Death Foretold
BOLINGBROOK, Ill. Kathleen Savio predicted her own murder. She told her sister it would be made to look like an accident. She even named her killer, her ex-husband, police sergeant Drew Peterson.
Not long afterward, Kathleen Savio, 40, was found deaddrowned in a bathtub, her long dark hair matted with blood from a one-inch gash on the back of her head.
The county coroner ruled her death an accident.
She was Drew Peterson’s third wife. With Kathleen’s death, Drew Peterson got control of a million-dollar life insurance benefit for the couple’s two sons, and he inherited all of his ex-wife’s money and property, including her suburban Chicago home and her half of their joint business investments.
Kathleen’s dire prediction to her sister was not the first time she foretold her own murder. In November 2002, two years before her death when her divorce from Peterson was at its nastiest, Kathleen wrote to the Will County State’s Attorney’s Office, begging the prosecutor to charge Peterson with breaking into her home and holding a knife to her throat.
Kathleen wrote that her police sergeant ex-husband was furious over having to pay her child support. “He knows how to manipulate the system, and his next step is to take my children away,” Kathleen wrote. “Or kill me instead.”
In the end, prosecutors now say, he did both. Three years later, Drew Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy, disappeared.
Stacy Peterson, the bubbly, vivacious 23-year-old fourth wife of 53-year-old Bolingbrook police sergeant Drew Peterson, disappeared on Sunday morning, October 28, 2007. The last person known to have seen Stacy alive was her husband.
Drew Peterson, who was 53 when Stacy went missing, claimed his 23-year-old wife, whom he had started dating when she was 17, abandoned their two sons, ages 4 and 2, to run off with another man.
Most everyone else, including many police and prosecutors, now suspects he killed her.
Drew Peterson claims he last saw Stacy about 10 a.m., when she got a telephone call from a friend. The call woke him up, said Drew, who had worked the late shift the previous night as a patrol supervisor for the Police Department. After speaking with his wife briefly, Peterson said, he went back to sleep.
“She was gone when I woke up,” Drew Peterson told NBC News.
Stacy was supposed to help her sister, Cassandra Cales, and her sister’s boyfriend paint their house, but when Stacy hadn’t arrived by that afternoon, Cassandra called her cell phone, but Stacy didn’t answer. As the hours ticked by with no word from Stacy, her family started to become nervous.
Drew Peterson claims Stacy called him at 9 p.m. She told him she was leaving him for another man. Although there is no way to establish who made that call, police investigators reportedly found a record of a call from Stacy’s phone to Drew’s phone at 9 p.m. the night she disappeared.
Thomas Morphey, Drew Peterson’s stepbrother, though, has said he was with Peterson at 9 p.m. the night Stacy disappeared. Morphey, who admits to problems with drugs and alcohol, recounts that he and Peterson were having coffee when Peterson left his cell phone with Morphey but told him not to answer it. While Peterson was gone, Morphey said, two calls came in on the phone. The Caller ID listed both calls as coming from “Stacy’s Cell.”
Later that night, Drew Peterson called Stacy’s family and told them about the phone call he says he received from his wife. The family didn’t buy Drew’s story. At midnight, Cassandra Cales went to the Bolingbrook Police Department to file a missing person report. Because the case involved one of their own officers, Bolingbrook police sent Cassandra to the Illinois State Police.
The Bolingbrook cops also notified Drew that his sister-in-law was trying to report his wife missing.
Monday, the next day, Drew Peterson took the day off. He said he spent the day looking for Stacy, finding her 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix in a parking lot at Bolingbrook’s Clow International Airport, just a few blocks from their home.
That night, he allowed Illinois state troopers to search the home. The State Police investigators were treating Stacy’s disappearance as a missing person investigationa case of a runaway wife. They didn’t suspect foul play, and they didn’t have a search warrant.
State Police Captain Carl Dobrich told the press: “Mr. Peterson was cooperative and allowed our officers, including a crime-scene technician, into the residence to do a limited consensual search. Nothing was found. Both vehicles were at the residence, a GMC Denali and a Pontiac Grand Prix. We were allowed access to the Denali, but not to the Grand Prix.”
The troopers had to ask themselves, though, if Sergeant Drew Peterson, a 29-year police veteran, was really interested in finding his wife, why wouldn’t he let them search her car, the same car he said he had found parked at the airport the day after his wife vanished?
