Unsolved '66: Valerie Percy Was Murdered 58 Years Ago Today

After I wrote a book about her unsolved case, an odd series of events took place that I can only explain as parts of a cover-up.

Thirteen years ago, my book Sympathy Vote: a Re-investigation of the Valerie Percy Murder, was published.

Valerie, the 21-year-old twin daughter of former US senator Chuck Percy, was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in her family’s home along the shore of Lake Michigan in the prestigious suburb of Kenilworth, Illinois, on September 18, 1966. The facts of her case are downright bizarre.

Prior to her killing, no one had been murdered in Kenilworth, then a seventy-five-year old town. Valerie was as unlikely a victim of murder as Kenilworth is a setting for it. There was also the time, five a.m., one of the quietest hours. Homicides in general decline sharply after three a.m. The day? It was a Sunday. Except for their first few hours, which when it comes to violent events are often carry-overs from Saturday nights, Sundays are slow when it comes to homicide.   

Valerie Percy, center, with her family in Kenilworth.

Chicago detectives were directing the investigation from the start. The city’s superintendent of police was called by Valerie’s father, who was a multi-millionaire, president of Bell & Howell corporation and five weeks away from being elected to the US senate. But even Chicago’s finest, who had investigated thousands of murders sparked by every motive under the sun had not seen a case like Valerie’s.

They were perplexed by nine small, triangular-shaped wounds to Valerie’s head. Three and a half days later, searchers on a coast guard boat from Wilmette retrieved a World War II era, M-1 Garland bayonet from the lake. It was about forty feet from shore, or “about as far as someone could throw it,” police told reporters. The tip of the bayonet’s hilt, the battering feature of the weapon, matched Valerie’s head wounds. In other words, Valerie’s murder was preceded by the following scenario; a person walking around in a town full of millionaires just before five a.m. armed with a bayonet— in other words, a very unusual type of psycho.

Further reason to believe this is the massive investigation into Valerie’s killing. It revealed that nothing was taken from the Percy’s house, not even what today would be the equivalent of almost six hundred dollars in cash that was in a purse that was left untouched on the bed next to Valerie. Her killer was not in need of money.

Sympathy Vote was the first account of the Percy murder to name the late William “Bill” Thoresen III as suspect in Valerie’s case. Bill Thoresen was a violent, 28-year-old misfit and habitual criminal who, by late 1970, was a presumed serial killer—one believed to have arranged the murder of his sole sibling near Kenilworth almost a year to the day before Valerie’s murder. In 1966, Bill’s parents lived just a couple of blocks from the Percys.

Flush with cash he inherited from his brother’s will, and proceeds from his own trust fund, Bill had no need to steal in 1966. He drove a red Ferrari and had just purchased a mansion in San Francisco. He sought out victims only to kill and left cash behind at many crime scenes, including a family of three named Bricca, murdered near Cincinnati a week after he bludgeoned Valerie to death. Robert Lamb, the lead investigator on Valerie’s case, met with police who were investigating the Bricca murders and told a reporter that whoever murdered Valerie murdered the Briccas.

My second book, Zodiac Maniac, reveals why there’s no doubt that the Briccas were murdered by Bill Thoresen, and that he murdered three members of another family named Sims in Florida the following month. (A lot of previously unreleased information has surfaced in recent years, in part because like me, people have written books on some of these cases.) But when it comes to Bill, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. By 1966, he had been murdering with impunity for thirteen years.

I first heard of him not in the relation to the Percy case but Kenilworth the summer before Valerie’s murder, when he and his brother destroyed their parents’ mansion while trying to extort money from them. It is a story of rich dysfunction that must be read to be believed. This is important because no working class, or middle class family, had the resources to keep such a dangerous kid out of prison, and tolerate him destroying their home.

And no working, or middle class kid, had the resources to travel from coast to coast for the sole purpose of murdering. And Bill wan’t just a serial killer but a serial mass murderer. If either is measured by the number of deaths one is responsible for, he was highly successful. This would likely explain weird things that happened after Sympathy Vote was published, and an odd thing or two that happened before it was written.

But four months after it was published, circa 1966 FBI reports surfaced. They reveal that federal agents believed Bill murdered Valerie, not only because he was a violent criminal whose parents lived in Kenilworth but because, three months after Valerie was murdered, Bill’s wife Louise was arrested while she was attempting to ship Bill a cache of old military weapons, included were three bayonets identical to the one that was used to murder Valerie.

In 2016, a New York-based lawyer, John Q Kelly, asked to examine the files police have on the Percy case, most of which by then were a-half-century old. Reporters in Chicago were skeptical of the excuses authorities used when refusing Kelly’s request. Police said it would be too expensive and time consuming to make copies of the reports for Kelly. They also said the Percy case was “active and ongoing,” and Kelly’s investigation might hinder chances of the case one day being solved.

But as Kelly’s attorney pointed out, a new suspect hadn’t been named by police in the Percy case since the nineteen sixties. And police elsewhere had released reports pertaining to other unsolved cases, some not as old as Valerie’s. Chicago’s media also didn’t fail to notice the absolute secrecy of officials regarding Kelly’s suit. What did police have in their inventory regarding the case a half century later? That memo was redacted. What did the various agencies say to each other in response to Kelly’s requests? Those memos, too…redacted.

