FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  If the police were correct in their speculation, Peterson may have been trying very hard, with the help of his stepbrother, Tom Morphey, to ensure that Scott Rossetto received well more than his share of misery. In the early days of Stacy’s disappearance, before the twins’ grand jury appearance, state police conducted searches around Scott Rossetto’s home in the Village of Shorewood, a burgeoning but still relatively small bedroom community about fifteen miles from Peterson’s cul-de-sac. The searches did not register with the public as particularly important at the time, but within weeks, the state police’s reasons for poking around out there became quite clear.

  The week before the Rossetto twins went before the grand jury, a pair of law enforcement sources divulged why the police were searching Scott Rossetto’s town: not because Rossetto was a suspect—he wasn’t—but because, as one of the sources said, “If you knew your wife had a boyfriend, you’d put the body by him.”

  Another police source on the Peterson case told me investigators speculated that the night Stacy vanished, her husband took her cell phone with him to Shorewood and dialed his own phone. He had left his telephone back in Bolingbrook, the source said, and when the call went through, it would show that Stacy’s phone was somewhere near Scott Rossetto’s residence and that his own was in Bolingbrook, where it belonged. That way, the call would “ping” off cell towers in Shorewood, leading investigators to believe Stacy had made the call herself while she was with Rossetto. According to a column by Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times, Peterson had some help with this plan. The day after Sheryl Alcox said her boyfriend, Tom Morphey, was away at “therapy,” Sneed broke a story painting Peterson’s unemployed stepbrother not as a bumbling patsy but as an active accomplice who helped “dispose” of a troublesome wife.

  Sneed extensively quoted a solid “source close to the investigation” who pegged self-preservation as Peterson’s motive. Stacy posed a threat to him: Her existence jeopardized not only his financial security, but his freedom.

  “Sneed hears Stacy Peterson told a clergyman in August that her husband had claimed to have killed his former wife, Kathleen Savio, and made it look like an accident,” Sneed said in a November 29 column, apparently referring to Schori.

  Not only that, the source said, but “the day Stacy disappeared, she told Peterson she was leaving him and issued this ultimatum: She was going to begin divorce proceedings and she wanted him out of the house by Wednesday….”

  Sneed’s column continued: “The source believes it was the day of Stacy’s ultimatum that her life may have ended. Stacy had told friends recently that if she disappeared, it wouldn’t be her doing.”

  And that, according to Sneed’s source, was where Morphey came in.

  Sneed’s source provided a timeline for the late afternoon and evening of the last day Stacy was seen alive. It picked up about six hours or so after Stacy supposedly left her home and family, and three and a half hours before her “Dear Drew” call to Peterson.

  By 5 p.m., according to Sneed’s source, Peterson called in to take the day off work. At 7 p.m., he met Morphey at a local Starbucks and discussed “the problems he was having with Stacy and how to dispose of the problem.”

  “Peterson reportedly excused himself and left Morphey in the coffee shop with Peterson’s cell phone, which he told Morphey not to answer if it rang,” Sneed wrote. “The phone did ring after Peterson’s departure and the name ‘Stacy’ appeared on the caller ID.”

  Sneed went on to say, “Later that evening, Morphey was again summoned by Peterson—only this time to his home, where he reportedly asked Morphey for help removing a blue plastic barrel, which Morphey later described to police as feeling warm, and loaded it into a sports utility vehicle, sources said.”

  Morphey reportedly attempted suicide the next day by overdosing on liquor and pills. He was taken to Edward Hospital in Naperville for treatment. Peterson openly admits he stopped by the hospital to pay his stepbrother a visit. The two must have had quite a lot of catching up to do.

  Another pinging of Peterson’s cell phone the night of October 28 led state police to coordinate underwater searches of stretches of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in and around the nearby towns of Lockport and Romeoville, a police source told me.

  Stacy’s sister Cassandra Cales claims to have called Peterson’s cell phone about 11 o’clock that night from the nearby Meijer department store parking lot. Stacy was last seen that morning.

