CNN | July 9, 2012
By Brad Johnson and Michael Martinez

Los Angeles (CNN) -- A woman who witnessed the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy says she has agreed to testify for Sirhan Sirhan's new defense team.

Nina Rhodes-Hughes insists Sirhan was not the only gunman firing shots when Sen. Kennedy was murdered only a few feet away from her at a Los Angeles hotel. She says there were two guns firing from separate positions and that authorities altered her account of the crime.

"What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right," Rhodes-Hughes has told CNN. "The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups."

As a federal court has been preparing to rule on Sirhan's current legal challenge to his conviction in the Kennedy murder, Rhodes-Hughes says she has been contacted by Sirhan's lead defense lawyer, New York attorney William Pepper. "He asked me if indeed I would testify that there was another shooter and I said yes, I would," she said. Rhodes-Hughes says she has not been contacted by the California attorney general's office, which represents the other side in the Sirhan federal court case.

Rhodes-Hughes has described for CNN various details of the June 1968 assassination as well as her long frustration with the official reporting of her witness account and her reasons for speaking out 44 years later: "I think to assist me in healing -- although you're never 100% healed from that. But more important to bring justice.

"For me it's hopeful and sad that it's only coming out now instead of before -- but at least now instead of never," said the former Los Angeles resident now living near Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada.

Sirhan, the only person arrested, tried and convicted in the shooting of Robert Kennedy and five other people, is serving a life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California.

The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles is set to rule on a request by Sirhan, now 68, that he be released, retried or granted a hearing on new evidence, including Rhodes-Hughes' firsthand account.

At his 1969 trial, Sirhan's original defense team never contested the prosecution's case that Sirhan was the one and only shooter in Kennedy's assassination. Sirhan testified at his trial that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought." He was convicted and sentenced to death, which was reduced to life in prison in 1972.

After the trial, Sirhan recanted his courtroom confession.

In recent federal court filings, state prosecutors led by California Attorney General Kamala Harris argued that even if there was a second gunman involved in the Kennedy shooting, Sirhan hasn't proven his innocence and he's still guilty of murder under California's "vicarious liability" law. Sirhan's new legal team disputes Harris' assertion concerning the state statute.

The current battle has prosecutors and Sirhan's lawyers engaging directly the merits of new evidence -- as well as witness recollections such as Rhodes-Hughes' account -- never before argued in court.

The particular clash over Rhodes-Hughes was triggered five months ago by prosecutors under the attorney general when they contended that Rhodes-Hughes had told the FBI she heard no more than eight gunshots during the assassination. In court papers filed in February, Harris' prosecutors argued that Rhodes-Hughes was among several witnesses reporting "that only eight shots were fired and that all these shots came from the same direction."

Three weeks later, Sirhan's lawyers challenged those assertions in a response also filed in federal court in Los Angeles. The defense team led by William Pepper contended that the FBI misrepresented Rhodes-Hughes' witness account and that she actually had heard a total of 12 to 14 shots fired.

"She identified fifteen errors including the FBI alteration which quoted her as hearing only eight shots, which she explicitly denied was what she had told them," Sirhan's lawyers argued in February, citing a previously published statement from Rhodes-Hughes in which she stated, "I heard 12-14 shots, some originating in the vicinity of the Senator [and] not where I saw Sirhan."

The FBI and the California attorney general's office have both declined comment to CNN on the controversy over Rhodes-Hughes' witness account since the matter is now being reviewed by a federal judge.

When the dispute over her account erupted in February, CNN sought out Rhodes-Hughes for comment, eventually locating her in March in the Vancouver area.

Rhodes-Hughes, now 78, told CNN that she was a television actress working as a volunteer fundraiser for Kennedy's presidential campaign and that she had been invited to the Ambassador Hotel to celebrate, along with the senator and hundreds of his supporters, his anticipated victory in the June 4, 1968, California primary election. She said she witnessed the Kennedy shooting shortly after midnight on June 5 inside a hotel kitchen service pantry.

The FBI report indicates that she was indeed inside the hotel pantry during the crucial moments of the Kennedy shooting, but Rhodes-Hughes contends the bureau got details of her story wrong, including her assertions about the number of shots fired and where the shots were fired from.