Such secrecy is not indicative of local government. I knew a high-ranking source at Kenilworth’s police department at the time and have no reason to believe that he, or his colleagues, were behind it and have reasons to believe they weren’t. This is further reason to suspect that Bill Thoresen was a criminal the likes of which had not been seen before, or since.

In Zodiac Maniac, I document reasons to believe that less than two years after he murdered Valerie, Bill lured a family of six to their cottage in Northern Michigan so he could shoot them, and shoot them he did. As for all the secrecy? It reveals how some of what’s in the Percy case files ties Valerie’s murder to the Zodiac case in Northern California, where Bill was living when the Zodiac Killer murdered five and wounded two. This, too, is detailed in Zodiac Maniac.

That’s why I was not surprised by what I found when I tried to locate what it cost Kenilworth to keep Kelly from viewing the Percy case files. I knew the village had hired several lawyers to beat back his suit. In its annual report the year of the suit, there is no accounting for what those lawyers charged Kenilworth to redact those memos.

And if that’s not suspicious enough, there is a figure for what is called a one time charge to the police department’s pension fund of $325,000. In other words, with no explanation of what the suit cost, it’s not a stretch to suggest that village officials lied to their constituents about the cost and did so with more, what else?, secrecy.

But this kind of thing regarding the Percy case has been going on since at least 1973, when the FBI, which you recall believed in 1966 that Bill Thoresen murdered Valerie, planted a story in Chicago’s media that implies that one of a number of jewel thieves was Valerie’s killer. Trouble is, the thieves’ MOs are well documented (one of them wrote a book) and in no way resemble what happened fifty eight years ago today in Kenilworth, not even close. We know the FBI planted the story because one of its former agents, Vincent Inserra, admits it in his autobiography. Given the facts of the case, it’s a really stupid story.

So, six years after the FBI suspected that Bill murdered Valerie, they planted an obviously bogus story that an unlikely suspect did it. And if that isn’t crazy enough, the story was written by two crime reporters for the Chicago Sun-Times who almost certainly knew it was B.S. So why did they write it? For it they won, or you might say were bribed with, Pulitzers! Forty four years later, officials in the town where the murder happened claimed the case was active, forbid a lawyer from looking at old police reports about it and appear to have lied about what it cost to keep him from doing so.

After all that, I put together a comparison of Bill Thoresen’s signature (which appears in Zodiac Maniac and I obtained from a police source) with handwriting on an envelope crime reporters in California believed was addressed by the killer of presumed Zodiac Killer victim Cheri Jo Bates, another young woman who was stabbed to death six weeks after Valerie Percy’s murder. I posted it to a Facebook group about the Zodiac case. It was removed in less than thirty seconds.

A year or so after Zodiac Maniac was released, it was favorably reviewed an a couple of Chicago-area publications. But soon after, I noticed that reader reviews of both of my books mysteriously fell about a half star each (and have stayed that way) at Amazon dot com. This was doubly odd as Sympathy Vote had been out about five years and had maintained a four and a half star rating throughout that time.

It wasn’t hard to imagine, after the revelations of the Twitter Files stories, that Amazon, which has hired feds to work in online “security”, rigs their reviews at the behest of said feds and is allowed to monopolize the sales of online books in order to control what information the public might learn.

Before this, several videos appeared on YouTube about the Percy case. They had been there for years and racked up tens of thousands of views. So it was surprising when, as I reported here previously, a new video on Valerie’s case by Crime Zone appeared a year ago and mysteriously shot to the top of YouTube searches on her murder. The makers of the Crime Zone video neither appear on camera nor disclose who they are.

In fact, they wrote to me and signed their note “Nigel” (with no last name), while asking me to appear in their video. This is reason to believe that they are propagandists. Another reason is their video on the Percy case lies. For instance, it implies that evidence in Chuck Percy’s yard was washed away by a sprinkler system. Of course, there’s no source listed for this information in the video because the Percys didn’t have a sprinkler system.

The video also fails to inform viewers that the hilt on the bayonet found near the Chuck Percy’s home matched Valerie’s head wounds, and the FBI suspected Bill Thoresen murdered Valerie Percy because his wife tried to ship him identical bayonets just after Valerie’s murder.

The only reason to leave out such important details, not to mention make videos anonymously it would seem, would be to continue to cover up Bill Thoresen’s criminal history. (The Percy case Crime Zone video also goes on a tangent about what a jerk I am because I reported them for using some of my photos without permission and then ignored them when they requested that I help cover up who murdered Valerie. Go figure.)

My new book, Super Killer, reveals that Bill Thoresen murdered at least eighty seven persons, many in the Chicago area when he was a teenager living near the Percys, but also in California (Zodiac case), Iowa, Wisconsin (the apparent location of his first murder), Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida and Texas.

When it comes to Bill and the Percy case, this would appear to explain FBI tales that make no sense yet won Pulitzers, government shrouding old reports with secrecy, evidence being stripped immediately from social media and propaganda appearing at the top of YouTube searches by Google, which once lectured the public “don’t be evil” but hasn’t since 2018.

And yes, further reason to believe that Valerie Percy’s case was not active and ongoing in 2017 is there hasn’t been a peep about it from police in Kenilworth in the seven years since.