← Crimes of the Times
Crimes of the Times
The Assassination of RFK
00:37:32
On today’s episode, we discuss one of the pivotal events of the 1960s: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a promising presidential candidate at the time of his murder. Though the gunman was caught at the scene, confessed at trial, and even bragged about the shooting, his motives have largely been forgotten. In that collective amnesia, conspiracy theories have flourished.
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- [00:01]
Christopher Goffard
This is an la times studios podcast. The assassin was a small, wiry, pockmarked young man with curly hair and a hard to place accent. He had concealed himself behind an ice machine in the crowded kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He carried an eight shot revolver he got for $25. He had loitered in the area for hours, asking kitchen workers if his target would be coming that way. Nearby, in the Embassy Ballroom, Robert F. Kennedy had just declared victory in the June 4, 1968 California Democratic primary. The ecstatic crowd chanted, we want Bobby. We want Bobby. If you look at photos of the crowd and you will see expressions of unembarrassed love, the kind few candidates inspire. Kennedy was 42. He was a New York senator. His admirers revered him as a secular saint, a figure of hope in a brutal, tumultuous decade. But he was despised on the right and divisive on the left. In East Los Angeles, Mexican American crowds had greeted him rapturously in Van Nuys. His campaign cars were pelted with stones. Assassinations had already left an indelible blight on the decade. The senator's older brother, President John F. Kennedy, was killed in 1963. In 1965, it was Malcolm X. In April 1968, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. On the day of King's assassination, it was Robert F. Kennedy who broke the news to a largely black crowd at a political rally in Indianapolis. He spoke of the stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land and of the possibility of compassion. He spoke of his brother's murder. He quoted Aeschylus, his favorite poet. Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own date despair against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. Scores of cities exploded into rioting in the wake of King's murder. Indianapolis did not. Kennedy's speech deepened his reputation as a healer.
- [03:04]
Eric George
Historian and biographer Larry Tighe described him as the most trusted white man in black America.
- [03:11]
Christopher Goffard
This is Eric George, a Los Angeles attorney who has represented the Kennedy family
- [03:17]
Eric George
and on and on. Just remarkable. Somebody who was a compassionate leader who really, I think a lot of people felt in 1968 was the sole person who could have unified the country or at least gotten rid of a lot of the division.
- [03:32]
Christopher Goffard
Now, just two months after King's death, in the early hours of June 5, Kennedy was shaking hands with kitchen workers and wading through the Ambassador Hotel. He was headed to the Colonial Room to talk to reporters. The pantry was a shortcut. Kennedy had almost no security. His protection was a few rent a cops hired for crowd control and a thin scrim of hotel security guards. Later, his staffers would say the campaign did not want their candidates seen among uniformed local cops. The LAPD was considered poisonous to voters Kennedy needed, particularly after the Watts riots of three years earlier. The neglect of real security seems astonishing in retrospect, especially considering that an assassin's rifle had killed his brother in Dallas five years earlier. JFK's death had changed Bobby Kennedy. He now had an almost permanent sadness in his eyes. In the words of his friend, the journalist Pete Hamill, Hamill had urged Bobby Kennedy to run for president. He told him, if you won, the country might be saved. Hamill was with him that night at the Wilshire Boulevard Hotel. He was with him as he moved through the pantry, which Hamill described as a long, grubby area, the sort of place where Puerto Ricans, blacks, and Mexican Americans usually work to fill white stomachs. Kitchen workers pressed forward to touch the candidate. Then the gunman emerged, a messenger. Hamill wrote, quote from the Secret Filthy heart of America. The killer was caught at the scene, gave a clear motive, and did not dispute his responsibility as the sole gunman at trial. Given all that, it seems an unlikely case to have generated conspiracy theories. But they've been given fuel by Kennedy's namesake and second son, RFK Jr. Who was a teenager when his dad was killed and is currently the country's Secretary of Health and Human services. Today on crimes of the times, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. A monumental wound in modern American history, Although the motives of the assassin have largely been forgotten. I'm Christopher Goffard.
