By: EMI ENDO and ERIC MALNIC TIMES STAFF WRITERS

The negatives of some photographs taken in the moments surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy are missing.

That is not a matter of debate.

But almost everything else about the pictures is.

Did they show the crucial seconds when bullets felled the presidential candidate in a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, as claimed by the photographer, Jamie Scott Enyart? Or did they show nothing of the assassination, as alleged by the city attorney's office?

Could they have been destroyed, along with other evidence, after the official assassination investigation, as suggested by Enyart? Or were they simply misplaced, only to turn up in state archives more than 25 years later, as claimed by city and state officials?

And was a manila envelope containing the recently rediscovered negatives stolen from a courier's car in Inglewood last Friday, as claimed by the courier? Even attorneys for the city, who may soon have to mount a defense in Enyart's $2-million lawsuit over the missing negatives, admit that the circumstances surrounding the alleged theft are "highly unusual."

Enyart's attorney, Alvin Greenwald, hinted darkly at a conspiracy--a suggestion, never substantiated, that has haunted every investigation of the New York senator's death.

"Somebody, for some reason, is making sure those photos do not reach public view," Greenwald said.

Louis "Skip" Miller, an attorney for the city, conceded that the incident in Inglewood was strange, but he scoffed at Greenwald's suggestion.

"What happened here is just a petty theft," Miller said. "A run of bad luck."

The Los Angeles City Council offered a $5,000 reward Wednesday for the negatives' safe return, saying they are "critical evidence" in the defense against Enyart's lawsuit.

Enyart said Wednesday that he is in "absolute shock" over the missing negatives.

"They've been playing fast and loose with the evidence since Day 1," he said, suggesting that some important material in the case had been deliberately destroyed. "All I want is my photos."

Enyart, now a 43-year-old television special effects director, was a 15-year-old amateur photographer when he attended the primary election gathering at the Ambassador in 1968. By his account, he shot three rolls of film that night.

He said most of those exposures were made during Kennedy's victory speech in the Ambassador's ballroom, but a few captured the critical moments when Kennedy was gunned down seconds later in a nearby pantry.

(Enyart's pictures should not be confused with the widely circulated photos of the dying senator by Times staff photographer Boris Yaro and Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge.)

In the weeks that followed the slaying, investigators confiscated every photograph they could find that had been taken that night at the Ambassador. Enyart's were among them.

Later, when he asked for his film, he learned that the courts had ordered that investigative files on the case--and all evidentiary material related to it--be sealed for 20 years.

After waiting 20 years, Enyart asked for his photos back in 1988. The city said it had lost them. Enyart, who had begun work on a book about the assassination, responded with a $2-million lawsuit that he filed against the city and state on Aug. 14, 1989.

Last August, Enyart was told that his negatives had been found in the state archives in Sacramento, where they had been filed mistakenly under the wrong name. The state hired a courier, George Phillip Gebhardt, who flew to Los Angeles International Airport on Friday with an envelope that was said to contain the negatives.

Gebhardt later told Inglewood police that as he headed downtown in a rented car, he got a flat tire on Century Boulevard near Freeman Avenue. He said that when he got out to inspect the tire, he may have left the right front window partially open. The courier said that when he got back into the car, his jacket, which he had left on the front seat, and the envelope, which he had left on the back seat, were missing.

Gebhardt acknowledged that he didn't see anyone near the car when he got out to check the tire. But he said that when he had stopped for a traffic light a block earlier, he had seen a man get out of a red car behind him and start pounding the fender of the red car with his fist. That man, Gebhardt suggested, might have slashed his tire.

On Wednesday, during preliminary court maneuverings for the trial of the lawsuit, which is scheduled to start Feb. 5, attorneys for the city displayed contact prints they said had been made from the negatives before they were lost. None of the prints showed Kennedy after he left the ballroom.

Enyart insisted that the contact prints were incomplete. He said he had taken pictures that showed Kennedy twisting and falling after he was shot in the pantry: "I watched Kennedy fall to the ground. Where are those photos?"

Miller, the attorney for the city, responded with skepticism.

"He's trying to say two more rolls of film are missing, but they don't exist," Miller said. "There are no pantry pictures."

PHOTO: Skip Miller, an attorney for the city of Los Angeles, displays a contact sheet of Jamie Enyart's negatives at hearing.