Three days later, the troopers were back with a search warrant. They seized Peterson’s cell phone, his computer, and 11 guns, including a Colt Sporter, a chopped-down, military-style assault rifle, with a barrel a good bit shorter than the minimum 16 inches required by both state and federal law. Peterson’s lawyer claimed his client was authorized to have the rifle because he was a member of the Bolingbrook police SWAT team. Peterson was later charged with possession of an illegal firearm, but the charges were eventually dismissed.
The state troopers also towed Stacy’s car to the crime lab.
A few days later, the state investigators were back at the Peterson home with a second search warrant. They weren’t buying Drew’s story of a runaway wife either.
On Friday, November 9, State Police Captain Carl Dobrich again spoke to the press. “Early on, we looked at this as a missing-person case, but…the evidence [is] starting to strongly point to Drew Peterson,” Dobrich said. “I would say that right now, Drew Peterson has gone from being a person of interest to being a suspect. I would say the case has shifted now from a missing-person case to a potential homicide.”
Friday, November 9, 2007, twelve days after Stacy Peterson’s disappearance, must have been a tough day for Drew Peterson.
Not only did the Illinois State Police name him a suspect in his fourth wife’s disappearance, calling the case “a potential homicide,” but Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow also announced he was going to exhume the body of Kathleen Savio, Peterson’s third wife, who had died under suspicious circumstances three years earlier. Glasgow said he would arrange for a second, independent autopsy.
Speaking at a press conference about Kathleen Savio’s death, Glasgow was quoted in The Chicago Tribune:
“There are strong indications that it was a homicide. That’s why we’re doing the exhumation. Clearly, there are indications from the crime-scene photographs that are not consistent with an accident. I read the autopsy protocol. I looked at the crime-scene photographs, and I looked at the photographs from the autopsy. And with 29 years of experience, there’s no doubt in my mind it wasn’t an accident.”
Additionally, Glasgow agreed to allow renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for the state of New York, to perform a separate autopsy on behalf of the Savio family.
Three days later, November 12, 2007, Peterson submitted a letter of resignation to the Bolingbrook Police Department. After 29 years on the job, he was entitled to a pension of $6,000 a month.
The next day, James Glasgow had Kathleen Savio’s casket dug from her grave at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in the village of Hillside, 20 miles northeast of Bolingbrook, and her remains moved to the Will County morgue.
Drew Peterson had always wanted to be a police officer. Immediately after graduating from Willowbrook High School in suburban Chicago in 1972, he joined the U. S. Army and trained as a military policeman.
Two years later, he married his high school girlfriend, Carol Hamilton.
In 1977, Peterson joined the Bolingbrook Police Department. The following year he was made part of the elite Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad. He grew his hair down his back for undercover assignments. Peterson was an aggressive young officer, and after just two years on the job the Bolingbrook police brass named him their officer of the year.
After six years and two children, though, Peterson’s marriage collapsed. Carol divorced him in 1980 after discovering that Drew had been cheating on her while she had been pregnant with their second child.
Not long after the divorce, Peterson became engaged to another woman, but she broke off the engagement because of his controlling behavior. When she handed him back his ring he became violent. For months after the breakup, he stalked and harassed her, sometimes following her in his police car to intimidate her. He once pulled her over to write her a ticket for having bald tires.
In 1982, Drew Peterson married Victoria Rutkiewicz. During their 10-year marriage, Drew grew increasingly controlling and increasingly violent. According to Victoria, Peterson told her he could kill her and make it look like an accident.
Although he occasionally hit her, said Victoria, the blows were never serious enough to send her to the hospital. Those would come later, with a different wife.
In 1985, the Bolingbrook Police Department fired Drew Peterson for official misconduct, according to The Chicago Tribune. Peterson’s misconduct allegedly included disobedience of his superiors and failing to report a bribe while working a narcotics investigation. But after a legal battle that lasted into the next year, the department was forced to reinstate Peterson, when a county judge overruled the Bolingbrook Fire and Police Commission.
Although Victoria stood by her husband during his legal troubles, his behavior toward her didn’t improve. “He put a microphone in our kitchen and taped our conversations,” she told the Tribune. “He was cheating so much he wanted to make sure I wasn’t.”
By late 1991, Victoria was fed up with her husband, who was now involved with Kathleen Savio, whom he had met on a blind date set up by the wife of a fellow cop. On Valentine’s Day 1992, Drew took Kathleen to Jamaica for a romantic holiday.
Four days later, on February 18, 1992, Drew and Victoria’s decade-long marriage ended in a no-fault divorce, something she later described to the Tribune as “amicable.”
