Sirhan Sirhan, a young Arab-American, who was in the pantry in front of Kennedy, fired a pistol eight times and was subdued. He was charged with the crime. It seemed like an open-and-shut case, and was accepted as such by the mass media and the public.
But there were exceptions. Fernando Faura was one of them. A reporter for the Hollywood Citizen News, he was immediately suspicious. While working the night of June 4-5, he was driving with a young Kennedy campaign worker, Luke Perry, when they heard that RFK had been shot. They immediately went to Good Samaritan Hospital where Kennedy had been taken, then to LA Police Headquarters, and Faura's chase for the truth began.
"We shot him, we shot him!"
That pursuit centered on the search for a young woman in a white polka-dot dress who became a key person in solving RFK's murder. Faura writes, "Seconds after the shooting stopped, a young woman in a polka-dot dress ran out of the kitchen, past Sandra Serrano, a Kennedy campaign worker. The woman shouted, 'We shot him, we shot him.' Asked who they shot, the woman replied, 'Kennedy,' and ran into the morning darkness and history, never to be found."
This "Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress" -- seen by many witnesses with Sirhan and other men before and after the assassination -- becomes the object of Faura's search and the hub of this book. Quoting transcripts of his own tape recorded interviews with key witnesses, as well as police and FBI records, Faura systematically takes us through his investigation from start to finish. Reading it carefully, one cannot but be deeply impressed by his thoroughness and attention to detail. Nor can one not be chagrined by the ways his work was stymied by law enforcement and he was "followed, spied on, and harassed." It becomes evident that his pursuit of the truth was dangerous.
Early in his investigation Faura joined forces with Jordan Bonfante of Life magazine, but when Life eventually killed the investigation after a call from the White House that cited "national security reasons," Faura abandoned his pursuit out of fear for his children and lack of adequate resources.
Much of what government forces had to hide involved the girl in the polka-dot dress.
First News of the Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress
The public first heard of her shortly after the shooting, when Sandy Vanocur of NBC News interviewed Sandra Serrano live from the Ambassador Hotel at 1:30 AM on June 5, 1968. Faura prints the transcript of that interview from a FBI report of June 10, 1968, File # Los Angeles 56-156, in which Vanocur asks her to recount exactly what she observed as she cooled off outside on a rear metal emergency fire escape.
"Then this girl came running down the stairs and said, 'we've shot him, we've shot him.' Who did you shoot? And she said 'We've shot Senator Kennedy!'".And after that a boy came down with her, he was about 23 years old, and he was Mexican-American".She was not of Mexican-American descent. She was not. She was Caucasian. She had on a white dress with polka-dots, she was light-skinned ".she had a funny nose."
An hour later Serrano is interviewed by the LAPD. She tells them that while she was sitting on the same steps 15-20 minutes prior to seeing the girl flee down the steps with one man, she saw the same woman, together with two men, ascend the stairs past her.
Later she tells the FBI the same thing, even adding that the woman said, "Excuse us" as they brushed past her. She identifies one of the men going up as Sirhan.
Serrano never retracted her story, although she was subjected to ruthless intimidation by the LAPD and the FBI. "Serrano was not the first decent citizen to come forward with information, feeling it was her duty, and wind up on the receiving end." Faura presents the testimony of many others he interviewed that saw the girl in the polka-dot dress with Sirhan and other men in the pantry, fleeing the crime scene, in the hotel earlier in the day, etc. They too were subjected to government intimidation to retract their stories.
Other Witnesses
There is Vincent DiPierro -- the son of the Ambassador's ma????tre d', a student at the University of California, and a hotel employee -- who voluntarily testified to a grand jury that he saw, from a distance of five feet, the girl in the polka-dot dress with Sirhan in the pantry moments before the shooting. He testified that they were together. He told the grand jury, "They were both smiling. In fact, the moment the first two shots were fired, he still had a very sick looking smile on his face. That's one thing -- I can never forget."
There is Jose Caraval, another employee, who after the shooting saw the girl run into a dead-end hall trying to escape, only to run back out frantically.
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