PHOTO: (B1) NEGATIVES VANISH: The disappearance of negatives of photos taken by Jamie Scott Enyart, above, in the moments around the assassination of Robert Kennedy raises questions. B10 PHOTOGRAPHER: RICK MEYER / Los Angeles Times

Type of Material:

Descriptors: KENNEDY, ROBERT F; ASSASSINATIONS -- LOS ANGELES; PHOTOGRAPHS; EVIDENCE; MISSING PROPERTY; LOS ANGELES -- SUITS; ENYART, JAMIE SCOTT;

Copyright © 1996 Times Mirror Company

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Headline: Robert Kennedy Photos
Wire Service: APn (AP US & World)
Date: Son, 23. Jun 1996 Copyright 1996 The Associated Press.

By MICHAEL FLEEMAN
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- On assignment for his high school newspaper one June night in 1968, Scott Enyart pointed his Nikon at Robert F. Kennedy and saw history through a 50mm lens.

"All of a sudden," Enyart recalls, "he dropped from the frame."

What Enyart witnessed in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel were the last frantic moments in the life of a man who might have been president. Enyart's photographs could potentially show so much, answer so many questions about a case that has been dogged by allegations of incompetent investigation and cover-up from the start.

But the photos, Enyart says, are missing.

In a lawsuit against the city that is scheduled for trial by midweek, Enyart alleges the pictures -- among 108 frames of film he says he exposed that night -- were either lost or sold by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Enyart wants the city to give his photos back or, at the very least, fork over some of the money he says he could have made for the dramatic images.

He accuses the city of putting up three decades of roadblocks to cover its actions in the Kennedy investigation.

"These police officers are going to be put on the stand and describe how they conducted business 25 years ago. It's not going to be a very pretty picture," says Enyart, now 43 and a special-effects man for the movies.

The city contends the pictures exist only in Enyart's teen-age imagination, that whatever photos he took at the Ambassador were returned to him as prints. The negatives, the city alleges, were lost in an unfortunate theft earlier this year.

"I'll call it wishful thinking and, frankly, that's what it is," says Skip Miller, an attorney for the city. "If they were important evidence, they would have been used at the (Sirhan Sirhan) trial, as 40 other photographs were."

On June 5, 1968, Enyart was taking pictures for the Fairfax High School Gazette of Kennedy's celebration after winning California's Democratic presidential primary.

When Kennedy finished his speech in the hotel ballroom, Enyart followed the New York senator into a nearby kitchen pantry. He says he was snapping him in profile when Kennedy suddenly twisted out of the viewfinder and turmoil erupted.

Enyart says he raised his camera over his head and pressed the shutter repeatedly. He climbed up on a steamer table and took even more photos. Minutes later, he returned to the ballroom to record the chaos there.

Police confiscated Enyart's film -- he says it was three, 36-exposure rolls -- and interviewed the youngster at Rampart Division station. A transcript of that questioning still exists. But not all the pictures.

Enyart received about two dozen prints from the police, all of which showed either the speech or the ballroom after the assassination. None of what he considers the important ones, those showing the scene in the pantry immediately after the shooting and the apprehension of Sirhan, were returned.

Told that investigators had sealed all evidence in the case for 20 years, Enyart waited until the late 1980s, then requested return of all his photos. The images, he says, could be valuable to himself and to history.

"They would at least corroborate or disprove the theories that are out there and, to me, put the whole thing to rest," he says.

These theories include dark suggestions that Sirhan didn't act alone, that a second weapon was involved, that police bungled the investigation or covered up crucial facts. Sirhan was convicted and remains in prison in California.

Enyart filed suit, the city said it didn't have his film, and he failed to turn up any trace of his negatives independently. Then city attorneys reported finding the negatives, misfiled under the wrong name in the state archives in Sacramento.

They sent Enyart a proof sheet they said was made from the archived negatives and arranged for a courier to deliver the negatives to him.

But the proof sheet contained only 29 1/2 frames. Enyart says he was eager to get the negatives and show that the proof sheet was not a complete record of his work that night.

Then things took a turn for the weird. The courier claimed the package of negatives was stolen from his rental car in Inglewood.

Now, all Enyart has left is a proof sheet -- and a lot of suspicions. He says he now doubts even whether the proof sheet images are his pictures. Additionally, the negatives proofed on paper were from bulk roll Ilford film, and he was using prepackaged Kodak film that night.

His attorney, Alvin Greenwald, suggested the city and the police want to prevent the public from seeing these images for reasons only the police know.

