Valerie Percy

Case background and investigation

Valerie Percy was 21 and had recently graduated from Cornell University when she was killed in her family's home on the Lake Michigan shore in Kenilworth, a village north of Chicago. Her father, Charles Percy, a former Bell & Howell executive, was then the Republican candidate for the United States Senate, and she had been working on his campaign.

According to a Chicago Tribune retrospective, she went to bed at about 10 p.m. on September 17, 1966, after an evening with campaign colleagues. At around 5 a.m. on September 18 her stepmother, Loraine Percy, was woken by sounds in the house, went to Valerie's room and saw a man standing over the bed holding a flashlight. He ran from the house. Valerie had been beaten about the head and stabbed repeatedly. The Tribune account says the intruder was described as about 5 feet 8 inches tall and around 160 pounds.

Investigators concluded that the intruder had got in by breaking a pane of glass in a French door. The Tribune reported that palm and finger prints were recovered from the bedroom and from the broken glass. WTTW has reported that the weapon was never found and that a $50,000 reward produced no breakthrough. The killing was the first homicide on record in Kenilworth. Both Senate candidates suspended campaigning for a period, and Charles Percy won the election that November; he served in the Senate until 1985.

The inquiry became one of the largest in Illinois history. By 1972 investigators said they had pursued more than 1,300 leads and conducted thousands of interviews. CBS Chicago's timeline of the case notes that by 1973 attention had turned to men associated with a burglary ring, and in later years authors and reporters have put forward other theories. None of these resulted in charges, and no suspect has been officially identified as the killer.

The Illinois State Police led the case until 2002, when it passed to the Kenilworth Police Department and a regional major crimes task force. In 2016 a lawsuit sought release of the roughly 20,000-page file, according to NBC Chicago and WTTW; police opposed disclosure on the ground that the investigation was still active, and the records have remained largely withheld.

Charles Percy died in 2011. As the sixtieth anniversary approached in September 2026, Kenilworth police Commander Ryan Glew said in a statement reported by CBS Chicago and the Tribune that the department is investigating open and active leads and that resolving the case for the family and the community remains a priority. The murder is still unsolved.