FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  Peterson and his attorney at times seemed to be their own worst enemies. Oddly, for all the talking they did, all the outlandish remarks and apparently unwise television appearances they made, nothing came back to haunt them. After a while, the antics of Peterson and Brodsky were the only thing keeping the pair in the public eye. Eventually it seemed as though the police and prosecutors would have liked nothing better than for the world to stop paying attention to Drew Peterson and his lawyer, if only they would let that happen.

  Peterson suddenly adopting a low profile was a remote possibility. The less attention he received, the more he appeared to crave it. When the media launched its second en masse invasion of his cul-de-sac—right after the February 21 announcement that the second autopsy performed on Savio’s remains concluded she was the victim of a homicide—Peterson could not contain himself entirely. At one point, he said he’d do an interview if a female television reporter, who happened to be out of earshot at the time, would put on a bikini. The spotlight had found Peterson, all right—the same way trouble always seemed to.

  Over the course of his nearly three decades in law enforcement, Drew Peterson pulled two hitches in an undercover narcotics unit. When he was in uniform, he elected to work overnights, starting his shift when the department brass was leaving for the day. And as a sergeant, Peterson had less involvement with the public than when he was a patrolman. There he called the shots, he said, from “behind the scenes.”

  For a man who seemed to prefer lurking in the shadows, Peterson still couldn’t avoid attracting the unwanted attention of his supervisors. But then, from the stories Peterson himself tells, he always chafed against authority. Even as a freshman football player at Willowbrook High School, he was often ordered to do extra running, wearing all of his pads, as punishment for acting up during practice. All the running he was doing convinced him that he might as well join the cross country team.

  “I was always running anyway,” he said. Not just that, but “I was running with all that gear on.”

  Free of his helmet and pads, he placed in the top five at big varsity meets. But his cross-country career was cut short his junior year, he said, when he stepped into a gopher hole and severely injured his hip.

  Decades later, Peterson was a police officer and was still getting into trouble. In fact, in 1985, long before the names of Drew and Stacy Peterson were splashed across national television news shows, he was actually fired from the Bolingbrook Police Department for running an unauthorized undercover operation while working for a multijurisdictional narcotics squad. A grand jury also investigated his activities in this case, but in a pattern that would repeat itself in years to come, Peterson prevailed. He was indicted, but the charges were dropped, and he got his job back.

  Instead of slowing down with age, Peterson continued to find himself in the crosshairs of internal affairs as his career with the Bolingbrook Police Department drew to a close. During his last five years or so as a cop, the department launched no fewer than three probes on Peterson. In the last one, he cashed in his chips and retired before the police chief had a chance to make good on his bid to fire him.

  The swan song of Peterson’s career began in July of 2002 when his third wife, Kathleen Savio, accused him of breaking into her house and holding her at knifepoint against her will. The department investigated, but nothing came of it.

  In September of 2007, Peterson was suspended for eight days for his part in allowing a high-speed car chase of a stolen Hummer, which ended with the wreck of the fleeing vehicle. Department policy forbids high-speed chases for stolen vehicles, on the grounds that recapturing someone’s swiped Hummer is not worth putting officers, pedestrians, and other drivers in danger of being run off the road.

  No one was hurt and Peterson was not directly involved in the pursuit, but Police Chief Ray McGury suspended “like a half a dozen officers,” he said, with Peterson getting the longest penalty “because he’s a supervisor and I hold him to a higher standard.”

  Peterson didn’t even know the chase was going on until the cars passed right by a restaurant where he was sitting with Stacy.

  “They were discussing—he didn’t get into detail what they were discussing, and I didn’t need to know that,” McGury said. “I just needed to impress upon him that you are the supervisor and you’re in charge of the shift. You know you’ve got cars driving by you at excessive speeds, chasing a stolen car, which you know is a total violation of policy.” A sergeant should know, McGury said, that if he sees a squad car rocketing down the road, “you then have to pick up the phone and call the dispatcher to find out what’s going on.”

  Just a few weeks later, on October 29, Stacy Peterson was reported missing, bringing McGury not only more headaches but also unwanted national media attention directed at his department. The investigation into her disappearance was quickly handed off to the state police, who in the early days of their inquiry—sometime between October 29 and November 9, when Peterson was suspended without pay—developed information about Peterson that they passed back to the Bolingbrook department, prompting yet another internal probe of the volatile sergeant.

  The subject of the inquiry hasn’t been made public, but Bolingbrook Police Lieutenant Ken Teppel said it was unrelated to Stacy’s disappearance. Teppel explained that the unspecified offense that Peterson allegedly committed while on the job could be classified as official misconduct, which is a felony. If convicted, it would cost him the roughly $6,000 monthly pension he was set to collect for the rest of his life.

  Peterson resigned from his job, just shy of marking thirty years with the department. The early departure would cost him about $200 a month in pension money, but it would save him the indignity of further investigation.

