The RFK Assassination: Sirhan, the Second Gunman, and the Question

Q: Who shot Robert F. Kennedy?

Officially, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Christian Palestinian-Jordanian born in Jerusalem, fired the shots that killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at approximately 12:15 AM on June 5, 1968, minutes after RFK had won the California Democratic presidential primary. Sirhan was apprehended at the scene with the Iver Johnson .22 Cadet revolver in his hand. He was tried in 1969, convicted of first-degree murder, and originally sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after California abolished capital punishment in 1972. Sirhan has remained incarcerated continuously since his arrest in 1968 — 58 years as of 2026. The unresolved question is whether he acted alone. Wound forensics, audio analysis of a recording made in the pantry, and witness testimony have produced a sustained 50-year argument that a second shooter was present.

Q: Who was Sirhan Sirhan?

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born March 19, 1944 in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian Arab family. The family emigrated to the United States in 1956 following the displacements of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. They settled in Pasadena, California, where Sirhan attended John Muir High School and Pasadena City College. In the period before the assassination he worked as an exercise boy at thoroughbred racetracks; he had ambitions to become a jockey but suffered a fall that ended that direction. His notebooks, recovered after his arrest, contained repeated handwritten entries including 'RFK must die' and 'My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession.' Sirhan has consistently maintained that he has no memory of the shooting itself. His defense at trial, led by attorney Grant Cooper, argued diminished capacity. He has been before the California Board of Parole Hearings 17 times. On August 27, 2021, the Board recommended parole for the first time. On January 13, 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the recommendation. Sirhan, 82 in 2026, remains incarcerated.

Q: Was there a second gunman in the RFK assassination?

This is the central unresolved question of the case. The autopsy on RFK, performed by Los Angeles County Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, established that all four bullets that struck Kennedy entered from behind and at near-contact range — the fatal shot was fired from approximately one inch behind the right ear at a sharply upward trajectory. Sirhan was at all times in front of Kennedy, separated by maitre d' Karl Uecker, and never closer than approximately three feet. The wound geometry has been the central physical-evidence basis for the second-shooter framing for 58 years. Audio analysis of the Pruszynski recording — a tape made by Polish-Canadian journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski whose recorder was running on the rostrum — by forensic audio specialist Philip Van Praag in 2005 and 2007 concluded that the tape captured at least 13 shot sounds, with at least 2 shots fired so closely together they could not have come from the same 8-round revolver. The Los Angeles District Attorney's office and the FBI have maintained the single-shooter conclusion across multiple official reviews.

Q: Who was Thane Eugene Cesar?

Thane Eugene Cesar (1941–2019) was a security guard employed by Ace Guard Service who was assigned to the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the RFK assassination. Cesar's regular employment was as a maintenance worker at Lockheed Burbank. As Kennedy walked through the pantry corridor following his victory speech, Cesar was directly behind and slightly to Kennedy's right. Cesar admitted he had drawn his service weapon during the shooting. He owned a privately-owned .22 H&R revolver in addition to the .38 he was wearing for his Ace Guard Service shift. Cesar sold the .22 to a co-worker named Jim Yoder a few months after the assassination. The weapon was reportedly stolen from Yoder's home in 1969 and has never been recovered for ballistic comparison. Cesar consistently denied involvement in the shooting throughout his life and lived openly in California, the Philippines, and elsewhere. He died at age 77 in 2019. The unrecovered .22 has been described in the research literature as the case's single most consequential missing piece of evidence.

Q: What is the Pruszynski recording?

