FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  On that last Sunday in February, his weekend with his sons over, Peterson took the boys back up the street to their mother’s home. No one answered the door. It was unlike Savio to miss a scheduled pickup or drop-off; in fact, in the past she had often called the cops if he was at all late in bringing back the boys. Her unusual absence concerned him, Peterson later said. The boys stayed with him and Stacy that night.

  On Monday night, March 1, Peterson again attempted to find out was going on inside the home of his ex-wife. He was on duty, in uniform, when he drove up in his squad car to his old house at 392 Pheasant Chase Drive. He rang the bell repeatedly; again no one answered. He then went next door to summon help from neighbors. A locksmith was also called, and he was able to gain entry to the home.

  Peterson was reluctant to go inside. After all the blowups he’d had with his ex-wife, the fights and allegations and calls to police, he did not want to be accused of doing anything untoward. So he sent the neighbors in first. Steve Carcerano, a neighbor whom Peterson said witnessed acts of violence between him and Savio, ventured into the house along with another neighbor, Savio’s friend Mary Pontarelli. They made it to the bathroom and Carcerano saw what he said looked like an “exercise ball” sitting in the dry bathtub. But it was no ball. It was Kathleen Savio, doubled over, naked and dead.

  Peterson rushed up the stairs, Carcerano said, saw the scene in the bathroom and called out, “Oh, my God!” What, he fretted, would he possibly tell Kristopher and Thomas?

  Peterson’s colleagues from the Bolingbrook Police Department were the first to respond to the scene. It was, to say the least, an uncomfortable situation. The deceased’s ex-husband was a sergeant on the force, and the couple’s tumultuous history was well-documented with the department. Supervisors decided it was prudent to immediately hand the investigation off to an outside agency. That agency was the Illinois State Police.

  State police detectives arrived at Savio’s home and called in technicians to process the crime scene. Savio’s body was then removed from the bathroom and taken to the county morgue in nearby Crest Hill.

  The officers then talked to Savio’s neighbors, according to Illinois State Police Special Agent Herbert Hardy, who later testified at a coroner’s inquest to determine how Savio died. They spoke to Drew Peterson, and they also interviewed Steve Maniaci, Savio’s boyfriend at the time. Maniaci and Peterson’s ex-wife had reportedly spoken on the phone around 1 o’clock Sunday morning. She asked him to come over, according to Hardy, but he begged off, saying he was tired.

  Hardy said another state agent also interviewed the ex-husband’s new wife, Stacy Peterson. Years later, after Stacy had been missing for weeks and suspected by the state police to be dead at the hands of her husband, a law enforcement source said the fourth wife played a key role in keeping Peterson above suspicion in the death of number three.

  “She was his alibi,” the source said, but went no further.

  State police didn’t interview Thomas, who was eleven at the time, or Kristopher, who was nine, “just not to put them through that,” according to Hardy.

  At the time she died, Savio was both working and studying nursing at Joliet Junior College; she had a boyfriend with whom she was discussing marriage. She had two sons. And in a month or so, the conclusion of her divorce would bring her into a respectable haul of money and property.

  So Kathleen Savio had quite a bit to live for. She did not fit the profile of a suicidal subject, and healthy women around the age of forty don’t often accidentally drown while bathing.

  But it was not impossible—at least the state police thought so—and that was the story they stuck to.

  On May 7, 2004, six members of a coroner’s jury settled into their chairs at a government building in downtown Joliet to hear testimony relating to Savio’s death.

  While a coroner’s inquest involves witnesses, testimony and a jury, the proceeding is nothing like a court trial. The purpose is solely to determine the manner and cause of death, and jurors have only five options available to them: natural, accidental, suicide, homicide and undetermined. An inquest can be called for any death that is not obviously natural.

  The jury’s decision also carries no legal weight. At Savio’s inquest, Will County Coroner Patrick K. O’Neil prefaced the proceedings by reminding those gathered there, “This is neither a civil nor a criminal hearing.” As a statement from the Adams County, Illinois coroner’s office explains, “The verdict and inquest proceedings are merely fact finding in nature and statistical in purpose.”

