FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  Clearly, Aikin believes Peterson was involved in Stacy’s disappearance. She now shudders to think that, on her visits to Illinois, she so often slept in the man’s bed. She slept there with Stacy, she explained, on his side of the bed, while Drew was working the overnight shift or just out on the town, being Drew.

  “I slept on that man’s side of the bed,” Aikin said, in a voice betraying the horror she later felt. “It’s insane.”

  As curious and repugnant as it might seem for a seventeen-year-old girl to take up with a forty-seven-year-old man who was vying for her affections while his appropriately aged wife and young sons were sleeping not far away, it undeniably set Stacy up in a pretty good situation. She gained a beautiful home and in short order a pair of healthy, adorable children, one boy and one girl. With the package came two sons Stacy inherited from the previous Mrs. Peterson and soon adopted as her own. Bychowski described Stacy as trying to go above and beyond in proving she loved the older boys enough to be their birth mother.

  Stacy had made, it seemed, a nice little life for herself. And no matter how things may have devolved between herself and her much older husband, she could take satisfaction in knowing that her children’s lives were infinitely more stable than her own had been.

  Stacy was smart enough to grab hold of what must have seemed a golden opportunity for a teenage girl who had fended for herself and her siblings for practically her entire life. But at some point in her four years of living that dream, it turned out to be less than she expected. Either she’d had enough and fled, or else she was taken out against her will. If that was the case, and her brother was going to keep his family’s story up-to-date, he’d have to find room on his skin for the name of one more departed relative.

  Stacy Cales was a seventeen-year-old hotel desk clerk in 2001 when she made the acquaintance of a charming police sergeant old enough to be her father. Drew Peterson in fact was a father, with two boys living at home and two grown sons. He happened to be a husband as well, for the third time. But none of this stopped him from wooing the teenage girl behind the front desk at the SpringHill Suites in Bolingbrook, a moderately priced Marriott hotel right off Interstate 55 which was largely geared toward business travelers passing through the small town.

  Stacy worked the overnight shift. So did Peterson, patrolling Bolingbrook’s quiet streets during their darkest hours, police work that he called “cookies and milk” after a stint as an undercover narcotics officer took him to the larger, grittier city of Joliet, a dozen or so miles south.

  One might think Sergeant Peterson was stopping in on the petite teenager to ensure her safety. But the real reason, he later said, was that the cop he patrolled with had his eye on another woman working at the hotel.

  “My partner liked her partner, and we got together,” Peterson said.

  One of Stacy’s former coworkers at the SpringHill Suites said Peterson made a bad impression on her. The woman, who out of fear did not want to give her name, said she was disgusted by the notion of a middle-aged man romancing a teenage girl thirty years his junior. Yet, for an older man past his prime, Peterson must have cut a dashing figure in his uniform, and he overwhelmed his young love with pricey tokens of his affection.

  An old boyfriend of Stacy’s also remembered Peterson showing up at the hotel to woo the teenager. Keith Rossetto, a male nurse, dated Stacy for about two months, according to his twin brother, Scott Rossetto, also a nurse. Keith and Stacy’s relationship ended when he left to join the Army two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Soon after, Stacy took up with Peterson, although he had been hanging around her even before Rossetto departed to serve his country.

  For his part, Keith Rossetto said he did not exactly date Stacy.

  “We were kind of in a getting-to-know-you phase,” he told me. Still, Keith Rossetto, himself about a dozen years older than Stacy, spent time with her. He went to the hotel while she worked through the night, and when things were slow, they would go outside to smoke cigarettes and talk.

  During this time, Drew Peterson also dropped in, and Keith Rossetto remembers not caring much for the cop, who kept showing up at the job of the girl he was getting to know.

  “I didn’t like him, I can tell you that,” Rossetto told me. “It was like he was trying to impress me that he was a Bolingbrook cop, and he was on a special team or whatever.”

