FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  Then in December 2007—during the height of the media furor surrounding the Stacy Peterson investigation—the jury’s decision was in: an award to Kevin and Melissa Fox of $15.5 million, an amount believed to be the highest judgment in Illinois history for a police-misconduct case. The couple was seeking $44 million.

  However, the Foxes have not seen any money yet and probably won’t anytime soon; the appeals process will ensure that the matter remains in court for years.

  Throughout the Fox case, outside observers wondered: How could anyone, especially a father, confess to such horrible things if he hadn’t done them? Steven Drizin, legal director of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, told Chicago magazine in a July 2006 article that he found nothing mystifying about a confession like Fox’s. “You’re overcome by grief,” he said. “You’re put into a cramped room and subjected to an unusually long interrogation. You’re told there is overwhelming evidence against you, including a failed polygraph [Fox had taken a lie-detector test and been told he’d failed]. You’re offered a less-serious offense and the chance to go home to your family and clear things up later in court. They simply broke him down psychologically to a point where he believed that the only way he was going to get this nightmare to stop was to confess.”

  Peterson, a lifelong police officer, must have been well aware of how seldom the missing are found in the environs of Bolingbrook and how incredibly unlikely it would be for local prosecutors to bring a murder charge without a body or clear indication that a crime had been committed. Peterson’s knowledge of the Fox ordeal and resulting lawsuit—a huge source of rancor among the Will County police community—would make local detectives and prosecutors hesitant to risk another of its kind.

  Then again, as one veteran deputy with the sheriff’s department that investigated Riley Fox’s death suggested, maybe Peterson was just looking for a way to get rich quick.

  “What if,” the deputy speculated to me, “he saw this Fox mess, and he said to his wife, ‘Honey, take the bus to Wyoming and check into a hotel and do not call anybody. Pay for everything in cash and stay there and wait for me to get a hold of you.’

  “He has to know, with his history, with the last wife and everything, they’re going to be looking at him,” the cop said. “So he starts acting all goofy and he goes on TV and says stupid shit. And then when they arrest him, his wife shows up and he sues the county.”

  There’s no evidence whatsoever that this was Peterson’s plan. If it was, he has yet to pull off the part where he gets the police to arrest him, at least for anything more substantial than an unrelated weapons charge. Stacy might have to stay in that Wyoming hotel room for an awfully long time.

  After so much upheaval in a short period of time—his romance with Stacy, his explosive split and subsequent feud with Savio, followed by her untimely and strange death—Drew Peterson must have looked forward to the spring and summer of 2004 to bring a measure of peace to his life. The ex-wife up the street who had given him all that grief was gone. Remarkably, a state police investigation into her death found nothing untoward, and a coroner’s jury had ruled the cause to be accidental drowning, taking the heat of suspicion off of her ex-husband. In the relative calm, the Petersons could conceivably turn their attention to their still-new marriage and focus on their now considerable parenting duties. Their son, Anthony, who had been born in July 2003, was hitting all the milestones that delight parents as children approach their first birthdays, and Stacy was pregnant with their second child, daughter Lacy. Additionally, the couple now shared their home with Kristopher and Thomas, the two sons of Drew Peterson and Kathleen Savio, who went to live with their father after their mother died.

  Adding to the crowd at 6 Pheasant Chase Court was Stephen Peterson, Drew’s adult son from his first marriage, and Stephen’s girlfriend, a young woman named Jennifer. Both were college students at the time, living in the Peterson basement.

  And the Peterson clan was about to meet new next-door neighbors, Sharon and Bob Bychowski, who had just moved to Pheasant Chase Court.

  Despite the twenty-six-year difference in their ages, Stacy and Bychowski immediately bonded the day in April 2004 when Stacy, with much of her famly in tow, walked over to introduce everyone.

  “She was your friend in five minutes and your best friend in ten,” Sharon Bychowski recalled. “Family and friendships were so important to her.”

