FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  While Aikin said it was not her place to criticize her legally adult niece or to tell her what to do, she did say she spoke to Stacy about her affair with the married middle-aged man.

  “I did talk to her a little bit,” Aikin recalled. “I can’t remember what I said.”

  Even if Aikin had spoken to Stacy more than just a little bit, she would have been working against the clock. After all, if she had plans of talking her niece out of the ill-fated romance, there was little time to do so. Stacy and Drew were on the fast track, with the young girl pregnant by eighteen and married by nineteen.

  “They got married eight days after the divorce with Kathleen,” Aikin said. “It was a very private wedding.”

  Stacy and Drew married and settled into their home on Pheasant Chase Court, a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, a mere five hundred yards away from his old home, where Savio was still living. Peterson had actually closed on his new home in April 2002, nearly a year and a half before he and Stacy tied the knot, so they did have the opportunity to set up house before exchanging vows.

  The married life must have afforded Stacy the security she had lacked throughout childhood, but it also kept her tied down with the duties of a wife and mother. Before she turned twenty-one, and less than fifteen months into her marriage, she had given birth to her second child. Plus, there were the two boys from Peterson’s marriage to Savio that stayed with them during visits with their father and would, before long, become permanent members of their household.

  “She was out here with the kids all the time,” said Bychowski. “Those kids were so important to her.”

  Stacy was a natural when it came to motherhood, according to her neighbor. But it took some work to get Stacy looking, or at least dressing, the part of an adult, married woman with a slew of kids to take care of and what many have called a jealous, controlling husband. Luckily for Stacy, her next-door neighbor and best friend was there to help the young girl transform into a grown woman.

  “She went, in the short time I was with her, from dressing in junior sizes to dressing elegantly and changing the way she looked,” Bychowski said. “She really, I feel, in three and a half years, she went from dressing like a kid to dressing like a mom.”

  Bychowski knew something about appropriate professional dress. As an Avon district manager with eight hundred people working for her, she had to, and she tried to impart that wisdom to Stacy.

  “We would be in Kohl’s shopping somewhere and she would say to me, ‘Does this look okay?’ And I would say, ‘I probably wouldn’t buy that.’

  “Like it was too short, or it was too punky, you know?” Bychowski explained. “If your objective is to dress like a mom now, then what you wear has to change.”

  It wasn’t just her clothes that transformed. After the birth of her second child, daughter Lacy in January of 2005, Stacy embarked on a series of upgrades that included breast enlargement, Lasik eye surgery, and a tummy tuck. Peterson portrayed himself as an indulgent husband, paying for the procedures.

  When Lacy was born, Stacy was nineteen days shy of her twenty-first birthday. If her life had followed a different course, she might have been just a college kid hanging out with other college kids, instead of a mother of two and stepmother of another two. She still had some growing up to do. One neighbor told of Stacy wearing a bikini when she went out to cut the grass. The same neighbor said she cautioned a friend who came to her house not to look too long at Stacy or be overly friendly, because Drew was always watching.

  “He would be at the door, looking out,” she said.

  This was not unusual behavior for Peterson, as many who were close to Stacy said. Bychowski claimed that he would follow Stacy while he was supposed to be working and when she was doing nothing more sinister than clothes shopping for herself and her children.

  “He would come there in the cruiser,” she said. “He would be in the parking lot of Kohl’s, [asking,] ‘Hey what [are] you guys doing?’”

  Bychowski initially thought Peterson’s suspicions were focused more on family finances than infidelity.

  “At first I thought he was checking on how much she was spending, because he always picked on her for spending,” she said. “It didn’t matter if she bought a toothpick. It cost too much.”

  She soon learned otherwise.

  “[He was] constantly calling,” Bychowski said, telling how Peterson was fixated on his wife’s whereabouts, checking on the places she was going and who was in her company when she went there.

  It was strange then, that after Stacy had vanished, Peterson seemed to suddenly have little interest in tracking down her location.

