FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  Peterson disputed this version of events. He said that he and Stacy agreed to get rid of the dog—she gave it to a coworker of her father’s—because it was not housebroken and no one took the time to train it. To Bychowski, however, the dog was just an example of Peterson getting his way and of Stacy following his direction.

  Bychowski and Peterson also took different views of Stacy’s motivation to embark, in August of 2006, on an extensive self-improvement program.

  Stacy gave birth to the couple’s first child, Anthony, in July of 2003. A year and a half later, nineteen days before Stacy’s twenty-first birthday, came the second baby, Lacy, named after Stacy’s sister who died as an infant. Stacy was of course still young—not even old enough to legally buy liquor by the time she had her second child—but after giving birth to two kids in eighteen months, her body was not the same. She decided to make some changes.

  She began with breast augmentation, braces, and Lasik eye surgery so she would not have to wear glasses. The coup de grâce for the 2006 upgrade plan was, as her husband termed it, “hair removal.”

  While Stacy agreed to the procedures, and may have even asked for them, the extent of the breast augmentation was a point of contention between husband and wife, Bychowski said.

  “She was an A [cup] and then she breast-fed her two kids,” she said. “So she went to a C. He wanted her to go to a double D; what an asshole. And the doctor said, ‘Absolutely not. Her frame will not carry that big of breasts. She’ll be uncomfortable. She’ll have back issues. I will not do that. I’ll take her to a C and that’s it.’ So that’s what she had. She thought that was realistic. But he wanted her to go up to a double D. It’s a big joke for him.”

  The overhaul continued into the next year. About two months before she vanished, Stacy underwent painful liposuction on her legs along with what Bychowski described as an excruciating tummy tuck.

  “She was a hundred thirty [pounds] before surgery,” Bychowski said. “Then she had liposuction on her legs. I said to her, ‘Where?’ And then she had the tummy tuck.”

  It was the tummy tuck, or abdominoplasty, that Bychowski said was the real killer. During abdominoplasty, excess skin and fat in the abdominal area are surgically removed and the muscles tightened. There are numerous risks associated with the surgery, and Stacy’s recovery was a long and agonizing one.

  “When she had her tummy tuck, she was on the floor in the living room. Nobody could touch her,” Bychowski said. “She had drains in her for like four days. She was on the floor because she couldn’t get up. She was on a mattress in the living room so she could be a part of the family still. Then they took out her drains and then she still couldn’t hardly walk. It’s like major surgery.”

  The surgery left a “hairline” scar that wouldn’t show when she wore a bikini, Bychowski said. “But it looked odd. It looked like they recreated her belly button. Which they did.”

  On the bright side, the scar was partially covered by one of Stacy’s two tattoos: red cherries with green leaves inked across her right-front hip. She also had a blue-and-yellow carnation on the small of her back.

  In Bychowski’s view, her friend’s “improved” form was a little much. “It looked weird, you know, when she was in her bathing suit,” Bychowski said. “She’s totally like a big, giant hourglass.”

  Of course, to the person having all that surgery, and the person paying for it, an hourglass figure might have been precisely the desired outcome. In Peterson’s mind, he’d gallantly accommodated his wife’s desire to enhance her appearance. He viewed himself in general as an overindulgent husband, pampering his young wife after her hardscrabble upbringing. The surgeries and physical renovations lay on the same continuum as the apartment, furniture, Grand Prix and other gifts that he’d showered on his teenage girlfriend when their love was new. As Peterson said on Dateline NBC, “Stacy wanted [it], she got it. “I mean, she wanted a boob job, I got her a boob job,” he said. “She wanted a tummy tuck, she got that. She wanted braces, Lasik surgery, hair removal, anything.

  “Stacy loved male attention,” her husband explained. “And she loved being anywhere and having people pay attention to her.”

  Still, Bychowski had no doubt that Peterson was trying to mold his wife into his ideal of a woman, and Stacy was susceptible to his opinions.

