Fatal Vows (6 page)

“Ranked as a top community in the United States to raise children, retire and start a home-based business, the city boasts nationally acclaimed schools, the best public library system in the country, an exceptionally low crime rate and a lower unemployment rate than the state’s average,” Naperville boasts on the city’s Web site. “In 2005, the city was once again named as one of best places to live in the United States by
Money
magazine. Naperville ranked third of 100 finalists and was the only Illinois town to make the 2005 ‘Best Places To Live’ list.” In 2006, Naperville placed even higher, coming in at 2nd on the
Money
list.

Bolingbrook might never be Naperville—contrary to its middle-class, lily-white portrayal in the media, Bolingbrook has pockets of low-income and minority residents—but in the early part of the new millennium, it was still forging its own identity. In 2002, Bolingbrook unveiled the ostentatious Bolingbrook Golf Club, a 270-acre course with a 76,000-square-foot clubhouse. The village got another jewel in its crown when the Promenade mall opened in April 2007. An upscale, open-air shopping plaza, the Promenade was an ambitious project for Will County.

In April 2002, Drew Peterson paid about $220,000 for the house he moved into with Stacy: a two-story domicile with an attached garage and above ground pool on Pheasant Chase Court in a subdivision abutting Clow International Airport, a single-runway facility whose south end practically borders Peterson’s backyard. Peterson of course wasn’t new to the street, and the house he had lived in with Savio was even larger, according to his third wife’s sister, Anna Marie Doman.

“There were so many rooms,” Doman said.

The prices of homes in the Bolingbrook area soared soon after Peterson’s 2002 purchase, then swiftly plummeted. Like many homeowners living in a volatile local market, Peterson seemed quite conscious of the swooning real estate values. He often spoke of friends losing their homes due to foreclosure in the housing bust, and he urged reporters to write about this “economy crunch” instead of Stacy.

There was a time when the asphalt circle of Pheasant Chase Court served as a playground for neighborhood children to ride bicycles and race remote-control cars. That all changed by Halloween of 2007, when a caravan of television trucks and a legion of reporters set up camp across the street from Peterson’s home, asking questions about Stacy’s disappearance.

“This court, before you guys showed up, was a child-friendly court,” Peterson said in November to a small group of reporters standing on his front step. “You guys just killed all that.”

True enough, next to no children played there throughout that winter. Then spring returned, and the media had largely departed. But even with the warm weather and the lack of trucks and reporters clogging up the street, there were still few, if any, frolicking children on the cul-de-sac—one of several marked changes to the previously unremarkable street left in the wake of the Stacy Peterson story.

The house next door to Peterson’s—not the one belonging to Sharon and Bob Bychowski—went up for sale in the months after Stacy disappeared. The owner listed the two-story house, built in 2003 with vaulted ceilings and a fireplace, at $259,999. The house certainly got enough exposure after it went on the market in early 2008, but probably not the kind most home-sellers would crave. With its for-sale sign planted firmly in the yard, the house made regular appearances in television news reports about notorious next-door neighbor Drew Peterson. One had to wonder if there was a buyer out there willing to pay full price for the privilege of living next to Drew—especially in a souring real estate market.

Peterson himself admitted to me that, after spending most of his life in Illinois and three decades in Bolingbrook, he wanted to move out, go “somewhere warm,” but could not, because his missing wife’s name was on the title of the house.

If Peterson ever does leave the neighborhood, for whatever reason, one thing is certain: The years he lived on Pheasant Chase Drive and Court, with one wife who’s now deceased and another who’s gone missing, won’t soon be forgotten.

Kathleen Savio, the woman sleeping upstairs while Drew Peterson and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend had sex in the basement, must have been under the impression that her family life was stable, because news that her husband was embroiled in a torrid love affair is said to have hit her like a ton of bricks. After all, she learned of his infidelity from an anonymous note.

