The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (29 page)

“I’ve known Juan Romero for more than twenty years,” Rigo Chacon told Jay Margolis. “Juan has told me several times that he felt the heat of the bullet by his ear. If somebody fires from your side or behind you, and the bullet is only a short distance, a couple inches or more from your ear, you are gonna feel the heat . . . If Juan was standing behind Kennedy, and somebody fired from behind him, then that’s the bullet from which he felt the heat . . . What Juan told me and what he has told me repeatedly is that he did say that Bobby told him, ‘Is anybody hurt? Is everybody okay? . . .’ Up until this day, Juan is traumatized. When I took him to see Kennedy he felt compelled to talk to Bobby at his grave and apologize and tell him he was sorry [for distracting him by shaking his hand]. Later, he told me he felt better that he finally got that done because the spiritual part of him, he was sincere in believing that he was talking to Bobby Kennedy and apologizing. He’s a very, very humble man.”

In his official autopsy report, Noguchi confirmed Don Schulman’s unwavering assertion that three shots did indeed hit Kennedy. What’s more, Noguchi relayed how “the all-important bullet that had caused Kennedy’s death” came from behind RFK’s head. Noguchi conceded: “The bullet had entered the skull an inch to the left of Kennedy’s right ear . . . and shattered . . . But such small metallic bits could not be matched definitively to Sirhan’s gun. That meant that other evidence would be needed to establish that Sirhan Sirhan was in fact the assassin.”

In the yet-to-be-published
An Open & Shut Case
by Robert J. Joling, J.D., and Philip Van Praag, the authors provided an airtight case that none of Sirhan’s bullets hit Kennedy. On the other hand, they assumed that Cesar was the only other shooter besides Sirhan and they attributed the fatal blow to Cesar.

However, Joling is wrong that Cesar killed Kennedy. Presumably without a photo identification of the third shooter until now, thanks to Irene Gizzi, no one, including Joling, pursued Martha Raines’s description of the medallion guy as “approximately 6-feet 2-inches tall, Caucasian, with dark, wavy hair and wearing a suit (not a uniform).” In fact, at Sirhan Sirhan’s trial, Juan Romero’s eyewitness testimony of seeing the third shooter was completely ignored and dismissed.

Romero testified that he had seen a gunman deliver the fatal wound to the Senator’s head and clearly affirmed this person was
not
Sirhan Sirhan. The third shooter could not have been Cesar because he was already the second shooter. The security guard does not fit the description of a person running towards the Senator, who appeared like he “couldn’t wait to shake his hand,” as Juan Romero explained. “I seen the guy put a hand at the Senator’s head. And then I saw a gun.” Positioned directly behind the Senator, Cesar had by this time finished shooting his gun, hitting Kennedy twice to the right armpit. In fact, the third shooter’s fatal shot to RFK’s head was to come next.

As a former attorney and judge, Robert Joling told Jay Margolis he had been studying the RFK assassination since it occurred. Joling revealed to Margolis how he interviewed Don Schulman and found him completely credible. In 2007, Joling’s co-author Philip Van Praag provided strong support to Schulman’s account by analyzing audio evidence from freelance reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski who inadvertently left his recorder on and discovered later that he had recorded the shooting. Van Praag established how at least thirteen shots were fired that day, more than Sirhan had in his own eight-shot .22 caliber Iver Johnson Cadet 55SA revolver. Joling and Van Praag noted in their book: “Shouldn’t there be some bullets on the scene that identify with Sirhan’s gun? . . . Or was the LAPD Property gun (H18602) . . . the gun destroyed in July, 1968—used to produce the test-fired bullets?”

In fact, not including Kennedy himself, it can never be determined whether any of the remaining bullets from the five other victims came from Sirhan’s gun simply because H18602 was the gun used to test-fire the bullets and this gun belonged to Jake Williams,
not
Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan’s gun was actually labeled H53725 but this was
not
the gun used to perform the ballistics tests. The man who performed the test-firing, LAPD criminologist DeWayne Wolfer, widely-considered by many of his colleagues to be unqualified for his position, later explained it away by a “clerical error.”