  Fewer inquests are being held these days, following a change in Illinois law that gave coroners the option after January 1, 2007, to determine the cause of death without an inquest. But in 2004, a suspicious death such as Savio’s necessitated one, and a little more than two months after the discovery of her body in a bathtub, the first probe into her tragic demise was under way.

  O’Neil ran the show at Savio’s inquest, but the star player at the proceeding was Special Agent Hardy of the Illinois State Police. Hardy was dispatched to testify, even though he only played a small role in the investigation of the woman’s death. He did not talk to Peterson or Stacy, and he never met with friends or family of Peterson and Savio. He also did not attend Savio’s autopsy and never made an appearance in the second-story bathroom of 392 Pheasant Chase Drive to inspect the death scene. Yet for some reason he was the representative the state police selected to attend the inquest of a police sergeant’s former wife, who died mysteriously in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, weeks away from taking her ex-husband for a good piece of his financial pie, and who had at one time filed an order of protection in which she alleged he had threatened to kill her.

  Hardy did question some of Savio’s neighbors but, by his own admission, not any who might provide any useful information.

  “I didn’t talk to the ones that were really close to her,” Hardy testified at the inquest. “Myself and [another agent] did what we call a ‘neighborhood canvas,’ and we did speak to quite a few of the neighbors in the general area of the residence.”

  It came as little surprise that Hardy did not get much information out of those neighbors.

  “Did anyone hear or see anything unusual, see any squad cars or anything, any suspicious activity in that area?” O’Neil, the coroner, asked Hardy.

  Hardy said they had not.

  “Did you find any signs of foul play during the course of your investigation?” O’Neil asked at the inquest.

  “No, sir,” Hardy said. “We did not.”

  So the tangential neighbors were not the only ones who saw nothing amiss; neither did the state police who arrived soon after the grisly discovery. There were no indications of a burglary or home invasion, no weapons in the house and, according to Hardy, no signs on Savio’s body or in the home that a struggle had taken place.

  “Everything seemed to be in order,” he said. The only possible exception was an unmade bed with some books and magazines lying on it. “Nobody related to us that they saw anything unusual in the neighborhood those last few days.”

  The only unusual thing, then, was the dead woman in the dry bathtub.

  “There was no water [in] the tub when our agents arrived,” Hardy said. “It must have drained out after setting for such a long period of time.”

  Savio’s hair was still wet, the special agent noted, her fingertips were pruned, and her skin was wrinkled. She had a cut on the back of her head, and a small amount of blood was in the tub.

  “We think that the laceration from her—that she sustained to the back of her head—was caused by a fall in the tub,” Hardy said. “There was nothing to lead us to believe that anything else occurred. There was no other evidence at this time that shows that anything else occurred.”

  However, Hardy never laid out a specific scenario about what state police believe immediately preceded the fall in the tub. Had Savio, at the end of her bath, stood up to unplug the drain but slipped before she could do so? Ha
d she slipped getting into the tub? State police didn’t say; perhaps it was not something that could be determined. The tub stopper was down—that was confirmed at the inquest—but there was no mention of having tested the stopper to see how fast a tubful of water could seep away. Would a plugged-up tub drain and dry out in less than two days, the amount of time between Savio’s phone call with her boyfriend and the discovery of her body? Would a body lying in a tub trap some water underneath it that wouldn’t evaporate in that time? If any of these questions factored into the state police’s deliberations, the public never knew of it.

  Savio, state police concluded, had fallen and drowned in the tub while water slowly drained away; she died from an accidental drowning.

  “And at the point we’re at now,” Hardy said, “we’re still waiting… All alibis, all stories were checked as to where people were, and if I remember…if I recall correctly, the only thing we’re waiting for now is some phone records to find out if certain calls were made when they said they were made. So at this point, that’s where we’re at.” And it’s at that point that they pretty much stayed for the next three and half years.

