By John C. Brady, II, PhD, D.Crim
In what was already a turbulent year in America, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down following a political rally in Los Angeles in June 1968. His assassin was a young disenfranchised, dark-skinned, Palestinian immigrant—Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. The killer was apprehended on the spot, still holding the gun after unloading eight bullets at RFK—an open and shut case, so it seemed, for the 24-year-old labeled as a “political terrorist who deserves to die in the gas chamber!” A conviction of first degree murder and a death penalty followed a “circus-like” trial. More than half a century later, as Sirhan remains in prison (despite 16 failed parole hearings), he continues to insist having no memory of planning or executing the murder.
Dr. John C. Brady, the author of Psychological DNA: Who Killed Robert F. Kennedy?—A Cold Case Analysis, was a doctoral student in the School of Criminology at UC Berkeley at the time of the trial, and his professor and adviser was Sirhan’s chief defense psychiatrist, Dr. Bernard L. Diamond, sparking a lifelong interest in the case. And now after his own long career in the field, Dr. Brady puts renewed focus on this old case, using a new investigative process, known today as psychological DNA research, he pieced together the many fragments of Sirhan’s broken personality to retrospectively challenge many of the original decisions made during the trial, and answer the troubling question that has persisted for fifty-years: What was the real reason or reasons Sirhan chose to shoot Senator Kennedy?
Dr. Brady’s precise analysis is underscored by Sirhan’s defense team’s multiple legal missteps as well as the stream of unhelpful and inconsistent expert testimonies that resulted in the jury’s terribly misinformed decision and subsequent conviction. His careful reassessment, uses updated, present-day psychiatric classifications and research methods (including psychological DNA) not available when Sirhan was originally misdiagnosed.
Dr. Brady’s investigation into Sirhan’s volatile mental state takes the reader deeper into the unconscious and distorted contours of the killer’s mind, for the first time uncovering additional psychiatric conditions that help to explain why, in a trance state, Sirhan shot Senator Kennedy, and how Sirhan’s recall was inexplicably wiped clean from his memory. The twisting psychological path in Psychological DNA leads to the answer for why Sirhan actually killed Senator Kennedy.
Copyright © 2023 John C. Brady, II
Brady Enterprises, LLC