FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  One thing Peterson was consistent about was his effort to be funny. And as he grew increasingly glib, one attorney told me that if the embattled ex-cop had retained him, he would have “fired him” as a client if he did not agree to shut up. Peterson’s first two attorneys, Fred Morelli and Gary Johnson of Aurora, Illinois, might have actually fired him, or maybe he gave them the sack. Either way, the relationship was obviously not working, because while Morelli and Johnson were representing him, Peterson went on the Today show and asked for a lawyer to come forward and take his case.

  Peterson mentioned to host Matt Lauer—during the same appearance in which he discussed how Stacy’s menstrual cycle took a toll on their marriage—that he was frightened by the prospect of funding his legal defense. “Talking to lawyers Monday night, it could cost as much as a quarter-million dollars to defend one of these cases,” Peterson said. “So, basically, I’m reaching out to attorneys of America for help.

  “If anybody would like to take my case and help me out here, please call,” Peterson said. “Let me know what you can do for me. Help me out.”

  Sure enough, Peterson did get a call. It came from Chicago attorney Joel Brodsky. And in Brodsky, Peterson may have found legal counsel who enjoyed attention as much as he did—as long as the attention was not on his personal life or questionable professional actions.

  Brodsky bristled when it surfaced that the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission suspended his law license for three months for forging a dead man’s signature to get paid. On May 8, 2001, the commission administrator filed a one-count complaint against Brodsky, alleging that he “forged a signature on bank forms in order to withdraw client funds from the bank, falsely endorsed a cashier’s check issued by the bank, failed to deposit the proceeds in a separate identifiable trust account and kept the funds for his own purposes.”

  Later, the Illinois Supreme Court agreed with a review board that Brodsky did not commit forgery, because he did not intend to defraud anyone.

  Brodsky again got bent out of shape when it came to light that in September of 2002 a SWAT team had responded to his home in the upscale Chicago suburb of Wilmette.

  A report of the incident, which was classified as “mental-suicidal subject,” said that Brodsky’s wife, Elizabeth Brodsky, went to the police station about 6 p.m. and claimed her husband was “inside the house armed with a shotgun.”

  Elizabeth Brodsky later said she did not think her husband was suicidal and had no intention of conveying that to the police. She said she had merely argued with Brodsky and had gone to the police station in hopes of talking to a counselor. The police asked her if there were any guns in the house, she said, and she told them there were two. She insists she never said her husband was “armed with a shotgun,” and she was very critical of the Wilmette Police Department in general.

  Regardless of what Elizabeth Brodsky said at the time or five years later, the police surrounded her home and a squad of officers was sent to the Brodsky residence, dispatched through the multijurisdictional Northern Illinois Police Alarm System. Elizabeth and Joel Brodsky described this group as a SWAT team.

  Joel Brodsky also said suicide was not on his mind after arguing with his wife.

  “I’m in my living room watching TV,” he said. “Next thing I know, I’m getting a call from a hostage negotiator.”

  Brodsky was taken from his home to Evanston Hospital. No one was arrested in connection with the incident.

  But when his personal life was not under the microscope, Brodsky not only tolerated the media attention—he ran after it. And there was little indication that he discouraged his client from doing the same.

  The pair went on the Today show and Brodsky appeared with some frequency on cable-network news programs. The two of them seemed to be trying to outdo one another with outrageous quotes.

  Asked how Stacy, a young mother with four children to take care of and a house to keep up, would have time to carry on the adulterous affair alleged by her husband, Brodsky said, “There’s always room for Jell-O.” On the author of a threatening letter to Peterson, Brodsky said, “You tell me a guy who writes a letter like this wouldn’t try to kill Drew?” and warned the would-be attacker that his client was a karate expert and ex-police officer. “You definitely don’t know what you’re getting into,” the attorney declared.

  Brodsky was pleased with the persona he projected on the small screen. “I can tell you, I think I do a pretty good job on TV,” he said. “People have told me I do a pretty good job.”

