FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson Read online

  Copyright © 2008 Joseph Hosey & Phoenix Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.

  The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author of this book and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or its affiliates.

  eBook International Standard Book Number (ISBN): 978-1-61467-120-6

  Original Source: Print Edition 2008 (ISBN: 978-1-59777-606-6)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data Available

  Kindle Edition: 1.00 (8/8/2011)

  Ebook conversion: Fowler Digital Services

  Rendered by: Ray Fowler

  Book Design by: Sonia Fiore

  Cover Photography: AP Images/ M. Spencer Green

  Printed in the United States of America

  Phoenix Books, Inc.

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  Beverly Hills, CA 90212

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  For Gracie

  “He knows how to manipulate the system, and his next step is to take my children away. Or kill me instead.”

  —From a letter dated November 14, 2002, from Kathleen Savio to Will County Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth Fragale regarding her estranged husband, Sergeant Drew Peterson.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BACK COVER

  Walter Martineck hardly knows Drew Peterson, a retired police sergeant in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook, but he’s a good friend of Peterson’s stepbrother, Tom Morphey. So it was that Martineck found himself unwittingly drawn into the events of October 28, 2007, the day Peterson’s young wife, Stacy, was last seen. The prologue that follows is a dramatization based on an account Morphey reportedly gave to police, as well as statements Martineck made in the media regarding his strange run-in with Morphey late that day, before Martineck had heard a word about Stacy’s disappearance. In the months that she’s remained missing, numerous stories have flooded out from both those who knew her well and those who barely knew her; stories that the police, and everyone following the case in the national news, are sorting through to answer the vexing question: What happened to Stacy?

  Drew Peterson set a cup of coffee in front of his stepbrother, who was slumped in a stuffed chair in the back of Starbucks, away from the wide windows looking out onto busy Weber Road. Tom Morphey sipped the coffee and waited to hear why Peterson had summoned him there.

  But Peterson only said, “Drink this. You look like you need it.”

  Morphey could believe he did. He’d woken up that morning with a familiar dull ache behind his eyes and burning in his stomach after spending the day on the couch, watching the Bears give away a game to the Lions. Then he dozed off and might still have been asleep if his stepbrother hadn’t called at 5 o’clock that evening, asking to meet him at the Starbucks midway between their homes in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook.

  Peterson told Morphey to be there at seven; it was important.

  Morphey heaved himself off the couch and, since he had nowhere else to be, headed over to Starbucks, happy for the chance to help his stepbrother for a change. Usually it was Peterson coming through for him with things like money, furniture, or work. Just the other day Peterson had told him he could probably line up something at the local Meijer department store; Morphey needed the job, and it would not have been the first that Peterson had helped him get.

  When Morphey walked into Starbucks, he was early for their meeting. Peterson was already there, sitting in back, reading the paper.

  After getting Morphey coffee, Peterson asked, “How’s things at home?”

  Morphey just shrugged and asked about Peterson’s three boys, daughter, and wife, Stacy. Peterson gushed about the kids: Tom at the top of his class and playing trumpet in the school band, Kris a champion junior high wrestler, Anthony and Lacy adorable and growing up fast. About Stacy—his fourth wife, mother to Anthony and Lacy, stepmother to Tom and Kris—he said nothing. He fell silent and stared across the table.

  “Why aren’t you working tonight?” Morphey asked.

  “Taking the day off.” More silence. Then: “I need something.”

  So he didn’t just want to talk, to get something off his chest. He—Drew Peterson, Bolingbrook police sergeant, enforcer of law and order—needed something from his troubled, unemployed stepbrother. It was the best Morphey had felt in a long while.

  “What?” he said quickly.

  “Stacy,” Peterson said. “She said she’s leaving me again. You know how she is.”

  Morphey said he knew.

  “It’s like this every month,” Peterson said. “Right around her period. It’s getting to be too much. Especially since Tina.”

  Stacy’s half sister, Tina, had died about a year before. Peterson had told Morphey how hard Stacy had taken it, about her depression, her pills. Morphey, too, knew a little something about depression and pills.

  “You know what else?” Peterson said. “I think she’s running around on me.”

  “Get out of here.”

  Peterson pulled out his wallet and opened it to a picture of Stacy, in a tight party dress, leaning over Drew as he sat on a chair. “You’d say no to this?”

  “She’s a fox,” Morphey agreed, “but that doesn’t mean she’s running around.”

  Peterson put the wallet away. “It’s getting to be a problem,” he said. “She’s a problem. We got to dispose of the problem.”

  Morphey didn’t know what to make of that. He didn’t really want to know. Had he even heard his stepbrother correctly? He didn’t try too hard to figure it out.

  Peterson rubbed his temples and pushed back his hair. “I need you to wait here for a little while.” Then he reached into his jacket, pulled out a cell phone and handed it to Morphey.

  “Take this. Whatever happens, don’t answer it. Just stay here. Don’t fall asleep. Get another coffee, whatever. Just don’t leave and don’t answer the phone. And don’t call anybody either. Think you can handle that?”

