Fatal Vows (18 page)

“I said, ‘Bob, the kids are there.’ He sits up and he goes, ‘Okay, that’s not right.’ I said, ‘You don’t think I’m being a drama queen to tell you that I think that there’s something wrong with this?’ And he goes, ‘One thing I know about her is, she’d never leave her kids.’

“My husband’s not involved with a lot of stuff,” Bychowski said, “but he knows her well enough to know those kids are always with her.”

Soon after Bychowski returned home, Stacy’s sister Cassandra and Bruce Zidarich were at her door.

Zidarich asked Bychowski if she’d heard about Stacy; Bychowski said she had. Stacy’s sister, Bychowski said, was crying.

Cassandra had apparently had a sleepless, stressful night. After not hearing from Stacy all day Sunday, around eleven that evening she had gone to her sister’s house. The driveway was empty. She said she spoke with her nephew Kristopher who told her his parents had fought that morning, then Stacy had left, and his father was out looking for her.

Cassandra left the house and called Peterson on his cell phone. She was sitting in the parking lot of a nearby Meijer department store when he told her that Stacy had run off, and he was trying to find her. She said Peterson also told her he was home, which she found difficult to believe, considering she had just been there.

Cassandra then went to the Downers Grove Police Department. She did not want to trust the matter to the Bolingbrook police, and might have chosen the Downers Grove police because she had grown up in the town, but they sent her to Bolingbrook anyway.

From the Bolingbrook Police Department, Cassandra drove by her sister’s home again. This time, both the Denali and the Grand Prix were parked there. Cassandra then headed to the nearby District 5 state police headquarters and, in the early hours of Monday, October 29, reported Stacy Peterson missing.

By the time Cassandra showed up at Bychowski’s house, she had an awful feeling about what had happened to her sister.

“She said, ‘He killed her. He killed her,’” Bychowski said.

“One thing I know about Stacy is she would never leave with anybody without calling Cassandra,” Bychowski continued. “She would never let her sister cry on TV. She absolutely, unconditionally loves Cassandra—no matter what. No matter how stupid Cassandra acts. She totally loves Cassandra.”

Monday ended and Tuesday morning came with no sign of Stacy on Pheasant Chase Court. It was the third day Bychowski would not hear from her friend, but the missing woman’s husband kept coming over and calling. At around 9 a.m., he rang his neighbor’s phone to give her his predictions for the day ahead.

“He goes, ‘This is what’s going to happen today. The media, the media will be coming today.’”

Bychowski remembered her surprise and confusion, and asked Peterson what he was talking about.

She said Peterson told her, “Well, because you know Bruce thinks I hurt Stacy. You know, Bruce and Cassandra think I hurt her. So now the media’s going to be coming today.”

She said Peterson wanted her to move one of his cars into her driveway so reporters would not know he was home. He called her again when he was out at the airport with his kids, putting a sticker on his plane. The media was coming, he said, and he didn’t want them to know if he was there or not.

Bychowski said her secretary talked her out of doing him the favor—“Sharon, do not get in that car. Are you out of your mind?”—so Bychowski told Peterson that she didn’t think it was a good idea.

“He said, ‘Can you just wear gloves?’” Apparently he assumed that her concern was about leaving fingerprints. Bychowski coolly responded, “Uh, no. I don’t think that’s a good idea either.”

In the end he just put his car in her driveway himself, Bychowski said. On Wednesday, he informed her that he “may or may not need” to move his car back over to her house again, she said, but called back to tell her about a change in plans: His stepbrother, it seemed, tried to commit suicide, and Peterson was going to visit him in the hospital.

Upon his return, Bychowski asked how his stepbrother was making out, and Peterson sounded puzzled.

“He goes, ‘What? Oh, well, he lost his job, lost his family—go figure,’” Bychowski said. “I thought, ‘Ooh, you guys must not be too close to him.’ Just kind of the way he said it was very flippant.”

Peterson wasn’t the only one asking favors. Also on Tuesday, Bychowski said, a state police sergeant called and asked her if she could babysit the children next door, because the state police were taking Peterson in for questioning. Instead, they ended up talking to him at home for about an hour and a half, Bychowski said, so Peterson was still around at 5:30 in the afternoon when he rang her doorbell again and asked if she could take Anthony to an evening daycare program.

That Wednesday was Halloween, and Bychowski, determined that the children not miss their holiday fun, took them trick-or-treating.

“About 4 o’clock [Peterson] called me and we passed the kids over the back fence with their outfits. And then I brought them in here and changed them into Superman and Tinkerbell.” To avoid the media, Bychowski drove the kids—minus Kristopher, who went on his own—down the street.

“If you get out of the car two blocks away, no one will know who you are,” Bychowski observed, and reported that the children enjoyed themselves despite the unsettling circumstances surrounding the day.

The day after Halloween, a Thursday, was not nearly as much fun. The state police took Peterson in for questioning, and then they served a search warrant on his home. Needless to say, the children were upset. Bychowski said a neighbor told her the cops were grabbing Stacy’s kids.

“One had Lacy in his arms,” she said. The little girl was screaming, “like bloodcurdling screaming outside,” so Bychowski took her into her house and soothed her.

Later in the day, Bychowski said she had Peterson, his children, a pair of police officers, television personality Greta Van Susteren and her crew, Cassandra Cales and her friend Bruce, and Kathleen Savio’s sister Anna Marie Doman all packed into her house while the cops searched Peterson’s home and property. Bychowski said Peterson told her they needed to talk and led her into her tiny powder room.