  Bychowski saw a lot of herself in the young woman. Like Stacy, she had been a young mother—her son Roy was born when she was seventeen—and had taken up with a much older man, but the relationship didn’t last. At nineteen, she struck out on her own selling Avon products; at twenty-five, she was hired as a manager. She eventually met Bob Bychowski, to whom she’d been married for twenty-two years when Stacy’s disappearance turned her life upside down. By the time she moved next door to Stacy she had become an Avon district manager with her own secretary.

  For the next three and a half years, until Stacy vanished, Stacy and Bychowski regularly dropped by each other’s homes and Bychowski, by her own account, became close with the family, often watching the kids, giving them treats, and listening to Stacy when she needed to unload the growing stress in her marriage.

  That April day they met, only about a month and a half after Savio died, Bychowski had no idea of the recent turmoil in her new neighborhood. She would soon learn. About six weeks after moving in, Bychowski recalled, while talking with Stacy over the back fence, Peterson ambled over and said, “You know, my last wife died.”

  Bychowski was so taken aback she could only laugh in astonishment.

  “I’m like, ‘Okay, are you serious?’ And he goes, ‘Oh yeah, yeah. It was ruled an accident. That was close.’”

  Stacy then asked Bychowski if she wanted to go down and look at Savio’s house, which they were cleaning to sell. Bychowski, who loves looking at homes for sale, agreed. It was on this trip that Stacy divulged how she and Drew used to have sex in the basement of that house while the rest of the family slept upstairs.

  According to Bychowski, Stacy took her neighbor into her confidence many times after that. Those heady nights in the basement seemed long gone as Stacy opened up to the older woman about the couple’s ever more frequent fights, which sometimes grew violent, and of Stacy’s growing determination to leave her husband. If Drew Peterson had in fact found some peace in the spring and summer of 2004, it didn’t last.

  Bychowski said she could tell right away the honeymoon was over at 6 Pheasant Chase Court, unless the honeymoon involved physical blows. If anything, she said, the couple mellowed over time and the fights became less fierce.

  “When I first moved here, they were more physical,” Bychowski said. “But, see, she would hit him back. So stuff started breaking in the house. Then he realized she’s going to hit me back and it’s going to spin out of control. So he started following her.”

  His “following” was often done by cell phone. “Everywhere we went—Kohl’s, to get a haircut, to pick up my granddaughter—he always called,” Bychowski described. “At first I think she thought it was nice, but as it went on….”

  Peterson denies ever raising a hand to his wife and says that, if anything, he was on the receiving end of any battering. For a time, he repeated an oft-broadcast story of Stacy striking him in the head with a frozen steak. He said she “hated being cornered” but maintains he never hit her. Peterson also points out that he has never been charged in connection with a domestic incident, much less had the police called to his home for a problem with Stacy. While he and Savio were frequent subjects in police reports, there were never any such reports involving him and his fourth wife.

  Relatives of Stacy, particularly her “stepsister” Kerry Simmons, who is actually a half sister of a half sister and not a blood relative at all, told a different story. Simmons said on the Dateline NBC show which aired on December 22 that Peterson “threw [Stacy] down the stairs. There was an instance where he had knocked h
er into the TV. I think one time he actually picked her up and threw her across the room. I mean, she’s small. She’s a hundred pounds.”

  Bychowski said she would walk away when she saw or heard the couple fighting. “I mean, that’s not my place.” Stacy, she said, “was willing to sort out everything herself.”

  Stacy may have insisted she was able to handle her husband on her own, but Bychowski also recalls the young woman expressing her fear of being unable to escape a horrible fate, even predicting her impending death.

  “She would just constantly say to me, ‘If I’m missing it’s not an accident. He killed me,’” Bychowski said. “She would say it to me all the time. Many, many, many times.”

  So what were Drew and Stacy fighting about? No outsider can know for sure what happens within a marriage, but based on the accounts of friends and family, certain issues were likely sources of conflict. One was Drew’s jealousy, his suspicion that Stacy was sneaking around with other men; the three-decade difference in their ages may have ceased to be a novelty.

