The Proper Name

The first question was ordinary. When I was a kid in Southern California in the 1970s, I asked my mother why I was named Valerie. My mother said that before I was born, there was a senator who had twin daughters, one of whom was named Valerie. One night one of the sisters was killed by a stranger in their house. When my mother read about the incident in the newspaper, she thought, What a pretty name.

I asked which of the twins was named Valerie. My mother said she couldn't remember. Though I'd later doubt that response, by then I didn't trust my memory either; it didn't seem possible that I recalled such a thing accurately. So I returned to the story in my forties in a state of uncertainty. I searched the internet using the words I remembered—senator, twins, murder, Valerie—and was astonished to find that everything my mother had told me was true. But because I was a little girl when my mother told the story, I had assumed that the twins were little girls. In reality, they were twenty-one, and the murdered daughter was Valerie Percy.

Valerie Percy was the daughter of a Chicago businessman, Charles Percy, who was not yet a senator, but running for national office, which he later won. After her graduation from Cornell in June 1966, Valerie returned home to the wealthy enclave of Kenilworth, Illinois, to help with her father's campaign. On the morning of September 18, someone entered the house and killed her in her bedroom. The family, including her identical twin sister, Sharon, was asleep in the house, unaware.

In September 1966 my mother was twenty-four years old; she would have read coverage of the Percy case in the Ithaca Journal and the Cornell Daily Sun, which covered the crime extensively due to Valerie Percy's Cornell connection. My mother had earned both her BA and MBA at Cornell; my father was finishing his PhD in physics. They'd been married for a little over two years. She was a first-generation college student from a large family that had moved around the Connecticut River valley when she was a child; he was the son of a California pharmacist. My mother must have read the Percy articles in the apartment she and my father shared in an old farmhouse on Ellis Hollow Road in Ithaca.

The Percy story ran daily for almost a week in the Ithaca Journal, alongside updates from Viet Nam and the NASA space program, as well as ads for Bass Weejuns, Salem menthols, hi-fi stereophonic sound, DuPont Dacron blazers, Ayn Rand books. The newspaper described Valerie Percy in diminutive terms: she was one of her father's "comely blonde twin daughters"; she was "gracious"; she "always wanted to do the right thing." On the other hand, one of her former professors said she was "exciting and stimulating to know." On the front page of the Cornell Daily Sun on September 19, 1966, she appears in a studio portrait, dark-eyed, demurely dressed, smiling slightly. She doesn't meet the camera's gaze—nor does she in the more candid, badly reproduced photograph in the same day's Ithaca Journal. The articles included graphic details: the Ithaca Journal said that Mrs. Percy had been "awakened by a moan." She found Valerie "dying of a crushed skull and more than a dozen stab wounds," and ran to activate the burglar alarm. By the time a doctor from the neighborhood arrived, it was too late.

Writing this feels like a cruel repetition, but it's what my mother must have read.

An investigation began immediately and soon involved the FBI. The Ithaca Journal offered updates on the Percy case well into 1967, revealing potential clues. Valerie's mother had caught a glimpse of the assailant, a white man, before he fled. There was no attempt at robbery. Police found bare footprints leading to a beach on Lake Michigan; a wet woolen glove; a green station wagon; a hole in the glass of a French door. Other items appeared later...