Drew Peterson, a 53-year-old Bolingbrook, Ill. police sergeant, is scheduled to retire in less than two weeks. Retirement is normally a happy time. But instead, he contemplates a missing wife and the reason she may have gone missing.
Stacy Peterson, 23, is Sgt. Peterson’s fourth wife, someone he met when she was a 17-year-old local Bolingbrook town employee. He left his then-40-year-old wife, Kathleen Savio, and their two children to ultimately marry after Stacy after she got pregnant.
A history of violence, another dead wife
Sgt. Peterson appears to have a history of challenged relationships and bad luck. While little is known concerning his first two marriages, we know he met Kathleen in the early 1990s.
But within five years of their marriage, someone started sending Kathleen letters suggesting that her husband was having an affair, something which resulted in her filing for divorce. This was due in part to Drew's relationship with the future Mrs. Stacy Peterson.
Sgt. Peterson was alleged to have beaten his third wife severely enough to send her to the hospital, to have threatened to kill her and to have held a knife to her throat. According to Mrs. Peterson No. 3, who once obtained a restraining order against her husband and who would go on to divorce him in 2004, he wanted her dead and he had stated “he would burn her house down to shut her up.”
Evidently, Sgt. Peterson got his wish for Kathleen to shut up, and sometime after their divorce, she was found drowned in an empty bathtub in her home. Her ex-husband was allegedly returning their two children to Kathleen when he found the doors to her home locked. He went to a neighbor’s house, summoned a locksmith who eventually opened the door to Kathleen’s home. He then had a neighbor search the house. It was the neighbor who found Kathleen’s body in the tub.
The question is this: Is this the normal response of a trained police officer, or of someone who knows how to take his time, how to stage a crime scene, and how to create plausible deniability while establishing a workable alibi?
We know that many people die of freak accidents. Others, on the other hand, may be the victim of a crime of passion in which one partner takes out his anger, frustration and rage on the other (sometimes resulting in an unplanned assault that may even lead to death). Lastly there are boyfriends or husbands who make up their mind that they want a physical divorce, but don't want the legal and financial responsibilities attached to such an action.
That kind of man
When you think of this type of person, think of Californian Scott Peterson in the death of his pregnant wife, Laci. Or actor Robert Blake, who was charged, but later acquitted of the murder of his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley. And then there’s the case of Utah resident Mark Hacking who shot his wife in her sleep, disposing of her body in a Dumpster on its way to the landfill.
These crimes or suspected crimes may have all had an element of anger and rage, but they also had an element of planning. The murdererad thought out the disposal of his victim’s body, or at least considered how to cover his tracks and his DNA.
The death of Kathleen Savio (Peterson) was ruled an accidental drowning, with the local medical examiner suggesting, evidently, that she somehow injured herself and drowned in a tub full of water, with the water then draining from the tub. Her hair was wet and her fingers were wrinkled as if having been exposed to water.
Some might question her death in light of the threats made against her life, while others might consider how easy it would be to cause someone to drown in a tub, this by holding their head under water, or by simply pulling their feet above the water causing their head to go under. One or two minutes at most and an adult or child could drown in this manner, something that would be far from an accident. The circumstances surrounding the death of Kathleen Savio are now being reconsidered by the local district attorney, especially in light of the missing status of the current Mrs Peterson.
Clues: Did Stacy leave or disappear?
Stacy Peterson's husband has said that she left last Sunday morning to meet someone, and that she called him at 9 p.m. that same evening to indicate where the family car could be found. “She was in a snooty mood,” when she called, her husband said. No one has heard from her since this reported contact. She allegedly left in her red jogging suit and her children, ages 2 and 4, and her family continue to wait for word. At least one person has portrayed the relationship between Sgt. Peterson and Stacy as “strained,” a characterization that could also fit his former relationship with wife No. 3. Stacy’s living sister has stated that Stacy “lived in fear of her husband,” and that “she wanted a divorce.”
Sgt. Peterson, meanwhile, has stated his belief that Stacy left him for another man, further suggesting that she took with her extra clothes and her cell phone. He has said that she was seeing a psychiatrist and had been prescribed anti-anxiety drugs. He also points out that Stacy’s mother allegedly disappeared 10 years ago, an act that Stacy may just have copied from her mother. “She was where she wants to be,” says her husband.
Some have pointed to Sgt. Peterson’s termination by his department some 22 years ago — for alleged acts of disobedience, failure to report a bribe, official misconduct, and of allegedly soliciting drugs in exchange for information about his department — as evidence of his questionable character. These charges, however, were later dropped and his firing was reversed, giving him his old job back.
Soon-to-be retired Sgt. Peterson has apparently had some unlucky breaks in his life. Bad luck appears to have followed him for years. Whether his current wife simply took a sabbatical from their marriage and will soon reappear on her own (perhaps on the arm of another man), or, as her husband has suggested, the media attention might be sufficient cause for her to stay away, nobody knows.
Police officers become suspects too
Most will remember the June disappearance of 26-year-old Canton, Ohio, resident Jessie Marie Davis, pregnant with the child of her boyfriend Bobby Cutts, Jr. Cutts was married and a police officer. In that case, Cutts was charged with the murder of Davis and her almost full-term child (a girl she was going to name Chloe). It's crimes like these that prove anyone, including police officers, are capable of harming someone they know — even the mother of their children.
Should Stacy Peterson “surface” alive and well, the authorities investigating her disappearance and the media should be assured in knowing that they were fair in considering Sgt. Peterson’s possible involvement. After all, isn’t it usually the significant other in such cases?
But should Stacy be found dead or remain missing it will be up to the authorities to explain the how and why of her disappearance.
Next steps for investigators
Like in the case of so many other missing persons, the authorities will attempt to determine Stacy’s use of her car, her credit cards, and her cell phone. Many recent missing person and murder cases have been solved, in part, by identifying where the victim’s, or the killer’s cell phone was last used and by identifying the last cell tower their phone “pinged” against.
This has become such a common police tactic, however, that some really “smart” kidnappers and murderers will find ways to confuse the investigation by planting cell signals, perhaps by using a person’s cell phone after the victim was kidnapped or murdered in a location and at a time that could frustrate investigators trying to make sense of why a person was there one minute and gone the next.
We have also seen a new breed of methodical killers — men who may have thought long and hard about how to make their wife or girlfriend disappear without a trace. Some may have put their plan into action. Meanwhile, for the missing, the investigation continues.
Clint Van Zandt is a former FBI agent, behavioral profiler and hostage negotiator as well as an MSNBC analyst. His web site, www.LiveSecure.org provides readers with security-related information.