The Pruszynski recording is a continuous audio tape made by Polish-Canadian journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski, whose reel-to-reel recorder was running on the speakers' rostrum in the Embassy Ballroom and continued running as Kennedy moved into the pantry corridor where the shots were fired. The tape captured the audio of the shooting itself. The recording was overlooked for decades; it was rediscovered in the California State Archives in the early 2000s. In 2005 and 2007, forensic audio specialist Philip Van Praag conducted detailed analysis of the recording and concluded that it contained at least 13 distinguishable shot sounds — incompatible with the 8-round capacity of Sirhan's Iver Johnson .22 Cadet revolver. Van Praag further concluded that at least one pair of the shot sounds was separated by an interval too short to have come from a single revolver. His analysis was presented in court filings during Sirhan's habeas corpus proceedings. The Los Angeles District Attorney's office did not adopt Van Praag's conclusions; the analysis remains the most-cited forensic exhibit in the second-shooter framing.

Q: What does RFK Jr. believe about his father's assassination?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., RFK's third son, has publicly stated his belief that Sirhan Sirhan did not act alone in the killing of his father. In December 2017 he visited Sirhan at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego — the first member of the Kennedy family to do so. Kennedy publicly stated after the visit that he had become convinced of Sirhan's claim of having no memory of the shooting and that the wound geometry and audio evidence established that another shooter was present. He has supported Sirhan's parole. RFK Jr. ran for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, then as an independent; he endorsed Donald Trump in August 2024. He was confirmed as US Secretary of Health and Human Services in February 2025. His public position on the assassination has been consistent across these political changes: that the official single-shooter conclusion does not match the physical evidence, and that the case warrants reopening.

Q: What was Sirhan's 2021 parole grant?

On August 27, 2021, the California Board of Parole Hearings recommended parole for Sirhan Sirhan for the first time in his 17 parole hearings. The recommendation followed a hearing during which Paul Schrade — a former United Auto Workers organizer who had been wounded in the pantry alongside Kennedy and who had spent decades arguing for Sirhan's release on the basis that he believed Sirhan had not killed Kennedy — testified in support of parole. RFK Jr. and his brother Douglas Kennedy also supported the recommendation. The Board's recommendation went to Governor Gavin Newsom for review. On January 13, 2022, Newsom rejected the recommendation, citing what he characterized as Sirhan's incomplete acceptance of responsibility for the assassination. Sirhan remained incarcerated. He has had at least one further parole hearing since; he remains in California Department of Corrections custody as of 2026.

Q: What was the Polka Dot Dress girl?

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, multiple witnesses inside and outside the Ambassador Hotel reported having seen a young woman in a white dress with black or dark polka dots. The most widely cited witness was Sandra Serrano, a 20-year-old Kennedy campaign volunteer, who reported to police that she had been sitting on a fire escape outside the hotel when a young woman in a polka-dot dress and a young man ran past her saying 'We shot him! We shot him!' Several other witnesses corroborated seeing a woman of that description in or near the pantry. The Los Angeles Police Department, in interviews led by Sergeant Hank Hernandez (who used a polygraph during questioning), produced a recanted statement from Serrano. Serrano subsequently said the recantation had been coerced. The polka-dot-dress witness has remained one of the case's most disputed elements — a possible second-suspect lead the LAPD effectively closed within days of the assassination.

Q: What did Dr. Thomas Noguchi conclude?

Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County Coroner who performed the autopsy on Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968, concluded that all four bullets that struck Kennedy were fired from the rear at upward trajectories and at near-contact range. The fatal shot entered approximately one inch behind Kennedy's right ear, traveled upward through the brain, and lodged in the right hemisphere. Noguchi documented powder burns and gunpowder tattooing on Kennedy's hair and skin around the entrance wound, indicating a muzzle-to-target distance of one to three inches. Sirhan was, by all witness accounts, never closer than approximately three feet to Kennedy and was always positioned in front. Noguchi's wound geometry — published in his 1983 memoir Coroner — has been the single most consequential physical-evidence basis for the second-shooter framing. Noguchi himself, in subsequent public statements, repeatedly emphasized the inconsistency between his autopsy findings and the official single-shooter conclusion.

Q: Why has the RFK case never been reopened?

