by JOSEPH HOSEY
“If you get out of the car two blocks away, no one will know who you are,” Bychowski observed, and reported that the children enjoyed themselves despite the unsettling circumstances surrounding the day.
The day after Halloween, a Thursday, was not nearly as much fun. The state police took Peterson in for questioning, and then they served a search warrant on his home. Needless to say, the children were upset. Bychowski said a neighbor told her the cops were grabbing Stacy’s kids.
“One had Lacy in his arms,” she said. The little girl was screaming, “like bloodcurdling screaming outside,” so Bychowski took her into her house and soothed her.
Later in the day, Bychowski said she had Peterson, his children, a pair of police officers, television personality Greta Van Susteren and her crew, Cassandra Cales and her friend Bruce, and Kathleen Savio’s sister Anna Marie Doman all packed into her house while the cops searched Peterson’s home and property. Bychowski said Peterson told her they needed to talk and led her into her tiny powder room.
“He walks in with me and he says, ‘Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a chick in the bathroom.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, and we are in here because…?’ He goes, ‘Okay, should they arrest me, I want to make sure my kids go to Steve [Stephen, Peterson’s grown son from his first marriage]. You’ve got his number. Call him right away, and he’ll come and get the kids.’”
Bychowski said he expected the police to take him in for seventy-two hours. “‘A seventy-two-hour hold,’ he said. ‘We do it all the time.’”
The Bolingbrook police might have done it all the time, but the state police did not pull that on Peterson. They did not run him in, and when they were done rummaging through his house and seizing his cars and various other possessions, he returned home with his children.
Friday brought another call from Peterson, Bychowski said—again, to ask a favor. He wanted to move the kids through her house to send them off with Stephen and avoid the media massing in front of his house. Drew, Stephen, and the kids arrived with some packed clothes at her back door. Bychowski was surprised to see Kristopher there in the middle of a school day. She said the boy told her his father said he could stay home; his brother, Thomas, however, was at school.
“Odd,” Bychowski said. “So I said to Drew, ‘How come Tom went to school but Kris didn’t?’ He said, ‘Well, I thought he could help out with the little kids.’ I don’t believe that. I think Kris knew too much, and he wanted to get him out of there. Kris is the one that stuttered when I said, ‘Where’s your mom?’ Kris is the one who heard them fighting in the morning and told Cassandra, and Kris is the one he takes out of school on Friday.”
Bychowski said she sent Stephen Peterson back for the children’s winter coats, boots and gloves. Lacy did not want to leave but was finally taken away. That was the last Bychowski saw of Drew Peterson until he returned home the following Thursday. That night, Bychowski claims, Peterson peered in her windows and was “yelling” at her. Peterson maintains he was merely attempting to pass off the ashes of Stacy’s deceased half sister, Tina.
Two days after this incident, Geraldo Rivera landed in Bolingbrook and commandeered Bychowski’s house, lining up just about every player involved in the drama and stashing them inside her home.
Without a doubt, life on Pheasant Chase Court had taken a surreal turn.
“It’s just, I mean, look at how bizarre this is,” Bychowski said.
It was bizarre. And the strange days were just beginning.
Drew Peterson acted like a hunted man when the media first came calling to ask questions about his last two wives: both the one reported missing the final Monday morning of October 2007, and the other found dead in her bathtub a few years before. Peterson opened his front door just wide enough for one eyeball to peer out. The glass in and around the door was plastered with sheets of white paper, and the blinds were kept drawn over the large front windows. When he cracked open his door and looked out with one eye, he was terse and appeared nervous. It wouldn’t take long for him to emerge from his shell.
Though he initially was reluctant to appear on camera or leave his house after Stacy was gone, soon Peterson was inviting reporters into his home for interviews. Then, in short order, Peterson was venturing outside to banter with the camera crews, reporters and photographers keeping constant vigil in his cul-de-sac, waiting for something to happen—either for Peterson to pull some outrageous stunt or for the police to swoop in and snatch him up. And while an O.J. Simpson-style slow-speed car chase along Interstate 55 might have been asking for too much, Peterson’s behavior was so odd that it couldn’t be ruled out. Unfortunately for the media swarm outside 6 Pheasant Chase Court, the police did disappointingly little swooping or snatching, although Peterson fulfilled his part by clowning around for the cameras and mouthing no shortage of memorable quotes.
