Unsolved ’66: The Documentary
Unsolved ’66: The Documentary
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (8th in a series)
A few years ago, I didn’t have a clue how many people William Thoresen murdered.
Beyond the secrecy surrounding the Percy murder case files and the sketchiness of his wife’s trial and book, I had no idea of the size of the coverup that kept his responsibility for the crimes secret.
I didn’t know it was ill-conceived and poorly executed beyond the implausible, unconfirmable story that the FBI planted in the Chicago media about who murdered Valerie Percy and a book that conspicuously contains no credits for its photos.
After the lawsuit failed to dislodge the Percy murder case files, life moved on. However, I had not forgotten William Thoresen.
I knew from reading his wife Louise’s book that he was six foot one; 170 pounds; had wavy, dark brown hair with flecks of red in it; and that he parted it on the left. Judging by the photos in the book, William worked out. He looked fit and muscular.
He also had struggled mightily with a stuttering problem in his youth. I knew this from the book and from interviewing a childhood classmate of his.
I was aware that Louise studied speech therapy and helped him in this regard. His classmate told me that by adulthood, William’s verbal skills had improved.
My takeaway from this was that it was a relative comparison, and speaking for him remained a challenge.
After the lawsuit regarding the case files ended, nothing new appeared to be on the horizon regarding the Percy murder or William Thoresen, or so I thought. A year or two passed before I sat down and watched the documentary “This is the Zodiac Speaking” about the Zodiac Killer case.
The Zodiac murders occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area starting in December 1968, though for good reasons that many (including myself) believe, they go back as far as 1962. The final murder was in October 1969, the victim a cab driver named Paul Stine.
You may recall, while researching the Percy case, I learned that William and Louise moved to San Francisco in 1965. They purchased a mansion in Pacific Heights with the inheritance that William received from his brother Richard after he successfully plotted Richard’s murder. I knew that the Stine crime scene was a dozen blocks from the mansion and believed William may have been Zodiac.
As I started to watch the documentary, I was not looking for anything in particular. More than halfway through it, Zodiac attack survivor Bryan Hartnell tells of how he and his date, Cecelia Shepard, were attacked by Zodiac at Lake Berryessa.
When Hartnell said that he conversed with the killer, I was as stunned as when I read about William collecting military weaponry before Valerie Percy was murdered by a bayonet-wielding assailant. As Hartnell explained, when the killer spoke, his words came with an unusual cadence. It was something Hartnell could not forget.
Then another witness to the Lake Berryessa attacks, Vallejo police department dispatcher Nancy Slover, relates that she spoke with the killer on the phone after he stabbed Hartnell and Shepard.
Slover, too, remarked on the killer’s unusual manner of speaking. She said it sounded as if he was reading what he was saying or had rehearsed it prior to the call.
William lived in San Francisco at the time of the Zodiac murders. He was violent and had been a suspect in two senseless, brutal murders. His wife, Louise, also convinced a jury that he murdered three others.
I knew Louise had studied speech therapy and worked with him to overcome stuttering. Furthermore, they lived within a ten-minute walk of the final Zodiac crime scene.
There was more. According to Cecelia Shepard’s autopsy report, the presumed weapon she and Hartnell were stabbed with was a bayonet.
Moreover, three female witnesses who observed a suspect for about twenty minutes just prior to the attack on Hartnell and Shepard described him to police. I compared their suspect descriptions to a photo of William taken at a Las Vegas jail in 1967. Their words could not have come closer to describing William. The women were excellent witnesses.
Notoriously, Zodiac wrote letters to the press. In one, after the Stine murder, he wrote that when police were searching a nearby park for him, they never got within two blocks of him and were to the west.
William’s large house was two blocks east of the park. It’s clear that he had made it back home by that time.
I also read that witnesses to the Stine murder noted the killer, like William, had red in his hair.
After killing Stine, Zodiac walked north. A minute or two later, police saw a suspect who fit William's description walking east and then north. William’s house was northeast of where Stine was slain.
I noticed that all of Zodiac’s letters arrived in envelopes containing two stamps—double the required postage—with a notation that included the word “editor.”
However, the first mailing after William’s death and several that followed lack both the notation and the double stamps. Yet police declared them to be genuine.
The changes on the envelopes are proof that William was Zodiac. Police claims that they are genuine, despite the major changes in MO, are further reason to believe William’s involvement was covered up.
They and/or the feds knew he was Zodiac and much more. So I wrote and released another book. That’s when I realized the coverup had, almost certainly, come to my very door.
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