FATAL VOWS: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

by JOSEPH HOSEY

  Agents in the unit were drawn from various law enforcement entitites, including the Illinois State Police, with officers assigned to the squad generally serving three years. Peterson logged five and a half years in two separate tours of duty. Peterson speaks fondly of one of his supervisors from the narcotics squad, Mike Kraft, another officer from Bolingbrook who eventually rose to the level of assistant chief of that department. Peterson was less impressed with another supervisor, Ronald Janota, who came from the ranks of the Illinois State Police to head up the squad.

  “I have nothing good to say about Ron Janota, other than I feel he was truly an incompetent leader,” Peterson said of the state police lieutenant colonel after both had retired from their careers in law enforcement. He eventually sued Janota and others whom he charged with harassment and trying to discredit him.

  According to court documents, Peterson’s problems in the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad started when he revealed to his supervisors that he had embarked on an unsanctioned investigation to nail Anthony “Bindy” Rock, a high-profile criminal in Joliet in the 1970s and 1980s who shared with Peterson a knack for slipping out of serious trouble, perhaps most notoriously avoiding a lengthy prison stay after his conviction in a cop-killing case. It just so happened that at the time Peterson went off on his solo pursuit of Rock, the state police had their own case going against the man, and Peterson knew it. He disclosed his after-hours investigation only after it ultimately failed.

  Peterson has his own take on the matter, of course. The way he tells it, he was the victim of a petty prosecutor, Ed Petka, who was jealous of his success in undercover narcotics endeavors.

  Rock had been convicted of murder, burglary and criminal damage to property in connection with a 1970 robbery of a wine-and-liquor warehouse that resulted in the slaying of Joliet Police Officer William Loscheider, one of seventeen cops participating in surveillance of the building. Loscheider was actually shot by another officer, who mistook him for one of the fleeing burglars, but Rock was convicted of murder. After a series of appeals, the state Supreme Court upheld the original conviction, but a judge gave Rock a sentence that amounted to a little more than time served. He was concurrently serving time for other convictions, so he stayed in prison another couple of years, but in all, considering the seriousness of a murder conviction in a cop-killing case, he ended up spending very little time behind bars.

  “Nobody could get him,” Peterson said. “The state couldn’t get him. I got him.”

  Peterson said he nailed Rock for possession of ten thousand hits of amphetamines in November 1980. While the case ended up with a conviction, Rock beat it on appeal. But Peterson, saying he was determined to collar Rock, tried a second time in 1985.

  The “investigative report” Peterson turned in on his dealings with Rock from April 28, 1985, to May 3, 1985, starts with Peterson making plans with Jerry O’Neill, the brother of his second wife, for the purpose of “purchasing cocaine from Anthony Rock.”

  Peterson said he hoped to lure Rock into selling him cocaine by convincing him he was a “dirty cop.” In his report, Peterson said he told Rock he was “tired of watching everyone else get rich and that [he] now had an entire system set up to ‘move cocaine’” and “if anybody could help him, it would be Bindy.”

  The whole “dirty cop” ruse, Peterson later explained to me, was why he took his ex-brother-in-law along to set Rock up. O’Neill—with whom Peterson remained close even after divorcing O’Neill’s sister—was described in Peterson’s report as a member in good standing of the Hell’s Henchmen motorcycle gang. Peterson told me he brought O’Neill with him in hopes of appearing more genuinely criminal. (Their adversarial occupations notwithstanding, Peterson and O’Neill’s friendship ended only with O’Neill’s getting his face shot off in Cook County, Illinois. The man or men who gunned him down have never been brought to justice.)

  A local police officer who worked in an undercover narcotics unit said enlisting one’s civilian brother-in-law for assistance in a solo drug operation is highly unusual. Nonetheless, Peterson managed to set up a meeting with Rock. During this meeting, they felt each other out, and at one point played a “what if” game, each speculating on different ways one could set the other up.

