Frank Zappa's Lost Robert Kennedy Assassination Documentary Album
Another of Zappa's Mystery Discs and Its Unsolved Subject
[Edit, 10/26/2022: At 1:38:07 of the YouTube video of The Second Gun, Gerard Alcan and/or Theodore Charach “gratefully acknowledge”, inter alia, Straight Records. My theory of the origins of the album is correct.]
“A man came to us with some tapes. He had been making a documentary album about the assassination of Robert Kennedy and he had interviewed all these people and he had put together this really fantastic album. That was when we had the Bizarre label and the deal with Warner Brothers on the Bizarre label was we could bring projects to them and they had the right to refuse them and they heard that and that's why it never came out. They were afraid of it."
Frank Zappa, undated interview (possibly Rotterdam, The Netherlands, circa May 24, 1980), “Unreleased Records”, “Frank Zappa: A Weirdo Discography”, http://www.lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/weirdo/unreleased.html#kennedy
“When Sandra Serrano completed her interview with NBC’s Sander Vanocur an hour or so after the shooting, Teddy Charach took her seat. It quickly became clear Charach wasn’t in the pantry, but as he ratted on with his unsolicited report, Vanocur’s face betrayed the thoughts of many after him—‘Who let this guy in here?’
“Charach grabbed the spotlight and never really let it go, a true eccentric who has made this case his life’s work. He puzzled the LAPD to the point of suspicion. When they checked gun-range rosters for Sirhan’s name, Charach’s name was also checked, along with more than a dozen others.
“Charach was a constant thorn in the side of the LAPD and district attorney’s office in the early seventies, and their intelligence files portray a Canadian newsman ‘of questionable prominence,’ with a string of traffic citations for excess smoke coming from his vehicle, prone to releasing press statements from an address at the Washington Hilton. Charach had a theatrical style of presentation that looks pretty funny now, but he did truly pioneering work at the time, conducting ‘audio-video interviews’ with key witnesses the authorities either ignored or willfully misinterpreted.
“Two or three months after the assassination, Charach picked up the phone and called Don Schulman. He was doing an investigation on the Kennedy killing, Charach said, and it was most important he come talk to him. Schulman said, ‘Fine, come over.’
…
“Charach then came back and told Schulman he was making a documentary record album. …”
O’Sullivan, Shane. Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy. New York: Union Square Press, 2008, pp. 322, 323, providing a possible clue to the identity of Zappa’s mystery man.
As someone who has forgotten more than most will ever know about both Frank Zappa and the unsolved assassination of Robert Kennedy, I never thought I’d learn there was a connection between the two subjects beyond the City of Los Angeles.
Not much is known about Zappa’s shelved documentary album project. In the early 1970s, Zappa owned two record labels, Bizarre (which released his own albums) and Straight (which released others’, including Alice Cooper’s). Reprise Records, a division of Warner Bros., distributed the labels. Later in the decade, he and manager Herb Cohen founded DiscReet Records, which Warner Bros. distributed. Zappa experts cannot agree on whether this album was slated to be released on Straight, Bizarre, or DiscReet. Evidently, Reprise and/or Warner Bros. rejected the release. It has never surfaced among the many unreleased recordings and test pressings of Zappa’s that circulate in the collectors’ community.
Zappa later sued Warner Bros. for, among other things, artistic interference, and he rarely referred to the company without expressing sardonic, withering contempt.
Why would record company executives be “afraid” of a documentary album about the assassination of Robert Kennedy?
While it’s impossible to know, especially without extant documentation, eyewitness accounts, or any knowledge of the contents of the rejected album, I can think of several reasons that have nothing to do with Frank Zappa or the man who approached him with audio footage. (Whether or not it was the late Theodore Charach, Charach directed a 1973 documentary titled The Second Gun.) These reasons do not begin to rise to the level of being exhaustive.
The revolver retrieved from suspect Sirhan Sirhan held eight rounds. The official LAPD ballistics report had to account for all eight and only those eight as seven bullets were officially extracted from four shooting victims and the eighth had to have hit the ceiling to account for several observed and documented holes in the ceiling. (The eighth bullet was said to be “lost in the ceiling interspace”. The second largest and highest paid police department in the United States apparently couldn’t find a bullet in a ceiling interspace, raising more questions about their competence and honesty.) [Edit 10/22/2022: There were actually SIX known shooting victims. I really have forgotten more than most will ever know.] [Edit 10/26/2022: Recently, LAPD was the third largest police department in the United States. I don’t know how large it was relative to Chicago’s in 1968 (or this year). The point is still valid.]
Many authors and documentary directors (including O’Sullivan, who is both) have documented extra bullet holes in walls and door jams. There is extensive photographic and cinematographic evidence as well as sworn statements by LAPD officers, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, and FBI agents who saw them. Even one extra bullet or hole would be too many to fit in the gun in evidence.
At the autopsy, Los Angeles County medical examiner Thomas Noguchi determined Kennedy was shot from behind at point blank range. Every single eyewitness present insisted Sirhan was in front of Kennedy for the entire assassination and never closer than two feet away. (The limits to human eyewitness accounts do not extend to simple, salient facts such as whether or not Sirhan was ever behind Kennedy or was ever within point blank range, especially when the accounts are unanimous. Otherwise, every history book that recounts events before Matthew Brady, at least, would need to be rewritten or discarded.)