“He walks in with me and he says, ‘Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a chick in the bathroom.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, and we are in here because…?’ He goes, ‘Okay, should they arrest me, I want to make sure my kids go to Steve [Stephen, Peterson’s grown son from his first marriage]. You’ve got his number. Call him right away, and he’ll come and get the kids.’”

Bychowski said he expected the police to take him in for seventy-two hours. “‘A seventy-two-hour hold,’ he said. ‘We do it all the time.’”

The Bolingbrook police might have done it all the time, but the state police did not pull that on Peterson. They did not run him in, and when they were done rummaging through his house and seizing his cars and various other possessions, he returned home with his children.

Friday brought another call from Peterson, Bychowski said—again, to ask a favor. He wanted to move the kids through her house to send them off with Stephen and avoid the media massing in front of his house. Drew, Stephen, and the kids arrived with some packed clothes at her back door. Bychowski was surprised to see Kristopher there in the middle of a school day. She said the boy told her his father said he could stay home; his brother, Thomas, however, was at school.

“Odd,” Bychowski said. “So I said to Drew, ‘How come Tom went to school but Kris didn’t?’ He said, ‘Well, I thought he could help out with the little kids.’ I don’t believe that. I think Kris knew too much, and he wanted to get him out of there. Kris is the one that stuttered when I said, ‘Where’s your mom?’ Kris is the one who heard them fighting in the morning and told Cassandra, and Kris is the one he takes out of school on Friday.”

Bychowski said she sent Stephen Peterson back for the children’s winter coats, boots and gloves. Lacy did not want to leave but was finally taken away. That was the last Bychowski saw of Drew Peterson until he returned home the following Thursday. That night, Bychowski claims, Peterson peered in her windows and was “yelling” at her. Peterson maintains he was merely attempting to pass off the ashes of Stacy’s deceased half sister, Tina.

Two days after this incident, Geraldo Rivera landed in Bolingbrook and commandeered Bychowski’s house, lining up just about every player involved in the drama and stashing them inside her home.

Without a doubt, life on Pheasant Chase Court had taken a surreal turn.

“It’s just, I mean, look at how bizarre this is,” Bychowski said.

It was bizarre. And the strange days were just beginning.

D
rew Peterson acted like a hunted man when the media first came calling to ask questions about his last two wives: both the one reported missing the final Monday morning of October 2007, and the other found dead in her bathtub a few years before. Peterson opened his front door just wide enough for one eyeball to peer out. The glass in and around the door was plastered with sheets of white paper, and the blinds were kept drawn over the large front windows. When he cracked open his door and looked out with one eye, he was terse and appeared nervous. It wouldn’t take long for him to emerge from his shell.

Though he initially was reluctant to appear on camera or leave his house after Stacy was gone, soon Peterson was inviting reporters into his home for interviews. Then, in short order, Peterson was venturing outside to banter with the camera crews, reporters and photographers keeping constant vigil in his cul-de-sac, waiting for something to happen—either for Peterson to pull some outrageous stunt or for the police to swoop in and snatch him up. And while an O.J. Simpson-style slow-speed car chase along Interstate 55 might have been asking for too much, Peterson’s behavior was so odd that it couldn’t be ruled out. Unfortunately for the media swarm outside 6 Pheasant Chase Court, the police did disappointingly little swooping or snatching, although Peterson fulfilled his part by clowning around for the cameras and mouthing no shortage of memorable quotes.

As the days went by without the law making a move, Peterson grew bolder. At one point in the initial days of his wife’s disappearance, he chatted with former Los Angeles homicide detective turned television personality Mark Fuhrman, famous for his star turn in the O.J. case and later for writing a book about the decades-old Martha Moxley murder that led to the trial and conviction of Kennedy relative Michael Skakel.

Then, about two weeks after Stacy Peterson vanished, Geraldo Rivera rode into town. The man who stared Charles Manson in the eye, who reported from war zones and uncovered the broken bottles hidden away in Al Capone’s vault, had touched down in Bolingbrook, and he wanted to talk to Drew Peterson.

Rivera actually did accomplish this. He ventured inside Peterson’s home and spoke with him off camera. When he emerged, Rivera reported to his audience that there was a tightening noose around the neck of Peterson, who remained inside his home, hiding from the television cameras while Rivera broadcast from a perch in front of the house.

Peterson later told me his conversation with Rivera was relaxed and cordial. He said he watched the live broadcast with family and friends as soon as Rivera left his house and was both shocked and amused by the television personality depicting him as a frightened man with a noose around his neck.

“Geraldo Rivera, the nuisance of news,” Peterson called him.

Geraldo would go on to dub Peterson the “skunk of Bolingbrook.” In turn, Peterson appeared on the
Today
show and told host Matt Lauer that his only regret in the months following Stacy’s disappearance was “letting Geraldo Rivera in my house. Nothing other than that.”

After his chat with Peterson, Geraldo camped out next door at the home of Sharon and Bob Bychowski, where quite a crowd was assembled. Besides Geraldo and his assorted staff were neighbors of Lisa Stebic, a missing woman from nearby Plainfield, who vanished about six months before Stacy and whose story was rapidly losing public interest as a result of the drama on Pheasant Chase; Melissa and Charlie Doman, the niece and nephew of Kathleen Savio; Steve Carcerano, Kathleen and Drew’s neighbor from their time down the street as man and wife; and Debbie Forgue, the half sister of Stacy’s deceased half sister, Tina Ryan. At one point Debbie’s husband, Martin Forgue, went over to Peterson’s home to retrieve Ryan’s ashes. Meanwhile, Rivera tried, and failed, to get people inside the house to proclaim that a hostage situation over the ashes was unfolding next door.