  While he said he still enjoyed trying cases, he also seemed to be auditioning for a career in show business. Acknowledging that he might want to dabble in television as a second job, he mused, “It would be nice if I could mix them both.”

  Brodsky might have come charging in like the cavalry when Peterson implored the “attorneys of America for help,” but he wasn’t going to save the day for free. When I asked him if he was working the case simply for the publicity, he laughed. In an attempt to fund his legal defense and hire some private eyes to track down Stacy, Peterson launched his DefendDrew Web site in the second week of December 2007.

  “For the cost of a few cups of your morning coffee, you can help to ensure that Drew can afford to support his ongoing legal defense, find his missing wife and divert any remaining funds into a trust for his children,” the Web site said.

  The page went on to read, “We are not asking you to decide whether or not Drew Peterson is guilty, but in the United States of America, one should be able to defend one’s self without losing everything.”

  The site was shut down, and Peterson and Brodsky have yet to divulge how much money they raised.

  They may not have made a dime, but once again Peterson succeeded in causing quite a stir, which was the last thing you would expect from a man who had become the prime suspect in one wife’s disappearance and the obvious focus of police attention in another’s homicide. But maybe Peterson had a feeling his situation was not so dire. Or else, after getting a taste of fame, he simply couldn’t help himself.

  Both Brodsky and Peterson seemed happy to be cast in virtually any light, so long as it shone on them brightly. To up the amperage of their image, they brought in Florida-based publicist Glenn Selig.

  Sharon Bychowski, for one, found the notion of Peterson employing a publicist curious, if not despicable.

  “Normal people don’t get publicists,” she said.

  Selig, at least according to Peterson and Brodsky, saw dollar signs in the case of Stacy Peterson. They now wanted to get paid to talk, particularly about Peterson’s days as an undercover officer with the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad. The restriction must have irked Peterson to some extent, because he was proud of the work he had done with the unit. He was eager to share tales of the escapades he and the other narcs got themselves into, but would not go on the record about any of it without Glenn’s permission. And Glenn wanted to get paid.

  Despite the involvement of Selig and whatever restrictions he may have mandated, Peterson remained glib and talkative, much like his outspoken confidant, Brodsky. Part of it was Peterson’s ego, at which even he poked fun.

  “I find me fascinating,” he told me once, somewhat in jest. But almost everything with Peterson was a bit of a joke. It was just Drew being Drew, explained Candace Aikin.

  “Like you guys see,” Aikin said. “That’s the way he is. He always tries to make light of a situation.”

  In the early days of Stacy’s disappearance, Peterson was apprehensive around reporters and at times expressed his disdain for them. There was the oft-repeated television clip of Peterson, standing in his driveway, asking the press mob a curious question: “What do you get when you cross the media with a pig?”

  Peterson was kind enough to provide the answer: “You get nothing, because there’s some things a pig won’t do.”

  Before long, though, Peterson warmed up to the press and showed no aversion to consorting with the swine mil
ling around his home, wisecracking with them, and generally being pleasant and accommodating, although sometimes veering toward the bizarre.

  Take, for example, the night the state police served their fourth search warrant within six weeks of Stacy vanishing. Peterson was in rare form that evening, regaling a trio of reporters who’d called on him soon after the state cops showed up at his doorstep with the paper to search his house.

  Peterson addressed a wide range of subjects, from surprise that reporters had yet to pin down one of his adolescent love interests to dismissing any possibility of his appearing as a Playgirl magazine centerfold model. In between, he talked about not missing his career as a police officer—he’d just retired—and the lack of prospects on his romantic horizon.

  “I thought you guys would be all over my eighthgrade prom date,” Peterson quipped soon after I walked up to his front door. As usual, he wouldn’t open the door all the way for the interview. Instead, he stood in the six-inch gap but remained there to answer questions, even though, he said, he knew this would not sit well with Brodsky.

  Peterson seemed to grasp that his newfound celebrity status was not something to take for granted, and he would have to put some effort into maintaining it. When other stories threatened to push him off the front page or from the top of the hour, Peterson, with the able assistance of Brodsky, was quick to reinsert himself as the focus of attention.

