FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  By November 16, just three days after Savio’s body was taken out of the ground, Dr. Michael Baden—former chief medical examiner of New York City, author, and frequent guest on television-news shows—had reached his conclusion about how Savio died. When, after several commercial-break teasers, he announced his verdict at the end of Greta Van Susteren’s program on the Fox News network that night, Susteren treated the event as though it were the Oscars and Baden held an envelope with one of the winner’s names inside.

  “It’s my opinion, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, it’s a homicide, and that’s what I would put down on the death certificate,” Baden proclaimed.

  While Baden’s pronouncement carried no legal weight, it certainly packed a dramatic punch, given the circumstances leading to Savio’s exhumation. And Baden was not done talking. Detectives and doctors, Baden said, should have realized there was something rotten afoot in 2004.

  “Even initially, there was enough information that it was a homicide because of the fact that she was an adult, healthy, hadn’t been drinking or anything, found dead in a bathtub. It does not happen accidentally,” he said. “No history of seizures or illness. And in addition, there were indications then of multiple blunt-force traumas, of being beaten up. And one of the things we were able to look at today is those bruises [that] were still there, and we could see with the naked eye that they were fresh.”

  Baden’s assertions of fresh bruises and an obvious homicide were a direct contradiction of the inquest testimony of both Special Agent Hardy and Coroner O’Neil. O’Neil, an elected official who is not a forensic pathologist, could say he was merely repeating what was related to him by Bryan Mitchell, the doctor who performed the initial autopsy. The state police, on the other hand, had some explaining to do.

  Digging up Savio’s body not only put fresh pressure on the state police—and, certainly, on Peterson—but unleashed a flurry of activity from Savio’s family to right what they saw as long-ignored wrongs.

  Anna Marie Doman and her brother, Henry Martin Savio, started to put a wrongful-death civil lawsuit in motion, going so far as to hire New York City attorney John Quinlan Kelly, who’s no stranger to high-profile cases. He represented the parents of Natalee Holloway, the young woman from Alabama who vanished during a high school graduation trip to Aruba in May of 2005. Like Baden, Kelly frequently appeared on Fox News programs and, in fact, one night in February, 2007, was a guest on Greta Van Susteren’s show that featured both the Natalee Holloway and Savio cases.

  Kelly also represented the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson in a multi-million-dollar civil suit against disgraced football legend O.J. Simpson.

  Like Nicole Brown Simpson’s family before her, Doman suggested her family might pursue the wrongful-death suit against Peterson if the case broke that way.

  “If it flies from there, that’s the direction we’ll go,” Doman said.

  Doman and Henry Martin Savio also felt emboldened enough to try to wrest control of Savio’s estate from the suddenly embattled Peterson.

  In February 2008, the brother and sister filed court papers to have Carroll removed as executor and replaced by themselves. They alleged that allowing Peterson’s uncle to be the executor was a conflict of interest, and leveled accusations that he “wasted and mismanaged the estate.”

  That opinion was echoed by Richard J. Kavanaugh, who was a court-appointed administrator for Savio’s estate. In January 2008, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, Kavanaugh said he was concerned about the way the handwritten will “just popped up” after Savio died. “It gives you the sense that it’s something that’s concocted.”

  According to the Sun-Times, Kavanaugh had become involved in the case because no Savio family member showed up to represent the estate in court at the time that the will was being handled, a point Peterson, in the same article, made hay of: “If they didn’t like it, well, they should have done something. They didn’t.”

  Now, apparently, there were plenty of Savio family members who wanted to be put in charge of the dead woman’s estate, not only Doman and her brother but Savio’s thrice-married father, Henry J. Savio, and his twenty-three-year-old son, who filed suit to be executors themselves.

  Doman and Henry Martin Savio, however, asserted that they should be executors rather than their father, Henry J. Savio, whom they claimed was “unfit to serve due to hostility in that he has had no relationship with any of the children while they were growing up…failed to support them during their minority and first met his grandchildren at the funeral of Kathleen and has no relationship with them.”