  Cales said Peterson sounded out of breath and told her he was at his home. But Cales said that she had been outside of his house shortly before she made the call, and he was nowhere to be found.

  The police source said cell phone records showed Peterson was somewhere near Romeoville by the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

  “When Cassandra called Drew’s phone, it pinged near that area,” the source said.

  In response, divers searched the canal floor, using high-tech equipment and watercraft, which required the clearing of abandoned, submerged automobiles. The searches turned up nothing.

  Despite the lead that put police there, my source called one of the searches a “complete waste of time” and was not impressed with the operation as a whole. Even with the high-tech underwater cameras, the searches were leaning on luck and battling long odds. Apparently, locating a body in the Sanitary and Ship Canal, which runs twenty-four feet deep and over two hundred feet wide, is akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Visibility in the canal was limited to about half a foot, the source told me, and for the camera to catch a peek of Stacy or a blue barrel, it would “have to bump into it.”

  “I think they’re just trying to show they looked, she’s not in there, and move on to the next location. If they do [find the blue barrel supposedly containing Stacy’s remains],” the source said before the searches were called off, “it’s because God wants them to, because there’s no way they’re going to find it in that muck.”

  Peterson has his own version of events of October 28, the day he last saw his wife. When he recounted it to me, while sitting behind a desk in his house on Halloween night, he didn’t mention Tom Morphey once.

  The last time he laid eyes on his wife, Peterson said, was midmorning on October 28, a Sunday. He admitted to having skipped out of work early, returning home about three or four a.m. Peterson said he hit the hay at that time but woke up at about 9 o’clock to the din of his children jumping around. He said he “believes” Stacy was still in the house, but he could not be sure because, having just woken up, he did not fully trust his memory.

  Peterson does remember his wife telling him she was leaving to help Bruce Zidarich, a friend of her sister, paint the former home of her brother, Yelton Cales, in Yorkville, which was a good half hour away.

  At the time of Stacy’s disappearance, Yelton Cales was back in prison at Western Illinois Correctional Center for violating his parole. Peterson said the family had leased the Yorkville home for him to serve out a house-arrest sentence. He couldn’t stay with his father, Anthony, Peterson said, because he lived too close to a school to house a registered sex offender. Peterson said his wife, who favored bright and vibrant colors, painted the rented house in bold hues for her brother. Stacy’s next-door neighbor Bychowski added that Stacy even gave the decor an Asian flair to make her brother “happy” during his house arrest.

  “She painted the wall red on one side. She did a theme like a Chinese theme,” Bychowski said. “She bought him a bedspread with her [own] money so he could have a Chinese bedroom, because he loves Chinese.” Bychowski said Stacy also arranged for her brother’s ride home from prison and installed a telephone in the house.

  Yelton, however, did not get to enjoy his Chinese decor for long before being dragged back to prison, so on that Sunday, Stacy and Zidarich were going to repaint the house and break the lease. Peterson said he thinks his wife left about eleven in the morning, but once again he said he could not be sure.

  Zidarich reportedly last spoke to Sta
cy about 10:15 that morning. Stacy never showed up to paint. Her sister Cassandra had spent the day waiting to hear from her. Cassandra allegedly said Stacy didn’t pick up her cell phone when she called that afternoon, or any of the other times she tried ringing her that day.

  The next time Peterson said he heard from his wife was about 9 p.m., when she called his cell phone. He said she wanted to let him know she had met another man and abandoned her family. That’s the story he’s stuck with ever since: Stacy ran off with another man.

  Bychowski too has her own timeline of that day, and through sheer repetition—to the cops, grand jury, and numerous reporters—even the most minute details appear burned into her brain and capable of being summoned automatically.

  That Sunday, she called the Peterson house at “five to twelve,” she said. Kristopher answered, and when she asked to speak to his mom, Bychowski said he sounded a little disoriented, responding, “Um, uh, uh, hold on.”

  “Drew picked up the phone,” Bychowski continued, “and said, ‘Hey Shar-on’—that’s what Lacy called me, Sharon—‘what’s up?’ And I said, ‘Where’s Stace?’ ‘Oh, she went to her grandpa’s to run some errands.’”

