Kirjahaku

Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 seems like it should be an open-and-shut case. Many people crowded in the small room at Los Angeles’s famed Ambassador Hotel that fateful night saw Sirhan Sirhan pull the trigger. Sirhan was also convicted of the crime and still languishes in jail with a life sentence. However, conspiracy theorists have jumped on inconsistencies in the eyewitness testimony and alleged anomalies in the forensic evidence to suggest that Sirhan was only one shooter in a larger conspiracy, a patsy for the real killers, or even a hypnotized assassin who did not know what he was doing (a popular plot in Cold War–era fiction, such as The Manchurian Candidate). Mel Ayton profiles Sirhan and presents a wealth of evidence about his fanatical Palestinian nationalism and his hatred for RFK that motivated the killing. Ayton unearths neglected eyewitness accounts and overlooked forensic evidence and examines Sirhan’s extensive personal notebooks. He revisits the trial proceedings and convincingly shows Sirhan was in fact the lone assassin whose politically motivated act was a forerunner of present-day terrorism. The Forgotten Terrorist is the definitive book on the assassination that rocked the nation during the turbulent summer of 1968. This second edition features a new afterword containing interviews and new evidence, as well as a new examination of the RFK assassination acoustics evidence by technical analyst Michael O’Dell.

_Protecting the Presidential Candidates_ is the first book of its kind to examine how presidents and presidential candidates were protected during the presidential election cycles - from JFK to Trump. It is also the first book of its kind to tell the story of the role of state troopers and private bodyguards in protecting presidential candidates. Protection for candidates changed and evolved from the free-wheeling style of the 1950s and early 1960s, which afforded presidential candidates little or no protection, to the growth of bodyguard personnel, increased intelligence facilities and state of the art technology employed today to keep the candidates safe. Presidential candidates relish connecting with the public and it has given greater visibility to the bodyguards who are willing to place themselves between a presidential candidate and a would-be attacker. In the milieu in which the Secret Service operates, bodyguards have witnessed the terrors of election campaigns when presidential candidates have waded into crowds to shake hands with their supporters, rode in open-top cars, and made sudden but risky changes to their schedules - oblivious to the fact that in every campaign there have been people stalking candidates with ill intent. Many stories revealed in _Protecting the Presidential Candidates_ have remained largely hidden from the public; some buried in newspaper archives and others in oral histories, presidential libraries or official government documents. The author draws on numerous sources, including FBI files, presidential biographies, vice presidential biographies, civilian bodyguard memoirs, Secret Service agent memoirs, White House staff memoirs and more so that these stories can now be told. The book also allows readers to gain an insight into the personal as well as professional relationships between the candidate and the bodyguards who protected them. Some candidates were so trusting of their bodyguards they embraced them as part of an 'inner circle' of advisers. Bodyguards have also witnessed embarrassing moments in a candidate's campaign and how intrusive they have been at the most delicate of moments. 'The president's day is your day,' one agent said. 'Nobody sees the president the way an agent does.'

Few events have been the subject of more conspiracy theories than the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers. Indeed, a great many people consider that there were other individuals than Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan involved in both murders. Was a shot fired from Dealey Plaza's grassy knoll? Why did Jack Ruby shoot Oswald? Was it the CIA, the Soviets, Cuban nationalists or the Mafia that arranged John Kennedy's assassination? Was Robert Kennedy shot from in front and behind, and who had the most to gain from his death? These are just a few of the questions that have been put forward by a myriad of conspiracy theorists and it is those people and their ideas that Mel Ayton has tackled head-on. Over many years, Mel Ayton has examined all the more substantial conspiracy theories and, through careful analysis of documents and eyewitness statements, he has demolished each one. In each case, Mel Ayton presented the results of his detailed investigations in periodicals as he worked through the various theories. These have now been brought together to provide a comprehensive analysis of all the main theories as to who, how and why the two Kennedy brothers met their deaths in such unusual circumstances. Though wild ideas will continue to be proposed and efforts will still be made to demonstrate that Oswald could not have fired off three shots with great accuracy in the few seconds available to him as the presidential cavalcade passed beneath the window where he crouched, or that there were sinister reasons why three CIA men were allegedly present on the night of Robert Kennedy's assassination, the harsh reality is that the Kennedy brothers were each killed by lone gunmen. This is an absorbing read, brought up to date with the addition of new material as it has been uncovered. Maybe, just maybe, this book will persuade people that the official accounts of both murders, although flawed, are not cover-ups but simply statements of fact.

