Unsolved ’66: The Rock Star
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (17th in a series)
I’ve written that William Thoresen was the Zodiac Killer and murdered forty-seven people. (See: https://www.classicchicagomagazine.com/has-the-valerie-percy-murder-finally-been-solved/.)
After that, I began reviewing other cases for evidence that he was responsible for more murders, which would hardly be surprising. William was a son of one of America’s wealthiest families and traveled the country during the 1960s committing violent assaults, exploding bombs, and illegally transporting the weapons of warfare.
He accomplished this in between arranging the murder of his brother, attempting to murder his parents and their housekeeper, and murdering two associates, as documented in his wife, Louise’s, book.
William had not been employed since the early sixties. With family money, he didn’t need to work. In the end, he blew through two fortunes. By the time William was killing under the moniker Zodiac, his father was paying his bills. It reminds me of an adage I once heard: There’s no disfunction like rich disfunction.
I knew prior to the mid 1970s that random killings and serial murderers were rare. I also knew that while Zodiac, William explained that he enjoyed hunting humans. What he left out was that being wealthy allowed him to take it to a whole new level, as evidenced by many of his crimes.
Unlike most serial killers, he didn’t commit the same crime time and again. He had time to mix up MOs and to seek recognition through publicity as manifested in his best-known case, Zodiac, the killer with a stage name who stoked fear in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969.
I revealed that in February and September 1966, William murdered two people near Chicago, the first a fifth-grader named Debbie Fijan, the other a recent college graduate, Valerie Percy, daughter of then US Senate candidate Chuck Percy.
Between those killings, however, on the evening of Sunday, July 17, in an apartment in the heart of Hollywood, was a musician named Bobby Fuller, age twenty-three. His group, the Bobby Fuller Four, was a formidable live band, and had several notable hits, including “I Fought the Law,” which reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 a few months earlier.
Also present was the band’s road manager, Rick Stone, and Fuller’s mother, Loraine, who was visiting. As the evening progressed, Fuller phoned his girlfriend in New York. Stone fell asleep on a couch in the living room, and Loraine went to bed around 1 a.m.
About an hour and a half later, Stone went to the kitchen for a glass of water and noticed the front door was open, which was not unusual. Seconds later, he thought he heard Bobby pull the door closed.
At about 3 a.m., Bobby drank beer with his building’s apartment manager, Lloyd Esinger, in Esinger’s apartment. Bobby was in a good mood and was planning to buy a car later that day.
After sunup, Loraine Fuller noticed her car was missing, which Bobby had been using. Later, he failed to turn up at a scheduled recording session.
Just before 5 p.m., two of Bobby’s friends arrived at the apartment. They noticed his mother’s car was not in the lot but decided to ring Bobby’s doorbell anyway. There was no answer.
Meanwhile, Loraine descended to the first floor in order to get the mail and saw her car was parked in the building’s side lot. Bobby was sprawled across its front seat. A gasoline can was on its front floorboard, and the interior reeked of gas. Bobby was dead.
Randy Fuller said his brother’s body was soaked with gas. He was quoted as saying: “All I remember is that he was down in the seat and I could see that his eyebrow was torn and there was a puddle of blood under his face.” Rick Stone said it appeared that some of Bobby’s fingers had been broken and his footwear was torn up at the toes.
Bobby’s friend Charlene Nowak said Bobby’s skin was bruised, scratched, and scraped. Bruising is noted on his autopsy report, which conspicuously does not estimate a time of death, a central question in every homicide investigation. Nor does it note the injuries Stone observed to Bobby’s fingers. It does, however, indicate two reasons to reasons to believe that Bobby swallowed gasoline.
His brother, mother, and Nowak were sure that Bobby didn’t commit suicide. Such a conclusion seems easy considering that he was in a good mood when last seen and was expecting to buy a car that day. Nor did he overdose as he was soaked in gas and with bruises, scrapes, a torn eyebrow and likely broken fingers, he most certainly had been beaten.
It’s obvious he had been driven back to his apartment in his family’s car and it arrived during the narrow time frame between when his friends arrived and his mother checked the mail, just a few minutes.