  “He was trying to make her into what he wanted,” she said. “Absolutely. I think she really wanted to be as good as she could be. If somebody tells you you’re fat, somebody tells you, ‘God, you’ve got a lot of stretch marks, you’re just not the person I married,’ what do you do? You’ve got to make a choice. You either try to get better or you give up. I don’t think she wanted to give up.”

  Perhaps not when she began her self-improvement regimen, but in the three and a half years Stacy had been her friend, Bychowski had seen quite a change—physical and otherwise—in the young mother who had trotted her family over to meet the new neighbor in April 2004.

  One member of that day’s parade was no longer living as part of the family by the time Stacy disappeared: Jennifer, the then-girlfriend of Stephen Peterson, who had been living in the basement. According to Bychowski, Jennifer left for quite a valid reason:

  “Jennifer came home to find Steve screwing someone in the basement,” she said. “So she packed her things and went back home.”

  Bychowski said Stacy loved the young woman and felt terrible about what had supposedly happened. At the same time, the echoes of Stacy’s own basement trysting with Peterson in the early days of their clandestine affair were not lost on her.

  “Know what she said to me?” Bychowski said. “‘Like father, like son.’”

  The number of jobs that Drew Peterson has held rivals the number of women he’s romanced. Just as Peterson usually didn’t confine himself to the woman to whom he was married, his career as a police officer, while the basis of his professional identity, wasn’t the only work that occupied him.

  “I’ve had six jobs at one time,” said Peterson, ticking off such trades as running printing and prepress businesses, owning a chimney-sweeping service, dabbling in wedding photography, getting involved with his former pal Ric Mims in cable-television installation, having a share in a karate school, and presiding over his tavern, Suds Pub, in the town of Montgomery, Illinois, about seventeen miles west of Bolingbrook.

  Peterson could juggle the day jobs because his police work took place on the overnight shift. This allowed him to keep business hours for himself. He made a lot of money, he said, but the schedule was exhausting.

  To be sure, Drew Peterson loved the good life that his many jobs afforded, so it was probably fortunate that he’d put in all those hours and socked away some money. The roughly $6,000-a-month police pension that he began collecting after his retirement in December of 2007, while hardly chump change, wasn’t going to maintain the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed. Also, since his fourth wife’s disappearance, he faced the additional burden of legal fees. These concerned him enough that shortly after he retired he set up a Web site, DefendDrew.com, that accepted donations through PayPal to foot his legal bills and fund the search for Stacy, with any leftover dollars going into trust for his children. The site attracted so much traffic that the host company shut it down within a day. Peterson’s attorney, Joel Brodsky, said the site was closed because it had achieved the short-term goals they’d set. That said, he refuses to reveal how much money the site actually took in.

  But a love of money was not the only motive Peterson had for pursuing so many professions. In his heyday, before his recent troubles, Peterson was even something of a Renaissance man. As a police officer, he cut a figure of uniformed authority. With a hand in the bar business, he assumed the role of publican. He was an expert in the martial and the photographic arts, running the karate school and the wedding-picture business. If that weren’t enough, Peterson was a motorcycle enthusiast who purchased a thirty-thousand-dollar bike after he turned fifty. He is also a licensed
pilot with his very own airplane.

  Peterson said he flew general-aviation airplanes when he was younger, having earned his license when he was seventeen. At the time Stacy vanished he was the proud owner of an Aquilla Trike, worth about twenty grand. The open-sided, two-seater, microlight craft barely resembles a plane at all, instead looking more like a three-wheeled jogging stroller with a propeller mounted in back, the entire contraption dangling from a hang glider. Peterson had his Aquilla imported from South Africa, where the trikes are made, and kept it in a hangar at Cushing Field in Newark, Illinois, about thirty miles from his Bolingbrook home. In a conversation with me he said he had a good story about his ordeal in getting the Aquilla to the United States from South Africa, but never elaborated.

