Unsolved '66: Over the Target
Why the Files to a Fifty-Year-Old Unsolved Murder Are Kept Secret
In December 2016, a Cook County judge ruled to the keep investigative files pertaining to the unsolved murder of Valerie Percy, daughter of former US Senator Charles “Chuck” Percy, sealed.
I was in the courtroom when the decision was announced. A New York attorney, John Q. Kelly, who was raised in Glencoe, Illinois, near the town of Kenilworth, where the murder occurred, sought to view the files. When Kenilworth police denied his request, Kelly sued to gain access under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Lawyers representing Kenilworth and its police listed a number of reasons for keeping the files secret. Making them available would be prohibitively costly, they said. But that seemed odd when hiring lawyers to fight Kelly’s suit did not seem like a cost-saving alternative.
Chicago’s ABC-7 News reported that police claimed the Percy murder investigation was active, a suspect was at large, and allowing Kelly to view the files might jeopardize the possibility that the case might one day be solved.
Kelly’s Chicago-based attorney, Matt Topic, said he was skeptical that the investigation was active because no proof was offered that it was. Authorities had not named a new suspect or lead in Percy’s murder in more than four decades. Police elsewhere had released files from other unsolved cases, some not as old as Percy’s, and did so in ways that respected the privacy of victims’ families.
Meanwhile, Chicago’s news media reported that those responding to the suit could not have been more secretive. Their memos were almost completely redacted. Indeed, it appeared as if the fate of the free world hinged on keeping the half-century-old police reports hidden. It wasn’t hard to imagine that officials were hiding something.
In 2023, seven years after Kelly filed his suit, the Percy case appears as cold as ever. The battle over the files, the likes of which I had not heard of then or since, seemed the latest turn in the Percy investigation, which began on September 18, 1966, when Valerie’s stepmother, Loraine, came upon a killer in Valerie’s darkened bedroom.
Three days later, a World War II-era bayonet was discovered near Percy’s house. Valerie’s head wounds matched the triangular end of its pummel.
The bayonet was discovered on the one-year anniversary of the mysterious death of Richard Thoresen at age twenty-four. The son of a Kenilworth multi-millionaire, he was found dead of a gunshot wound sixteen miles from Kenilworth, in Lake Forest. Richard’s brother, William Thoresen III, and William’s wife Louise inherited more than $500,000 (almost $5 million today) from Richard’s estate. A violent, habitual criminal, William was a prime suspect in Richard’s murder.
In 1970, Louise testified that William—who by then was also dead—masterminded Richard’s killing and murdered the hitman himself six months later. Circa 1966 reports reveal that the FBI believed William to be a prime suspect in Valerie Percy’s murder.
Nonetheless, in 1973, the FBI planted an implausible story in the Chicago Sun-Times that implies that one of a number of Mob-connected jewel thieves murdered Valerie. On the forty-eighth anniversary of Percy’s murder, retired FBI agent Vincent Inserra published his memoirs. They reveal he was the source of the story.
But the Percys were not the type to own the kind of jewels the Mob coveted, and the thieves did not smash their way into houses at 5 a.m. or murder their victims. Suspiciously, at the time that Sun-Times story ran, Louise was readying her book about life with her late husband. Much of it lacks credibility and seems to be part of some sort of cover-up.
Years before John Kelly’s fight to access the Percy case files, I thought that her book was a whitewash of William's crimes. It is the only non-fiction book I’ve seen that lacks credits for its photographs. In the world of publishing, failing to identify photo sources never happens. Some of the book’s other content is also fishy. The names of nearly everyone who knew Bill and Louise Thoresen are changed. Whoever produced the book apparently didn’t want anyone to be able to track them down.
According to news reports, Louise shot her husband in Fresno, California, on June 10, 1970. The day that he died, the Fresno Bee reported that William was pronounced dead at the hospital. But the following day, it and all subsequent reports said that he was found dead in their Fresno home. There was no explanation for the earlier apparent misreporting of this key detail, which under normal circumstances would have been corrected in a follow-up story.
This is reason to believe that Louise didn’t shoot William. He died elsewhere, and the misreporting was due to the feds not having worked out their bogus story by press time.
Police said that Louise shot William with a .38-caliber revolver and that witnesses saw her run from her home seconds later. Though this purportedly happened at about 8 a.m. on a summer weekday on a block of closely-situated homes, no one heard gunshots, and none of the witnesses are named nor are quoted in the stories. Given this, it’s suspicious that the editors of a paper like the Bee, in 1970, would print the story.
After the shooting, Louise reportedly ran across the street to the home of an attorney named W. J. McDermott. I have not been able to determine whether anyone by that name lived on East Cambridge Avenue in 1970. Also lacking from all reports is a photo of William’s body being removed from his home, though including such a photo would have been routine if not a must for such a story. Although Louise repeated this story of her shooting William in her book and at her trial (I did as well in two books), it’s obvious now that it is a complete fabrication.
