Some people come to believe things are not true or supported by any credible evidence. Whatever Schrade has come to believe he has not presented any actual evidence.
“I have told police and testified [to the grand jury],” Uecker said in a 1975 affidavit, “that there was a distance of at least one and one-half feet between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. … There is no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. … Sirhan never got close enough to a point-blank shot, never.”The evidence of a second shooter is overwhelming. Schrade and other witnesses maintain that Sirhan couldn’t have fired the shots that hit Kennedy from behind.
Sirhan never got close enough to fire a shot into RFK’s head from an inch away and Sirhan never got behind Kennedy.
Sirhan was tackled after firing two shots.
Sirhan was apprehended at the scene with the smoking gun. How does a second shooter escape unnoticed from that crowd?
As Vincent Bugliosi noted, there was at least one other armed suspect according to witness accounts plus the security guard directly behind Kennedy, Thane Caesar, was seen with this gun drawn by witnesses.
Michael Wayne, who looks similar to Sirhan, and Caesar are two named potential suspects. There were other suspects seen with Sirhan at the hotel on the night RFK was killed.
No positive match was made between Sirhan’s gun and the bullets that struck RFK.
The physical evidence in RFK’s case has never favored the lone assassin narrative.
Sirhan’s defense attorneys avoided the evidence of a second shooter because they just wanted to keep him from getting the Death Penalty. Arguing that he was part of a conspiracy wouldn’t have exonerated him or gotten him a lighter sentence.
It's even sillier than a second shooter in Dealey Plaza because there were at least areas that provided seclusion there. There is an alleged audiotape in which experts have disputed the number of shots fired. It is by no means conclusive of the number of shots fired. But even if there were a second shooter that would not lessen Sirhan's guilt since he was obviously a shooter.
There are also photos of other bullet holes in the pantry confirming that at least 10 shots were fired. Again, more than 8 shots is too many shots to have been fired from Sirhan’s revolver. There had to be another gun involved.
The LAPD attempted to suppress evidence of a conspiracy but not all the evidence was lost.
Kathleen Kennedy, who hasn’t come out For or Against Sirhan’s parole, wants to reopen the investigation into her father’s assassination:
“Bobby makes a compelling case,” the former Maryland lieutenant governor told The Post. “I think it should be reopened.”
Schrade and a host of authors and researchers point to a number of apparent missteps by the Los Angeles police and prosecutors in focusing solely on Sirhan, while suppressing evidence of a second shooter, such as:
• Prosecutors withheld the autopsy report from Sirhan’s defense lawyers until six weeks into the trial, showing that Kennedy had been shot at point-blank range from behind. Five other people in the hotel pantry standing behind Kennedy, including Schrade, were hit by bullets fired from in front of them.
• Police failed to investigate an armed private-security guard who was walking behind Kennedy at precisely the angle where the fatal shots to Kennedy’s head and back were fired. He has consistently denied firing his weapon but has told conflicting stories over the years.
• Police officers and FBI agents identified apparent bullet holes in two door frames of the pantry, indicating more than eight shots were fired. But no evidence of those holes was presented at trial, and the Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames shortly after the trial.
• The lead crime-scene investigator testified at trial that bullets from the wounded victims matched a bullet from Kennedy, but presented no photos or evidence to support that. When two ballistics experts examined the bullets after the trial, they found the bullets didn’t match. Subsequent investigations couldn’t match any of the bullets to Sirhan’s gun. The crime-scene investigator was subsequently criticized even by prosecutors for sloppy work in the case, by a judge for seeming perjury in another high-profile murder, and later suspended by his own police chief.
• Los Angeles police bullied or ignored witnesses whose stories did not match the lone gunman scenario, records show, particularly people who claimed they saw Sirhan with a dark-haired woman in a white polka-dot dress. Then at trial, prosecutors brought in a blonde-haired woman with a green polka-dot dress and claimed she was the mysterious woman in question. Sirhan’s lawyers, focusing on a mental health defense, did not challenge that, either.
…
Noguchi found that four shots had been fired at Kennedy from at most three inches away. Three shots appeared to be in contact with Kennedy’s back and shoulder, based on powder burns to his jacket, Noguchi said, with one shot passing through the jacket’s shoulder pad and not touching Kennedy. All three were fired sharply upward. The fourth shot was fired into the back of Kennedy’s head from three inches away, Noguchi concluded, by test-firing a similar gun to determine how much gunpowder sprayed at various distances.
“Thus I have never said,” Noguchi wrote in his autobiography, “that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.” At a conference last month of RFK assassination authors, Pittsburgh coroner Cyril Wecht pressed Noguchi as to whether there was a second gunman, but the 91-year-old pathologist said, “That’s not my duty.” He also told Wecht that defense attorneys never spoke with him before the trial and did not ask him about the muzzle distance at trial.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/06/05/did-l-a-police-and-prosecutors-bungle-the-bobby-kennedy-assassination/