The case has been formally reviewed multiple times but has not been criminally reopened. The 1968 Los Angeles Police Department investigation concluded a single shooter. The 1975 Los Angeles County Special Counsel review (Wolfer-Kaiser) reaffirmed the single-shooter conclusion. The 1988 LAPD records release, after years of pressure, made approximately 50,000 pages of investigative material public. In 2010, then-Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley conducted a review and again reaffirmed the single-shooter conclusion. Federal involvement has been limited. The FBI's role was confined to evidence analysis at LAPD's request and was not the principal investigation. The institutional position is that the case was solved in 1968 and that the physical evidence and Sirhan's apprehension at the scene constitute conviction beyond any reasonable doubt. The independent-research community argues that none of the institutional reviews has engaged the wound-geometry and audio-analysis evidence on its merits, and that successive reviews have largely cited their predecessors rather than re-examining the underlying evidence.

The RFK case is the rarest kind of contested American assassination: a case where the convicted shooter has continuously professed no memory of the act, where the autopsy of the victim conducted by an internationally respected coroner contradicts the prosecution's wound-trajectory account, where a never-recovered second weapon belonging to a security guard standing behind the victim has been the subject of public speculation for half a century, and where audio analysis of a recording made in the room produced a count of shot sounds that the official 8-round revolver cannot mathematically have produced. All of these are in the documentary record. The case is officially closed.

Where it started — June 4–5, 1968

On the night of June 4, 1968, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy — born November 20, 1925, brother of the assassinated 35th president, sitting United States Senator for New York, and front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination — won the California Democratic primary. The victory came after one of the more dramatic primary contests of the 20th century, in which Kennedy had entered the race only on March 16 of that year, after Senator Eugene McCarthy's strong New Hampshire showing had demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson's vulnerability. McCarthy had remained in the race; the California outcome was widely understood as functionally determinative for the nomination.

Kennedy delivered his victory speech in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on June 5. He concluded with the words "And now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there" — a reference to the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Around 12:13 AM, Kennedy left the stage. Rather than exit through the ballroom's front, his security detail directed him through a kitchen pantry corridor as a faster route to a press conference scheduled in the Colonial Room.

The pantry was approximately 50 feet long and roughly 12 feet wide. Estimates of the number of people present in the pantry at the moment of the shooting range from approximately 30 to over 70, with the lower number representing immediate principals and the higher number including hotel staff, journalists, and supporters who had crowded into the corridor. Maitre d' Karl Uecker was leading Kennedy by holding his right wrist. Behind Kennedy and to his right was security guard Thane Eugene Cesar. Busboy Juan Romero, who had served Kennedy room service the night before, reached out to shake Kennedy's hand.

At approximately 12:15 AM, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan — a 24-year-old Christian Palestinian-Jordanian who had entered the pantry from a side ice machine area — opened fire with an Iver Johnson .22 Cadet revolver. Karl Uecker grabbed Sirhan's gun arm and slammed it onto a steam table. Sirhan continued firing as he was tackled. Kennedy was shot four times. Five other people in the pantry were wounded: Paul Schrade, William Weisel, Ira Goldstein, Elizabeth Evans, and Irwin Stroll. Kennedy was carried out of the pantry, taken first to Central Receiving Hospital and then transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital. He died at 1:44 AM on June 6, 1968, approximately 26 hours after the shooting.

Documented · the wound profile

Per the autopsy by Dr. Thomas Noguchi, Los Angeles County Coroner, on June 6, 1968:
Wound 1 (fatal): Entrance approximately one inch behind the right ear, at near-contact range with powder burns and tattooing visible. Trajectory upward and forward through the brain.
Wound 2: Entrance behind the right armpit, traveling upward into the soft tissue of the neck.
Wound 3: Entrance in the right axillary region, traveling through soft tissue and exiting at the chest.
Wound 4: Through the suit jacket, no impact on body.
All four bullet impacts entered Kennedy from behind. Sirhan was, per all witness accounts, in front of Kennedy at all times, separated by Karl Uecker, never closer than approximately three feet, and never positioned to fire at near-contact range from behind. The wound geometry is the case's central physical-evidence dispute.

