Fatal Vows (16 page)

B
y mid-2006, the once-torrid February-October romance of the teenage hotel desk clerk and the middle-age suburban cop had mellowed into marriage and parenthood. After Stacy’s half sister Tina Ryan died in September of 2006, things took a decided turn for the worse, and by the autumn of 2007, the relationship between Drew and Stacy Peterson was nothing short of rocky.

Stacy’s grief over her half sister’s death understandably put stress on the Petersons’ marriage, but Drew Peterson actually blamed the couple’s misery on his wife’s menstrual cycle. Whenever she got her period, she wanted a divorce and then settled down again when it had passed, he claimed. Others say Stacy, period or no period, was on her way out by early October 2007, if not sooner.

What’s not debatable is that ever since Stacy was last seen on October 28, 2007, several people have come forward—either through the media or the grand jury investigating her disappearance—to speak to Stacy’s activities and state of mind in the weeks before she vanished.

Candace Aikin said Stacy told her she was getting ready to leave her husband, an announcement that almost forced Aikin to alter a visit to Illinois where she planned to attend a nephew’s birthday party in October of 2007. She was going to stay in Bolingbrook with the Petersons, as she usually did.

“I was out there a lot, and I stayed with them every single time,” Aikin said. She added that she was “very close to Stacy,” having been present both at her birth and the birth of her sister, Cassandra.

Aikin found Drew Peterson to be pleasant company, but she was reluctant to stay with the couple and their children if the family was embroiled in domestic strife. While Stacy told Aikin she was going to end the marriage, she assured her aunt that her presence in the home would not be a problem. Aikin did end up staying with them.

“They were getting ready for a divorce, she said, before I came,” Aikin recalled. “She said it wouldn’t be uncomfortable, but it was different than the other times I was out there.”

Aikin wasn’t the only person with whom Stacy shared her plan to leave Peterson. Sharon Bychowski attested that Stacy also talked about wanting to leave, as did Scott Rossetto, with whom Stacy exchanged racy text messages in the months before her disappearance and who later testified before the grand jury investigating the case. Pamela Bosco, Cassandra’s legal guardian and family spokeswoman, also said Stacy wanted to take her children and get away from Peterson. She said Stacy had asked Cassandra about moving in with Bosco’s brothers in California.

But there was other information, more shocking than her intention to end her marriage, that Stacy supposedly played close to the vest in the months before October 28, reportedly confiding in only two men.

One of those men was a Wheaton, Illinois attorney named Harry Smith, whom Stacy contacted to discuss divorcing her husband. Smith represented Savio in her divorce from Peterson.

The other man was minister Neil Schori, formerly of Westbrook Christian Church, a nondenominational congregation where Stacy and Drew Peterson sometimes attended services. On December 10, the minister told his story to Greta Van Susteren on her cable news show. After the show aired, Schori, a tall, congenial man, was reluctant to tell his tale again or be perceived as trying to capitalize on Stacy’s misfortune. At the same time, he told me that he does not want Stacy to be forgotten or for her case to fade away before justice can be done, and that he stood by all the statements he made on that broadcast.

On the show, Schori said Stacy telephoned him in August of 2007. Stacy had not been to church in a few months, and Schori had not seen her during that time. Her call came at the cusp of a hectic and eventful time for Schori’s own family. His wife, Brandi, gave birth to twin daughters in early October. Then, in November, he left Westbrook Christian Church to be installed as lead pastor at Naperville Christian Church. But in August, those events were still ahead of him; he agreed to see Stacy.

The pair met the next day in a Bolingbrook coffee shop. Stacy filled him in on the troubles in her marriage, but Schori sensed there was something more she wanted to tell him.

“Well, I try not to push people into an area that they’re not comfortable, and I gave her—I gave her an out,” said Schori, who has a master’s degree from Lincoln Christian College and participated in two counseling-related internships.

“I said, ‘If you’d like to share it with me, I’m here to hear it.’ I said, ‘But there’s no pressure. You don’t have to feel like you have to share anything you’re not comfortable with.’”

What Stacy told him, Schori said, was, “He did it.” Schori said he believed he knew what Stacy was talking about, but “needed clarification.” They had never before broached the subject of wife number three.

“I had just heard casual conversations in the community and in my own church about speculation over an interesting death of Mr. Peterson’s wife, his third wife,” he told Van Susteren.

When Schori pressed Stacy to explain what she was talking about, he recalled, she said, “He killed Kathleen.”

“And I was really blown away,” Schori said. “I was reeling inside.”

“I asked for more specific things. She gave me details that I really can’t share. But I just got her talking about it and asked her what—this is a crazy amount of information. Again, I asked her, ‘What exactly can I do with this? Why did you tell me?’ I asked her if she had ever told anyone else. She said, at the time, she had never told another person.”

Schori said Stacy provided him with “specific information about [Peterson] not being in the house” the night of Kathleen Savio’s death. Stacy told Schori that she discussed Peterson’s absence with him “shortly after” the evening in question, and that she knew what had transpired at her husband’s old house on Pheasant Chase Drive.

