Fatal Vows (2 page)

Once downstairs, they carried the barrel through the attached garage and out to the driveway, where Peterson set it down to open the back of his Denali. The two men hoisted the barrel into the car. Peterson wedged a piece of wood against it to keep it from rolling around.

“Well, I better get this out of here,” he said.

“Where you going?” Morphey asked.

“I know a guy wants to buy some chlorine,” Peterson said.

“Now?”

“He wants it pretty bad.” Peterson pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and palmed it into Morphey’s hand.

“Ah, Drew, come on,” Morphey protested. “You don’t have to.”

“Got to run,” Peterson said as he climbed into his Denali and closed the garage door from inside his car. Morphey watched the door go down, then drove home.

In his kitchen, he sat down and had a few drinks. His head throbbed.
Dispose. Problem.
He had a few more and then walked up the street to the home of his pal Walter Martineck. Lights shone through the front window, so he knocked on the door.

Wally opened the door, and Morphey blurted out, “I think I just helped move Stacy with Drew.”

Wally tried to follow what he was saying, but Morphey was drunk and rambling, nearly incoherent. He kept trying to push a handful of money onto his pal. Wally refused and asked where the cash had come from. Morphey wouldn’t say. He left his friend standing mystified in the doorway and walked back to his own house.

When he woke up the next morning, his girlfriend told him something that he already knew, no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise. So he went back to bed and tried to forget; he tried to pretend that it had never happened.

When he awoke the second time and couldn’t fall back to sleep, Morphey swallowed a handful of pills and chased them with what was left in a big plastic bottle of liquor. The rest of that day, October 29, 2007—the day that Stacy Peterson was reported missing, as his girlfriend had informed him in the morning—was largely lost to Morphey. And as he gratefully drifted off again, he hoped the whole thing had been a bad dream.

Waking up in a hospital room in Naperville, the next town over, was no dream. Through his haze, he heard people saying he had tried to end it all with liquor and pills. He believed what these people were saying, never mind that he could not quite make out what they looked like. Whether he had intentionally tried to kill himself, which was entirely possible, or had simply overdone it trying to block out the terrible thoughts racing through his mind, Morphey didn’t know or care. They gave him drugs to sleep, which was nice, but when the drugs wore off, an unwelcome consciousness returned. He slept and woke, and upon one woozy resurfacing, Drew Peterson had materialized next to his bed.

Peterson, catching Morphey’s eye, leaned over and asked, “How you feeling?”

I
nked into the flesh of Yelton Cales is the sad history of his troubled family. It’s an incomplete history, still without an ending, but tattooed tributes to dead relatives already cover much of Yelton’s upper body. On his left arm are the names of two of his four sisters, Jessica and Lacy. They died as young children. Scrawled indelibly on the left side of his neck is his mother’s name, Christie. She is probably dead too, although no one knows for sure; she hasn’t been seen or heard from since she walked away from her family, clutching her Bible, in March of 1998.

One name absent from Yelton’s skin is that of his little sister Stacy Peterson, who was last seen at her home in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook on October 28, 2007. Maybe Yelton didn’t add Stacy’s name because he hoped she would be found quickly. More likely he didn’t have the work done because at the time that she vanished, he was in prison for violating parole on a sex-crime conviction. When he was freed in June 2008, however, and Stacy was still missing, it looked like he might need to add another tattoo to his living book of the dead.

Yelton’s body is a testament to the adversity that he and his sister, Stacy Peterson, faced from a young age, but the tattoos tell only part of the story. They don’t tell about the mother who, before leaving for good when Stacy was fifteen, regularly took off for long stretches of time. They don’t tell about the reportedly heavy drinking of both parents, or of how Stacy and her siblings were left to fend for themselves for weeks on end as teenagers. The tattoos don’t tell the full story, even, of the man who bears them, a registered sex offender whose run-ins with the law pained his sister, although she still loved and tried to help him. And they don’t tell of the loss of Stacy’s adored half sister, Christina—called Tina to distinguish her from her mother, for whom she was named—who succumbed to colon cancer in September 2006, when Stacy was a young mother of two, stepmother of another two, and the fourth wife of a much older police officer.

When Stacy Cales, at the age of nineteen, married forty-nine-year-old Drew Peterson, overnight sergeant of the Bolingbrook Police Department, he must have seemed to offer the stability, respectability and authority she’d rarely known in her tumultuous early years.

It didn’t turn out that way. Soon after Tina died, by many accounts, the Petersons’ marriage went on the rocks, and several people say Stacy talked about taking her four kids and leaving Drew. Then, slightly more than a year after Tina’s death, Stacy went missing, without the kids. All along, Drew Peterson has maintained that Stacy, repeating her mother’s pattern, abandoned the family for another man.

The Illinois State Police, however, saw it differently from the beginning. Within two weeks, they had ruled Stacy’s disappearance a “potential homicide,” and their sole suspect was, and still is, Drew Peterson.

The same day the state police declared Stacy’s disappearance a potential homicide, the Will County state’s attorney also reopened an investigation into an event in Peterson’s recent past that to many had always felt unsettled and mishandled: the death of his third wife, Kathleen Savio, to whom he was married when he began romancing the then-seventeen-year-old Stacy. Three and a half years before Stacy vanished, Savio, with whom Peterson was still embroiled in contentious divorce proceedings even though by then he had married his much younger girlfriend, was discovered dead in her home, in a dry bathtub. State police investigated and pretty swiftly concluded that Savio had slipped in the tub and died accidentally. A coroner’s jury upheld that ruling. Peterson was never a suspect, and the whole episode was behind him in about two and a half months. But when Peterson’s next wife disappeared, the death of his third spouse suddenly took on a more suspicious appearance. Her body was exhumed for another look, and this time a different conclusion was reached: Savio’s death had been no accident, but a homicide.