  “Yeah, Drew.”

  Peterson left. Morphey studied the phone. It was a nice one, but Morphey did not mess with it. He did not want to screw up. He sat there and tried to stay awake.

  After about half an hour, a jolting ring made Morphey drop the phone in his lap. When he picked it up, he saw the caller ID.

  Stacy.

  Morphey stared at the phone until it stopped ringing. He didn’t know what was going on, but suddenly he wasn’t so sleepy.

  Another half hour passed before Peterson reappeared. When Morphey asked where he had gone, Peterson told him that he just went to run an errand.

  Morphey handed back the phone. “Your wife called.”

  Peterson put the phone in his pocket without looking at it. “I know,” he said. “You did a good job.”

  Out in the parking lot, Peterson said, “Give me a call tomorrow. I might have something on that Meijer’s thing.” He got in his GMC Denali and drove off.

  A few hours later, he called Morphey again. “You think you can come over here? I ne
ed a hand moving something. The Denali and the Grand Prix are in the driveway, so just park in front. You’re all right to drive, right?”

  Morphey put on his jacket and headed for the door. He told his girlfriend Sheryl he’d be back in a minute; he had to go to Drew’s.

  When he got to Peterson’s house, his stepbrother opened the front door before Morphey had a chance to ring the bell. As Morphey stepped inside, Peterson glanced around the sleepy cul-de-sac. It was a few days before Halloween. The air was crisp, the house almost as dark as the street.

  The kids were sleeping, and Peterson said Stacy was out with her sister. Morphey thought that was strange, since both cars were parked in the driveway. Maybe Stacy’s sister had picked her up from the house.

  Morphey followed Peterson upstairs and into the bedroom. He noticed a blue plastic barrel next to the bed. The barrel was tightly sealed and had two plugged holes in its lid, maybe openings for a pump. It looked a little smaller than a fifty-five-gallon drum.

  Peterson squatted and put his fingers under the edge of the barrel’s bottom. “I’ll tip it,” he said. “You take it from the top.”

  He pushed the barrel over, and Morphey accepted its weight. It was warm against his hands. Peterson backed out of the bedroom and toward the stairs. Morphey walked after, holding up his end. The barrel was not very heavy, and now Peterson bore all of its weight as he stepped backward down the stairs.

  Morphey asked what was in the barrel.

  “Chlorine,” Peterson said.

  Morphey thought it was strange that Peterson would have a barrel of chlorine for his swimming pool all the way upstairs, next to his bed. He wondered for what reason it needed to be moved late on a Sunday night, not to mention why it felt warmer than the air in the room. But he didn’t ask any of these questions. He told himself to just believe his stepbrother, to go along with it and show himself capable of helping with this simple task.

  Once downstairs, they carried the barrel through the attached garage and out to the driveway, where Peterson set it down to open the back of his Denali. The two men hoisted the barrel into the car. Peterson wedged a piece of wood against it to keep it from rolling around.

  “Well, I better get this out of here,” he said.

  “Where you going?” Morphey asked.

  “I know a guy wants to buy some chlorine,” Peterson said.

  “Now?”

  “He wants it pretty bad.” Peterson pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and palmed it into Morphey’s hand.

  “Ah, Drew, come on,” Morphey protested. “You don’t have to.”

  “Got to run,” Peterson said as he climbed into his Denali and closed the garage door from inside his car. Morphey watched the door go down, then drove home.

  In his kitchen, he sat down and had a few drinks. His head throbbed. Dispose. Problem. He had a few more and then walked up the street to the home of his pal Walter Martineck. Lights shone through the front window, so he knocked on the door.

  Wally opened the door, and Morphey blurted out, “I think I just helped move Stacy with Drew.”

  Wally tried to follow what he was saying, but Morphey was drunk and rambling, nearly incoherent. He kept trying to push a handful of money onto his pal. Wally refused and asked where the cash had come from. Morphey wouldn’t say. He left his friend standing mystified in the doorway and walked back to his own house.

  When he woke up the next morning, his girlfriend told him something that he already knew, no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise. So he went back to bed and tried to forget; he tried to pretend that it had never happened.

  When he awoke the second time and couldn’t fall back to sleep, Morphey swallowed a handful of pills and chased them with what was left in a big plastic bottle of liquor. The rest of that day, October 29, 2007—the day that Stacy Peterson was reported missing, as his girlfriend had informed him in the morning—was largely lost to Morphey. And as he gratefully drifted off again, he hoped the whole thing had been a bad dream.

  Waking up in a hospital room in Naperville, the next town over, was no dream. Through his haze, he heard people saying he had tried to end it all with liquor and pills. He believed what these people were saying, never mind that he could not quite make out what they looked like. Whether he had intentionally tried to kill himself, which was entirely possible, or had simply overdone it trying to block out the terrible thoughts racing through his mind, Morphey didn’t know or care. They gave him drugs to sleep, which was nice, but when the drugs wore off, an unwelcome consciousness returned. He slept and woke, and upon one woozy resurfacing, Drew Peterson had materialized next to his bed.