  Right before Christmas Eve 2007, Anu and Dignesh Solanki threatened to steal some of Peterson’s time in the sun. Dignesh’s wife, Anu, had driven from her home in Wheeling, Illinois, to the Des Plaines River, supposedly to dispose of a broken Hindu idol. She did not come back in a timely fashion, and the last anyone found of her was her car, left parked and running by a river dam. Fearing she had drowned, police mounted a four-day, six-mile search that involved underwater divers and helicopters. But Anu wasn’t anywhere near the river.

  Four days later, Anu resurfaced in Los Angeles, where she had fled with another man, just as Peterson claimed his own wife had. Despite the fact that Anu was gone only four days and Stacy, at that time, almost two months, Peterson pointed to Anu Solanki as living proof that he was telling the truth.

  “This happens a lot more frequently than people are talking about,” he said. “This is just another case of what happened to me happening to someone else.”

  After the Anu Solanki case, Brodsky issued a “demand” to prosecutors that they guarantee not to prosecute Stacy if she were ever found alive, or attempt, through a civil lawsuit, to get her to repay the cost of searching for her. Apparently this was in response to prosecutors having considered, and rejected, filing criminal charges against Anu Solanki and seeking restitution for the $250,000 search.

  “We’re demanding that the state’s attorney come forward and state, if Stacy comes back right now, or shows herself, she will not be prosecuted or sued,” Brodsky said to me.

  When a representative of the state’s attorney’s office declined to meet his demand for this assurance, or to even recognize it, Brodsky called it a sign that they were “not as intent on getting Stacy back as they would lead us to believe. You’ve got a scared young girl out there who may have made a mistake and not realized the consequences.” No one investigating Stacy’s disappearance, however, has ever said anything about bringing charges against her.

  While Brodsky’s demand purported to have Stacy’s best interests at heart, in late January he and Peterson called a Chicago radio show and suggested the host sponsor an on-air contest to get Peterson a date.

  On January 23, Peterson and Brodsky placed an impromptu call to longtime Chicago radio personality Steve Dahl, host of a morning show on 104.3 WJMK-FM. For months, Dahl had been having a lot of fun at Peterson’s expense, imitating Peterson’s voice while reading the news and making up songs about his predicament. So, as Peterson later described it to Shepard Smith of Fox News, “We decided to call in and let some air out of him,” keeping everything “in good nature and in good fun.”

  Dahl asked Peterson about a young blond woman who had reportedly left a note in his mailbox asking him to call her. The woman neglected to include her telephone number in the note, an omission Peterson described as a “blonde moment.” Peterson also said that the woman had later driven by his house and blown him kisses, but nothing ever came of it.

  “That’s got to be encouraging, though,” Dahl said. “The ladies are coming back around.”

  “The ladies are coming back around,” agreed Peterson.

  Then Brodsky piped up: Dahl should host a “Win a Date with Drew Contest.”

  Dahl immediately embraced the idea. “I’ll absolutely do that,” he said. “We’ll do a Drew Peterson dating game tomorrow.” Dahl said he would line up three women for Drew to interview. “Let’s do it tomorrow at eight.” Then he added, “But I think we’re going to send a chaperone on the date, just to be on the safe side. I’m kidding! I’m kidding!”

  After Peterson and Brodsky had hung up, Dahl plugged the contest to listeners: “Tomorrow, Drew Peterson dating game, 8 o’clock.”

  Peterson and Brodsky spent the day preparing questions for the ladies who’d be vying to go on a date with him. They approached the dating show as a comedy bit, but their questions had the ring of Peterson’s recent history. Some of his questions were: “Do you need a boob job?”

  “Do you get PMS?”

  “Do you now or have you ever lived in a home that required license plates?”

  “Do you have any tattoos, and are they spelled correctly?”

  Brodsky’s contribution was, “Do you take baths or showers?” an obvious reference to Kathleen Savio, whom the audience would remember was found dead in a dry bathtub.

