4 – The Mysterious Woman in the Polka Dot Dress Has Never Been Found
After his arrest, Sirhan says he doesn’t remember speaking with anyone before the assassination. However, several witnesses claim he was with a girl wearing a polka dot dress in several locations within the hotel, including in the pantry. Along with another man, this mystery woman was spotted running away from the pantry after the shooting. Sandy Serrano, an RFK campaign worker, having a break on a balcony at the time of the murder, says she saw the polka dot dress lady running from the hotel with a male companion; she was apparently shouting “We shot him. We shot him.”
It is easy to dismiss this story because there always seems to be a mysterious, unidentified individual involved in assassinations. However, an extraordinary number of people saw the same lady acting strangely and in the company of Sirhan. Paul Sharaga, an LAPD officer, and an elderly couple who were in the parking lot behind the Ambassador Hotel collaborated Serrano’s story. Practically every witness to the polka dot dress woman provided a similar description which is unusual in itself. They said she wore a white dress with black or blue polka-dots, was well-built and had a crooked nose and dirty blond hair.
After receiving descriptions from dozens of witnesses, the LAPD murder investigation team, named Special Unit Senator (SUS), spent a lot of time and resources trying to track down the mystery woman and her male friend. They desperately looked through news film archives to try and find photographic evidence of this woman’s existence but to no avail. The trouble is, there were several women in the hotel wearing a polka-dot dress although there was no evidence to link any of them to the assassin.
Some people try to latch on to the women in the polka-dot dress theory as ‘evidence’ of a conspiracy, but they fail to take into account the chaos of the scene. The United States Army has reported the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony in the midst of a battle. Therefore, it is safe to assume that those who witnessed the mystery woman are unreliable because the assassination took place in a crowded room, and in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there was mass panic.
Serrano and another eyewitness, Vincent DiPierro, both claimed they saw the woman in the polka-dot dress shouting “We shot him.” However, when police officers showed them multiple dresses with varying colors, sleeves, and polka dots, they gave different descriptions of the dress they saw. DiPierro later picked out Kennedy campaign worker, Valerie Schulte, as the woman he saw. Cathy Fulmer, who also wore a polka-dot dress, stated that she had a conversation with a stranger she later identified as Sirhan. Therefore, we should put the polka-dot theory to rest even though there is a suggestion that the SUS was far from thorough and transparent in the investigation.