As the days went by without the law making a move, Peterson grew bolder. At one point in the initial days of his wife’s disappearance, he chatted with former Los Angeles homicide detective turned television personality Mark Fuhrman, famous for his star turn in the O.J. case and later for writing a book about the decades-old Martha Moxley murder that led to the trial and conviction of Kennedy relative Michael Skakel.
Then, about two weeks after Stacy Peterson vanished, Geraldo Rivera rode into town. The man who stared Charles Manson in the eye, who reported from war zones and uncovered the broken bottles hidden away in Al Capone’s vault, had touched down in Bolingbrook, and he wanted to talk to Drew Peterson.
Rivera actually did accomplish this. He ventured inside Peterson’s home and spoke with him off camera. When he emerged, Rivera reported to his audience that there was a tightening noose around the neck of Peterson, who remained inside his home, hiding from the television cameras while Rivera broadcast from a perch in front of the house.
Peterson later told me his conversation with Rivera was relaxed and cordial. He said he watched the live broadcast with family and friends as soon as Rivera left his house and was both shocked and amused by the television personality depicting him as a frightened man with a noose around his neck.
“Geraldo Rivera, the nuisance of news,” Peterson called him.
Geraldo would go on to dub Peterson the “skunk of Bolingbrook.” In turn, Peterson appeared on the Today show and told host Matt Lauer that his only regret in the months following Stacy’s disappearance was “letting Geraldo Rivera in my house. Nothing other than that.”
After his chat with Peterson, Geraldo camped out next door at the home of Sharon and Bob Bychowski, where quite a crowd was assembled. Besides Geraldo and his assorted staff were neighbors of Lisa Stebic, a missing woman from nearby Plainfield, who vanished about six months before Stacy and whose story was rapidly losing public interest as a result of the drama on Pheasant Chase; Melissa and Charlie Doman, the niece and nephew of Kathleen Savio; Steve Carcerano, Kathleen and Drew’s neighbor from their time down the street as man and wife; and Debbie Forgue, the half sister of Stacy’s deceased half sister, Tina Ryan. At one point Debbie’s husband, Martin Forgue, went over to Peterson’s home to retrieve Ryan’s ashes. Meanwhile, Rivera tried, and failed, to get people inside the house to proclaim that a hostage situation over the ashes was unfolding next door.
“It was absolutely crazy,” Sharon Bychowski said. “This is the biggest thing in our whole life we’ll ever be through. I mean, think about it. Could there be anything bigger than somebody murdering their wife next door to your house? I don’t think so.” (Despite what his next-door neighbor may think, Peterson still has not been charged—at least as of the beginning of summer 2008—with murder or any other offense related to the death of his third wife or the disappearance of his fourth.)
Bychowski said Geraldo’s staff members had wormed their way inside her house earlier in the day. They began by asking if they could do a feed from the backyard; then they wanted to move onto the patio. Bychowski agreed. Afterwards, they asked if Geraldo could actually si
t at her kitchen table but leave the booms and equipment outside. Again, she agreed.
“But now the booms are inside,” Bychowski said. “So it gets crazier and crazier. Finally they say, ‘We’re just going to do it, we’re just going to stand up.’” They took down a $300 lamp, to protect it from being hit by a boom. “And they moved my kitchen table. Now all the cameras are here, then he moved my husband’s chair. You’re kind of in the middle of it, what are you going to do? You’re going to say no? He said, ‘I promise you, no matter what, we are going to put every single thing back where we found it. You will be absolutely one hundred percent happy when we leave.’ And we were. They were very nice. They called me the next day: ‘Did we put back everything we moved in your house? Is there anything we didn’t do? Is there anyone I can call for you? Cleaning? Did you check out everything?’”
Everything, Bychowski said, checked out just fine.
