"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." - Sun Tzu
Friday, July 13, 2012
RFK Assassination Witness Willing to Testify for Sirhan Sirhan's Lawyers
updated 11:30 AM EDT, Mon July 9, 2012
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Nina Rhodes-Hughes agrees, if called, to testify about a second shooter
- Rhodes-Hughes: Sirhan Sirhan was not the only shooter in the pantry
- Sirhan was the only person charged and convicted in RFK assassination
- Witness says FBI altered her account of RFK shooting
Nina Rhodes-Hughes
insists Sirhan was not the only gunman firing shots when Sen. Kennedy
was murdered only a few feet away from her at a Los Angeles hotel. She
says there were two guns firing from separate positions and that
authorities altered her account of the crime.
"What has to come out is
that there was another shooter to my right," Rhodes-Hughes has told CNN.
"The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups."
As a federal court has
been preparing to rule on Sirhan's current legal challenge to his
conviction in the Kennedy murder, Rhodes-Hughes says she has been
contacted by Sirhan's lead defense lawyer, New York attorney William
Pepper. "He asked me if indeed I would testify that there was another
shooter and I said yes, I would," she said. Rhodes-Hughes says she has
not been contacted by the California attorney general's office, which
represents the other side in the Sirhan federal court case.
Previously reported
RFK assassination witness tells CNN: There was a second shooter
Attorneys for RFK convicted killer Sirhan push 'second gunman' argument
Prosecutors, attorneys argue: Was there a second gunman in RFK assassination?
Prosecutors rebut convicted RFK assassin's claims in freedom quest
Convicted RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan seeks prison release
Convicted RFK assassin denied parole
Sirhan Sirhan, convicted RFK assassin, to face parole board
Rhodes-Hughes has
described for CNN various details of the June 1968 assassination as well
as her long frustration with the official reporting of her witness
account and her reasons for speaking out 44 years later: "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," said the former Los Angeles resident now living near
Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada.
Sirhan, the only person
arrested, tried and convicted in the shooting of Robert 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 Sirhan, now 68, 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." He was convicted and sentenced to death, which
was reduced to life in prison in 1972.
After the trial, Sirhan recanted his courtroom confession.
Was there a second RFK shooter?
Sirhan Sirhan's federal case
Convicted RFK assassin awaits ruling
In recent federal court
filings, state prosecutors led by California Attorney General Kamala
Harris argued that even if there was 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 concerning the state statute.
The current battle has
prosecutors and Sirhan's lawyers engaging directly the merits of new
evidence -- as well as witness recollections such as Rhodes-Hughes'
account -- never before argued in court.
The particular clash
over Rhodes-Hughes was triggered five months ago by prosecutors under
the attorney general when they contended that Rhodes-Hughes had told the
FBI she heard no more than eight gunshots during the assassination. In
court papers filed in February, Harris' prosecutors argued that
Rhodes-Hughes was among several witnesses reporting "that only eight
shots were fired and that all these shots came from the same direction."
Three weeks later,
Sirhan's lawyers challenged those assertions in a response also filed in
federal court in Los Angeles. The defense team led by William Pepper
contended that the FBI misrepresented Rhodes-Hughes' witness 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 which she stated, "I heard 12-14 shots,
some originating in the vicinity of the Senator [and] not where I saw
Sirhan."
The FBI and the
California attorney general's office have both declined comment to CNN
on the controversy over Rhodes-Hughes' witness account since the matter
is now being reviewed by a federal judge.
When the dispute over
her account erupted in February, CNN sought out Rhodes-Hughes for
comment, eventually locating her in March in the Vancouver area.
Rhodes-Hughes, now 78,
told CNN that she was a television actress working as a volunteer
fundraiser for Kennedy's presidential campaign and that she had been
invited to the Ambassador Hotel to celebrate, along with the senator and
hundreds of his supporters, his anticipated victory in the June 4,
1968, California primary election. She said she witnessed the Kennedy
shooting shortly after midnight on June 5 inside a hotel kitchen service
pantry.
The FBI report indicates
that she was indeed inside the hotel pantry during the crucial moments
of the Kennedy shooting, but Rhodes-Hughes 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 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.