What the theory claims

The official position is that Sirhan Sirhan, acting alone, fatally shot Senator Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel pantry. The alternative-to-official position holds that the documentary record establishes the presence of at least one additional shooter and that the institutional handling of the case has been a sustained failure to engage that record on its merits. The thesis decomposes into specific propositions.

Researchers argue that the wound geometry produced by Dr. Thomas Noguchi's June 6, 1968 autopsy is incompatible with Sirhan as the sole shooter. The fatal shot was fired from approximately one inch behind Kennedy's right ear, at a sharply upward trajectory; powder burns on Kennedy's hair and skin establish the muzzle-to-target distance. Sirhan was demonstrated by every available witness account, including the FBI's own witness summaries, to have been positioned in front of Kennedy throughout the encounter, separated from him by Karl Uecker, and never closer than approximately three feet. The argument is not that Sirhan did not fire — the apprehension of him with the smoking weapon establishes that he did — but that he could not have fired the fatal shot. Noguchi himself emphasized this inconsistency in his 1983 memoir Coroner and in subsequent public statements.

Researchers further argue that the audio analysis of the Pruszynski recording establishes shot counts incompatible with the single-shooter conclusion. The recording, made by Polish-Canadian journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski, captured the audio of the shooting itself. Forensic audio specialist Philip Van Praag, beginning with his work in 2005, conducted spectrographic and waveform analysis on the recording. His published findings: the tape contains at least 13 distinct shot sounds; at least one pair of those shots is separated by an interval too short to have been produced by a single revolver; and certain shot waveforms exhibit acoustic characteristics ("waveform anomalies") consistent with two different weapons. The Iver Johnson .22 Cadet revolver in Sirhan's possession had a capacity of 8 rounds. Van Praag's analysis was filed in court submissions during Sirhan's habeas corpus proceedings. The Los Angeles District Attorney's office did not adopt the analysis.

The third major proposition concerns Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar was an Ace Guard Service security guard whose regular employment was at Lockheed Burbank, the aerospace defense contractor. He was directly behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting — the only person in the pantry at near-contact range from behind. He admitted that he drew his weapon during the shooting. He owned a privately-owned .22 H&R revolver in addition to the .38 he was carrying on his Ace Guard Service shift. Multiple researchers, beginning with journalist Theodore Charach in his 1973 documentary The Second Gun, have argued that Cesar's .22 was the source of the fatal shot. Cesar sold the .22 to co-worker Jim Yoder a few months after the assassination. The weapon was reportedly stolen from Yoder's home in 1969 and was never recovered. The non-recovery of the .22 — never available for ballistic comparison to the rounds extracted from RFK — has been described in the research literature as the case's single most consequential evidentiary failure.

The variations

Within the broad alternative-to-official frame, the research community has developed several specific sub-camps that share a common rejection of the single-shooter conclusion but differ in the identification of the principal additional shooter.

The Cesar-as-second-shooter variation, most fully developed in Theodore Charach's 1973 documentary The Second Gun, in Lisa Pease's 2018 book A Lie Too Big to Fail, and in Tim Tate and Brad Johnson's 2018 documentary The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, holds that Thane Eugene Cesar — for reasons variously characterized — fired the fatal rounds from his privately-owned .22 H&R revolver while Sirhan's shots from the front created the diversion and accounted for the wounds to other pantry occupants. Cesar consistently denied involvement until his death in 2019.

The hypnosis / Manchurian Candidate variation, developed in different forms across William Turner & Jonn Christian's 1978 book The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan's defense team's diminished-capacity argument at trial, and the work of Dr. Daniel Brown (the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who interviewed Sirhan extensively beginning in 2008), holds that Sirhan was operating in a programmed dissociative state induced by external coercion. Sirhan's consistent claim that he has no memory of the shooting itself is the central support. Dr. Brown, in court testimony and in published peer-reviewed work, argued that Sirhan exhibited specific psychological characteristics consistent with what the Cold War-era literature on covert hypnotic-coercion programs (including the documented CIA MK-Ultra program) described.

