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Pruszynski recording

Decades after the assassination, it was discovered that the shots in the kitchen pantry had been recorded on audio tape by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a freelance newspaper reporter who was covering Senator Kennedy's presidential campaign for the Montreal Gazette and today resides in his native Poland. Pruszynski had made the recording with a battery-powered portable cassette tape recorder and an attached microphone. Pruszynski's tape is the only known sound recording of the assassination, and analysis of it has only just begun.

At the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on February 21, 2008, Philip M. Van Praag of PVP Designs in Tucson, Arizona, presented his conclusions concerning the Pruszynski tape, which he asserted provides a record of a second gun being fired in the assassination. the Academy plans to publish Van Praag's paper later in the year.

On June 6, 2007, the newly-discovered Pruszynski recording was the centerpiece for a television program about the Kennedy case on Discovery Times Channel, now known as Investigation Discovery Channel. The one-hour documentary, entitled Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination, provided evidence from the recording that convicted gunman Sirhan Sirhan had not acted alone. Pruszynski's audio tape, which had never been broadcast in the 39 years since the murder, was aired for the first time during the Discovery Times program. According to three out of four audio experts interviewed for the documentary, the reporter's recording reveals that a second gun was fired in the Bobby Kennedy shooting.

Stanislaw Pruszynski and his recording equipment were approximately 40 feet southwest of Senator Kennedy when the shots erupted inside the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry. Pruszynski was unaware that his portable machine was still operating as it captured the sounds of the Kennedy shooting. Pruszynski also was unaware of the shooting itself because it was taking place amidst the various sounds of celebration, some distance away inside another room and outside the reporter's purview.

At that moment, Pruszynski was about to enter a narrow back corridor leading into the pantry from the hotel’s Embassy Room, a ballroom where Kennedy had just delivered his victory statement following the Tuesday, June 4 California Democratic primary election. When the shooting commenced, Pruszynski was at the north side of the ballroom and descending a small set of steps at the east end of the ballroom's makeshift stage where the Senator had spoken. Although he did not know his recorder was still recording at that point, Pruszynski just happened to be holding his microphone tilted upward and pointed toward the pantry, and above the heads of the crowd on the ballroom floor beneath him. Doors between Pruszynski and the shooting were open at the time.

Film and video shot by more than one camera in the Embassy Room—in particular, an ABC-TV black and white video-relay camera—captured pictures of Pruszynski, his recorder and microphone in hand, as he descended the ballroom platform's east steps, departed the steps and proceeded toward the kitchen pantry precisely while the shooting was taking place off-camera, inside the pantry. As the Kennedy shooting continued in the pantry, Pruszynski continued moving in the ballroom toward the corridor that accessed the pantry, getting his microphone closer to the shooting but still unaware of the shots erupting in that other room.

Pruszynski's audio recording captured a number of rapidly occurring sounds, each one very short in duration and with something of a popping or even clapping quality. "Conspiracy Test" quoted four audio experts who analyzed the Pruszynski recording: Philip Van Praag and Wes Dooley in the United States, Eddie Brixen in Denmark and Philip Harrison in the United Kingdom. Van Praag, Dooley and Brixen determined that the tape had captured at least 10 gunshots—and possibly as many as 13 shots—in the RFK assassination; all other possible sources for the sounds, including popping balloons, ricochets, echoes, etc., were ruled out. The presence of at least 10 shots is highly significant because Sirhan's handgun could fire no more than eight shots at a single time. Sirhan possessed only the one revolver and had no opportunity to reload his weapon once the shooting erupted in the pantry. If the Pruszynski recording does indeed reflect more than eight shots fired, it establishes the existence of a second gunman.

Harrison dissented on the issue of number of shots, reporting that he was able to confirm only seven or eight shots in the Pruszynski recording. The Discovery Times program explained that Harrison had not been provided all of the information and materials that had been made available to the other three experts. While all four experts bypassed a crude cassette copy of the Pruszynski recording that had been created years before by the California State Archives in Sacramento, only the first three experts worked directly from several high-quality digital and analog master dubs of the recording. Harrison relied on a digital copy of just one of those master dubs. Unlike at least two of the other experts, Harrison did not know where Pruszynski and his microphone were located during the Kennedy shooting and was unaware that Pruszynski and his microphone were moving toward the shots as they were being fired. In the Discovery Times TV program, Harrison conceded, "Any information relating to where Mr. Pruszynski was standing at the time or any movements he made during the sequence of shots would, to some degree, have been of assistance."

The Pruszynski recording's importance rests not only upon the number of shots fired but also upon two additional evidence: the intervals between the shots and differing acoustic characteristics.

Two of the four audio experts reported that the Pruszynski recording contains evidence of a second gunman firing virtually simultaneously with Sirhan. They determined—and a firearms expert concurred—that there was at least one set of so-called "double-shots," and possibly two sets. In the one set of "double-shots" that these experts confirmed for "Conspiracy Test", the set's twin shots were fired too close together for both to have come from Sirhan's revolver. The shooting's two separate sets of "double-shots"—that is, the third and fourth shots in the first set and the seventh and eighth shots in the second set—were separated by 122 and 149 milliseconds respectively. In field tests, a trained firearms expert firing under ideal conditions could only manage 366 milliseconds between shots using the same weapon. The dissenting Philip Harrison did not address this key issue of shot intervals.

In addition to the "double-shot" findings, one of the Discovery Times audio experts, Philip Van Praag, reported to the AAFS in 2008 that five of the shots heard in the recording—3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 in a sequence of 13 shots—had odd acoustic characteristics which the expert attributed to their being fired from a second gun pointing away from Pruszynski's microphone. In his scientific paper on the Pruszynski recording, Van Praag reported to the AAFS that a forensic investigation had matched the anomalous acoustic characteristics to those of a Harrington & Richardson .22 firearm known as the H&R Model 922. Sirhan's weapon in the pantry was a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet.

The significance of the Pruszynski recording was unknown for 36 years until early 2004, when an American journalist obtained a copy of the California State Archives's crude cassette dub of the original recording. The original is the only audio recording known to have captured the actual Robert Kennedy shooting. Two other sound recordings made that night by newsmen Andrew West of Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate KRKD and Jeff Brent of the Continental News Service did not capture the shooting itself but recorded only the shooting's immediate aftermath.

Discovery Times's "Conspiracy Test" concluded by posing this question: "Will the continuing respect for Robert Kennedy and the new evidence of a second gunman lead to a re-opening of the RFK assassination?" One of the program's audio experts answered it this way: "My feeling about the evidence that's come up here is that you can't back away from real stuff. It merits closer examination. And as a citizen of this country, [I believe] it has to be looked at."