Unsolved '66: A Certain Family
Unsolved '66: A Certain Family
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (4th in a series)
When John McDonough described his summer job with the Kenilworth Police Department, he mentioned a family.
During the summer of 1965, the Thoresens, a family of four, seemed to be tying up the department almost daily.
They were rich—not unusual for Kenilworth. What was unusual was that their two adult sons were engaged in an ongoing battle royal with their parents.
I don’t recall McDonough telling me more than this and that Kenilworth police were frustrated because the parents always seemed to file and then drop charges against their sons.
The family’s youngest son, Richard, was found shot dead under mysterious circumstances at age twenty-four in another wealthy suburban Chicago enclave, Lake Forest, at summer’s end.
McDonough likely added that the family’s oldest son, William, was shot dead by his wife, Louise, four years later.
I had yet to learn that, during these battles, Richard and William Thoresen caused much destruction to their parents’ mansion.
Most importantly, however, McDonough said that Louise wrote a book. I found a copy and started to read it.
Having studied the Percy murder for a while at that point, I knew that police found a bayonet in Lake Michigan near the Percys’ house three days after the slaying.
It was located in the direction of footprints that led from a patio door below Valerie’s room, where the killer escaped, to a beach where the prints disappeared at the water’s edge.
Its triangular-shaped pummel matched a number of uniquely-shaped wounds, one of them fatal, to Valerie’s head, the description of which had been published prior to the knife’s discovery.
Robert Lamb and Joe DiLeonardi, the Percy case investigators, recalled the unusual knife, a military weapon, and said they could not recall another case in which a civilian had been attacked by someone wielding a bayonet.
This meant something as they had investigated thousands of homicides in what was then the nation’s second most populous metro area.
Before I heard of the Thoresens, I knew that Valerie was murdered by someone who was walking around with a bayonet in a town full of millionaires at five o’clock on a Sunday morning. That meant one thing: psycho.
In her book, Louise describes William as violent, a habitual criminal. In his teens, he was institutionalized a number of times. Half the time, after they married, he was absent.
She notes that in August 1966, a month or so before Valerie was murdered, William was hoarding military weaponry.
This all but leapt off of the pages: William was a violent misfit. At the time of the murder, his parents lived two blocks from the Percys’ house.
Yet, in all of the coverage of the murder, he had not been named a suspect.
Later, I saw reports revealing that he was the FBI’s prime suspect for Valerie’s murder. Two months after the slaying, Louise was arrested at Kennedy Airport while attempting to ship William a cache of military weapons that included several of the same type of bayonets (M-1 Garland) as the one used to murder Valerie.
According to Lamb, the FBI failed to inform Illinois police that they believed William murdered Valerie.
Later (in 1973) I learned, by the admission of one of their agents, Vincent Inserra, the FBI planted an implausible story that implies one of a number of home-invading jewel thieves murdered Valerie.
One of thieves, Frank Hohimer, wrote a book that explains their MOs, which do not fit what happened at Chuck Percy’s house the morning that Valerie was murdered.
The FBI story is also based on a tale told by a mobster who was dead. So any skeptics would just have to take the bureau’s word for it.
The following year, Louise Thoresen’s book was sold through book clubs. Though it received a scathing review in the New York Times, for some odd reason, the paper covered its release with a feature: an interview with Louise, who was described as nervous when she met with one of the paper's reporters.
I presumed she was nervous because she knew that William murdered Valerie and had been forced to participate in a sham trial that, along with the book, was part of a cover-up to keep Chuck Percy, a US Senator, from learning the FBI had a prime suspect in the murder of his daughter yet sat on it.
In hopes that no one would discover William, who was dead, seven years after the murder, they planted a story that jewel thieves murdered Valerie.
It may also have been to protect members of the justice system who time and again let William, a rich man’s son, off though he committed numerous bombings, violent assaults, and weapons violations. Not to mention he served but three months for a rape conviction before being granted early parole.
What I did not know is this was just the tip of the iceberg. Louise Thoresen was sitting atop a gigantic lie.
How big? There was still much to learn.
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