The broader-conspiracy variation, developed in Robert Joling and Philip Van Praag's 2008 book An Open and Shut Case and in Lisa Pease's 2018 work, holds that the assassination was a coordinated operation involving multiple actors — at minimum, Sirhan in front, an additional shooter behind, and a logistics network providing both. Specific candidates for the broader logistics have included variations on intelligence-community involvement, organized-crime involvement (RFK had been the lead Justice Department prosecutor of organized crime as Attorney General 1961–1964), and Cuban exile involvement (a category that overlaps with the JFK assassination research literature).

Documented · the Pruszynski audio analysis

The Pruszynski recording is a continuous audio tape made by Polish-Canadian journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski, whose reel-to-reel recorder ran throughout RFK's victory speech and continued through the move into the pantry. The recording captured the audio of the shooting itself.
The tape was overlooked for decades; rediscovered in the California State Archives in the early 2000s. In 2005 and 2007, forensic audio specialist Philip Van Praag conducted spectrographic and waveform analysis. Findings: at least 13 distinguishable shot sounds; at least one pair separated by an interval too short for a single revolver; certain waveforms with acoustic characteristics consistent with two different weapons. Sirhan's Iver Johnson .22 Cadet revolver had an 8-round capacity. Van Praag's analysis was filed in Sirhan's habeas corpus court submissions. The Los Angeles District Attorney's office did not adopt the conclusions.

Documented · the Sandra Serrano testimony

Sandra Serrano, a 20-year-old Kennedy campaign volunteer, was sitting on a fire escape outside the Ambassador Hotel during the shooting. She told police she observed a young woman in a polka-dot dress and a young man running past her saying "We shot him! We shot him!" Multiple additional witnesses inside and outside the hotel reported a young woman matching the description in or near the pantry.
LAPD interviews of Serrano, conducted by Sergeant Hank Hernandez, produced a recanted statement after polygraph-supported questioning. Serrano publicly stated subsequently that the recantation had been coerced. The polka-dot-dress witness lead was effectively closed within days of the assassination. Multiple later researchers have treated the closure as one of the case's principal investigative failures.

Documented · Sirhan's parole timeline

1969: Sirhan convicted of first-degree murder; originally sentenced to death.
1972: Sentence commuted to life imprisonment after California abolishes capital punishment in People v. Anderson.
1983–2016: Sirhan denied parole 15 times across successive hearings.
August 27, 2021: California Board of Parole Hearings recommends parole — first such recommendation in 17 hearings. Paul Schrade (UAW organizer wounded in the pantry), RFK Jr., and Douglas Kennedy testify in support.
January 13, 2022: Governor Gavin Newsom rejects the recommendation, citing incomplete acceptance of responsibility.
2026: Sirhan, age 82, remains incarcerated in California Department of Corrections custody.

RESEARCHING THIS?

Save the audio, the autopsy, and the photographs.

The Pruszynski recording, the Noguchi autopsy, the Scott Enyart photographs (impounded by LAPD then partly destroyed), the LAPD's 1988 50,000-page disclosure, and the 2018 RFK Jr. statements are scattered across federal and California archives. Some material has been removed and re-released across decades. Classified saves videos and audio locally so your case file persists across institutional changes.

The connections people make

The RFK case sits at the center of one of the most studied clusters of cases in American assassination research. The connections researchers cross-reference are specific, documentary, and run through institutions whose internal records have, in some cases, been partially declassified across the half-century since the assassination.

The most-frequently-made connection is to the JFK assassination of November 22, 1963 — the killing of RFK's older brother. Researchers treat the two cases as a coherent pattern in part because of the family relationship, in part because of the institutional response (single-shooter conclusion in each, despite contested forensic findings; restricted federal review; sealed investigative material released in stages over decades), and in part because of specific overlapping evidentiary categories. The 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated both JFK and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. but did not include RFK in its mandate — a decision that the research community has since treated as itself a significant institutional choice.

