We shot him." DiPierro, the son of the Ambassador's maitre d'hotel, said he saw a"pretty girl" standing next to Sirhan seconds before the shooting. She was"wearing a polka dot dress." After police officers showed Serrano and DiPierro a dozen dresses with varying polka dots, sleeves and colours the two witnesses gave widely varying descriptions of what kind of dress they had seen.
Pantry eyewitness Vincent DiPierro said he saw, “…one girl [during the night] ... that was in there [the pantry] that night with a 'pug-nose'….. and dark hair.” DiPierro said she had been standing in the area near Kennedy when the shooting occurred and that she had also been standing near the tray stacker where Sirhan crouched beforehe began shooting. “There was so much confusion that night,” DiPierro said.
At Sirhan's trial DiPierro testified as to what he observed. Defense lawyer Grant Cooper asked him what caused him to notice Sirhan. DiPierro replied, “There was a girl standing in the area [of the pantry]” and this caused him to notice Sirhan. He said the girl was pretty and when shown a photograph of Kennedy campaign worker Valerie Schulte confirmed this was the girl in question. It became obvious that in the chaos that followed the shooting - with the added distractions of camera flashes and television lighting that filled the pantry - that DiPierro had been led to mistake the color of Schulte's hair (blonde) and clothes; Schulte's dress was actually green with yellow polka dots. The same mischaracterization of the dress was probably made by Darnell Johnson who claimed to see the woman in the pantry with a man and also in the Embassy Room both before and after RFK was shot. Johnson's description of the girl is not in contradiction to the positioning of Valerie Schulte who had been standing in the pantry with a man when the shots were fired.
There were further compelling reasons to explain why purported"accomplices" ran out of the pantry uttering words to the effect that"they" had"shot Kennedy" - but the explanations do not rest on 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 a