conspiratorial answers. Michael Wayne, a young man who bore a resemblance to Sirhan, had earlier asked Senator Kennedy to autograph a poster. He ran out of the pantry when the shooting started and was mistaken for an assailant. A security guard handcuffed him and turned him over to the police. A crowd of people assumed he was the assassin or the assassin's accomplice. As it turned out, Wayne was only running for a telephone.
Cathy Fulmer, who had been in the pantry at the time of the shooting, said she had a conversation with a"stranger" who she later identified as Sirhan. She became scared when the shooting started and she too ran out of the pantry. She cried out"Kennedy was shot." Fulmer wore a white dress with a polka dot scarf. This may be the explanation for Richard Houston's sighting of a girl in a polka dot dress allegedly running from the pantry shouting"We shot him." It would also account for Nurse Gloria Farr's description of Sirhan standing next to a girl"wearing a polka dot scarf." Furthermore, the reports of a girl shouting"We shot him" may also have originated with a statement made to the LAPD by another pantry witness, Los Angeles Schools employee Ralph Williams, who was outside the kitchen door at the time of the shooting. Williams described a girl who left the kitchen shouting, “We"ve got him, we"ve got him” followed by another woman who described the first woman as"her crazy daughter."
In building their conspiracy scenarios most writers fail to put the eyewitness testimony within the context of a chaotic scene when witness observations are particularly faulty and susceptible to misconstruction. This truth was first recognized by the US Army, which reported the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony in the midst of battle. Many of its reports about soldiers involved in conflicts have shown that it is extraordinarily difficult to make sense of a battle until the following day, after the soldiers have had a chance to experience a good night's sleep. Information from shell-shocked soldiers immediately after combat, the Army discovered, was notoriously poor because it had not yet been processed in such a manner that it could be retrieved. Many witnesses of the RFK murder who gave reports about the shooting immediately after the event formulated better pictures of what occurred in subsequent interviews.
Other witnesses discovered their memories of events connected with the assassination were not as reliable as they initially thought. Some came forward to give detailed information about Sirhan's activities in the weeks and months preceding the assassination and about how unidentified accomplices had accompanied Sirhan. When asked to say their stories were based on"positive identification," many balked.
Despite compelling and plausible explanations, which centered around the unreliability of eyewitness accounts, the polka-dot girl stories persisted as conspiracy advocates repeatedly made reference to Kennedy campaign worker, Sandra Serrano, and her story of a girl in a polka dot dress, accompanied by two male companions, who claimed they had shot Senator Kennedy as they ran out of the hotel. Shortly after the shooting Serrano told her story to a news team.
On June 7th 1968 Serrano was interviewed by FBI Special Agent Richard C. Burris at her home. Serrano said she left the Ambassador ballroom at 11.30pm and went outside to sit on a stairway that lead to the Embassy Room. She sat on the fifth or sixth step. Two or three minutes later she said a woman and two men started up the stairs, one of whom she later identified as Sirhan. When the woman got near her, the woman said, “Excuse us” and Serrano moved to the side so the three could pass. Approximately half an hour later she heard noises that sounded like a car backfire and one of the men and the woman ran down the stairs shouting “We shot him, we shot him!” Serrano asked “Who did you shoot?” and the woman replied “Senator Kennedy.” She immediately returned to the Embassy Ballroom and asked an unidentified guard if Kennedy had been shot. The guard told her she must h