Fatal Vows (3 page)

Sharon Bychowski, Stacy’s next-door neighbor in Bolingbrook, who became a close friend and confidante of Stacy’s in the last few years before she disappeared, recalled some of the tales Stacy told about growing up in the Cales family.

“He drinks a lot,” Bychowski said of Stacy’s father, while Stacy’s mother “was kind of into drugs a lot.” She and Drew Peterson said Anthony Cales worked in construction, but Aikin said he was a plumber. According to the Web site A Candy Rose, which has been tracking the case of Stacy’s disappearance, at one time Anthony Cales had plans to buy a marina in Florida, but ended up back in Illinois.

Bychowski said Stacy had told her that their father left her, Yelton and Cassandra alone for three weeks (her parents were divorced by this time). “And they went to school every day,” Bychowski said. “They got up and dressed, took showers. [Stacy] was twelve or thirteen, I think she said. She was still in grammar school.

“I said, ‘You got up and went to school every day for three weeks?’ I said, ‘How did you have enough food?’ [Stacy said], ‘We ate mac and cheese, and we ate whatever we had.’ I said, ‘Nobody knew that you guys were alone?’ She said, ‘No. We didn’t want to be separated.’ So she’s got a lot of background.”

Bychowski said Stacy related that episode as the two women were returning from an outing in rural north central Illinois.

“We were going out to see my niece Jennifer—she lives in Paw Paw,” Bychowski said. “They went out with me to a picnic. On the way back, me and Stacy were in the front seat, and we went by that area and she said, ‘You know, I used to live here. As a matter of fact, we were here for three weeks by ourself.’ [
sic
] And she told me that story.”

Bychowski remembered pressing Stacy as to why the three children, when left to fend for themselves, did not seek help. “She said, ‘But we knew that if we told somebody, we’d be separated.’ I said, ‘My God, Stacy, how much did you grow up?’”

After her mother disappeared and her father proved to be a less than responsible parent—having separated from Linda by this time—foster care apparently became a greater likelihood for Stacy and Cassandra. (Yelton, more than four years older than Stacy, was probably old enough by then to be on his own.) To avoid that, Stacy, by then in high school, went to live with her half sister Tina, about eight years her senior. Tina was the daughter of Christie and, according to Aikin and Bychowski, a man named Ron Kokas, whom Christie never married. At least for some of her growing up, Tina was in her mother’s care; at other points, she was in foster care, according to Tina’s friend Steve Cesare.

Nonetheless, by the time Stacy lived with her, Tina was married and in her twenties. Perhaps because they shared a mother who had left them behind, Tina in turn became a surrogate mother for Stacy, who lived with her sister during Tina’s divorce from her first husband and after she married her second husband, Jamie Ryan. Aikin said Stacy was living with Tina and Jamie when she took up with Drew.

Stacy’s sister Cassandra was also lucky enough to escape foster care. She was taken in by her employer, local businesswoman Pamela Bosco, who became Cassandra’s legal guardian and, after Stacy disappeared, served as the family’s spokeswoman. Years later, Bosco admitted that she regretted not taking in Stacy as well. But by that time, Cassandra’s older sister was already out in the world. She had graduated from Romeoville High School in 2001—a semester early, according to her Aunt Candy—had found a job as a hotel desk clerk, and was about to meet Sergeant Drew Peterson.

Stacy, Aikin said, grew up fast. But despite the tumult and hardship she suffered from her very first days, she didn’t give in to defeat or gloom.

“She was more of a softy,” Aikin said of Stacy. “She still had her frustrations and everything. But she tried hard, she tried very hard, to make her life positive.”

Indeed, a theme that repeatedly comes through from those who knew Stacy is that while she endured a tough childhood, she was not hardened by it. Messed up as her family was, she never turned her back on them and probably felt especially devoted to Cassandra and Yelton, after the siblings had looked out for one another for so many years. Stacy took school seriously and aspired to become a nurse, starting classes at Joliet Junior College the fall that she vanished. In photos, she often appears peaceful, serene. There was something about Stacy, even when she was just a small child, that was inherently good, her aunt said.