Photos: Kennedy family tragedies
The 42-year-old Kennedy
was the most seriously wounded of the six people shot inside the pantry
only moments after the New York senator had claimed victory in
California's Democratic presidential primary. 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 told 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 state Attorney General
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. 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 lawyer 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 eight bullets, but no more.
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 what an
expert said was 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 tape as
gunshots.
"The gunshots are
established by virtue of my computer analysis of waveform patterns,
which clearly distinguishes gunshots from other phenomena," Van Praag
said. "This would include phenomena that to human hearing are often
perceived as exploding firecrackers, popping camera flashbulbs or
bursting balloons."
The Pruszynski recording
is now a major point of controversy among the new evidence being argued
between the two sides in the Sirhan federal court case.
California Attorney
General Harris contends that Van Praag's findings amount to an
"interpretation or opinion" that is not universally accepted by acoustic
experts. However other audio experts have reported finding more than
eight gunshots in Stanislaw Pruszynski's recording.
In 2005, Spence
Whitehead of Atlanta told CNN that he had located "at least 9, possibly
11 shot sounds" captured by Pruszynski's audiotape of the Kennedy
shooting.
A 2007 Investigation
Discovery Channel television documentary reported that Wes Dooley and
Paul Pegas of Pasadena, California, along with their colleague Eddy B.
Brixen of Copenhagen, Denmark, had located "at least ten" shots in
Pruszynski's recording of the kitchen pantry gunfire.
Also appearing in the TV
program was Philip Harrison of York, England. In a published analysis,
Harrison described locating within the Pruszynski tape more than ten
"impulse sounds" occurring inside the pantry: seven that he attributed
to gunshots, three that he considered candidates for an eighth shot and
several other impulse sounds that he said he could not identify.
CNN initially reported on the Pruszynski recording 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 a published analysis
of the Pruszynski sound recording, Philip Van Praag described five of
the gunshots captured in the tape as being fired opposite the direction
of Sirhan's eight shots. Van Praag also described the five shots -- the
third, fifth, eighth, 10th and 12th gunshots within a 13-shot sequence
-- as displaying an acoustical "frequency anomaly" indicating that the
alleged second gun's make and model were different from Sirhan's weapon.
In this NBC photo taken in December 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.
A chance meeting with Bobby 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 in December
1965 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 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 told 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
William Pepper focused on in particular when CNN asked him to comment on
her recounting 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 lawyer told 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.
Rhodes-Hughes 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. She 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.
"It was rapid fire and a
different sound than the other gun which Sirhan had," Rhodes-Hughes
said. "The shots that I heard coming from my right, more towards the
Senator, were much more deeper resounding and were rapid, rapid, rapid
fire."
In his analysis of the
Pruszynski recording, Philip Van Praag found that some of the 13 shot
sounds he located in the tape were fired too rapidly, at intervals too
close together, for all of the shots fired 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 the two Pasadena forensic audio engineers who
corroborated Van Praag's second-gun findings for the 2007 TV
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. "The
shots to my right, where Senator Kennedy was, continued," she said. "It
was a deeper sound, a different sound and much more rapid."
During all of that time,
Rhodes-Hughes told CNN, "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 said 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. She said
Rhodes and members of the senator's presidential campaign tried to calm
her down.
"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, Robert F. 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 said she made a point of telling two FBI agents in July
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 said of the FBI agents who conducted the interview in her Los
Angeles home. She also said 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 said 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 one of several
books he wrote on the Robert Kennedy assassination.
Rhodes-Hughes recounted the Kennedy shooting and her initial contact with Melanson in a 1990s interview on "Contact," a local TV program in Vancouver carried at the time by Rogers Cable.
Defense lawyer 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 trial. Most of the original prosecution's evidence was
stipulated by the original defense team, which agreed that Sirhan had
killed the presidential candidate.
Rhodes-Hughes says she
believes 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.
"From my perspective, I
am not here to convict Sirhan Sirhan or release him," Rhodes-Hughes
says. However "there definitely was another shooter," she insists. "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.
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