Fatal Vows (8 page)

After she split with Peterson, Kathleen and Maniaci had the opportunity to get a romance off the ground, and their future looked promising.

“My sister was very happy,” Anna Marie said. “Steve’s mild-mannered. He just loved the kids. I was so happy she was happy.

“She loved those kids to death,” she continued. “I don’t think she would have been with anyone who didn’t love the kids.”

Kathleen and Maniaci were together in early 2004. By then, the war between Savio and Peterson seemed to be winding down.

Then suddenly, during the last weekend of February, came an abrupt, total ceasefire.

That weekend, Peterson had his sons. He tried to return the boys to Savio at the appointed time, he said, only she was not home, or at least not answering the door.

It was unlike Kathleen to be gone when her sons were scheduled to return.

The reason for her strange absence would soon become known: a revelation that was a tragedy for her young sons and family but also spelled the sudden end of Peterson’s ongoing battles—financial, emotional, civil, and criminal—with the woman up the street.

D
rew Peterson spent the last weekend of February 2004 with his two sons, Kristopher and Thomas; the highlight of the weekend was a visit to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. The boys lived with their mother, Kathleen Savio, but their dad was just down the street with his new young bride.

In a few weeks, Peterson had a court date in which he was to surrender a substantial amount of assets and property to his ex-wife. Peterson may have been remarried, and Savio may have been involved with a new boyfriend, but their divorce was not yet final. The second half of the proceedings, the part where the couple’s property and assets were divided, was at last coming to a close, and it looked like Savio was going to walk away with at least the house on Pheasant Chase Drive and very likely much more.

“Drew was already skinned alive in the preliminary,” said Anna Marie Doman. “She was going to get the majority.” Already Peterson was paying a few thousand a month in child support, Doman said, and her sister told her she was due to get part of his pension, as well. “She was going to do pretty well,” Doman said. “She wouldn’t have to work after that. But she never got it. Quite a miracle.”

On that last Sunday in February, his weekend with his sons over, Peterson took the boys back up the street to their mother’s home. No one answered the door. It was unlike Savio to miss a scheduled pickup or drop-off; in fact, in the past she had often called the cops if he was at all late in bringing back the boys. Her unusual absence concerned him, Peterson later said. The boys stayed with him and Stacy that night.

On Monday night, March 1, Peterson again attempted to find out was going on inside the home of his ex-wife. He was on duty, in uniform, when he drove up in his squad car to his old house at 392 Pheasant Chase Drive. He rang the bell repeatedly; again no one answered. He then went next door to summon help from neighbors. A locksmith was also called, and he was able to gain entry to the home.

Peterson was reluctant to go inside. After all the blowups he’d had with his ex-wife, the fights and allegations and calls to police, he did not want to be accused of doing anything untoward. So he sent the neighbors in first. Steve Carcerano, a neighbor whom Peterson said witnessed acts of violence between him and Savio, ventured into the house along with another neighbor, Savio’s friend Mary Pontarelli. They made it to the bathroom and Carcerano saw what he said looked like an “exercise ball” sitting in the dry bathtub. But it was no ball. It was Kathleen Savio, doubled over, naked and dead.

Peterson rushed up the stairs, Carcerano said, saw the scene in the bathroom and called out, “Oh, my God!” What, he fretted, would he possibly tell Kristopher and Thomas?

Peterson’s colleagues from the Bolingbrook Police Department were the first to respond to the scene. It was, to say the least, an uncomfortable situation. The deceased’s ex-husband was a sergeant on the force, and the couple’s tumultuous history was well-documented with the department. Supervisors decided it was prudent to immediately hand the investigation off to an outside agency. That agency was the Illinois State Police.

State police detectives arrived at Savio’s home and called in technicians to process the crime scene. Savio’s body was then removed from the bathroom and taken to the county morgue in nearby Crest Hill.

The officers then talked to Savio’s neighbors, according to Illinois State Police Special Agent Herbert Hardy, who later testified at a coroner’s inquest to determine how Savio died. They spoke to Drew Peterson, and they also interviewed Steve Maniaci, Savio’s boyfriend at the time. Maniaci and Peterson’s ex-wife had reportedly spoken on the phone around 1 o’clock Sunday morning. She asked him to come over, according to Hardy, but he begged off, saying he was tired.

Hardy said another state agent also interviewed the ex-husband’s new wife, Stacy Peterson. Years later, after Stacy had been missing for weeks and suspected by the state police to be dead at the hands of her husband, a law enforcement source said the fourth wife played a key role in keeping Peterson above suspicion in the death of number three.

“She was his alibi,” the source said, but went no further.

State police didn’t interview Thomas, who was eleven at the time, or Kristopher, who was nine, “just not to put them through that,” according to Hardy.

At the time she died, Savio was both working and studying nursing at Joliet Junior College; she had a boyfriend with whom she was discussing marriage. She had two sons. And in a month or so, the conclusion of her divorce would bring her into a respectable haul of money and property.

So Kathleen Savio had quite a bit to live for. She did not fit the profile of a suicidal subject, and healthy women around the age of forty don’t often accidentally drown while bathing.

But it was not impossible—at least the state police thought so—and that was the story they stuck to.

On May 7, 2004, six members of a coroner’s jury settled into their chairs at a government building in downtown Joliet to hear testimony relating to Savio’s death.

