Who killed Robert Kennedy? Not the man who has been jailed for 50 years, says late senator’s son

Just before Christmas, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr pulled up to the massive Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a California state prison complex in the desert outside San Diego that holds nearly 4,000 inmates. Kennedy was there to visit Sirhan B. Sirhan, who was convicted of killing his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, nearly 50 years ago.

While his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, waited in the car, Robert Kennedy Jnr met with Sirhan for three hours. It was the culmination of months of research by Kennedy into the assassination, including speaking with witnesses and reading the autopsy and police reports.

“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Kennedy says. He will not discuss the specifics of their conversation. But when it was over, Kennedy had joined those who believe there was a second gunman, and that it was not Sirhan who killed his father.

“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” says Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father’s 11 children. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Kennedy, 64, says he does not know if his involvement in the case will change anything. But he now supports the call for a reinvestigation of the assassination led by Paul Schrade, who also was shot in the head as he walked behind Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, but survived.

Kennedy was just 14 when he lost his father. Even now, people tell him how much Bobby Kennedy meant to them. His death – five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas, and two months after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jnr was killed in Memphis – devastated a country already beset by chaos.