Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy 40 years ago this week in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is living out his days in the California state prison at Corcoran. He is 64 and has never fully explained what happened that night other than to say he can't remember it. The interesting thing is how under-examined the Robert Kennedy assassination is, compared to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.," said David Talbot of San Francisco, author of Brothers, a book that looks into Robert Kennedy's own investigation into his brother's death and his conviction that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy. "Bobby remains the unknown territory," Talbot said. "But even if you look at it minimally, there are questions that come to mind." Over the years, Sirhan has told investigators who interviewed him in prison that he was in a hypnotic trance during the shooting and can't remember it at all. William Turner, a retired FBI agent who wrote a book about the case, ... thinks Sirhan was "hypno-programmed to shoot" and that he was a real-life Manchurian Candidate - [a] brainwashed dupe whose controllers want to assassinate a presidential candidate. Turner suspects the same villains as do the JFK conspiracy theorists - "organized crime and, predominantly, people from the CIA." [Philip Van Praag, a retired electrical engineer and audio expert,] and a fellow investigator, former American Academy of Forensic Scientists president Robert Joling, ... have written a book about the killing, whose title, An Open and Shut Case, is a dig at the police investigation. Joling says an "independent panel of forensic scientists" should be created to "reinvestigate this matter on all the evidence."
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