Kathleen promptly kicked Peterson out of the house, and divorce proceedings began in early 2002. Their marriage was dissolved in the autumn of the following year, about three months after Drew and Stacy’s son Anthony was born, and slightly more than a week before Drew and Stacy got married. In an unusual legal move, the divorce was bifurcated, meaning that while the marriage was legally ended, the financial side of the proceedings and the division of their property would be settled at a later date. The judge permitted this so that Peterson could marry his by-then pregnant teenage fiancée.

While Kathleen may have been shocked to learn Peterson was sleeping with someone else, she had been in that situation before, just in the opposite role. Supposedly, when she started dating Peterson, she did not know that he was still married to his second wife, Vicki, whom Peterson divorced in 1992 after nearly nine years of marriage.

Within two and a half months, Peterson married Kathleen—“Kitty” to family and friends—in a ceremony at Divine Shepherd Lutheran Church. Peterson was thirty-eight, Kathleen twenty-eight.

But the ceremony took place under a cloud. Just two weeks before the wedding, Kathleen’s mother died of a stroke, at age fifty-five. “It just killed her,” said Kathleen’s sister, Anna Marie Doman. “What a way to start a marriage.”

It wasn’t the day’s only setback. Kathleen’s father, Henry J. Savio, who was supposed to give her away, didn’t show up for the ceremony. He didn’t tell anyone he wasn’t coming and could not be reached. The family later learned he was angry at Kathleen for an unspecified reason, although his erratic behavior wasn’t entirely surprising. Anna Marie said—and her brother, Henry Martin Savio, has concurred—that her father had almost no relationship with his children while they were growing up.

Over the course of their marriage, Kathleen gave Peterson his second set of sons, Kristopher and Thomas, born nineteen months apart. Peterson already had two boys, Stephen and Eric, from his first marriage, to high school sweetheart Carol Brown, but those children stayed with their mother after the divorce and are much older than their half brothers.

After Kathleen discovered her husband’s affair with Stacy and ordered him to leave, Peterson may have been out of Savio’s house but, with two children between them, he was far from out of her life. By late April 2002
—
in a move either ill-considered or designed to make the divorce from his hot-tempered third wife as contentious as humanly possible
—
Peterson and Stacy set up house right down the street from Kathleen. Peterson told me he wanted to stay close to his sons. Whatever his reasons, his proximity to his estranged wife seemed only to deepen the rancor they felt for each other, which in the months to come played out for all the neighbors to see. Compared to the split of Kathleen Savio and Drew Peterson, a run-of-the-mill divorce would look like a street fight in the face of nuclear war.

The Battle of Pheasant Chase waged for about a year and a half after the couple went to court to sever their marriage, during which time the Bolingbrook police, i.e., Peterson’s fellow officers, handled seventeen domestic incidents involving Peterson and Kathleen or Kathleen and Stacy. In one other instance, it was Kathleen alone on the police report. Many incidents involved visitation issues with their sons, for whose sake the embittered couple apparently could not manage to keep up even a semblance of civility. The boys even had to testify in court once, according to Peterson, after he brought battery charges against their mother.

“They were like two monkeys in a cage, poking each other,” one party familiar with the battle said of the divorcing couple’s relationship.

On top of all the calls to police, Kathleen filed for an order of protection against Peterson on March 11, 2002, alleging physical abuse, harassment and interference with her physical liberty. According to a petition Kathleen wrote by hand, Peterson called her and said that he was coming over to the house “to deal” with her. He wanted her dead, Kathleen alleged in the petition, “and if has to, he will burn the house down just to shut me up.”

After she dropped the kids off at school, “he came running after me ready to beat me up,” the petition continued. “He now [waits] for me to return home to teach me a lesson. He has [a] gun and other weapon I believe he will use on me. He just doesn’t care if he live or die [
sic
], or I live or die.”

Savio went on to detail abuse and violence she said her husband had meted out during their marriage. “Several [times], he has restrained me, held me down, knocked me into walls, come after me with a poker, riped [
sic
] my necklace off, left marks on my body all the time, threaten to steal my kids, and desert me.”