Notorious LAPD criminalist DeWayne Wolfer, who was in charge of the ballistics investigation of the assassination, is a symbol of professional incompetence and dishonesty with a reputation of slipshod work intended to deliver to prosecutors anything that would bolster the state’s case. Other ballistics experts coined the verb “wolfer” to describe such shoddy work. Wolfer was accused of misconduct and even perjury in the case of former Los Angeles County District Attorney and accused murderer Jack Kirschke. But even Wolfer concluded the assassination’s fatal shots were fired at a range no farther than three inches at most.
The aforementioned Don Schulman, film runner for KNXT news, saw security guard Thane Eugene Cesar with his gun drawn during the shooting and was “pretty sure” he fired the gun. Schulman was hardly the only eyewitness to report seeing other guns fired.
Cesar sold a gun to co-worker Jim Yoder on September 6, 1968, three months after the June 5 assassination. He told Yoder he fired the gun on duty as a security guard and that someone may question Yoder about that. Cesar only worked two assignments as a security guard (the other was uneventful). Yoder left California (long before that became a great idea) and moved to Arkansas. The gun was stolen from his Arkansas home. Charach and his film crew found the gun in a muddy pond in Arkansas many years later. Charach made another documentary film about the gun and the search for it.
High school student Scott Enyart was present in the pantry during the shooting. He was covering that evening’s California primary for his high school newspaper. He took photographs of the assassination and/or its immediate aftermath. The LAPD confiscated the film and told him they would return prints or negatives within a week. They never did.
In the 1990s, Enyart won a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, which had failed to return his property. Despite having many attorneys on staff, the beleaguered taxpayers of the city of devils were forced to pay extra for an expensive private attorney (who lost the case anyway). The court ordered the City to return the negatives to him. A courier stopped at a gas station while delivering the negatives from Sacramento. The negatives were stolen. (Later, they were reported to have been destroyed.)
In 1976, Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi ran for District Attorney of Los Angeles County as a Democrat. A significant part of his platform called for reopening the investigation of the assassination. Bugliosi had collected several sworn affidavits of law enforcement officers who saw bullet holes at the crime scene that were not accounted for in official reports. He used the phrase “firing squad” to describe the amount of guns present at the crime scene. Bugliosi lost because, among other reasons, Los Angeles voters still elected Republicans other than the one token City Council member from Chatsworth. (The late Bugliosi was hardly a “conspiracy theorist”—he authored Reclaiming History, a book in which he argued for several hundred pages that Lee Oswald acted alone assassinating Robert Kennedy’s older brother.)
Others who have recently publicly rejected the state’s version of events and supported a reinvestigation are Robert Kennedy, Jr., and assassination shooting victim Paul Schrade. (Kennedy’s last words included, “Is Paul all right?”)
If readers were still puzzled why I trusted no information from the government or media long before 2020 unless the media in question were as honest as Frank Zappa or as unconnected and independent as Theodore Charach and Shane O’Sullivan, the above include more reasons why. (No, I cannot confirm Zappa submitted an album with evidence suggesting there were at least two guns pointed at Robert Kennedy.)
While I have forgotten more than most will ever know (or want to) about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, I haven’t learned as much as I should. The legacy media does not function as anything other than a propaganda arm for the bipartisan kleptocracy/statist quo, and I don’t have time to constantly and sedulously search obscure websites and publications like mine to report on every development in the case (and there are still developments). The “news” media may have reported that Kamala Harris stopped another reopening of the investigation when she was Attorney General of California, but it generally did not report when Sirhan was recently stabbed in prison two years ago. (It was likely a coincidence that he was about to testify in a non-binding, unofficial trial that could only make recommendations to actual courts. Things happen in prison, and he was recently moved from solitary confinement to the general population for the first time.) While driving in the area of the site of the demolished Ambassador Hotel, the scene of the crime, in December 2019, I resolved to confirm that I had just drove past the site as soon as I arrived home. I not only confirmed that it was the location of the hotel—I also discovered that Thane Eugene Cesar died in the Philippines two or three months earlier. The media must not have thought that newsworthy, even in a dismissive context (“Suspect in Preposterous RFK Assassination Conspiracy Theory Dies”). (While Manila is where Black Dahlia prime suspect George Hodel fled to avoid extradition, it could well be another coincidence that Cesar spent the final decades of his life there. His wife was Filipino.)
Will Zappa’s album ever surface so that a few more of these questions can be answered? I think it’s doubtful. His family recently sold his catalog, including (presumably) archives of unreleased material, to Universal Music Group, which is not known to be less fearful than Warner Bros. circa 1980. If the family retained the archive of unreleased recordings, it is doubtful Ahmet Zappa and company would consider demand sufficient to bother with a release when there are hours of unreleased Zappa compositions to be heard. (It would take half a lifetime to grok what has already been issued.)
If Charach was indeed behind the project, perhaps most or all of the recordings are present in his other work. (I have only seen excerpts; this is not an endorsement.)
Regardless, I’d like to hear the red-lighted album someday and find Charach’s gun search documentary. Stranger things have happened (including events like the Robert Kennedy assassination and the careers of Frank Zappa and Theodore Charach).