While a coroner’s inquest involves witnesses, testimony and a jury, the proceeding is nothing like a court trial. The purpose is solely to determine the manner and cause of death, and jurors have only five options available to them: natural, accidental, suicide, homicide and undetermined. An inquest can be called for any death that is not obviously natural.

The jury’s decision also carries no legal weight. At Savio’s inquest, Will County Coroner Patrick K. O’Neil prefaced the proceedings by reminding those gathered there, “This is neither a civil nor a criminal hearing.” As a statement from the Adams County, Illinois coroner’s office explains, “The verdict and inquest proceedings are merely fact finding in nature and statistical in purpose.”

Fewer inquests are being held these days, following a change in Illinois law that gave coroners the option after January 1, 2007, to determine the cause of death without an inquest. But in 2004, a suspicious death such as Savio’s necessitated one, and a little more than two months after the discovery of her body in a bathtub, the first probe into her tragic demise was under way.

O’Neil ran the show at Savio’s inquest, but the star player at the proceeding was Special Agent Hardy of the Illinois State Police. Hardy was dispatched to testify, even though he only played a small role in the investigation of the woman’s death. He did not talk to Peterson or Stacy, and he never met with friends or family of Peterson and Savio. He also did not attend Savio’s autopsy and never made an appearance in the second-story bathroom of 392 Pheasant Chase Drive to inspect the death scene. Yet for some reason he was the representative the state police selected to attend the inquest of a police sergeant’s former wife, who died mysteriously in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, weeks away from taking her ex-husband for a good piece of his financial pie, and who had at one time filed an order of protection in which she alleged he had threatened to kill her.

Hardy did question some of Savio’s neighbors but, by his own admission, not any who might provide any useful information.

“I didn’t talk to the ones that were really close to her,” Hardy testified at the inquest. “Myself and [another agent] did what we call a ‘neighborhood canvas,’ and we did speak to quite a few of the neighbors in the general area of the residence.”

It came as little surprise that Hardy did not get much information out of those neighbors.

“Did anyone hear or see anything unusual, see any squad cars or anything, any suspicious activity in that area?” O’Neil, the coroner, asked Hardy.

Hardy said they had not.

“Did you find any signs of foul play during the course of your investigation?” O’Neil asked at the inquest.

“No, sir,” Hardy said. “We did not.”

So the tangential neighbors were not the only ones who saw nothing amiss; neither did the state police who arrived soon after the grisly discovery. There were no indications of a burglary or home invasion, no weapons in the house and, according to Hardy, no signs on Savio’s body or in the home that a struggle had taken place.

“Everything seemed to be in order,” he said. The only possible exception was an unmade bed with some books and magazines lying on it. “Nobody related to us that they saw anything unusual in the neighborhood those last few days.”

The only unusual thing, then, was the dead woman in the dry bathtub.

“There was no water [in] the tub when our agents arrived,” Hardy said. “It must have drained out after setting for such a long period of time.”

Savio’s hair was still wet, the special agent noted, her fingertips were pruned, and her skin was wrinkled. She had a cut on the back of her head, and a small amount of blood was in the tub.

“We think that the laceration from her—that she sustained to the back of her head—was caused by a fall in the tub,” Hardy said. “There was nothing to lead us to believe that anything else occurred. There was no other evidence at this time that shows that anything else occurred.”

However, Hardy never laid out a specific scenario about what state police believe immediately preceded the fall in the tub. Had Savio, at the end of her bath, stood up to unplug the drain but slipped before she could do so? Had she slipped getting
into
the tub? State police didn’t say; perhaps it was not something that could be determined. The tub stopper was down—that was confirmed at the inquest—but there was no mention of having tested the stopper to see how fast a tubful of water could seep away. Would a plugged-up tub drain and dry out in less than two days, the amount of time between Savio’s phone call with her boyfriend and the discovery of her body? Would a body lying in a tub trap some water underneath it that wouldn’t evaporate in that time? If any of these questions factored into the state police’s deliberations, the public never knew of it.

Savio, state police concluded, had fallen and drowned in the tub while water slowly drained away; she died from an accidental drowning.

“And at the point we’re at now,” Hardy said, “we’re still waiting… All alibis, all stories were checked as to where people were, and if I remember…if I recall correctly, the only thing we’re waiting for now is some phone records to find out if certain calls were made when they said they were made. So at this point, that’s where we’re at.” And it’s at that point that they pretty much stayed for the next three and half years.

In stark contrast to Hardy’s confidence in how Savio perished, her family testified at the inquest that they never for a moment believed her death was an accident. Rather, they told the jury that Savio lived in terror of Peterson.

Savio’s sister, Susan Savio, said Kathleen even predicted that if she died, “it may look like an accident, but it wasn’t.”

“And it’s just very hard for me to accept that,” Susan continued, “what had happened. His reactions to this were a laughing matter—cleaning everything out, ready to get rid of the house. It’s very hard.”

Peterson did not attend the inquest.

Family members also brought up financial issues between Kathleen Savio and Peterson. In the divorce settlement, Savio was to get the house. Once she had it, Susan Savio said, “She was going to sell the house and move away.” But Peterson had other plans, according to Savio family members.

“He said he wanted to sell her house, pay his off, and open a bar,” said Anna Marie Doman, speaking up from the audience. “That’s what he said at the wake, anyway.”