“It was more than just putting two and two together,” he said. “It was not speculation on her part.” What it was, he confirmed, was a confession by Peterson to his new young wife.

Police had interviewed Stacy about Savio’s death, but she did not tell them the story she told Schori, the minister said.

“I believe she was simply afraid,” he said, noting that even three years later, he did not believe she intended to tell police.

When Schori got back to Westbrook Christian Church after his disquieting conversation with Stacy, something perhaps even more unsettling awaited him: a voice mail message from Drew Peterson. He wanted to meet with the minister.

Schori called Peterson back. “He just said, ‘Hey, I’m just trying to get a hold of you. I thought maybe we could meet since you just met with Stacy.’ And I—I sort of backed out of doing that,” Schori said.

“Your heart must have been in your shoes when you got that voice mail,” said Van Susteren.

“Oh, my gosh,” Schori said. “Sure.”

Peterson’s attorney, Joel Brodsky, went on the offensive the very next night. In an interview with Dan Abrams on MSNBC, Brodsky said that he’d heard rumors of a romantic connection between Stacy and the minister.

The attorney explained he had received “several calls” on the subject but added, “I don’t know if there is any validity to it.”

An incredulous Abrams asked Brodsky, “You guys are going to slime a man of the cloth now on this one?”

“Believe me, that’s not something I started,” Brodsky replied. “People call me.”

Brodsky later admitted the “rumors” he had heard were spoken by Peterson himself. The “people” who’d called him must have been Peterson.

Schori denied any involvement or romantic entanglement with Stacy and warned Brodsky to back off. Peterson said he could not comment on Schori’s feelings for his wife, but said he had no doubt Stacy had the hots for the minister.

“All I know for sure is, Stacy had a big crush on him,” Peterson told me. “Every time she went to see him, she was all dolled up, all sexied up.”

Brodsky went a step further and said he was told Stacy would put on a bikini top and roar by Westbrook Christian Church on her motorcycle to catch the minister’s attention. Again, the man that he said had informed him of this was none other than Peterson.

Stacy and Schori may never have had anything more than a tense conversation in a coffee shop, but early on in the investigation into her disappearance, a man from her past surfaced. It turned out that he had been trading lascivious text messages and carrying on flirty phone conversations with Stacy in the weeks leading up to October 28. The man—thirty-five-year-old male nurse Scott Rossetto—said that the text message and phone sessions were the extent of their relationship, which stopped short of anything physical. Based on the content and specificity of the text messages, however, police thought the relationship went much further. The text messages have never been released to the public.

Rossetto and his twin brother, Keith Rossetto, also a male nurse, testified before a special grand jury investigating Stacy’s disappearance and Savio’s death. The grand jury convened in November of 2007 for a six-month term with the option to extend for another four months; all proceedings of the grand jury are closed.

Keith Rossetto had spent time with Stacy in the months before he left for the Army and she met Peterson, though Keith denies that they actually dated. While both knew Stacy when she was a single girl, it was Scott who interacted with her in the weeks before she vanished.

On November 21, 2007, with Stacy missing for nearly a month, the Rossetto brothers testified before the grand jury. The goateed identical twins were dressed in almost-matching clothing, topped with dark stocking caps pulled low on their shaved heads.

“They were like something out of a Coen brothers movie,” observed one official.

When they were younger, the Rossetto brothers dreamt of fame, and not the kind that comes from testifying about a woman whom police believe may have been killed by her husband, a woman with whom the police suspect one or both of the twins may have slept. The brothers had been a singing duet since they performed “Jesus Loves Me” together at a church when they were two years old, and in the mid-1990s they had aspirations to make it in Nashville. Those aspirations had evaporated by November 2007.

“So much for that,” Keith said to me when I brought up their erstwhile musical dreams. After making his appearance before the grand jury, Keith was on his way home; his twin brother remained upstairs answering questions.

A few days before he went in front of the grand jury, Scott Rossetto told
The Herald News
that he had not heard from Stacy in about six years when “all of a sudden she called me out of the blue about three weeks before she disappeared.” She told him that “she was just going through some stuff and just found my phone number,” and divulged the troubles in her marriage and her thoughts about leaving her husband.

For the next week or two, Scott and Stacy kept in touch, he said. They flirted on the phone and sent each other racy text messages for maybe twelve days. A few months later he was explaining himself to a grand jury.

The line of questioning was not accusatory, he said, although a prosecutor asked him if he “did anything” to Stacy. The most he did to her was send her “perverted and flirty” text messages, he said, and met with her one time, nine days before she vanished, at a Bolingbrook Denny’s restaurant.

Drew Peterson showed up too. Stacy had let him know about her plans, Rossetto said. She and Drew had argued about her going to meet with Scott, but she went anyway. So her husband, in uniform and in his squad car, made a point of checking up on his wife that night.