State Releases Records From R.F.K. Slaying

Confidential records of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy nearly 20 years ago were made public here Tuesday, along with a report that more than 2,400 photographs had been destroyed by the Los Angeles Police Department.

State Archivist John F. Burns declined to weigh the importance of the missing photos and refused to draw conclusions based on the voluminous police file, suggesting that any conclusion varying from the official police version will require intensive study. Burns spent eight months cataloguing the material after an agreement was reached to make most, but not all of the files, public.

The written records and material evidence, including convicted assassin Sirhan B. Sirhan’s .22-caliber revolver and his notes declaring “Kennedy must die,” went on display in the State Archives Building, near the Capitol. Included are large filing cabinets containing 50,000 documents collected in a yearlong investigation by the LAPD’s Special Unit Senator, which interviewed more than 4,700 people and generated more than 2,900 other photographs, 190 reels of audio tape and 20 reels of 16-millimeter film.

The missing photographs were studies of the crime scene, ballistics examinations and witness reenactments. The pictures were said to have been destroyed three months after the assassination at a county incinerator. In addition, as has been previously reported, bullet-punctured ceiling tiles and damaged door jambs were destroyed.

Asked for comment about the destroyed photos, LAPD spokesman Cmdr. William Booth, former Police Chief Tom Reddin and the man who headed the Kennedy investigation, Robert A. Houghton, retired chief of detectives, all said they did not recall that any photos were destroyed.

‘Routinely Destroyed’

“I don’t recall any incident of burning,” said Houghton.

But Booth said that the department had notified the City Council in 1975 that potential evidence that had not been used during Sirhan’s trial had been “routinely destroyed.” Any photographs that might have been destroyed, Booth speculated, “would have been items not received, classified or designated during the trial.”

Secretary of State March Fong Eu opened the records to the public at a press conference attended by dozens of reporters and television camera crews, describing the occasion as a “historic moment.” She said it was a time to reflect on that “awful night at the Ambassador, a night which ended one life and changed so many others.”

The complete LAPD file had been keep secret for a generation for the avowed purpose of preserving the confidentiality of information given to investigators and guarding the privacy of hundreds of people questioned in the inquiry.

Shot After Midnight

The 42-year-old New York senator was shot in the crowded hotel pantry at 12:15 a.m. on June 5, 1968, shortly after making a victory speech as the winner of the California Democratic presidential primary. He died at 1:44 a.m. on June 6 after brain surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital.

Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder in April, 1969.

Both those who are certain that Sirhan, then a 24-year-old Jordanian immigrant who had lived in the United States for 11 years, acted alone, and those who suggest that a thorough study of the records may reveal a “second gunman” had long sought access to the files.

Now, scholars, researchers, conspiracy theorists, investigative reporters or the merely curious may view microfilmed records of the investigation for two hours at a time, with a lottery to determine the order of admission.

And they may buy most of the written documents on microfilm for $275, or purchase a complete set of material, including video and audio tapes, for $412. Dozens of orders from throughout the country indicate that the demand may be brisk, according to Burns.

Conspiracy Theory

Describing how the investigative file came to the state last August, Eu explained that the LAPD had concluded that Sirhan acted alone and there was no conspiracy, but others were not sure.

“They believed there were too many inconsistencies in the police scenario to be accepted, and they asked that further study be made and that records of the case be opened to the public for examination,” she said.

An advisory committee formed in Los Angeles recommended that the collection be transferred to the State Archives, and Mayor Bradley, the City Council and the Police Commission agreed.

The commission released a 1,500-page police summary of the investigation in March, 1986, but that step failed to satisfy the critics, including Paul Schrade, one of five others wounded when Kennedy was shot.

For years, Schrade has found it virtually impossible to believe the police finding that one of the bullets that went through the padding of Kennedy’s suit jacket also struck Schrade in the forehead.

Lawsuit Filed

The retired United Auto Workers official brought suit along with CBS in 1975 to force the refiring of Sirhan’s gun and the examination of ballistics evidence.

“I’ve done my job,” Schrade said in a telephone interview last week. “I still have questions about the official version and hopefully we can find more through historians and investigators.”

Thomas Kranz, an attorney appointed to conduct a subsequent investigation financed by Los Angeles County, also expressed satisfaction with the opening of the investigative files, something he had advocated for a decade.

“To delay the release of information, when the Robert Kennedy assassination was undoubtedly one of the greatest tragedies to hit our generation, did not serve a public purpose,” he said.

Kranz, who now is a counsel for the Army in Washington, is convinced that Sirhan acted alone. He has concluded that the second-gun question has been answered to all but “die-hard doubters, conspiracy lovers, publicity seekers and the uninformed.”

Ballistics Reports

He cites the findings of seven ballistics experts impaneled in Los Angeles in the fall of 1975 to support his opinion. The criminalists refired Sirhan’s gun and exhaustively examined bullet evidence introduced at Sirhan’s trial.

Patrick V. Garland, who headed the panel, said this week that he and his fellow experts were “all virtually certain that Sirhan’s gun was the one.”

Five of the seven experts found that bullets taken from Kennedy and two other victims, police test bullets and the bullets that they fired all came from the same gun, with a “gross imperfection” in its barrel.

Because of the standards of absolute certainty required of ballistics experts, Garland said, the panelists could not say that there is no other .22-caliber revolver of the same make in the world with the same damaged spot that marked bullets in the same way. But, he said, the odds that two absolutely similar guns were in the pantry when Kennedy was shot are “astronomical.”

When the 1,500-page LAPD summary was released in March, 1986, Sirhan--now 44 and serving a life term at Soledad Prison--said in a telephone interview: “The report says I killed the senator and acted alone. That is true, and I have already admitted that.”

Doubters Remain

Despite Sirhan and the experts, however, critics such as Gregory Stone, a candidate for a political science doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, are not mollified. When the records were opened Tuesday, Stone complained that Los Angeles police had destroyed “critical evidence.”

“It’s tragic and shocking to learn that even more official evidence was destroyed. . . . It has been one of the major problems in this case . . . and now we’re learning that far more was destroyed than we realize,” he said. “That’s tragic.”

Pictures of the autopsy, the senator’s bloodied clothing, criminal “rap sheets,” juvenile records, internal police personnel records and the records of the FBI and other police agencies were among the items not made public. Burns said the FBI will eventually release its own file.

In another development Tuesday, it was reported in Los Angeles that Stephen Smith, brother-in-law of Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, had asked the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for the clothing worn by the senator on the night he was shot. The request is being considered, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven Sowders.

Times staff writer Ronald L. Soble contributed to this article from Los Angeles.