Fatal Vows (5 page)

Whatever it was, the pull must have been powerful, because judging from the heady recklessness with which they carried out their affair, Peterson and Stacy didn’t appear to have worried too much about the repercussions of getting caught. Stacy even introduced her Aunt Candy to the older, married father-figure she was dating.

“I met Drew in 2001, right after she met him,” Aikin said. She found the dynamics of the relationship odd but said it was not her place to discourage her niece’s budding love affair.

“It was pretty crazy,” Aikin said. “But she was old enough to make her own choices. There was nothing I could do.

“She didn’t have a mom. She didn’t have a lot of guidance. I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just how her life was.”

Perhaps even more revealing of their recklessness, in their early days Drew and Stacy would tryst in the basement of the Peterson house while his wife and boys slept upstairs. Sharon Bychowski, who became Stacy’s next-door neighbor on Pheasant Chase Court and instant dear friend in April of 2004, said the young woman took her to the house where Peterson and Savio had lived—just down the street on the nearly identically named Pheasant Chase Drive.

Stacy told her, “‘This is where he lived, down in the basement,’” Bychowski said. “And I said, ‘So wait,’—I don’t know her very well [at this point]; I just moved here—I said, ‘So wait, he was bringing you here to the house?’ She said, ‘Yes, we would go into the basement, and I would leave in the morning before Kathleen got up.’”

Just as when he was questioned about his alleged extramarital affairs while married to wives one and two, Peterson freely admitted that he and Stacy would have sex in the basement while his unwitting third wife and boys slept upstairs.

Bychowski said she was shocked by her new friend’s revelation, telling her, “‘Stacy, that’s terrible. I don’t even know you that well and I can tell you that’s terrible.’ She said, ‘Oh no, no, Sharon. You don’t understand. Their marriage was over.’”

Stacy said that Peterson and Savio, by that time, were just staying in the same house because they hadn’t yet divided up their assets and neither could afford to move.

“I said, ‘Wait, let me tell you what else he told you,’” Bychowski continued, and proceeded to rattle off such lines as, “We haven’t slept together in a really long time” and “I’m only here for the kids.”

“She said, ‘How did you know that?’”

“Stacy,” Bychowski told the young woman, “because every man says that kind of shit. That’s why. It’s standard, comes with the package.”

But by the time Bychowski shared her wisdom of the male species with her young friend, it was too late. Peterson had already snared Stacy, gotten her pregnant, and married her. Their son, Anthony, was born in July 2003, and not three months later, the new parents married in an outdoor wedding ceremony.

Savio’s sister, Anna Marie Doman, said she found the notion of Peterson taking up with a girl fresh out of high school creepy.

“It’s like a child molester,” she said. “Stacy looked like she weighed ninety pounds—no tits, no boobs. She’s not a woman.”

And from the get-go, she predicted their marriage would come to no good.

“Back then I said it’s not going to last, because when she hits twenty-one and sees there’s a whole world out there, the shit’s going to hit the fan, which is pretty much what happened.” Doman might have been off by a couple years, but there are many who believe her prediction was dead-on accurate.

Savio learned of her husband’s philandering through an anonymous note. The revelation turned her world upside down, but Doman said her sister was not particularly surprised. In fact, she had caught him cheating before, prior to Stacy’s entry into their lives.

“He had this humungous cell phone bill, and she was like, ‘What the hell?’” Doman described.

The same number was listed on the bill again and again, so Savio sought her sister’s advice.

“I said, ‘Ask Drew. I don’t know what to tell you.’ She asked, and he gave her some bullshit. She called. It was some young girl named Heather.”

Savio invited Heather to her home. Face-to-face, Savio informed Heather that her boyfriend happened to be married—to her—and that he had two sons.

“That girl disappeared after that,” Doman said.

Clearly, whatever disapproval he faced in his choice of new love had no effect on Drew Peterson. Between playing the expansive provider and thrilling at their clandestine moments in his basement, the middle-aged Drew Peterson was, without question, quite a happy man in 2002 and 2003.

He fondly recalled the joy he felt with Stacy and her antics to attract attention to them and leave onlookers scratching their heads. For example, Stacy would grab him in public and kiss him passionately, then earnestly ask, “Do I kiss the best of all my sisters?”

It was not the only way they turned their fatherd-daughter age difference into a game. In the supermarket, Stacy sometimes acted like she was trying to get him to buy alcohol for her and the “friends” she had left outside, loudly badgering him to buy her wine to shock other shoppers.