Doubts about James Earl Ray, Dr. Martin Luther King's lone assassin, arose almost immediately after the civil rights leader was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968. From the start, his aides voiced suspicions that a conspiracy was responsible for their leader's death. Over time many Americans became convinced the government investigations covered up the truth about the alleged assassin. Exactly what led Ray to kill King continues to be a source of debate, as does his role in the murder. However, Mel Ayton believe the answers to the many intriguing questions about Ray and how conspiracy ideas flourished can now be fully understood. Missing from the wild speculations over the past fifty-two years has been a thorough investigation of the character of King's assassin. Additionally, the author examines exactly how the conspiracy notions came about and the falsehoods that led to their promulgation. The Man Who Killed Martin Luther King is the first full account of the life of James Earl Ray based on scores of interviews provided to government and non-government investigators and from the FBI's and Scotland Yard's files plus the recently released Tennessee Department of Corrections prison record on Ray. Most importantly, the testimony of Anna Sandhu has often been ignored by writers but her story is crucial in gaining an understanding of Ray's deceptive ways. A courtroom artist, who, after listening to Ray's story, later married him. Also missing from accounts of the alleged conspiracy' is the story told to this author by Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary Deputy Warden Rolland H. Cisson, which decisively renders Ray's claims of innocence to be bogus. In the short-lived freedom he acquired after escaping from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967, following being sentenced to twenty years in prison for repeated offences, he travelled to Los Angeles and decided to seek notoriety as the one who would stalk and kill Dr. King, who he had come to hate vehemently. From the time of King's murder, the reader will follow Ray to solitary confinement in a Nashville prison. Then, six years later, on 10 June 1977, James Earl Ray again escaped from prison, this time with five others. Ray was the last to be recaptured, having survived only on wheatgerm. Finally, the book relays Ray's stabbing by several black inmates, then his resulting diagnosis with Hepatitis C, which caused his death twelve years later, in 1998.

In American history, four U.S. Presidents have been murdered at the hands of an assassin. In each case the assassinations changed the course of American history.But most historians have overlooked or downplayed the many threats modern presidents have faced, and survived. Author Mel Ayton sets the record straight in his new book Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts?From FDR to Obama, telling the sensational story of largely forgotten?or never-before revealed?malicious attempts to slay America’s leaders.Supported by court records, newspaper archives, government reports, FBI files, and transcripts of interviews from presidential libraries, Hunting the President reveals:How an armed, would-be assassin stalked President Roosevelt and spent ten days waiting across the street from the White House for his chance to shoot himHow the Secret Service foiled a plot by a Cuban immigrant who told coworkers he was going to shoot LBJ from a window overlooking the president’s motorcade routeHow a deranged man broke into Reagan’s California home and attempted to strangle the former president before he was subdued by Secret Service agents.In early 1992 a mentally deranged man stalking Bush turned up at the wrong presidential venue for his planned assassination attemptThe relationships presidents held with their protectors and the effect it had on the Secret Service’s missionHunting the President opens the vault of stories about how many of our recent Presidents have come within a hair’s breadth of assassination, leaving America’s fate in the balance. Most of these stories have remained buried?until now. Includes glossy photo signature of historic pictures and documents

Believing himself to be on a "God-given mission," Joseph Paul Franklin was the only racially motivated serial killer ever pursued by the Justice Department. Mel Ayton examines his murderous life, from his poverty-stricken youth in a backward Alabama suburb to his indoctrination by militant Nazis and southern racists to his eventual capture by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ayton's exhaustive report uncovers the truth behind Franklin's three-year undertaking to murder Jews and African Americans. White supremacist Franklin was, by his own admission, an outlaw, a racist, and weird. As a neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klansman, he violently enforced his views by embarking on a "lone hunter" mission to kill. He saw African Americans and Jews as subhuman and knew no moral obstacle to racial violence, invoking the Bible to support his criminal acts. As Franklin's 1977–80 killing spree was contemporaneous with other racially charged incidents that other Klansmen and neo-Nazis wrought throughout the United States, his story also exposes how hate organizations have made killers out of disaffected and bitter young men.In this first full-length book about Franklin, Ayton reveals a shocking and unsavory side of American society.

