Unsolved '66: A Bogus Book

Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (5th in a series)

Two and a half years passed between the time when Chuck Percy’s one-time Kenilworth, Illinois, home was demolished and the publication of my book about the murder there.

I had read the book by Louise Thoresen about her husband, William. She was acquitted of murdering him in California in June 1970.

Twenty years prior to that, Chuck Percy bought his Kenilworth home. The following year, police there began their record on William, who was fourteen.

The record grew and the offenses became more serious. Meanwhile, a separate record tracked offenses by William’s brother, Richard.

During the summer of 1965, the brothers’ records were combined as Richard and William battled their parents.

Louise’s book, It Gave Everybody Something to Do, is one reason to believe that William murdered Valerie.

Another is the FBI documents which reveal that, by late 1966, they thought William murdered Valerie. However, after he was dead, the FBI planted an implausible story in the Chicago press that one of an association of jewel thieves was the killer.

Louise Thoresen’s book doesn’t make any more sense than the planted jewel thieves story. She wrote that William beat her brutally, breaking bones and causing permanent hearing damage. He was never faithful to her, masterminded the murder of his brother, and then murdered the man who did it plus another person.

She revealed that he attempted to murder his parents, and that she was furious when her lawyers told her that, while in jail, he offered numerous people money to murder her.

Yet, in page after page, she declares her love for him and writes that she didn’t mean to kill him when she put five bullets into his back.

Her claim is BS. Only an idiot would believe it. And there’s more.

When Louise was in jail awaiting trial, her father-in-law took her son to an acquaintance and insisted the acquaintance care for the boy rather than William’s parents, who then hid out in Michigan in order to avoid having to appear at Louise’s trial.

Fifty years later, I interviewed the acquaintance, who was still perplexed as to why William’s parents, who were perfectly healthy, requested that someone else—a non-family member—mind their grandson for what turned out to be six months.

Meanwhile, Louise never remarried or dropped the Thoresen name. It is on her tombstone.

The FBI had to be behind it all. They did not want the boy to be around his family while it was orchestrating his mother’s trial and interviewing his grandparents about all the murders William committed.

And there are more oddities about Louise’s book. Though it was purportedly published by a New York publisher, none of its photographs contain credits. Anyone who knows anything about publishing knows that this kind of thing just isn’t done. But it was done and for a reason: Someone wanted that no one would be able to trace some of those pictures back to the photographer and, perhaps, to the publication they originally appeared in.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. (There’s more on this in my book Zodiac Maniac.)

The point is that at the time, I was viewing this all in the context of Valerie’s murder and the three that Louise wrote that William admitted committing.

That isn’t to say, when researching my first book (on the Percy murder), knowing that William and Louise moved to San Francisco in 1965, I didn’t suspect him in passing of being the Zodiac Killer, a case that I had not researched in depth. But at that time, chronicling the Percy case was enough.

Later, after the first book was published, a New York-based attorney, John Q. Kelly, called.

He said he grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, and remembered when Valerie was murdered. He was intrigued by the case.

Eventually, Kelly asked for the contact information to some of my sources. He wanted to talk with Robert Lamb about the case and requested that I ask Lamb if they could speak one day.

Lamb politely declined, saying he felt that his memory was beginning to fail him. Kelly was was undeterred. He believed that more could be learned about Valerie’s murder.

I stayed in touch with Kelly for a while. I did not know what, if anything, he would do.

I had left Illinois (though I return each year around the anniversary of the murder for a dinner at Hackney’s restaurant with some of my sources) and thought I was done with the Percy case.

I was wrong again. It had to do with the tip of that iceberg mentioned earlier.

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Unsolved '66: The Lawyer