Unless Stacy Peterson turns up somewhere, with a plausible explanation of where she’s been all this time, her exit from the world will be much like her entry into it and a great deal of the time in between: marked by tragedy and family troubles.

Stacy Cales was the third child born to her mother, Christie, and father, Anthony, of Downers Grove, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Yelton came first, followed by Jessica, the sister Stacy never met because she died in a house fire before Stacy was born.

Stacy’s aunt, Candace Aikin of El Monte, California, said the little girl was about a year and a half old when she suffered burns and smoke inhalation during a December 1983 fire in the family’s ranch home. Christie Cales, who was about a month away from giving birth to Stacy, managed to escape from the burning house through a window, barefoot and in her pajamas. Her husband, Anthony, wasn’t home at the time of the fire.

“My sister called me when the paramedics were taking her daughter out of the house,” Aikin recalled. “She said, ‘They’re taking my daughter away.’”

Cruelly, the family suffered another terrible loss not long after. In October 1987, when Stacy was three and the family had added two more daughters—Cassandra, age two, and baby Lacy—Lacy fell victim to sudden infant death syndrome. After the loss of her second daughter in less than four years, Christie Marie Cales’ life seemed to spiral out of control, and she became an intermittent figure in Stacy’s upbringing.

After her tragedies, Christie “had a history of vanishing for weeks on end,” according to the missing persons Web site the Doe Network, dedicated to investigating and solving such cold cases. She moved to the south suburbs to live with family members and saw her children only periodically.

According to a November 26, 2007, article in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, Christie Cales also suffered from depression and spent time in a psychiatric institution. While she was on the outside, Christie ran afoul of the law. One of her criminal convictions was for contributing to the neglect of a child: She had let Yelton, then seven, outside in the snow without adequate clothing.

“Cales…admitted to drinking a case of beer a day and drew convictions for many criminal charges,” the Doe Network site says. “DuPage County warrants [were] issued for her on charges including criminal damage to property, battery and drunken driving.”

In 1983, the
Sun-Times
article reports
,
Christie sought a protective order against her husband, saying he had threatened her with a .357-caliber pistol. Anthony Cales was charged with aggravated assault, but his wife refused to testify against him, so the charges were dropped. The couple seemed to have reconciled, because five months later they bought a ranch home in Downers Grove, the same one that burned down only a few months later.

In November 1989, the
Sun-Times
article also states, Christie pleaded guilty to shoplifting a bottle of vodka and three packs of cigarettes from a drugstore. The day after Christmas that same year, she was arrested for stealing two cases of Old Style, a bottle of Baileys and more cigarettes from a food store.

Eventually, her husband, Anthony, filed for divorce and custody of the children, according to the Doe Network site. In 1990, Christie at first challenged the filing but then failed to show up to court for divorce hearings, so Anthony’s request for divorce was granted. “Not showing up for court was typical behavior for her,” the Doe Network says.

When Stacy was fourteen, her mother picked up her Bible, said she was going to church, and left. But this time her absence wasn’t just for weeks. It was apparently permanent, because she hasn’t been seen or heard from since. No one knows exactly what happened to her.

“I think she went with another guy and just got in a bad situation,” Candace Aikin said. “She had a habit of disappearing.” Still, Aikin adamantly believed that Christie, who was forty when she vanished, is dead, not living a new life with a new identity or anything like that. True, she had taken off before, but she always surfaced eventually.

Aikin also believed that her sister, for all of her troubles, could have held it together if not for the horror of losing a second child. She recalled a visit years later to the Bolingbrook home of her niece, Stacy, during which Stacy’s husband Drew took the family, including Stacy’s father, out to dinner. Aikin remembered the lament of her former brother-in-law.

“He felt like if we wouldn’t have lost Lacy, the second child, they would still have been together,” Aikin recalled Anthony Cales telling the table. “He said, after the first death it was hard. After the second death, she lost it.”

Aikin said that after Lacy died, Anthony Cales took his surviving children, Yelton, Stacy and Cassandra, down south to Florida and possibly Louisiana. For a few years she lost track of the family. They moved frequently, and she didn’t always know where they were or, when she did know, why they were in a certain place.

“He didn’t let us see [the children],” Aikin said. “I think he was hiding from my sister more than anyone.”

But Aikin said her access to her nieces and nephew resumed when Stacy’s half sister, Tina, tracked them down somewhere in the South.

“It wasn’t too long, a couple years,” Aikin said, relieved to find her big sister’s children once again.

Although Aikin didn’t live close to her nieces and nephew, she said she always tried to keep close tabs and have a positive influence on their lives, “because I was like a mother to them.” Aunt Candy was the closest thing they would have to a mother, at least for a part of their lives—particularly for Stacy.

“Stacy was like a daughter,” Aikin said. “I was very close to her.”

Even before their mother up and left, however, Stacy and her siblings had less than ideal childhoods, growing up without much parental oversight. After her parents divorced in 1990, her father married Linda Cales, in Florida, about five years later. Stacy’s former stepmother has said Anthony Cales was an abusive alcoholic, and their home was no place to grow up. The couple and the kids moved around to different places—not always, it seems, living together—shuffling around the South with periods back up in Illinois, before eventually returning to the Chicago area for good. Anthony and Linda are now divorced.