Unsolved ’66: Chicago Part 3
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (23rd in a series)
Readers who are following these articles know that a series of highly unusual random murders—two triple and one double—occurred in Chicago and northeastern Illinois between 1955 and 1960.
The crimes were as unlikely as they were brutal, so terrible that their likes had not been seen before, nor have they been since. The victims were suburban housewives and children and teens from Chicago who were most certainly preyed upon because they were younger or older and weaker than their killer.
Although the victims differed greatly in age and were from different neighborhoods and towns, they had two things in common: All were members of close-knit families and were leading lives that were almost boring for a lack of trouble.
The exceedingly rare crimes in which their lives were taken also share similarities with the equally rare slayings of the Zodiac Killer, who is believed to have murdered several individuals and attacked numerous couples with lethal results.
The Chicago murders and the proven and presumed crimes of Zodiac share further unique similarities: a killer who communicated by phone and by mail; and multiple victims who were bound—in the case of Zodiac, while under the guise of a robbery.
Previously, I revealed that Lorretta Grimes, the mother of Chicago’s murdered Grimes sisters, received a call from a man she believed murdered her daughters. It was remarkably like a call police in California received in 1962 from a man presumed to have been the Zodiac Killer.
But there's more. In the wake of the murders, and in Zodiac-like fashion, Mrs. Grimes received a letter from a writer who claimed to be the killer. Passages in it sound like those written a dozen years later by Zodiac and a letter sent to Mary Means, another Illinois mother who was mourning the murder of a daughter in an unsolved case that shares unique, Zodiac-like similarities. (Debbie Means and her boyfriend were slain in May 1969, between Zodiac’s first two attacks, when many believe the killer was somewhere up to no good.)
Both the Grimes and Means letters contain “please forgive me.” The letter to Grimes also includes “I didn’t meane [sic] to kill your daughter,” which sounds like “I lost my mind and hurt her more than a ment too [sic]” that the killer of Means’s daughter wrote to her mother.
To this I added that a man, William Thoresen III, the son of a multi-millionaire who—after he was gunned down and in spite of having made headlines for committing bombings and assaults, hoarding tons of weapons, and being connected to three murders—has been forgotten by history.
When William left Illinois for Arizona, the double and triple Chicago-area murders ceased. Less than two years later, when he began traveling to California, the Zodiac murders began.
You may recall that while William was living near Chicago, a teenager named Judith Mae Anderson was shot and dismembered and her remains were found in oil drums that were dumped in Lake Michigan. Chicago police questioned him after he was overheard making incriminating statements that a witness believed were about Anderson’s case.
The drums containing Anderson’s remains were found in Montrose Harbor. Three of the other Chicago victims—boys named Robert Peterson and John and Anton Schuessler—vanished just after visiting bowling alleys located on Montrose Avenue.
Investigators discovered traces of chemicals used in the production of steel inside the drums that contained Anderson, and also evidence containing minute particles of steel on the bodies of the Peterson-Schuessler boys. Meanwhile, during the 1950s, William worked at his father’s steel distribution business in Chicago, a fact revealed in William’s wife Louise’s book.
Eleven years after Anderson was murdered, the Zodiac sent mailings to newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area, where William moved four years earlier. He had not held a job since the early ’60s, when he lived in Arizona. This gave him time to familiarize himself with the area and, it appears, to execute the murders, follow their investigations in the media, and write Zodiac letters and ciphers.
In 1995, thirty-nine years after Peterson and the Schuesslers were murdered, Kenneth Hansen was charged and later found guilty of those murders though prosecutors admitted no physical evidence linked Hansen to the crimes.
They tried to link him to a bar called Henri’s that was located near where the boys got off a city bus the evening they disappeared. The theory that the boy were abducted by a patron of the bar, which was frequented by homosexuals, went back to the original 1955 investigation.
But what went on at Henri’s the night of the murders was fully investigated, and the theory went nowhere. The boys were last seen hitchhiking on Milwaukee Avenue, meaning that anyone could have picked them up.
Besides metallic evidence, another connection between the Peterson-Schuessler case and Judith Mae Anderson’s murder is Montrose Avenue. It provides further reason to believe the boys were murdered not by Kenneth Hansen but by William Thoresen. Looking at the thinness of the case against Hansen, one can only wonder: Was he convicted as part of a coverup of William’s many murders and playing the justice system with his family's money?
There’s more to this. The story continues here. Please share it and subscribe: