American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [44]
Then, after the assassination, Serrano saw the same girl, running down a fire escape out of the hotel and shouting, “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Kennedy!” Later, an LAPD interrogator put heavy pressure on Serrano to recant her story, which she did at the time. But when Serrano was interviewed again 40 years later, she stuck to what she’d originally said. And she wasn’t the only one who reported seeing something like this. Police Sergeant Paul Sharaga, who was in the hotel’s back parking lot six minutes after the shooting, also heard a young couple run past yelling about having killed Kennedy.9 He put out an APB. But Sharaga said, when he went to look for the three copies he made of his report two weeks later, they had vanished.10
Sirhan himself said: “I met the girl and had coffee with her. She wanted heavy on the cream and sugar. After that I don’t remember a thing until they pounced on me in that pantry.”11 Could it be that the girl said some keyword or phrase that triggered his amnesia?
According to the LAPD logs, the cops were looking for two suspects besides Sirhan within minutes of the assassination. Then they stopped searching within the hour, because “they only have one man and don’t want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy. This could be somebody that was getting out of the way so they wouldn’t get shot.”12 Huh? That makes no sense at all for an honest investigator to reason.
The fact is, the LAPD had a long history of a “special relationship” with the CIA, from helping out with clandestine activities to training certain officers for double duty. When they formed Special Unit Senator (SUS) to look into the assassination, the two main cops through which all information flowed both had ties to the CIA. “In retrospect it seems odd that ... policemen who doubled as CIA agents occupied key positions in SUS, where they were able to seal off avenues that led in the direction of conspiracy.”13 They also badgered any witness who didn’t support the Sirhan-did-it-alone scenario.
Manuel Pena, a multilingual fellow who’d done special ops for the CIA, saw all the SUS reports and was the man responsible for approving all interviews. His partner, Sergeant Enrique “Hank” Hernandez, handled all the polygraph work, which he’d also done in Vietnam, South America, and Europe. Both Pena and Hernandez had been undercover CIA with the Agency for International Development (AID). Later, Hernandez started his own security firm and got rich handling big government contracts.14
As soon as Sirhan’s trial ended, the LAPD got busy destroying evidence, including the ceiling panels and door frames from the pantry that they’d taken pictures of showing extra bullet holes. Their rationale, when asked later, was these were “too large to fit into a card file”! Once again, we’ve got the authorities destroying evidence at a crime scene, just like with the King case. They also burned some 2,400 photographs, supposedly all duplicates, but we know some important ones are still missing—like the pictures taken by a 15-year-old kid named Scott Enyart. He was standing on a table so he could get a good view of Kennedy as he came in and took three rolls of Kodak film that the cops confiscated afterwards and said he could get back—if he came around in twenty years! Enyart had to fight in court to eventually be returned only 18 prints (no negatives), which were then promptly stolen out of the back seat of a car.15
Also gone missing were “X-rays and test results on ceiling tiles and door frames, spectrographic test results [for bullets], the left sleeve of Senator Kennedy’s coat and shirt, the test gun used as a substitute for Sirhan’s gun during ballistics tests,