FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  Heather moved in with her grandparents when she was sixteen, joined the military after high school, and never spoke to her father again. Lisa stayed with her father, bouncing back and forth between Michigan and Florida. She landed in a Florida prison for auto theft in April 2007. Her release was scheduled for June 2008.

  Since his wife disappeared, Duvall has been arrested on charges of felony assault in Ludington, Michigan, and on charges of possession of a firearm by a felon in Shorewood. In Volusia County, Florida, he has been arrested on charges of disorderly intoxication, driving under the influence, and sale and delivery of marijuana. In contrast to the ease with which Duvall has repeatedly made his presence known to police, Jeri Lynn Duvall’s whereabouts remain a mystery to this day.

  Not that finding a body in Will County is any guarantee of an investigation going somewhere. Such was the case with Inge Strama, a Plainfield mother of two who disappeared in July 1993.

  The Plainfield police never publicly named her husband, Frank Strama, a suspect in the case. But Strama understood that he was not above their suspicions.

  “Statistically, it is the husband that’s involved a lot of the time,” he told The Herald News a year after his wife vanished. “I was a suspect, and I was interrogated several times.”

  Still, the police never named Strama as a suspect—even after his wife’s extensively decomposed body turned up four years later in an overgrown, empty lot in the Chicago suburb of Worth, about two blocks from where her car had been spotted only hours after her husband first reported her missing. All that was left to identify Inge were her teeth and wedding band. Because of the condition of her body, investigators could not determine how she met her end.

  Like Drew Peterson, Frank Strama claimed his wife ran off with another man. If this were the case, then somewhere in her running around she ended up a time-ravaged corpse in Worth. And if Inge Strama’s or Stacy Peterson’s “other” men ever existed, it’s likely their disappearances would have resulted in missing-persons reports to match up with Inge’s and Stacy’s. The two men must have kept extremely low profiles before running off with their married women, however, because it seems neither man, if he does in fact exist, has been reported missing.

  The Strama case was a victory of sorts, as a body was eventually found. Just getting to that point can be a tricky thing in and around Will County, even when the body has not been hidden. Take, for example, the disappearance of David Bucholz, a nineteen-year-old manager of a Dairy Queen in the city of Lockport.

  Bucholz took a dinner break from the Dairy Queen one evening in July 2001 and never returned. No one saw anything of him until the next April, when his skull was found in a field near Romeoville, the next town over.

  The police had been able to find Bucholz’s Honda two weeks after he vanished. The keys were hanging from the ignition and a cup containing antifreeze was inside the car. Investigators theorized that Bucholz drank the toxic antifreeze and walked off to die. His body was not concealed yet still took nine months to find.

  In adjacent Grundy County, eighty-five-year-old Clarence Henry was gone even longer. He likely was inside his car in the Illinois River for nine days shy of a year—despite air, ground, and river searches—before two young fishermen found a sneaker containing human remains, then noticed something in the water when a barge came through and disturbed the surface.

  That something turned out to be Henry’s car and what was left of Henry (who was missing his shoe and the foot that was inside of it). It was not determined whether Henry drove into the river accidentally or intentionally; regardless, it seems unlikely that he and his car were put there to be forever hidden away.

  During his tenure protecting and serving, Drew Peterson worked on a high-profile missing-persons case that his department tackled, that of thirteen-year-old Rachel Mellon, who vanished January 31, 1996. The case remains unsolved. Peterson confirmed that he helped with the case but won’t discuss it further.

  That day in 1996, Rachel had a sore throat and stayed home from school with her stepfather, Vince Mellon. Her mother, Amy Mellon, went off to work and never saw her daughter again. During the stepdaddy and daughter’s day together, the girl somehow vanished without Mellon realizing it. In fact, the first time anyone noticed that Rachel was no longer in the house was after her mother came home from work and the family was settling in for dinner.

  For the first two days, Bolingbrook police considered the matter a missing-persons or teenage-runaway case—Rachel had run away from home once before, for twelve hours—despite evidence that Rachel took nothing into the freezing January weather but a pair of slippers, the sleep clothes on her back, and possibly a blue blanket. Police then came and looked around the house, Amy Mellon said, but nothing happened after that.