“We had such a great life and he blew it,” Victoria told the newspaper. “It wasn’t good enough for him.”
Less than three months later, Drew Peterson married his third wife, Kathleen Savio.
In May 1993, Drew Peterson smashed his new bride’s head against a dinning room table, sending Kathleen to the hospital in the nearby town of Hinsdale.
Over the next few years, Drew and Kathleen had two sons, Thomas and Kristopher, but their marriage was a violent one. When Bolingbrook police responded to a domestic disturbance complaint at the couple’s home, though, nothing happened: Drew was one of their own.
In 2001, Peterson met Stacy Cales, a front desk clerk at the Springhill Suites Hotel on Remington Boulevard in Bolingbrook. She had just graduated from Romeoville High School, a couple of miles south of Bolingbrook. She was 17. Drew Peterson was 47.
The two started dating.
“I had this uncontrollable need to take care of her,” Peterson told The Chicago Tribune just three days after Stacy disappeared. “We just hit it off, and one thing led to another. It wasn’t something I planned. It was a very romantic time.”
At first, the 30-year difference in their ages was an issue, but Peterson later claimed Stacy didn’t mind.
“She was beautiful, and it was exciting having a young, beautiful woman interested in me,” Drew Peterson told NBC News in December 2007. “And I pursued the relationship.”
Stacy told friends she felt safe with her police sergeant boyfriend. He bought her gifts. He took her places. He bought her a car. He rented her an apartment.
In October 2001, Kathleen received an anonymous letter conveying the bitterly ironic news that her husband was carrying on an affair with a teenager. A few months later, Kathleen and Drew Peterson both filed for divorce, within a day of each other. Kathleen asked for child support, alimony, and her half of the marital assets, which included their cars, their cash, their home, their investments, and their two businessesa printing shop and a bar.
By then Drew Peterson was an old hand at the divorce game, and he knew that this divorce, potentially his third, had the potential to cost him a lot of money.
Unless he inherited everything.
In the spring of 2002, Drew Peterson and Stacy Cales moved into a house on the same street as the home he had shared with Kathleen, Pheasant Chase Court. With only three blocks separating his estranged wife from his new teen-aged girlfriend, Drew Peterson’s divorce swiftly became uglyreally ugly.
Bolingbrook police records show that between the spring of 2002 and February 2004, police officers were called to Kathleen’s home 19 times to intervene in domestic fights. Twice, Drew Peterson had Kathleen arrested for domestic violence, though she was found not guilty in both cases.
Kathleen alleged that Drew and Stacy tormented her by frequently loitering in front of her house, either on rollerblades or in one of their cars.
One arrest came, according to Kathleen, after Stacy called her names in front of her children while videotaping the incident with Kathleen’s own camera, which Drew had taken from her house. That led to a confrontation between the two women, with Kathleen trying to snatch the camera from Stacy’s hands. Drew jumped in and slammed Kathleen to the ground and held her down until the police arrived.
On July 5, 2002, Kathleen was coming down the stairs in her house carrying a load of laundry when she discovered Drew inside her home, in violation of a protection order. She told police that Drew held a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her. Kathleen filed a complaint, but the police didn’t arrest Drew.
On November 14, 2002, Kathleen wrote her letter to Will County Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth Fragale, begging the prosecutor to help protect her from Drew, who she said was likely to kill her.
But Kathleen Savio’s pleas went unanswered.
On October 10, 2003, Drew Peterson and Kathleen Savio were divorced. Although the marriage was dissolved, the property settlement, the most contentiousand potentially costliest to Drew Peterson, was still pending and would be decided at a trial scheduled for April 6, 2004.
Drew Peterson stood to lose upwards of $300,000 in cash and assets, plus half of his $72,000 a year police pension when he retired.
Eight days later, on October 18, Drew, 49, married his 19-year-old pregnant girlfriend, Stacy Cales.
In late 2003, according to prosecutor James Glasgow, Drew Peterson tried to pay someone $25,000 to kill Kathleen Savio.
Then in February 2004, less than two months before the trial that could have shorn him of half of his financial worth, Peterson ran into a fellow Bolingbrook police officer in the Will County courthouse. While discussing his recent divorce and the upcoming property settlement, Peterson told the other officer, “My life would be easier if she were just dead.”
Four days before she was found dead, Kathleen confided to her sister, Sue Doman, her fear about what Drew would do to her. “Just the Thursday before she passed away,” Doman told ABC News, “she called me, and she said she just felt so strongly that he was going to kill her, and it was going to look like an accident.”
