Unsolved ’66: Chicago Part 2
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (22nd in a series)
An odd thing happened when I began this series of murder stories that include the case of three women at Starved Rock State Park in 1960 and that I believe the Zodiac Killer committed.
My second book, Zodiac Maniac, includes an argument that Zodiac was William Thoresen, who was from the Chicago area, and that there are indications that his murderous past was covered up. But while I was writing about the Starved Rock case recently, a friend told me about a story in the March 2022 issue of Chicago Magazine about Chester Weger, who spent fifty-nine years in prison for the murders. Weger is also the subject of a recent HBO documentary I have not yet seen.
However, while perusing the magazine story, I noticed something. It says that a suspect in the case, whose description I remember being uncannily close to William’s description, was “about five foot eight.”
Because I had read Steve Stout’s excellent 1982 book on the case, this struck me as incorrect, so I checked. Sure enough, the description on page 67 does not say the suspect was five foot eight but “under six feet tall.”
The point is the wording “under six feet tall” could be within two inches of William’s height, whereas five foot eight is a difference of five inches. Moreover, the magazine reports, there was another man seen with the suspect. Curiously, this is not mentioned in Stout’s exhaustively-researched book nor many news stories that reported on the case.
The inaccuracy regarding the suspect’s height, and mysterious appearance of a second man in this recent article (and possibly in the documentary), where facts reported earlier point to William, does not surprise me. There are numerous other reasons reasons to believe that authorities have long known that William was Zodiac and are monkeying with facts. In short, they
• suspected that he murdered Valerie Percy and others and covered it up by keeping investigative files secret;
• declared fictitious documents to be genuine in the Zodiac case;
• planted implausible stories about numerous murders William appears to have committed, including Percy’s;
• fired a government lawyer for investigating a Florida triple murder there’s evidence that William committed;
• jailed two men whom authorities had reasons to believe were innocent.
It’s also conspicuous that this (ahem) “error” regarding the suspect’s height hinders rather than supports an argument that William was the killer in the women at Starved Rock State Park.
So I'm inclined to believe that this fact being reported inaccurately in Chicago Magazine (perhaps by way of a recent documentary) may well be another example of Hollywood and legacy media producing propaganda at the behest of US intelligence agencies, a phenomenon that is well documented.
The actual description of the suspect in Stout’s forty-year-old book is but one reason to believe that William murdered the Starved Rock victims.
Add to this Kenneth Hansen’s conviction for the Peterson-Schuessler murders thirty-nine years after the slayings of the three Chicago boys, one of the most infamous crimes in the city's history. Jack O’Malley, the state’s attorney for Cook County, conceded there was no physical evidence connecting Hansen to the crimes.
However, in 1955, police discovered that there were microscopic bits of a rare type of high-temperature stainless steel under one of the boys’ fingernails. Dark smudges containing metal shavings also were present on the boys’ elbows and feet.
William Thoresen’s father owned Great Western Steel, a steel distributor in Chicago. A letter, written by William’s brother in 1964, reveals that William worked there prior to the nineteen sixties.
Less than two years after the boys were slain, William became a suspect in the murder of Chicago teen Judith Mae Anderson. Anderson’s dismembered remains were found in in steel drums that contained traces of chemicals used in the production of steel. Her case, which is notorious in the city’s police department to this day, was never solved.
Earlier, investigators wondered why the smudges were on the bodies of Robert Peterson and the Schuessler brothers. Given that they contained metal shavings, it’s not a stretch to presume William placed the bodies in drums he obtained from his father’s steel business.
However, since there were three bodies, he may have determined the drums would make transporting the boys’ remains by car difficult. So he removed the bodies from the drums, smudges intact. But he retained the idea of using drums and did so when he murdered Anderson.
The boys went missing on Sunday, October 16, 1955. It was a very bad year for William. That February, he escaped from a Chicago hospital’s mental ward. When he arrived home, he locked himself in his room. Armed with a shotgun, he told his father and two family servants that he would kill anyone who entered. “Parents did not want us to break in and take him,” Kenilworth police wrote into William’s record.
A month before the boys vanished from Chicago’s North Side, William took his parents’ Chevy and a .45-caliber automatic handgun and was believed to have gone to the city. Three weeks before the boys were murdered, he was committed again. Eleven days later, William escaped a local mental facility that he had been transferred to the day before.
At the time, his whereabouts were unknown, and police confiscated his guns from his family's home. Ten days before the boys were murdered, Kenilworth authorities learned that William was to be committed to a mental ward in Philadelphia. Whether he actually was is not known. However, as his wife Louise later wrote, by this time he had learned that using his family’s money to bribe hospital staff was a way out of mental hospitals.
Yet again, it seems not a coincidence that Robert Peterson and John and Anton Schuessler were beaten and strangled. William’s guns were confiscated a week earlier. The weeks preceding the murders were especially bad ones during a bad year for him, though it appears he would have had it no other way.
William turned eighteen a week to the day before the boys were slain and later told his wife that he was angered when, upon reaching age twenty-one, he was not rewarded by his parents with a generous portion of their millions. It’s not hard to imagine that he was expecting something similar when he reached eighteen.
All of the above are reasons to believe that William took out his anger on the three Chicago boys, the Grimes sisters, Judith Mae Anderson, and the women at Starved Rock State Park.
An inquiry regarding the discrepancy in Chicago Magazine about the suspect’s height went unanswered by the story’s writer, Jake Malooley. A fact that implicates William in the Starved Rock murders being misreported now is another reason to believe that a cover-up of his crimes continues.
There’s more to this. The story continues here. Please share it and subscribe:
I’m currently reading Lindbergs book on the Schuessler Peterson murders and I’m glad I came across your writings. The Kenneth Hansen case just doesn’t ring true to me.
Some facts are more obvious than others. Which add up to a solution for this case.