In his final hours at the apartment, Bobby was expecting a call from an unknown person regarding a party, perhaps in Malibu, where LSD, still legal in 1966, would be present. At approximately 4 a.m., a white car was seen being driven back and forth in front of his apartment building.
Upon learning these facts, it was clear to me that Bobby Fuller was murdered by William Thoresen. For one thing, William inherited a white Chevy in the fall of 1965. This is one reason why I suspect he murdered Debbie Fijan, who was last seen speaking with a man who was in a white car five months before Bobby was murdered.
I also knew that in 1968 William murdered Richard Robison and his family in Michigan. A few hours later, Robison was expecting to be picked up, along with his family, by a mysterious figure with whom Robison had exchanged phone calls.
As with Robison, I believe Bobby was set up by William. The party story was a sham to get Bobby out so William could torture and murder him. Bobby wasn’t the only one of William’s victims to meet such a fate.
In her book, William’s wife, Louise, wrote that William began frequenting Los Angeles nightclubs in 1962. One of the places where he stayed was the Continental Motor Lodge. According to the Los Angeles City Historical Society, there was no such place during the 1960s.
However, there was the Continental Hotel, which has changed names numerous times since 1966 and exists to this day. By the 1970s, it was referred to simply as the Hyatt. The name changes would account for Louise recalling the name incorrectly.
Further reason to believe it is the hotel is its location: 8401 West Sunset Boulevard—walking distance to the clubs that made up the heart of the LA live music scene in 1966. These include Ciro’s at 8433 West Sunset, It’s Boss at 8533 West Sunset, and Gazzari’s at 9039 West Sunset. The Bobby Fuller Four also played PJ’s, located just two blocks south of Sunset at 8151 Santa Monica Boulevard.
There are other reasons it’s clear that William murdered Bobby. For one, according to his wife, William frequently used LSD. Another is the time that the white car was seen near Bobby’s apartment building, 4 a.m. William murdered at such odd hours. Valerie Percy was murdered at 5 a.m., and the neighbors of a family named Bricca, whom William murdered in Ohio a week after Percy, believed the killer crossed through their yard at 4 a.m.
I had long suspected that William murdered in Southern California while staying in Los Angeles. Bobby was beaten and tortured like numerous victims of William in the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area from 1967 to 1969.
As for motive, William wanted publicity for his crimes. Did he know when he murdered Valerie Percy that her father was a millionaire US Senate candidate? One reason to suspect he did is that Bobby Fuller was a rock ’n’ roll star; murdering him would be a natural for publicity.
William murdered on a level not seen before, carrying out home invasion mass murders—the Robison case is but one example—and brazen public executions. Zodiac’s attacks are the tip of the iceberg.
He set Bobby up with a promise of a party and tortured him, making him swallow gasoline. He did a similar thing to his last Ann Arbor–Ypsilanti murder victim, whom he tortured by burning her skin with what authorities said was a caustic substance.
Bobby Fuller’s murder is yet another reason to believe William’s crimes were covered up. Anyone doubting this needs look no further than the introduction of a 1986 AP story on Bobby’s death: “Bobby Fuller had wowed them with his hit song, ‘I Fought the Law.’ His career was about to take off and there was nowhere to go but up. Instead, Fuller died 20 years ago Friday at the age of 23 while sniffing gasoline fumes to get high.”
Such a statement regarding Bobby’s cause of death is absurd and demonstrably false. The AP example is one of a number of such stories in news and entertainment programing about victims in unsolved cases where facts and evidence point to William Thoresen as the killer.
As I reveal in my second book, such stories badly misrepresent events and conspicuously cite vague, unnamed sources such as “police” and others who are identified only by first name—or who were dead by the time the story ran—and thus the information cannot be confirmed.
These cases include Valerie Percy, Reet Jurvetson (who, like Bobby Fuller, Thoresen brutally murdered in Los Angeles) the Zodiac Killer and the Michigan cases 1967-1969. For this reason they can be presumed to be propaganda designed to cover up William Thoresen’s responsibility for murders like Bobby Fuller’s and dozens more.
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Bobby’s classic “Let Her Dance,” performed by Phil Seymour (LP and live versions)