Synopsis
In 2011, as author Glenn Wall began research on what became a book on the Valerie Percy murder case (Kenilworth, Illinois, 1966), he was unaware that there was a previously unnamed criminal whom the FBI considered to be a prime suspect for the murder. However, he did learn that police couldn't make anything of one piece of evidence found at the crime scene nor of two other area crime scenes whose crimes were linked to the murder. It was odd, they said. He took their word for it, and it didn't mean anything to him at the time. He never thought he’d have reason to revisit the case. He couldn't have been more wrong, and that mysterious evidence is but one reason why. Wall was aware that the suspect had moved to San Francisco in the mid 1960s, and it had crossed his mind that he could have been the notorious criminal known as the Zodiac Killer, whose killings remain unsolved. But he didn't know then that there are dozens of reasons to believe that he actually was Zodiac nor that one of the most persuasive is that unusual bit of evidence discovered at crime scenes in Winnetka and Lake Forest, Illinois, and at the Percy family's house. In addition, Wall found that the crimes the suspect committed in California further implicate him in the crimes he committed in Illinois and vice versa. Wall knew, as with many high-profile unsolved cases, that baseless rumors had surrounded the Percy case for years. None of them were true. But there was, he came to believe, a coverup—not to protect the political career of Valerie's father, Chuck Percy, nor a member of his family. No, it was to protect the careers and reputations of those who'd freed the suspect time and again. It seems a person of ordinary means who had done what he most certainly did would have been locked up early on, likely saving untold lives, though there are some mitigating circumstances involving at least one federal investigative agency. That aside, it's not a stretch to say that those powerful and connected people would have been no match for a US senator and others whose children had been brutally murdered by the maniac son of a multimillionaire.