Unsolved ’66: The Cover-Up
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (10th in a series)
Just because a story is “unbelievable” doesn’t mean it’s not true. That may be another way of saying that truth is stranger than fiction.
Having investigated William Thoresen, the Percy murder, and seen the documentary This is the Zodiac Speaking, it appeared that William murdered many more people than Valerie Percy and three others.
More investigating proved it. He was the notorious Zodiac Killer. Based on what I knew about William, I was not surprised.
I had seen the evidence: witness statements; documentary evidence in the form of handwriting samples that include William’s signature; his hometown police record; and physical evidence, including what he scratched into glass at Chuck Percy’s house just before he murdered Valerie.
All of this explains the secrecy with which authorities guard the Percy case files. It would not be warranted otherwise.
Meanwhile, I noticed a constant churn of unlikely Zodiac suspects being dredged up time and again on websites, in social media, and in books. It seemed not to be a coincidence.
There is evidence regarding Valerie’s murder—like the FBI’s implausible story planted in 1973—that authorities have known the extent of William’s crimes since 1970. His being shot dead on June 10, 1970, would allow it to be covered up. He was dead, and those in the justice system had motive to bury what they knew about him.
They are gatekeepers of information. They called a case in which police haven’t named a new suspect in nearly half a century “active and ongoing.”
The same year that authorities made that claim in Illinois, the lawyer who was investigating a triple home-invasion murder case in Florida—another one that appears to have been carried out by a killer armed with a bayonet—that happened five weeks after Valerie’s slaying was fired for interfering in another “ongoing investigation” that hasn’t named a new suspect in decades.
More evidence of a cover-up are William’s wife’s book and trial, and easily provable-as-fake Zodiac letters that arrived just after William died. So I published a second book, Zodiac Maniac: The Secret History of the Zodiac Killer, which documents his responsibility for nearly fifty murders.
Because the book was self-published, there was no promotional money behind it. Other than a couple of articles about it in Chicago publications that reviewed it favorably, little was done to promote it. Yet strange things soon happened.
But first, a little context: During the past year or two, I’ve been aware of a rub going on between independent journalists and legacy (or mainstream) news outlets and Silicon Valley. Independents complain that their work is censored by policies and algorithms of tech giants like Twitter, Google, and Facebook, which favor legacy news outlets.
Some prominent journalists who worked for legacy media quit and went independent while making such claims. A few have gravitated to sites like Substack and Odysee.
There are also concerns about the ties between monopolistic tech firms like Amazon, which now plays a sizable role in publishing and government, with which Amazon has massive contracts.
I knew that agencies like the FBI monitor and may even moderate online forums and social media groups where they can masquerade as ordinary people with an interest in, for instance, the Zodiac Killer case.
Nonetheless, with a new book out, I posted handwriting evidence that links William to the murder of suspected Zodiac victim Cheri Jo Bates, who was stabbed to death just a few weeks after Valerie. I posted it in a Facebook group dedicated to the Zodiac Killer case. Then something happened that I have not seen happen before regarding any other proposed Zodiac suspect. In seconds, right before my eyes, the post was deleted and with no explanation.
What do the moderators of the group have against William as a Zodiac suspect? Why did they delete the post when it seems they will not only allow but seemingly encourage the most far-fetched, flimsy theory regarding other suspects?
I’ll tell you why. Because William was Zodiac. The FBI knows it and is prowling the web, ready to delete proof of it.
Elsewhere (in a crime-related forum), not much later, and while in a debate with a mysterious character who will not identify himself (whereas my identity is there for anyone to see), I posted information indicating that William was responsible for a string of murders in the Midwest during the late 1960s.
The post, one of the most solid pieces of writing I think I've done, was censored, slashed from just under five hundred words to just over one hundred. Even before this, I suspected that some crime-related sites and social media groups, including those dedicated to the Zodiac Killer case, masquerade under missions to help solve these cases while in actuality working to hinder the efforts of anyone who might.
In recent years others noted that officials have made no progress regarding DNA evidence in the Zodiac case, even though the killer was almost certainly mailing his DNA all over San Francisco.
But these aren’t the only indications that government gatekeepers seek to keep William’s deeds buried like his ashes.
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