Rhodes-Hughes tells CNN she informed authorities in 1968 that the number of gunshots she counted in the kitchen pantry exceeded eight -- which would have been more than the maximum Sirhan could have fired -- and that some of the shots came from a location in the pantry other than Sirhan's position.

The 42-year-old Kennedy was the most seriously wounded of the six people shot inside the pantry only moments after the New York senator had claimed victory in California's Democratic presidential primary. The presidential candidate died the next day; the other victims survived.

The Los Angeles County coroner determined that three bullets struck Kennedy's body and a fourth passed harmlessly through his clothing. Police and prosecutors declared the four bullets were among eight fired by Sirhan acting alone.

Rhodes-Hughes told CNN the FBI's eight-shot claim is "completely false." She says the bureau "twisted" things she told two FBI agents when they interviewed her as an assassination witness in 1968, and she says state Attorney General Harris and her prosecutors are simply "parroting" the bureau's report.

"I never said eight shots. I never, never said it," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "But if the attorney general is saying it then she's going according to what the FBI chose to put into their report."

"There were more than eight shots," Rhodes-Hughes said. She says that during the FBI interview in her Los Angeles home, one month after the assassination, she told the agents that she'd heard 12 to 14 shots. "There were at least 12, maybe 14. And I know there were because I heard the rhythm in my head," Rhodes-Hughes said. She says she believes senior FBI officials altered statements she made to the agents to "conform with what they wanted the public to believe, period."

"When they say only eight shots, the anger within me is so great that I practically -- I get very emotional because it is so untrue. It is so untrue," she said.

Contacted by CNN for comment, Sirhan lawyer William Pepper called the alleged FBI alteration of Rhodes-Hughes' story "deplorable" and "criminal" and said it "mirrors the experience of other witnesses."

Other witnesses also mentioned more than eight shots

Law enforcement investigators have always maintained that only eight shots were fired in the RFK assassination, all of them by Sirhan. His small-caliber handgun could hold eight bullets, but no more.

But released witness interview summaries show at least four other people told authorities in 1968 that they heard what could have been more than eight shots. The following four witness accounts appear not in FBI reports but in Los Angeles Police Department summaries:

-- Jesse Unruh, who was speaker of the California Assembly at the time, told police that he was within 20 to 30 feet behind Kennedy when suddenly he heard a "crackle" of what he initially thought were exploding firecrackers. "I don't really quite remember how many reports there were," Unruh told the LAPD. "It sounded to me like somewhere between 5 and 10."

-- Frank Mankiewicz, who had been Kennedy's campaign press secretary, told police that he was trying to catch up to the senator when he suddenly heard sounds that also seemed to him to be "a popping of firecrackers." When an LAPD detective asked Mankiewicz how many of the sounds he'd heard, he answered: "It seemed to me I heard a lot. If indeed it had turned out to have been firecrackers, I probably would have said 10. But I'm sure it was less than that."

-- Estelyn Duffy LaHive, who had been a Kennedy supporter, told police that she was standing just outside the kitchen pantry's west entrance when the shooting erupted. "I thought I heard at least about 10 shots," she told the LAPD.

-- Booker Griffin, another Kennedy supporter, told police that he had just entered the pantry through its east entrance and suddenly heard "two quick" shots followed by a slight pause and then what "sounded like it could have been 10 or 12" additional shots.

An analysis of a recently uncovered tape recording of the shooting detected what an expert said was at least 13 shot sounds erupting over a period of less than six seconds. The audiotape was recorded at the Ambassador Hotel by free-lance newspaper reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski and is the only known soundtrack of the assassination.

Audio expert Philip Van Praag told CNN that his analysis establishes the Pruszynski recording as authentic and the 13 sounds electronically detected on the tape as gunshots.

"The gunshots are established by virtue of my computer analysis of waveform patterns, which clearly distinguishes gunshots from other phenomena," Van Praag said. "This would include phenomena that to human hearing are often perceived as exploding firecrackers, popping camera flashbulbs or bursting balloons."

The Pruszynski recording is now a major point of controversy among the new evidence being argued between the two sides in the Sirhan federal court case.

California Attorney General Harris contends that Van Praag's findings amount to an "interpretation or opinion" that is not universally accepted by acoustic experts. However other audio experts have reported finding more than eight gunshots in Stanislaw Pruszynski's recording.

In 2005, Spence Whitehead of Atlanta told CNN that he had located "at least 9, possibly 11 shot sounds" captured by Pruszynski's audiotape of the Kennedy shooting.

A 2007 Investigation Discovery Channel television documentary reported that Wes Dooley and Paul Pegas of Pasadena, California, along with their colleague Eddy B. Brixen of Copenhagen, Denmark, had located "at least ten" shots in Pruszynski's recording of the kitchen pantry gunfire.

Also appearing in the TV program was Philip Harrison of York, England. In a published analysis, Harrison described locating within the Pruszynski tape more than ten "impulse sounds" occurring inside the pantry: seven that he attributed to gunshots, three that he considered candidates for an eighth shot and several other impulse sounds that he said he could not identify.

CNN initially reported on the Pruszynski recording in 2008 and then with additional details in a BackStory segment in 2009. 

Shots fired from two different locations

California prosecutors have argued that witnesses heard shots coming from only one location, but Rhodes-Hughes tells CNN that while the first two or three shots she heard came from Sirhan's position several feet in front of her, she also heard gunshots "to my right where Robert Kennedy was."

According to the autopsy report, the coroner concluded that the senator's body and clothing were struck from behind, at right rear, by four bullets fired at upward angles and at point-blank range. Yet witnesses said Sirhan fired somewhat downward, almost horizontally, from several feet in front of Kennedy, and witnesses did not report the senator's back as ever being exposed to Sirhan or his gun.

In a published analysis of the Pruszynski sound recording, Philip Van Praag described five of the gunshots captured in the tape as being fired opposite the direction of Sirhan's eight shots. Van Praag also described the five shots -- the third, fifth, eighth, 10th and 12th gunshots within a 13-shot sequence -- as displaying an acoustical "frequency anomaly" indicating that the alleged second gun's make and model were different from Sirhan's weapon.

A chance meeting with Bobby Kennedy

The path that eventually led Nina Rhodes-Hughes to the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry began 2½ years earlier during a chance meeting with Robert Kennedy in December 1965 at NBC-TV studios in Burbank, California. She was being made up for her co-starring role in the daytime drama "Morning Star" when Kennedy suddenly entered the makeup room. The actress was starstruck. "I saw Robert Kennedy and everything else disappeared from view," she said. "There was an aura about him that was very captivating. He kind of pulled you in. His eyes were very deep set and they were very blue. And when you looked at him, you got very drawn in to him."

As Rhodes-Hughes remembers it, the senator had arrived to pre-record an interview on "Meet the Press" and the two discussed political issues while awaiting their separate TV appearances. "Here I am, just an actress in a soap opera, and he took the time to have an in-depth conversation with me," said Rhodes-Hughes, who was then known professionally by her screen name Nina Roman.

As impressed as Rhodes-Hughes was with Robert Kennedy, she says the senator indicated that he was impressed with her ability to quickly memorize many pages of TV script. She says he confided to her that he had no such talent himself but that his older brother, the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, had possessed similar skills.

"Our conversation basically was the clincher for me," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "I said to him, 'You know, I have followed your career in politics and I really believe in you and I love all the things that you did -- and are trying to do, and propose to do -- and so if ever you declare yourself a candidate for the presidency, I will work for you, heart and soul.' And he smiled and said, 'Well, I don't know if that's going to happen.' And he was very humble and very sweet."

Rhodes-Hughes says that later, in the spring of 1968, shortly after Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency, she helped form a campaign support group in Los Angeles called "Young Professionals for Kennedy" and assisted in raising funds for the California phase of the senator's White House bid.

Weeks later, as he claimed victory in the California primary, addressing hundreds of supporters in the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room shortly after midnight on June 5, Kennedy paid tribute to the many volunteers, like Rhodes-Hughes, who had assisted his campaign. Referring to his own role during his brother's successful run for the presidency in 1960, Kennedy told them, "I was a campaign manager eight years ago. I know what a difference that kind of an effort and that kind of a commitment makes."

