Fatal Vows (13 page)

Bychowski said she would walk away when she saw or heard the couple fighting. “I mean, that’s not my place.” Stacy, she said, “was willing to sort out everything herself.”

Stacy may have insisted she was able to handle her husband on her own, but Bychowski also recalls the young woman expressing her fear of being unable to escape a horrible fate, even predicting her impending death.

“She would just constantly say to me, ‘If I’m missing it’s not an accident. He killed me,’” Bychowski said. “She would say it to me all the time. Many, many, many times.”

So what were Drew and Stacy fighting about? No outsider can know for sure what happens within a marriage, but based on the accounts of friends and family, certain issues were likely sources of conflict. One was Drew’s jealousy, his suspicion that Stacy was sneaking around with other men; the three-decade difference in their ages may have ceased to be a novelty.

On her end, Stacy went from being a single seventeen-year-old to a mother of four in less than three years. While by all accounts she was a devoted mother, even to the children who weren’t hers biologically—Bychowski recalled Stacy helping Kristopher with his math homework and throwing parties in Thomas’ honor—raising four children is a huge responsibility that could easily put stress on a marriage.

One event that inarguably took an emotional toll on Stacy was the death of her half sister, Tina Ryan. Tina succumbed to colon cancer in September of 2006, at the age of thirty-one, and Stacy was devastated. Soon afterward, Peterson said, his wife became depressed and lost her faith in God. She set up what Peterson called a “shrine” to Tina on a bookshelf in the corner of Peterson’s office, to the side of his large wooden desk. He showed it to me after Stacy disappeared. The shelves contained pictures of Tina, as well as various knickknacks and mementos that seemed based on a Disney theme. As time marched on with no sign of Stacy, the number of artifacts in the shrine dwindled, which to Peterson was just as well: “It gives me more room for my own things.” While Stacy must have tried to find solace in the objects during the numb days following her half sister’s death, the items apparently did not hold the same sentimental value for Peterson.

At one time the shrine included an urn holding Tina’s ashes, but, in one of the odder episodes of the Stacy Peterson story, close to two weeks after she was reported missing, her husband returned the remains to Tina’s family while Geraldo Rivera was broadcasting live from the Bychowskis’ house. A few members of the family stepped over to Peterson’s house to collect the ashes while Rivera tried without success to get the relatives to agree that a potential hostage situation could be developing inside 6 Pheasant Chase Court. These ashes were just one of the few mementos Stacy had to remember Tina by.

Peterson’s former friend, Ric Mims, even said on a television interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that Stacy was taking mood-altering drugs to help her deal with her grief over the death of Tina, which may have further affected her emotional state. Bychowski remembered watching in shock as Mims made his statements for the camera right in her own home, which she had allowed to be used for the taping.

“Ric was going on and on about how she was under psychiatric care,” Bychowski said. “And I’m looking at him like, ‘Oh, my God, what do I do? Do I jump up and say this is really ridiculous, stop taping, get out?’”

Bychowski said Stacy wasn’t “psychiatric nuts.” She did take Prozac after having her babies because “she had a terrible time with postpartum depression,” Bychowski said, but she didn’t stay on the drug because it made her tired, and the medication conflicted with allergy medicine she took.

Stacy might not have been “psychiatric nuts,” but Peterson blamed the effect Tina’s death had on her for the “emotional roller coaster” that life with his wife had turned into. (At other times, he blamed her menstrual cycle.) Then again, he’d described life with Savio in the same terms. Peterson’s last two marriages apparently were a veritable amusement park of emotion.

“She [Savio] came from an abusive home-life growing up. She had abusive stepparents,” Peterson told Matt Lauer during an interview on the
Today
show. “At first it was very romantic and, again, after she had children, hormones kicked in and, again, an emotional roller coaster with her.”

He seemed to feel more pity for himself than for either of his last two wives, with their less than ideal upbringings, or, for that matter, the deceased Tina Ryan. Whatever sorrow he felt over his dead half sister-in-law he kept very well hidden, indeed. For example, instead of helping his wife get through the difficult day of Tina’s funeral, the event instead brought out Peterson’s jealousy.

Tina’s wake and funeral were held in the small town of Marseilles, Illinois, and both Peterson and his neighbor Bychowski said numerous friends and relatives attended. Stacy described the services as heart-wrenching, Bychowski said. Stacy and Tina’s husband, Jamie, were particularly overcome.