- [06:06]
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- [07:15]
Eric George
Dr. Swartz was face down in a pool of blood.
- [07:18]
Christopher Goffard
A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy.
- [07:21]
Eric George
A very gruesome and disturbing scene.
- [07:25]
Christopher Goffard
Persons of interest obsessed with role playing and the occult.
- [07:30]
Eric George
We're here now.
- [07:31]
Christopher Goffard
I can smell blood From Sony Music Entertainment and M. William Phelps llc. Fatal Fantasy available now on the binge Search for Fatal Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts. Scores of people were crowding the dingy pantry of the Ambassador Hotel when Robert F. Kennedy came through with his entourage in June 1968. A wiry young man stepped forward with a gun, extending his right arm as he fired. Two.22 caliber hollow point bullets hit Kennedy in the back. A third bullet entered behind his right ear, fragmenting in his brain. It was so close that it left powder burns on the ear. An Associated Press reporter said the shot sounded, quote, almost like a brief burst of machine gun fire. Also in the crowd was Rosie Greer, a hulking former defensive tackle for the Los Angeles Rams. He rushed in to pin the assassin against a serving table. People were shouting, get the gun. But the gunman managed to empty his eight shooter. He hit five bystanders, but only Kennedy was fatally wounded. Some were yelling for instant vigilante justice. Kill him. Kill him. Others were crying, no Jack Ruby. Haunting the scene were memories of Dallas, where nightclub owner Jack Ruby had gunned down LEE Harvey Oswald, JFK's assassin. Now the younger Kennedy lay dying beside the ice machine on the dirty floor. Somebody put rosary beads in his hands. His wife, Ethel, the mother of his 11 children, touched ice cubes to his cheek. At first, the gunman refused to give his name. At the station, police examined his eyes and found no signs of intoxication, a fact that Would become relevant later. Police could not place his accent. He was arraigned as John Doe in an early morning courtroom session. Authorities had not given advanced word of it to the press or public. They didn't want another Dallas soon. The assassin was identified as Sirhan Sirhan. He was 24 years old. He lived with his mother in a white frame house in Pasadena. His fingerprints were on file because he'd applied for a job at Hollywood park racetrack. He identified as a Christian Arab, a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship. He'd emigrated to the United States at 12 years old and spent the second half of his life here. His life had been a chronicle of failures and accumulating resentments. He'd failed out of Pasadena City College. He'd found a job at a health food store but couldn't keep it. He tried to be a jockey, but horses kept throwing him. He'd been reduced to the low status task of walking the horses, but he couldn't keep that job either. His older brother Adele would say he spent a lot of time alone in his room talking to himself and studying the occult. Suran frequently expressed anti Jewish feelings. Acquaintances told the Times his supreme hatred was the existence of the state of Israel. Robert Kennedy had reported in British Palestine for the Boston Post in his early 20s and had become a stalwart supporter of the Jewish state. In a recent interview he had proposed selling it 50 Phantom fighter jets. Police found diaries and notebooks in Sirhan's bedroom. In one he wrote rfk must be disposed of like his brother was. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy must soon die. Die, die, die, die, die, die, die. My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakeable obsession. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated. Assassinated, assassinated, assassinated.
- [11:32]
Eric George
We know and we don't have to resort to anything other than the words of Sirhan Sirhan. Why he murdered the senator.
- [11:41]
Christopher Goffard
This is Kennedy family attorney Eric George.
- [11:43]
Eric George
Again, I think it was ideological. I think it was also anti Semitic, anti Israel.
- [11:51]
Christopher Goffard
In Sirhan's notebooks investigators found the words Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5th, 1968.
- [12:00]
Eric George
His words, his writing. Notably, June 5th, 1968 is the one year anniversary of the commencement of the Six Day War in which Israel defeated an Arab coalition of Jordanian, Syrian and Egyptian military forces.