  On her end, Stacy went from being a single seventeen-year-old to a mother of four in less than three years. While by all accounts she was a devoted mother, even to the children who weren’t hers biologically—Bychowski recalled Stacy helping Kristopher with his math homework and throwing parties in Thomas’ honor—raising four children is a huge responsibility that could easily put stress on a marriage.

  One event that inarguably took an emotional toll on Stacy was the death of her half sister, Tina Ryan. Tina succumbed to colon cancer in September of 2006, at the age of thirty-one, and Stacy was devastated. Soon afterward, Peterson said, his wife became depressed and lost her faith in God. She set up what Peterson called a “shrine” to Tina on a bookshelf in the corner of Peterson’s office, to the side of his large wooden desk. He showed it to me after Stacy disappeared. The shelves contained pictures of Tina, as well as various knickknacks and mementos that seemed based on a Disney theme. As time marched on with no sign of Stacy, the number of artifacts in the shrine dwindled, which to Peterson was just as well: “It gives me more room for my own things.” While Stacy must have tried to find solace in the objects during the numb days following her half sister’s death, the items apparently did not hold the same sentimental value for Peterson.

  At one time the shrine included an urn holding Tina’s ashes, but, in one of the odder episodes of the Stacy Peterson story, close to two weeks after she was reported missing, her husband returned the remains to Tina’s family while Geraldo Rivera was broadcasting live from the Bychowskis’ house. A few members of the family stepped over to Peterson’s house to collect the ashes while Rivera tried without success to get the relatives to agree that a potential hostage situation could be developing inside 6 Pheasant Chase Court. These ashes were just one of the few mementos Stacy had to remember Tina by.

  Peterson’s former friend, Ric Mims, even said on a television interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that Stacy was taking mood-altering drugs to help her deal with her grief over the death of Tina, which may have further affected her emotional state. Bychowski remembered watching in shock as Mims made his statements for the camera right in her own home, which she had allowed to be used for the taping.

  “Ric was going on and on about how she was under psychiatric care,” Bychowski said. “And I’m looking at him like, ‘Oh, my God, what do I do? Do I jump up and say this is really ridiculous, stop taping, get out?’”

  Bychowski said Stacy wasn’t “psychiatric nuts.” She did take Prozac after having her babies because “she had a terrible time with postpartum depression,” Bychowski said, but she didn’t stay on the drug because it made her tired, and the medication conflicted with allergy medicine she took.

  Stacy might not have been “psychiatric nuts,” but Peterson blamed the effect Tina’s death had on her for the “emotional roller coaster” that life with his wife had turned into. (At other times, he blamed her menstrual cycle.) Then again, he’d described life with Savio in the same terms. Peterson’s last two marriages apparently were a veritable amusement park of emotion.

  “She [Savio] came from an abusive home-life growing up. She had abusive stepparents,” Peterson told Matt Lauer during an interview on the Today show. “At first it was very romantic and, again, after she had children, hormones kicked in and, again, an emotional roller coaster with her.”

  He seemed to feel more pity for himself than for either of his last two wives, with their less than ideal upbringings, or, for that matter, the deceased Tina Ryan. Whatever sorrow he felt over his dead half sister-in-law he kept very well hidden, indeed. For example, instead of helping his wife get through the difficult day of Tina’s funeral, the event instead brought out Peterson’s jealousy.

  Tina’s wake and funeral were held in the small town of Marseilles, Illinois, and both Peterson and his neighbor Bychowski said numerous friends and relatives attended. Stacy described the services as heart-wrenching, Bychowski said. Stacy and Tina’s husband, Jamie, were particularly overcome.

  The day after the funeral, Bychowski said, when Stacy came next door to visit, she wasn’t herself. Bychowski, who had also lost a sister to cancer, told Stacy she understood how hard it was when a loved one died.

