Fatal Vows (12 page)

“It depends on who the cops are who get your case that night,” he said. “If you get a couple bad ones, you’re screwed.”

A confession played an important role in McCarthy’s exoneration. Years later, a different confession figured prominently in another widely publicized murder case in Will County—this time with disastrous results. The confession came from a father, Kevin Fox, horrifically admitting to killing his three-year-old daughter. Within hours, though, Fox denounced his confession, saying he had given it under extreme duress after fourteen hours of grilling by Will County sheriff’s detectives.

The morning of June 6, 2004, three-year-old Riley Fox was discovered missing from the family’s home in the little Kankakee River town of Wilmington, about a half hour south of Joliet. That morning, Riley’s brother Tyler came into his father’s bedroom and said Riley was gone. Kevin Fox had been alone with his children that night while his wife, Melissa Fox, was taking part in a breast-cancer walk in Chicago and spending the night with friends. Earlier in the evening, Fox had left the kids at their grandparents’ while he went to a concert with his brother-in-law. When word of Riley’s disappearance got out, the small town launched a massive volunteer and police search. Within hours, a pair of hikers found the little girl’s body floating face down in a creek about four miles from her house. She was half naked and her mouth had been covered with duct tape. The ensuing autopsy revealed more grisly details: Riley had been sexually abused and was still alive when she went into the water.

For months, Melissa and Kevin Fox and their family cooperated with detectives. They submitted to rounds of questions and provided the police with samples of their DNA, trusting officers in their efforts to find Riley’s killer. Unknown to them, however, Kevin had become their prime suspect.

In October 2004, detectives brought Melissa and Kevin Fox into the sheriff’s department and interrogated Fox for fourteen hours, without a lawyer, keeping his wife in a separate room for some of that time. By the end of the marathon session, Fox, to the shock of his family and friends, confessed to killing Riley. He made a videotaped statement in which he reportedly described accidentally hitting his daughter in the head with a bathroom door. Thinking he had killed her, he supposedly masked the mishap as a kidnapping, sexual assault and murder, and topped it off by dumping his daughter in the creek.

Fox was arrested. The very next day, Jeff Tomczak, the Will County state’s attorney, announced he would pursue the death penalty. At the time, Tomczak was a week away from an election showdown with his bitter political rival, Glasgow. Tomczak’s critics accused him of timing the interrogation to score a high-profile, tough-on-crime victory days before a hotly contested election (which Tomczak subsequently lost). Tomczak, Will County Sheriff Paul Kaupas, and others insisted politics had nothing to do with it; Tomczak denied knowing that the detectives were going to bring Fox in that night, much less that Fox would tell them on videotape that he violated and killed his daughter. Almost immediately after his arrest, Fox recanted his confession, which he said he gave only in desperation, after a grueling interrogation and promises from detectives that if he admitted his guilt, he could plead to a lesser charge, get out on bond and go home to his family. (The detectives denied offering any lenient treatment in exchange for a confession.) But as he learned later that day, he in fact could not bond out—he would spend the next eight months in jail. And far from any lesser charge, Tomczak was going after him for first-degree murder, which carried a possible death sentence.

Kevin and Melissa Fox consequently filed a civil-rights lawsuit that named the county, the detectives who interrogated him, Tomczak, and others involved with the case.

A key factor in their lawsuit was the delay in testing DNA evidence that had been recovered from Riley’s body. Months after the crime, the evidence languished untested. Fox’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner, finally secured a court order to send the evidence to a private lab for testing. The results brought glorious news for Fox and his supporters: The DNA did not match Fox’s. Glasgow, who was now the state’s attorney after defeating Tomczak, freed Fox. As with freeing McCarthy, it was a move that enraged many in the law enforcement community, who to this day are convinced Kevin Fox murdered his daughter. They were also frustrated that the judge in the civil suit didn’t allow Fox’s videotaped confession to be admitted as evidence and shown to jurors.

Then in December 2007—during the height of the media furor surrounding the Stacy Peterson investigation—the jury’s decision was in: an award to Kevin and Melissa Fox of $15.5 million, an amount believed to be the highest judgment in Illinois history for a police-misconduct case. The couple was seeking $44 million.

However, the Foxes have not seen any money yet and probably won’t anytime soon; the appeals process will ensure that the matter remains in court for years.

Throughout the Fox case, outside observers wondered: How could anyone, especially a father, confess to such horrible things if he hadn’t done them? Steven Drizin, legal director of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, told
Chicago
magazine in a July 2006 article that he found nothing mystifying about a confession like Fox’s. “You’re overcome by grief,” he said. “You’re put into a cramped room and subjected to an unusually long interrogation. You’re told there is overwhelming evidence against you, including a failed polygraph [Fox had taken a lie-detector test and been told he’d failed]. You’re offered a less-serious offense and the chance to go home to your family and clear things up later in court. They simply broke him down psychologically to a point where he believed that the only way he was going to get this nightmare to stop was to confess.”

Peterson, a lifelong police officer, must have been well aware of how seldom the missing are found in the environs of Bolingbrook and how incredibly unlikely it would be for local prosecutors to bring a murder charge without a body or clear indication that a crime had been committed. Peterson’s knowledge of the Fox ordeal and resulting lawsuit—a huge source of rancor among the Will County police community—would make local detectives and prosecutors hesitant to risk another of its kind.

Then again, as one veteran deputy with the sheriff’s department that investigated Riley Fox’s death suggested, maybe Peterson was just looking for a way to get rich quick.

