Fatal Vows (29 page)

Peterson still managed to find himself in the company of a very attractive, and very young, woman. Kim Matuska, an employee of the tanning salon frequented by Peterson’s friend Steve Carcerano and then Peterson himself, told me she had on occasion spent the night at Peterson’s home—although she insisted there was “nothing physical” going on. When I asked him about it, Peterson did not seem to share that opinion.

Either way, Peterson was there for Kim when the Naperville police pulled over the guy she was riding with one early May morning and took him into custody. She and Peterson happened to be talking on the phone at the time. They were talking on the phone a lot around then, she said, and he rushed out about 2 o’clock in the morning to pick her up. He rushed out so fast, in fact, that the Naperville police stopped him for speeding. Peterson got off with a warning.

Matuska, an aspiring veterinarian attending a community college in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, said the cops had hassled her about her involvement with Peterson—right after her very own mother called them about it.

Matuska said a state police investigator showed up at the tanning salon and told her that not only was he sure Peterson killed both Kathleen and Stacy but that she would be next. Amazingly, the young woman was not put off by this and asked the cop what was actually a very valid question: “Then why isn’t he in jail?”

Nearly a month into Matuska’s relationship with Peterson, even Sharon Bychowski—Peterson’s most determined opponent—had yet to talk any sense into her.

But after months of squaring off with Peterson, Bychowski became terrified of her neighbor, and for good reason: The suspect in two homicides had acquired the ability to open her garage door.

A remote control garage door opener programmed for Bychowski’s residence was inside one of Peterson’s vehicles that the Illinois State Police had seized as evidence in November 2007. In March 2008, Peterson managed to recover the Pontiac Grand Prix and GMC Denali, and when going through the cars, he discovered the opener that Sharon had given to Stacy so that she could get inside to prepare for a garage sale. Now Peterson had the opener, and he used it to open her garage door.

“I fear for my life,” Sharon told me after seeing, to her alarm, her garage door mysteriously open and figuring out why.

“In the event that anything happens to me, I want the public to know I fear for my life. I feel closer to Stacy and Kathleen than ever.”

Bychowski called the police, who tried to get Drew to give up the garage door opener. He refused. It was his property, he said. Besides, he was only checking the openers when he was looking through the cars that he had just gotten back from the police. He had no idea it would open Bychowski’s garage.

“It’s nothing I did intentionally,” he said. “So kiss my ass.”

That would not be Peterson’s only brush with the law after Stacy went missing. In fact, he would end up under arrest on a felony charge of unlawful use of a weapon when police and prosecutors decided—nearly seven months later—that one of the guns taken into custody as possible evidence in Stacy’s disappearance was illegal.

The barrel of the weapon, which was a semiautomatic assault rifle Brodsky claimed Peterson carried with the department’s blessing as part of his SWAT duties, was shorter than the state-mandated sixteen inches. Peterson surrendered himself at the Bolingbrook police station and was driven to the Will County jail in Joliet by a couple of state troopers. He seemed to be enjoying himself on the ride, laughing heartily and scoffing at his latest legal jam as nothing more than “the usual.”

Peterson spent only a few hours being processed in the county jail and was released after posting a $7,500 bond. On his way out, Peterson exclaimed, “There’s good news—I just saved a bundle on my car insurance!”

One cop source questioned why the prosecutor charged the case at all and mocked Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow for waiting so long to do so. The source wondered how prosecutors could have suddenly realized the gun was illegal after holding onto it for more than a year.

“What?” the source asked. “Nobody had a ruler seven months ago?”

A spokesman for Glasgow said prosecutors were well aware all along that the gun was illegal and only took action when it appeared they might lose custody of it and some of the other weapons they were holding in the case. It turns out prosecutors might have been right about that, as the very next day, Brodsky won the return of eight guns being held by police for evidentiary purpose. Possession of the weapons was transferred to Peterson’s son Stephen, the Oak Brook cop.

While Peterson laughed his way in and out of police custody, for Bychowski her neighbor’s return was no laughing matter. With one push of a garage door opener, he frightened her enough to install video cameras on the exterior of her house and inside her garage.

The posters and signs in Bychowski’s yard, however, seemed to truly get under Peterson’s skin. He said he worried about the effect the pictures would have on his two youngest children, Anthony and Lacy. They would ask him, “Why is that picture there?” Peterson said. The whole time Stacy has been missing, he’s continued to tell them their mother is on vacation.

“I tell them the picture’s up because they miss her,” Peterson said. “I don’t tell them they put them up to harass me. My whole thing is, do what you want to me, but leave the kids alone.”

While Peterson was feuding with one next-door neighbor, the other was hoping to pull stakes and get out of the cul-de-sac. In the wake of Stacy’s disappearance, those neighbors put their three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house up for sale. As of March 2008, the house was still on the market.