  In stark contrast to Hardy’s confidence in how Savio perished, her family testified at the inquest that they never for a moment believed her death was an accident. Rather, they told the jury that Savio lived in terror of Peterson.

  Savio’s sister, Susan Savio, said Kathleen even predicted that if she died, “it may look like an accident, but it wasn’t.”

  “And it’s just very hard for me to accept that,” Susan continued, “what had happened. His reactions to this were a laughing matter—cleaning everything out, ready to get rid of the house. It’s very hard.”

  Peterson did not attend the inquest.

  Family members also brought up financial issues between Kathleen Savio and Peterson. In the divorce settlement, Savio was to get the house. Once she had it, Susan Savio said, “She was going to sell the house and move away.” But Peterson had other plans, according to Savio family members.

  “He said he wanted to sell her house, pay his off, and open a bar,” said Anna Marie Doman, speaking up from the audience. “That’s what he said at the wake, anyway.”

  At the inquest Doman also told of assets Peterson stood to gain if his ex-wife happened not to be alive by the time they settled the financial issues of their divorce. Peterson, she said, had taken out a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy.

  “She also had a one-million-dollar policy that I’m not sure if he knew that she had changed,” Doman said. “He was the original beneficiary. She did change it to—down the road—to put her boys, plus the equity in her house, which was worth a little over three hundred thousand [the net proceeds were actually $287,154]. It was paid for. But he was trying to claim the whole house on joint tenancy, which should have been hers. It was pretty much a deal that was cut between them. Yeah, so there was a lot of financial gain.”

  While on the stand, Hardy said he knew nothing of any large insurance policies from which Peterson might have been able to profit. He didn’t mention any probe of Peterson’s financial gain from his ex-wife’s death. But Anna Marie Doman asserted that financial gain was at the forefront of Peterson’s mind.

  “He wants the whole house, wanted to be named the executor of the assets, which means he would have controlled the one-million-dollar policy, and plus he also took out a separate policy himself on her, the one hundred thousand,” she said.

  As it happened, Peterson did not become the executor of his ex-wife’s will. Instead, his uncle, James B. Carroll, was named the executor of the two-page handwritten will that coincidentally popped up only about two weeks after Savio died. It was produced by Peterson himself.

  The will, which was written on lined paper and dated March 2, 1997, had Peterson and Savio leaving everything to each other, except “in the unlikely event we should die on or about the same time,” in which case their two sons, and Savio’s stepsons, would get to split it all up. As Peterson was still very much alive when Savio was found drowned in an empty tub, he stood to get everything.

  And Carroll did right by his nephew, allegedly awarding him nearly complete control of Savio’s assets even though the two were divorced, at least halfway, and Peterson was married to another woman with whom he had a child.

  Of the will, Peterson said, “We just tucked it away, and I found it after she died,” according to a Chicago Sun-Times article dated January 25, 2008. “There’s nothing sinister and out of line about it. Everything was done proper.” Interestingly, Savio’s divorce attorney, Harry Smith, said Savio had told him that she didn’t have a will. And the court-appointed administrator for Savio’s estate made a statement claiming that “the actions of the Executor were not in the best interest of the Estate or its beneficiaries,” calling the will itself “purported.” Nonetheless, in 2005, a Will County judge accepted the will as valid, because two of Drew Peterson’s friends testified that they had witnessed both Peterson and Savio sign the document.

  After Stacy Peterson disappeared, three and a half years later, the state police would take a close look at the financial dealings of Drew Peterson and Kathleen Savio, but at the 2004 inquest, the topic did not appear to interest them much.

  The inquest had other business to cover, anyway. O’Neil briefed jurors on Savio’s autopsy, which had been performed by forensic pathologist Bryan Mitchell.

  Savio’s remains were delivered to Mitchell in a body bag. Save for a yellow metal necklace, she was naked, and her hands were bagged. In his physician’s report to O’Neil, Mitchell wrote, “The decedent appears to be of normal development, an adequately nourished and hydrated adult, and white female weighing 154 pounds and measuring 65 in. in length.

