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

  Despite their differences and failure to turn up any real sign of Stacy, at the conclusion of the first day’s search, Taylor was nevertheless encouraged.

  “We did real good today,” he said, after the volunteers wrapped things up and he took a break to get a bite to eat in a nearby Burger King before going back out with the diehards to search some more. “[This] is much better than what we have dealt with in the past. It’s tenfold what it was.”

  The volunteers shared his enthusiasm, he said, and he took heart that the operation had gotten off to a good beginning.

  “The people obviously are a little happier that it’s more fluid,” he said. “I think they’re more reassured that we have a better format. We have an emergency-management presence. We’re all working together, I think, a little better than we have in the past. We’re coordinated better.”

  One conspicuous absence among the men and women in the field was Drew Peterson himself. Neighbors and friends said he had recently returned to town after taking his children to a Wisconsin water park during their spring break from school.

  He’d gotten back in time to lend a hand, but Peterson was not interested. The day before Taylor’s first search of the spring was to take place, Peterson stood in the front doorway of his home. Asked whether he would be participating, he laughed. When questioned about what he thought of the many men and women sacrificing their time and effort to look for his missing wife’s body, he said, “Go for it,” and chuckled again. He also mocked Taylor, calling him “Sharon’s goofy son Elroy” and “Opie.” Stacy, in fact, couldn’t stand Taylor, Peterson told me a few days after the search. This dislike stemmed somehow from an episode in which Sharon’s son offered to paint the Petersons’ house, and the couple declined.

  Peterson’s attorney had a more expansive response than Peterson to the dozens of men and women willing to give up their weekends to look for his client’s wife.

  “God bless them,” Brodsky said when I interviewed him, three days before the search, for an article published in The Herald News.

  “This is America,” he went on. “I can’t stop them from wasting their time. They can search every bush, pond and river in the state of Illinois if that makes them happy.”

  As far as lawyer and client were concerned, their stance was: What was the point of walking around in the weeds and mud when Drew Peterson had said from the very beginning that his wife was alive and well? How many times was he going to have to tell everyone that she had run off with another man? He was the victim here, the one abandoned and left to take care of four children by himself.

  And Stacy didn’t leave Peterson to go start a new life in some desolate Joliet field. She was Bahamas bound, Peterson had reportedly claimed. Then again, there was that person who claimed to have sighted the young woman in Kentucky. And there was the letter placing Stacy in a Peoria, Illinois supermarket, looking pregnant. Perhaps she was in Thailand, Brodsky and Peterson stipulated to the media, as one photo demonstrated. Of course, no one else believed it was Stacy in the photograph, even though the shot supposedly came from somebody as reliable as a retired cop—somebody just like Drew.

  Wherever Stacy was, it was not a field in Joliet. It was not a field anywhere. It was somewhere warm and tropical like the Bahamas or Thailand, maybe Peoria or Kentucky, but definitely with another man.

  “If they would just consider,” Brodsky suggested in that same interview, “as a possibility that she started her life over overseas, Drew would certainly contribute to that [search] effort.”

  Stacy’s sister Cassandra did not buy—has never bought—Peterson’s story about his wife running off with another man.

  “Drew Peterson believes that my sister left and that we should be searching in other towns, and Jamaica and Thailand,” Cassandra said during a press conference to announce the resumption of the searches for Stacy. “My sister did not leave willingly.”

  To think otherwise, most would say, is delusional. Stacy is no more in Thailand or Jamaica than she is on the moon. But to think she is in a nearby field, one the state police invited inexperienced volunteers to attack on their own, seems equally implausible.

  At least the volunteers could say they were trying to help. Drew Peterson, on the other hand, must have had more important things to do. But for all their trying, for all their good intentions, the volunteers walking around that field were not accomplishing much. Even among their ranks, there was no shortage of criticism. Two questioned how the searchers would react upon seeing a decomposed corpse that had been lying out in the elements for five months.

  “Have any of these people ever seen a dead body?” asked the woman, who did not want to be identified but said her line of work exposes her to deceased people. “Do they even know what a body’s going to look like after all this time?”

  It was probably safe to assume that few of the volunteers meandering around the marshland close to Joliet Junior College had been anywhere near decomposing human remains. God only knows what their reaction might have been had they actually stumbled upon them. But on the first search of the spring after Stacy disappeared, that did not happen. It did not happen the next day either. With each passing day, it seemed less likely that it ever would.

  However fruitless their efforts seemed, the volunteers were not dismayed in the slightest by the prospect of returning to duty. As far as Roy Taylor was concerned, he was never going to give up.

  “This is my life,” he once told me. “This is the most important thing I’ve done in my life.”

  Hours after anyone last spoke to Drew Peterson’s fourth wife, the Red Sox won the World Series and third baseman Mike Lowell was named most valuable player. Nearly four months later, on the day state officials changed Kathleen Savio’s four-year-old accidental drowning verdict to a homicide, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama were facing off in the increasingly rancorous Texas Democratic primary.

