RFK Photos Destroyed Were Duplicates, LAPD Says

Thousands of photographs destroyed by the Los Angeles Police Department two months into the investigation of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy were duplicates, an LAPD spokesman said Friday.

“They went through the stuff and got rid of superfluous photos, said Cmdr. William Booth, quoting a retired member of the department who does not want to be identified or “get involved with the press.”

According to Booth, the officer was charged with handling more than 5,000 photographs collected by the LAPD’s Special Unit Senator in its yearlong investigation of the June 5, 1968, shooting of Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel.

Destruction of 2,410 photographs was disclosed Tuesday when the confidential records of Kennedy’s assassination nearly 20 years ago were made public at the State Archives in Sacramento.

The missing photographs related to bullet fragments and shell casings, comparison tests, Kennedy’s clothing, gun-firing tests, re-enactment of the shooting by witnesses and tracing and location of bullets, according to photo indexes.

The archives also released records showing that two police officers, acting on the orders of Lt. Roy Keene, an administrative specialist on the Special Unit Senator task force, burned the 2,410 photos in the incinerator at “County General Hospital” on Aug. 21, 1968.

The report said the destroyed photographs were “without code numbers,” while the remaining LAPD photos in the special unit files were coded.

Keene retired after the breakup of the special unit in the summer of 1969 and moved to Roseburg, Ore., where he served as chief of police. Relatives said Friday that he is in the hospital and unavailable to comment on the Kennedy case.

The man who headed the Kennedy investigation, Robert A. Houghton, retired chief of detectives, said Friday that special unit investigators gathered photographs from “all over,” including newspapers, magazines, private individuals and motion picture films.

“We were gathering as much data as we could,” Houghton said. “It served no purpose to keep a lot of unrelated photos. All of it did not have value. Common sense tells me that any material we threw away had no value to the investigation at all.”