Building a Biography

The accused assassin of Robert Kennedy sat passively in his 12-ft. by 12-ft. maximum-security cell at Los Angeles County's Central Jail for Men, reading works on theosophy. Meanwhile, bits and pieces of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan's personality and past began falling into place. Most of the insights came with last week's release of testimony taken by the grand jury, which had convened the day after Kennedy died.

Vincent T. Di Pierro, college student and part-time waiter at the Ambassador Hotel, recalled seeing Sirhan at the moment of the murder. "The minute the first two shots were fired," testified Di Pierro, "he still had a very sick-looking smile on his face. That's one thing--I can never forget that."

Three others in the serving kitchen where Kennedy was shot also testified to seeing Sirhan, who crouched on a tray rack and asked repeatedly if the Senator would come that way. But it was not the innocuous-looking Jordanian that attracted attention; it was a svelte, mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress, who was seen joking with the accused and who reportedly later rushed past stunned campaign workers shouting, "We shot him!" Though a number of publicity-hungry females turned themselves in to police, a worldwide woman hunt had failed to uncover the real Miss Polka Dot.

Mixed Bag. Another witness claimed that he had seen Sirhan at a suburban gun club twelve hours before the assassination. Contrary to range policy, which calls for a pause between shots, Sirhan snapped off up to 300 rounds in rapid-fire succession with an Iver Johnson .22-cal. revolver, the same type as that used in the killing. The Los Angeles County coroner testified that Senator Kennedy was struck with three bullets, rather than two as originally thought. The third landed in back of the right armpit, near the second. The shots had apparently been fired at point-blank range, at least one of them only two or three inches from the victim.

The week also produced a mixed bag of claims from people who said they had some special knowledge of the sullen defendant. A former Castro commandant, Jose Duarte of Miami, said he had scuffled with Sirhan a month ago in Los Angeles when he heard Sirhan tell a group of leftists: "What the U.S. needs is another Castro." In London, Journalist Jon Kimche, who is known mainly for his sensational anti-Arab diatribes, wrote in the Evening Standard that Sirhan had returned to the Middle East twice, in 1964 and 1966. The story was flatly denied by the FBI and State Department. In fact, the peripatetic Sirhan to whom Kimche was alluding may be an American citizen named Sirhan Selim Sirhan, ten years older than the accused and no kin, who frequently visits the Middle East.

Every Scintilla. While all this second-guessing was going on, Los Angeles officials were diligently scrutinizing every scintilla of evidence, mindful of the 1963 mess made by their counterparts in Dallas. Twenty-three of L.A.'s top cops have been assigned full time to the case, while a special three-man legal team, whose members have handled 200 homicide cases for the D.A.'s office, will make sure that neither Sirhan's rights nor potential evidence is perjured. Interviewing the defendant are two court-appointed psychiatrists. A trial date will be set at a June 28 hearing, and Sirhan will plead either guilty, no contest, not guilty, or not guilty by reason of insanity.

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