Unsolved ’66: Chicago Part 4
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (24th in a series)
Facts and evidence reveal that William Thoresen committed a number of multiple murders and at least one single murder in Chicago and northeastern Illinois between 1955 and 1960.
However, thirty-nine years after the first of them—the triple slayings of three Chicago boys, Robert Peterson and brothers John and Anton Schuessler—a man named Kenneth Hansen was convicted of their killings.
Jack O’Malley, state attorney for Illinois Cook County, admitted that no physical evidence connected Hansen to the slayings. Investigators purportedly stumbled upon Hansen as a suspect while investigating another Chicago area mystery: the presumed murder of candy heiress Helen Brach, who vanished in February 1977.
Prosecutors argued that Hansen murdered the boys in a rage. One account says it happened after Peterson caught Hansen molesting the Schuessler brothers. Another is that it happened after the boys rejected Hansen’s offer of money in exchange for sex.
Either way, prosecutors said, the murders occurred at stables owned by a feared figure with criminal ties, Silas Jayne, who purportedly was Hansen’s boss at the time. Hansen denied committing the murders and having worked for Jayne when they occurred.
Almost four decades later, neither side could prove either version of events. But what there was proof of is the boys had been bound. Tape had been placed over their eyes and mouths, and they were beaten and strangled.
The binding and beating of the boys sounds consistent with what happened to two of the victims murdered four years later in another mysterious triple homicide not far from Chicago at Starved Rock State Park.
That the boys were bound and gagged suggests they were not murdered by someone in a rage but by a killer who planned the crimes in advance and either threatened or beguiled his victims into being tied up.
Prosecutors argued that Hansen was working as a stablehand for Jayne at the time of the murders and after discovering that Hansen murdered the boys, Jayne helped dump the bodies in a forest preserve near O’Hare Airport. Rather than calling police, Jayne did this because he feared that if the murders were connected to his stables it would ruin his business.
However, facts of the case do not support the prosecution’s limited argument. Conspicuously missing from it is what Chicago police theorized in 1960: The boys were slain by a killer who murdered six others, including the Grimes sisters (a double slaying) and the Starved Rock victims.
During his trial, no one appears to have suggested that Hansen was responsible for those crimes. However, evidence and witness statements point to William Thoresen, a violent, habitual criminal who, during the 1950s, lived in one of Chicago’s wealthiest suburbs courtesy of his millionaire parents, as perpetrator of all nine murders.
Suspiciously, by the time of Hansen’s trial, Silas Jayne, a key character in the claim that Hansen murdered the boys, was dead. This is like the source for an implausible story that Chicago FBI agent Vincent Inserra admitted planting in 1973 in the Chicago press about the Valerie Percy murder. That story implies that a jewel thief, fingered by a dead mobster, murdered Percy. However, a circa 1966 report reveals that the FBI believed William Thoresen was responsible.
This isn’t the only reason to doubt government officials who maintained it was Hansen who murdered the boys. The feds’ star witness at Hansen’s trial, Red Wemette, said that in the 1970s he told the FBI that Hansen had made self-incriminating statements about the boys’ murders. But at the time, the FBI had no interest in the information.
This seems odd given that two decades later, the same information was key to prosecuting Hansen. During his trial, other witnesses testified that Hansen made statements implying that he murdered the boys. Yet none of them apparently deemed the slayings, which were arguably Chicago’s most infamous unsolved case, important enough to notify police.
It also seems odd that Hansen, who went on to have two children and run his own stables business, would have made such statements about an infamous case to people he did not know well. He denied having made them. Overall, it seems there was little in the prosecution’s case that they could prove, from where Hansen lived at the time of the murders to where he worked.
Trace elements of what prosecutors said was hay was found in the lungs of at least one of the boys. This was offered up as proof they had been present at stables. But the bodies also had dark smudges on their elbows and feet that contained microscopic bits of metal. Police in 1955 believed this was evidence that the boys, or their bodies, had been at a machine shop or similar type of business.
One of the boys had similar-sized bits of a second metal, a rare stainless steel, under his fingernails. Indeed, the forensics work on the boys’ case—police consulted experts at an industrial firm in Indiana—was outstanding for its time.
William Thoresen was a suspect in the murder of Judith Mae Anderson, who was slain less than two years after the Peterson-Schuessler murders and whose dismembered body was discovered in oil drums that contained traces of chemicals used in steelmaking.
William worked for his father’s steel distribution business during the 1950s. This, along with the metals evidence in the boy’s case and William’s being investigated by Chicago police for making incriminating statements regarding Anderson’s murder (which is documented in a police report), are reasons to believe that he placed the the bodies of the boys in drums before abandoning the idea. This makes sense as transporting the bodies in barrels would have been more difficult, and nearly two days elapsed between the time that the boys disappeared and when their bodies were found.
So why, in the 1970s, did authorities not act on Wemette’s information that Hansen murdered the boys yet come to believe it was a key to solving the case in the 1990s? Was it because by the seventies they believed that William, who was dead, murdered all nine victims but by the late 1980s they worried that his involvement might become known and it would expose a cover-up?
This isn’t a stretch given the facts of the Chicago murders and William’s adventures in the US justice system where he, a rich man’s son, served no time for numerous assaults in which victims’ bones were broken, bombings for which he avoided extradition, and weapons violations on a massive scale. And that’s not to mention that he is presumed to have murdered two and masterminded the murder of a third—his brother.
When Kenneth Hanson was arrested, his son Mark told the Chicago Tribune that the charges against his father were “a crock. I think police are just trying to clean up some old homicide.”
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