Sirhan Sirhan and the hypnosis question
He has never remembered doing it. A defence psychiatrist hypnotised him and concluded the dissociation was self-induced. Everything beyond that is contested, and one popular claim has no source at all.
Sirhan’s seized notebooks contain pages of repetitive writing. He says he does not remember producing them.
Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy in the service pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on 5 June 1968. He was seized at the scene, holding the weapon, in front of many witnesses. Kennedy died the following day.
The conviction has never been seriously in doubt on the question of who fired. What has been argued for fifty years is what was happening in Sirhan's head, because from the moment of his arrest he has said he does not remember it.
What is documented
Sirhan's notebooks, seized from his home, contain pages of repetitive writing including the phrase "RFK must die" written over and over. He has said he has no memory of writing them either.
In January 1969 the defence psychiatrist Bernard Diamond — professor of law and psychiatry at Berkeley, and a significant figure in American forensic psychiatry — hypnotised Sirhan in his cell, using a coin held in front of his eyes.
Under hypnosis Sirhan relived the shooting. Diamond took him through the hours beforehand step by step. Asked to write while in trance, Sirhan reproduced the same compulsive repetition found in the notebooks.
Why the case attracts the programming theory
Because of a genuine cluster of features. A killer with no memory. Repetitive automatic writing. A defence psychiatrist describing trance states in court. A period in which American intelligence agencies were, demonstrably, funding research into hypnosis and dissociation.
And a forensic dispute that has never gone away: arguments about the number of shots, the position of the fatal wound, and whether the physical evidence is consistent with Sirhan alone.
The claim with no source
It is frequently asserted that Louis Jolyon West — the psychiatrist who held MKULTRA funding to study hypnosis and suggestibility, and who examined Jack Ruby — was involved with Sirhan.
We have found no reliable primary source placing West anywhere near Sirhan Sirhan, and we do not repeat the claim.
What later hypnosis added
Sirhan has been examined again in the decades since, including by psychologists engaged by his legal team who have argued he was subject to coercive influence. Those assessments are advocacy in a live legal process, which does not make them wrong and does mean they are not neutral.
The wider problem applies here as everywhere: hypnosis does not reliably recover memory. It increases confidence without increasing accuracy and makes a subject markedly more suggestible to the interviewer's framing. Material generated under hypnosis is inadmissible in many jurisdictions for that reason.
That cuts against both readings. It undermines the claim that hypnosis has revealed programming, and it undermines Diamond's 1969 reconstruction just as much.
Where it rests
Sirhan fired at Robert Kennedy. He appears genuinely not to remember it. A psychiatrist hypnotised him and concluded the dissociation came from within him. No document connects him to the people who were funded to study such states.
That leaves a real unanswered question about his mental state and no evidence for the answer most often given.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Is there any document connecting West to Sirhan?
West's papers at UCLA are open to researchers, which makes this answerable rather than permanently disputed. Nobody appears to have searched them for this purpose and published the result.
- 02
Do recordings of the 1969 Diamond sessions survive?
They are the primary evidence for everything said about Sirhan's mental state, and are cited far more often than they are quoted.
Be the first to comment
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
California v. Sirhan — trial record
California State Archives · no public copy located
Louis Jolyon West papers, 1890–1998
UCLA Library Special Collections
George Washington University
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