  According to the petition to reopen Kathleen Savio’s estate, Henry Martin Savio and Anna Marie Doman have, in addition to full sister Susan Savio, three half siblings from their father’s two subsequent marriages, and another half sibling from their mother’s remarriage. Despite the existence of Savio’s full sister and four half siblings, Henry Martin Savio and Anna Marie Doman maintained that “they had the closest relationship with [Kathleen Savio] prior to her death and have been instrumental to pursuing the investigation into her death.” Doman did live the closest to her sister, first in Bolingbrook—at one time living on the same street that Peterson’s stepbrother, Tom Morphey, would move onto—and then in nearby Romeoville with her two children, Charlie and Melissa Doman, and Melissa’s children. Anna Marie Doman also said she was vocal in her futile attempts to get police and prosecutors to take a hard, serious look at her sister’s death.

  She and her brother, she insisted, were not angling to strike it rich by seizing control of their sister’s estate. In fact, she said, they would probably lose money when legal fees were factored in. They were doing it, she said, to ensure Kathleen’s two sons, Kristopher and Thomas Peterson, got what they deserved of their deceased mother’s worldly possessions.

  “We’ll be suing on behalf of the boys,” Doman said. “People think we’re making money on this. We’re not.”

  A Will County judge sided with the Savios, removing Carroll from his role as executor in April and replacing him with Anna Marie and her father. It was but one step on the path to the wrongful-death lawsuit Anna Marie said she wanted to pursue.

  Different considerations would be in play with such a civil action suit against Peterson. It might not only wound him financially but could also get him on the witness stand, under oath, so an attorney could ask him some less than comfortable questions about the circumstances of Kathleen Savio’s “accidental” demise. If he was placed on the stand, Peterson said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and mutter nothing that might incriminate him.

  The Savio family’s quest for what they saw as justice for their sister got an enormous boost on February 21, 2008, when State’s Attorney Glasgow’s office finally announced the results of Blum’s follow-up investigation and dropped this bombshell: Kathleen Savio’s death was, in fact, a homicide, not an accident.

  “[C]ompelling evidence exists to support the conclusions that the cause of death of Kathleen S. Savio was drowning and further, that the manner of death was homicide,” the press release quotes Blum as saying.

  Blum’s investigation included a review of photos from the scene of Savio’s death, reports of the initial scene investigation, and an examination of the physical location of Kathleen Savio’s death that he conducted on November 20, 2007. His report also included the results of microscopic examinations and toxicological tests conducted on postmortem tissue specimens, which were collected during the first autopsy, on March 2, 2004, the second autopsy performed by Dr. Blum on November 13, 2007, and Baden’s autopsy three days later. Those results, however, remain part of the ongoing investigation into Kathleen’s death and have not been released.

  Blum’s findings certainly were a gratifying development for Kathleen’s family. The news even knocked the wind out of Peterson, who sputtered, “You’re kidding me” and “Unbelievable” when told of the report. A day later he even admitted to being “scared.” Then his bravado returned, and
he and his attorney, Joel Brodsky, dismissed the new findings as having little merit, coming nearly four long years after the original autopsy found no signs of foul play.

  For the time being, even with Blum’s new findings, the official police record of that weekend—that Drew Peterson was watching the dolphins at Shedd Aquarium with his children when Kathleen Savio died—hadn’t been disproved. But Peterson’s alibi was Stacy, and she wasn’t around to confirm it anymore. The state police also have not said what she told them that night.

  But Stacy reportedly had done some talking about the night Drew’s wife before her had died. After Stacy vanished, at least two men came forward to say she had had conversations with them about Kathleen’s death. The conversations must have born little resemblance to what Stacy told the state police, because based on what the men recounted of those talks, they sounded like the farthest thing from an alibi.

