Unsolved '66: The Secret Files
Unsolved '66: The Secret Files
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (7th in a series)
After a judge’s decision in 2016 blocked attorney John Kelly from examining files pertaining to Valerie Percy's murder, Kelly filed an appeal.
In 2019, an appellate court disagreed with the ruling, Kenilworth’s blanket argument for keeping all of the files secret. This purportedly would have paved the way for further proceedings regarding the matter.
Sometime later, however, a source who once worked for Senator Chuck Percy advised me that the appeal had been dropped at the request of the Percy family.
The source questioned why Valerie’s family—which more than anyone else, it seems, would be seeking answers or closure in the case of their murdered kin—would request that a free, independent investigation of the slaying be halted.
However, earlier by way of an affidavit, Valerie’s twin sister, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, told the court “The murder of my sister in our family’s home was a horrible chapter in my life. The thought or re-living these events for any reason other than to see the person or persons who murdered Valerie brought to justice is extremely painful to me and the members of the Percy and Rockefeller families.”
Sharon previously revealed to a Chicago Tribune reporter that she had financed a private investigation of the crime. She chose to keep the results of it secret.
That begs the question. Did Sharon have reason to believe that the person who murdered Valerie was, by 2016, beyond being held accountable by a court of law?
In other words, while authorities in Kenilworth were arguing that Valerie’s killer remained at large, and a judge said the investigation was active and ongoing, did Valerie's sister, after financing a private investigation presume, or even know, that Kelly’s investigation would be futile?
In another oddity, it appears that Kelly’s dropping the suit was not picked up by Chicago’s media, which seems unusual given they found his quest to access the case files to be a story worth covering.
Meanwhile, though I had not forgotten the Percy murder and the meticulous secrecy with which Illinois officials guard its files, time moved on.
In January 2017, storied Chicago police homicide detective and one-time Percy case investigator Joe DiLeonardi, someone I feel lucky to have known, passed away. More than anyone, DiLeonardi wanted to get to the bottom of Valerie’s case.
Meanwhile, it seemed the only police sources on Chicago’s North Shore who would utter William Thoresen’s name were long retired.
Though everything seemed to have ground to a halt regarding the Percy case, I learned something by becoming involved in it: Serial killers and random killers have been around since the days of Jack the Ripper. But prior to the mid 1970s, they were rare.
One reason for this is the US population was significantly smaller before those born during the baby boom’s peak came of age. That happened—you guessed it—in the mid 1970s. In 1966, the term “serial killer” was years from being coined.
This is presumably why, in hundreds of news stories about Valerie’s murder, no one—not the crime reporters who covered it nor the city detectives who worked it—theorized that Valerie was simply murdered by a killer, even though they knew that her slayer broke into the home of a family named Pirruccello, which was a mile away and full of people, the day before her murder and at the same unlikely hour of the morning.
Evidence linked both crimes, but there were no links between the families and those who knew them.
Meanwhile, I exchanged emails with James Campbell, who has an interest in the Percy case, hosts a radio program on cold cases, and has roots on the North Shore. He would barrage me with questions regarding the the murder: Why Valerie? Why her room? Why that part of the house?
“Because Valerie’s room was in a corner of the house, down the hall, isolated, and did not share a wall with any bedrooms where other family members were sleeping.” It was not a bad answer, but I was not satisfied with it. Neither was Campbell.
Today I believe, on that fateful morning in Percy’s house, William Thoresen intended to go from room to room, killing all who were in their beds after catching them off guard at 5 am because he was not just a serial killer but, when possible, a mass murderer. In addition to his other crimes, what happened to Valerie is proof.
Prior to killing her, he murdered at minimum one entire family in a home invasion. And they weren’t the last. Where, when, and the evidence that proves he did this is documented it in Zodiac Maniac.
This explains the otherwise inexplicable hold with which authorities cling to the Percy case files. They don’t want John Kelly or anyone else to know, for example, the size of the footprint that police found in the garden at Pirruccello’s house. It links the Percy murder to evidence in a slew of other murders that it’s clear William committed.
On the morning William murdered Valerie, he was nearly caught and fled when Loraine Percy confronted him. This is ironic because rumors circulated afterward that Loraine murdered Valerie. In actuality, she saved the family.
The same was true the morning before, in Winnetka, where Frank Pirruccello ran William out before he could lay his bayonet on anyone.
It’s no coincidence that the Pirruccello family was home at the time, and that the Percys were, too, the following day. A Northwestern University student saw William watching the Percys house the evening before Valerie was murdered.
The feds don’t want John Kelly or anyone else to know the description of that suspect because it links William and the Percy murder to several home invasion mass murders that occurred between 1964 and 1968.
A week to the day after Valerie was murdered, William stabbed to death a family of three named Bricca in another home invasion that took place on the outskirts of Cincinnati. How do I know?
Richard Speck’s night of rape murders notwithstanding, such crimes were all but unheard of in 1966. Illinois police later said the Percy and Bricca crimes were linked, but most importantly, an off-duty policeman witnessed William as he watched the Briccas’ home the evening before the murders as he had watched the Percys'.
The policeman also engaged the suspect, who fit William’s description, in conversation and noted that William’s diction seemed unnaturally perfect. This is documented in a book on the Bricca case.
It wasn’t the last time that a witness would recall William’s usual way of speaking, a legacy of his stuttering and the speech therapy he received from his wife.
“THORESEN is a very strange person, has a very bad speech impediment, and all of the actions at the house have been mysterious,” an FBI agent typed into a report titled “Murder of Valerie Percy, Kenilworth, Illinois, September 18, 1966”, a little over a month the murder. The agent had just interviewed one of William’s neighbors in San Francisco.
Another witness in the Bricca murders case saw William’s Ferrari, which was described as “a fancy red sports car,” parked a block from the victims’ home at the same unlikely hour that Valerie Percy was murdered.
All of this was just still the tip of the iceberg and why, it seems not a stretch to suggest, the Percy case files remain secret.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-valerie-percy-murder-records-court-met-20161206-story.html
https://abc7chicago.com/valerie-percy-murder-kenilworth-investigation/1642474/
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/attorney-says-facts-reported-in-50-year-old-valerie-percy-murder-case-are-wrong-2/65867/
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