  In his younger years, Peterson had been a member of the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad, a multi-jurisdictional, undercover drug unit. He considers his work with this team to be the finest in his law enforcement career. An episode during his time with the unit led to him not only being fired from the Bolingbrook Police Department, which had loaned him out to the unit, but also being brought up on criminal charges. Peterson weathered that storm, as he always seemed able to do. The charges were dropped and he got his job back, but it was the end of his days as an undercover narcotics agent.

  All that was far behind Peterson by the time he was sniffing around after Stacy at the SpringHill Suites, supposedly so his partner could chase some other woman working there. Peterson and Stacy’s romance may have been a fortuitous by-product of their colleagues’ flirting, but their liaison unleashed a storm of events beyond anything even they might have anticipated at the time.

  For one thing, Peterson was still married to Kathleen Savio, although nothing as flimsy as marital vows had ever stopped him from cheating on the two wives before her. And Savio, Stacy would learn before long, was not going to set her husband, and their financial assets, free without a tenacious fight. Within a few months, police cruisers responding to Savio and Peterson’s domestic battles would become a common sight on the street where all three—Savio, Peterson and Stacy—ended up living.

  For another, Peterson’s supervisors on the police force most certainly were not as delighted as he was with his new girlfriend.

  “When the department found out I was a forty-seven-year-old sergeant, and I was engaged to a seventeen-year-old, there was a big scandal,” Peterson said.

  Once the department brass caught wind of their involvement, the higher-ups approached prosecutors to determine if Peterson was violating sexual-abuse statutes by romancing a girl practically a third his age. Apparently, he was not. In Illinois, seventeen is the age of sexual consent, unless the older person is in a position of authority—such as a teacher, counselor, or coach—in which case the age of consent is eighteen. The state’s attorney’s office decided that Peterson’s status as a police officer did not constitute a position of authority over Stacy.

  “The state’s attorney said, ‘He’s not doing nothing wrong,’” Peterson recalled, visibly pleased by the memory of getting the green light to carry on with his young love, whom he clearly intended to marry as soon as he was legally free of Savio.

  That Drew Peterson was able to take three ladies to the altar before Stacy is evidence enough of his charisma. And with each trip up the aisle, the age difference between himself and his wife grew wider.

  With his first wife, high school sweetheart Carol Hamilton, the gap in age was a mere three years. With his second wife, Victoria Rutkiewicz, it had stretched to five: her twenty-three to his twenty-eight. Then, a thirty-eight-year-old Peterson tied the knot with twenty-eight-year-old Kathleen Savio.

  To put the icing on the wedding cake, Police Sergeant Drew Peterson, forty-nine, made an honest woman out of nineteen-year-old Stacy Cales in October 2003. She had given birth to their son, Anthony, not three months before they wed.

  Peterson married his first wife, Hamilton, in 1974, two years after he graduated from Willowbrook High School, which she also attended. She accompanied Peterson to his senior prom.

  Peterson and Hamilton had two sons together, Eric and Stephen, but divorced in 1980. Hamilton, later Carol Brown after remarrying, did not accuse Peterson of anything sinister or violent. Asked by Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America if there were “any signs of controlling behavior, the things that you’re hearing about
now?” Carol told her, “No, there really wasn’t. You know, in the beginning, we just had a normal relationship.”

  But that normal relationship did not last.

  “Apparently we somewhat grew apart, and then one day I did discover that he was having an affair,” Carol told Sawyer.

  Peterson also cheated on his next wife, Rutkiewicz, whom he married in 1982. By the time Stacy disappeared, Rutkiewicz was going by the name Vicki Connolly and living in the tiny downstate Illinois town of Paxton. I met with Vicki Connolly one night while she was at the home of her daughter, Lisa Ward, also in Paxton. Vicki said she did not wish to talk about her marriage to Peterson and also told me she was afraid. I spoke to Ward as well, both in person and on the telephone, and exchanged e-mail messages with her. Ward, who lived with Peterson as his stepdaughter from the age of eight until she was seventeen, said she and her mother were not interested in discussing their time with the ex-sergeant.