The weekend that Kathleen Savio died, Drew Peterson had their two children over for a visit. He later said he tried to drop them off to her Sunday afternoon, but Kathleen didn’t answer her door. Nor was she answering her phone. The two boys stayed over at Drew and Stacy’s house again that night. Monday night, Drew cruised past Kathleen’s house in his police car and ran into a neighbor, Steve Carcerano.
With Carcerano standing by, Drew knocked on Kathleen’s door. Again, he got no answer. Drew called a locksmith to the house.
It was almost 11 p.m. by the time the locksmith got Kathleen’s door open. By that time, Drew and Carcerano had been joined by another neighbor named Mary. Strangely, Drew, the on-duty patrol supervisor for the town police, asked the two neighbors to go inside the house and look for Kathleen.
Carcerano walked into the master bedroom. “I looked towards the back of the bathroom,” he later told ABC News. Lying in the bathtub was a bloated object he couldn’t recognize. “As I walked closer to it, it was Kathy laying there naked.”
Kathleen Savio was dead.
When police arrived at Kathleen’s house, they didn’t follow standard procedures for investigating a death of unknown causea potential homicide. Judging by their actions, they had already concluded that Kathleen’s death had been an accident, despite the evidence to the contrary that would be obvious to officials like State’s Attorney James Glasgow looking at the case three years later.
When Glasgow, who was not State’s Attorney at the time of Kathleen’s death, reviewed the case after the 2007 disappearance of Stacy Peterson, he said the death scene in Kathleen’s bathroom appeared to have been staged to look like an accident.
But in 2004, then-State’s Attorney Jeff Tomczak didn’t see it that way. In May 2004, a six-member coroner’s jury listened to a couple hours of testimony and ruled Kathleen Savio’s death an accidental drowning. One of the witnesses who testified was a state police investigator who told the jury there was no evidence of foul play, and that the laceration on the back of Kathleen’s head had been the result of a fall. The conclusion was that the fall had knocked her out and she had drowned in the tub.
The trooper on whose testimony the jury leaned so heavily had not been present at either the death scene or at the autopsy, nor had he interviewed Drew Peterson, whose new wife, conveniently enough, provided his alibi.
Nevertheless, Kathleen Savio’s death was officially ruled an accident.
Drew Peterson didn’t waste time mourning his ex-wife’s sudden death. The Savio family said that immediately after Kathleen’s funeral, while the rest of the family was attending a reception, Drew backed a truck into the driveway of the home he had once shared with Kathleen, loaded many of her possessions into the truck and drove away.
Shortly after Kathleen’s death, Peterson produced a handwritten will, supposedly signed by Kathleen, that left all of her assets to him. James Carroll, Drew’s uncle, was named executor of Kathleen’s estate, which was valued at nearly $300,000.
In November, Peterson sold Kathleen’s house and made $287,000. He had previously sold the bar they had owned for $325,000 and had kept all of that money as well.
In April 2005, James Carroll turned over all of Kathleen’s property and money to Peterson.
There was also Kathleen’s $1 million life insurance policy that named as beneficiaries her two sons, ages 10 and 11, over whom Drewas a result of Kathleen’s deathhad acquired full custody.
Then there was wife number four. Drew and Stacy married and had a second child, but things weren’t always rosy at the new Peterson house at 6 Pheasant Chase Court in Bolingbrook.
Stacy was almost a prisoner in her own house. Drew barely let her out of his sight. While on patrol, he stopped in frequently at home. He called Stacy incessantly to check up on her. Once, when she was getting a haircut with a friend, Drew called her eight times.
It didn’t take long for the pressure of confinement to get to Stacy. Soon she was talking about getting out of her marriage.
On August 31, 2007, Stacy Peterson called a young man named Neil Schori, an assistant pastor at the church she had been attending, occasionally with Drew but most often by herself. Stacy said she wanted to meet Schori to discuss something important.
The next day they met at a local coffee shop. After several minutes of small talk, Stacy blurted out the real reason she wanted to meet.
“He did it,” she said.
Pastor Schori knew Stacy was talking about her husband, but he wasn’t sure what she meant. “He did what?”
“He killed Kathleen.”
To back up her allegation, Stacy gave the young pastor details about Drew’s actions the night Kathleen Savio was killed that left Schori no doubt she knew what she was talking about.
“It was more than just putting two and two together,” Schori later told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren. “It was not speculation on her part.”
