Unsolved ’66: Chicago Part 7
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (28th in a series.)
If you wonder whether William Thoresen murdered Valerie Percy, the daughter of then (in 1966) US Senate candidate Charles Percy, and also murdered at least seventy others over a decade and a half, consider the case of Michael Gargiulo.
Gargiulo was convicted and sentenced to death for crimes against three Los Angeles area women between the years 2001 and 2008. Two of his victims, Ashley Ellerin, age twenty-two, and Maria Bruno, thirty-two, were stabbed to death.
A third woman, Michelle Murphy, who was twenty-six at the time, fought off Gargiulo and survived. DNA evidence from that attack was the break police needed and led to Gargiulo’s arrest.
He attacked his victims in their homes, as Valerie Percy's killer did. Also like Percy’s killer, Gargiulo attacked at least two people while they were sleeping. In another similarity, Gargiulo, like Thoresen, was from Chicago's suburbs.
In 2008, the year that he was arrested, Gargiulo was charged with the murder of a one-time neighbor, eighteen-year-old Tricia Pacaccio. Her case had been cold for nearly fifteen years, soon after Pacaccio’s father found her stabbed to death outside their home in Glenview, Illinois, in August 1993.
There are more similarities. Though the murders are separated by twenty-seven years, the family homes of Gargiulo and Thoresen were only seven miles apart. Pacaccio was slain just a block from Gargiulo’s parents’ house.
When Percy was murdered at her family’s home in Kenilworth, Illinois, in 1966, Thoresen’s parents’ home was two long blocks away. Like Percy in her hometown, when Pacaccio was slain, it was noted that murders in Glenview are almost unheard of.
Statements that Gargiulo made to police after his arrest suggest he may be responsible for up to ten murders. But how many murders would he, whose crimes resemble numerous killings that Thoresen appears to have committed, have gotten away with if DNA analysis had not been available to investigators in 2008?
What if he, like Thoresen, was murdering before the phrase serial killer was coined, before suburban police investigative task forces were formed, and before their reports and evidence were stored in networked computer databases?
Also, what if Gargiulo had not needed to support himself by working a day job? What if instead, he had the immense family wealth that Thoresen appears to have used to support a murder spree that lasted at least fifteen years?
In other words, there are reasons to believe that when Thoresen was traveling he was planning and executing murders as though it were his full-time job. What’s more, evidence and witness statements suggest that in some cases he spent time following news coverage of his crimes, writing letters, and making phone calls to authorities, families, and neighbors of his victims.
This in itself is more evidence that Thoresen committed certain crimes. Not only have most killers not communicated as Thoresen did, they would not have have had time to do so. Other killers had to work to pay rent, and most did not have the money to travel coast to coast and back again, often by air, between murders.
A good example of this is the 1968 murders of the Robison family, who were set up by a series of phone calls and the promise of travel to another destination. In this way, the Robison case is similar to the 1966 murder of musician Bobby Fuller in Los Angeles, where Thoresen frequently travelled.
This is something to consider when pondering how many murders Thoresen got away with in an age when police lacked advanced investigative tools and basic knowledge of the behavior of serial killers that existed by the time Gargiulo began killing. Thoresen’s toll appears to be a staggering number.
This is why it would be no surprise that much appears to have been done right up to the present day to cover it up.
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There are a few similar facts between the Gargiulo crimes and the ones done by Thoresen. They both made mistakes and thought they were not going to get caught. And so they were repeating the offence and making trouble for everybody.