And Peterson seemingly could not be stopped, Kathleen wrote, as she “put [a] dead bolt on [the] door, [but] he broke through it.”

A judge granted the restraining order, forbidding Peterson to enter the Pheasant Chase Drive home, come around his estranged wife, or take their children out of her care except for his two brief weekly visits with them. Peterson was served the following day with a court summons. The order instructed the process server to deliver the paper to Peterson at Bolingbrook Village Hall, which is adjacent to the police station. It also listed his badge number, 959.

The protection order, however, didn’t last long; Kathleen dropped it. Peterson said he contacted her attorney and explained that he would be unable to work as a police officer because the order prohibited him from carrying a gun. Kathleen’s attorney would not discuss the matter. In any event, within a month and a half, Peterson had moved in down the street with the woman who was Kathleen’s replacement.

If the violence Kathleen accused Peterson of committing during their marriage had in fact happened—attacking her with the poker, tearing off her necklace, bouncing her off of walls, restraining and marking her body—Savio never called the police at the time of the alleged events. Once Peterson and she had split, however, she showed no reluctance to bring in the cops. Of the eighteen occasions on which the police were summoned to mediate the couple’s disputes, only one occurred before their divorce proceedings began; Kathleen appears to have initiated contact with the law in at least twelve of them.

Her family has repeatedly said she was frightened of Peterson. In fact, less than a year into their marriage, Savio—then Kathleen Peterson—was taken to the emergency room with a head injury she said was inflicted by her husband, and which her sister said the police responded to.

According to a Hinsdale Hospital emergency department report dated April 28, 1993, Kathleen Peterson was treated after she was “involved in an altercation [with her] husband…was hit in [the] head [with a] dining room table.” Her son Thomas was not quite four months old at the time.

Kathleen suffered from nausea and dizziness, the report said. The police were notified, according to both the emergency room report and Kathleen’s sister, Anna Marie.

“The police were at the house before we left [for the hospital], trying to calm Drew down,” Anna Marie said. “They didn’t do anything.”

Another of Kathleen’s sisters, Susan, told of the fear Kathleen felt during her marriage to Peterson.

“She was just terrified of him,” Susan said in May 2004. “He always threatened her. He had her in the basement one time. He did many, many things to her. He wished only for her to go away.”

Kathleen’s nephew, Charlie Doman, the son of Anna Marie, said he got along fine with Peterson while the police sergeant was married to his aunt. Charlie, who with his sister Melissa and his mother lived less than a mile from Peterson and “Aunt Kitty,” even worked in the tavern the couple owned in the town of Montgomery, about seventeen miles from Bolingbrook.

After the discovery of Peterson’s teenage lover and the ensuing divorce proceedings, however, bad feelings developed between Peterson and his wife’s family, Charlie told me.

The police first showed up on Pheasant Chase Drive on February 17, 2002, less than a month prior to the divorce action. They arrived to settle a “mutual argument between Drew and Kathleen,” according to the report, using the first names that would characterize every synopsized report in the feud, in which the combatants and the police were so well-known to one another. “Drew left the residence. Kathleen’s attorney was advised by [a department] supervisor.”

The next time the police were involved in the couple’s running row was in April 2002, forty-one days after Peterson’s divorce filing. “Kathleen showed up at Drew’s residence [on Pheasant Chase Court] and started removing items from Drew’s truck,” according to the Bolingbrook Police Department. “Drew came outside and Kathleen started hitting him in the back. Drew filed a report but never followed up with State’s Attorney for charges.”

That was only the first time Kathleen allegedly lashed out at Peterson. Five days later, on May 3, “Drew stated that Kathleen struck him, spit at him, and pushed him in the back,” according to the police record. “Drew did not want Kathleen arrested.”

Apparently he changed his mind on May 26. Or pressing charges could have been Stacy’s idea, as “Kathleen punched Stacy in the face because she was in the car when Drew was attempting to drop the kids off,” police said. “Kathleen was arrested. Independent witnesses. Drew kept the children.”