Unsolved '66: The Doctor and His Wife
Unsolved '66: The Doctor and His Wife
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others and it was covered up. (3rd in a series)
Minutes after Valerie Percy was fatally bludgeoned and stabbed in her bedroom, her father phoned a neighbor who lived two doors to the south.
I knew the neighbor was a doctor, Robert Hohf, and that he was deceased. I had seen his final resting place in a nearby churchyard while searching for Valerie’s grave.
Needing another source, I phoned Hohf’s widow, Nydia “Nan” Hohf, who lived in the same mid-century, modern home that she shared with her family in 1966.
I dialed the same number Chuck Percy did that fateful morning forty-five years earlier.
Though she was ninety years old, Nan was employed as a counselor at the North Shore Senior Center. Fortunately, on the day I called, she was at home. I identified myself, told her I was a writer, and that I was researching Chuck Percy’s early political campaigns.
Wasting no time, she said, “Do you want to know about the murder?”
No more than an hour later, she invited me into her home. The house and its furnishings looked the way they did the day of the crime—fabulous—and were continuing to draw visits from classes of architecture students.
After I took a seat near a picture window overlooking Lake Michigan, she handed me the riveting, two-thousand-word, handwritten account of the murder that her husband, Robert, wrote three days after answering Chuck Percy’s distress call.
His “Percy Murder Event” is nothing like the news reports I read about the murder. It describes the surreal drama that unfolded inside Percy’s house at approximately 5:30 a.m. on September 18, 1966, minutes after Valerie’s killer fled to a nearby beach.
Hohf showed me the file where her husband had placed it, along with other intriguing artifacts from that day, including notes on the back of Kenilworth police investigator Bill Sumner’s card.
The discovery of Hohf’s document led to a Chicago Tribune news story by their reporter Robert McCoppin. It appears, in its entirety, in my book Sympathy Vote.
Meanwhile, I was introduced to several police sources, including Robert Lamb, who led the Percy murder investigation for the Illinois State Police; Joe DiLeonardi, who worked it early on as a Chicago police homicide detective; Vernon Roddy, the last surviving member of the the 1966 Kenilworth Police Department; and David Miller, the Kenilworth police sergeant then in charge of the case.
Though retired, Lamb and DiLeonardi remained interested in the case and spent hours answering my questions.
To better understand the crime, I reviewed investigative documents, some of them handwritten, and crime scene photos. The slaying was no less horrific than reported in 1966, the investigation one of the largest in US history.
Also referenced were archives at the Kenilworth Historical Society, where I examined blueprints of the various additions Percy added to his home during the 1950s.
Missing was its upstairs floor plan, the layout of its bedrooms. Presumably, it was taken by police after the murder—long before the materials were donated to the village’s historians.
There was also the form, filled out by a realtor, when Percy sold the house in 1967. As the sale was direct, between friends, the realtor could only speculate on the price paid.
One day, while I was visiting the historical society, an acquaintance pointed me in the direction of another source, John McDonough.
While in college, McDonough spent the summers of 1965 and 1966 working temporarily for the village’s police department. He was hired back in the early days of the murder investigation as the department sought to keep up with an influx of leads that were flowing in from the public.
Having spent his career in journalism, McDonough could not have been a better source. A twentieth-century cultural and political historian, he assembled a personal archive of Percy-related materials, from the murder to Chuck Percy’s political career, while still a college student.
Included were photographs he took outside of Percy’s house the day of the murder and recordings he made of Chicago radio and television news media reports that covered the crime.
My first meeting with McDonough came an hour or so after I had reviewed the most sensitive documents pertaining to the case. It was an unforgettable day.
While sitting in his home office, he told me about his summer job at the police department, what his duties were, and who the officers were that he worked with.
In an apparent aside, he told me one of the most memorable things about the job during the summer of 1965, something that involved a certain Kenilworth family.
At the time, it wasn’t clear how valuable McDonough’s direction and/or this information was. A week or two later, however, it changed everything.
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Such a shocking, sad story even all these years later. And I learned a lot of new information from your book.
I like how you are narrating this, about your personal perspective, and how you got to meet all these interesting people, and to learn more about the case than was previously known in the public.