Unsolved '66: The Lawyer
Unsolved '66: The Lawyer
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (6th in a series)
Though I lost touch with John Kelly, the attorney who expressed interest in the Percy case, I knew he had ideas about it.
In 2016, not long before the fiftieth anniversary of the murder, a Chicago-area publication, the Daily North Shore, revealed that Kelly, who has represented families in numerous high-profile wrongful death cases, sought to view files pertaining to the murder.
He made his request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It was denied. Kelly then sued under that act to access the files.
Officials in Kenilworth cited numerous reasons for fighting the suit, including the number of documents involved and the purported cost of making them available.
It was ironic that they would cost as an excuse. Kenilworth is one of the wealthiest communities in the nation, not to mention that fighting Kelly’s suit could not have been cheap.
In what might be portrayed as an overplaying of its hand, the village further claimed that releasing the records would obstruct the investigation and that a perpetrator was at large.
The making of such a statement regarding an ice-cold, half-century-old case suggested the influence, not of authorities in Kenilworth, but of the feds as some or all of the files from many high-profile unsolved murder cases, some not as old as Percy’s, were made public long ago.
Included are records regarding the home invasion mass murders of the Robison family in Michigan in 1968, and the Zodiac Murders, in which five were killed and two wounded in and around the Bay Area in the late 1960s.
Defendants included numerous Illinois agencies that played roles in the Percy investigation. It was decided that Kenilworth would respond to the suit on behalf of all the defendants. It all came to a head in early December 2016.
I was in the courtroom when Cook County judge Ann Demacopoulos ruled against Kelly, saying she was “convinced [the Percy murder] is an ongoing active investigation.” This is another reason to believe that the feds were pulling strings in the matter.
Kelly opened his wallet by hiring a Chicago attorney, Matt Topic, to pursue the suit on Kelly’s behalf.
“They're claiming that it is an ongoing investigation, and just because it's not solved doesn't mean it's really an active and ongoing investigation,” Topic told Chicago ABC-TV reporter Chuck Goudie. “And just because somebody looks at the file from time to time doesn't mean that it's an active investigation.”
Indeed, the judge gave no evidence as to how, specifically, the investigation might have been active and ongoing. Nor, for instance, how releasing some of the original police reports might put a future prosecution at risk.
Meanwhile, police have not named a new suspect for the murder since 1973. At the time of the ruling, based on the judge’s comments, ABC’s Goudie pondered whether authorities in Kenilworth might soon make a big announcement regarding the case. But one never came, and no additional suspects, alive or dead, have been named in the five years since.
Memos from the various agencies that responded to the suit are almost entirely redacted. A reader looking at them might think that Kelly’s intention to peruse ancient reports from a single murder posed an imminent threat to US national security.
If there’s anything like it involving other cold case murder investigations, I’ve yet to hear it.
Meanwhile, four months before Chicago ruling that Kelly might interfere in “an ongoing investigation,” a prosecutor for the state of Florida, Jeremy Mutz, was fired while investigating a triple murder that occurred in Tallahassee just five weeks after Valerie Percy was murdered.
The firing was justified, according to State Attorney Willie Meggs, who said Mutz had acted inappropriately when contacting witnesses in an investigation that was ongoing. The vaguely-worded explanation sounded remarkably similar to the “ongoing investigation” verbiage used to quash Kelly’s probe.
Not only that, the description of the knife used in the Tallahassee slayings said it was long, wide-bladed, and likely double-edged, which sounds like a bayonet.
In another similarity to Valerie Percy’s murder, an exceptionally rare case of the victim being attacked with a bayonet, the Florida slayings were a home invasion, which is another rare occurrence.
When a reporter for WCTV asked Meggs whether Mutz crossed a line somewhere, Meggs responded “"I will only say to you that Jeremy Mutz is no longer with our office."
In 1966, a witness in the Tallahassee case told police that she overheard a phone call where a man who spoke in an unnatural fashion confessed to the crimes.
None of this made me think that I was incorrect in believing that William Thoresen murdered Valerie. He was responsible for the Tallahassee killings as well. His wife’s trial (for his killing) was a highly-orchestrated show that, along with the release of her book, was a whitewash of William’s multi-state murders that took dozens upon dozens of lives.
Taken together, these were mechanisms used to cover up that the FBI, which had solid evidence that William murdered Valerie yet withheld it from police who were investigating her murder in Illinois.
Regarding Valerie’s murder, secrecy appears at every turn. I had thought the subterfuge existed only because William murdered Valerie; the three persons for which he was accused during his wife’s trail; and Judith Mae Anderson in 1957, a brutal unsolved slaying for which he was a suspect.
But Valerie was not just a millionaire’s daughter. Her father became a three-time US Senator. Before I knew of Jeremy Mutz’s firing, I wondered: Could all of this secrecy be due just to her and Anderson’s cases?
Today, while pondering this, I recall Bob Woodward, who early on, while investigating the Watergate break-in, was advised by Deep Throat: “You’re missing the overall.”
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