Two Unsolved Political Killings on This Day in History

 

Valerie Percy, 21, daughter of U.S. Senate candidate Charles H. Percy, was murdered in the family mansion in the Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, Illinois on this day in 1966. She had been stabbed to death in her bed. Percy would win election to the Senate in November, but nobody would ever be charged with the murder, and the crime would remain unsolved at the time of his death 45 years later. In 2014, a new book on the murder would identify the late William Thoresen III, who lived with his wealthy family less than two blocks from the Percy home, as the likely suspect. Ironically, Thoresen suffered a fate similar to that of Miss Percy, murdered while lying in his bed.

Also, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in a plane crash on this day in 1961. New evidence supports a theory that the pioneering U.N. secretary general was assassinated.

"Questions surrounded the crash from the first. For one thing, writes Susan Williams in her 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjold?, the British high commissioner at Ndola, Lord Alport, showed little concern after the U.N. plane failed to land at its scheduled time, instead insisting that Hammarskjold had decided to go elsewhere. Then there was the fact that search for the plane’s wreckage and crash site didn’t begin for hours after the crash, though witnesses had reported seeing a great flash in the sky soon after midnight. 

Local residents in the area had seen a second plane in the sky that night, but their testimony was discounted or ignored by colonial authorities, the Guardian reported in 2011. The crash’s sole survivor, U.N. security officer Harold Julien, also spoke before he died of an explosion on board the plane, but the authorities assumed he was too ill and sedated to be taken seriously.

Two days after Hammarskjold's death, former U.S. President Harry Truman insinuated to reporters that the U.N. leader had been assassinated, saying he 'was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said _when they killed him._'" Source

There is also evidence suggesting the plane was shot down. A CIA report claimed the KGB was responsible.

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