  One way, Rock suggested, was if the state’s attorney, Petka, was granting Peterson immunity while he was behaving like a “dirty cop.” Rock then asked, “Why does Petka want me so bad?” Peterson stroked Rock’s ego, telling him it was because Rock was “the ultimate in criminals.”

  Peterson said he proposed a business arrangement with Rock in which he would buy cocaine from him in exchange for twenty percent of the front and ten percent of what was sold afterward. In his report, Peterson said he agreed but told Rock he would look for a better connection elsewhere once he was started.

  Rock has seen Peterson’s report and told me it was dead-on accurate, “just opposite” in terms of the business arrangement. Rock told me Peterson approached him with a plan in which Peterson would supply Rock with cocaine ripped off from his drug raids with the narcotics squad, expecting Rock to move it and surrender a percentage of his net sales. Rock told me he was not interested in Peterson’s scheme. In other words, according to Rock, there was no “dirty cop” pretense at all. Peterson genuinely wanted to sell drugs through Rock; he truly was a dirty cop.

  “Yeah, okay,” Peterson said when told about Rock’s take on his undercover operation. “That never happened, so he’s got to put his spin on it.”

  When Chief Charnisky learned of Peterson’s ploy, he went after Peterson’s job.

  Bolingbrook’s board of fire and police commissioners found Peterson guilty of disobedience, conducting a self-assigned investigation, failure to report a bribe immediately, and official misconduct. The board fired him. Two months earlier, a grand jury had indicted Peterson on charges of official misconduct and failure to report a bribe.

  Peterson blamed Petka for this, saying, “He shotgunned me.”

  But then the criminal charges were dropped. The special prosecutor appointed to try the case, Raymond Bolden, who later became a judge, said at the time that the charges were not provable. And in March of 1986 Peterson got his job back. Judge Edwin Grabiec ruled that the fire and police commission did not have sufficient evidence to find him guilty of the charges. Not even the chief of police could shake Peterson off the force.

  Peterson responded by going on the offensive, suing Petka, who by then was an Illinois state representative; Charnisky; Janota; the town of Bolingbrook; and the fire and police commission. Peterson’s lawsuit alleged the defendants met and conspired to discredit and harass him, and that they prevented further investigation of statements he reported Rock had made during their interaction, statements accusing Petka of taking kickbacks and Janota of being incompetent.

  Peterson said the suit was kicked out.

  “They hid behind Petka’s executive immunity,” he claimed.

  So, after that whole flap, Charnisky was still stuck with Peterson, the cop he could not oust. History would repeat itself twenty-two years later, when Chief McGury also failed in his attempt to fire Peterson.

  In the end, McGury knew the law was on Peterson’s side, and whether he liked it or not, he had to let him quit. He compared fighting Peterson’s resignation to throwing money away on a nuisance lawsuit.

  “It becomes dollars and cents,” McGury said. “Is this worth fighting for $300 an hour? Or is it worth writing this person a check for five grand and saying, ‘Get out of here’?… That’s why I think they looked at this and said, in the big picture, ‘We need to get beyond this, move on. He wants to leave. We want him to leave. Let him leave.’ I think they just wanted him gone.

  “I did too. But I also wanted him to stand trial. Then one of my friends who’s an attorney said, ‘You got to remember something. You can’t hold somebody hostage to punish them. They have the right to leave.’”

  Peterson had the right to leave, and he left. But McGu
ry predicted his former overnight sergeant would face a far worse punishment than anything handed down by the Bolingbrook fire and police commission.

  “I know very well from what the state police tell me,” McGury said. “If I’m a betting person, at some point they’ll charge him with the murder of Kathleen Savio and that’ll lead into a motive to get rid of Stacy.”

  Six months into the case, McGury’s bet had not paid off. But the game wasn’t over yet.