- [12:16]
Christopher Goffard
When Sirhan shot Kennedy, he missed his timeline by just a few minutes.
- [12:22]
Eric George
The fact that there was a decision to bring senator Kennedy through the kitchen area, the fact that Sirhan Sirhan happened to be right there and it just gives rise to a whole bunch of what ifs. This doesn't get a lot of attention. But he also had said in one of those notebooks, ambassador Goldberg must die. He must be eliminated.
- [12:52]
Christopher Goffard
Arthur Goldberg had been the US Ambassador to the United nations during the Six Day War. Sirhan hated him, too. Apart from his private writings, Sirhan had also told people of his desire to murder Kennedy. At Sirhan's 1969 trial, a black trash collector named Alvin Clark testified about arguing with Sirhan a few weeks before the California primary. Clark revered Kennedy as the man who had paid to bring the murdered Martin Luther King Jr's body back home to his family. So when Sirhan said, I'm planning on shooting him, Clark replied, if you do, you'll be killing one of the best men in the country. Hours before driving to the ambassador, Sirhan had visited a gun club in Duarte, firing hundreds of rounds from his.22 at the range. He told the rangemaster he wanted the best box of shells he had. I got to have some that will not misfire, he said. The trial went on for 14 weeks, and there were 90 witnesses. Sirhan's defense lawyers did not dispute that he had killed Kennedy. They said he acted alone. Their goal was to spare him the death penalty by convincing jurors it was second degree murder, not first. Defense attorney Emil Berman said it was the act of a immature, emotionally disturbed and mentally ill youth who had killed in a trance like state. The attorney said Sirhan had been traumatized by the sight of political violence as a child, and news of the Arab Israeli conflict unleashed blinding rage. In his fantasies, he was often a hero and savior of his people, Berman said. Sirhan's angry outbursts became a regular feature of the trial. He was enraged at the release of his notebooks and enraged that his poor school grades had been made public, along with the fact that he had scored 89 on an IQ test. At one point, he announced he wanted to fire his lawyers, plead guilty to murder in the first and be sent to the gas chamber. I killed Robert F. Kennedy willfully, premeditatedly, and with 20 years of malice aforethought, he told the court. He later explained that this was a reference to the 1948 birth of Israel. One of the scholars of the case, Mel Ayton, wrote a book called the Forgotten Terrorist Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. His book details the fanatical antisemitism that marked Sirhan's upbringing. Ayten has since passed away, but when I interviewed him last year, he told me that part of what fuels crackpot conspiracy theories is Historical amnesia about what motivated Sirhan. He said, if there's no motive, they can promote their idea that he was just an innocent patsy. He described Sirhan as a chronic failure who believed the murder would make him a hero. Hayton told me, quote, what Sirhan thought would be a redeeming feature of his life is his politics, which has been ignored by conspiracy writers.
- [16:09]
Dan Moldea
I think it was much simpler than that. I don't think that he was that sophisticated politically.
- [16:15]
Christopher Goffard
This is Dan Moldea, another scholar of the case. He differs from Ayton in how much weight to give, ideological factors.
- [16:24]
Dan Moldea
This guy was only 24 years old. Go back a few weeks before the murder when Sirhan was studying to be a jockey down at Corona. He was thrown by a horse, one of the horses he was riding through, and it hurt him. He was hurt. He was hurt so badly that he was accused of lacking the nerve to get back on the horse or any horse. And he got tagged with a reputation as a coward. And he admits that. And I think that he felt that he could eliminate that. And one fell swoop.
- [17:01]
Christopher Goffard
At one point, he says Sirhan told a writer that it had taken him only seconds to become as famous as Bobby Kennedy.
- [17:09]
Dan Moldea
I believe that he was trying to prove to himself that he was not a coward, that he was capable, that he was, he was a person who could make a difference.