  Right around the fourth anniversary of Rachel’s disappearance, perhaps to make up for lost time, Bolingbrook police brought Vince Mellon into the station and held him for nine hours. Officers also served a search warrant for his blood, saliva, and body hair as part of a first-degree-murder investigation.

  Four days after this, Vince Mellon was trotted before a grand jury. Police also revealed that they had discovered “new information” through “technical advances,” amounting to “significant developments” in the case. It looked like the investigation had finally taken off.

  That was in February 2000. Whatever the new information, significant developments and technical advances may have been, they remain as great a mystery today as what happened to Rachel. Her stepfather, in the intervening years, has run afoul of the law on a variety of charges. Her mother was also picked up for theft, which involved the couple stiffing a Joliet motel out of a night’s stay. Both Amy and Vince Mellon, who now live in Cleveland, Tennessee, pleaded guilty to the theft charge.

  By the time Stacy Peterson disappeared, Rachel Mellon would have been a young woman of twenty-five. No one has ever been arrested or charged in connection with her disappearance. Prior to the tenth anniversary of the young girl’s disappearance, State’s Attorney Glasgow, whose administration handled the Mellon matter throughout its history—except for a four-year stretch following his electoral defeat in November 2000—said that Rachel’s was “obviously at the top of our list as far as the cold cases we have.”

  Rachel’s father, Jeff Skemp of the Chicago suburb Forest Park, said he’s accepted that his daughter is probably not coming back, although he’s never totally given up hope that she might be living somewhere no one can find her.

  Skemp, who works as a cab dispatcher, remembers meeting Drew Peterson.

  “I kind of liked him,” Skemp said. “He was real brazen and kind of cocky. I think the whole world knows he’s cocky now.”

  His lukewarm admiration of Peterson, however, doesn’t extend to police in general.

  “I just think that Will County’s just inept,” Skemp said. “I know Bolingbrook is. They did the same thing with Rachel that they did with Stacy. They waited a week before they went in the house.” In fact, state police searched the Peterson home three days after Stacy was reported missing. Still, Skemp says, “They wait too long before they realize the seriousness of the case. They just got a terrible track record.”

  That track record includes not only the unsolved cases of Stacy Peterson, Lisa Stebic, Joan Bernal, Jeri Lynn Duvall, Inge Strama, and Rachel Mellon but also two high-profile Will County homicides in which police did arrest someone—only, in each case, it turned out to be the wrong man.

  On May 18, 1998, state police were called into Frankfort for the first murder in the village’s 128-year history. The Frankfort police asked for the state agency’s assistance because they thought they were ill-equipped to lead the investigation of such a serious crime. As it turned out, the state police—the same agency now handling the Peterson and Savio investigations—didn’t prove themselves any more adept.

  Juliet Chinn was a forty-three-year-old, long-time employee of Oak Forest Hospital. She worked as a pharmacist on the second shift
, along with her boyfriend of nine years, fellow pharmacist Barry McCarthy.

  One Monday afternoon Chinn failed to show up at work, which was strange for her. She did not call in to explain her absence, which was stranger. At the suggestion of a coworker, McCarthy left the hospital and drove to Chinn’s Frankfort condominium to check on her.

  When he got there he found his girlfriend sprawled in a pool of blood, a rug covering her and a knife sticking out of her chest. McCarthy called the Frankfort police. When they arrived and saw Chinn’s slain body, the man standing in the parking lot—McCarthy—began to look to them very much like the killer.

  That night McCarthy was taken to the Frankfort police station, where officers confiscated his shoes. He was then ferried to the local state police headquarters, where he was interrogated into the morning and through the next night. Hardly recovered from the shock of finding his nine-year companion stabbed and covered in blood, he was questioned for more than twenty-four hours. Grueling and exhaustive as the interrogation was, police apparently didn’t uncover enough information to hold him for another night. He was released without being arrested.