  But Ward did go on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. To protect her identity, Ward’s last name was not given, and she was shown only in silhouette. In the interview, Lisa Ward described her stepfather as “strict, extremely strict, sometimes not a very nice person” and prone to be “extreme with the punishment sometimes.”

  “I was hit with a belt for many years,” Ward said.

  She continued, saying that despite outward appearances, she knew her mother was not happy in her marriage to Peterson and that he was “abusive to my mother. He was very controlling to her, watched every move that she had made.”

  And just as with his first wife, Carol, Drew lost his second wife when she got fed up with his having sex with other women.

  “My mom [wanted out] because he was not being faithful to her, and he had not been faithful for many years,” Ward said to Van Susteren. “And I think that she knew and finally had just had it, just wanted out.”

  At least one of the other women Peterson was having sex with was Kathleen Savio, who became wife number three; reportedly, she didn’t know Peterson was married at the time she started seeing him.

  Besides being wives of Drew Peterson, Rutkiewicz and Savio had something else in common, at least according to relatives. They both thought he could kill them and make it look accidental. As Ward told Van Susteren, “I mean, I told her she doesn’t have to be afraid of him anymore, but obviously, he had hurt her, you know, so badly all those years ago that she still thinks about that. He used to tell my mother that he could kill her and make it look like an accident.”

  When told about the threats he supposedly made against his second wife and ex-stepdaughter, Peterson, who has had no reservations about admitting his extramarital affairs, had an explanation.

  “Vicki’s just mad ’cause I cheated on her,” he said. He also said Ward resented him for being “a strong disciplinarian.”

  Besides Peterson’s four brides, there was the one that got away: fiancée Kyle Piry. Peterson fit her in between his first and second marriages.

  Piry claims she called it quits with Peterson; Peterson says he was the one to give her the heave-ho. Either way, Piry was twenty when the four-month engagement was called off. Keeping with his pattern of everwidening age discrepancies, Peterson was twenty-seven.

  Years later, with Peterson the subject of intense scrutiny by the police and public for both the disappearance of Stacy and the mysterious death of Savio, Piry accused Peterson of stalking her and of abusing his power as a police officer to make her life miserable for ending their relationship back when they were dating and engaged to marry.

  Peterson denied this, saying Piry was just bitter over their breakup and even angrier for his spurning her attempts to rekindle the romance. He went on to explain that he dumped Piry after finding out she was seeing other men and “dancing” at bachelor parties. Piry, after denying Peterson’s allegations, upped her own and claimed her ex was so cheap that he recycled their engagement ring when he proposed to Rutkiewicz.

  No matter what the first three wives and the fiancée he failed to close the deal with said after things ultimately broke down, they must have seen something in Peterson at the beginning. It seems young Stacy was no different.

  She may have found Peterson irresistible, blown away by the dashing figure he cut in his Bolingbrook police uniform, not to mention his authoritative mustache. Or maybe it was just the attention and the gifts he showered on her: he bought her a Pontiac Grand Prix, set her up in an apartment, and furnished her new digs. Something definitely attracted Stacy to Peterson, and it was very likely a combination of both the promise of financial security and the possibility of the stable home life she’d never had.

  Whatever it was, the pull must have been powerful, because judging from the heady recklessness with which they carried out their affair, Peterson and Stacy didn’t appear to have worried too much about the repercussions of getting caught. Stacy even introduced her Aunt Candy to the older, married father-figure she was dating.

  “I met Drew in 2001, right after she met him,” Aikin said. She found the dynamics of the relationship odd but said it was not her place to discourage her niece’s budding love affair.

  “It was pretty crazy,” Aikin said. “But she was old enough to make her own choices. There was nothing I could do.

  “She didn’t have a mom. She didn’t have a lot of guidance. I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just how her life was.”

  Perhaps even more revealing of their recklessness, in their early days Drew and Stacy would tryst in the basement of the Peterson house while his wife and boys slept upstairs. Sharon Bychowski, who became Stacy’s next-door neighbor on Pheasant Chase Court and instant dear friend in April of 2004, said the young woman took her to the house where Peterson and Savio had lived—just down the street on the nearly identically named Pheasant Chase Drive.

