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That Makes Some Sense

Bill Tope

On an early September morning in 1966,
Valerie Percy, twin daughter of Bell &
Howell executive Charles Percy, then a
candidate for the U.S. Senate, was brutally
beaten and bludgeoned to death with a
WWII vintage bayonet. The murder was
never solved.

Valerie was an ardent, enthusiastic
campaign worker for her father. Her death
at her home on Chicago’s North Shore, at
the hands of person or persons unknown,
came as a shock to her family and friends.
Murders just do not happen, let along go
unsolved, in Kenilworth.

Various local miscreant types—even the
mob—were originally tagged for the killing,
but no one was ever indicted. It is perhaps
telling that in the Southern Illinois town of my
childhood, where the murder was fodder
for the local hair dressers, saloons and
barbershops, it was explained away as being
the fault of the victim herself.

Did she dress provocatively? Did she do
drugs? Was it the work of the opposing
campaign, the result of some treacherous
deal she had struck in pursuit of electing
her father? After all, Percy was a Republican,
and in heavily Democratic areas that was
reason enough for these suspicions.

But it was subsequently revealed that Valerie
Percy did not do drugs, didn’t hang with anyone
who did, and had finessed no dishonest political
bargains. But the last remark that I heard at the
barber shop was most reflective of the
intolerant, patriarchal tenor of the 1960s.

The barber, clipping the sparse hair of his
customer, stepped back and remarked,
“Maybe she was pregnant!” as though an
ambitious father, disgraced and humiliated by
her reckless behavior, had ordered a sanction
on his own daughter. “Now that,” replied his
customer, “makes some sense....”

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