Researchers cross-reference the case with the MLK assassination of April 4, 1968 — exactly two months before RFK's killing. The two cases together produced the institutional response of 1968 that fundamentally shaped the subsequent American security state, and the parallel research literature on the two has cross-pollinated for half a century. William Pepper, the attorney who has spent four decades on the MLK case, has also addressed RFK; the methodological framing across the two cases shares structural features.

Researchers cross-reference the case with the documented CIA MK-Ultra program — the agency's 1953–1973 research into hypnotic coercion, behavioral modification, and the production of programmed actors. Sirhan's continuous claim of no memory of the shooting, his extensive notebook-writing in what defense psychiatrists characterized as a self-induced trance state, and his behavioral profile during apprehension and trial have been treated by researchers including Dr. Daniel Brown (Harvard Medical School psychiatrist) as consistent with the operational categories MK-Ultra documented. Whether MK-Ultra-category methodology was applied to Sirhan, and by whom, is the contested interpretive question; the program's documented existence is part of the public record (the 1977 Senate hearings under Senator Frank Church and the 1975 Rockefeller Commission documented the program in detail).

Researchers cross-reference the case with the JFK Jr. plane crash of July 16, 1999 — the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., RFK's nephew and the namesake of his older brother. The Kennedy family has experienced an unusual concentration of unexpected deaths across three generations: JFK (1963), RFK (1968), David Kennedy (1984, accidental overdose), Michael Kennedy (1997, skiing accident), JFK Jr. (1999, plane crash), Saoirse Kennedy Hill (2019, accidental overdose), Maeve Kennedy McKean (2020, drowning), and several others. Whether to treat this concentration as a "Kennedy curse" of statistical clustering or as something requiring different explanation is a methodological choice that runs through the research literature.

The case is sometimes cross-referenced with Marilyn Monroe's death of August 4, 1962 — given Monroe's documented relationships with both John and Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s, and given that Dr. Thomas Noguchi performed both autopsies (Monroe's in 1962 and RFK's in 1968). The methodological pattern between the two cases — institutional handling that produced contested findings — has made them frequent companion subjects in the Kennedy-era research literature.

Key voices

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (born 1944) — convicted of RFK's murder; has consistently maintained no memory of the shooting; 17 parole hearings; recommended for parole 2021, rejected 2022.
Dr. Thomas Noguchi (1927–2024) — Los Angeles County Coroner who performed the autopsy; documented all four wounds as fired from behind at near-contact range; emphasized the wound-geometry inconsistency in his 1983 memoir Coroner.
Paul Schrade (1924–2022) — UAW Western Region director; wounded in the pantry; spent the remaining 54 years of his life arguing for a reinvestigation; principal supporter of Sirhan's parole.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (born 1954) — RFK's son; visited Sirhan in prison December 2017; publicly stated belief in second-shooter framing; supported parole.
Thane Eugene Cesar (1941–2019) — Ace Guard Service security guard; behind RFK at moment of shooting; owned .22 H&R revolver; sold it to Jim Yoder; weapon never recovered for ballistic comparison.
Philip Van Praag — forensic audio specialist; 2005 and 2007 analysis of Pruszynski recording established the 13-shot count.
Stanislaw Pruszynski — Polish-Canadian journalist whose reel-to-reel tape recorder captured the audio of the shooting.
Dr. Daniel Brown (1948–2022) — Harvard Medical School psychiatrist; conducted extensive interviews with Sirhan beginning in 2008; testified in court regarding hypnotic-state evidence.
Lisa Pease — investigative researcher; author of A Lie Too Big to Fail (2018), the most comprehensive recent treatment of the second-shooter framing.
Robert Joling & Philip Van Praag — co-authors of An Open and Shut Case (2008).
William Turner & Jonn Christian — co-authors of The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1978; updated 2006).
Theodore Charach — director of The Second Gun (1973), the first sustained documentary treatment of the Cesar framing.
Mel Ayton — historian; author of The Forgotten Terrorist (2007), the most cited mainstream defense of the single-shooter conclusion.

