" additional shots.
An analysis of a
recently uncovered tape recording of the shooting detected at least 13
shot sounds erupting over a period of less than six seconds. The
audiotape was recorded at the Ambassador Hotel by free-lance newspaper
reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski and is the only known soundtrack of the
assassination.
Audio expert Philip Van
Praag told CNN that his analysis establishes the Pruszynski recording as
authentic and the 13 sounds electronically detected on the recording as
gunshots.
"The gunshots are
established by virtue of my computer analysis of waveform patterns,
which clearly distinguishes gunshots from other phenomena," he said in
an e-mail. "This would include phenomena that to human hearing are often
perceived as exploding firecrackers, popping camera flashbulbs or
bursting balloons."
Van Praag's Pruszynski
recording findings are now a major point of controversy among new
evidence being argued between the two sides in the Sirhan federal court
case. Harris contends that his findings amount to an "interpretation or
opinion" that is not universally accepted by acoustic experts.
CNN initially reported on Van Praag's audio analysis in 2008 and then with additional details in a BackStory segment in 2009.
Shots fired from two different locations
California prosecutors
have argued that witnesses heard shots coming from only one location,
but Rhodes-Hughes tells CNN that while the first two or three shots she
heard came from Sirhan's position several feet in front of her, she also
heard gunshots "to my right where Robert Kennedy was."
According to the autopsy
report, the coroner concluded that the senator's body and clothing were
struck from behind, at right rear, by four bullets fired at upward
angles and at point-blank range. Yet witnesses said Sirhan fired
somewhat downward, almost horizontally, from several feet in front of
Kennedy, and witnesses did not report the senator's back as ever being
exposed to Sirhan or his gun.
In his analysis of the
Pruszynski sound recording, Philip Van Praag found that five of the
gunshots captured in the tape were fired opposite the direction of
Sirhan's eight shots. Van Praag also concluded that those five shots --
the third, fifth, eighth, 10th and 12th gunshots within a 13-shot
sequence -- displayed an acoustical "frequency anomaly" indicating that
the alleged second gun's make and model were different from Sirhan's
weapon.
A chance meeting with Robert Kennedy
The path that eventually
led Nina Rhodes-Hughes to the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry began 2½
years earlier during a chance meeting with Robert Kennedy at NBC-TV
studios in Burbank, California. She was being made up for her
co-starring role in the daytime drama "Morning Star" when Kennedy
suddenly entered the makeup room. The actress was starstruck. "I saw
Robert Kennedy and everything else disappeared from view," she said.
"There was an aura about him that was very captivating. He kind of
pulled you in. His eyes were very deep set and they were very blue. And
when you looked at him, you got very drawn in to him."
As Rhodes-Hughes
remembers it, the senator had arrived to pre-record an interview on
"Meet the Press" and the two discussed political issues while awaiting
their separate TV appearances. "Here I am, just an actress in a soap
opera, and he took the time to have an in-depth conversation with me,"
said Rhodes-Hughes, who was then known professionally by her screen name
Nina Roman.
As impressed as
Rhodes-Hughes was with Robert Kennedy, she says the senator indicated
that he himself was impressed with her ability to quickly memorize many
pages of TV script. She says he confided to her that he had no such
talent himself but that his older brother, the assassinated President
John F. Kennedy, had possessed similar skills.
"Our conversation
basically was the clincher for me," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "I said to
him, 'You know, I have followed your career in politics and I really
believe in you and I love all the things that you did -- and are trying
to do, and propose to do -- and so if ever you declare yourself a
candidate for the presidency, I will work for you, heart and soul.' And
he smiled and said, 'Well, I don't know if that's going to happen.' And
he was very humble and very sweet."
Rhodes-Hughes says that
later, in the spring of 1968, shortly after Kennedy announced his
candidacy for the presidency, she helped form a campaign support group
in Los Angeles called "Young Professionals for Kennedy" and assisted in
raising funds for the California phase of the senator's White House bid.
Weeks later, as he
claimed victory in the California primary, addressing hundreds of
supporters in the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room shortly after midnight
on June 5, Kennedy paid tribute to the many volunteers, like
Rhodes-Hughes, who had assisted his campaign. Referring to his own role
during his brother's successful run for the presidency in 1960, Kennedy
told them, "I was a campaign manager eight years ago. I know what a
difference that kind of an effort and that kind of a commitment makes."