Trying to keep Kennedy from heading to the pantry

For Rhodes-Hughes there was one more commitment to keep. She had promised Kennedy aide Pierre Salinger that following the candidate's victory speech she would try to meet the senator as he exited the ballroom and usher him to a backstage area where Salinger had been keeping abreast of the California primary returns. She says although she and another campaign volunteer made sure to carefully position themselves to greet the candidate, the opportunity never came. According to Rhodes-Hughes, shortly after Kennedy completed his remarks in the Embassy Room, he was whisked away by others down a corridor and toward the kitchen pantry while she scurried to catch up.

"No, no, that's the wrong way!" Rhodes-Hughes told CNN she shouted to the senator and his escorts as she chased after them in an unsuccessful effort to turn them around. "It's this way! Come back! You're going the wrong way!"

Kennedy and Sirhan almost face-to-face

Rhodes-Hughes says that after she entered the kitchen pantry's west entrance, she could see Kennedy in left profile, "greeting" well-wishers a few feet ahead of her. She says a moment later she was looking at the back of the senator's head, as he continued onward, when suddenly the first two or three shots were fired.

"I saw his left profile. And then, very, very quickly, he was through greeting, and he turned and went into the original direction that he was being ushered to," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "At that point, I saw the back of his head and part of his shoulders and back."

"My eyes were totally on him, and all of a sudden I started hearing popping sounds, which I thought at first were flashbulbs from a camera," she said.

It was Rhodes-Hughes' account of Kennedy's movements in the pantry that Sirhan's lawyer William Pepper focused on in particular when CNN asked him to comment on her recounting of the shooting.

"This observation is vital," said Pepper. "Her clear recollection of being some short distance behind the Senator and seeing his left profile and then seeing him quickly turning so that the back of his head was in her sight at the time the shooting began -- this reveals that the Senator was almost directly facing Sirhan just before he took three shots, from behind, in his back, and behind his right ear at powder burn range, making it impossible for Sirhan to have been Robert Kennedy's shooter," the defense lawyer told CNN. "It clearly evidences the existence of a second gunman who fired from below and upward at the senator."

Rhodes-Hughes says that while she was behind Senator Kennedy, looking at the back of his head and hearing the first two or three gunshots, Kennedy did not appear to be struck by bullets at that point.

Still believing the first shots were merely flashbulbs, she says she then took her eyes off the senator, while turning leftward, and caught her first glimpse of Sirhan standing in front of Kennedy and to the candidate's left.

Rhodes-Hughes told CNN that the 5-foot-5-inch tall Sirhan was propped up on a steam table, several feet ahead of her and slightly to her own left. She says part of her view of Sirhan was obstructed and she could not see the gun in his hand but she says that, as soon as she caught sight of Sirhan, she then heard more shots coming from somewhere past her right side and near Kennedy. She told CNN that at that point she was hearing "much more rapid fire" than she initially had heard.

"It was rapid fire and a different sound than the other gun which Sirhan had," Rhodes-Hughes said. "The shots that I heard coming from my right, more towards the Senator, were much more deeper resounding and were rapid, rapid, rapid fire."

In his analysis of the Pruszynski recording, Philip Van Praag found that some of the 13 shot sounds he located in the tape were fired too rapidly, at intervals too close together, for all of the shots fired in the pantry to have come from Sirhan's Iver Johnson revolver alone.

Sirhan's lawyers report in their federal court papers that gunshot echoes have been ruled out as the cause of the Pruszynski recording's "double shots." Ricochets also are ruled out according to the two Pasadena forensic audio engineers who corroborated Van Praag's second-gun findings for the 2007 TV documentary "Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination."

'They've killed him! They've killed him!' 

Rhodes-Hughes told CNN she heard gunshots coming from some place not far from her right side even while Sirhan was being subdued several feet in front of her. "The shots to my right, where Senator Kennedy was, continued," she said. "It was a deeper sound, a different sound and much more rapid."

During all of that time, Rhodes-Hughes told CNN, "people are falling around me. I see a man sliding down a wall. Then I see Senator Kennedy lying on the floor on his back, bleeding. And I remember screaming, 'Oh no! Oh, my God, no!' And the next thing I know, I'm ducking but also in complete shock as to what's going on.

"And then I passed out," she said.