What’s most notable about this is, three years after Valerie Percy was slain, William was living in San Francisco when a serial killer who fit William’s description and called himself the Zodiac stabbed two persons (one fatally) with a bayonet and shot six others (four fatally) in the Bay Area.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the Zodiac stabbed his victims in a cross-like pattern. Valerie Percy was stabbed in a cross-like pattern. The Zodiac signed his letters with what has been described a circle-cross symbol. Valerie Percy’s killer etched a circle-cross symbol into the glass of the door of her family’s home before smashing its glass in. Louise wrote that William employed Melvin Belli in the mid 1960s. Belli is the same attorney the Zodiac wrote to in 1969.
After the ruling that kept the Percy files sealed, Kelly said he would appeal but then dropped the pursuit and declined to comment on it. Yet it appears that secrecy surrounding the files continued.
Though the Village of Kenilworth’s 2016 annual report makes no mention of what it cost to fight Kelly’s suit, a comparison to its previous year’s report reveals that the village’s administrative costs doubled in 2016, the year of the suit, expanding by a whopping $325,000. According to the report, the $325,000 was a one-time payment to its police pension fund. Given that there’s no mention of what it cost to fight the suit, it’s not a stretch to suggest that the pension fund payment is how officials hid the cost of keeping a lid on a cover-up.
After the Percy case faded from headlines, I wrote a second book, Zodiac Maniac. It credits William Thoresen with forty-seven murders and offers further evidence that he was the Zodiac. And it has been covered up since 1970. While researching that case, I learned that Zodiac had an unusual penchant for communicating. He phoned police, and in some early cases (there are reasons to believe) he wrote letters to newspapers and relatives of his victims that were signed with fictitious names.
This made me recall a bizarre, three-page letter that Chuck Percy’s neighbor Dr. Robert Hohf received in 1967, a year after Valerie Percy was murdered. As is documented in my book on the Percy murder, on the letter’s first page, in its margin, is a handwritten message to Hohf stating that a copy of the letter was also mailed to Senator Percy.
Realizing that the handwriting on Hohf’s copy might resemble handwriting on documents written (and suspected to have been written) by Zodiac as well as William’s signature (which I have), I searched for my copy of the letter.
It was then that I realized that its first page, the one with handwriting on it, was missing. When I contacted Hohf’s widow, Nan, I learned that the first page of her copy of the letter was also missing. This was odd, given that I spent a few years working on that book and did not misplace materials while doing so.
Anyone who read it could have realized that both Hohf and I had copies of the letter. A friend of the Percys told me that the FBI was forwarded all mail regarding Valerie’s case that was sent to Senator Percy.
Perhaps more important, as documented in Zodiac Maniac, William’s signature resembles handwriting on an envelope believed to have been addressed by the killer of presumed Zodiac victim Cheri Jo Bates, who was stabbed to death a month after Valerie Percy was murdered, and on documents with connections to cases that include numerous unusual Zodiac MOs such as the Morrison-Means murders in Illinois. They occurred in May, 1969, when many believe that Zodiac was somewhere, up to no good. It also seems no coincidence that not long after Willam’s death a former FBI official coined a phrase: serial homicide.
In 2016, minutes after it was announced that the Percy case files would remain sealed, I met John Q. Kelly. He was surprised when I told him over beers in a downtown Chicago restaurant that I had seen a photo of the door that Valerie’s killer etched a circle-cross symbol into. What I did not tell him is that I had seen more than that—evidence in the files that authorities worked to keep secret.
This is why they redacted their memos, and why a judge called what clearly was and remains an ice-cold case an ongoing, active investigation. It’s also why Louise Thoresen’s book has no photo credits and uses fictitious names, and why the FBI planted a nonsense story that implies a thief murdered Valerie. It’s also why there’s no accounting in Kenilworth’s 2016 annual report of what it cost to fight Kelly’s suit, and why the news stories that report Louise shot William to death are obviously untrue. What’s in the Percy case files leads directly to William, and further ties him to the Zodiac murders, of which there are a staggering number.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Post the evidence and arguments in Zodiac Maniac to social media—to Zodiac-affiliated groups and to crime-related websites and forums—and see how fast it is removed, buried, or censored.
A few years after Kelly’s fight to view the Percy files ended, my books on the Percy and Zodiac cases earned favorable reviews from Chicago-area journalists. But not long afterwards, I noticed that both books mysteriously fell about a half star each in ratings on Amazon dot com.
This was odd as I also noticed that reviews of them had slowed to a trickle. My book on the Percy case had been out for years and maintained a four-and-a-half-star rating. Later, my Zodiac book did, too. Then the ratings of both books mysteriously fell on a site run by a company that maintains a monopoly in online book sales and whose ties to US government security agencies could not be closer.
As of this writing, when someone looks up Zodiac Maniac at Amazon they see eight other books on the Zodiac case, all of which are rated about a half-star higher than mine. This is how the US government, and big tech, keep a cover on a cover-up.
These crimes can be read about in books and on the internet. The proper investigation was carried out by the detectives at the time. The police were not able to make a arrest. So now we are looking at these
unsolved cases.
The letter to Melvin Beli is a clue. It could have been written by the same person but is it a logical thing to do. Did he really think it was going to help, or was he playing at something else.