However, this cannot be a simple “clerical error” when Jake Williams’s gun was the weapon actually being test fired as if it were Sirhan’s own gun, which it was not. Therefore, Wolfer lied when he testified under oath that the “Sirhan death weapon and no other gun in the world fired the fatal shot that killed Senator Kennedy.” The other shooting victims on June 5, 1968, not including Kennedy, had each been shot one time. They were as follows: Paul Schrade, who was grazed on the forehead, Elizabeth Evans, also grazed on the forehead while searching for her shoe, Ira Goldstein, who was wounded in his left hip, Irwin Stroll, hit in his left shin, and William Weisel who took a shot to the left abdomen.

Intriguingly, both Thane Eugene Cesar and Sirhan Sirhan were carrying a .22 on the day of RFK’s assassination despite Cesar lying to police that he brought a Rohm .38. In fact, Cesar was never asked to actually produce his weapon to authorities to see if it really was a .38 he was carrying or if it was a .22. They merely took Cesar at his word that it was a .38. Cesar owned a nine-shot .22 caliber Harrington & Richardson revolver also known as an H&R 922.

An AP Wire Photo dated June 5, 1968, released to the news services only hours after the shooting, correctly showed how Kennedy was shot in the back of the head near his right ear. Inexplicably against Sirhan’s right to due process, the autopsy report itself was not accessible to Sirhan’s defense team until after the beginning of Sirhan’s trial on January 7, 1969, more than seven months following the RFK assassination.

The autopsy report and the June 5 Associated Press photo both show how Kennedy was shot from behind but every credible witness places Sirhan facing Kennedy the entire time. This discrepancy appears to be purposefully hidden from Sirhan’s defense team so no one would think to point out that it wasn’t physically possible for Sirhan to be RFK’s true assassin. The Associated Press, by visiting RFK at Central Receiving Hospital and later Good Samaritan Hospital, knew from nurses and doctors on June 5 the exact location of the fatal bullet that killed Kennedy before Dr. Thomas Noguchi performed the autopsy on the Senator at 3:30 a.m. on June 6.

Unfortunately, four important eyewitnesses were either never asked the right questions or were simply ignored: Don Schulman’s comments about the Senator being shot from the rear by Thane Cesar, Juan Romero’s sighting of a third gun behind Kennedy’s head, Martha Raines who, in addition to Romero, also saw a third shooter fire his weapon, and Irene Gizzi who miraculously identified four out of five dangerous persons in the Ambassador Room.

The four individuals identified by Ms. Gizzi included two Ku Klux Klan terrorists (Tarrants and Ainsworth) and two powerful CIA agents (Morales and Joannides). Irene Gizzi also made it clear how all four were working side-by-side shortly before the shooting in a five-person group, along with Unidentified Man in Profile who, according to Ms. Gizzi, may or may not be the “unidentified third man” with “blonde hair and horn-rimmed glasses” on page 452 of Shane O’Sullivan’s book. As for Sirhan Sirhan, he was blamed for killing Kennedy even though none of his bullets were proven to hit the Senator.

“We got the call there at the Ambassador Hotel,” Schaefer Ambulance driver Edgardo Villalobos told Jay Margolis. “The guy with me was Darryl Stump. I guarantee he’s not around because I looked like his son then. We were way over at Beverly Boulevard. Joe Tarnowski radioed us for the call. There were a lot of people in that crowd during all the confusion. We responded but we didn’t get to transport him because the city was there.

“They were different from us. They wore police uniforms, not paramedics, just regular technicians, the g-unit they called it and they were ambulance guys. When you see them, they had a badge and you think you’re looking at LAPD. But that was their uniform back in those days. The police was there with them and they all worked together.

“So the technicians from the city [Robert Hulsman and Max Behrman] grabbed our stretcher, took over, put Bobby in it and away they went. They didn’t give us a chance to do anything, which is a very rude thing to do because we were there responding to the call however the city can take over. They put our stretcher in their ambulance so we went along after and followed them to pick up our stretcher. The city got the first call and Schaefer got the second call. In certain areas, anything the city cannot handle, we get.

