FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  The press follows the police on Bretz’s list of people not to talk to.

  “One of the dangers is people write down what you say, but it’s slanted to their point of view,” Bretz said.

  Any speaking to the media should be done, or at the very least directed, by the attorney. Bretz explained how he would handle Peterson.

  “Come across as being concerned,” he said. “The loving husband…. ‘Stacy, please come back to me. I know we’ve had our differences, but please come back to me. I love you. The children….’ We haven’t heard any of that.

  “I would have just taken a completely different approach to it,” he said, adding, “preferably, I would have done all the talking.”

  Bretz said he has encountered difficult clients before, and even let the ones who dismissed his instructions go, but “for the most part, people listen to you.”

  The point Bretz tries to get across to his clients is the police only care about what you say if they can use it against you. They are looking for incriminating statements or a statement they can prove untrue, he said. It’s not as if you are going to talk your way out of trouble in the papers or on television.

  “If the police have enough in fact to arrest you, they’re going to arrest you whether you say anything or not,” he said.

  If he were representing Peterson, Bretz said he would try to establish that Stacy was still alive or had made plans to take off alone. Failing that, he said, “Your best bet is to sit back, say little, stay out of the limelight, let the investigation take its course, and hope it hits a dead end.”

  Immediately after Stacy was reported missing, her family expressed a distrust of the police, which seemed understandable considering that Peterson himself was a cop, and he’d apparently skated without serious scrutiny when his last wife died.

  “The only thing we worry about is, once a cop, always a cop,” Matthew Simmons, the husband of Kerry Simmons, who is a half sister of Tina Ryan, said to me on November 1, 2007, while we stood in the midst of the mayhem outside Peterson’s residence. The day we spoke, police pored over the house searching for clues to Stacy’s disappearance.

  Simmons had some advice for the police as they combed for clues, going so far as to let the air out of the inflatable Halloween decorations in the front yard and to check beneath the family’s aboveground swimming pool.

  “It’s just like this,” he said. “Do your job. That’s all we’re asking.”

  That same day, Savio’s sister Anna Marie Doman showed up and decried what she described as the indifference of the state police who had investigated her sister’s death in 2004.

  “Nobody looked at my sister’s case close enough,” Doman told me. “I never got a call back [from the police]. It was like they couldn’t be bothered.”

  About a week later Doman learned that the investigation into her sister’s death was being reopened. The day before Savio’s body was exhumed, Doman’s son, Charlie Doman, said he didn’t want the Illinois State Police to investigate his aunt’s death again, because he remembered how they had handled it the first time.

  “I think another agency needs to look at it,” he said. In explaining why, he said, “Well, they fucked up. Now what are they going to do about it?” He also wondered, “If they’re protecting this guy, why are they protecting this guy? Does he have something on them?”

  Doman didn’t get his wish; the investigations into Savio’s death and Stacy’s disappearance remain in the hands of the state police. Whatever they were doing about either case, they’ve said little about it publicly. On the one occasion they let the press in on what they trumpeted as a possible break, it blew up in their collective face, with the hot lead proving to be nothing more than a truck driver’s fabrication.

  Peterson’s former boss, Bolingbrook Police Chief Ray McGury, was more candid about the case. He publicly shared his desire to fire Peterson—a possibility his sergeant dodged by retiring—and his disgust at his subordinate’s antics after his wife disappeared. Unlike Bretz, McGury was confident Drew Peterson would be charged in connection with both Savio’s death and Stacy’s disappearance.

  “They’re just waiting for some things to happen,” McGury said in January 2008. “Some things have to happen. Some information has to come back to them to start putting some pieces in place.”

  McGury believed there would be a resolution to both cases. He also was of the mind that Stacy knew what part her husband might have played in the death of his third wife. In fact, he believes she might have known all along. “I think she did,” he said. “And that’s that tightrope you walk, because she’s a victim and yet, you know….” Stacy was Peterson’s alibi when the state police investigated Savio’s death, an official told me. Once she was nowhere to be found, his alibi was gone. Then again, as long as she didn’t turn up, she couldn’t recant her story either. If McGury’s theory ends up playing out, Stacy and Savio are both victims, but Stacy had a hand in at least covering up for her husband. She might not have known what she was getting into when she wed Peterson, but if McGury was right, she learned before too long.