  Peterson, catching Morphey’s eye, leaned over and asked, “How you feeling?”

  Inked into the flesh of Yelton Cales is the sad history of his troubled family. It’s an incomplete history, still without an ending, but tattooed tributes to dead relatives already cover much of Yelton’s upper body. On his left arm are the names of two of his four sisters, Jessica and Lacy. They died as young children. Scrawled indelibly on the left side of his neck is his mother’s name, Christie. She is probably dead too, although no one knows for sure; she hasn’t been seen or heard from since she walked away from her family, clutching her Bible, in March of 1998.

  One name absent from Yelton’s skin is that of his little sister Stacy Peterson, who was last seen at her home in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook on October 28, 2007. Maybe Yelton didn’t add Stacy’s name because he hoped she would be found quickly. More likely he didn’t have the work done because at the time that she vanished, he was in prison for violating parole on a sex-crime conviction. When he was freed in June 2008, however, and Stacy was still missing, it looked like he might need to add another tattoo to his living book of the dead.

  Yelton’s body is a testament to the adversity that he and his sister, Stacy Peterson, faced from a young age, but the tattoos tell only part of the story. They don’t tell about the mother who, before leaving for good when Stacy was fifteen, regularly took off for long stretches of time. They don’t tell about the reportedly heavy drinking of both parents, or of how Stacy and her siblings were left to fend for themselves for weeks on end as teenagers. The tattoos don’t tell the full story, even, of the man who bears them, a registered sex offender whose run-ins with the law pained his sister, although she still loved and tried to help him. And they don’t tell of the loss of Stacy’s adored half sister, Christina—called Tina to distinguish her from her mother, for whom she was named—who succumbed to colon cancer in September 2006, when Stacy was a young mother of two, stepmother of another two, and the fourth wife of a much older police officer.

  When Stacy Cales, at the age of nineteen, married forty-nine-year-old Drew Peterson, overnight sergeant of the Bolingbrook Police Department, he must have seemed to offer the stability, respectability and authority she’d rarely known in her tumultuous early years.

  It didn’t turn out that way. Soon after Tina died, by many accounts, the Petersons’ marriage went on the rocks, and several people say Stacy talked about taking her four kids and leaving Drew. Then, slightly more than a year after Tina’s death, Stacy went missing, without the kids. All along, Drew Peterson has maintained that Stacy, repeating her mother’s pattern, abandoned the family for another man.

  The Illinois State Police, however, saw it differently from the beginning. Within two weeks, they had ruled Stacy’s disappearance a “potential homicide,” and their sole suspect was, and still is, Drew Peterson.

  The same day the state police declared Stacy’s disappearance a potential homicide, the Will County state’s attorney also reopened an investigation into an event in Peterson’s recent past that to many had always felt unsettled and mishandled: the death of his third wife, Kathleen Savio, to whom he was married when he began romancing the then-seventeen-year-old Stacy. Three and a half years before Stacy vanished, Savio, with whom Peterson was still embroiled in contentious divorce proceedings even though by then he h
ad married his much younger girlfriend, was discovered dead in her home, in a dry bathtub. State police investigated and pretty swiftly concluded that Savio had slipped in the tub and died accidentally. A coroner’s jury upheld that ruling. Peterson was never a suspect, and the whole episode was behind him in about two and a half months. But when Peterson’s next wife disappeared, the death of his third spouse suddenly took on a more suspicious appearance. Her body was exhumed for another look, and this time a different conclusion was reached: Savio’s death had been no accident, but a homicide.

  Unless Stacy Peterson turns up somewhere, with a plausible explanation of where she’s been all this time, her exit from the world will be much like her entry into it and a great deal of the time in between: marked by tragedy and family troubles.

  Stacy Cales was the third child born to her mother, Christie, and father, Anthony, of Downers Grove, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Yelton came first, followed by Jessica, the sister Stacy never met because she died in a house fire before Stacy was born.

  Stacy’s aunt, Candace Aikin of El Monte, California, said the little girl was about a year and a half old when she suffered burns and smoke inhalation during a December 1983 fire in the family’s ranch home. Christie Cales, who was about a month away from giving birth to Stacy, managed to escape from the burning house through a window, barefoot and in her pajamas. Her husband, Anthony, wasn’t home at the time of the fire.

  “My sister called me when the paramedics were taking her daughter out of the house,” Aikin recalled. “She said, ‘They’re taking my daughter away.’”

  Cruelly, the family suffered another terrible loss not long after. In October 1987, when Stacy was three and the family had added two more daughters—Cassandra, age two, and baby Lacy—Lacy fell victim to sudden infant death syndrome. After the loss of her second daughter in less than four years, Christie Marie Cales’ life seemed to spiral out of control, and she became an intermittent figure in Stacy’s upbringing.

  After her tragedies, Christie “had a history of vanishing for weeks on end,” according to the missing persons Web site the Doe Network, dedicated to investigating and solving such cold cases. She moved to the south suburbs to live with family members and saw her children only periodically.