Bychowski had spent the previous night in a La Quinta hotel to get away from all the media lunacy on the street—and from Peterson, who she says was shouting at her over their fence and standing at her window the night before that. When she returned to her home, the scene outside it had only grown more surreal.
“Out in front are all the Stebic people,” she said. “They all come in. They’re all on my couch. It was nuts. Charlie and Melissa [Doman] were here. It was crazy. It wasn’t supposed to be in my house. [Rivera] wanted to use my backyard. It wasn’t that cold. He just had his jacket on. Charlie, Melissa, Stebic people, [Steve] Carcerano… It was absolutely crazy.”
Not all the action was in Bychowski’s house, or even on Pheasant Chase Court. Geraldo had conducted an earlier interview in the back seat of a car in an “undisclosed location” with Ric Mims, who only days before had been Peterson’s staunchest supporter. Mims, who had steadfastly defended Drew and proclaimed his close friend’s innocence, apparently had an abrupt change of heart. He also seemed to be very afraid, hence his backseat interview in the undisclosed location.
Meanwhile, at Bychowski’s house, Geraldo moved from subject to subject, and at one point appeared to instigate a confrontation between Savio’s nephew, Charlie Doman, and Carcerano, the man who would eventually take Mims’ place as Peterson’s chief flunky.
The role of Drew’s friend and defender provided Carcerano with some notoriety, but it was not all cable television interviews and curious gazes while he was out on the town with Peterson. In fact, Carcerano told me of a nasty confrontation with a disapproving woman who recognized him as supporter of Peterson when he was just trying to get some color at a local tanning salon. But in the same conversation he also mentioned to me that—if he could not appear as himself—he hoped former ’N Sync boy-bander Joey Fatone (whom he believes resembles him) would play his part when a movie is made of Drew Peterson’s story.
But before there was a movie, there was Geraldo, and Carcerano told the Fox News Network personality how he was there the night Savio’s body was found in her bathtub. Doman did not believe this, and later told me he had never heard of Carcerano before the Geraldo taping. He had always been under the impression that another neighbor and friend of his aunt had been the only one to go into the house and make the grisly discovery while Peterson waited outside.
Visibly angry, Doman seemed on the verge of attacking Carcerano before Geraldo stepped between them. When I spoke with Carcerano about this incident, he told me he was not scared. If Doman had attacked him, he told me, it would have been a big mistake. But that wasn’t what came across on television.
While Bychowski willingly opened her home to Geraldo from the beginning and has given numerous interviews in the months since Stacy disappeared, another neighbor was not as welcoming to the army of media; apparently, he considered the state of his lawn to be of a significantly higher priority. This homeowner strung yellow police tape around his front yard to keep the press from trampling over it. Peterson himself at one point posted no-trespassing signs and placed orange traffic cones at the edge of his driveway, but they did little to keep the media away. Warning signs and traffic cones aside, Peterson did not particularly seem to want the media to stay away.
Peterson displayed his zeal for appearing on television—or, at the very least, seeing his name in print—within days of Stacy’s disappearance. By Halloween, he had started entertaining reporters inside his home. The same night, Greta Van Susteren—who drove this story in the media as she did the Natalee Holloway missing-person’s case less than three years earlier—broadcast live across the street from his home for the first time.
On Halloween, Peterson granted me an audience as he sat behind his desk, the one topped by boxes disguised as classic books like A Tale of Two Cities and War and Peace. He took questions and was gracious and expansive with his answers. As I listened, the inherently creepy Ric Mims lurked in the background. At the time, Mims was Peterson’s staunchest supporter, whose responsibilities involved answering the door for Peterson and running interference for him. In fact, when I got inside and noticed Mims lingering mere inches from Peterson, I asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m his brother,” Mims said.
“No, he’s not,” Peterson said from behind his desk, not bothering to glance at the longtime friend who was about to betray him in his greatest time of need.
Mims continued to skulk around throughout my conversation with Peterson. He also answered the door when trick-or-treaters rang.
Peterson’s children, back from their own trick-or-treating, also milled about. It was disturbing to have a four-year-old playing at my feet while his father detailed the death of his third wife and the supposed adulterous affair that prompted his fourth wife, the four-year-old’s mother, to abandon the family.