  The mystery surrounding Stacy Peterson consumed Roy Taylor’s life after the young woman vanished in October 2007. The father of a fifteen-year-old girl and son of Sharon Bychowski, Taylor held down a house-painting job and had enough going on before that fateful fall, but none of that mattered quite as much after Stacy disappeared. Finding his mother’s best friend and next-door neighbor became his major preoccupation.

  “It’s the priority,” Taylor said emphatically. “The most important thing in my life: God, family and Stacy. The most important thing I have going in my life.”

  Almost immediately after Cassandra Cales reported Stacy missing to the police, Taylor took to the fields around her Bolingbrook home in a desperate bid to find her. He dealt with various groups such as Texas Equusearch, a search-and-rescue outfit that works on horseback and in November of 2007 joined the search for Stacy. Combing the area, however, turned up nothing, and the arrival of winter effectively halted the volunteer effort to find Stacy.

  Cassandra said the police never ceased their search operations, and on at least one occasion even used jackhammers to break through ice. But the men and women who were not getting paid to look for Stacy lacked the resources—or the guidance from police—to tackle such an endeavor.

  The volunteers might have had an off-season, but Taylor didn’t rest. He labored through the winter months to prepare for the resumption of searches in the spring. He and his mother, along with a select group of others, organized fundraisers to offset the cost of fuel and other search necessities.

  As soon as the weather warmed, Taylor’s efforts were back in full swing. By late March, he was leading a team of volunteers through a swampy field near Joliet Junior College, where Stacy was taking nursing classes up until the time she vanished. It was the volunteers’ first search of the year.

  “Apparently it’s a place police go to kind of kick back, you know, for a few hours in between,” Taylor said. “They catch a lot of young people doing stuff they shouldn’t.”

  In fact Taylor, who assumed the role of “search coordinator,” said he spoke with the Illinois State Police, who provided him with promising search locations, including the field by the junior college. The locations were kept secret until the last possible moment, out of fear that if they were publicized too early, they could be compromised by someone moving the very thing the searchers hoped to find. Most volunteers didn’t say it in so many words, but there was no getting around the fact that what they were looking for that last weekend in March was a dead body.

  The field was also in the vicinity of the home of Scott Rossetto, with whom the police—despite the male nurse’s strident denials—believed Stacy might have been romantically involved, and whom, a police source has said, Peterson might have been trying to frame for Stacy’s disappearance.

  Taylor was not sure Rossetto was the reason the state police sent him and his volunteers to the field.

  “It was a location of their interest,” Taylor said. “I believe the land there is under some kind of bank foreclosure—an old nursery. It hasn’t been occupied for some time.”

  He conceded that Rossetto could have been part of the equation, but he emphasized that other factors went into the state police’s directing volunteers down to the south end of Joliet’s west side.

  “We talked with [state police] about that,” Taylor said. “They basically said, ‘Don’t think like that. Think like that but also think like this, and think like this. Don’t be one track, be very open.’”

  That Saturday, there were no identifiable representatives of the state police in the field. Taylor did not elaborate on the details of why they directed him to that spot, or how confident they felt about Stacy being there. It was curious, though, that the state police would set loose a group of volunteers without police supervision in an area where investigators truly believed the victim of a homicide might have been dumped. How would that conversation have gone? “Sure, we think she’s in that field by the junior college. Just go out and walk all over the place and poke around with your sticks. If you find her, give us a call right away. And remember: Don’t touch anything. That’s real important.”

  It was possible, but doubtful. Then again, in light of their handling of Kathleen Savio’s death, it seems nothing from the state police, as far as this particular case went, could be considered beyond the pale.

  Before heading off for the Saturday search, Taylor signed up and registered about five dozen volunteers at the Bolingbrook Aquatic Center. The volunteers received a modicum of training from local emergency services and disaster agency workers—one of whom had his pistol with him—who were offering their professional guidance on their day off. Then the searchers traveled south on Interstate 55 to get down to business.