  “He had such an obsession and compulsion to control her, at what point did he decide to kill her?” Bychowski pondered one winter day close to five months after Stacy was last seen alive, making no secret of her theory of what had happened to her friend. However, while the state police have ruled Stacy’s disappearance to be a “potential homicide” and have named Peterson a suspect, still today, he has not been charged with anything.

  “After all that money he invested in her,” Bychowski wondered, “at what point did she just become expendable bullshit?”

  Bolingbrook doesn’t have much in the way of heritage or tradition. It can’t; it’s only been around since 1965, which makes it eleven years younger than its most famous resident, Drew Walter Peterson.

  The town, which was developed as a bedroom community whose first homes were priced at ten thousand dollars, is connected to Chicago by the Stevenson Expressway. According to a “History of Bolingbrook,” the first residents of the mid-1960s did not always get what they thought they were paying for.

  “Lesson #1 learned the hard way through teary eyes: everything you see in the model home isn’t in your finished house, necessarily,” the official town history says. “In the case of Dover homes that meant no carpeting or even floor tile in some area [sic] unless you paid extra. And there certainly were no trees or lawns. And not always paved streets.”

  When Bolingbrook was incorporated in 1965, it was a modest burg of 5,300 people in 1,200 homes. The village has been growing ever since and in 1975 became the proud home of Old Chicago, the world’s first completely enclosed amusement park and shopping center. However, Old Chicago struggled and closed six years later.

  By the time Peterson was in the midst of his romance with young Stacy Cales, U.S. Census Bureau estimates put Bolingbrook’s population at about 66,000. The median home value in 2005 was more than $225,000, over twenty times the price of an abode in the town’s first days.

  Bolingbrook features some impressive homes, but the town—essentially a series of subdivisions—has forever been a less successful, even faceless, little sibling to neighboring Naperville. More than a hundred years older than Bolingbrook, Naperville not only has some history, it also has a bustling city center. While Bolingbrook is a series of subdivisions, Naperville is home to a quaint downtown area and charming Riverwalk, which draws visitors from across the Chicago area.

  “Ranked as a top community in the United States to raise children, retire and start a home-based business, the city boasts nationally acclaimed schools, the best public library system in the country, an exceptionally low crime rate and a lower unemployment rate than the state’s average,” Naperville boasts on the city’s Web site. “In 2005, the city was once again named as one of best places to live in the United States by Money magazine. Naperville ranked third of 100 finalists and was the only Illinois town to make the 2005 ‘Best Places To Live’ list.” In 2006, Naperville placed even higher, coming in at 2nd on the Money list.

  Bolingbrook might never be Naperville—contrary to its middle-class, lily-white portrayal in the media, Bolingbrook has pockets of low-income and minority residents—but in the early part of the new millennium, it was still forging its own identity. In 2002, Bolingbrook unveiled the ostentatious Bolingbrook Golf Club, a 270-acre course with a 76,000-square-foot clubhouse. The village got another jewel
in its crown when the Promenade mall opened in April 2007. An upscale, open-air shopping plaza, the Promenade was an ambitious project for Will County.

  In April 2002, Drew Peterson paid about $220,000 for the house he moved into with Stacy: a two-story domicile with an attached garage and above ground pool on Pheasant Chase Court in a subdivision abutting Clow International Airport, a single-runway facility whose south end practically borders Peterson’s backyard. Peterson of course wasn’t new to the street, and the house he had lived in with Savio was even larger, according to his third wife’s sister, Anna Marie Doman.

  “There were so many rooms,” Doman said.

  The prices of homes in the Bolingbrook area soared soon after Peterson’s 2002 purchase, then swiftly plummeted. Like many homeowners living in a volatile local market, Peterson seemed quite conscious of the swooning real estate values. He often spoke of friends losing their homes due to foreclosure in the housing bust, and he urged reporters to write about this “economy crunch” instead of Stacy.