  McGury refused to accept his resignation; he wanted Peterson fired. He tried to force Peterson to appear before the fire and police commission, which has the authority to hire and fire personnel. On November 20, the board ruled that it was bound by law to accept Peterson’s resignation and therefore declined to allow McGury to present the results of the internal affairs probe. The outcome rankles the police chief to this day.

  “I still don’t think it was a valid retirement,” McGury said. “I’m not an attorney. And there’s absolutely—well, there’s no doubt he circumvented the system so that he didn’t have to stand, you know, and be charged with some things.”

  Maybe McGury couldn’t fire Peterson, but he could try to get him arrested, and possibly stripped of his pension. He passed the fruits of the internal affairs investigation on to Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow. It apparently did not meet Glasgow’s standards; no charges were brought as a result of the investigation. Peterson retired with his pension, about $70,000 a year, intact. As he had so many other times in his life, Drew Peterson got out of another scrape without suffering any real repercussions.

  The end of 2007 was a trying time for Bolingbrook Police Chief Ray McGury. Drew Peterson, the department’s longtime overnight sergeant, was daily fodder for television news programs up and down the dial. “Experts” on national news programs cast McGury’s department in a less than favorable light, and the chief said that he had received death threats via e-mail since Sergeant Peterson’s wife had disappeared.

  McGury did not deserve it. For one thing, his department was not handling the investigation of Stacy Peterson’s disappearance; the Illinois State Police were. Likewise, his department was not responsible for the original and, now, second investigation into the mysterious death of Kathleen Savio; that too was the state police.

  Additionally, McGury did not hire Peterson, nor was he the police chief who tried and failed to fire him in 1985. McGury was not even around when Peterson and Savio were battling each other both in and out of divorce court, or when Savio turned up dead in a dry bathtub and the state police found nothing overtly peculiar about it.

  No, McGury inherited Peterson when he took the job as the Bolingbrook Police Department’s top man in August
of 2005, smack in the middle of the scandals sparked by Peterson and his wives. It would take some time for McGury to learn the full extent of how deeply those scandals had affected the department.

  In fact, until McGury suspended Peterson in September of 2007 after the high-speed chase incident, he had rarely gotten “up close and personal” with the sergeant who would draw the eyes of the world to Bolingbrook only a month or so later. It was a matter of their schedules, McGury explained. As the chief, he worked days. Peterson, the sergeant with the most seniority, was more comfortable working after dark.

  “Some of these guys I don’t see for six months,” McGury said. “It’s just the nature of the job. I leave at 5 o’clock; they come in at 5. They’re getting off at 7 a.m.; I’m coming in at 7 a.m. And the only times I see them is when I visit roll call, let them know that I am still the chief, that guy that’s in that office there. I do some ride-alongs occasionally when schedule allows. So I didn’t see Drew.”

  Sometimes, McGury said, he wishes he had never seen Drew.

  “There are some days, I was joking with my wife, where Captain McGury sounds a whole lot better than Chief McGury,” he said.

  He was Captain McGury at the Naperville, Police Department, where he worked for more than twenty years before leaving to lead the force in Bolingbrook.

  Growing up on Chicago’s South Side—in the Irish Catholic enclave around 103rd Street and Pulaski Avenue—McGury initially wanted to become a fireman, like his dad, but he became interested in law enforcement while attending St. Xavier University, in his same South Side neighborhood.

  McGury left the neighborhood to work first for the Palos Hills Police Department, and then Naperville, when the tiny town was on the cusp of a population explosion that saw it take off to become one of the most desirable places to live in the United States. That’s where he came under the influence of David Dial, a police chief who had the idea of molding his staff into future police chiefs themselves.

  “The more you’re around Dave, the more you kind of say, maybe being the chief of police, being the top dog, would be kind of interesting,” he said. “When the Bolingbrook job came available, it was tempting only because it’s in the area. I didn’t have to uproot my family too much.”

  While the two towns share a border, the communities are quite different. Naperville, founded in 1831, boasts higher property values, a posh downtown, thriving nightlife, and pride in its traditions and history. Its downtown Riverwalk is a regional attraction. There was also the 2006 Money magazine article, listing the town as the second-best place to live in the United States, and other magazines and organizations have bestowed similar recognition. Bolingbrook, meanwhile, was incorporated in 1965 and has, well, a very nice shopping mall.

  McGury said he knew about these differences from the beginning but still was not prepared for what awaited him in his new position.

  About six months into his tenure, the superintendent of the town’s public works department, along with his predecessor, were implicated in a theft scandal. Federal investigators were brought in to probe the matter, and in January of 2007, the two men, Donald Ralls and John Schwab, pleaded guilty to tax fraud. Since then, the federal investigation seems to have branched out.

  “It’s no secret,” McGury said. “The mayor [Roger Claar] would tell you this if he sat here with you, is that the feds are looking at him.”

  While the theft scandal was a big enough deal to attract news coverage in nearby Chicago, it was nothing compared to the media onslaught that was unleashed after October 29, 2007, when the fourth wife of the department’s overnight sergeant was reported missing.

