Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn't believe it was Sirhan Sirhan.
LOS ANGELES - Just before Christmas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled up to the massive Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center, a California state prison complex in the desert outside San Diego that holds nearly 4,000 inmates. Kennedy was there to visit Sirhan B. Sirhan, the man convicted of killing his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, nearly 50 years ago.
While his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, waited in the car, Robert Kennedy Jr. met with Sirhan for three hours, he revealed to The Washington Post last week. It was the culmination of months of research by Kennedy into the assassination, including speaking with witnesses and reading the autopsy and police reports.
"I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan," Kennedy said. He would not discuss the specifics of their conversation. But when it was over, Kennedy had joined those who believe there was a second gunman, and that it was not Sirhan who killed his father.
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"I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence," said Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father's 11 children. "I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn't commit."
Kennedy, 64, said he doesn't know if his involvement in the case will change anything. But he now supports the call for a re-investigation of the assassination led by Paul Schrade, who also was shot in the head as he walked behind Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles but survived.
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Kennedy was just 14 when he lost his father. Even now, people tell him how much Bobby Kennedy meant to them.
RFK's death - five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas and two months after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis - devastated a country already beset by chaos.
In 1968, the Vietnam War raged, American cities had erupted in riots after MLK's assassination and tensions between war protesters and supporters were growing uglier. Robert Kennedy's newly launched presidential bid had raised hopes that the New York Democrat and former attorney general could somehow unite a divided nation. The gunshots fired that June night changed all that.
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