  There was a time when the asphalt circle of Pheasant Chase Court served as a playground for neighborhood children to ride bicycles and race remote-control cars. That all changed by Halloween of 2007, when a caravan of television trucks and a legion of reporters set up camp across the street from Peterson’s home, asking questions about Stacy’s disappearance.

  “This court, before you guys showed up, was a child-friendly court,” Peterson said in November to a small group of reporters standing on his front step. “You guys just killed all that.”

  True enough, next to no children played there throughout that winter. Then spring returned, and the media had largely departed. But even with the warm weather and the lack of trucks and reporters clogging up the street, there were still few, if any, frolicking children on the cul-de-sac—one of several marked changes to the previously unremarkable street left in the wake of the Stacy Peterson story.

  The house next door to Peterson’s—not the one belonging to Sharon and Bob Bychowski—went up for sale in the months after Stacy disappeared. The owner listed the two-story house, built in 2003 with vaulted ceilings and a fireplace, at $259,999. The house certainly got enough exposure after it went on the market in early 2008, but probably not the kind most home-sellers would crave. With its for-sale sign planted firmly in the yard, the house made regular appearances in television news reports about notorious next-door neighbor Drew Peterson. One had to wonder if there was a buyer out there willing to pay full price for the privilege of living next to Drew—especially in a souring real estate market.

  Peterson himself admitted to me that, after spending most of his life in Illinois and three decades in Bolingbrook, he wanted to move out, go “somewhere warm,” but could not, because his missing wife’s name was on the title of the house.

  If Peterson ever does leave the neighborhood, for whatever reason, one thing is certain: The years he lived on Pheasant Chase Drive and Court, with one wife who’s now deceased and another who’s gone missing, won’t soon be forgotten.

  Kathleen Savio, the woman sleeping upstairs while Drew Peterson and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend had sex in the basement, must have been under the impression that her family life was stable, because news that her husband was embroiled in a torrid love affair is said to have hit her like a ton of bricks. After all, she learned of his infidelity from an anonymous note.

  Kathleen promptly kicked Peterson out of the house, and divorce proceedings began in early 2002. Their marriage was dissolved in the autumn of the following year, about three months after Drew and Stacy’s son Anthony was born, and slightly more than a week before Drew and Stacy got married. In an unusual legal move, the divorce was bifurcated, meaning that while the marriage was legally ended, the financial side of the proceedings and the division of their property would be settled at a later date. The judge permitted this so that Peterson could marry his by-then pregnant teenage fiancée.

  While Kathleen may have been shocked to learn Peterson was sleeping with someone else, she had been in that situation before, just in the opposite role. Supposedly, when she started dating Peterson, she did not know that he was still married to his second wife, Vicki, whom Peterson divorced in 1992 after nearly nine years of marriage.

  Within two and a half months, Peterson married Kathleen—“Kitty” to family and friends—in a ceremony at Divine Shepherd Lutheran Church. Peterson was thirty-eight, Kathleen twenty-eight.

  But the ceremony took place under a cloud. Just two weeks before the wedding, Kathleen’s mother died of a stroke, at age fifty-five. “It just killed her,” said Kathleen’s sister, Anna Marie Doman. “What a way to start a marriage.”

  It wasn’t the day’s only setback. Kathleen’s father, Henry J. Savio, who was supposed to give her away, didn’t show up for the ceremony. He didn’t tell anyone he wasn’t coming and could not be reached. The family later learned he was angry at Kathleen for an unspecified reason, although his erratic behavior wasn’t entirely surprising. Anna Marie said—and her brother, Henry Martin Savio, has concurred—that her father had almost no relationship with his children while they were growing up.

  Over the course of their marriage, Kathleen gave Peterson his second set of sons, Kristopher and Thomas, born nineteen months apart. Peterson already had two boys, Stephen and Eric, from his first marriage, to high school sweetheart Carol Brown, but those children stayed with their mother after the divorce and are much older than their half brothers.