  “The day, and this is my personal opinion, the day she married him was the day she signed her death warrant,” McGury said. “Personal opinion: She’s a young girl at the time. What was she, eighteen when she married him? I’ve got a son that’s twenty. He’s a kid.

  “But still, I can kind of see. I do want to give her the benefit of the doubt. I think she got caught up. She came from a tough life, at least I understand that she did. She had a guy who was good to her, who had money—took care of her. [It] was the first time probably in her life that she had that. There are thousands of stories like that I’m sure in this country, where people get sucked up into that whole scenario there.”

  Stacy might have been one in a thousand, but the other nine hundred ninety-nine were not the focus of months of national media scrutiny. For a time, her story dominated not only all local outlets, but was also daily fodder for cable-news programs that breathlessly reported every new development or rumor in the case, however minor or unlikely. Sharon Bychowski practically devoted her life to keeping the public aware of the missing woman’s case, but all that attention amounted to little in regard to helping unravel the mystery of where her best friend Stacy had gone.

  While rumors swirled that the police and prosecutors were ready to pounce on Peterson and charge him with the murder of his fourth wife—just as soon as they could find her body—they had a body all along in 2004. But the state police insisted that this body, of third wife Kathleen, ended up dead accidentally.

  Television talking heads were quick to cast aspersions on Will County Coroner Patrick O’Neil for supposedly botching the inquest into Savio’s death. But O’Neil merely presided over the proceeding. During the inquest, Savio’s relatives painted a frightening and sinister picture of Peterson, but Illinois State Police Special Agent Herbert Hardy informed the six-member coroner’s jury that nothing indicated that Savio had met her end through foul play. Savio drowned after falling and hitting her head in the tub. It was as simple as that. The jury heard this and returned with a determination that Savio was indeed the victim of an accidental drowning. It is hard to question their conclusion in light of Hardy’s testimony.

  The results of a coroner’s inquest carry absolutely no weight in criminal court. Yet, for some reason, the state police chose to point to it as the reason to close the case on Savio’s death.

  For the state’s attorney to ever charge Peterson, the state police will have to explain what their agents were thinking in 2004. Such a move by prosecutors would be tantamount to throwing the investigators under the proverbial bus, since in criminal trials prosecutors and police play for the same side. Even if the agents on the case deserve to be thrown there, it’s a step any politician would have to be reluctant to take.

  Drew Peterson must be nervous. He likens his position to being stricken with cancer and waking up each day hoping a miracle cure has been discovered. But
it is not clear if he means that this miracle cure will be Stacy coming home to show everyone he did not kill her; that the state police will bungle the investigation of her disappearance—just as they did with his last wife, if forensic pathologists Michael Baden and Larry Blum are to be believed; or that he is brought to trial and found innocent.

  Whatever Peterson believes about the mess he has gotten himself into—or the tough hand fate has dealt him to play—he remains free to talk about it with whichever reporter happens to show up at his front door, or on whatever television program he deigns to grace with his appearance. For no other reason than that many people think he killed two women he had married, Drew Peterson is a man in demand.

  In March of 2008, he also bested the state police in court to get back his seized Grand Prix, Denali and computers. Drew was being Drew, the cop who in the 1980s was fired and indicted, only to have the charges dropped and his job restored. Twenty years later he was under suspicion for his third wife’s death; nothing came of it. Then his fourth wife vanished, and so far no one can stick anything criminal about that on him. The state police take away his computers, guns and cars, and he gets back everything but the guns. And even the guns, or at least most of them, ended up in the possession of his son Stephen, as Peterson requested. He is Drew Peterson, and he keeps winning.