  Still, police and prosecutors face the challenge of tying Peterson to the crime. The new autopsy conclusions, while potentially damaging to Peterson, are far from a lock on prosecutors getting an indictment or conviction. In fact, as crime-fighting history in Will County has shown time and again, a lock of that kind can prove somewhat elusive.

  Five miles south of Bolingbrook on Route 53, tucked back from the road behind neatly manicured lawns, lies the sprawling Stateville Correctional Center. For decades, this has been where the worst of the worst were often sent: murderers, rapists, sex offenders. Richard Speck, who one night in 1966 systematically stabbed and strangled seven student nurses in Chicago, then raped the eighth before killing her too, was a longtime resident of Stateville until his death in 1991. John Wayne Gacy, the notorious “clown killer” who entertained neighborhood children as Pogo the Clown and ended up killing thirty-three boys and young men, most of whom he buried in the crawl space under his house, was executed at Stateville in 1994.

  One of Illinois’ maximum security prisons and more recently the site of a receiving and classification center which male convicts from northern Illinois pass through before being assigned a regular prison home, Stateville presents an imposing image. Spreading over 2,264 acres, bordered by a thirty-three-foot concrete wall with ten towers, and inhabited by the ghosts of thousands of hardened felons, Stateville is a potent reminder that crime doesn’t pay. Yet in Will County, despite being home to Stateville, crime—serious crime—doesn’t always get punished either.

  Friday, November 9, just twelve days after Stacy Peterson vanished, Illinois State Police Captain Carl Dobrich announced at a press conference that Drew Peterson was a suspect in his wife’s disappearance. The same day, Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow said that he was ordering the body of Peterson’s third wife, Kathleen Savio, to be dug up and reexamined, to see if the state police, who had handled the investigation into her death and found no signs of foul play, missed something the first time around.

  It was not a good day for Drew Peterson. In fact, it was not a good week. Two days earlier, Peterson had been called to testify before a grand jury. Still, after twenty-nine years in Will County law enforcement, he had to know that he was a long way from being dragged off in handcuffs and charged with murder. He had to know how very unlikely it would be for him to stand trial for the killing of a woman whose body no one has yet been able to find.

  How can it be, many may reasonably wonder, that a man can lose fully fifty percent of his wives under mysterious circumstances and, so far, avoid arrest? In Will County, actually, such situations are not unheard of. The disappearance of Stacy Peterson was another installment of a sad story, familiar enough to have spawned a sardonic joke in the area: If you want to get rid of your wife, Will County seems to be the place to do it. It might be funny if there weren’t a plentiful history of unsolved cases and criminal-justice misfires to support that view.

  In November of 2007, Peterson wasn’t the only guy walking around Will County with a missing wife and the cops on his back. Fewer than ten miles away, over in Plainfield, lived Craig Stebic, husband of thirty-seven-year-old Lisa Stebic, a food-service worker at an elementary school, who went missing about six months before Stacy Peterson. Lisa had mailed her attorney a letter telling him she wanted her husband out of the house so she and their two children could “live in peace.” Unfortunately, the letter did not get to the lawyer until a couple of days after Lisa was last seen alive.

  Stebic told police his wife walked away from their home on April 30, 2007, carrying her purse and a cell phone. A neighbor filed a missing person’s report. While police have named Craig Stebic a “person of interest” in his wife’s disappearance—they’ve searched his computer records, interviewed him, and seized twenty-four guns from his home, along with a pickup truck and a car—he has not been charged in the case. No one else has, either.

  The cases of Stacy Peterson and Lisa Stebic share some striking similarities. Peterson said Stacy threatened to divorce him; Stebic and his wife were in the midst of a divorce. Lisa Stebic, according to friends, said she was afraid of her husband and was receiving counseling from an agency that provides services to battered women (claims her husband denies); Stacy Peterson had also told friends and family that she feared her husband would harm her. Family and friends of both women insist they would never abandon their children. Both husbands are suspects in their wives’ disappearances, although police have not backed up their limited accusations with any action as bold as arresting either man.