  Bychowski believes Peterson did not know then of his wife’s plans to accompany Zidarich to Yorkville.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it? Yes,” Bychowski said. “He didn’t know. I don’t believe he knew that she had already talked to Bruce about cleaning the house. So there’s a difference of story right here, right from the get-go.”

  But at the time Sharon called, she had an entirely mundane purpose: to give the kids some lollipops she’d bought for them. So Peterson brought Kristopher, Anthony, and Lacy over after they’d eaten lunch, around 1 p.m. He asked her to watch the three children while he took care of some business.

  “By the time he got actually in the car, it was about 1:15,” Bychowski said. “And then he came right back at 1:30, because I was still outside. Then I went inside about 1:30 to do the rest of my work. Then I started wrapping Christmas presents.”

  About a half hour later, around 2 p.m., Bychowski called Stacy’s cell phone. The call went straight to voice mail, which struck Bychowski as odd. “When she’s gone, she never turned her cell off, ever.”

  Bychowski did not hear from Stacy for the rest of the day. At about 8:30 a.m. the next morning—Monday, October 29—her doorbell rang. She expected it to be Stacy, who usually rang the bell and walked right in. This time, though, it was Peterson. He grabbed Bychowski by the arm and, saying he needed her, took her to his house. She didn’t even have time to put on her shoes.

  “I thought, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God, what’s wrong?’ My heart is pounding, that kind of pounding when you get pulled over by the cops?… [I asked,] ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ [Drew said,] ‘Just come, come.’ He wouldn’t tell me. I see that there’s both cars in the driveway.”

  Once she was inside Peterson’s house, he dropped what he must have thought was a bombshell, only Bychowski knew it was coming.

  “He says, ‘She left me,’” Bychowski said. “I go, ‘Yeah’…. I’m thinking, ‘And?’ ’Cause I know how unhappy she is, and I know she wants to leave him. I thought she left for sure.

  “I said, ‘Where are the kids?’ And he says, ‘They’re upstairs.’”

  With this revelation, she knew something was amiss.

  “He goes, ‘I know this is really difficult for you. I know you thought she was your bud and all.’ I’m like, ‘Now what do I do?’ I’m in the house alone with him, basically. And you know what else was odd? Everything was perfect. Like, we have the same flowers. They’re always on her kitchen table. Gone. There’s nothing on the kitchen table. No kids’ place mats. No sippy cups. Nothing. Odd.”

  Peterson then complained of Stacy looting their safe and going on a spending spree. He said she took $25,000 from their safe at home, Bychowski said, but Stacy had told Bychowski the week before that she had transferred $25,000 to pay off a home-equity line of credit so they would only have to divide up assets and not liabilities. “But he doesn’t know that I know that,” Bychowski said. “So I just said, ‘Oh.’”

  Peterson said Stacy also took passports and car and house titles, and bought herself new clothes and a bikini. The list gave Bychowski further cause for concern.

  “Well, I also know that she has a favorite bikini. She’s not going to give that up. I know she has these fabulous bras that she bought herself as a treat after she had her liposuction. I said, ‘She’s not giving up those bras.’ I know her. She had favorite bras. She’s not giving up all those bras.”

  Bychowski was in disbelief. She figured Stacy would leave Peterson sooner or later, but she could not swallow that the young woman would abruptly depart without taking her children. When she got home and briefed her husband, she said he had a similar sense of dread.

  “I said, ‘Bob, the kids are there.’ He sits up and he goes, ‘Okay, that’s not right.’ I said, ‘You don’t think I’m being a drama queen to tell you that I think that there’s something wrong with this?’ And he goes, ‘One thing I know about her is, she’d never leave her kids.’

  “My husband’s not involved with a lot of stuff,” Bychowski said, “but he knows her well enough to know those kids are always with her.”

  Soon after Bychowski returned home, Stacy’s sister Cassandra and Bruce Zidarich were at her door.

  Zidarich asked Bychowski if she’d heard about Stacy; Bychowski said she had. Stacy’s sister, Bychowski said, was crying.