  And this is where the expert lawyers have nothing to say to him, where maybe they are wrong and Brodsky is the best man to handle his case. Because no matter what the smart thing to do might be when you are suspected of killing a couple of your wives, Drew Peterson, the man in demand, has seldom failed to meet these demands. Whether he does it himself, showing up in New York to make a live morning show appearance or tape a prime-time spot, or sends Brodsky, Drew Peterson and his lawyer have said too much and too many of the wrong things. Yet Peterson is still walking around saying them.

  Peterson may actually feel like he has cancer, but in the end he is probably going to be all right. Considering Peterson’s history of slipping out of trouble, Glasgow’s lack of a strong opponent in the upcoming election to spur him toward taking action, and the stubborn elusiveness of a body that can be identified as Stacy, the incumbent state’s attorney may be content to watch public interest wither and die, and embark on another four years in office. Drew Peterson was a cop. He knows how the system works. He has testified in court more times than he can remember. He has told me that appearing before a grand jury is old hat to him. Peterson knows how the deck is stacked. And no matter what he says about his anxieties and worries, he can’t be that scared.

  In the months since her best friend vanished, Sharon Bychowski has done her very best to antagonize Drew Peterson.

  She’s rallied the community, organizing benefits and fundraisers to subsidize volunteer searches for Stacy Peterson. She’s plastered the windows of her house, right next door to Drew’s, with missing-person fliers and erected a large sign in her front yard bearing Stacy’s photograph under the words “Where is Stacy???” In an expression of neighborhood solidarity, the sign moved around to other houses on the cul-de-sac of Pheasant Chase Court. And Bychowski rarely misses an opportunity to speak against Peterson in the media, slamming him for everything from hiring a publicist to supposedly socializing with young women apparently star-struck by his notoriety.

  “He’s a married man,” she said. “We need to remind him of that.”

  In his newfound bachelorhood, Peterson has stepped out every once in a while on weekends—sometimes in the company of his attorney, Joel Brodsky, and his friend from up the street, Steve Carcerano—and passed some time at Tailgaters, a neighborhood bar. Bychowski took issue with his leaving his four kids home alone, even though his sons born to Kathleen Savio were by then teenagers and old enough to watch the younger two.

  To remind Peterson of his status as legal husband of Stacy, Bychowski and her son, Roy Taylor, organized a “boycott” of Peterson’s hangout, calling for patrons to walk out if he dared to set foot inside. Instead of going back, Peterson, Brodsky and Carcerano took their business to Chicago’s upscale Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse. At Gibsons, Brodsky said, Peterson would be “able to meet a much nicer class of people.”

  Peterson still managed to find himself in the company of a very attractive, and very young, woman. Kim Matuska, an employee of the tanning salon frequented by Peterson’s friend Steve Carcerano and then Peterson himself, told me she had on occasion spent the night at Peterson’s home—although she insisted there was “nothing physical” going on. When I asked him about it, Peterson did not seem to share that opinion.

  Either way, Peterson was there for Kim when the Naperville police pulled over the guy she was riding with one early May morning and took him into custody. She and Peterson happened to be talking on the phone at the time. They were talking on the phone a lot around then, she said, and he rushed out about 2 o’clock in the morning to pick her up. He rushed out so fast, in fact, that the Naperville police stopped him for speeding. Peterson got off with a warning.

  Matuska, an aspiring veterinarian attending a community college in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, said the cops had hassled her about her involvement with Peterson—right after her very own mother called them about it.

  Matuska said a state police investigator showed up at the tanning salon and told her that not only was he sure Peterson killed both Kathleen and Stacy but that she would be next. Amazingly, the young woman was not put off by this and asked the cop what was actually a very valid question: “Then why isn’t he in jail?”

  Nearly a month into Matuska’s relationship with Peterson, even Sharon Bychowski—Peterson’s most determined opponent—had yet to talk any sense into her.

  But after months of squaring off with Peterson, Bychowski became terrified of her neighbor, and for good reason: The suspect in two homicides had acquired the ability to open her garage door.

