Unsolved '66: The Crime Scene Photos
Though there is much that remains to be revealed about Zodiac Killer case propaganda and the cover-up that it is meant to conceal, this is about a day in 2011 and a turning point in my investigation into the murder of Valerie Percy.
More importantly, the investigation would eventually reveal links between Percy’s case to the notorious Zodiac murders. But it took years and much study of work done by others to realize the significance of what I saw that day, and what is contained in documents I was supplied with a few days later.
A few months earlier, I had shelved plans to write a book about Percy’s father, Charles “Chuck” Percy and his early political campaigns. Valerie was murdered near the end of her father’s second campaign, a successful run for US senate in 1966.
Forty five years later, I had lunch with Robert Lamb, a former Illinois state police detective who led the Percy murder investigation after state investigators were called into the case eight days after Percy was murdered in her family’s Kenilworth, Illinois home. Lamb and I met at a restaurant in Chicago’s northwest suburbs.
An hour or so later, I met a new source who an acquaintance in Kenilworth advised me to contact. Information that the source had was no less significant than what Lamb agreed to share with me, though I was clueless to it at the time.
I was sitting in a booth at the restaurant when I saw Lamb coming in through the door. Though seventy-eight and with grey hair, it wasn’t hard to imagine that his size had been an asset during his days in uniform. Lamb was carrying a three ring binder and a photo album.
The binder contained memos and status reports from the Percy investigation that dated back to September, 1966. In the album were eleven photographs, ten of them were taken by Chicago Police and investigators from the Cook County morgue.
I’d spoken with Lamb approximately once a week for several months by then. We had discussed some of the reports. One day, during a phone conversation, he seemed preoccupied with something. Was he looking at crime scene photos?, I asked. Yes, Lamb replied.
After he slid into the seat that was across the table from me, Lamb handed me the photo album. “Be careful with this”, he said in a voice that just above a whisper. “Some of these are kind of graphic.”
Only a few other tables were occupied in the eatery. I had chosen a booth that was far from them. After a waitress took our order, she left the dining area. I looked up frequently to make sure that no one saw what Lamb and I were discussing.
The first photo in the album was a large, color portrait of Valerie Percy when she was alive. It may have been taken during her senior year at Cornell University, no more than a year before she was murdered. I had seen a number of photos of her by then but it was the best. She looked beautiful. The rest of the pictures were black and whites. Eight were crime scene photos. The final two were taken at the morgue on Polk Street in Chicago.
The first was a picture of a shrub that was in the northeast corner of Percy’s backyard, an area that faced Lake Michigan. Lamb said it was the one that a knit glove had been discovered on. The glove had been removed before the photographer had the chance to document it.
I had read that the weather cleared up in the Chicago area on September 18, 1966, the day of the murder. You could see it in the photographs. All these years later, I believe the glove was a clue that was deliberately left behind by the killer, William Thoresen III, the violent son of one of one of Percy’s wealthy neighbors who was 28 at the time of the Percy murder. Valerie Percy was far from Thoresen’s first victim and he left clues at other crime scenes.
The second photo was of a shoe, or footprint, in the sand on the beach below Percy’s home. It was on dry sand. So at best the most that it documented was the approximate size of the killer’s foot, or shoe.
Lamb thought that it was just a random print from the beach. But former Kenilworth officer, Vernon Roddy, told me that there was a clear set of prints that lead from Percy’s patio, from which the killer fled, to the water’s edge. Roddy saw the prints in the dew of the grass of Percy’s yard and on the beach beyond it.
The next photo in the album is terrifying. It is of the glass door that the Thoresen smashed in order to gain entry to the house. The door was beneath Valerie’s room. Huge, curved shards of glass remained in its upper pane. A Kenilworth police officer is standing next to the door. About two thirds of the outside edge of a circle, about seven inches, was still in the doorframe. The circle was in the lower, right hand corner of the pane that Thoresen scored with the symbol that he later used to sign his Zodiac letters with.
Near the door’s handle, he tried to punch the circle of glass out of the pane in order to reach inside and open the door but smashed out a large portion of the door’s glass instead. Lamb didn’t have much in the way to suspect that Thoresen murdered Percy. But he knew that her murderer scored the same symbol into the glass of two other North Shore homes before murdering Percy.
The symbol has been referred to by some as the “circle cross” and looks like the crosshairs in a gun sight. Thoresen was obsessed with guns. Seven months after Percy was murdered, federal agents confiscated over seventy tons of them from him. That’s right, tons.
Years later, I learned that two of the Zodiac Killer’s victims were stabbed with a bayonet. I knew that a bayonet was the murder weapon in the Percy case and that two Percy investigators, including Lamb, told me her case was the only one they’d heard of where a civilian murdered had been linked to a bayonet.