  Peterson did not short himself on toys. Besides the motorcycle and airplane, he had a camper, a swimming pool, at least eleven guns, two cars, and a couple of computers. He also lived in a spacious, two-story home with a vaulted living room ceiling; and after his daughter, Lacy, was born in 2005, Peterson had four children under the age of twelve to take care of, as well as a wife who, in the eighteen months before she vanished, racked up five-figure bills for a comprehensive cosmetic overhaul. Shorting himself on women no less than on toys, Peterson had also weathered three divorces that certainly set him back monetarily, although his financial settlement with Savio was never finalized before she died.

  While he appeared to have been a profligate spender, Peterson must have also been a saver—if his reported claims that his young wife snatched twenty-five thousand dollars in cash right before she disappeared are to be believed.

  Bank records show, however, that after Stacy vanished Peterson sent more than ten times that much to his son Stephen, one of the two adult stepsons nineteen-year-old Stacy had acquired in her marriage to Drew.

  Peterson wrote several checks to the twenty-eight-year-old, who followed in his father’s footsteps to become a police officer in nearby Oak Brook, Illinois. Reportedly, one of the checks was in excess of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and some were from joint accounts in the names of both Stacy and Drew Peterson. Peterson later explained to me the good sense behind this innocent action: he was merely trying to prevent Stacy from looting the bank accounts herself from a remote location.

  Peterson was lucky to have that kind of cash on hand, with the prospect of funding a pricey and lengthy legal battle in connection not only with Stacy’s disappearance but the death of his third wife, now officially a homicide, looming over his head. Because he was a suspect in the “potential homicide” of his missing wife, the dread of going to jail gnawed at Peterson. He compared it to having cancer, to waking up every day facing a truly frightening future.

  That was the introspective Drew Peterson. The artistic Drew Peterson photographed and captured wedding memories for marrying couples and engaged in kung fu fighting. Of course, he was a lover, as well; a man who seemingly was never going to restrict himself to one woman for life, as evidenced by his four marriages and the extramarital affairs he freely admits to.

  It’s difficult to imagine Peterson finding time for so many business ventures, so many children—he fathered six and had one stepdaughter—and so many women. But by his own account, and those of some of his ex-wives, he did. Peterson talked to me briefly about one “girlfriend” he had while he was married to his second wife. He was adamant about not having anything to do with the apparent suicide of her brother, who was found hanging in his garage, but as far as sleeping with the woman while he was married to someone else—yeah, Peterson said, that happened.

  Peterson spread himself around, it seemed, in all aspects of his life. “At one time, I employed over a hundred people,” Peterson told me, and among those on his payroll were relatives and in-laws, people he said he was “supporting.” In fact, he couldn’t seem to help collecting people who needed support and who, in contrast to Peterson’s police-officer duty to uphold law and order, didn’t exactly stick to the straight and narrow. There was, for example, his second wife’s motorcycle-gangster brother who got shot to death, and Stacy’s brother, Yelton, a registered sex offender.

  One in-law Peterson gave a job to was Savio’s nephew, Charlie Doman. Doman first worked as a maintenance man at Suds Pub, owned jointly by his Aunt Kitty and her then-husband, Peterson. From there, he moved into the kitchen, and was then made a manager.

  “Then my Aunt Kitty fired me,” Doman recalled.

  But they apparently ironed out their difficulties, because Savio and Peterson brought Doman back to Suds Pub to work as a DJ.

  After he left the bar, however, Doman ran into some trouble of his own. He pleaded guilty to felony aggravated battery in connection with an August 1998 stabbing. He stuck a knife in a sleeping “friend” numerous times and was charged with attempted murder on top of the aggravated battery.

  Doman’s friend survived the attack, and Doman’s ensuing plea deal got him off with probation and the two hundred twenty-three days he’d spent in jail awaiting trial.

  In 2003, Doman landed back behind bars after pleading guilty to a theft charge. He supposedly walked off with his boss’ cash register and the money it held. The judge gave him two years.

  Doman said that was a “different time” in his life, and he’s settled down since. But before he went to prison, before he even stabbed his friend, he worked in his brother-in-law’s bar in various capacities. While there, he made the acquaintance of Drew’s stepbrother, Tom Morphey, another relative to whom Peterson gave a helping hand.