  Stebic has even spoken up to say he felt Peterson’s pain. “I know what he’s going through,” Stebic said. “Especially with you media and everything.”

  With Peterson, the police are contending with one of their own: a sergeant with nearly three decades of law enforcement knowledge that could help him outwit those who would put him behind bars. Stebic happens to be a pipe fitter and remains just as free, proving that you don’t have to be a professional to confound the cops.

  Florence Wilms has been following the news of Stacy Peterson’s disappearance with particular interest. She’s seen these details before: the missing wife, the husband who claims she ran off with another man, even allegations of an unaccounted-for barrel. To Wilms, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, the case all too eerily resembles another with which she’s intimately familiar.

  Wilms’ daughter, Joan Bernal, disappeared in December of 1988. Days earlier, she and her husband, Gilbert Bernal, had set out on a trip to his hometown of Edinburg, Texas. According to police, Gilbert Bernal said his wife missed her three children and wanted to return home. So he gave her $1,500, and she hopped on a Joliet-bound bus out of McAllister, Oklahoma. If she ever made it back home, no one saw her around town.

  Like Stacy Peterson, Joan Bernal’s body has not been found and her husband has become a suspect in her disappearance. Witnesses have claimed to have seen Joan Bernal in Chicago Heights and Tennessee; in much the same way, Peterson’s lawyer claimed to have anonymous letters indicating Stacy’s been sighted in the company of a man in a Peoria, Illinois supermarket and in a Kentucky shopping mall.

  One of Bernal’s in-laws reportedly testified that Bernal assured his wife that he could kill her, place her in a barrel, and hide her forever. Other witnesses reportedly said Gilbert Bernal bought a pair of barrels prior to the alleged murder. After his wife disappeared, only one barrel was still in his garage. When Florence Wilms heard about a barrel possibly figuring into Stacy Peterson’s disappearance—Tom Morphey’s as-yet unproven story that he helped Drew Peterson move a barrel the night Stacy vanished—she was astonished.

  “I swear that Drew Peterson has taken a lesson from” her daughter’s case, Florence Wilms told The Herald News of Joliet. “It sounds so similar.”

  Unlike Drew Peterson, however, Gilbert Bernal was arrested, even though there was no evidence of a dead body. On the strength of his in-law’s testimony, and other witness statements, Bernal was charged with the murder of his wife and ordered to stand trial.

  An arrest and a trial date, howeve
r, don’t guarantee a trip to Stateville. After waiting eleven months to stand trial, Gilbert Bernal’s day in court never came; a murder case without a body can apparently only go so far. Prosecutors set Bernal free before he was tried.

  And despite intense searches that now look like an uncanny prelude to the Stacy Peterson case, no one ever found Joan Bernal, or the elusive second barrel.

  Another stubbornly cold missing-wife case in Will County is the disappearance of Jeri Lynn Duvall.

  Jeri was last seen alive by her husband, Bob Duvall, on June 8, 1990, when she was thirty-nine years old. The Duvalls’ stormy marriage was marked by constant domestic strife, according to one of their daughters, Heather. She told The Herald News in a September 2, 2007 article that she remembers her father choking her mother and chasing her around the neighborhood with a knife. Heather also said that he would disable his wife’s car whenever he got mad at her.

  Heather was twelve and her sister, Lisa, was eight when they left to spend a weekend in Michigan with their maternal grandparents. Heather told The Herald News that her parents had fought before their departure, and she “didn’t want to leave her with him.” Her mother reassured Heather that everything was fine, but after the weekend with their grandparents, when Bob Duvall showed up to collect his children, he was sporting fresh scratches on his face and arms. Once he and the girls were at their home in Shorewood, a small town west of Joliet, he told them their mother had walked out.

  It was not for another four days, after Jeri’s mother insisted, that Duvall reported his wife missing to police. The police, in turn, found nothing substantive to help them locate the missing woman.