- [17:20]
Christopher Goffard
With the trial and headlines worldwide, the Palestine Liberation Organization distributed posters of Sirhan praising him as, quote, a commando, not an assassin.
- [17:32]
Dan Moldea
I think that they came to him and they sort of lionized him and loved him.
- [17:36]
Christopher Goffard
The famous former FBI profiler John Douglas gave his own assessment of the case Killer in an essay with Mark Ulshacker. He said Sirhan was both a mentally unstable and angry nobody and a driven, mission oriented ideologue. Sirhan's rage as well as his weirdness were on full display when he took the stand at his trial. He testified that he could change the color of a candle flame with the power of his mind. He. He said he did not remember committing the shooting. He said he'd been drunk. He delivered a screen on the history of the Middle East. He told his attorney, Zionism is more inimical to me than communism is to you. Defense psychiatrists said Sirhan suffered paranoia and social maladjustment and that he viewed Kennedy as a surrogate for the father who had abandoned him. They claimed mirrors at the Ambassador Hotel might have initiated his homicidal trance. Prosecutor Lynn Compton ridiculed the claims. If you don't buy it like I don't buy it, then there's nothing left but plain old cold blooded first degree murder. The jury convicted him and gave him death, a sentence commuted to life in Prison in 1972 when the Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional. A year later, when the Black September terrorist group kidnapped the US Ambassador and two other Western envoys in Sudan, Sirhan's release was one of the group's demands. The US refused. The three captives were executed in the 1970s. Sirhan told journalist Paul Callan that his memory of assassinating Kennedy was hazy but but he was ready to take credit as a hero to his people. He done it for my Palestine, my beloved homeland, and added what I did was a political act. I was the instrument. In a 1989 interview with journalist David Frost, Sirhan said that he had acted alone and disavowed any conspiracy in Kennedy's death. He suggested that collaborating with conspirators would have been at odds with his mistrust trustful nature. He knew how easily a collaborator could become a witness against him. He claimed now to feel remorse, while at the same time he compared himself to a Jew who had been given the opportunity to kill Adolf Hitler. Nearly 20 years later at his 2016 parole hearing, however, Sirhan was using different rhetoric. He was now insisting he had not even committed the crime. Crime at the time, several conspiracy theories were afloat, but one that gained traction with Sirhan's legal team was that he had somehow been hypnotically programmed to fire his gun. It was part of a plan to divert attention from the real shooter. They said legally speaking, I'm not guilty of anything, sirhan said. It was not until 2021, however, that Sirhan can convinced a California parole panel that he should go free.
- [21:17]
Eric George
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- [22:17]
Christopher Goffard
Christopher Gofford here reminding you that the stories you hear on this podcast are based on original reporting by LA Times journalists like myself and with deepfakes and AI generated content on the rise. It's more important than ever to support reporters on the ground. Help support our newsroom by subscribing to the LA times. Head to latimes.com getlat to get started. That's latimes.com getlat Dr. Swartz was faced
- [22:48]
Dan Moldea
down in a pool of blood.
- [22:50]
Christopher Goffard
A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy.
- [22:53]
Eric George
A very gruesome and disturbing scene.
- [22:57]
Christopher Goffard
Persons of interest obsessed with role playing and the occult.
- [23:02]
Eric George
We're here now.
- [23:03]
Christopher Goffard
I can smell blood from Sony Music Entertainment and and M. William Phelps llc. Fatal Fantasy available now on the binge search for Fatal Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:20]
Eric George
In August of 2021, a three person panel of the Board of Parole Hearings assessed parole and granted it to him.