“I believe, like I tell everyone, she’s not missing,” Peterson told me that night. “She’s gone on her own. And it’s not by nothing that I did.”
This could not have been an easy thing for a man like Peterson to admit. Granted, closing in on fifty-four he was no longer young, and it must have been tough to keep up with a woman who had thirty years less mileage, a woman who had blossomed from the seventeen-year-old kid he’d first met into a twenty-three-year-old with bigger breasts, surgically sculpted legs, and a new flatter stomach. Still, he was Drew Peterson, former undercover narcotics officer, then sergeant in charge of the overnight shift, when the streets of Bolingbrook are at their most desolate. And he was a Lothario, married four times and, by his own admission, unfaithful to the first three wives. As Mims put it in an interview on CNN, “He was a big flirt with the ladies,” and a lot of people in town knew it.
“I wouldn’t say a womanizer,” Mims added, “but just overly flirtatious, chasing a little bit here and there.”
Still, Drew was man enough to admit it when the tables were turned and he was the cuckold, left home alone with the kids while his young wife was off gallivanting only God knew where. And that was just what he did on Halloween night, suggesting that the rabbit gene might run in the family, since Stacy’s mother had run off herself about eight years before.
The day after Halloween, things became even more curious. The cliché “media horde” could have been defined by an aerial photograph of Peterson’s cul-de-sac. And the legion only grew once the state police showed up to execute a search warrant.
The cops seized both Peterson’s GMC Denali and the Pontiac Grand Prix he had purchased for Stacy. They grabbed computers, compact discs, iPods and his collection of eleven guns. Cadaver dogs and their handlers poked around Peterson’s property and home. Rumors—repeated to this day despite a lack of evidence to confirm them—swirled in the packed cul-de-sac that the dogs had hit on something in the master bedroom, although that was never found to be true.
For much of this spectacle, Peterson was sequestered next door at the Bychowski’s. Perhaps as a cop-to-former-cop courtesy, he allowed Fuhrman in to speak with him, but managed to stay out of view, at least until he could no longer resist stepping—or catapulting himself—into
the media spotlight.
Peterson accomplished this by ambling out the Bychowskis’ back door in the late afternoon and down their driveway. He made sure he attracted attention by masking himself with an American flag bandanna and dark sunglasses, and pulling an NYPD baseball cap low over his eyes.
He stood there in the driveway until a few reporters noticed him and walked over to ask questions. He accepted a compliment for his bandanna but had time for little else. When the camera crews finally caught sight of him and rushed over, Peterson said, “Oh, I got to run away,” and did just that.
Mims, who on November 1 was still in Peterson’s corner, denied that the man behind the mask was his pal Peterson. Few, if any, took Mims seriously, which was a running theme throughout the saga of Stacy’s disappearance. And Mims soon showed himself to be a pretty lousy friend, much less a brother. Once the embattled cop’s most vocal ally, Mims turned on Peterson and sold a story to the National Enquirer which included the line, “Mims says [Drew’s son Kristopher] had heard his parents fighting, an argument that police and Mims believe ended in murder.”
Mims would not say how much he was paid for the story. When asked about the friend who betrayed him, Peterson said, “Our hero. He was out to make some money, and he got his thirty seconds of fame, so God love him.”
The sight of Peterson standing in his next-door neighbor’s driveway, resplendent in his red, white and blue bandanna, NYPD cap and glasses, became an enduring visual in the case. Other images also became instantly memorable: Peterson, again in his bandanna mask, on his motorcycle, roaring down his driveway past the press, and earning the Chicago Sun-Times headline “Easy Rider”; Peterson, armed with a handheld video camera, filming the camera crews outside his home while they filmed him; the broadcast of Peterson on the Today show, blaming his marital problems with the wife nobody could find on “her menstrual cycle.”
“I’m not trying to be funny here,” Peterson said to preface his remarks, all the while clearly trying to be funny, “but Stacy would ask me for a divorce after her sister died on a regular basis. I’m not trying to be funny. And it was based on her menstrual cycle.”