Thirty years after Robert F. Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles grappled with the assassination anew Friday, dredging up the emotion and suspicion that continue to haunt the killing and its legacy.
In Pasadena, the brother and lawyer of Sirhan Sirhan sought support for their attempts to gain a new hearing for the man convicted of the killing. Outside the remains of the hotel, conspiracy theorists laid out their argument that Sirhan may have been a hypnotized dupe sent that night to provide a distraction for the real killer.
And at City Hall, Councilman Nate Holden used the anniversary as a political platform--in this case to promote his suggestion that a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard near the old hotel be renamed in the senator's honor.
As with the other assassinations of the period--those of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965 and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968--Bobby Kennedy's killing continues to stake a claim on the public imagination, defying resolution even 30 years after the fact.
Sirhan and his supporters point to what they say is intriguing new ballistics evidence and say it could either clear Sirhan or at least implicate a second gunman. They are particularly captivated by forensic evidence suggesting that the bullets that killed Kennedy were fired at point-blank range, an important fact because witnesses say Sirhan did not get that close to the senator.
What's more, they accuse the Los Angeles Police Department of wantonly mishandling and cavalierly destroying evidence. Some of Sirhan's most aggressive backers go so far as to implicate the department in an active cover-up--making police accessories after the fact to one of the most traumatic criminal acts of the 1960s.
Other veterans of the period, however, say that they are confident the right man is spending his life behind bars for the crime.
"These conspiracy people have exhausted their remedies," snorted Ed Davis, the retired LAPD chief who was a deputy chief at the time of the killing. "Immediately after the assassination, the conspiracy theorists came up with implausible hypotheses. The Board of Police Commissioners . . . listened patiently for months and months but decided there was nothing to them."
And yet, Davis on Friday found himself musing on the assassination too.
"I'll never forget Sirhan Sirhan sitting up there in Homicide," Davis said from his home in Morro Bay. "He was just sitting there, snickering."