  Cassandra had apparently had a sleepless, stressful night. After not hearing from Stacy all day Sunday, around eleven that evening she had gone to her sister’s house. The driveway was empty. She said she spoke with her nephew Kristopher who told her his parents had fought that morning, then Stacy had left, and his father was out looking for her.

  Cassandra left the house and called Peterson on his cell phone. She was sitting in the parking lot of a nearby Meijer department store when he told her that Stacy had run off, and he was trying to find her. She said Peterson also told her he was home, which she found difficult to believe, considering she had just been there.

  Cassandra then went to the Downers Grove Police Department. She did not want to trust the matter to the Bolingbrook police, and might have chosen the Downers Grove police because she had grown up in the town, but they sent her to Bolingbrook anyway.

  From the Bolingbrook Police Department, Cassandra drove by her sister’s home again. This time, both the Denali and the Grand Prix were parked there. Cassandra then headed to the nearby District 5 state police headquarters and, in the early hours of Monday, October 29, reported Stacy Peterson missing.

  By the time Cassandra showed up at Bychowski’s house, she had an awful feeling about what had happened to her sister.

  “She said, ‘He killed her. He killed her,’” Bychowski said.

  “One thing I know about Stacy is she would never leave with anybody without calling Cassandra,” Bychowski continued. “She would never let her sister cry on TV. She absolutely, unconditionally loves Cassandra—no matter what. No matter how stupid Cassandra acts. She totally loves Cassandra.”

  Monday ended and Tuesday morning came with no sign of Stacy on Pheasant Chase Court. It was the third day Bychowski would not hear from her friend, but the missing woman’s husband kept coming over and calling. At around 9 a.m., he rang his neighbor’s phone to give her his predictions for the day ahead.

  “He goes, ‘This is what’s going to happen today. The media, the media will be coming today.’”

  Bychowski remembered her surprise and confusion, and asked Peterson what he was talking about.

  She said Peterson told her, “Well, because you know Bruce thinks I hurt Stacy. You know, Bruce and Cassandra think I hurt her. So now the media’s going to be coming today.”

  She said Peterson wanted her to move one of his cars into her driveway so reporters would not know he was home. He called her again when he was out at the airpor
t with his kids, putting a sticker on his plane. The media was coming, he said, and he didn’t want them to know if he was there or not.

  Bychowski said her secretary talked her out of doing him the favor—“Sharon, do not get in that car. Are you out of your mind?”—so Bychowski told Peterson that she didn’t think it was a good idea.

  “He said, ‘Can you just wear gloves?’” Apparently he assumed that her concern was about leaving fingerprints. Bychowski coolly responded, “Uh, no. I don’t think that’s a good idea either.”

  In the end he just put his car in her driveway himself, Bychowski said. On Wednesday, he informed her that he “may or may not need” to move his car back over to her house again, she said, but called back to tell her about a change in plans: His stepbrother, it seemed, tried to commit suicide, and Peterson was going to visit him in the hospital.

  Upon his return, Bychowski asked how his stepbrother was making out, and Peterson sounded puzzled.

  “He goes, ‘What? Oh, well, he lost his job, lost his family—go figure,’” Bychowski said. “I thought, ‘Ooh, you guys must not be too close to him.’ Just kind of the way he said it was very flippant.”

  Peterson wasn’t the only one asking favors. Also on Tuesday, Bychowski said, a state police sergeant called and asked her if she could babysit the children next door, because the state police were taking Peterson in for questioning. Instead, they ended up talking to him at home for about an hour and a half, Bychowski said, so Peterson was still around at 5:30 in the afternoon when he rang her doorbell again and asked if she could take Anthony to an evening daycare program.

  That Wednesday was Halloween, and Bychowski, determined that the children not miss their holiday fun, took them trick-or-treating.

  “About 4 o’clock [Peterson] called me and we passed the kids over the back fence with their outfits. And then I brought them in here and changed them into Superman and Tinkerbell.” To avoid the media, Bychowski drove the kids—minus Kristopher, who went on his own—down the street.