For adjacent research, see our coverage of the JFK assassination (the parallel case in the same family), the MLK assassination (April 1968, two months earlier), and the CIA MK-Ultra program (the documented federal hypnotic-coercion research).

The official position

The official position of the United States government and the State of California is that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, acting alone, fatally shot Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel pantry at approximately 12:15 AM on June 5, 1968. Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder by a Los Angeles County Superior Court jury on April 17, 1969. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972. The 1975 Wolfer-Kaiser review reaffirmed the single-shooter conclusion. The 1988 LAPD records release of approximately 50,000 pages of investigative material did not produce a reopening. The 2010 review by Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley reaffirmed the single-shooter conclusion. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has played a supporting rather than principal role; the federal government has not opened a parallel investigation. Sirhan's parole was recommended by the California Board of Parole Hearings on August 27, 2021 and rejected by Governor Gavin Newsom on January 13, 2022.

Where it is now

In 2026, the RFK assassination occupies an unusual position in American public life. Sirhan Sirhan, 82, remains incarcerated. The 2021 parole recommendation and 2022 gubernatorial rejection have become the most active institutional development on the case in two decades. RFK Jr.'s February 2025 confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services has placed a Kennedy with a publicly stated second-shooter position into the executive branch — an institutional configuration that has not previously existed. RFK Jr. has not, as of the available record, made any formal request to the FBI or DOJ regarding reopening the case in his current role; whether any such request would have institutional traction is an open question.

The Ambassador Hotel itself was closed in 1989 and demolished in 2005. The pantry corridor where the shooting occurred no longer exists; a Los Angeles Unified School District complex (the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools) opened on the site in 2010. Paul Schrade died in 2022 at age 97 having continued his reinvestigation advocacy until his death. Thane Eugene Cesar died in 2019 in the Philippines, age 77, never having made a public statement of involvement. Dr. Thomas Noguchi died in 2024 at age 97. The original investigative principals are now mostly deceased.

The 2023 Discovery+ documentary series The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy renewed public attention to the audio analysis. Tim Tate and Brad Johnson's 2018 documentary The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy remains the most cited recent visual treatment. Lisa Pease continues to publish on the case. The single most consequential outstanding evidentiary question — the disposition of Cesar's .22 H&R revolver, sold to Jim Yoder and reportedly stolen in 1969 — remains unresolved. Whether the weapon will surface, whether any additional declassification will produce material relevant to the second-shooter framing, and whether RFK Jr.'s position in HHS will produce any institutional reconsideration are the open questions of 2026. Fifty-eight years after June 5, 1968, the case is, in the way that every contested mid-20th-century American assassination is, both closed and not closed.

Go deeper

Primary and secondary sources

Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, autopsy report on Robert F. Kennedy, June 6, 1968 (Los Angeles County Coroner)
People v. Sirhan Sirhan, Los Angeles County Superior Court (1969) — trial transcript
LAPD investigative file (the "SUS" file), released 1988 — approximately 50,000 pages
Los Angeles County Special Counsel report (Wolfer-Kaiser), 1975
Theodore Charach, The Second Gun (1973, documentary film)
William Turner & Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: A Searching Look at the Conspiracy and Cover-Up (1978; updated 2006)
Dr. Thomas Noguchi, Coroner (1983)
William Klaber & Philip Melanson, Shadow Play: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, the Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American Justice (1997)
Mel Ayton, The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (2007)
Robert Joling & Philip Van Praag, An Open and Shut Case: The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (2008)
Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (2018)
Tim Tate & Brad Johnson, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (2018, documentary)
California Board of Parole Hearings, transcript of August 27, 2021 hearing
Office of the Governor of California, statement of January 13, 2022 rejecting parole recommendation
Discovery+, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy (2023)

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Frequently asked questions

Who shot Robert F. Kennedy?