The day after the funeral, Bychowski said, when Stacy came next door to visit, she wasn’t herself. Bychowski, who had also lost a sister to cancer, told Stacy she understood how hard it was when a loved one died.

“So she said to me, ‘That’s not really my problem,’” Bychowski recalled. Stacy told her that she and Drew had had a big fight at the funeral. Stacy, her father, her sister Cassandra, Jamie, and Drew were all standing around the casket, saying goodbye. The others walked off after their farewells, but Stacy and Jamie stayed. “And she said, ‘I just couldn’t tear myself away. It was very hard to say goodbye for the last time.’

“She said to Jamie, ‘Let’s just do it together. Let’s just walk away together.’ So they turned at the same time and they walked outside, and when they walked into the hallway, Drew said to her, ‘Are you fucking Jamie?’

“My God, she was absolutely devastated by that.”

They argued in the car on the way home, Bychowski said, and he kept up the argument into the night. “He used to do that a lot,” she said. “He would keep her sleep deprived and argue with her all night long and not let her sleep.”

Bychowski said Stacy simply could not believe he would accuse her, right at Tina’s funeral, of sleeping with her half sister’s husband. That was, in Bychowski’s mind, when Stacy made the decision that she would be better off if she was no longer married to her husband.

“She was so devastated, is the only word I could use, and hurt and upset by that. She said, ‘I’ve got to make some changes. I’ve got to do something different. I’ve got to divorce him.’”

Stacy’s aunt Candace also claims Stacy wanted to part with Peterson. She was considering a move to either Phoenix or somewhere in California, Aikin said.

“She told me when I was there [visiting in October, 2007] she was trying to find a way to get out and take the children.”

And by “the children,” Candace Aikin said, Stacy did not just mean the two she had given birth to, Anthony and Lacy. She planned on taking along the sons of Kathleen Savio, Kristopher and Thomas, when she escaped from Drew Peterson.

Peterson himself, in the last months before Stacy disappeared, also wanted the family to move—but not without him. Bychowski said the couple first visited Arizona, with the idea that it would be close to Stacy’s aunt in California. Then they looked at property in California, Bychowski said, but found nothing in their price range.

In the summer of 2007, Drew’s new idea was Kentucky and possibly bringing Stacy’s dad along to live nearby. But Stacy told Bychowski there was no way that would happen.

“Stacy hates Kentucky,” Aikin seconded. “Stacy wouldn’t live in Kentucky.”

Strangely enough, after Stacy disappeared, Peterson’s attorney, Joel Brodsky, released an anonymous letter that put Stacy in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Folorence, Kentucky, on November 18, 2007. She was in the company of an unidentified man. The letter was sent to Peterson’s Bolingbrook home but was addressed to “Joel Peterson.”

The letter writer claims that when she approached Stacy, the woman implored her to leave her alone: “Please don’t ruin my life. Please. I just want to be left alone, please.” Stacy then supposedly hotfooted it away, but not before the quick-witted anonymous-letter writer captured her image by snapping a cell phone photograph. Disappointingly, no photograph was enclosed with the letter.

Peterson had taken a road trip with his children to Disney World about the time the letter would have been mailed—he found it in his mailbox the day he got back. The letter was postmarked in Cincinnati, Ohio, which would have been on the likely route from Bolingbrook to Orlando, Florida. Brodsky insisted his client and children did not go that way while on the road to the Magic Kingdom.

Aikin, Bychowski, and Pamela Bosco, the legal guardian of Stacy’s little sister, Cassandra Cales, all dismissed the possible validity of anonymous letters.

There is no evidence that Stacy ever got away, but even if she had, both Aikin and Bychowski are sure it would not have been to Kentucky and most certainly not to the part where Drew took her father to visit, a region Bychowski claims did not even boast a Wal-Mart.

Even though Stacy’s aunt and father figured into the relocation plans at various points, in Bychowski’s view Peterson sought to move in order to isolate Stacy from her family: “Control people do that,” she said.

Bychowski clearly saw a control motive in much that transpired between Peterson and his wife. His need for control manifested itself, she said, in his reaction to Minnie, a miniature pinscher that Stacy’s sister, Cassandra, had given her. The puppy did not last long in the Peterson household. Drew forced her to get rid of it, Bychowski said, because he hated that it peed in the house.

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.