  “So she said to me, ‘That’s not really my problem,’” Bychowski recalled. Stacy told her that she and Drew had had a big fight at the funeral. Stacy, her father, her sister Cassandra, Jamie, and Drew were all standing around the casket, saying goodbye. The others walked off after their farewells, but Stacy and Jamie stayed. “And she said, ‘I just couldn’t tear myself away. It was very hard to say goodbye for the last time.’

  “She said to Jamie, ‘Let’s just do it together. Let’s just walk away together.’ So they turned at the same time and they walked outside, and when they walked into the hallway, Drew said to her, ‘Are you fucking Jamie?’

  “My God, she was absolutely devastated by that.”

  They argued in the car on the way home, Bychowski said, and he kept up the argument into the night. “He used to do that a lot,” she said. “He would keep her sleep deprived and argue with her all night long and not let her sleep.”

  Bychowski said Stacy simply could not believe he would accuse her, right at Tina’s funeral, of sleeping with her half sister’s husband. That was, in Bychowski’s mind, when Stacy made the decision that she would be better off if she was no longer married to her husband.

  “She was so devastated, is the only word I could use, and hurt and upset by that. She said, ‘I’ve got to make some changes. I’ve got to do something different. I’ve got to divorce him.’”

  Stacy’s aunt Candace also claims Stacy wanted to part with Peterson. She was considering a move to either Phoenix or somewhere in California, Aikin said.

  “She told me when I was there [visiting in October, 2007] she was trying to find a way to get out and take the children.”

  And by “the children,” Candace Aikin said, Stacy did not just mean the two she had given birth to, Anthony and Lacy. She planned on taking along the sons of Kathleen Savio, Kristopher and Thomas, when she escaped from Drew Peterson.

  Peterson himself, in the last months before Stacy disappeared, also wanted the family to move—but not without him. Bychowski said the couple first visited Arizona, with the idea that it would be close to Stacy’s aunt in California. Then they looked at property in California, Bychowski said, but found nothing in their price range.

  In the summer of 2007, Drew’s new idea was Kentucky and possibly bringing Stacy’s dad along to live nearby. But Stacy told Bychowski there was no way that would happen.

  “Stacy hates Kentucky,” Aikin seconded. “Stacy wouldn’t live in Kentucky.”

  Strangely enough, after Stacy disappeared, Peterson’s attorney, Joel Brodsky, released an anonymous letter that put Stacy in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Folorence, Kentucky, on November 18, 2007. She was in the company of an unidentified man. The letter was sent to Peterson
’s Bolingbrook home but was addressed to “Joel Peterson.”

  The letter writer claims that when she approached Stacy, the woman implored her to leave her alone: “Please don’t ruin my life. Please. I just want to be left alone, please.” Stacy then supposedly hotfooted it away, but not before the quick-witted anonymous-letter writer captured her image by snapping a cell phone photograph. Disappointingly, no photograph was enclosed with the letter.

  Peterson had taken a road trip with his children to Disney World about the time the letter would have been mailed—he found it in his mailbox the day he got back. The letter was postmarked in Cincinnati, Ohio, which would have been on the likely route from Bolingbrook to Orlando, Florida. Brodsky insisted his client and children did not go that way while on the road to the Magic Kingdom.

  Aikin, Bychowski, and Pamela Bosco, the legal guardian of Stacy’s little sister, Cassandra Cales, all dismissed the possible validity of anonymous letters.

  There is no evidence that Stacy ever got away, but even if she had, both Aikin and Bychowski are sure it would not have been to Kentucky and most certainly not to the part where Drew took her father to visit, a region Bychowski claims did not even boast a Wal-Mart.

  Even though Stacy’s aunt and father figured into the relocation plans at various points, in Bychowski’s view Peterson sought to move in order to isolate Stacy from her family: “Control people do that,” she said.

  Bychowski clearly saw a control motive in much that transpired between Peterson and his wife. His need for control manifested itself, she said, in his reaction to Minnie, a miniature pinscher that Stacy’s sister, Cassandra, had given her. The puppy did not last long in the Peterson household. Drew forced her to get rid of it, Bychowski said, because he hated that it peed in the house.