In March 2008, five months after Stacy disappeared, Neil Schori would tell his story to a special grand jury investigating the death of Kathleen Savio and the disappearance of Stacy Peterson.
Stacy also told Schori that she was afraid of her husband.
Pastor Schori wasn’t the only person to whom Stacy Peterson related her marital troubles.
In early October, Stacy got in touch with an old friend, Scott Rossetto, whose brother she had dated. Over the next couple of weeks, the two of them started swapping emails and text messages. Some of the messages were flirty, Rossetto admitted, but he maintained the two of them were not having an affair.
On October 17, the night before Drew and Stacy’s fourth wedding anniversary, a friend of Stacy’s received a disturbing email from her. “I am finding that the relationship I am in is controlling, manipulative and somewhat abusive,” Stacy wrote.
At midnight, Drew gave Stacy a diamond ring for their anniversary.
The next day, October 19, Stacy met Scott Rossetto and some of his friends at a Denny’s restaurant. They got an unexpected visit from Drew.
“He just showed up,” Rossetto told The Chicago Tribune. “He was actually driving around in a squad car. He drove around the building a couple of times.”
Drew strolled into the restaurant and sat down at the table with Stacy, Scott, and Scott’s friends. The uniformed police sergeant’s sudden appearance made everyone at the table uncomfortable. Peterson focused his attention on Scott and Stacy.
“He asked me how I would feel if my wife went off with another guy,” Rossetto told the Tribune. “I told him, ‘Honestly, I would trust her until she gave me a reason not to.’ He didn’t respond. He just kept staring at her. He sat with us for a good 15, 20 minutes.”
In late October, just days before she disappeared, Stacy called local attorney Harry Smith, who had represented Kathleen Savio in her divorce from Drew, and told him she wanted to discuss filing for divorce.
On October 25, Stacy called her friend Pam Bosco. She asked Pam about renting her own place to live. She told Pam: “I have to get out of here, you know. I’m not feeling very safe. I’m afraid he’s going to hurt me.”
Saturday night, October 27, Stacy’s sister Cassandra ate dinner with Drew and Stacy at their home. Drew looked angry. When the sisters were alone, Stacy hugged Cassandra and said: “I love you…if anything happens to me, he killed me. It wasn’t an accident.”
That was the last time Cassandra saw her sister. Stacy Peterson disappeared the next morning.
Dr. Larry Blum performed a new autopsy on the exhumed body of Kathleen Savio on November 13, 2007. His results stood in stark contrast to those of the first autopsy, done three years earlier.
Although the full autopsy report is evidence and has not been made public, Dr. Blum said in a statement: “Compelling evidence exists to support the conclusions that the cause of death … was drowning and further, that the manner of death was homicide.”
Three days later, nationally renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, acting on behalf of the Savio family without charging for his services, performed a third autopsy on Kathleen Savio. His conclusions reinforced those of Dr. Blum.
“I don’t think there’s any possibility this was an accident, and I don’t think there’s any indication this was suicide,” Dr. Baden told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. “It’s my opinion, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, that it’s a homicide.”
On May 7, 2009, a special Will County grand jury, which had spent 18 months investigating the cases of Kathleen Savio and Stacy Peterson, handed down an indictment charging Drew Peterson with the first-degree murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. The grand jury did not hand down an indictment in connection with Stacy Peterson’s disappearance.
State troopers arrested Peterson that same day during a car stop a few blocks from his house. He was driving Stacy’s Pontiac Grand Prix.
While headed to court the day after his arrest, Drew continued mugging for the cameras, as he has done almost since the day Stacy Peterson disappeared. While being led into court in a red prison jumpsuit and chains, Peterson joked about his attire with reporters.
“Look at this bling,” he said, holding up his handcuffs. “Look at this nice, spiffy outfit. Three squares a day.”
On May 18, 2009, Drew Peterson pleaded not guilty to murdering Kathleen Savio. He remains in jail with his bail set at $20 million.
Stacy Peterson remains missing.
The information for this story came from a variety of sources, including:
ABC News
NBC News
CBS News
Fox News Channel
The Associated Press
The Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Sun-Times
The Will County, Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office
Henry J. Savio and Anna M. Doman vs. Drew Peterson and James B. Carroll, Circuit Court of Will County, Illinois
A letter from Kathleen Savio to Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth Fragale, dated Nov. 14, 2002
Bill of Indictment and Warrant of Arrest for Drew Peterson, Will County, Illinois Circuit Court, No. 09-CF-1048, dated May 7, 2009