Shadow Play ─ The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy

This updated edition for the 50th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s murder explores ignored witness accounts, coerced testimony, bullet-hole evidence, and other issues surrounding the political homicide.

On June 4, 1968, just after he had declared victory in the California presidential primary, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Captured a few feet away, gun in hand, was a young Palestinian-American named Sirhan Sirhan. The case against Sirhan was declared by the police to be “open and shut” and the court proceedings against him were billed as “the trial of the century;” American justice at its fairest, swiftest, and most sure. But was it? Shadow Play explores these pressing questions:

- Why did some LAPD interrogators refuse to accept the testimony of key witnesses, continuing to challenge them until they changed their stories?
- Why were the police files of the murder investigation sealed for over twenty years?
- Why did Sirhan’s attorneys fail to challenge any of the physical evidence at his trial?

Updated to include new information about an audio recording of the shooting and other evidence from the crime scene, Shadow Play challenges the official assumptions and conclusions about this most troubling, and perhaps still unsolved, political homicide.

WILLIAM KLABER earned a Golden Reel Award nomination in 1993 for The RFK Tapes, a nationally broadcast, one-hour public radio documentary on the murder of Robert Kennedy.

PHILIP H. MELANSON was a political science professor and the chair of the Robert Kennedy Assassination Archives at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He died in 2006.