- [23:32]
Christopher Goffard
This is lawyer Eric George again. When the California panel decided that RFK's assassin Sirhan Sirhan ought to go free, many people were stunned. For decades it had seemed inconceivable that the man convicted of a crime so notorious, with such far reaching effects on American history might ever go home. The parole panel decided that Sirhan had been rehabilitated and was no longer a threat. This was during the era of LA District Attorney George Gascon, who forbade his prosecutors from appearing at parole hearings to argue against an inmate's release. Before Sirhan could be released, however, Governor Gavin Newsom had to sign off on the decision. To help persuade Newsom that that was a terrible idea, members of the Kennedy family enlisted Los Angeles attorney Eric George.
- [24:24]
Eric George
We filed a petition with Governor Newsom asking him to reverse that decision.
- [24:30]
Christopher Goffard
As it happened, Eric George's father, Ronald George, had been the attorney at the California Attorney General's Office who fought Sirhan's appeal in 1971. George gave me a copy of the 291 page brief his father wrote.
- [24:46]
Eric George
It's all on typewritten paper, a blast from the past. He argued it before the California Supreme Court. It is meticulous, it's compelling and it has a factual record that just dispels any sense that we might be dealing with a person who's innocent, he said.
- [25:05]
Christopher Goffard
His father kept a photocopy in his office of Sirhan's threats against Kennedy or
- [25:11]
Eric George
Photostat, as it may have been called at the time of that incredibly eerie writing of Sirhan Sirhan to the effect that he, Sirhan had an unshakable conviction that RFK must die, die, die. And it continues on several more times. And just even look at that. And the actual photo stat of the handwriting is pretty eerie.
- [25:35]
Christopher Goffard
So this case is in your blood from the get go.
- [25:37]
Eric George
In an odd way it is. I never expected to have the opportunity to do a much deeper dive. And I think what happened was that the initial parole board was just very misguided. I think they felt that he had spent so many years in prison and he was not a danger for that reason and didn't pay any attention to the underlying facts about Sirhan. Sirhan's refusal to acknowledge his role on the crime, his refusal to be honest and frankly his refusal to accept political motivations for it.
- [26:15]
Christopher Goffard
One conspicuous member of the Kennedy family supported the idea of letting Sirhan go. However, that was the victim's third child, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who is now the US Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration. RFK Jr described Sirhan's guilt as a fiction. He believed a security guard who had been with RFK in the Ambassador Hotel pantry, a rent a cop named Thane Eugene Caesar, had done it, perhaps as part of a CIA scheme. RFK Jr. Believed Sirhan's defense team had bullied him into conceding guilt. RFK Jr wrote that when he met the 77 year old Sirhan in prison, he found him gentle, humble, kind hearted, frail and harmless. In a newspaper column, RFK Jr called on California Governor Gavin Newsom to release him and said he and two of his nine surviving siblings felt his release quote, best reflects my father's legacy as a pious Catholic who believed in redemption and forgiveness,
- [27:28]
Eric George
compassion, forgiveness indispensable to human life and the human condition. But it's got to stem from an acknowledgment of the wrongdoing or of the actions by the guilty party and that that's something that has simply never occurred here.
- [27:44]
Christopher Goffard
In his fight to block parole, George argued that Sirhan posed a continued threat.
- [27:49]
Eric George
He had been agitated by what was happening in the Middle East. There's still that same kind of tumult in the Middle east which does get to issues like his capacity to become violent again. Just as in 1968, a state of hostilities exists between Israeli and Palestinian forces, the type of violence that he committed with a.22 caliber weapon could just as easily be repeated. Given his albeit older, but nonetheless physically able self.
