Several in law enforcement who participated in the cover-up — Manny Hermano for one — were rewarded for their efforts, earning themselves better jobs and sometimes government contracts. Hermano left the LAPD (for the second time) and became a teacher and I suppose passed his wisdom on. He died in 2009 in Palm Desert, California.
In 1971 forensics expert and prosecution shill Wayne Wolf was promoted to head of the LAPD Crime Lab, in as fine an example of the Peter Principle as I’ve ever seen. Upon his retirement from the LAPD he became president of Ace Guard Services — the firm that had dispatched Thane Eugene Cesar to the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968. He died in 2012 in North Hollywood. I never met him.
Sgt. Pete Shore, a cop who lived up to the idealized LAPD of Jack Webb’s Dragnet, got pushed into early retirement and took a position as a small-town sheriff in Missouri. Former FBI man and criminalist Will Harris made no secret of his opinion that Sirhan Sirhan was not a lone shooter, giving many interviews on the subject; he died in 2007 after a distinguished teaching career.
Thomas Noguchi, “coroner to the stars,” was reinstated on July 31, 1969. Over a long, attention-attracting career, he performed autopsies on Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate, Janis Joplin, David Janssen, Divine, William Holden, and John Belushi, among other show biz luminaries. These were some of the famous co-stars in his story but they only made one guest appearance each.
Grant Cooper, lead attorney in Sirhan Sirhan’s defense, also enjoyed a celebrated career, but by the time of his death in 1990 his reputation had been tainted by rumors that he’d thrown his most famous case. Nor was his prestige enhanced by the Friars Club card cheating scandal, where his chief client was mobster Johnny Roselli.
Over the years, evidence continued to surface that undermined the notion of Sirhan as the lone assassin. Bullets recovered at the crime scene, for instance, could not be matched to Sirhan’s gun. And then there was the ever-climbing number of bullets, which some had adding up as high as eighteen. An audio expert identified thirteen shots on a recording of the assassination.
“The gunshots,” the audio expert said, “are established by virtue of my computer analysis of waveform patterns, which clearly distinguish gunshots from other phenomena. This would include sounds that to human hearing are often perceived as exploding firecrackers, popping camera flashbulbs or bursting balloons.”
The thirteen shots captured on tape indicated some were fired too rapidly, at intervals too close together, to have come from Sirhan’s weapon alone.
In 1977, Dr. Joseph W. Bryant was found dead in his room at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas shortly after being summoned to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Though no autopsy was performed, his death was ruled natural causes, although rumors persist that the doc died by gunshot. What’s one bullet more or less at this point?
Bryant, it was learned after his demise, had been an associate of JFK-assassination suspect David Ferrie. He had taught hypnosis techniques to Ferrie, and they had both been members of the same obscure religious sect. Such odd coincidences (or “coincidences”?) seemed to turn up everywhere in this case. For example, Sirhan Sirhan had worked with the brother of Arthur Bremer, would-be George Wallace assassin, at the racing stables in Santa Anita.
Was it a coincidence that Thane Eugene Cesar worked for the Hughes organization at Lockheed? Or that Cesar had been employed by Hughes’ man Maheu at the Bel Air Patrol security firm? Cesar dropped out of sight for a time, turning up in 1994 in the Philippines, his last known place of residence. He passed a lie detector test for a journalist who became his agent. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Cesar died on September 11, 2019. His agent was asking $25,000 an interview.)
Elaine Nye married Korean War veteran Jack Hart in Hollywood in 1973. Jack wrote several well-known rock songs and, as an agent, represented at various times Eddie Cochran, Rosemary Clooney, and Glenn Campbell. According to his son from his first marriage, Jack claimed to have worked for the CIA in mind-control experimentation. At some point in the ’70s (according to Elaine’s daughter from her first marriage), the couple was on the run from the FBI, hiding out in Missouri with relatives. Elaine liked to brag that she’d been the polka-dot-dress girl — she would wear the dress once a year just to piss her husband off. Once she had wanted to wear the dress to church and Jack, who was somewhat abusive, had forbidden it. They split up and she became a nurse, an alcoholic, and a fundamentalist Christian, not necessarily in that order. She died in 2013.
Robert Maheu was fired by Howard Hughes in 1970. He stayed in Vegas, establishing Robert A. Maheu and Associates and becoming, according to reliable sources, one of Las Vegas’s leading citizens. Sketchier sources claim Maheu liked to take credit for masterminding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Mission: Impossible man died of congestive heart failure at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas in 2008.
Jack Anderson took over Drew Pearson’s Washington Merry-Go-Round column and over time became as well-known as his late mentor. His mob-centric theory on the assassination of John F. Kennedy brought him criticism from mainstream media, but experts on the subject find much to admire in his thinking and research. He never took on the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, although his work on the Watergate conspiracy got him targeted for assassination himself.
Film director John Frankenheimer — while he never again reached the heights of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May — remained a successful moviemaker till his death in 2002.
Shep Shepherd died in his sleep in Washington, D.C., in 1975.
After he left Las Vegas, Howard Hughes moved to the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Managua in Nicaragua. An earthquake in December 1972 sent him to the Xanadu Princess Resort on Grand Bahama Island, where he lived his last four years. In 1972, Clifford Irving claimed he’d co-authored the reclusive Hughes’ autobiography. Hughes denounced the writer in a teleconference; a postal investigation led to Irving’s indictment and subsequent fraud conviction. Hughes died on April 5, 1976, onboard a Learjet.
In September 1969, Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas was informed his examinations of Sirhan Sirhan must cease. An assistant warden wrote, “I am concerned that Dr. Simson appears to be making a career out of Sirhan.” Simson-Kallas resigned in protest and went into successful private practice. He died in Monterey, California, in 1987.
In 1994, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey’s client, Claude DuBoc, accused of drug dealing, agreed to forfeit his assets as part of the plea bargain. But Bailey had transferred nearly six million dollars of those assets into his own accounts. He was disbarred in Florida in 2001 and Massachusetts followed suit in 2003. Later appeals to be admitted to the bar in Maine were unsuccessful. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Bailey died in 2021.)
In the 1980s, Sandra Serrano — administering a child care center in East Los Angeles — stayed active in politics, successfully running the election campaign for a leading Latina politician. When she loaned the candidate living expenses, Sandra arranged to pay herself back from campaign funds. The state sniffed out irregularities in the campaign’s finances and the Los Angeles D.A. charged Serrano with embezzlement. Forty thousand dollars of legal fees later, she entered a nolo contendere plea, accepting conviction but not admitting guilt.
Serrano hadn’t spoken in public about the assassination since June 1968. But researchers had unearthed tapes of the nasty interrogation by Hermano, and a documentary filmmaker sought her out. Serrano was told by the authorities if she stayed silent about June 5, her felony conviction would be reduced to a misdemeanor.