  However, the lucky bachelorettes never got their chance with Drew. Station management, anticipating a public outcry, decided against the dating game bit the night before it was to go on the air. Peterson claimed he wasn’t disappointed by the turn of events, but his dismay was apparent.

  Two days later, Peterson waited outside his home in the freezing cold for nearly an hour to talk to Fox News’ Shepard Smith about, he presumed, the whole radio dating game affair. Peterson thought he was in for a light interview, a break from the probing questions and cloud of suspicion, for a television piece about his sense of humor. But Smith started asking uncomfortable questions about how his children were handling their mother’s disappearance and the notorious, but elusive, blue barrel.

  Peterson, delighted to talk about himself at the outset of the interview, was visibly less eager to answer the more serious questions. He obliged at first, saying that he personally grieved over Stacy’s disappearance but wasn’t going to “hide in a corner and cry about it,” and also that being a suspect in her disappearance was like having cancer: “You’re just looking for that miracle cure to make it all go away.” He also told Smith that his two younger children missed their mother and believed she was on vacation, but the older two boys knew she was missing.

  However compliant he may have been early on, Peterson shut down the interview as soon as Shepard said, “The neighbors say they saw you carrying out a big blue barrel that would be big enough….”

  “Again, again, again, Shepard, that’s not what we agreed to talk about,” a near-frozen Peterson said to Smith, who was playing hardball while sitting in the warmth of his New York studio.

  “Oh, I didn’t agree to any…any restrictions on conversation. I would never do that,” Smith said unconvincingly.

  “Okay, well, then I guess I got to walk away. Have a good day, Mr. Shepard,” Peterson said to Mr. Smith. “It was nice talking to you.”

  Peterson then removed his earpiece and retreated into his garage, after soliciting assistance from the camera crew to “Unhook me, guys.”

  As the camera showed him walking back into his house, Smith intoned, “Well, he’ll talk about the dating game, but he won’t talk about the fact that the neighbors say they saw him with a large, fifty-five-gallon blue barrel, carryi
ng it out with someone else, shortly after his wife went missing.”

  I followed Drew into his garage after the interview. Once he was inside and defrosting, Peterson asked me, “Did that look funny or stupid?”

  I answered, in all honesty, that it was pretty funny.

  Peterson was then manning the phones, taking calls from Brodsky and Selig the publicist, while his fifteen-year-old son, Thomas, watched the reactions of Smith and Geraldo Rivera on the large living room television. Rivera and Smith made rather unfavorable comments about Thomas’ father while family photographs, most of which had the boy’s own face and those of his siblings blurred out, flashed across the screen.

  Pictures of Thomas’ mother, Kathleen Savio, and Stacy Peterson, the woman who had adopted him, were also shown while commentators speculated about whether Peterson may have killed one or both women. Thomas’ younger half siblings, Anthony and Lacy, played in the living room but paid little to no attention to the television. And Peterson was too wrapped up in his own televised personal drama to pay much mind to the children, at least that afternoon.

  Peterson could not even escape his newfound fame when he took his children to Disney World at the end of December and into the New Year.

  “The problem is, I got more stares and dirty looks,” Peterson said of his failure to blend in with the crowds in the Magic Kingdom. “One guy called me Scott Peterson,” the California man who is on death row after having been found guilty in 2004 of killing his wife and unborn son.

  Drew Peterson might have been complaining about his notoriety, but he could not hide the pleasure he took in telling how many people recognized him.

  “It was like, ‘That’s Drew Peterson,’ and it happened a lot,” he said.

  Peterson traveled to New York City and Los Angeles to make television appearances. He invited People magazine into his backyard for a photo shoot. Whenever the whirlwind of media attention billowing about him started to subside, Brodsky conveniently brought to the press another anonymous letter detailing a Stacy sighting, or a lascivious text message from a mystery lover Peterson happened to stumble upon while looking at her old cell phone. Once Brodsky claimed he was sent a photograph snapped by a retired police officer showing a woman in Thailand who he believed just might be Stacy, even though she looked nothing at all like her.