  A remote control garage door opener programmed for Bychowski’s residence was inside one of Peterson’s vehicles that the Illinois State Police had seized as evidence in November 2007. In March 2008, Peterson managed to recover the Pontiac Grand Prix and GMC Denali, and when going through the cars, he discovered the opener that Sharon had given to Stacy so that she could get inside to prepare for a garage sale. Now Peterson had the opener, and he used it to open her garage door.

  “I fear for my life,” Sharon told me after seeing, to her alarm, her garage door mysteriously open and figuring out why.

  “In the event that anything happens to me, I want the public to know I fear for my life. I feel closer to Stacy and Kathleen than ever.”

  Bychowski called the police, who tried to get Drew to give up the garage door opener. He refused. It was his property, he said. Besides, he was only checking the openers when he was looking through the cars that he had just gotten back from the police. He had no idea it would open Bychowski’s garage.

  “It’s nothing I did intentionally,” he said. “So kiss my ass.”

  That would not be Peterson’s only brush with the law after Stacy went missing. In fact, he would end up under arrest on a felony charge of unlawful use of a weapon when police and prosecutors decided—nearly seven months later—that one of the guns taken into custody as possible evidence in Stacy’s disappearance was illegal.

  The barrel of the weapon, which was a semiautomatic assault rifle Brodsky claimed Peterson carried with the department’s blessing as part of his SWAT duties, was shorter than the state-mandated sixteen inches. Peterson surrendered himself at the Bolingbrook police station and was driven to the Will County jail in Joliet by a couple of state troopers. He seemed to be enjoying himself on the ride, laughing heartily and scoffing at his latest legal jam as nothing more than “the usual.”

  Peterson spent only a few hours being processed in the county jail and was released after posting a $7,500 bond. On his way out, Peterson exclaimed, “There’s good news—I just saved a bundle on my car insurance!”

  One cop source questioned why the prosecutor
charged the case at all and mocked Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow for waiting so long to do so. The source wondered how prosecutors could have suddenly realized the gun was illegal after holding onto it for more than a year.

  “What?” the source asked. “Nobody had a ruler seven months ago?”

  A spokesman for Glasgow said prosecutors were well aware all along that the gun was illegal and only took action when it appeared they might lose custody of it and some of the other weapons they were holding in the case. It turns out prosecutors might have been right about that, as the very next day, Brodsky won the return of eight guns being held by police for evidentiary purpose. Possession of the weapons was transferred to Peterson’s son Stephen, the Oak Brook cop.

  While Peterson laughed his way in and out of police custody, for Bychowski her neighbor’s return was no laughing matter. With one push of a garage door opener, he frightened her enough to install video cameras on the exterior of her house and inside her garage.

  The posters and signs in Bychowski’s yard, however, seemed to truly get under Peterson’s skin. He said he worried about the effect the pictures would have on his two youngest children, Anthony and Lacy. They would ask him, “Why is that picture there?” Peterson said. The whole time Stacy has been missing, he’s continued to tell them their mother is on vacation.

  “I tell them the picture’s up because they miss her,” Peterson said. “I don’t tell them they put them up to harass me. My whole thing is, do what you want to me, but leave the kids alone.”

  While Peterson was feuding with one next-door neighbor, the other was hoping to pull stakes and get out of the cul-de-sac. In the wake of Stacy’s disappearance, those neighbors put their three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house up for sale. As of March 2008, the house was still on the market.

  The life of Drew Peterson has certainly taken a drastic turn since October 28, 2007, ten days after the fourth anniversary of his fourth marriage. A week and a half after he’d sprung for a diamond ring as an anniversary gift for his wife, he was insisting to a skeptical world that he had nothing to do with her puzzling and troublingly abrupt disappearance. By the time the long Illinois winter, one of the snowiest in years, was slowly giving way to spring, Peterson had been in the national news so much that he was beginning to sound like Princess Diana or George Clooney, a major celebrity fed up with his fame, instead of a lifelong suburban cop who became a media spectacle because most of America believed that he might have killed his last two wives. He bemoaned his lack of privacy, how he could not even escape his notoriety in Disney World and the way his house was pelted with eggs while he was out of town.