  Stacy told her, “‘This is where he lived, down in the basement,’” Bychowski said. “And I said, ‘So wait,’—I don’t know her very well [at this point]; I just moved here—I said, ‘So wait, he was bringing you here to the house?’ She said, ‘Yes, we would go into the basement, and I would leave in the morning before Kathleen got up.’”

  Just as when he was questioned about his alleged extramarital affairs while married to wives one and two, Peterson freely admitted that he and Stacy would have sex in the basement while his unwitting third wife and boys slept upstairs.

  Bychowski said she was shocked by her new friend’s revelation, telling her, “‘Stacy, that’s terrible. I don’t even know you that well and I can tell you that’s terrible.’ She said, ‘Oh no, no, Sharon. You don’t understand. Their marriage was over.’”

  Stacy said that Peterson and Savio, by that time, were just staying in the same house because they hadn’t yet divided up their assets and neither could afford to move.

  “I said, ‘Wait, let me tell you what else he told you,’” Bychowski continued, and proceeded to rattle off such lines as, “We haven’t slept together in a really long time” and “I’m only here for the kids.”

  “She said, ‘How did you know that?’”

  “Stacy,” Bychowski told the young woman, “because every man says that kind of shit. That’s why. It’s standard, comes with the package.”

  But by the time Bychowski shared her wisdom of the male species with her young friend, it was too late. Peterson had already snared Stacy, gotten her pregnant, and married her. Their son, Anthony, was born in July 2003, and not three months later, the new parents married in an outdoor wedding ceremony.

  Savio’s sister, Anna Marie Doman, said she found the notion of Peterson taking up with a girl fresh out of high school creepy.

  “It’s like a child molester,” she said. “Stacy looked like she weighed ninety pounds—no tits, no boobs. She’s not a woman.”

  And from the get-go, she predicted their marriage would come to no good.

  “Back then I said it’s not going to last, because when she hits twenty-one and sees there’s a whole world
out there, the shit’s going to hit the fan, which is pretty much what happened.” Doman might have been off by a couple years, but there are many who believe her prediction was dead-on accurate.

  Savio learned of her husband’s philandering through an anonymous note. The revelation turned her world upside down, but Doman said her sister was not particularly surprised. In fact, she had caught him cheating before, prior to Stacy’s entry into their lives.

  “He had this humungous cell phone bill, and she was like, ‘What the hell?’” Doman described.

  The same number was listed on the bill again and again, so Savio sought her sister’s advice.

  “I said, ‘Ask Drew. I don’t know what to tell you.’ She asked, and he gave her some bullshit. She called. It was some young girl named Heather.”

  Savio invited Heather to her home. Face-to-face, Savio informed Heather that her boyfriend happened to be married—to her—and that he had two sons.

  “That girl disappeared after that,” Doman said.

  Clearly, whatever disapproval he faced in his choice of new love had no effect on Drew Peterson. Between playing the expansive provider and thrilling at their clandestine moments in his basement, the middle-aged Drew Peterson was, without question, quite a happy man in 2002 and 2003.

  He fondly recalled the joy he felt with Stacy and her antics to attract attention to them and leave onlookers scratching their heads. For example, Stacy would grab him in public and kiss him passionately, then earnestly ask, “Do I kiss the best of all my sisters?”

  It was not the only way they turned their fatherd-daughter age difference into a game. In the supermarket, Stacy sometimes acted like she was trying to get him to buy alcohol for her and the “friends” she had left outside, loudly badgering him to buy her wine to shock other shoppers.

  “She’d say, ‘Come on, all the kids are waiting in the parking lot,’” Peterson recalled, smiling at the memory. He even owned a ceramic figurine of a cop and a little girl, which he displayed on a shelf behind his desk. He pointed it out and quipped, “That was me and Stacy in 1988,” when Stacy would have been four years old to his thirty-four.