She went on: “I... I saw Mrs. Kennedy, Ethel, kneeling by her husband. He was on his back, sort of... staring up. She was trying to comfort him. I never saw anything so sad, but also... nothing ever so horrifying. I started to... to scream, and I ran out of there and back through that corridor, behind the stage. Yelling, ‘They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him! Oh my God, he’s dead! They’ve killed him!’”
She held her arms to herself, shivering.
“They?” I asked.
She nodded, nodded, nodded. “Yes, they, they, they. I said ‘they’ because I knew there was more than one shooter involved!”
That hit me like a punch.
Her brow was knit, her eyes finally not wide. “And, Nathan, the police didn’t want to hear it, the FBI didn’t want to hear it, and they didn’t ask me about any of it in court, not really! Cut me off if I tried to give them one more word than I was asked for.”
“Who, that defense counsel — Cooper?”
“Both sides! And Sandy Serrano wasn’t even called as a witness!”
“Who’s Sandy Serrano?”
She grabbed my hand and squeezed. Indignation had given way to desperation. “Somebody you have to talk to, Nathan. Somebody you need to talk to right now. About the girl in the polka-dot dress.”
Nita met Sandra Serrano when the girl was co-chair of the Kennedy Youth in Pasadena, where Sandra lived with her aunt and uncle and worked at an insurance agency. Wrapping things up for the now defunct campaign, Nita and Serrano had shared their experiences about the night of the shooting.
We were able to meet with Sandy mid-evening at a cozy Mexican restaurant on Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena. The beckoning neon dated back a quarter of a century:
We shared a round of horchatas (a delicious blend of rice, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon) before ordering the meal I’d promised the two former RFK campaign workers. We were in a brown faux-leather booth under two framed prints, one depicting every US president in cameo portraits up through JFK, who was central in a bigger oval, a similar framed print of Presidéntes de México alongside. The lighting was low, old Mexican-style paintings adorning the pale yellow half-walls above wood paneling, with piped-in Mariachi music.
Sandy (as she insisted I call her, though calling me Mr. Heller) was attractive, zaftig, just out of her teens, her dark hair short but full, eyes large and bright. Her demeanor was serious, befitting the subject of our conversation, her navy dress on the demure side.
Nita and I were across from her in the booth.
“You remember how crowded the Embassy Ballroom was,” Sandy said. “How hot. How stuffy. I went outside and sat on the landing of a stairway alongside the building... sort of like a fire escape, but not the pull-down kind, you know? Wood, painted white. Sat away from the door on the edge, above the stairs.”
I nodded. “About what time was this?”
“Eleven-thirty or so. Nice and cool out there, and I’d been sitting, oh, for maybe five minutes when two guys and a girl came up the stairs and I kind of scooched over and gave them room to pass, you know? The girl seemed nice enough, excusing herself. She was maybe five foot six, dark bouffant hair, not as dark as mine, but dark. She was kind of stacked. Cute. Pretty, but with a turned-up nose.”
“Two guys with her, you said.”
“Yes, with long hair, kind of bushy, but it wasn’t that Sirhan Sirhan, if that’s what you’re thinking. This was a white guy. Average height. Kind of messed-up looking, like he could use a haircut, and had maybe slept in his clothes — what we call a borracho.”
I’d heard that word. “Drunk, you mean?”
Sandy shook her head. “No, more like... somebody who just doesn’t... look right, somehow. Kind of... out of it.”
“What about the other guy?”
“Not white. Mexican American, I think. I know because I am one. Gold sweater over a white shirt. Why a sweater on a hot night like this, I got no idea.”
“How old were they?”
She thought about that. “Early twenties, I’d say, all of ’em. They were definitely together, definitely a group. Oh, and the girl was poured into this white dress with black polka dots.”
Nita and I exchanged a glance.
“Anyway,” Sandy said, “I was just sitting there relieved to be out of that hothouse ballroom and away from the crowd, enjoying the cool air. Then around midnight or a little after, that girl kind of... burst out of the building and I darn near jumped out of my skin. Her, and the guy in the gold sweater, sort of tumbled out on top of each other. Almost trampled me.”
Trampled, like Nita in the Pantry while she was unconscious.
“Now this is the part nobody wants to believe, Mr. Heller,” Sandy said, small white teeth barely visible behind tight lips, her chin crinkling. She leaned across. “The girl, when she almost stepped on me? She stopped a second and says, ‘We’ve shot him! We’ve shot him!’”
Sandy let air out, shuddered, then had another sip of horchata. Raised her eyebrows and set them back down, as if she could hardly believe what she was about to share.
“So I say, not taking it seriously, ‘Who did you shoot’? And she says, ‘We’ve shot Senator Kennedy!’ And I say, ‘Oh, yeah, right.’ Then the polka-dot-dress girl goes running down the stairs with that gold-sweater guy coming right after her, the borracho one not with them. Scrambled off toward the parking lot and into the dark.”
Nita squeezed my hand under the table.
Incredibly, Sandy’s story that night had only begun. Starting with the early morning hours of the shooting, she’d been interviewed five times by the LAPD, at both Rampart Division Station and Parker Center, had participated in a videotaped reconstruction of her account, and even watched a police-organized fashion show of potential polka-dot dresses, none of which were right.
“A few weeks after the Senator’s death,” she said, “I was interviewed one last time, by a police lieutenant named Manuel Hermano, who says, call me ‘Manny.’ At first he seemed very nice — took my aunt Maggie and me out for dinner. A steak dinner, downtown. Bought me two drinks, even though I was underage. Kind of winking about it. I’m 21 now. Then he asked me again about what I saw, and I went over it for the thousandth time. He suggested I take a lie detector test, and go on the record once and for all, so I wouldn’t have to go over the same ground again and again. I said okay. Maybe it was the drinks. After that, he drove us to Parker Center.”
There she was escorted by Hermano into a small interview room and strapped into a chair with a polygraph machine nearby. After some routine questions, Hermano told her aunt to wait outside, and a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal began. Designed, Sandy said, to badger her into “admitting” she had made up her story. She was just one of over a dozen girls who had made up such tales, “Manny” told her, to get publicity for themselves and money from newspapers.
“He said I owed it to the Senator’s memory,” Sandy said, “and to his wife, not to shame a great man’s death by making up a story. He said Senator Kennedy was probably in the room there with us right now, listening to me lie. I insisted what I said I saw and heard really happened, that I didn’t care what his stupid thingamajig machine said, but it was all true.”
The young woman’s dark eyes were unblinking as she said, “He kept trying to push me into saying I lied, even though I hadn’t. In the end I just wanted to get out of there. Finally I said, well, maybe what I’d heard some other witnesses say colored my story. I wasn’t the only one talking about a girl in a polka-dot dress, you know. And that was as close to a lie as I told, because that wasn’t true. But it seemed to be enough for him, finally. Mr. Heller, there was a girl in a polka-dot dress — and I can give you the name of a policeman — a good one, an honest one — who can verify that.”