In fact, Mr. Schrade came to believe that there were two gunmen: Mr. Sirhan, who shot him and the other four people, and another, who shot Senator Kennedy. He claimed that the Los Angeles police did not do their best to find the second gunman, and that more than the eight bullets in Mr. Sirhan’s .22-caliber revolver had been fired in the pantry.
“Yes, he did shoot me. Yes, he shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” Mr. Schrade told The Post in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman?”
No official investigation ever found a second gunman.
Mr. Schrade never got what he wanted, a full reinvestigation of the assassination, despite his legal efforts to force the Los Angeles Police Department to disclose its so-called confidential 10-volume summary of its investigation of the assassination (which was made public when it was turned over to the state of California in 1987) and to greatly expand ballistics testing of Mr. Sirhan’s gun.
Mr. Schrade pointed to, among other things, the findings of an acoustics expert, Philip Van Praag, who examined an audio recording made by a journalist in the pantry and determined that 13 shots were fired, and the autopsy report that said Senator Kennedy was shot from behind, at point-blank range, and Mr. Sirhan stood in front of him.
“There are voluminous piles of paper that are strewn everywhere in his house,” Mr. Weil, Mr. Schrade’s brother-in-law, said in a phone interview. “L.A.P.D. archives. Other people’s work.”
Louise Stone Duff, Mr. Schrade’s sister, said: “It was such a quest for him. It consumed him. We had Zoom calls every few weeks with my kids and Uncle Paul, and it always came up.”
Mr. Schrade’s belief that while Mr. Sirhan had shot him, he did not kill Senator Kennedy led him to attend Mr. Sirhan’s 15th parole hearing, in 2016, where he apologized to him for not attending previous hearings and not fighting harder for his release.