man broke into Sen. Charles Percy’s home one morning in 1966 and stabbed Percy’s 21-year-old daughter, Valerie to death, but the crime story does not end with her ashes.

Valerie’s mother and father and the parents of the man believed to be the killer lived a bit more than a block away from each other in a wealthy suburb of Kenilworth, near Chicago. Once both believed killer and victim were dead, you could take just a step or two from his grave to where she had been buried. A young boy who lived about a mile away from the crime that shocked the nation was unaware of the news.

Crimes and cover ups

Nearly 60 years later, Lake Harmony author, Glenn Wall, that young, Chicago area boy, has written a trilogy of books in which claims that William Thoresen III, whose family home was near where Wall had lived, murdered the senator’s daughter and was the infamous Zodiac Killer who terrorized the country for what the author says is a time period of 17 years.

Wall also contends that the FBI has covered up the Zodiac case since 1970 and is still doing so today.

The author has made several contacts with neighbors who lived in Kenilworth, some who remembered the murder that happened inside Valerie’s bedroom in the wealthy senator’s house, which has since been torn down. One contact was a 90-year-old widow of the doctor who had examined Valerie’s body.

“First of all, Kenilworth police had never had a murder case and, it was believed, bungled the investigation. But Chicago authorities were directing it minutes after Valerie died,” said Wall. “The autopsy revealed that Valerie had triangular-shaped head wounds and stab wounds (to the torso) that were in a cross-like pattern. The murder weapon, found nearby three days later, was an M-1 bayonet with a hilt on the handle the tip of which matched the triangular wounds.

Two years later, Zodiac victim Cecelia Shepard was stabbed with a “‘bayonet-type weapon’” according to her autopsy report. The LA Times reported that she, like Valerie Percy, was stabbed in a cross-like pattern.

“Thoresen came from a very wealthy family. He was a known criminal who hired someone to kill his younger brother to gain his sibling’s trust fund and then he beat the triggerman to death with a hammer,” Wall writes.

The spring after Percy’s murder, Thoresen was charged with hoarding military weapons — over 70 tons of pistols, rifles, mortars, bayonets, land mines, machine guns, and an anti-tank cannon.

His father’s money paid the best lawyers to keep him free despite his charges for illegal firearms possession, bone-breaking assaults, bombings and bribery. Reports reveal the FBI suspected Thoresen murdered Valerie Percy after his wife was arrested for attempting to ship him several M-1 bayonets two months after Percy’s murder.

In 2016, a judge blocked a lawyer from accessing the then half-century old Percy case police reports. Wall believes Kenilworth officials buried the cost of keeping the records a secret with a lie in its annual report.

A touch of home

Glenn Wall’s personal life has come full circle following his investigation of the Percy murder. Raised near Chicago, he then attended California State University at Fullerton and earned a degree in communications.

While living in Milwaukee, he and his wife, Alexa discovered that the house built by his aunt and uncle in 1967 near Split-Rock Lodge in Lake Harmony that used to be a vacation spot for his childhood summers was for sale. They purchased the property in 2021.

The body count

What began as his simple interest in the Percy murder in 2010 has evolved into three books written from exhausting research and numerous interviews from which Wall evidentially proves that Thoresen beat and strangled three boys, two teenage sisters, and three women in Illinois before he murdered Valerie Percy and started calling himself Zodiac.

In total, Wall said Thoresen killed at least 87 people in 10 states during his savage slaughters that Wall said had begun in 1953.

Thoresen was not shy of public and media attention to his crimes. After he murdered the teen sisters, he called their mother and said, “This is another one the cops won’t solve.”

In April of 1962, he called the police in Ocean City California and said, “I’m going to pull something here in Oceanside, and you’ll never be able to figure it out.” The next day, he murdered a cabdriver in a case Zodiac researchers attribute to the infamous murderer. It was Thoresen who was famously known for sending letters about his evil deeds to several newspapers during his long crime spree.

The false finger of fate

There were witnesses to some of the murders and the two common denominators have been Thoresen’s 6 foot, 1 inch height and his wavy, reddish brown hair, but in at least one recent telling a description was changed to make him appear shorter than he was. Wall suspects the FBI is behind this as one of its agents admitted to planting what Wall calls a ludicrous account of the Percy murder in a Chicago newspaper in 1973, three years after Thoresen was dead.