  Jim Murray, clad in a red plaid jacket and armed with a walking stick, had something in common with the other volunteers trudging across the marshy ground. He did not know Stacy Peterson. He’d come out that afternoon because he was a longtime Bolingbrook resident, and since he had the time, he thought he should help.

  “It’s a worthy thing to do,” he said. “I’m an outdoorsman. I do a lot of mountain climbing, rock climbing.” He felt these attributes would be a valuable contribution to the team, along with his past experience as a volunteer to locate missing people, back when he lived in Washington State.

  Murray’s day job, building computers, doesn’t afford him many opportunities for mountain and rock climbing. Getting outside while taking up a cause as noble as searching for a missing mother, one who might have been murdered and hidden, depriving her loved ones of closure, was too much for a man like Murray to pass up.

  “I have a very boring life right now,” he said. “I like to do a lot of outdoors [activities], bike riding. Any opportunity I get to help in a situation like this—I mean, I’m a Bolingbrook resident. Anybody who has spare time on their hands and they live anywhere near here and they don’t come out and help, I think they need to check their priorities.”

  Another volunteer, Marie Galluzzi, knew Stacy and her kin about as well as Murray did.

  “I’m just out here to help,” said Galluzzi, who was taking part in her first Stacy Peterson search. “Hopefully help them put an end to their hurting.”

  A neighbor had accompanied her from Chicago down to Bolingbrook and Joliet. The neighbor explained that the search was a way for her to put off doing her chemistry homework, a reason that fell a bit short of Murray’s more idealistic motivations.

  The volunteers were visibly eager to get under way. Even before Taylor provided instructions and let them loose, a pair of young women made a discovery of sorts.

  “Okay, there’s underwear,” one said breathlessly to the other as she pointed to a pair of soiled, once-white briefs lying in the leaves along a path. No one seemed too interested in the young woman’s find, and she cried out, “Does anybody want to look at the underwear?”

  Some of her fellow volunteers did want to look. One prodded the underwear with a walking stick, and one of the search-and-rescue workers gave the garment a good visual going-over. A group of volunteers discussed for several minutes the possibility that the underwear might have something to do with Stacy Peterson, but ultimately the general consensus was that, no, it probably did not.

  Soon after this, two search-and-rescue workers happened upon and examined a filthy bedsheet spotted not far from the underwear. The sheet was of such potential significance that they ordered a television cameraman to stop filming and forbade photographers to snap any more pictures, apparently ou
t of security concerns. There was even talk of saving the sheet for the state police.

  After those two early discoveries, the search moved on. The crew in the field was a colorful bunch, in a literal sense. A good number sported orange, yellow and pink Stacy Peterson “missing person” T-shirts, complete with her photograph, the number of the telephone tip line and mention of the $25,000 reward offered for information leading to her return. These volunteers were very visible as they plodded across the sodden ground, armed with broomsticks, ski poles, or whatever other implement they chose to use in stabbing and beating the brush and soil that could be concealing Stacy.

  Rotting pieces of plywood were lifted and looked under, manhole covers were removed to see if anything lay inside, and the tall, dead grass was tramped over. But Stacy Peterson could have been there all along, and it is still conceivable the searchers would have missed her.

  The organizers tried to keep volunteers in a straight formation as they marched across the fields, but the line kept disintegrating within a matter of steps. Bolting rabbits startled some searchers; others drifted into small groups. A sense of distraction seemed to prevail, as volunteers at times appeared to wander around on their own. And some of the searchers did not seem to be doing much searching at all. As one volunteer grumbled, “With all due respect to the folks who came out to search, they’ve got a smoke in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Are you out here to search or to talk to your friends?”

  The man who made this remark was not a popular one. In fact, several of his colleagues tried with great fervor to convince one of the search-and-rescue workers to have him removed. They claimed the man had shown up drunk to a search in the fall of 2007 and struck another volunteer. The unwanted man hung around for a while, but eventually departed early.