“She was always happy,” Aikin said. “She noticed people. She was a people person. Even when she was very little.”

Her friend Cesare, a Chicago-area magician, knew Stacy when she was just a girl. Cesare met eight-year-old Stacy through the then-teenage Tina, who became both his girlfriend and lovely assistant. Tina was a “box jumper, because they jump in and out of boxes,” he explained. “I cut women in half, stuff like that.”

Cesare remembered Stacy as a vibrant, artistic girl who was very attached to her half sister.

“Stacy and Cassandra both looked up to Tina as their mother figure,” he said. “When Tina got sick, it was devastating for her.”

Stacy was also in need of a father figure, Cesare said, and this is apparently what led her to Peterson.

“Stacy was a good kid,” Cesare said. “In my eyes, she was just a little girl who got mixed up with the wrong guy.”

If anything, Stacy’s troubled childhood made her appreciate the importance of family. “Stacy was the glue in that family, and she was very responsible as a child,” Aikin said.

From a young age, Stacy focused on family, on keeping her own together as best as she could and then reaching out to bring them even closer once she was married and had the means to do so, Bychowski said. For example, she often hosted family get-togethers at the roomy house on a cul-de-sac that she moved into with her husband. When it came time to choose names for her own two children, she looked no further than her immediate family: Anthony for her son, after her father, and for her daughter, Lacy, after the younger sister who died as a baby.

She also made an effort to rekindle relationships among her in-laws, Aikin said.

“She brought Drew’s family back together,” Aikin said. “She said Drew didn’t get together with his family.”

As much as Stacy managed to resist the downward pull of her family’s troubles, the same wasn’t true of her heavily tattooed brother, Yelton. At the time Stacy disappeared, Yelton was twenty-eight and locked away in the Western Illinois Correctional Center. He had been convicted for the aggravated criminal sexual abuse of a victim between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and he had gone back to prison for violating his parole. It was hardly his first run-in with the law, however. He’d also spent time in prison for offenses as varied as possession of a stolen vehicle and domestic battery.

As his Aunt Candace Aikin said wistfully of her nephew, “He’s a stinker.”

The girl he was accused of sexually abusing was actually fifteen at the time of the offense, according to the Illinois State Police. Yelton was twenty-five. A report on the incident released by the Downers Grove Police Department said that about half past eleven on the night of January 7, 2005, Yelton “forcefully assaulted” the teen in the passenger side of a vehicle.

His victim told police that Yelton “held her hands above her head and penetrated her vaginally with his fingers and also with his penis [and] also forced her to have oral sex with him as well.”

Yelton took a four-and-a-half-year hit on the sex case, and now must register as a predatory sex offender for the remainder of his natural life. Prior to that, Yelton—whose non-familial tattooes include a picture of the cartoon character Yosemite Sam and a Chinese symbol on his back, footprints across his chest, a demon and a dragon on his left arm, a tribal sign on his right forearm, the letters “H.D.” on his right ankle, and the prediction “Hellbound” on his stomach—got three years for possession of a stolen motor vehicle (a black 1989 Ski-Doo snowmobile the cops caught him with in January 2004) and fifteen months for domestic battery.

According to the cops, Yelton showed up at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove in January 2002 with his girlfriend, whose identity the police have withheld. She had severe head injuries. Yelton, whose arms were scratched and shirt was soaked with blood, supposedly explained that his girlfriend fell out of the back of his van. Soon after arriving, he excused himself to go back to his van, saying he would return in “a few seconds.” He drove off, leaving his girlfriend behind. When Yelton later returned to the hospital, at one point a bottle of beer fell out of his freshly changed shirt.

Cursory examination by hospital staff showed the woman’s injuries were not consistent with falling out of a van, police said, but an injury to her eye was entirely consistent with being struck with a fist.

As the woman regained her composure and was able to recall what happened to her, she told officers that she and Yelton had driven to Bensenville, near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, to look for a friend. When they could not find the friend, however, Yelton’s girlfriend grew frightened that he was going leave her alone in a parking lot.