Suspects have been falsely convicted of committing what Wall maintains were Zodiac crimes including Chester Weger, who was convicted and served nearly 60 years in prison. Not one of the 2,500 men that were under the FBI watch were ever connected to evidence that would prove their guilt,

Another suspect, falsely convicted of a murder that Thoresen committed, was John Collins in Michigan. “It’s demonstrably provable that the investigation and the trail that led to Collins’ conviction was corrupt,” said Wall.

Wall claims that Thoresen moved about the country randomly killing his victims with impunity, but he was never investigated for the Zodiac crimes.

“The FBI was embarrassed,” said Wall. “They knew that if what actually happened was revealed, heads there would have rolled.”

Shooting

Then in 1970, Thoresen’s wife, Louise purportedly shot and killed him and ran across the street to tell a neighbor what she had just done. “There was no evidence of the shooting,” said Wall. “No photo of the body being removed from the house. No witnesses named. I can’t even verify that the neighbor lived there. The entire story appears to have been dictated by the police.”

Louise wrote a book about her husband after she was acquitted of shooting him. Wall believes the whole thing was a hoax.

“She had an eight year old son at the time who was separated from his family for six months while her phony show trial was planned and executed,” Wall said,” but once again her husband was not a Zodiac suspect. Louise died in 2003.”

Keystone killings

Among the crimes Wall argues the Zodiac Killer committed were two in Pennsylvania. One occurred in 1968, the victim, a Philadelphia Naval Hospital patient, was stabbed once in the heart. His body was found on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The other occurred a year later in a library at Penn State University. A student was stabbed once in the heart. Witnesses said that the killer, who fled the scene, was about six feet tall and looked like a foreign TV news correspondent, which fits Thoresen’s description.

“He knew exactly where to lethally insert a knife into his victims with only one thrust through the heart and he had the strength to do so,” said Wall.

Both murders are on record today as unsolved crimes, but in his books, Wall provides researched evidence connecting the homicides to Thoresen who was purportedly shot to death in June of 1970 in Fresno, California at age 32. His ashes are interred with those of his brother and parents, just up the road from Kenilworth. Valerie Percy’s remains were moved east through the wishes of the family.

Eyes on FBI

The author believes that all but the last of these murders happened with big money obtained from a father and a murdered younger son stuffed into the older son’s pockets so that this heir to a Chicago steel fortune could run to different states all over the country, commit his crimes, and evade justice.

The FBI, as a branch of the US government, has a long history of incompetence and covering up criminal activity. In 1919, the Bureau illegally detained Americans until they proved they had registered for the military draft resulting in the firing of the Fed’s director. Other improprieties included kickbacks accepted from oil companies tapping US Naval reserves, the illegal targeting of gays, African Americans, leftists, and war protesters, and the destruction of Watergate files that led to President Nixon’s resignation.

Has the FBI finally put the Zodiac case to rest? Not according to Wall. Portions of incriminating evidence he’s posted online have been mysteriously removed. He believes that he continues to be under government watch.

THE TRUTH BE TOLD …

When asked why he has dedicated so much time and research to confirm his belief that the FBI covered up the Zodiac case, Wall said, “I’d like to see the names of the men who were falsely convicted of Thoresen’s crimes, and which the Feds likely knew or suspected he did, be cleared forever. Police reports have been withheld from investigators and Thoresen’s familial DNA has not been tested, which would connect him to the murders.”

Wall added this final comment. “The phrase serial homicide was coined by the FBI in the early 1970s, or not long after Thoresen died. That’s no coincidence.”

From the ashes of a serial killer to the ashes of 87 slain bodies buried all across the country, Glenn Wall is dusting off the files of cold case murders and shining a light into the dark shadows of federal corruption.

His books: “Sympathy Vote: a Reinvestigation of the Valerie Percy Murder,” “Super Killer: the Further Crimes and Cover-Up of the Zodiac,” and “Zodiac Maniac: the Secret History of the Zodiac Killer” can be purchased on the Internet at Barnes and Noble.