  “The hair is long, brown, and straight,” he wrote. “The hair is soaked with blood. The eyes are closed.… There is a foam cone emanating from the nostrils… The lips are purple…. The tongue is partially clenched between the teeth. Each earlobe is pierced once…. The fingernails are short and clean. There is wrinkling of the fingers and palmar surface of the left hand.”

  Mitchell cut into Savio’s body, making a Y-shaped incision on her torso. His autopsy revealed that she had suffered from no tumors, significant trauma, infection or congenital anomalies. There was moderate pulmonary edema, or buildup of fluid in Savio’s lungs, and water in the ethmoid sinuses. In his report, Mitchell ascribed the immediate cause of Savio’s death to drowning. In the space on the report to list “other significant conditions contributing to death but not related to the terminal conditions,” Mitchell wrote nothing.

  Toxicological testing showed Savio had been living clean, free of alcohol and drugs, both street and prescription, when she died.

  Mitchell did find a one-inch blunt laceration to Savio’s scalp, a red abrasion to her left buttocks, three bruises on her lower abdomen, a bruise on the back of her thigh, purple bruises on both shins, two abrasions to the right wrist, an abrasion to her right index finger and a red abrasion on her left elbow. Other than the head wound, O’Neil told the jury that the injuries had been on her body for some time.

  “There are six—or there are seven other bruises noted to the decedent, all of which are old. There are no new bruises noted to the decedent,” O’Neil testified. He also said, strengthening Hardy’s assertion, “The laceration could have been related to a fall.”

  The jury took it all in—Hardy’s testimony, the family’s version of events, and the contents of Mitchell’s autopsy report. They retired, deliberated and returned to announce that they found Kathleen Savio’s death to be, indeed, an accidental drowning.

  The verdict stunned Savio’s family. “We were all standing in the hallway like, ‘Holy shit. Is that it?’” said Anna Marie Doman.

  Furious that her family had been denied justice, Doman told me that after the inquest she tried to get the state police to take another look at her sister’s death, but her pleas went unanswered.

  “I was screaming my
head off,” she said. “I was calling everyone I could. I had a suitcase full of stuff. They [the state police] said, ‘The coroner said it’s closed. It’s an accident.’ I asked [the coroner’s staff] more than once, ‘Is there further testing you can do?’ I’m thinking exotic drugs. Is there strange poison?”

  But the answer from the state police was clear: the jury’s decision essentially ended their interest in the matter. As State Police Master Sergeant Thad Lillis said at the time, the jury’s conclusion would likely close the investigation of Kathleen Savio’s death.

  And so it was for three and a half years, until Stacy Peterson vanished. Only then, after Stacy had disappeared, did anyone pay attention to the sordid tales of Kathleen Savio’s marriage to Peterson and the appeals of Savio’s sisters that her death had been no accident.

  The same day the state police declared that Stacy Peterson’s death was a “potential homicide” and named her husband Drew Peterson as their only suspect, the Will County prosecutor announced he had secured a court order to exhume Savio’s body from Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, for additional postmortem testing.

  On November 9, 2007, State’s Attorney James Glasgow’s petition to disinter Savio’s body from the suburban Chicago cemetery was granted. In his petition, Glasgow said Savio’s death scene appeared “consistent with the ‘staging’ of an accident to conceal a homicide.”

  Four days later heavy equipment ripped open Savio’s resting place and her leaky—or, as one police source put it, “cheap”—casket was pulled from the ground.

  Savio’s body was taken back to Will County for another autopsy, this one performed by forensic pathologist Larry Blum. Months passed before Blum’s findings were returned to the county and his determination released to the public. During that time, another forensic pathologist, not from Will County and more accustomed to the bright lights and big stage, did an autopsy of his own. The autopsy, performed with the approval of Savio’s family, was paid for with private funds, but the disclosure of the findings was quite public.