  A missing wife would have been bad enough without knowing what had befallen the previous Mrs. Peterson. As it happened, McGury did not know—he was hired more than a year after the first investigation into Kathleen Savio’s death—until he was confronted by Stacy’s sister and father a day after the young woman was last seen.

  “I met with Cassandra [Cales] and her father,” McGury said. He had called the meeting himself and endured, he said, about “twenty minutes of them really, really being angry with me personally for allowing this to happen.” Then Cassandra brought up something that McGury had never heard, causing him to cast a questioning glance over to his deputy chief, who was also at the meeting.

  “She says, ‘This is no different than with his third wife.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, with his third wife?’” McGury said. He had heard she passed away, but he never had any idea of the circumstances and controversy surrounding her death.

  “And [Cassandra] said she was obviously murdered. I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘Oh, yeah, act like you don’t know.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about other than I know she is deceased. And that’s how he married Stacy.’

  “So then it was like an hour long getting me caught up to speed,” McGury said. “After they left, I looked at my deputy chief and said, ‘This would’ve been kind of important for me to know.’ And he goes, ‘You’ve got to understand something: A) We weren’t involved in this. B) It was ruled a drowning. And we to this day never read any reports. We’ve never seen anything because state police did all of it.’”

  That did not stop the public from slamming the entire Bolingbrook Police Department in general, and its chief in particular, even though he wasn’t working in Bolingbrook during the first investigation of Savio’s death. Of his twenty-seven years in law enforcement, McGury said, the first four to six weeks after Stacy Peterson disappeared were “probably the toughest.” He was bombarded with hate mail and death threats.

  The threats and criticism have tapered off, but whenever a Drew Peterson program airs on television, McGury sees an uptick in nasty messages. “There’s a lunatic fringe out there that, you know, that’s going to come out of the woodwork. My major concern was the department, trying to keep the department together, keep it on track.”

  While he’d doubtlessly like to keep the lunatic fringe at bay, McGury has invited federal investigators to delve into his department’s handling of Peterson and Savio’s domestic feud, as well as just about everything else from that time to the present day. He’s turned all files over to the FBI and asked the agency to comb through everything, and the FBI has obliged.

  McGury said he knows some of his staff members didn’t welcome a federal investigation, but he feels it’s necessary for the future well-being of the department.

  “I want to know from a department standpoint what we did either on purpose or by mistake,” McGury said. “One way or another I’ve got to get this department turned around. I have to. As long as I’m the chief, I have to do that.” If the feds turn up proof of wrongdoing, he has vowed to hold people accountable

  “If we screwed something up with the Peterson marriage to Stacy, I got to know that.”

  Besides opening his door to the feds, McGury has been up front with the public and press as well; shortly after Stacy went missing, for example, he appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News show. Other police agencies have not been as forthcoming.

  The state police, McGury said, “just are awful” at handling the media. He said they tried to forbid him from appearing on Van Susteren’s show. “And I said, ‘Last time I checked, I’m the chief of police. So you’re not going to forbid me from doing anything.’”

  Cooperative as he was with the press, by the end of November 2007, the police chief had had enough of the national media caravan camped out in his town, as well as the snide allusions to small-town police corruption and incompetence, and the cloud of scandal hovering over the department he had headed for a little more than two years. He also was angered by the way the veteran sergeant comported himself while in the public eye, like the time Peterson popped up in front of television cameras with the American flag bandanna tied over his face, dark sunglasses covering his eyes, and an NYPD hat situated low on his forehead.

  “It’s an emba
rrassment,” McGury said of Peterson’s conduct. Others in the department shared his opinion, he added.

  “They’re cautious, though, and they should be, in that he’s only been named a suspect,” the chief said. “He hasn’t been charged with anything. So we can’t leap to the judgment that he’s responsible for the deaths of his third and now-missing fourth wife.”

  With all his attendant drama, Peterson may have worn on his colleagues by the end of his career, but many have said that in his heyday, he was a talented undercover narcotics officer. Peterson will tell you that himself.

  “I excelled at that,” he said.

  While Peterson obviously enjoyed discussing his exploits as an undercover drug agent, a few months after the state police announced that he was their only suspect in the “potential homicide” of his missing wife, Peterson clammed up. He had retained the services of Glenn Selig, who, Peterson said, advised him to keep his mouth shut when asked about entertaining tales from his past. After all, there was money at stake.

  “If the networks are paying for it, I can’t give it away,” was how Peterson put it.

  Before the vow of silence, though, he’d shared a few stories with me about his undercover work on a narcotics squad he clearly loved being a part of. Oddly enough, it was during this time that Peterson found himself in the most precarious jam of his career—at least until Stacy disappeared.

  Peterson took that particular hit in 1985, while working under a different chief, William Charnisky. At the time, Charnisky had loaned Peterson out to the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad, a drug enforcement task force based on the outskirts of nearby Joliet.