Officially, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, fired the shots that killed RFK in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at approximately 12:15 AM on June 5, 1968. Convicted 1969, originally sentenced to death, commuted to life 1972. He has remained incarcerated continuously — 58 years as of 2026. The unresolved question is whether he acted alone.

Who was Sirhan Sirhan?

Born March 19, 1944 in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian Arab family. Family emigrated to the US in 1956. Educated in Pasadena, California. Worked as an exercise boy at thoroughbred racetracks before the assassination. His notebooks contained "RFK must die" entries. He has consistently maintained no memory of the shooting. 17 parole hearings; recommended for parole 2021, rejected by Gov. Newsom 2022.

Was there a second gunman in the RFK assassination?

The central unresolved question. Dr. Thomas Noguchi's autopsy established all four bullets entered Kennedy from behind at near-contact range; Sirhan was in front, separated by Karl Uecker, never closer than ~3 feet. Audio analysis of the Pruszynski recording by Philip Van Praag in 2005/2007 concluded at least 13 shot sounds were captured — incompatible with Sirhan's 8-round revolver. The LAPD and FBI have maintained the single-shooter conclusion.

Who was Thane Eugene Cesar?

Ace Guard Service security guard (1941–2019) assigned to the Ambassador Hotel that night; regular employment at Lockheed Burbank. Directly behind RFK during the shooting. Admitted drawing his weapon. Owned a privately-owned .22 H&R revolver in addition to the .38 he was wearing. Sold the .22 to Jim Yoder months after the assassination; reportedly stolen 1969; never recovered for ballistic comparison.

What is the Pruszynski recording?

Continuous audio tape made by Polish-Canadian journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski, whose reel-to-reel recorder ran during RFK's victory speech and continued into the pantry where the shots were fired. Rediscovered in California State Archives in early 2000s. Philip Van Praag's 2005/2007 analysis: at least 13 shot sounds, at least one pair too close to be from a single revolver, certain waveforms with characteristics of two different weapons.

What does RFK Jr. believe about his father's assassination?

RFK Jr. has publicly stated his belief that Sirhan did not act alone. December 2017: visited Sirhan in prison — first Kennedy family member to do so. Has supported Sirhan's parole. Has been consistent on the position across his 2024 presidential campaign and his February 2025 confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

What was Sirhan's 2021 parole grant?

August 27, 2021: California Board of Parole Hearings recommended parole for the first time in Sirhan's 17 hearings. Paul Schrade, RFK Jr., and Douglas Kennedy testified in support. January 13, 2022: Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the recommendation, citing incomplete acceptance of responsibility. Sirhan remains incarcerated.

What was the Polka Dot Dress girl?

In the immediate aftermath, multiple witnesses reported a young woman in a polka-dot dress in or near the pantry. Sandra Serrano, 20-year-old campaign volunteer, told police she saw a young woman in a polka-dot dress and a young man running past her saying "We shot him! We shot him!" LAPD interviews under Sgt. Hank Hernandez produced a recanted statement after polygraph-supported questioning; Serrano subsequently said the recantation was coerced. The lead was effectively closed within days.

What did Dr. Thomas Noguchi conclude?

That all four bullets that struck RFK were fired from behind at near-contact range, with the fatal shot entering approximately one inch behind the right ear at upward trajectory and powder burns/tattooing indicating muzzle-to-target distance of one to three inches. Sirhan was always in front, never closer than ~3 feet. Noguchi emphasized this inconsistency in his 1983 memoir Coroner and in subsequent public statements.

Why has the RFK case never been reopened?

Multiple formal reviews have reaffirmed the single-shooter conclusion: 1968 LAPD investigation, 1975 Wolfer-Kaiser review, 2010 LA DA Steve Cooley review. The 1988 LAPD records release of ~50,000 pages did not produce reopening. Federal involvement has been limited. Independent researchers argue the institutional reviews have largely cited their predecessors rather than re-examining the underlying wound-geometry and audio-analysis evidence.