"All that we know (is) Scott's (case) may have shed something far more penetrating, far more important, far more significant than the mere loss of film," Greenwald said

Not so, says the city's Miller, who insists the proof sheet from the archives memorializes all of Enyart's work.

"He's got the pictures," said Miller. "They are in sequence. They are what they are."

Headline: RFK Photos
Wire Service: APn (AP US & World)
Date: Don, 22. Aug 1996 Copyright 1996 The Associated Press.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A jury on Thursday awarded a photographer $450,600 in damages and compensation for photographs he took of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination that were lost or destroyed.

A Los Angeles Superior Court jury deliberated more than two weeks before awarding Scott Enyart damages from the city for the eight years he spent trying to retrieve his film.

The city contended that whatever photos Enyart took of the presidential hopeful at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, were returned to him as prints. The city said the negatives were lost in a theft earlier this year.

Enyart took the pictures when he was 15, working on a high-school photojournalism assignment.

"As I was taking pictures, Robert Kennedy all of a sudden just dropped and twisted and fell," Enyart, 43, testified in the trial of his lawsuit.

He alleged that the photos, among 108 frames of film he says he exposed that night, were either lost or sold by the Los Angeles Police Department after being seized that night by investigators.

City lawyers say Enyart shot only one roll of film, none of it crucial.

"They took my film. They took it at gunpoint, they promised that they would give it back," Enyart said outside court.

"The courts asked me to wait for 20 years. By behaving as a good citizen and obeying the law, and obeying the courts, I was punished," Enyart said.

Man Wins Battle With City Over Kennedy Assassination Photos
Friday, August 23, 1996
Courts: He is awarded $450,600. Pictures of murder of Robert Kennedy were confiscated by LAPD and lost.

By CARLA RIVERA, Times Staff Writer

A Los Angeles man was awarded $450,600 Thursday by a Superior Court jury that found the city negligent for failing to return photographs that police confiscated after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

The verdict was a vindication for Jamie Scott Enyart, 43, a Hollywood special effects artist, who called his eight-year struggle for compensation a classic match of "David versus Goliath."

"I am absolutely thrilled," said Enyart, who was 15 and on assignment for his Fairfax High School newspaper June 5, 1968, when Kennedy, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was shot to death in the Ambassador Hotel pantry by Sirhan B. Sirhan.

In a case laced with historical and haunting memories, Enyart had claimed for years that as a teenager he stood atop a table and captured the moment when Kennedy was shot.

Enyart said he took three rolls of film, capturing scenes of the senator falling and the pandemonium that followed, but that the film was taken by police. He sued for $2 million, alleging that the city either lost or destroyed his valuable historical documents and then tried to cover up its deeds.

City lawyers had accused Enyart of trying to make money off the tragedy. They maintained that Enyart had been at the Ambassador but had taken only one roll of film and could not have captured the pivotal seconds of the assassination because he was not in the pantry where Kennedy was shot.

"They took my film and they took it at gunpoint," Enyart said after the verdict. "They promised that they would give it back and . . . asked me to wait for 20 years. I behaved as a good citizen and obeyed the law and . . I was punished."

The verdict was yet another blow to the credibility of the Los Angeles Police Department, as a jury accepted accusations that its handling of Enyart, his photographs and the entire case was, at the very least, incompetent.

"We definitely thought the city and police screwed up all the way through," said jury foreman Dorsey Caldwell.

The panel, which found the city and one of its police officers liable for negligence, awarded Enyart $299,700 in damages, $100,800 for the eight years he spent pursuing his film and $50,100 for the alleged destruction of his negatives.

Louis "Skip" Miller, a private attorney hired by the city at $225 an hour to handle the case, was tight-lipped after the decision, saying only that lawyers will decide later whether to appeal.

Miller had moved for a mistrial before the verdict was read, alleging juror misconduct and coercion. Superior Court Commissioner Emilie H. Elias, who presided over the trial, denied the motion.

But Miller indicated that those allegations--made by an excused juror who had been the panel's foreman--would be pursued.

On Monday, Elias said Miller may have acted inappropriately by talking to the excused juror and said she would report his actions to the State Bar.

Enyart says his photos would have answered key questions about the assassination: from which direction the shots were fired and whether there was more than one gunman.

In the weeks following the slaying, investigators confiscated all known photos and film they could find from that night, including Enyart's. He later learned that the case files would be sealed for 20 years. In 1988, when Enyart had begun a book on the assassination and requested the photos, the city said it had lost them.

©Los Angeles Times - Thursday, January 18, 1996