The Forgotten Terrorist by Mel Ayton

Author:Mel Ayton [Ayton, Mel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, History, United States, 20th Century, State & Local, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), Political Science, Terrorism, Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781640122017
Google: Q0CZDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-05-15T22:33:56+00:00

Sirhan faked his outbursts in court during his trial. He told his brother Adel he had planned them all along. At one point he asked Michael McCowan if he should “flip” as a way of demonstrating he was clever at fooling the court. He would “prove” that the outbursts were part of a clever plan.39

William Turner tried to connect Sirhan’s notebook entries that made reference to “Di Salvo” with the psychiatrist who purportedly hypnotized Sirhan. Turner wrote, “But the one that stuck out was, ‘Salvo Di Di Salvo Die S Salvo.’ It obviously alluded to the notorious Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. When I had talked with Sirhan in San Quentin, he insisted that he had no idea who DeSalvo was. If that was true—the Boston Strangler case was some years earlier—it stood to reason he had heard the name while in a: trance. It so happened that the DeSalvo murders had been cracked by the use of hypnosis, and the hypnotist was a Dr. William Joseph Bryan Jr., who had an office on the Sunset Strip of Los Angeles.”40

Sirhan had been recorded on tape at Ramparts Police Station, following his arrest, and the tapes revealed that he was lucid, aware, and articulate at the time. He even refused to give his name but was willing to engage in conversation with police officers about other matters. Sirhan talked about Albert DeSalvo and said the killer’s methods were “really cool.”41 And it is hardly surprising that Sirhan had indeed heard about the Boston Strangler. The case had been highly publicized and the subject of a bestselling book by Gerald Frank. The story was also made into a major Hollywood movie starring Henry Fonda, George Kennedy, and Tony Curtis and was released in cinemas in early 1968. Sirhan, a young man interested in criminal law and contemporary famous criminal cases, could not have failed to have heard about Albert DeSalvo.

As historian Henry Steele Commager observed in the late 1960s, “There has come in recent years something that might be called a conspiracy psychology. A feeling that great events can’t be explained by ordinary processes. We are on the road to a paranoid explanation of things. The conspiracy theory, the conspiracy mentality, will not accept ordinary evidence …. There’s some psychological requirement that forces them to reject the ordinary and find refuge in the extraordinary.”42

Conspiracy theories attract the attention of many Americans because their proponents have used age-old propaganda methods—exaggeration, rumor, innuendo, guilt-by-association, and paranoia. Dr. Patrick Leman of the Royal Holloway University of London conducted research on the phenomenon and concluded that conspiracy theories flower because people feel distanced from institutions of power and so are more likely to distrust official accounts. Furthermore, the rise of the Internet allows new theories to spread quickly and widely.43 Leman pointed to September 11, 2001, as a striking example. In the Muslim world and in some parts of the West, conspiracy theories have grown around the tragedy. In France left-wing author Thierry Meyssan’s book L’Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud) was an overnight sensation, topping the bestseller lists.

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