Unsolved ’66: The Rock Star—Part 4
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (20th in a series)
While researching unsolved murders that there are numerous reasons to believe William Thoresen committed, I found more reasons to think he was behind certain slayings—unique reasons that do not involve evidence.
The murder of musician Bobby Fuller is no exception. As with the aforementioned killings, in Bobby’s case, there are reasons to believe there was a cover-up.
Approximately eleven hours passed between the time that Bobby left his apartment building and when his battered body was discovered shortly before 5 p.m. on July 18, 1966.
Rigor mortis had reportedly set in, meaning he had been dead for at least two hours when found in his family’s car, which, according to witnesses, mysteriously appeared back at Bobby’s apartment building minutes earlier.
It was widely reported that there were two death certificates issued in Bobby’s case. In a box on the first one, where a choice of accident, suicide, or homicide appears, suicide was listed. However, this was changed to accident on his final death certificate, which was issued three months after his murder, following protests from Bobby’s family.
Under cause of death is typed “asphyxia inhalation of gasoline.” If the later determination of accident rather than suicide was more satisfactory to those who knew Bobby, it was barely so.
Years later, some people who knew Bobby said that police had tunnel vision regarding the investigation. However, this appears to have been attributed to an offhand comment made by a uniformed officer and should not be considered indicative of the investigation as a whole.
The case was considered a homicide from the investigation’s start. That’s why there was an autopsy and at least one Los Angeles police investigator would have attended it.
Police were not supplied a time of death by a witness, so determining when Bobby died must have been a primary objective of the procedure, which was begun less than four hours after the discovery of his body.
An attempt to determine the time of his death would have been done by examining the contents of Bobby’s stomach, and the findings would have been noted in his autopsy report. Given the numerous indications that he had ingested gasoline, it would not be surprising if his stomach was empty from vomiting.
Regardless, the lack of information regarding efforts to determine just when Bobby died from his released autopsy report is conspicuous. Equally conspicuous is that it’s not mentioned in any of the umpteen stories about Bobby’s case that appeared throughout the years.
The pursuit of this information in such cases would have been routinely sought by police and should be noted by anyone who writes seriously about the case. Yet it hasn’t been.
Details such as these were ignored by the TV news magazine Mysteries & Scandals, which featured Bobby’s case yet failed to ponder these questions. Moreover, if he was killed to collect on insurance, why would someone have broken his fingers, left his face and arms lacerated, and forced him to drink gasoline?
Failing to do so while rumor mongering, entertaining baseless theories, using sources that cannot be confirmed, and calling Bobby, who was battered and dead, merely “roughed up” makes the episode a scandal but no mystery. It’s Propaganda 101.
“There were so many theories in this case: suicide, accident, mob hit, insurance fraud, [and] revenge” Mysteries & Scandals’ host explained. But what’s suspiciously missing in this every-possibility-under-the-sun list is that Bobby Fuller was simply targeted by a killer of a type who murder more people than mob hitmen do and without motive. One in Bobby’s case never was established.
Indeed, the TV show tacked hard in the direction of the LAPD, blaming it for failing to solve Bobby’s case. However, doing so for any unsolved case is easy without producing evidence to prove it, which other than a dubious initial cause of death Mysteries & Scandals failed to do.
An internet site, “Trace Evidence,” not only overlooks the lack of information regarding Bobby Fuller’s time of death but baselessly states “we know that part of Bobby’s contract was tied to Morris Levy and Roulette Records.”
This theory has popped up in recent stories on the Fuller case. No source whatsoever is listed to support it. The Roulette theory is also absent in all earlier stories on the case, even those from the twentieth anniversary of Bobby's murder and that quote members of Bobby’s family.
What’s more, it’s never been documented that anyone from Roulette Records murdered anyone. What these stories appear to be is thinly-veiled propaganda designed to cover up. Given the facts of Bobby's case and such reports, it’s not a stretch to suggest that high-level authorities came to understand who murdered Bobby Fuller and that the killer murdered many others, which would explain propagandist gossip like Mysteries & Scandals.
William Thoresen was accomplished at getting away with murder but was nearly caught numerous times, at least once after returning to the scene of the crime, which is what he did when he drove the body back to Bobby’s apartment.
Because there were gasoline fumes in the car and a pack of matches on its back seat, Bobby Fuller’s brother, Randy, wondered whether the killer planned to set the car on fire but did not because there were people nearby. That’s exactly what happened.
Leaving the gas can inside the car as was done would have been a way to destroy evidence, but Bobby's killer did not follow through because the fire would have drawn attention to the car before he had time to get away. Having studied him for a decade, I would expect nothing less of William Thoresen who, as Zodiac, wrote that he enjoyed “hunting humans.”
Bobby's killer risked driving LA streets in broad daylight and during rush hour with a body in a car. This was unusual, brazen, and suggests that Bobby was murdered near his apartment building yet in a remote area like the nearby Hollywood Hills.
In 1970, William Thoresen’s wife, Louise, convinced a jury that William murdered a friend, Lewis Stoddard, in their San Francisco home before driving Stoddard’s body to San Francisco Bay and disposing of it.
She testified that William beat Stoddard bloody. Bobby Fuller was beaten bloody. Stoddard vanished three months before Bobby was murdered.
William was also a suspect in the 1957 murder of Judith Mae Anderson, whose killer transported her remains by car.
In the early 1960s, William was convicted of assaulting a woman in Topanga Canyon. She escaped naked, which suggests that she feared for her life, and flagged down a police cruiser.
There are reasons to believe that if she had not gotten away, William would have murdered her in the hills above Los Angeles. Bobby Fuller’s apartment was just beneath the hills of Los Angeles.
Murdering a public figure like Bobby and setting a car on fire with his body in it would have achieved what William wanted most: publicity.
There’s more to this. The story continues here. Please share it and subscribe:
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