“When the pictures came out in the media the next day, they showed how they covered Bobby with a big brown blanket on top of the stretcher and it had a big red circle that said S.A.A.S. (Schaefer’s Air Ambulance Service), which was like an advertisement. When they took our stretcher, it was made with our equipment, including the blanket on top of the stretcher . . . They first took him to Central Receiving Hospital. Then everything went bad. They were not prepared. Kennedy needed blood desperately and they didn’t have blood. So they transferred him to Good Samaritan where he died the next day.”

Twenty-five days after the RFK assassination, on June 30, 1968, at the Meridian, Mississippi, home of Jewish leader Meyer Davidson, the FBI ambushed Tommy Tarrants and Kathy Ainsworth, who were trying to plant a bomb on the front doorstep of Davidson’s house. The couple were caught in gunfire similar to the film
Bonnie and Clyde
(1967) and surprisingly the bomb Tarrants was carrying didn’t explode when he dropped it. Kathy Ainsworth, an elementary school teacher, who at the time was pregnant with her first child, died at the scene while her then-lover Thomas Tarrants had been shot
nineteen
times and survived. Following his astonishing recovery thanks to orthopedic surgeon Dr. Leslie Rush of Rush Memorial Hospital, Tarrants was initially put on death row yet was later inexplicably removed. He reasoned how “there were too many for the extra cells on death row.”

Consequently Tarrants only served eight years in prison at Parchman State Penitentiary before officially being released on December 13, 1976, at 8:30 a.m. Authorities were convinced he had transformed into a born-again Christian and no longer considered him a threat to society. Tarrants later became President of the C.S. Lewis Institute from 1998 to 2010 and is now Vice President of Ministry. He had previously been a co-pastor. An ordained minister, he currently possesses a Doctor of Ministry Degree in Christian Spirituality and a Master of Divinity Degree. “Nonetheless, some wouldn’t be convinced,” Thomas Tarrants wrote in his first book. “They no doubt still view my conversion as a gimmick for freedom.” After all, Tarrants himself conceded he was once regarded as “the most dangerous man in Mississippi.”

TIMELINE

Note:
Estimated times are indicated with a ~ symbol.

AUGUST 4, 1962:

8:00 a.m.

Mrs. Eunice Murray arrives for work.

9:00 a.m.

Isidore Miller calls from New York. Mrs. Murray assures Miller that Marilyn will return his call after she finishes dressing. Mrs. Murray never communicates the message to Marilyn.

Miller is Marilyn’s ex-father-in-law, one of her closest friends, and the kindest father figure she ever knew. To Marilyn, he is known as “Dad.”

9:00–10:15 a.m.

Marilyn’s best friend Ralph Roberts massages her back in her bedroom using his portable massage table. He notes she is “in wonderful shape and not tense.”

~ 10:20 a.m.

Ralph lets himself out the front door while Marilyn enters the kitchen and says good morning to Mrs. Murray. Per Mrs. Murray, Marilyn pours herself a glass of grapefruit juice. She does not eat or drink alcohol for the rest of the day. Tests of her unembalmed blood later reveal she hadn’t had a drop of alcohol that day.

~ 10:30–11:00 a.m.

Mrs. Murray noted, “Sometime during the earlier part of the day, the bedside table was delivered and Marilyn wrote a check for it. The citrus trees were also delivered that day and were placed in the rear yard.” Presumably the deliverers placed the bedside table where it belonged: in the guest cottage. There was already a bedside table in Marilyn’s main bedroom.

11:00 a.m.

Per Frank Neill, Twentieth Century-Fox studio publicist, he saw Bobby Kennedy arrive on the Fox lot, Stage 18, via helicopter. Bobby jumps out and quickly enters a car waiting for him with Peter Lawford inside.

Peter’s neighbor Ward Wood would later spot Bobby in the afternoon noting, “It was Bobby all right. He was in khakis and a white shirt open at the neck.”

12:00 p.m.

Pat Newcomb, who stayed overnight at Marilyn’s, awakens and per Pat and Mrs. Murray and later Greenson, Marilyn gets angry with her because Marilyn had no sleep the night before. In 1985, Mrs. Murray would concede that Bobby Kennedy was the real reason Marilyn was upset that day, not her alleged lack of sleep.