  Peterson and Morphey became stepbrothers in adulthood, after Peterson’s father and Morphey’s mother had died, and the surviving parents got married. Peterson’s father, Donald Peterson, had worked for Morphey’s father at the Northern Illinois Gas Company. Peterson said his father was diagnosed with cancer immediately after he retired.

  “That’s some way to spend your retirement,” he said. Peterson said that it was at his father’s funeral, in fact, that his mother met Al Morphey, her future husband, whose wife had also died from cancer. Thus did Drew Peterson and Tom Morphey become family, forming a bond that, according to at least one police source, eventually led to police linking the pair in a diabolical deed that may yet turn out to be more fact than fiction.

  Tom Morphey was nowhere nearly as successful as his gas-company-executive father. He reputedly struggled with addiction and was twice convicted of drunken driving. A former girlfriend twice sought to obtain protective orders, accusing Morphey of leaving on her answering machine a message that said, “Watch your back. Don’t go to sleep. You’ll be taken care of.”

  Morphey was also arrested for domestic violence. He pleaded guilty in exchange for court supervision but saw the supervision revoked when he failed to submit to psychological evaluation.

  Morphey had made a mess of his life, but gregarious Drew Peterson threw him a lifeline by giving him a job at Suds Pub.

  Charlie Doman said Morphey not only drank at work, but was also known to pass out on the job, becoming inebriated well before closing time. Still, Doman said, “He was a real nice, honest guy.”

  A nice, honest guy, albeit one with some personal troubles. Yet if Morphey’s friend Walter Martineck’s public pronouncements are to be believed, Morphey would one day be involved in an entirely different kind of trouble with Peterson.

  Martineck and Morphey both lived on Thistle Drive in Bolingbrook, about a mile or so from Drew Peterson. Coincidentally, Charlie Doman once lived on Thistle Drive too, as did his mother, Anna Marie, and sister, Melissa. They had relocated to Romeoville by the time Stacy Peterson vanished. Charlie and Anna Marie Doman say they did not know Martineck and that Morphey did not live on the street when they did.

  But Morphey was there at the end of October 2007, and on November 30, just more than a month after Stacy was last seen alive, Martineck went on the Today show to talk about his neighbor down the street.

  Martineck explained that he and Morphey, then forty, had been friends for years
. On Today, Martineck said his old pal had told him that Peterson paid him money to help him move a large container the same day Stacy disappeared. Morphey supposedly assisted Peterson in moving this container from his second-story bedroom to his GMC Denali outside.

  “He was real frantic. I could tell he’d been drinking a little,” Martineck said of his meeting with Morphey. “He put his hands on my shoulders and says, ‘You can’t tell no one. I know she was in there.’”

  Morphey then tried to give him the money Peterson paid him, Martineck said, but he would not take it and doesn’t know how much it was.

  The day after Stacy disappeared, Morphey tried to kill himself because “he was just afraid of his family’s life,” Martineck said. Afraid for his family’s life, perhaps, envisioning the aftermath of whatever Drew Peterson had drawn him into. Bolingbrook Fire Department logs show an 11 p.m., October 29, report of Morphey overdosing on sleeping pills.

  An interview with Martineck later aired on the prime-time news program Dateline NBC. On this show, he said Morphey told him, “I went with Drew to his house. He asked me to help him move something, and I said, ‘Yeah.’

  “I go, ‘That’s understood, but what do you mean, Stacy?’” Martineck said. “And he goes, ‘Well, we lifted a blue container out of—out of his room down into his truck.’ ‘Well, how do you know it’s Stacy?’ ‘It was warm.’ And the way he said ‘warm,’ it’s like it was warm.”

  Martineck says Peterson even provided Morphey with a motive.

  “Because, like, from what Tom said, Stacy was filing for a divorce,” he explained. “And Drew had to be out and apparently Drew wanted everything to himself.”