  Back in Bolingbrook, Drew Peterson was hunkered down in his home on Pheasant Chase Court. He had never played in a World Series, and he wasn’t running for office, but over the course of the last months of 2007 and the first few of 2008, he occasionally dominated the news cycle in a way that any professional athlete or campaign strategist would envy.

  Things appeared grim for Peterson: the Illinois State Police went out on a limb within the first two weeks of Stacy’s disappearance and boldly classified her case a “potential homicide,” naming Peterson a suspect. The once-closed investigation into Savio’s death also was reopened. Yet despite all the labeling and classifying by the state police, all of their contradicting, accusing and probing, Peterson remained insolent and self-confident.

  “No, I’ve never, ever seen anything like this,” said psychologist Philip Bonelli, referring to Drew Peterson’s public persona. Bonelli, like many residents of Illinois, has followed the case with acute interest.

  Bonelli’s office on quiet West Oak Street in Plainfield is about fifteen minutes from Peterson’s front door. He opened his practice in 1979 and works in the same town as Illinois’ other infamous “abandoned” husband—Craig Stebic, the pipe fitter whose estranged wife disappeared about six months before Stacy went missing. The appearance of headline-hogging Drew Peterson, with his attention-grabbing antics and double the number of wives who may have come to unnatural ends, was the best thing that could ever happen to Stebic, a low-key workingman who promptly got shoved off the front page once his erratic neighbor from Bolingbrook had a taste of fame.

  One of the main tenets of psychology is that diagnosing a patient without the chance to evaluate him directly makes assessment challenging. Before offering an opinion, any credible mental health professional asked to comment on, say, a celebrity acting bizarrely in public or a suspect in a tabloid-murder case will offer the important caveat, “This person is not a client of mine.” However, evaluating a nonclient in the news offers some advantages over a traditional client whom the therapist sees privately in his or her office. It provides the rare opportuni
ty to observe the client in the outside world, interacting with others, his full range of emotions on display, and how he handles situations that cannot possibly be duplicated in a counseling session. There is another advantage to evaluating a person based on his documented public behavior rather than on his account of events in a forty-five-minute session: The psychologist can view the behavior first hand, rather than have to interpret through a prism of whatever defenses, agendas, and distortions the client may have.

  I think that his pattern of deception in relationships and then further deception to cover up the deception certainly makes him a less credible individual. It makes one wonder why he has to lie about so many important things. Is he capable of a relationship? And, if he’s not capable of any kind of emotionally available relationship, then one wonders if this person can have any kind of attachment, or bonds, to others, if all are objects to be manipulated.

  The above was spoken by psychologist and Raising a Secure Child author Zeynep Biringen and taken from a Court TV news transcript. Here Biringen is talking about a man named Peterson, but not Drew; she is talking about convicted murderer Scott Peterson in an interview conducted in September of 2004.

  In the same interview, Biringen states unequivocally that Scott Peterson has antisocial personality disorder, the preferred mental health term used to describe people commonly called sociopaths. Other psychologists, on television and in print media, agreed with Biringen’s diagnosis of Scott Peterson. So perhaps both Scott and Drew share something besides a last name and media notoriety.

  The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a personality disorder as: “Deeply ingrained and enduring behavior patterns, manifesting themselves as inflexible responses to a broad range of personal and social situations…. They represent either extreme or significant deviations from the way the average individual or a given culture perceives, thinks, feels and particularly relates to others…. Such behavior patterns tend to be stable and to encompass multiple domains of behavior and psychological functioning.”

  There are ten types of personality disorders listed in the most recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the bible of the psychiatric profession. These range from conditions such as obsessive-compulsive personality disorder and dependence personality disorder to the more severe and threatening antisocial personality disorder.

  Bonelli, a licensed clinical psychologist, provides professional consultation for couples, families and individuals. He has never met Drew Peterson, but from following his behavior in the media, he felt confident offering his opinions on the notorious police sergeant.

  “His cockiness is the thing that stands out to me,” said Bonelli. “I’ve seen him as being almost belligerently cocky, where he wants to antagonize anyone who might have any negative responses to him.

  “I thought the epitome of his cockiness came out…when he solicited that divorce attorney from Chicago, saying that he’d like to have drinks with her and talk about a divorce,” Bonelli said, referring to an aside Peterson made about Playboy pinup and Chicago lawyer Corri Fetman, well-known locally for her “Life’s short. Get a divorce.” ad campaign.

  Peterson told me he might be interested in retaining Fetman to initiate divorce proceedings against Stacy, who at the time had been missing for more than three months. While the forty-four-year-old Fetman might be a little long in the tooth for Peterson’s taste—considering his four wives got successively younger and the last one was a teenager—the lonely stay-at-home dad indicated he would be interested in something more than just a professional relationship with the busty attorney. “If she wants to go out for drinks, give me a call,” Peterson said.