The Zodiac murders were in Northern California, where Thoresen lived. But I hadn’t heard of him yet. Turning the the album’s page, the next photo was of a hallway outside of Valerie’s bedroom on the second floor. I could see where the hallway, which ran along the rear of the home, intersected with another hallway that led to a spiral staircase in the front of the house. A stairway to the Percy’s attic is also in this photo.
On the next page was a picture that was taken in Valerie’s room. It was of a wall that faced Lake Michigan, its windows and the furniture that was against the wall; a dresser; a desk; a stereo system and an attache case. Everything was remarkably tidy except for a drawer that was open. I believe this was in the dresser but it may have been in the desk.
Lamb thought that the attache case belonged to one of the investigators. I’m not so sure. Attache cases were red hot in the mid-sixties. Valerie had an important job in her father’s campaign. The world was changing. Perhaps the attache case had been hers.
The next two photos were of Valerie’s body on her bed. One was taken from the foot of the bed looking back towards the headboard, the other was from the bed’s opposite end, near the headboard, looking down towards the foot of the bed.
Valerie is on her back on the left side of the bed, her head turned to the right. On the left side of her head the hair is matted and disheveled. Her arms are at her sides, extended and her legs are extended—the ankles just a few inches apart. She is clad in a nightdress. There is little if any blood visible on it.
I knew that she had been attended to by her stepmother, Loraine, and that her body had been examined by a neighbor, Doctor Robert Hohf. Defensive wounds are clearly visible on her right hand, near the knuckles. Lamb pointed out that they looked like teeth marks. I had read this in a news story.
Today, I have no doubt that Thoresen sought to kill everyone in the house as he did to a family in Ohio named Bricca a week after he murdered Valerie. Later, I came across information that Lamb met with Bricca case investigators and said that he thought Percy and the Briccas were murdered by the same person.
Valerie and Loraine saved four lives that morning. Valerie by fighting and making noise and Loraine by confronting her killer. The irony is that area residents would hear for decades that Loraine murdered Valerie.
I closed the album when the waitress checked on our table and was relieved that the photos weren’t as bad as I thought they might be. But the relief was short lived. The next photo was taken from across the room and the opposite side of the bed.
As I had read, Valerie’s bed was actually two twin beds that were joined by a single headboard. The headboard had reading lamps attached to its left and right-side corners. Each was operated by a pull chain. Part of the doorway to the room is visible in the left side of this photo.
The photographer stood in the doorway of a bathroom that opened to the room in order to capture as much of the scene as possible. Valerie is facing the camera. One of her eyes is shut, the other is partially open. Her eyes are blackened because she had been beaten about the head.
A couple of the small wounds from the hilt of the bayonet are visible on her forehead and near the top of the bridge of her nose, on the left side. This photo gave me nightmares. It also captured a life interrupted. While the left side of the bed is obviously disturbed, the right side looks untouched; one half of a perfectly-made bed. On it is Valerie’s purse. It’s upright. Leaning against the purse are two envelopes, at least one of them (and presumably the other) is stamped and addressed.
The last two photos in the album were of Valerie’s body at the Polk Street Morgue in Chicago. Though I didn’t realize it then, these were the ones that I needed to see. They were taken after Valerie had been, in Lamb’s words, cleaned up. Her hair is washed and combed and her eyes are closed. She is naked and her skin is stitched together post autopsy with a very heavy-looking thread.
The body is lying face up on a table. The first photo was taken from the right side. The other was taken from an angle looking down. Five wounds, each no bigger than a quarter, are visible on the torso.
One is at the base of the neck. Another one is in the belly, about halfway between the navel and genital area. Three others are across the chest. Lamb pointed out how the wounds were perfectly aligned, vertically and horizontally. The wound in the center of the chest is aligned with the wounds above and below it and the wounds to the left and right of it. What’s more, the ones across the chest are equal distance from each other. It is uncanny.
I was still an hour or so away from first hearing the name William Thoresen. It would be years before I learned that the Zodiac Killer’s stabbing victims had been stabbed in what the LA Times reported was “a cross-like pattern”, like I knew Valerie Percy had been stabbed. And before I learned that Thoresen had been obsessed with military weaponry, and I would recall seeing vintage footage of soldiers training with bayonet-affixed rifles, stabbing practice dummies in the throat belly, and the left and right sides—and finally in the center—of of the chest.
When we finished up our meals, Lamb and I shook hands and I headed east to meet that new source. What he told me, and was soon to supply me with, was no less significant than Lamb’s photos regarding Thoresen and the many notorious murders he committed.