When she would not leave of her own accord, “Cales drove recklessly to a parking lot…and stopped the van,” according to a police report. “Mr. Cales pulled the victim out of the back of the van by her ears. Mr. Cales proceeded to punch the victim in the face. The victim felt the right side of her face go numb. The victim is unsure of the events which followed after that.”

Yet Stacy, once again, didn’t abandon a family member, even one who had done a pretty thorough job of screwing up his life. When he was paroled on the sex charge, she helped fix up a rental home for him to live in, although he wasn’t able to enjoy it long before getting sent back to prison. Yelton was released again in June 2008.

Stacy’s friend Sharon Bychowski said Stacy loved her brother. But for her own part, Sharon did not hold out much hope for Yelton’s future.

“Yelton—I think he’s messed up,” she said. “I think he had a good time partying a lot. Drew says there’s nothing that would stop him from doing what he does. He would rather just get high and party than worry about the consequences. He doesn’t think consequences are important. When he gets out, he’s not going to be out very long. He’s going to be a career jail person. [Stacy’s] focus was to get him straight.”

It was precisely her devotion to family that makes Aikin utterly reject the story Drew Peterson has stuck to since Stacy disappeared: His wife was simply following in her mother’s footsteps, abandoning her family without a word of explanation. He in fact seemed perturbed by her irresponsible behavior, considering everything he had done to make her happy, including buying her new breasts and a tummy tuck, and springing for hair removal, corrective Lasik eye surgery and braces. He had really extended himself, and she had the nerve to leave him and four children in the lurch. At least that’s what he wanted everybody to believe, that his wife gave up on her husband and the children for the sake of an extramarital dalliance, one that possibly took her to a tropical vacation spot.

Stacy’s Aunt Candy didn’t buy his story for a minute.

“It’s the last thing she would have wanted,” she said. “When you have something happen in your childhood, you try to do the opposite. Her mother disappeared. She knew how that felt. She would never do that to her children.”

In the days immediately following Stacy’s disappearance, Peterson mentioned the lurid story of her mother’s disappearance to me and claimed there were “indications” Christie was still alive. On this topic, Aikin once again did not share Peterson’s worldview. Peterson, she claimed, badly wanted people to believe that because he also wanted people to think Stacy is still alive, that her story lines up neatly with her mother’s. But Aikin firmly insisted that her sister is not alive, and Stacy’s disappearance is not a reenactment of her mother’s.

Stacy, for one thing, did not inherit her mother’s habit of disappearing, Aikin has pointed out. Making herself scarce was something Stacy’s mother did quite often, but it was a stunt Stacy had not pulled even once before she vanished at the end of October 2007.

Moreover, Aikin and others believe, Stacy would not have traded in her children to further her own romantic happiness. Bychowski agreed: “She did not walk away from her little kids. She loves her babies.”

Stacy knew the particular pain of being an abandoned child; she would never willingly inflict the same injury on her own children. In fact, she had spoken with Aikin about her children’s futures without their mom.

“She wanted her children to be with me if anything ever happened to her,” Aikin said. “Now I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. All her wishes got thrown out the window.”

According to Aikin, Stacy sounded like anything
but
a woman planning to run off: She told her sister, Cassandra, to worry if she had trouble even getting through on the phone.

“Stacy told Cassandra, ‘If I don’t answer my cell, something’s wrong.’”

Stacy even predicted she would go out like this. Not dead in a tub like the wife before her, but just gone, faded away.

“She thought she would just disappear,” Bychowski said. “Ironic. Sometimes they say that you know what your destiny is before it even happens.”

Not that Stacy was looking in a crystal ball; Bychowski thought Peterson may have threatened her, saying that he could make her disappear. “Oh, I think so,” she asserted.

Clearly, Aikin believes Peterson was involved in Stacy’s disappearance. She now shudders to think that, on her visits to Illinois, she so often slept in the man’s bed. She slept there with Stacy, she explained, on his side of the bed, while Drew was working the overnight shift or just out on the town, being Drew.