Fatal Vows (21 page)

I answered, in all honesty, that it was pretty funny.

Peterson was then manning the phones, taking calls from Brodsky and Selig the publicist, while his fifteen-year-old son, Thomas, watched the reactions of Smith and Geraldo Rivera on the large living room television. Rivera and Smith made rather unfavorable comments about Thomas’ father while family photographs, most of which had the boy’s own face and those of his siblings blurred out, flashed across the screen.

Pictures of Thomas’ mother, Kathleen Savio, and Stacy Peterson, the woman who had adopted him, were also shown while commentators speculated about whether Peterson may have killed one or both women. Thomas’ younger half siblings, Anthony and Lacy, played in the living room but paid little to no attention to the television. And Peterson was too wrapped up in his own televised personal drama to pay much mind to the children, at least that afternoon.

Peterson could not even escape his newfound fame when he took his children to Disney World at the end of December and into the New Year.

“The problem is, I got more stares and dirty looks,” Peterson said of his failure to blend in with the crowds in the Magic Kingdom. “One guy called me Scott Peterson,” the California man who is on death row after having been found guilty in 2004 of killing his wife and unborn son.

Drew Peterson might have been complaining about his notoriety, but he could not hide the pleasure he took in telling how many people recognized him.

“It was like, ‘That’s Drew Peterson,’ and it happened a lot,” he said.

Peterson traveled to New York City and Los Angeles to make television appearances. He invited
People
magazine into his backyard for a photo shoot. Whenever the whirlwind of media attention billowing about him started to subside, Brodsky conveniently brought to the press another anonymous letter detailing a Stacy sighting, or a lascivious text message from a mystery lover Peterson happened to stumble upon while looking at her old cell phone. Once Brodsky claimed he was sent a photograph snapped by a retired police officer showing a woman in Thailand who he believed just might be Stacy, even though she looked nothing at all like her.

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.

O
ver 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.”