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None of this potentially exonerating detail was fully explored in court. In what proved to be an astounding strategic misjudgment, Sirhan's chief attorney, Grant Cooper, did not challenge the prosecution's "facts." The defense relied entirely on a theory of impaired judgment, which the jury had no trouble rejecting. Sirhan's death sentence was subsequently reduced to life imprisonment, which he is serving at California State Prison in Corcoran.
Has America a fixation on assassination conspiracies? After all, the latest furor over who really killed J.F.K., inspired by Oliver Stone's movie, has only recently abated. There remain rabid challenges to official versions of the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X murders. To sociologist Amitai Etzioni, the fascination with these questions reflects a need to explain life's inexplicable dark side: Why did all these heroes die? That tendency is encouraged by America's individualism, which encourages an instinctive distrust of authority and officialdom.
Mark Blitz of the Hudson Institute, an Indianapolis-based think-tank, argues that the persistence of conspiracy theories reflects a collective sense of impotency -- people feeling powerless before blind forces they cannot control. In its most benign form, this near paranoia confines itself to Elvis spotting. At worst it leads to convictions that the Jews -- or reactionary capitalists, or unreconstructed communists -- secretly control the world.
To Klaber, suspicions about the Sirhan verdict are based on fact, not fancy, and others who have followed the case and its aftermath concur. Retired L.A.P.D. sergeant Paul Schraga, the first cop on the scene after the shooting, is convinced that right-wing zealots in his department's elite intelligence unit were involved in the assassination. "Conspiracy?" he says. "You bet your bottom dollar there was a conspiracy." Several celebrities, including Norman Mailer and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., have petitioned a Los Angeles County grand jury to review the L.A.P.D.'s investigation of the younger Kennedy's killing. Alas, considering how much evidence has disappeared, it is an open question whether such a probe would resolve old doubts -- or create new ones.