Who Killed Robert Kennedy? Sirhan’s Trial and the 2025 Files

Robert F. Kennedy was killed by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant who shot the senator at close range in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Kennedy had won the California Democratic presidential primary hours earlier. He died the following morning at Good Samaritan Hospital at age 42. Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder and remains in a California prison more than five decades later. The lone-gunman conclusion has been reaffirmed by courts and federal reviews, but forensic conflicts and a persistent second-gunman theory have kept the case in dispute.¹

The Shooting at the Ambassador Hotel

After addressing roughly 2,000 supporters in the hotel’s Embassy Room, Kennedy took a shortcut through the kitchen pantry toward a press area. The pantry was crowded with waiters, staff, and journalists. Sirhan pushed forward and fired an eight-shot .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver, emptying the cylinder.²

Kennedy was hit three times. One bullet entered behind his right ear and pierced his brain, a wound surgeons later described as unsurvivable. A second lodged in the back of his neck, and a third caused a superficial shoulder wound. Five bystanders were also hit, none fatally.¹

Sirhan was tackled and disarmed almost immediately. Former Los Angeles Rams lineman Roosevelt Grier, Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson, and Kennedy campaigner Joe LaHive wrestled the gun from his hand and pinned him to a kitchen table until police arrived. Kennedy underwent brain surgery lasting several hours and died in the early morning of June 6, 1968.¹

Who Was Sirhan Sirhan

Sirhan was born on March 19, 1944, in Jerusalem to a Christian Palestinian family. He was four years old during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and his family was displaced from their home. They emigrated to the United States in 1957 and settled in Pasadena, California. His father abandoned the family six months later and returned to Palestine. Sirhan attended Pasadena City College and worked odd jobs, including at a horse stable and a health food store.³⁴

Why He Killed Kennedy

Sirhan’s stated motive was Palestinian nationalism and anger over American support for Israel. At trial he testified that his initial admiration for Kennedy turned to hatred after he saw the senator on television appearing to celebrate Israeli independence and heard a radio report claiming Kennedy had pledged to send 50 jet bombers to Israel.⁵

The 1967 Six-Day War affected him deeply. He carried out the assassination on June 5, 1968, the one-year anniversary of that war’s start. After his arrest he reportedly told those present, “I did it for my country.”³ In court he said he wanted “something I could identify with as a Palestinian and an Arab,” and testified, “Israel is not the underdog in the Middle East. The Palestinians are.”⁵

The Notebooks

On the morning of June 5, 1968, police and FBI agents searched Sirhan’s bedroom at 696 Howard Street in Pasadena with permission from his brother Adel. They recovered three notebooks; two were entered into evidence at trial.⁶

In entries dated May 18, 1968, Sirhan had written: “My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more and more of an unshakable obsession” and “Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68.” Other entries repeated “R.F.K. must die.” A handwriting specialist from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office confirmed the writings were Sirhan’s, and the prosecution used the notebooks as central evidence of premeditation. At the time of his arrest, Sirhan also had a newspaper clipping about Kennedy’s political support for Israel.⁶⁴

The Trial and Sentence

Sirhan’s trial began in February 1969 and lasted three months. He was charged with first-degree murder for Kennedy’s death and five counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder for the wounded bystanders. His attorneys argued he had acted impulsively and was mentally unstable, and Sirhan testified that he had been drinking and could not remember his actions. The notebook entries undercut that defense. In a dramatic courtroom moment, Sirhan himself declared he had committed the crime “with 20 years of malice aforethought.”⁷⁸

The jury convicted him on all counts. On May 22, 1969, he was sentenced to death in the gas chamber. Three years later the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, and his sentence was automatically commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole.⁸⁹

Why the Case Is Still Argued

The conviction has never fully closed the case, because the physical evidence and the eyewitness accounts do not fit together cleanly.

The Autopsy Versus the Eyewitnesses

Los Angeles County Medical Examiner Thomas Noguchi determined that all three bullets striking Kennedy were fired from behind, at the right rear, at upward angles, and from point-blank range. The fatal shot entered behind Kennedy’s right ear from just inches away. Yet virtually every eyewitness placed Sirhan in front of Kennedy and at least two to three feet away when he began firing.¹⁰¹¹

One explanation offered at the time was that Kennedy turned his body after the first shot, presenting his back to the gunman, and that Sirhan lunged forward during the attack. The discrepancy has never been fully reconciled to the satisfaction of all parties.

How Many Shots Were Fired

Sirhan’s revolver held eight rounds, and he emptied all of them. Multiple witnesses reported hearing more. Nina Rhodes-Hughes, a campaign volunteer standing in the pantry, said she heard 12 to 14 shots, some from a direction different than Sirhan’s position, and alleged the FBI altered her original 1968 statement to reflect only eight. Others who told police they heard more than eight included Jesse Unruh, then speaker of the California Assembly; Frank Mankiewicz, Kennedy’s campaign press secretary; and Kennedy supporters Estelyn Duffy LaHive and Booker Griffin.¹⁰¹²

Acoustic expert Philip Van Praag analyzed a recording made by freelance journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski and identified 13 distinct gunshot impulses over roughly five seconds. He noted that two pairs of shots occurred at intervals of 122 and 149 milliseconds, faster than a trained expert could fire the Iver Johnson, which required at least 366 milliseconds between shots. He attributed five of the shots to a second weapon consistent with a Harrington and Richardson 922 revolver.¹³