  It is, of course, possible that Peterson has nothing to hide, and that Stacy did in fact run off with a secret lover to indulge in an adulterous affair. Even if she did, Bonelli said, it would likely not weigh heavily on Peterson’s mind. That’s the way it is with antisocial personality disorder, he said, and he sees a strong sociopathic streak in Peterson.

  In Bonelli’s professional opinion, Peterson’s behavior both past and present strongly conforms to a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. There are seven criteria for the disorder, which the American Psychiatric Association defines as follows:

  • Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

  • Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.

  • Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.

  • Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.

  • Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.

  • Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.

  • Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.

  A person with three or more of the seven is considered a likely candidate. Peterson shows a strong possibility of possessing at least five.

  Lack of remorse. For a man who maintained that his young wife ran off on him, leaving him in the lurch with four kids, two of whom had already lost a mother once in their young lives, he didn’t seem terribly distraught. If he ever seriously searched for Stacy, there’s no evidence of it. While the army of television cameras at his house often annoyed him, he basked in the attention as well—joking with reporters, flying to New York City a couple of times to tape television appearances, even hiring a publicist so that he could profit from his sought-after presence instead of giving away access to Drew Peterson for free.

  He and his attorney, Joel Brodsky, also had a great time joking around with Chicago radio host Steve Dahl about the aborted “Win a Date with Drew Peterson” contest. Peterson was clearly disappointed when the radio station canceled the dating game, although he said he wasn’t.

  Irritability and aggressiveness. Friends and family of three of Peterson’s four wives say he was controlling, threatening, or outright abusive to the women. Savio seemed especially terrified of him; she wrote in a letter to an assistant state’s attorney that “several times” during their marriage she had ended up in the emergency room as a result of their fights, and that after they divorced, Peterson once broke into her house and held a knife to her neck.

  His irritability manifested itself in other ways. Instead of supporting his grief-stricken wife at the funeral of Stacy’s beloved half sister, Tina Ryan, Peterson supposedly turned to Stacy and asked her point-blank if she were “fucking” Ryan’s equally grief-stricken husband. He walked away from a television interview with Shepard Smith when the Fox News personality started asking him questions about the blue barrel and how his children were faring without their mother. Another time, he turned his own video camera onto the press hordes crowding his driveway.

  Reckless disregard for the safety of others. If the abuse allegations spelled out in Savio’s letter to a Will County assistant state’s attorney are true, as well as the many charges made by Savio and Stacy’s family, Peterson’s last two wives certainly felt that Peterson threatened their safety. “[H]is next step is to take my children away,” Savio wrote in the letter. “Or kill me instead.” His second wife, Vicki Connolly, also has claimed Peterson said he could kill her and make it look like an accident, a threat Peterson has denied.

  Repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest. For his renegade operation against career-criminal Anthony “Bindy” Rock, in which he presented himself as a dirty cop who wanted to set up a drug-selling operation, he was fired from his job and indicted on charges of official misconduct and failure to report a bribe. The charges were eventually dropped and Peterson got his job back. In 2007, he was suspended from the police force for eight days for his role in allowing a high-speed chase, against department policy. Shortly after Stacy disappeared, P
eterson was the subject of yet another internal investigation, on what charge the department has not said, other than to explain that by committing the offense, Peterson would be guilty of official misconduct, which is a felony. Peterson avoided further investigation by retiring.

  And certainly, if true, breaking into his ex-wife’s house and holding a knife to her neck would be grounds for arrest. (Bolingbrook police investigated that allegation; nothing ever came from it.)

  Deceitfulness. Peterson admits that he cheated on each of his first three wives. When cheating on Kathleen, he was so bold as to bring Stacy to his basement for sex while his wife and their sons slept upstairs. Then, after Kathleen died, he broke out a previously unknown and hardly official-looking will—a will that conveniently named his uncle as executor and left everything to Peterson.

  Of course, counterarguments could be made on each point. You have to think like a criminal to catch a criminal. No charges against Peterson ever stuck, and he’d never been charged with anything in connection with domestic disputes involving his wives. In regards to the media, he was just dishing back what they heaped on him. Who wouldn’t walk away from Shepard Smith when he started asking jerky questions? Anyway, Peterson was nothing but polite, saying, “Have a good day, Mr. Shepard. It was nice talking to you.”

  And the affairs? At least he had owned up to them, even if it sounded more like bragging than painful self-reflection. The will stood up in court. The radio show was all in good fun. If his last wife really had run off with another guy, why should he be the remorseful one?

  None of these arguments would likely sway Bonelli, who has found the totality of Peterson’s behavior very telling not only in providing insight into his personality but in revealing what fate Stacy met, and whether there was any basis for the slim hope she might still be alive somewhere.

  “He’s so self-centered. And he wouldn’t be [acting as he did] if he really believed Stacy were still alive,” Bonelli said, “because then she obviously would hear about this.