  Two months later, McCarthy was back at the local state police headquarters. This time, he was arrested and charged with the murder of Juliet Chinn. To be sure, McCarthy was a reasonable suspect. He and Chinn were romantically and professionally linked, and McCarthy was at the crime scene when police arrived. Not only that, but he had blood on his hands and pants, blood that would prove key to collaring him for the crime.

  According to Glasgow, private forensics expert Dexter Bartlett opined that, based on the pattern of blood spattered on McCarthy, Chinn had aspirated that blood onto him, proving she was still alive when he was with her in the condo. Glasgow had his doubts and called in Tom Bevel, a former Oklahoma City police investigator and associate professor of forensic science, to review Bartlett’s findings.

  Bevel did disagree with Bartlett. The spatter, he said, could have resulted from a part of Chinn’s body, perhaps her hand, falling in a puddle of blood and splashing McCarthy when he moved her to see if she was still alive. Effectively, Bevel was saying the state police had jailed an innocent man.

  More than a year after McCarthy was arrested, the charges against him were dropped during a routine hearing. But despite Bevel’s testimony and the dismissed charges, McCarthy knew that many people still thought he had murdered Chinn. The word of the police, he discovered, carries a lot of weight.

  “You work with people for twenty years and the police come in and say, ‘You killed someone,’ and they believe them,” McCarthy said, “because there’s so much faith in the police, and it’s undeserved.

  “People don’t know how to do their jobs,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

  Glasgow said state police investigators were upset with him for clearing McCarthy. The Frankfort police chief at the time, Darrell Sanders, who drove McCarthy back to his car after his twenty-four-hour interrogation by state police, said, “As far as I’m concerned, the case was closed, and the proper person was arrested.”

  About seven years passed after McCarthy’s exoneration, and the police remained hesitant to accept McCarthy’s acquittal. Then came further, even more convincing evidence that he was innocent: Someone else confessed to killing Chinn.

  That person was fifty-two-year-old Anthony Brescia, who was in prison for the murder of a man in Palos Park, about thirteen miles north of Frankfort, four months after Chinn’s murder. According to a press release put out by Glasgow’s office, Brescia told Illinois Department of Corrections workers that he had killed Chinn as well. Even though the Palos Park murder took place soon after Chinn’s in a nearby town during another daytime robbery, before his confession Anthony Brescia had never been considered in connection with Chinn’s slaying.

  In fact, Brescia’s confession was something of a fluke. His mother died shortly before he came clean, according to Glasgow. Brescia had the blood of one victim on his hands, but he did not want his mom knowing he had killed another person, Glasgow said.

  Brescia had another motive for owning up to Chinn’s killing that was a bit less selfless, according to two well-placed sources. He wanted a television set in his cell, and he expected to get it in exchange for his testimony. One of the two sources said Glasgow didn’t come through on the deal.

  Whatever Brescia’s reasons for confessing, corrections workers alerted Frankfort police to Brescia’s statements, and in December 2005 two detectives visited him in prison and took a videotaped confession, according to the press release from Glasgow’s office.

  Brescia had been committing a string of daytime robberies, and on that May day in 1998, Chinn’s condo was the next target. Brescia apparently didn’t plan, however, for Chinn to be home when he broke in. He fled. Chinn chased him out the front door and shouted his license plate number as he started down the street. So Brescia returned, stabbed her in the neck and chest with a kitchen knife, and strangled and choked her.

  He was indicted in June 2006 and, in March 2007, pleaded guilty. Anthony Brescia is now serving a life sentence for Chinn’s murder.

  McCarthy was vindicated by Brescia’s confession, but the damage to his reputation, psyche and wallet had been done. Friends had abandoned him. He no longer worked at the hospital. He dropped more than a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees and lost untold years off his life. He was reluctant to apply for a new job for fear a background check would turn up his murder arrest. He worried about clearing customs to enter a foreign country for vacation. Worst of all, Juliet was irrevocably gone. “She’s not back,” McCarthy said. “So I don’t need the time, to be honest with you.”

  McCarthy puts some of the blame for his wrongful arrest on fate, likening it to going to the emergency room when an incompetent doctor happens to be on shift. The fact that the detectives who showed up at Chinn’s home that evening in 1998 zeroed in on him instead of picking up the right trail was nothing more than the “luck of the draw, basically,” McCarthy said, sounding almost philosophical about his close brush with possible lifelong imprisonment or date with a lethal injection.

