In a Los Angeles courtroom in 1969, a slight 24-year-old man stunned the judge by trying to withdraw his not guilty plea, plead guilty to first-degree murder, and demand the gas chamber. The judge refused and forced a full trial. This episode traces the life of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the man who assassinated United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.

We follow him from a childhood in Mandatory Palestine and Jordan, marked by witnessing his brother's death, to Pasadena, a failed dream of becoming a jockey, and an obsession with Kennedy fueled by the senator's pledge to send fighter jets to Israel. We examine his notebooks, the diminished-capacity hypnosis defense, the commuted death sentence, and decades of denied parole hearings that turned a lone gunman into a fixture of enduring conspira ...