He finds it together with Life magazine's Jordan Bonafante when they travel to the Trancas restaurant and meet the owner at his mansion in "a scene out of the 'Godfather'." The owner allows them to go through the receipts for June 4th when Fahey said he and the girl stopped to have dinner. They find the receipt for exactly what Fahey said they ordered. More important, they find the woman who waited on them, show her the sketch of the girl and she confirms the likeness. Finally, Faura has Fahey subjected to a rigorous lie detector test that he passes with flying colors.
So the witnesses confirm that the girl in the polka-dot dress they saw and the girl in the sketch look alike. Fahey's independent description of the girl also matches the sketch. And Fahey tells Faura that the girl predicted the time and place of the assassination. A conspiratorial link is established.
Faura tells the authorities, but they refuse to follow up. Instead, they badger witnesses to change their stories. Faura realizes that the truth about this girl, her very existence, must be suppressed.
Faura, however, continues the search for the girl, always a few steps ahead of the FBI and LAPD, but he never finds her. He eventually concludes that she was probably eliminated by the organizers of the conspiracy.
He discovers that the LAPD officer in charge of the investigation -- Lt. Manny Pena -- is CIA connected, having worked for U.S. AID and been recently brought back to control the investigation. He documents the brutal interrogation techniques of Sgt. Hank Hernandez, CIA affiliated like Pena, to intimidate and break witnesses to change their stories.
Facts and Confirmations
There is much more that Faura discovers and details in his first-hand narrative. A review can only suggest it all. He rarely speculates. He sticks to giving us the record of his investigation as it happened -- transcripts, documents, FBI and LAPD records, his day-to-day itineraries, his doubts, hunches, confirmations, etc. -- all in the space of days, weeks, months of the assassination. Therein lies its great value.
A careful reader will note what he has to say about the strange case of the preacher Rev. Gerry Owens, Sirhan, Robert Weatherly, and the Shamel Ranch; about various attempts to kill or intimidate witnesses; about Sirhan's and the girl in the polka-dot dress's connection to the Rosicrucians and the practice of hypnosis; about various look-a-likes for Sirhan and the girl, etc. While he does not solve the case, he emphatically proves through his focus on the girl in the polka-dot dress that there was a conspiracy and a cover-up.
When at the end he diverges from his personal experiences, it is to present facts confirmed by other respected investigators that confirm and fill out the conspiracy. For example, he refers to the esteemed writer William Turner (The Assassination of Robert F.Kennedy, Review Mirror), a former FBI man, on the witness Jamie Scott Enyart. Enyart was a high school student who was trailing Senator Kennedy, his hero, that night, taking photographs from slightly behind and to his left. When the shots rang out, he continued taking pictures rapidly. They were shortly confiscated by the LAPD, allegedly to be used at the Sirhan trial, which they never were. They were then sealed for twenty years.
Twenty years later Enyart asked for them back and was told they had been burned. He sued and in 1996 was awarded $450,000. But during the trial they told him the photos were discovered, misfiled in Sacramento. The film that Enyart found had been tampered with, and most importantly there were no photos from within the pantry where Enyart had seen security guard Eugene Cesar get up from the floor behind RFK with his gun drawn. Cesar, who had suspected CIA links, was in the exact position from which Kennedy was shot. He is free to this day, and "there is no record that the LAPD gave Cesar a paraffin test to determine if he had fired the gun."
Faura quotes Turner: "Thus disappeared the RFK version of the Zapruder Film, which might have shown who shot him from behind."
A Few Questions
Faura's work leaves this reader with some questions.
If, as he writes a few times (as if asking an implied question), RFK's route through the pantry was "spontaneously changed by his staff at the last minute," how could the killers have known where to lay in wait? Was there an inside collaborator?
Who was the girl in the polka-dot dress? He doesn't say or speculate, but the excellent researcher Lisa Pease (see The Assassinations, pp. 591-7, 602) has presented a case that she may have been Shirin Khan, the daughter of Khaiber Khan, a very suspicious Iranian who had come from NYC to volunteer in Kennedy's campaign office where he did very strange things and was seen with Sirhan a few days before the assassination. Khaiber Khan, even more suspiciously, had given a ride on the night of the assassination to Michael Wayne, a Sirhan look-a-like who was arrested running out of the pantry after the shots were fired.
Faura, however, does tell us how witness Greg Clayton had seen Sirhan earlier in the evening with the girl in the polka-dot dress and three other men; how after the shooting he helped tackle the one who looked like Sirhan as he ran out of the pantry, saying, "let me go, got to get out of here. I am not answering any questions, I am not going to say anything in public." That man was Michael Wayne.
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