- [28:25]
Christopher Goffard
Governor Newsom blocked Sirhan's release, just as George had argued. Newsom said that Sirhan refused to take responsibility for his crime and that his lack of insight made him a continued threat. The governor rejected conspiracy theories, writing Sirhan, one man with a gun, acting alone, inflicted grievous harm to our country. Recently, the Trump administration released a cache of classified files on the assassination. Sirhan's current attorney, Angela Berry, told me that a team of researchers is combing them for new evidence that might help set her client free. But so far there hasn't been anything of use. The investigative journalist Dan Moldea has studied the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy for years. He went into it believing there was a good case for Thane Eugene Caesar as a second shooter. Caesar was the rent a cop who'd been standing next to RFK and had drawn his gun. In the chaos, Moldilla was bothered by the fact that Cesar's accounts of the shooting were. Were inconsistent. For example, in one version he fell to RFK's left, while in another he fell to his right, and another one,
- [29:40]
Dan Moldea
he falls on top of him. And so I said, for Christ's sake, G, can you just pick a story and stick to it? It was one of the reasons why I thought he was guilty was because he just. Just kept changing his stories. So I said to him, listen, are you willing to be polygraphed? And he said, sure. So I went and I found the best goddamn polygraph operator I could find. He passed with flying colors. I then started to treat him like an eyewitness after that. And then I started to go after Sirhan.
- [30:11]
Christopher Goffard
In the early 1990s, Maldea got an advance on a book about the case. The premise was that there was a second gunman. He went to interview Sirhan multiple times.
- [30:23]
Dan Moldea
I wanted to polygraph Sirhan. You wouldn't do it. I said, why don't you just admit it? Why don't you just admit that you did this? And he replied, why should I admit guilt when I've got you out there finding exculpatory evidence and saying that I didn't do it? That's my best hope here. And that's what. That's when he said that I was going out grabbing exculpatory evidence. That's what sheer hand was putting. I was being used. And in a way, I kind of probably was allowing myself, myself to be used. And because I was just trying to get the information. Sirhan loved his mother, and I think that was the reason why Sirhan could not confess because that would break his mother's heart. And so I said, you confess when your mother dies and will you confess finally, once and for all that you were responsible for this? And that's when he got mad at me, called me a mother, called me an. And he squared off on me. And I mean, you couldn't do too much in there. I mean, there's prison guards all over the place. I had spent years on this case and I don't think anyone expected in a million years for me to turn around and say I've been wrong. I did a 180 and disappointed a lot of people. But to me, you know, the book didn't do so well. But I really established my credentials as an honest journalist at that point.
- [31:50]
Christopher Goffard
Rather than promote the second gunman theory, Moldea's book, the Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, meticulously debunks it. Proponents of the theory point to photographs of the Ambassador Hotel showing the presence of four holes in the pantry door frame. They looked like they might be bullet holes. This meant there were more bullets than Sirhan's eight shot revolver had been capable of firing, hence a second gun. But Moldilla says the holes were caused by rolling kitchen carts that banged against the door frame.
- [32:22]
Dan Moldea
That's how eight bullets fired wound up being 12 bullets fired.
- [32:29]
Christopher Goffard
Then there were the bullets themselves. Only three recovered bullets were in good enough shape to be analyzed at Sirhan's 1969 trial. But in the 1970s, a court appointed firearms panel obtained Sirhan's gun and, and fired it into a water tank. The bullets did not match the bullets from the assassination.
- [32:50]
Dan Moldea
And that led to a lot of conspiracy theory, including me. That was one of the things that really affected me.
- [32:56]
Christopher Goffard
Moldea tracked down a man from the crime lab who gave an explanation.
- [33:02]
Dan Moldea
He goes, oh yeah, yeah, we take souvenirs all the time. He said, well, after Sirhan was convicted and after his appeals failed, we got Shearhan's gun and blah, blah, blah, we fired like, like a hundred bullets out of Sirhan's gun. And they each got a set, each, each of them got a set of eight bullets for their collections. Once you start firing a gun, you're going to change the configuration of the barrel.
- [33:36]
Christopher Goffard
Moldea tells me that Robert F. Kennedy, who as attorney General had targeted organized crime, is his favorite person in American history.
- [33:45]
Dan Moldea
I'm a mob reporter and Bobby Kennedy was my inspiration. He was the greatest crime fighter who ever lived. I wanted to get along with his, with his son. I truly did.