The life of Drew Peterson has certainly taken a drastic turn since October 28, 2007, ten days after the fourth anniversary of his fourth marriage. A week and a half after he’d sprung for a diamond ring as an anniversary gift for his wife, he was insisting to a skeptical world that he had nothing to do with her puzzling and troublingly abrupt disappearance. By the time the long Illinois winter, one of the snowiest in years, was slowly giving way to spring, Peterson had been in the national news so much that he was beginning to sound like Princess Diana or George Clooney, a major celebrity fed up with his fame, instead of a lifelong suburban cop who became a media spectacle because most of America believed that he might have killed his last two wives. He bemoaned his lack of privacy, how he could not even escape his notoriety in Disney World and the way his house was pelted with eggs while he was out of town.

Life on Pheasant Chase Court has also been transformed. A neighbor across the cul-de-sac from Peterson was more galled by the press than by having a suspected killer on the other side of the street. In the midst of the media siege of late 2007, the woman living there barked at reporters to get off her grass. Someone then strung yellow caution tape around her lawn. Long after the television crews, cameramen, reporters and satellite trucks had departed from Pheasant Chase Court, the caution tape remained, warning no one to stay away from the grass.

The caution tape, the missing-persons signs and fliers, Bychowski’s video cameras, Peterson himself—all were still on Pheasant Chase Court while, down in Joliet, a grand jury continued to investigate the death of Kathleen Savio and the disappearance of Stacy Peterson. Until Drew Peterson was either charged or exonerated, until there was some definitive response from the criminal justice system about his role in the fates of his last two wives, it seemed Pheasant Chase Court and probably all of Bolingbrook would be in limbo.

Peterson himself would likely welcome a resolution, although, of course, one in his favor. In the months since Stacy’s disappearance, he’s been the subject of stares and dirty looks, of whispers and accusatory murmurs. His friend Steve Carcerano once let me know that it was important for him to accompany Peterson to a bar or restaurant so that he could be “the eyes” in case “somebody tries to stick a knife in Drew’s neck.” Brodsky, too, told me he’d received numerous insulting messages, some of which ended along the lines of “I hope you die.” None of that seemed to dissuade Brodsky from pushing his case into the public eye; nothing appeared to cause him to question why he had taken it on in the first place.

Peterson wasn’t fazed either. He laughed off the threats as he seemed to laugh off everything, from his wife’s supposed infidelity to the next-door neighbor afraid he would kill her.

While Peterson and Brodsky still appeared in the news occasionally, at least Pheasant Chase was quiet again. For a time, the Bolingbrook street was like a Midwestern Modesto, California, from five years before. A media horde that would have dwarfed the legion outside Peterson’s home overran the town of Modesto for a possibly more famous Peterson—Scott, whose wife, Laci, also went missing.

Less than four months after she disappeared, Laci and her unborn baby washed up on the shore of San Francisco Bay. Her husband’s arrest followed in short order. Within two years, Scott Peterson was found guilty and sentenced to die, and Modesto residents could then begin putting the tragic episode behind them.

Bolingbrook remains without such resolution. No one has been charged in connection with the disappearance of Stacy Peterson or the death of Kathleen Savio. The lack of closure and the unanswered questions are troubling to some, traumatic to others. One day, Drew Peterson—or someone else—will have to tell Lacy and Anthony that their mother is not on vacation and that, in all likelihood, she is not coming back.

He has already addressed this with the other two children in the house, Thomas, who was fourteen when his mother was last home, and Kristopher, who was thirteen. Peterson says he has spoken with the boys, one of whom is now nearly as old as his stepmother when she was seduced by his father, and that they “know” what happened with Stacy. He has let them in on the fact that she ran off with another man.

But someone will have to explain to the two boys why their stepmother, who legally adopted them after their real mother suddenly died, never came back for them; why she never bothered to write a postcard or make a telephone call. Someone will have to try to convince them that their new mother fled from her home to indulge herself in an adulterous romance instead of simply divorcing her husband, taking a good portion of his assets in the process, and undoubtedly keeping custody of half, if not all, of the four children. The boys might have questions about this someday.

And there might be answers to these questions, but they are likely about as plausible as a married mother of four embarking on a ten-month vacation, as her youngest children, sadly, supposedly believe. And as sad as it might be for a two- and three-year-old to grow up without their mom, they at least have lost only one mother. Thomas and Kristopher have lost two.

In July 2008, Paula Stark and Len Wawczak, married acquaintances of Drew Peterson, revealed to me that they had been recording their conversations with him for nearly seven months, at the behest of the Illinois State Police Department. They claimed that Peterson had made incriminating statements, which were recorded and would be vital to his arrest in connection with the death of Savio and the disappearance of Stacy—an arrest they were convinced would come after their undercover operation was exposed.

Peterson shut himself off from the media after Stark and Wawczak went public with their story, much like he did in the wake of Stacy’s disappearance. He denied his former friends’ insistence that he’d made damning statements in their presence, but his behavior suggested otherwise. Stark and Wawczak have stood by their story, although whether or not a conviction will result from their actions remains to be seen.