Trying to keep Kennedy from heading to the pantry
For Rhodes-Hughes there
was one more commitment to keep. She had promised Kennedy aide Pierre
Salinger that following the candidate's victory speech she would try to
meet the senator as he exited the ballroom and usher him to a backstage
area where Salinger had been keeping abreast of the California primary
returns. She says although she and another campaign volunteer made sure
to carefully position themselves to greet the candidate, the opportunity
never came. According to Rhodes-Hughes, shortly after Kennedy completed
his remarks in the Embassy Room, he was whisked away by others down a
corridor and toward the kitchen pantry while she scurried to catch up.
"No, no, that's the
wrong way!" Rhodes-Hughes tells CNN she shouted to the senator and his
escorts as she chased after them in an unsuccessful effort to turn them
around. "It's this way! Come back! You're going the wrong way!"
Kennedy and Sirhan almost face-to-face
Rhodes-Hughes says that
after she entered the kitchen pantry's west entrance, she could see
Kennedy in left profile, "greeting" well-wishers a few feet ahead of
her. She says a moment later she was looking at the back of the
senator's head, as he continued onward, when suddenly the first two or
three shots were fired.
"I saw his left profile.
And then, very, very quickly, he was through greeting, and he turned
and went into the original direction that he was being ushered to,"
Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "At that point, I saw the back of his head and
part of his shoulders and back."
"My eyes were totally on
him, and all of a sudden I started hearing popping sounds, which I
thought at first were flashbulbs from a camera," she said. It was
Rhodes-Hughes' account of Kennedy's movements in the pantry that
Sirhan's lawyer Pepper focused on in particular when CNN asked him to
comment on Rhodes-Hughes' account of the shooting.
"This observation is
vital," said Pepper. "Her clear recollection of being some short
distance behind the Senator and seeing his left profile and then seeing
him quickly turning so that the back of his head was in her sight at the
time the shooting began -- this reveals that the Senator was almost
directly facing Sirhan just before he took three shots, from behind, in
his back, and behind his right ear at powder burn range, making it
impossible for Sirhan to have been Robert Kennedy's shooter," the
defense attorney said in an e-mail to CNN. "It clearly evidences the
existence of a second gunman who fired from below and upward at the
Senator."
Rhodes-Hughes says that
while she was behind Senator Kennedy, looking at the back of his head
and hearing the first two or three gunshots, Kennedy did not appear to
be struck by bullets at that point.
Still believing the
first shots were merely flashbulbs, she says she then took her eyes off
the senator, while turning leftward, and caught her first glimpse of
Sirhan standing in front of Kennedy and to the candidate's left.
She told CNN that the
5-foot-5-inch tall Sirhan was propped up on a steam table, several feet
ahead of her and slightly to her own left. Rhodes-Hughes says part of
her view of Sirhan was obstructed and she could not see the gun in his
hand but she says that, as soon as she caught sight of Sirhan, she then
heard more shots coming from somewhere past her right side and near
Kennedy. She told CNN that at that point she was hearing "much more
rapid fire" than she initially had heard.
In his recent analysis
of the Pruszynski recording, Philip Van Praag found that some of the
tape's 13 captured shot sounds were fired too rapidly, at intervals too
close together, for all of the gunshots in the pantry to have come from
Sirhan's Iver Johnson revolver alone.
Sirhan's lawyers report
in their federal court papers that gunshot echoes have been ruled out as
the cause of the Pruszynski recording's "double shots." Ricochets also
are ruled out according to Pasadena, California, forensic audio
engineers who verified Van Praag's Pruszynski findings for the 2007
Investigation Discovery Channel television documentary "Conspiracy Test:
The RFK Assassination."
'They've killed him! They've killed him!'
Rhodes-Hughes told CNN
she heard gunshots coming from some place not far from her right side
even while Sirhan was being subdued several feet in front of her.
"During all of that time, there are shots coming to my right," she said.
"People are falling around me. I see a man sliding down a wall. Then I
see Senator Kennedy lying on the floor on his back, bleeding. And I
remember screaming, 'Oh no! Oh, my God, no!' And the next thing I know,
I'm ducking but also in complete shock as to what's going on.
"And then I passed out," she said.
Rhodes-Hughes says that,
moments later, while she was regaining consciousness from having
fainted to the floor, she noticed that her dress was wet and that she
was missing a belt and one of her shoes. It was clear to her that she
had been trampled, but she was unhurt.