Rhodes-Hughes says that, moments later, while she was regaining consciousness from having fainted to the floor, she noticed that her dress was wet and that she was missing a belt and one of her shoes. It was clear to her that she had been trampled, but she was unhurt.

She then looked across the room and saw Kennedy once again, lying on the floor and bleeding, this time with his wife Ethel kneeling and trying to comfort him. Rhodes-Hughes said the sight horrified her, sending her screaming out of the pantry and back through the corridor, where she was attended to by her then-husband, the late television producer Michael Rhodes. She said Rhodes and members of the senator's presidential campaign tried to calm her down.

"I'm running out of the pantry and I'm yelling, 'They've killed him! They've killed him! Oh, my God, he's dead! They've killed him!'" Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "Now, the reason I said, 'they' is because I knew there was more than one shooter involved."

Little more than 25 hours later, Robert F. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.

Rhodes-Hughes describes the events of early June 1968 as "the most iconoclastic experience" of her life.

"Although it was 44 years ago, I will swear that this is exactly what happened. I remember it like it was almost yesterday, because you don't forget something like that when it totally changes your life forever," she said. "It took a great toll on me. For a while, even the backfiring of a car would send me into tears."

Never called to testify

Despite the fact her FBI interview summary indicates Nina Rhodes-Hughes was inside the kitchen pantry during the assassination, she was never called to testify at Sirhan's 1969 trial or at any subsequent inquiry over the years. Rhodes-Hughes said she made a point of telling two FBI agents in July 1968 that she would be willing to make herself available to appear as a witness anywhere at anytime and to testify "that there were more shots."

"They never wrote that down," she said of the FBI agents who conducted the interview in her Los Angeles home. She also said that when the pair of agents departed following their visit, they forgot to take along their attaché case and, minutes later, had to return to her residence and retrieve it.

Rhodes-Hughes said that, in the months following the June 5, 1968, assassination, she and some others who had been at the Ambassador Hotel refused news media interviews so as to avoid interfering with preparations for Sirhan's trial. It wasn't until the 1990s that Rhodes-Hughes was asked whether she would ever be willing to testify under oath -- an invitation coming not from a prosecutor or law enforcement official but from author Philip H. Melanson, a chancellor professor of policy studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

At Melanson's request, Rhodes-Hughes reviewed her 1968 FBI interview summary for the first time and found it contained more than a dozen inaccuracies. She provided Melanson with a statement, but the professor died some years later and Rhodes-Hughes once again missed her opportunity to testify. Before his death, Melanson published Rhodes-Hughes' statement in one of several books he wrote on the Robert Kennedy assassination.

Rhodes-Hughes recounted the Kennedy shooting and her initial contact with Melanson in a 1990s interview on "Contact," a local TV program in Vancouver carried at the time by Rogers Cable.

Defense lawyer Pepper calls Rhodes-Hughes' recollections "significant verification" of new assassination evidence that the Sirhan legal team is currently presenting. "It provides further verification of a dozen or more gunshots and mirrors the experience of other witnesses which confirms the existence of the cover-up efforts," he told CNN.

"Along with all of the other evidence we have provided, one wonders why it has taken so long for this innocent man to be set free, a new trial to be ordered or, at least, a full investigatory hearing to be scheduled," Pepper said. "Nothing less than the credibility and integrity of the American criminal justice system is at stake in this case."

Sirhan Sirhan's current legal team is doing something his original lawyers never did. They are asserting that Sirhan did not shoot Kennedy.

Sirhan's original defenders had decided at the outset that Sirhan was the lone shooter. Because Sirhan's initial lawyers presented a diminished capacity case in 1969, they never pursued available defenses. Evidentiary conflicts, and issues such as a possible second gun, simply were not addressed at Sirhan's trial. Most of the original prosecution's evidence was stipulated by the original defense team, which agreed that Sirhan had killed the presidential candidate.

Rhodes-Hughes says she believes the full truth of Robert Kennedy's murder has been suppressed for decades, and says she hopes that it will now finally come out and that the alleged second shooter will be identified and brought to justice.

"From my perspective, I am not here to convict Sirhan Sirhan or release him," Rhodes-Hughes says. However "there definitely was another shooter," she insists. "The constant cover-ups, the constant lies -- this has got to stop."