Nearly 44 years after the June 1968 assassination of U.S. presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy, a Canadian woman who was at the Los Angeles scene of the crime has emerged as the key witness in a bid by convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan to gain release from prison or be granted a new trial based on previously unheard evidence.
A U.S. federal appeals court is currently examining submissions from Sirhan’s legal team that argue suppressed ballistic evidence and eyewitness accounts — including one from the Canadian woman — suggest there was a second shooter at the Los Angeles hotel where Kennedy was murdered.
Vancouver resident Nina Rhodes-Hughes — a 78-year-old American-born television actress and a local theatre enthusiast in the city’s Bowen Island community — was serving as a volunteer fundraiser for Kennedy’s campaign when he was fatally shot in a kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.
He died from his wounds about 24 hours later, on June 6. Five others injured in the attack survived.
Rhodes-Hughes, after a Saturday interview with CNN sparked a worldwide resurgence of interest in the assassination, told Postmedia News on Monday that she heard at least 12 shots that day — not eight as argued by the California prosecutors who convicted Sirhan as the lone gunman.
The gun Sirhan had when he was arrested held only eight bullets.
“I gave them a true account of what happened,” Rhodes-Hughes said of the FBI investigators who interviewed her following the Kennedy killing. “I had no idea what they were going to say I said. You trust, you know? But what I said about a second shooter was completely ignored.”
Following Sirhan’s conviction, Rhodes-Hughes said she felt she was “not in a position of power or influence” to raise questions about a single-killer theory. Then, years after she’d moved to British Columbia in 1987 and become a Canadian citizen, she was contacted by University of Massachusetts professor and freedom-of-information advocate Philip Melanson, who was writing a book raising questions about the RFK assassination — including various threads of evidence pointing to more than eight gunshots and a possible second assassin.
She recalls Melanson showing her a transcript of her 1968 interview with FBI detectives.
There were more than a dozen errors in the document, she said, “and they credited me with saying there were eight shots — which I never said.”
Her eyewitness account of Kennedy’s murder “was completely misconstrued and misrepresented,” she added, vividly recalling details of where people were standing and what happened on the night of the assassination.
“There was no way that the shots coming from my right at such rapid fire were done by Sirhan Sirhan,” said Rhodes-Hughes, who spoke with Postmedia News Monday.
Photo by National Archive/Newsmakers
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy with his aide Theodore Sorenson April 3, 1968.
Rhodes-Hughes said in her CNN interview that she believes Sirhan — 24 at the time of the assassination and now 68 — “was absolutely there” as a participant in the killing and “I don’t feel he should be exonerated.”
But she added on Monday that “there is a great urgency” to identify the second shooter, “who I believe was the one that hit Sen. Kennedy.”
The Canadian woman’s recollections are now central to the legal challenge aimed at reopening the case and, potentially, winning Sirhan’s freedom.
Sirhan, a Jordanian citizen who immigrated to the U.S. in 1956, confessed before his 1969 trial to killing Kennedy because of his pro-Israel views. He is now serving a life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in California.
In November, Sirhan’s lawyers launched the latest of many appeal efforts on his behalf by filing documents in the U.S. Federal Court in Los Angeles that suggest a bullet from the crime scene was switched at the time of Sirhan’s prosecution to ensure it matched his gun and helped secure his conviction.
Among other evidence being presented to the court is a new audio analysis of a radio journalist’s recording of the gun blasts at the hotel that — according to one expert — proves there were at least 13 shots.
The contention that a second shooter was involved — and, in fact, fired the fatal shots — is key to Sirhan’s bid to reopen the case and raise doubts about his guilt. One line of argument being put forward by his defence lawyers — and a theory popular with conspiracy theorists — is that Sirhan was essentially brainwashed into participating in the murder plot, but was placed at the hotel primarily as a diversion and decoy suspect to allow the real killer to carry out the assassination, then escape.
Kennedy’s shooting death came less than five years after the November 1963 assassination in Dallas of his brother, then-U.S. president John F. Kennedy, and just two months after the Memphis murder of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968.
Robert Kennedy, who had served as U.S. attorney general during his brother’s presidency and then briefly during successor Lyndon B. Johnson’s first term in the White House, was serving as a Democratic senator from New York in 1968 and was a leading contender to win the party’s nomination for that year’s presidential race.
The 1968 presidential election ultimately was won by Republican candidate Richard Nixon over his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey.
Rhodes-Hughes’ concerns about alleged discrepancies in the Sirhan prosecution previously were published in the 1997 book about Kennedy’s assassination — Shadow Play: The Killing of Robert Kennedy, The Trial of Sirhan Sirhan, and the Failure of American Justice — co-authored by Melanson and William Klaber.
The authors concluded that the 1968 statements of Rhodes-Hughes and two other witnesses who cast doubt on the prosecution’s single-shooter case were “systematically ignored” by police investigators.
“None of them has sought publicity or gain concerning what they saw the night of the murder,” the authors wrote of the three witnesses. “None could be considered an assassination buff or a conspiracy theorist. They merely reported to the police what they saw.”
The head of Sirhan’s defence team, William Pepper, told CNN that Rhodes-Hughes’ insistence about hearing more than eight shots “mirrors the experience of other witnesses” and bolsters Sirhan’s push for a re-trial.
“She identified 15 errors, including the FBI alteration which quoted her as hearing only eight shots, which she explicitly denied was what she had told them,” Pepper stated.
“Suddenly I hear, ‘Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop . .’
Rhodes-Hughes said Monday that she met Kennedy in 1965 at a California television studio where he was being interviewed for a news program and she was preparing for her role as a character in the short-lived TV soap opera Morning Star.
“We had a discussion about politics,” she recalled. “He was very charming and very humble. And I told him that, ‘If ever you decide to run for president, I would absolutely work for you.’”
The New York-born actress, then known by her stage name Nina Roman, went on to organize several fundraisers for Kennedy after he entered the 1968 presidential contest.
“I began a group called Young Professionals for Kennedy,” said Rhodes-Hughes. “The bottom line is I raised an inordinate amount of money for him.”
That led the campaign organizers to invite Rhodes-Hughes to become more deeply involved in Kennedy’s battle for the Democratic nomination, she said.
“I got a wonderful telegram from Sen. Kennedy,” Rhodes-Hughes remembers. “And they invited me to come to the Ambassador (Hotel) that night and meet him again.”
At the hotel, where Kennedy was celebrating his triumph in the California primary, Rhodes-Hughes was asked to stand near the stage to steer the candidate to a conference room following his televised victory speech.
Instead, Kennedy was whisked by others in a different direction — toward a supposed shortcut through the hotel kitchen.
“I started to shout, ‘No, no, you’re going the wrong way! You’re going the wrong way!’” she recalled.
“So I ran after him . . . and suddenly I hear, ‘Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop . . .”
Finally, just before fainting from the chaos and crush of people rushing to the scene, Rhodes-Hughes remembered: “I looked to my right, and then the senator disappeared from sight . . .”
