Some 40 years after the shooting of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, new evidence has surfaced which suggests that the man serving a life sentence for his murder may not have fired the shots that killed the charismatic senator.

Earlier this week, forensic scientists met at a conference in Connecticut to discuss their independent findings on the Kennedy assassination.

Doubts

Many of the scientists have some serious doubts as to whether Sirhan Sirhan, currently serving a life sentence for the murder, actually fired the fatal shot that killed Kennedy.

One of the investigators, Dr. Robert Joling, has spent nearly 4 decades studying the Kennedy assassination.

He believes that he has determined that the fatal shot came from somewhere behind Kennedy, whilst Sirhan Sirhan was around four to six feet in front of the senator at the time, and never got close enough to him to have been able to have shot him from behind.

Analysis by another forensics engineer, Philip Van Praag, determined that a total of 13 shots were fired at the time of the Kennedy killing.

This data comes from analysis of a Canadian journalist’s tape recording, known as the Pruszynski recording, and raises a large issue as Sirhan’s gun only held eight bullets, according to the NBC reporter.

This ‘evidence’ would seem to suggest that there must have been a second shooter involved in the assassination of RFK.

‘Friendly’ Fire

Van Praag’s analysis led him to the conclusion that a second gun that was fired was a match for a type owned by one of Kennedy’s guards.

‘When that security guard was asked about owning that gun at first he admitted, ‘Yes I owned that kind of gun but I got rid of it two months before the assassination.’ correspondent Amy Parmenter said on MSNBC Wednesday.

‘It turns out upon further investigation, in fact, he did not get rid of that gun until five months after the shooting. Of course, you can see where we’re going with this. … That security guard, was in fact behind Senator Kennedy when the fatal shot was fired.’

Rifling 

Identification of a bullet became possible with the advent of rifling as far back as the 1400s. Rifling is a process of applying grooves to a gun barrel in order to increase the range and accuracy of bullets fired from it. These grooves cause the bullets fired to have distinctive grooves, indentations and scratches upon them. These marks on the bullets are, to a degree, unique to the weapon that fired them.

The first recorded case of firearm identification being used to identify the shooter was back in 1835 here in England. A suspect was caught with a bullet mold in his possession. On examination this mold proved to be an exact match for the bullet removed from his victim. The suspect promptly confessed to the crime.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

In 1902 Oliver Wendell Holmes became the first person to produce ballistics information in a court of law. Having done some reading on firearm identification he used a gunsmith to fire the suspected firearm into cotton wool. This test bullet was then compared to the one recovered from the victim. Under microscope it was proven that both had been fired by the same gun.

Calvin Goddard

Calvin Goddard, an ex army officer, compiled a database of all the guns available from twelve different manufacturers, including test firing data. He later invented the comparison microscope that allowed two bullets to be viewed side by side for ease of examination.

In 1925 Goddard wrote a piece for the “Army Ordnance” in which he described in detail the use of his comparison microscope for firearm investigations. He titled this article “Forensic Ballistics”, a term which has been retained ever since.