Fatal Vows (25 page)

He and his attorney, Joel Brodsky, also had a great time joking around with Chicago radio host Steve Dahl about the aborted “Win a Date with Drew Peterson” contest. Peterson was clearly disappointed when the radio station canceled the dating game, although he said he wasn’t.

Irritability and aggressiveness.
Friends and family of three of Peterson’s four wives say he was controlling, threatening, or outright abusive to the women. Savio seemed especially terrified of him; she wrote in a letter to an assistant state’s attorney that “several times” during their marriage she had ended up in the emergency room as a result of their fights, and that after they divorced, Peterson once broke into her house and held a knife to her neck.

His irritability manifested itself in other ways. Instead of supporting his grief-stricken wife at the funeral of Stacy’s beloved half sister, Tina Ryan, Peterson supposedly turned to Stacy and asked her point-blank if she were “fucking” Ryan’s equally grief-stricken husband. He walked away from a television interview with Shepard Smith when the Fox News personality started asking him questions about the blue barrel and how his children were faring without their mother. Another time, he turned his own video camera onto the press hordes crowding his driveway.

Reckless disregard for the safety of others.
If the abuse allegations spelled out in Savio’s letter to a Will County assistant state’s attorney are true, as well as the many charges made by Savio and Stacy’s family, Peterson’s last two wives certainly felt that Peterson threatened their safety. “[H]is next step is to take my children away,” Savio wrote in the letter. “Or kill me instead.” His second wife, Vicki Connolly, also has claimed Peterson said he could kill her and make it look like an accident, a threat Peterson has denied.

Repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
For his renegade operation against career-criminal Anthony “Bindy” Rock, in which he presented himself as a dirty cop who wanted to set up a drug-selling operation, he was fired from his job and indicted on charges of official misconduct and failure to report a bribe. The charges were eventually dropped and Peterson got his job back. In 2007, he was suspended from the police force for eight days for his role in allowing a high-speed chase, against department policy. Shortly after Stacy disappeared, Peterson was the subject of yet another internal investigation, on what charge the department has not said, other than to explain that by committing the offense, Peterson would be guilty of official misconduct, which is a felony. Peterson avoided further investigation by retiring.

And certainly, if true, breaking into his ex-wife’s house and holding a knife to her neck would be grounds for arrest. (Bolingbrook police investigated that allegation; nothing ever came from it.)

Deceitfulness.
Peterson admits that he cheated on each of his first three wives. When cheating on Kathleen, he was so bold as to bring Stacy to his basement for sex while his wife and their sons slept upstairs. Then, after Kathleen died, he broke out a previously unknown and hardly official-looking will—a will that conveniently named his uncle as executor and left everything to Peterson.

Of course, counterarguments could be made on each point. You have to think like a criminal to catch a criminal. No charges against Peterson ever stuck, and he’d never been charged with anything in connection with domestic disputes involving his wives. In regards to the media, he was just dishing back what they heaped on him. Who wouldn’t walk away from Shepard Smith when he started asking jerky questions? Anyway, Peterson was nothing but polite, saying, “Have a good day, Mr. Shepard. It was nice talking to you.”

And the affairs? At least he had owned up to them, even if it sounded more like bragging than painful self-reflection. The will stood up in court. The radio show was all in good fun. If his last wife really had run off with another guy, why should he be the remorseful one?

None of these arguments would likely sway Bonelli, who has found the totality of Peterson’s behavior very telling not only in providing insight into his personality but in revealing what fate Stacy met, and whether there was any basis for the slim hope she might still be alive somewhere.

“He’s so self-centered. And he wouldn’t be [acting as he did] if he really believed Stacy were still alive,” Bonelli said, “because then she obviously would hear about this.

“Sure, if she’s alive, she knows about it,” he continued. “And she’s going to be angry. And she’s going to, sooner or later, check in. I don’t care if she is off with someone else, the dude from wherever. This is enough crap to get her angry, and she’d respond to it. There’s no response. Therefore, there’s no Stacy. Therefore Drew can keep going and going and going and just play this egocentric game.”

Whatever happened to Stacy, and regardless of whether Savio accidentally drowned in her tub, as the state police said in 2004, or if she died by the hand of another, as a forensic pathologist said four years later, Peterson’s egocentric game was a dangerous one. Public opinion and political pressure were undeniable forces pulling the authorities to press charges against him, and the possibility of the police descending on his home and carting him off to jail was very real. But Peterson continued to make public appearances, banter with the press, and stick to the increasingly absurd story that his wife took off and was gallivanting around some tropical locale with another man.

Afflicting those people who, in basic terms, are hostile to society, antisocial personality disorder is believed to manifest itself in a lack of feelings or concern for the losses, pain, and suffering of victims; a tendency to be unconcerned, dispassionate, coldhearted, and unempathic, usually demonstrated by a disdain for one’s victims, Bonelli explained.

“You got it. He’s having fun with this. Sociopaths do that, they have fun with tragedy because they don’t feel a sense of guilt,” Bonelli said. “Anyone who is not sociopathic wouldn’t be having fun with his wife’s death and disappearance.

“It’s a game. It’s such a damn game to him,” Bonelli continued. “He’s having too much fun.” Of what an antisocial personality might be thinking in such a situation, Bonelli offers, “Everything’s okay, because I did it. It’s okay for me.”

Then there’s Peterson’s inclination towards deceit. He is most proud of the time he spent as an undercover narcotics officer, a calling steeped in subterfuge and duplicity.

Undercover officers “have to be deceitful,” Bonelli said. “And I think they learn how to slide a lot and to avoid issues, avoid being singled out. Their identity to being an undercover cop, they have to be sly.”

Diane Wetendorf, an advocate, trainer and consultant based in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and specializing in police-perpetrated domestic violence, took this a step further.