Other experts disagreed. Philip Harrison and Michael O’Dell, in a 2011 declaration, identified only seven certain gunshot sounds on the recording and called Van Praag’s analysis “flawed.” In 2013 the FBI concluded the tape was of “insufficient quality” to confirm the number of gunshots or identify specific weapons, and U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Wistrich rejected the recording as conclusive evidence that year.¹⁴

The Guard Behind Kennedy

Thane Eugene Cesar, a private security guard employed by Ace Guard Service, was escorting Kennedy through the pantry and holding his right arm when the shooting started. He admitted drawing his own service revolver during the chaos, and witnesses corroborated this. A 1971 LAPD report identified only Sirhan and Cesar as having displayed guns inside the pantry.¹⁵

Cesar was carrying a .38 that night but also owned a .22 Harrington and Richardson revolver. He first told investigators he had sold the .22 before the assassination, then later admitted he had been “mistaken” about the date of the sale. Police never examined his gun or tested whether he had recently fired it. Cesar denied firing his weapon and passed a polygraph test. In 2012, Sirhan’s own attorneys officially ruled out Cesar as the second shooter, though attorney William Pepper acknowledged he “may well have played a role” in some broader conspiracy.¹⁵¹⁶

The Hypnosis Theory

In later decades Sirhan’s defense advanced the theory that he had been “hypno-programmed” to fire shots as a diversion while a true assassin killed Kennedy from behind. Attorney William Pepper compared Sirhan to a “Manchurian Candidate” who acted in a robotic state before having his memory wiped, and engaged Dr. Daniel Brown, a Harvard psychologist specializing in hypnosis and trauma, to examine him. Witnesses at the scene described Sirhan as having a strangely calm, “glassed-over” look during the struggle to subdue him. Author George Plimpton, who helped tackle him, noted his “enormously peaceful eyes.”⁷¹⁷

No court has accepted the hypnosis theory. It also sits in tension with Sirhan’s own trial testimony claiming political motivation and premeditation.

What the LAPD Destroyed

On August 21, 1968, two months into the investigation, two police officers burned 2,410 photographs taken in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen. According to index records, the photos documented bullet fragments and shell casings, comparison tests, Kennedy’s clothing, gun-firing tests, witness re-enactments, and the tracing and location of bullets. The destroyed photographs lacked the code numbers assigned to surviving files.¹⁸

LAPD Commander William Booth called the photos “duplicates” and “superfluous.” Former chief of detectives Robert Houghton said it “served no purpose to keep a lot of unrelated photos.” The LAPD also destroyed ceiling tiles and a door jamb from the kitchen pantry, items that some researchers believed contained bullet holes that could have pointed to more than eight shots. State archivist John Burns said he and others had not known “that so much evidence was destroyed.”¹⁸¹⁹

Reinvestigations and the 2025 File Release

Doubts about the investigation prompted several reviews. In 1974, Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward held public hearings into the ballistics controversy. Criminalist Herbert MacDonnell of New York testified that the evidence suggested more than one gun was used and that bullets were fired at different angles. District Attorney Joseph Busch refused to reopen the case.²⁰ In 1975, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appointed private attorney Thomas Kranz as Special Counsel, and Superior Court Judge Robert Wenke ordered a re-examination of the Sirhan weapon and bullet evidence. Kranz’s final report, published in March 1977, did not overturn the original findings.

In 2011, William Pepper filed a 62-page federal habeas corpus petition arguing that a bullet had been switched before trial, that acoustic evidence proved 13 shots were fired, and that Sirhan had been programmed through hypnosis to serve as a diversion. In 2015, U.S. District Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell denied the petition, ruling that Sirhan “failed to meet the showing required for actual innocence.” She noted that Sirhan himself did not dispute firing eight rounds in the pantry.²¹²²

Paul Schrade, the union official who was the first person shot that night, became the most prominent public advocate for reopening the case. At Sirhan’s 2016 parole hearing, Schrade faced him for the first time since the 1969 trial and told him, “I forgive you for shooting me.” He also argued that Sirhan did not kill Kennedy, maintaining until his death in November 2022 that a second, unidentified gunman was responsible.²³

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14176 directing the release of government records related to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The National Archives began releasing files on a rolling basis: roughly 10,185 pages on April 18, 2025; 64,686 pages on May 7, 2025; and 9,653 pages on June 12, 2025. The releases include FBI field office materials, Sirhan’s handwritten notebooks, audio recordings of LAPD interviews, CIA documents, and records from the Johnson and Ford presidential libraries. Redactions were limited to Social Security numbers, tax identification numbers, and grand jury information.²⁴²⁵

Where Sirhan Is Now

Sirhan has appeared before parole boards 17 times. The Board of Parole Hearings initially found him suitable for parole in 1975 but quickly rescinded the grant, and he was denied at every subsequent hearing through 2016.⁸

In August 2021, a two-person parole panel recommended his release, influenced in part by California laws requiring consideration of an inmate’s age at the time of the crime and childhood trauma. Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón’s office did not send a prosecutor to oppose parole. Governor Gavin Newsom reversed the recommendation on January 13, 2022, concluding that Sirhan “poses an unreasonable threat to public safety.” Newsom cited Sirhan’s “shifting narrative” about the killing, his refusal to accept full responsibility, and his failure to meaningfully disclaim political violence committed in his name.²⁶⁸

He was denied again in March 2023 by a three-member panel, and once more on August 16, 2024, at his 17th hearing. Now 80, Sirhan remains an inmate at the R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego and will be eligible for another hearing in three years.²⁷²⁸

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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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8
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13
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14
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16
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17
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18
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19
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21
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22
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