She then looked across
the room and saw Kennedy once again, lying on the floor and bleeding,
this time with his wife Ethel kneeling and trying to comfort him.
Rhodes-Hughes says the sight horrified her, sending her screaming out of
the pantry and back through the corridor, where she was attended to by
her then-husband, the late television producer Michael Rhodes.
"I'm running out of the
pantry and I'm yelling, 'They've killed him! They've killed him! Oh, my
God, he's dead! They've killed him!'" Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "Now, the
reason I said, 'they' is because I knew there was more than one shooter
involved."
Little more than 25 hours later, Kennedy was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.
Rhodes-Hughes describes the events of early June 1968 as "the most iconoclastic experience" of her life.
"Although it was 44
years ago, I will swear that this is exactly what happened. I remember
it like it was almost yesterday, because you don't forget something like
that when it totally changes your life forever," she said. "It took a
great toll on me. For a while, even the backfiring of a car would send
me into tears."
Never called to testify
Despite the fact her FBI
interview summary indicates Nina Rhodes-Hughes was inside the kitchen
pantry during the assassination, she was never called to testify at
Sirhan's 1969 trial or at any subsequent inquiry over the years.
Rhodes-Hughes says she made a point of telling two FBI agents in 1968
that she would be willing to make herself available to appear as a
witness anywhere at anytime and to testify "that there were more shots."
"They never wrote that
down," she says of the FBI agents who conducted the interview in her Los
Angeles home. She also says that when the pair of agents departed
following their visit, they forgot to take along their attaché case and,
minutes later, had to return to her residence and retrieve it.
Rhodes-Hughes says that,
in the months following the June 5, 1968 assassination, she and some
others who had been at the Ambassador Hotel refused news media
interviews so as to avoid interfering with preparations for Sirhan's
trial. It wasn't until the 1990s that Rhodes-Hughes was asked whether
she would ever be willing to testify under oath -- an invitation coming
not from a prosecutor or law enforcement official but from author Philip
H. Melanson, a chancellor professor of policy studies at the University
of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
At Melanson's request,
Rhodes-Hughes reviewed her 1968 FBI interview summary for the first time
and found it contained more than a dozen inaccuracies. She provided
Melanson with a statement, but the professor died some years later and
Rhodes-Hughes once again missed her opportunity to testify. Before his
death, Melanson published Rhodes-Hughes' statement in "Shadow Play," a
book he co-authored with William Klaber in 1997 and one of several
Melanson wrote on the Robert Kennedy assassination.
Rhodes-Hughes recounted
the Kennedy shooting and her initial contact with Melanson in a 1992
interview on "Contact," a local TV program carried at the time in
Vancouver by Rogers Cable.
Defense attorney William
Pepper calls Rhodes-Hughes' recollections "significant verification" of
new assassination evidence that the Sirhan legal team is currently
presenting. "It provides further verification of a dozen or more
gunshots and mirrors the experience of other witnesses which confirms
the existence of the cover-up efforts," he told CNN.
"Along with all of the
other evidence we have provided, one wonders why it has taken so long
for this innocent man to be set free, a new trial to be ordered or, at
least, a full investigatory hearing to be scheduled," Pepper said.
"Nothing less than the credibility and integrity of the American
criminal justice system is at stake in this case."
Sirhan Sirhan's current
legal team is doing something his original lawyers never did. They are
asserting that Sirhan did not shoot Kennedy.
Sirhan's original
defenders had decided at the outset that Sirhan was the lone shooter.
Because Sirhan's initial lawyers presented a diminished capacity case in
1969, they never pursued available defenses. Evidentiary conflicts, and
issues such as a possible second gun, simply were not addressed at
Sirhan's 1969 trial. Most of the original prosecution's evidence was
stipulated by the original defense team, which agreed that Sirhan had
killed the presidential candidate.
Nina Rhodes-Hughes
opposes freedom for Sirhan Sirhan, whom she regards as one of two gunmen
firing shots inside the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry. "To me, he was
absolutely there," she said. "I don't feel he should be exonerated."
Rhodes-Hughes insists
the full truth of Robert Kennedy's murder has been suppressed for
decades, and says she hopes that it will now finally come out and that
the alleged second shooter will be identified and brought to justice.
"There definitely was another shooter," said Rhodes-Hughes. "The constant cover-ups, the constant lies -- this has got to stop."
CNN's Michael Martinez reported from Los Angeles and Brad Johnson from Atlanta.