Police officers, particularly ones working undercover, “know, number one, how to lie well.”

They also know, through their training, the best way to testify in court, she said. They only answer the questions, sticking strictly to facts, whereas “other defendants want to fill in,” Wetendorf said. “Cops are very savvy about that. It’s what they say. It’s how they say it. It’s what they don’t say. They know what to omit.”

Wetendorf created the program Spousal Abuse By Law Enforcement in 1996, which provided specialized counseling as well as legal and advocacy services for victims of officer-involved domestic violence. Wetendorf worked collaboratively with police departments to develop policies, provided advocacy to law enforcement institutions nationwide, trained community advocates, and provided thousands of hours of individual and group counseling. She is also an author and consultant.

On her Battered Women’s Justice Project blog, Wetendorf references the Stacy Peterson case:

“Media coverage on the disappearance of Stacy Peterson has been remiss in its failure to highlight former Sergeant Peterson’s profession as a law enforcement officer. Although most reports have noted his profession there has been no analysis addressing his law enforcement experience as a significant aspect of his emerging profile as a serial abuser.”

Wetendorf noted the high-profile case of, among others, Bobby Cutts Jr., an Ohio police officer who in February 2008 was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his pregnant girlfriend. “Too often, police departments deny that police-perpetrated domestic violence is a problem,” Wetendorf said. “After every exposure, they assure us that the perpetrator is a ‘bad apple’ and that the department ‘had no idea’ that the officer posed a lethal threat to the victim.

“It is time that we acknowledge this problem and recognize the fact that officers who batter can be highly skilled at abuse. Officers have professional training in tactics of manipulation, intimidation, coercion, and the use of physical force, which makes them among the most dangerous abusers. Their knowledge of how the criminal justice system operates enables them to use that system to their advantage and to successfully avoid accountability for their actions.”

Wetendorf said Peterson fits all of her criteria for an abusive husband working in law enforcement. Even if it’s determined that he had something to do with both Kathleen’s death and Stacy’s disappearance, she finds nothing particularly special about him. “There are thousands of them,” Wetendorf said. “Drew just happened to make the paper, for whatever reason. There’s nothing different about Peterson, except he’s a little more of a ham.”

Wetendorf did concede that, while she was not surprised by the methods he has been accused of using to control his last two wives, some of his antics on the nightly news, and his quotes in the papers, have left her baffled.

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on there,” she said.

Bonelli, on the other hand, maintains that he knows exactly what the hell’s going on there.

“He’s feeding his ego,” Bonelli said. “And this is where the arrogance and the cockiness that I spoke of at first comes right into it. He’s feeding his ego. And he thinks he’s not ever going to be at all caught, punished, anything. So he can get away with this.”

Even when things weren’t going Peterson’s way, the pressure did not seem to get to him. In February 2008, soon after a forensic pathologist called Savio’s death a homicide, Peterson and Brodsky were jetting back to New York City for another turn on the
Today
show. It was the third time he had appeared on the show, and this time, Peterson’s demeanor was markedly more subdued.

He allowed a crew from Greta Van Susteren’s program to film inside his house, following him around as he carried out his daily routine. The camera caught him performing such mundane tasks as making sandwiches for his children and taking the younger ones grocery shopping for the week’s food. He bemoaned his high weekly grocery bill, but said he was willing to pay the freight, so long as it meant he would be able to prepare healthy meals for his family. Apparently, allowing Van Susteren’s show to broadcast his everyday life with his family was all part of Peterson’s selling the world on the notion that he possessed a softer side. His effort was less than successful, however, and Peterson later told me he was a bit put off by the public criticism he received. Even when he was comporting himself in a sensitive and responsible manner, a disappointed Peterson complained, he could not convince the whole world that he was, at heart, a decent guy. But then, Peterson had a good four months of public image to repair.

Before this attempt to appear sensitive and soft-spoken, Bonelli found Peterson’s media appearances “not consistent with the realities.

“His expressions in [an interview]—he smirked. He was not real comfortable, which implied lying,” Bonelli said. “His eyes, he kept shifting. He could not keep a gaze, and that is also indicative of tremendous discomfort and lying. I’ve talked to you, Joe, and I look you straight in the eye, because I’m confident and comfortable. In those interviews I saw coverage of, he was all over the place. And he wasn’t on the interviewer. He was looking down. Looking down is always an indication of the lying thing. When you’re asked a question, and you know, you don’t know the answer, you look up. When you’re trying to avoid something, you look down.”

Antisocial personality disorder is three times as prevalent among men as it is among women. It is widely accepted that the roots of the disorder begin in childhood and that family dynamics play an influential part. Beyond Peterson’s upbringing, which was detailed in a November 2007
People
magazine article, his choice of friends in adult life offers some support to the belief that he suffers from the personality disorder. Not surprisingly, antisocial children tend to be rejected by other children. They tend to gravitate toward other poorly socialized children who are also outsiders, although even these friendships tend to be characterized by a weak bond. As the men in Drew Peterson’s orbit were introduced to viewers courtesy of Greta, Nancy Grace and Geraldo, many understandably asked, “Where does Drew find these people?” Indeed the group is a sketchy bunch, and one defined by an ambivalent relationship with the center of the ring himself. There’s Tom Morphey, who has reportedly battled alcoholism and regular unemployment his entire life, who reportedly leaned on his cop stepbrother for jobs and furniture. Ric Mims sold out his “good friend” to the
National Enquirer
and used his short-lived tabloid television fame to launch www.RichardMims.com. Drew’s one remaining public ally appears to be Steve Carcerano, the neighbor with whom he discovered Kathleen’s body. That loyalty, however, may soon be tested as well: Carcerano is seeking a lucrative book deal of his own.