  After Kathleen discovered her husband’s affair with Stacy and ordered him to leave, Peterson may have been out of Savio’s house but, with two children between them, he was far from out of her life. By late April 2002—in a move either ill-considered or designed to make the divorce from his hot-tempered third wife as contentious as humanly possible—Peterson and Stacy set up house right down the street from Kathleen. Peterson told me he wanted to stay close to his sons. Whatever his reasons, his proximity to his estranged wife seemed only to deepen the rancor they felt for each other, which in the months to come played out for all the neighbors to see. Compared to the split of Kathleen Savio and Drew Peterson, a run-of-the-mill divorce would look like a street fight in the face of nuclear war.

  The Battle of Pheasant Chase waged for about a year and a half after the couple went to court to sever their marriage, during which time the Bolingbrook police, i.e., Peterson’s fellow officers, handled seventeen domestic incidents involving Peterson and Kathleen or Kathleen and Stacy. In one other instance, it was Kathleen alone on the police report. Many incidents involved visitation issues with their sons, for whose sake the embittered couple apparently could not manage to keep up even a semblance of civility. The boys even had to testify in court once, according to Peterson, after he brought battery charges against their mother.

  “They were like two monkeys in a cage, poking each other,” one party familiar with the battle said of the divorcing couple’s relationship.

  On top of all the calls to police, Kathleen filed for an order of protection against Peterson on March 11, 2002, alleging physical abuse, harassment and interference with her physical liberty. According to a petition Kathleen wrote by hand, Peterson called her and said that he was coming over to the house “to deal” with her. He wanted her dead, Kathleen alleged in the petition, “and if has to, he will burn the house down just to shut me up.”

  After she dropped the kids off at school, “he came running after me ready to beat me up,” the petition continued. “He now [waits] for me to return home to teach me a lesson. He has [a] gun and other weapon I believe he will use on me. He just doesn’t care if he live or die [sic], or I live or die.”

  Savio went on to detail abuse and violence she said her husband had meted out during their marriage. “Several [times], he has restrained me, held me down, knocked me into walls, come after me with a poker, riped [sic] my necklace off, left marks on my body all the time, threaten to steal my kids, and desert me.”

  And Peterson seemingly could
not be stopped, Kathleen wrote, as she “put [a] dead bolt on [the] door, [but] he broke through it.”

  A judge granted the restraining order, forbidding Peterson to enter the Pheasant Chase Drive home, come around his estranged wife, or take their children out of her care except for his two brief weekly visits with them. Peterson was served the following day with a court summons. The order instructed the process server to deliver the paper to Peterson at Bolingbrook Village Hall, which is adjacent to the police station. It also listed his badge number, 959.

  The protection order, however, didn’t last long; Kathleen dropped it. Peterson said he contacted her attorney and explained that he would be unable to work as a police officer because the order prohibited him from carrying a gun. Kathleen’s attorney would not discuss the matter. In any event, within a month and a half, Peterson had moved in down the street with the woman who was Kathleen’s replacement.

  If the violence Kathleen accused Peterson of committing during their marriage had in fact happened—attacking her with the poker, tearing off her necklace, bouncing her off of walls, restraining and marking her body—Savio never called the police at the time of the alleged events. Once Peterson and she had split, however, she showed no reluctance to bring in the cops. Of the eighteen occasions on which the police were summoned to mediate the couple’s disputes, only one occurred before their divorce proceedings began; Kathleen appears to have initiated contact with the law in at least twelve of them.

  Her family has repeatedly said she was frightened of Peterson. In fact, less than a year into their marriage, Savio—then Kathleen Peterson—was taken to the emergency room with a head injury she said was inflicted by her husband, and which her sister said the police responded to.

  According to a Hinsdale Hospital emergency department report dated April 28, 1993, Kathleen Peterson was treated after she was “involved in an altercation [with her] husband…was hit in [the] head [with a] dining room table.” Her son Thomas was not quite four months old at the time.