- [33:57]
Christopher Goffard
Maldia says RFK Jr called him out of the blue in 2017, saying he did not believe the official version of the assassination.
- [34:06]
Dan Moldea
He said, listen, I. I want to tell you that I spent some time with Sirhan. I visited with Sirhan. And he says, I don't think he did it. I don't think. I don't think he fired the shots. And I go, bobby, this is the guy who killed your dad. He did it. I mean, there's no ands or buts about about it. I have been begging Bobby Kennedy to sit down with me and let's debate his father's murder, and I will wipe the floor up with him on this case because he doesn't know what he's talking about. I got a call from a member of the Kennedy family. The bottom line is they love Bobby Kennedy. They love him. He's their brother, but they can't stand what he's been doing. This is what he does to his family, is he overwhelms them with minutiae. You know, eight shots. You know, oh, it's 12 shots, three bullets. They don't match him in 75. You know, the four bullets in the. In the line of fire. You know, the muzzle distance, the eyewitness testimony, all the stuff where there are simple explanations. But Bobby Kenny is going to his family, and he's giving him this minutiae he overwhelmed. And how do they respond to it? They have no way to respond. And so what they wanted from me, what this one particular member of the family wanted from me was, how do we deal with him when he does this to us? And I said, just read chapter 30 of my book, where I address every one of these issues.
- [35:35]
Eric George
Clemency, forgiveness is due to those who have accepted the truth of their actions. And that is totally lacking here. Rather than have the kind of honest acknowledgment of what happened, you have all manner of dissembling and outright lying. There's no two ways about how to put it.
- [35:59]
Christopher Goffard
This is attorney Eric George.
- [36:00]
Eric George
Again, I think it's really a shame because there are so many circumstances where there really are historical questions that aren't and may never be answered. I would say not so here.
- [36:15]
Christopher Goffard
I asked George if he had any thoughts about why RFK Jr. Was drawn to this elaborate conspiracy theory involving his father's murder.
- [36:25]
Eric George
It's a great question. My speculation is that perhaps he wants to see greater meaning in the death of his father than simply that he was gunned down by a deranged, bigoted human who happened to be at the right place in what I'll call the wrong time.
- [36:43]
Christopher Goffard
In 2024, after his 17th parole hearing, Sirhan was again denied parole. He will be eligible again next year. He's now 82 years old. From LA Times Studios, this is Crimes of the Times. To read more about these cases, check out Crimes of the times@latimes.com we also have a link to our video episodes in the show. Notes this episode was written and reported by me, your host Christopher Goffard. Our senior producers are Mary Knoff and Jonathan Shiflett of Studio Phonic. Our editor is Cindy Chang and our associates producer is Jordan Patterson. Production help from Audrey Ngo. Our camera operators are Michael Siegel, Josh Summers and Peter Grayson. Our Director of Post Production is Patrick Stewart and our Senior Sound Recording Engineer is Nick Norton with additional engineering by Jordan Patterson. Our Podcast Marketing Manager is Bryn Jura, our Senior Media Marketing Manager is Will Dobson and our Product Marketing Director is Becca Dorsey. Our podcast Senior Finance Manager is Jenner Canaleo. Special thanks to LA Times Studio President Anna Mazonian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argenteri and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Crimes of the Times is executive produced and co created by Darius, Derek Shahn and me, Christopher Gofford.
- [38:33]
Eric George
Doctor Swartz was faced down in a pool of blood.
- [38:36]
Christopher Goffard
A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy.
- [38:39]
Eric George
A very gruesome and disturbing scene.
- [38:43]
Christopher Goffard
Persons of interest obsessed with role playing and the occult.
- [38:48]
Eric George
We're here now.
- [38:49]
Christopher Goffard
I can smell blood from Sony Music Entertainment and M. William Phelps llc. Fatal Fantasy Available now on the binge search for Fatal Fantasy Wherever you get your podcasts.