“What if,” the deputy speculated to me, “he saw this Fox mess, and he said to his wife, ‘Honey, take the bus to Wyoming and check into a hotel and do not call anybody. Pay for everything in cash and stay there and wait for me to get a hold of you.’

“He has to know, with his history, with the last wife and everything, they’re going to be looking at him,” the cop said. “So he starts acting all goofy and he goes on TV and says stupid shit. And then when they arrest him, his wife shows up and he sues the county.”

There’s no evidence whatsoever that this was Peterson’s plan. If it was, he has yet to pull off the part where he gets the police to arrest him, at least for anything more substantial than an unrelated weapons charge. Stacy might have to stay in that Wyoming hotel room for an awfully long time.

A
fter so much upheaval in a short period of time—his romance with Stacy, his explosive split and subsequent feud with Savio, followed by her untimely and strange death—Drew Peterson must have looked forward to the spring and summer of 2004 to bring a measure of peace to his life. The ex-wife up the street who had given him all that grief was gone. Remarkably, a state police investigation into her death found nothing untoward, and a coroner’s jury had ruled the cause to be accidental drowning, taking the heat of suspicion off of her ex-husband. In the relative calm, the Petersons could conceivably turn their attention to their still-new marriage and focus on their now considerable parenting duties. Their son, Anthony, who had been born in July 2003, was hitting all the milestones that delight parents as children approach their first birthdays, and Stacy was pregnant with their second child, daughter Lacy. Additionally, the couple now shared their home with Kristopher and Thomas, the two sons of Drew Peterson and Kathleen Savio, who went to live with their father after their mother died.

Adding to the crowd at 6 Pheasant Chase Court was Stephen Peterson, Drew’s adult son from his first marriage, and Stephen’s girlfriend, a young woman named Jennifer. Both were college students at the time, living in the Peterson basement.

And the Peterson clan was about to meet new next-door neighbors, Sharon and Bob Bychowski, who had just moved to Pheasant Chase Court.

Despite the twenty-six-year difference in their ages, Stacy and Bychowski immediately bonded the day in April 2004 when Stacy, with much of her famly in tow, walked over to introduce everyone.

“She was your friend in five minutes and your best friend in ten,” Sharon Bychowski recalled. “Family and friendships were so important to her.”

Bychowski saw a lot of herself in the young woman. Like Stacy, she had been a young mother—her son Roy was born when she was seventeen—and had taken up with a much older man, but the relationship didn’t last. At nineteen, she struck out on her own selling Avon products; at twenty-five, she was hired as a manager. She eventually met Bob Bychowski, to whom she’d been married for twenty-two years when Stacy’s disappearance turned her life upside down. By the time she moved next door to Stacy she had become an Avon district manager with her own secretary.

For the next three and a half years, until Stacy vanished, Stacy and Bychowski regularly dropped by each other’s homes and Bychowski, by her own account, became close with the family, often watching the kids, giving them treats, and listening to Stacy when she needed to unload the growing stress in her marriage.

That April day they met, only about a month and a half after Savio died, Bychowski had no idea of the recent turmoil in her new neighborhood. She would soon learn. About six weeks after moving in, Bychowski recalled, while talking with Stacy over the back fence, Peterson ambled over and said, “You know, my last wife died.”

Bychowski was so taken aback she could only laugh in astonishment.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, are you serious?’ And he goes, ‘Oh yeah, yeah. It was ruled an accident. That was close.’”

Stacy then asked Bychowski if she wanted to go down and look at Savio’s house, which they were cleaning to sell. Bychowski, who loves looking at homes for sale, agreed. It was on this trip that Stacy divulged how she and Drew used to have sex in the basement of that house while the rest of the family slept upstairs.

According to Bychowski, Stacy took her neighbor into her confidence many times after that. Those heady nights in the basement seemed long gone as Stacy opened up to the older woman about the couple’s ever more frequent fights, which sometimes grew violent, and of Stacy’s growing determination to leave her husband. If Drew Peterson had in fact found some peace in the spring and summer of 2004, it didn’t last.

Bychowski said she could tell right away the honeymoon was over at 6 Pheasant Chase Court, unless the honeymoon involved physical blows. If anything, she said, the couple mellowed over time and the fights became less fierce.

“When I first moved here, they were more physical,” Bychowski said. “But, see, she would hit him back. So stuff started breaking in the house. Then he realized she’s going to hit me back and it’s going to spin out of control. So he started following her.”

His “following” was often done by cell phone. “Everywhere we went—Kohl’s, to get a haircut, to pick up my granddaughter—he always called,” Bychowski described. “At first I think she thought it was nice, but as it went on….”

Peterson denies ever raising a hand to his wife and says that, if anything, he was on the receiving end of any battering. For a time, he repeated an oft-broadcast story of Stacy striking him in the head with a frozen steak. He said she “hated being cornered” but maintains he never hit her. Peterson also points out that he has never been charged in connection with a domestic incident, much less had the police called to his home for a problem with Stacy. While he and Savio were frequent subjects in police reports, there were never any such reports involving him and his fourth wife.

Relatives of Stacy, particularly her “stepsister” Kerry Simmons, who is actually a half sister of a half sister and not a blood relative at all, told a different story. Simmons said on the
Dateline
NBC show which aired on December 22 that Peterson “threw [Stacy] down the stairs. There was an instance where he had knocked her into the TV. I think one time he actually picked her up and threw her across the room. I mean, she’s small. She’s a hundred pounds.”