  “It depends on who the cops are who get your case that night,” he said. “If you get a couple bad ones, you’re screwed.”

  A confession played an important role in McCarthy’s exoneration. Years later, a different confession figured prominently in another widely publicized murder case in Will County—this time with disastrous results. The confession came from a father, Kevin Fox, horrifically admitting to killing his three-year-old daughter. Within hours, though, Fox denounced his confession, saying he had given it under extreme duress after fourteen hours of grilling by Will County sheriff’s detectives.

  The morning of June 6, 2004, three-year-old Riley Fox was discovered missing from the family’s home in the little Kankakee River town of Wilmington, about a half hour south of Joliet. That morning, Riley’s brother Tyler came into his father’s bedroom and said Riley was gone. Kevin Fox had been alone with his children that night while his wife, Melissa Fox, was taking part in a breast-cancer walk in Chicago and spending the night with friends. Earlier in the evening, Fox had left the kids at their grandparents’ while he went to a concert with his brother-in-law. When word of Riley’s disappearance got out, the small town launched a massive volunteer and police search. Within hours, a pair of hikers found the little girl’s body floating face down in a creek about four miles from her house. She was half naked and her mouth had been covered with duct tape. The ensuing autopsy revealed more grisly details: Riley had been sexually abused and was still alive when she went into the water.

  For months, Melissa and Kevin Fox and their family cooperated with detectives. They submitted to rounds of questions and provided the police with samples of their DNA, trusting officers in their efforts to find Riley’s killer. Unknown to them, however, Kevin had become their prime suspect.

  In October 2004, detectives brought Melissa and Kevin Fox into the sheriff’s department and inte
rrogated Fox for fourteen hours, without a lawyer, keeping his wife in a separate room for some of that time. By the end of the marathon session, Fox, to the shock of his family and friends, confessed to killing Riley. He made a videotaped statement in which he reportedly described accidentally hitting his daughter in the head with a bathroom door. Thinking he had killed her, he supposedly masked the mishap as a kidnapping, sexual assault and murder, and topped it off by dumping his daughter in the creek.

  Fox was arrested. The very next day, Jeff Tomczak, the Will County state’s attorney, announced he would pursue the death penalty. At the time, Tomczak was a week away from an election showdown with his bitter political rival, Glasgow. Tomczak’s critics accused him of timing the interrogation to score a high-profile, tough-on-crime victory days before a hotly contested election (which Tomczak subsequently lost). Tomczak, Will County Sheriff Paul Kaupas, and others insisted politics had nothing to do with it; Tomczak denied knowing that the detectives were going to bring Fox in that night, much less that Fox would tell them on videotape that he violated and killed his daughter. Almost immediately after his arrest, Fox recanted his confession, which he said he gave only in desperation, after a grueling interrogation and promises from detectives that if he admitted his guilt, he could plead to a lesser charge, get out on bond and go home to his family. (The detectives denied offering any lenient treatment in exchange for a confession.) But as he learned later that day, he in fact could not bond out—he would spend the next eight months in jail. And far from any lesser charge, Tomczak was going after him for first-degree murder, which carried a possible death sentence.

  Kevin and Melissa Fox consequently filed a civil-rights lawsuit that named the county, the detectives who interrogated him, Tomczak, and others involved with the case.

  A key factor in their lawsuit was the delay in testing DNA evidence that had been recovered from Riley’s body. Months after the crime, the evidence languished untested. Fox’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner, finally secured a court order to send the evidence to a private lab for testing. The results brought glorious news for Fox and his supporters: The DNA did not match Fox’s. Glasgow, who was now the state’s attorney after defeating Tomczak, freed Fox. As with freeing McCarthy, it was a move that enraged many in the law enforcement community, who to this day are convinced Kevin Fox murdered his daughter. They were also frustrated that the judge in the civil suit didn’t allow Fox’s videotaped confession to be admitted as evidence and shown to jurors.