Since the birth of our nation and the election of the first president, groups of organized plotters or individuals have been determined to assassinate the chief executive. From the Founding Fathers to the Great Depression, three presidents have been assassinated: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley. However, unknown to the general public, almost all presidents have been threatened, put in danger, or survived “near lethal approaches” during their terms. Plotting to Kill the President reveals the numerous, previously untold incidents when assassins, plotters, and individuals have threatened the lives of American presidents, from George Washington to Herbert Hoover. Mel Ayton has uncovered these episodes, including an attempt to assassinate President Hayes during his inauguration ceremony, an attempt to shoot Benjamin Harrison on the streets of Washington, an assassination attempt on President Roosevelt at the White House, and many other incidents that have never been reported or have been covered up. Ayton also recounts the stories of Secret Service agents and bodyguards from each administration who put their lives in danger to protect the commander in chief. Plotting to Kill the President demonstrates the unsettling truth that even while the nation sleeps, those who would kill the president are often hard at work devising new schemes.

It was in the early hours of 5 June 1968 that the US presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot three times by a Palestinian gunman, Sirhan Sirhan. Bobby, the younger brother of John F. Kennedy, who was himself murdered some five years earlier, succumbed to his wounds twenty-six hours later. For more than fifty years the subject of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination has remained in the news as conspiracy writers, assisted by the ruminations of Hollywood celebrities, continue to promote the many, and varied, theories surrounding the murder. The attempts at explaining Sirhan’s actions, from ‘mirror-gazing’, ‘amnesiac episodes’ and ‘trance-like states’, as reasons for the assassination have succeeded in obscuring just how explicit the motive of Robert Kennedy’s assassin was. The answer to the question of motive lies not in conspiratorial intrigue but in the story of how Sirhan’s life developed from an innocent 12-year-old Arab immigrant into a committed and fanatical supporter of the Palestinian cause with virulent anti-American sentiments. The Making of an Assassin takes the reader back to the killer’s early exposure as a schoolboy to the horrors of the Arab-Jewish conflict in East Jerusalem and the experiences of the Sirhan family and their neighbours who were at the centre of the struggle. The author also examines, and questions, accounts by Sirhan’s family that they were forcibly removed from their homeland and also their claims that Israel had ‘stolen’ their home. The story follows the family as they emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Pasadena, California. It was there that Sirhan, then a student at Pasadena College, Sirhan became integrated with the Arab student community, which, as a group, debated and promoted the Palestinian and wider Arab cause. Drawing on interviews with Sirhan’s acquaintances, the author reveals how the future assassin’s politics developed from his years as a young teenager to his eventual commitment to violent solutions to the Palestinian cause. This book offers a different and detailed portrait of Sirhan to those provided by conspiracy authors, revealing him as a frustrated, angry, and depressed social misfit who failed at virtually everything he turned his hand to and who was very much interested in a solution to where his life was going by engaging in extremist politics. Using police and FBI investigative files and obscure material which has never before been examined – including interviews with family members, work colleagues and friends, police reports and LAPD ‘Special Unit Senator’ files – a compelling review of Sirhan’s life is constructed, providing the reader with an in-depth analysis of Sirhan’s state of mind leading up to and following the assassination.

Few events have been the subject of more conspiracy theories than the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers. Indeed, a great many people consider that there were other individuals than Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan involved in both murders. Was a shot fired from Dealey Plaza’s grassy knoll? Why did Jack Ruby shoot Oswald? Was it the CIA, the Soviets, Cuban nationalists or the Mafia that arranged John Kennedy’s assassination? Was Robert Kennedy shot from in front and behind, and who had the most to gain from his death? These are just a few of the questions that have been put forward by a myriad of conspiracy theorists and it is those people and their ideas that Mel Ayton has tackled head-on. Over many years, Mel Ayton has examined all the more substantial conspiracy theories and, through careful analysis of documents and eyewitness statements, he has demolished each one, piece of evidence by piece of evidence. In each case, Mel Ayton presented the results of his detailed investigations in periodicals as he worked through the various theories. These have now been brought together to provide a comprehensive analysis of all the main theories as to who, how and why the two Kennedy brothers met their deaths in such unusual circumstances. Though wild ideas will continue to be proposed and efforts will still be made to demonstrate that Oswald could not have fired off three shots with great accuracy in the few seconds available to him as the presidential cavalcade passed beneath the window where he crouched, or that there were sinister reasons why three CIA men were present on the night of Robert’s assassination, the harsh reality is that the Kennedy brothers were each killed by lone gunmen. This is an absorbing read, brought up to date with the addition of new material as it has been uncovered. Maybe, just maybe, this book will persuade people that the official accounts of both murders are not cover-ups but simply statements of fact.