“She’d say, ‘Come on, all the kids are waiting in the parking lot,’” Peterson recalled, smiling at the memory. He even owned a ceramic figurine of a cop and a little girl, which he displayed on a shelf behind his desk. He pointed it out and quipped, “That was me and Stacy in 1988,” when Stacy would have been four years old to his thirty-four.

While Aikin said it was not her place to criticize her legally adult niece or to tell her what to do, she did say she spoke to Stacy about her affair with the married middle-aged man.

“I did talk to her a little bit,” Aikin recalled. “I can’t remember what I said.”

Even if Aikin had spoken to Stacy more than just a little bit, she would have been working against the clock. After all, if she had plans of talking her niece out of the ill-fated romance, there was little time to do so. Stacy and Drew were on the fast track, with the young girl pregnant by eighteen and married by nineteen.

“They got married eight days after the divorce with Kathleen,” Aikin said. “It was a very private wedding.”

Stacy and Drew married and settled into their home on Pheasant Chase Court, a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, a mere five hundred yards away from his old home, where Savio was still living. Peterson had actually closed on his new home in April 2002, nearly a year and a half before he and Stacy tied the knot, so they did have the opportunity to set up house before exchanging vows.

The married life must have afforded Stacy the security she had lacked throughout childhood, but it also kept her tied down with the duties of a wife and mother. Before she turned twenty-one, and less than fifteen months into her marriage, she had given birth to her second child. Plus, there were the two boys from Peterson’s marriage to Savio that stayed with them during visits with their father and would, before long, become permanent members of their household.

“She was out here with the kids all the time,” said Bychowski. “Those kids were so important to her.”

Stacy was a natural when it came to motherhood, according to her neighbor. But it took some work to get Stacy looking, or at least dressing, the part of an adult, married woman with a slew of kids to take care of and what many have called a jealous, controlling husband. Luckily for Stacy, her next-door neighbor and best friend was there to help the young girl transform into a grown woman.

“She went, in the short time I was with her, from dressing in junior sizes to dressing elegantly and changing the way she looked,” Bychowski said. “She really, I feel, in three and a half years, she went from dressing like a kid to dressing like a mom.”

Bychowski knew something about appropriate professional dress. As an Avon district manager with eight hundred people working for her, she had to, and she tried to impart that wisdom to Stacy.

“We would be in Kohl’s shopping somewhere and she would say to me, ‘Does this look okay?’ And I would say, ‘I probably wouldn’t buy that.’

“Like it was too short, or it was too punky, you know?” Bychowski explained. “If your objective is to dress like a mom now, then what you wear has to change.”

It wasn’t just her clothes that transformed. After the birth of her second child, daughter Lacy in January of 2005, Stacy embarked on a series of upgrades that included breast enlargement, Lasik eye surgery, and a tummy tuck. Peterson portrayed himself as an indulgent husband, paying for the procedures.

When Lacy was born, Stacy was nineteen days shy of her twenty-first birthday. If her life had followed a different course, she might have been just a college kid hanging out with other college kids, instead of a mother of two and stepmother of another two. She still had some growing up to do. One neighbor told of Stacy wearing a bikini when she went out to cut the grass. The same neighbor said she cautioned a friend who came to her house not to look too long at Stacy or be overly friendly, because Drew was always watching.

“He would be at the door, looking out,” she said.

This was not unusual behavior for Peterson, as many who were close to Stacy said. Bychowski claimed that he would follow Stacy while he was supposed to be working and when she was doing nothing more sinister than clothes shopping for herself and her children.

“He would come there in the cruiser,” she said. “He would be in the parking lot of Kohl’s, [asking,] ‘Hey what [are] you guys doing?’”

Bychowski initially thought Peterson’s suspicions were focused more on family finances than infidelity.

“At first I thought he was checking on how much she was spending, because he always picked on her for spending,” she said. “It didn’t matter if she bought a toothpick. It cost too much.”

She soon learned otherwise.

“[He was] constantly calling,” Bychowski said, telling how Peterson was fixated on his wife’s whereabouts, checking on the places she was going and who was in her company when she went there.

It was strange then, that after Stacy had vanished, Peterson seemed to suddenly have little interest in tracking down her location.

“He had such an obsession and compulsion to control her, at what point did he decide to kill her?” Bychowski pondered one winter day close to five months after Stacy was last seen alive, making no secret of her theory of what had happened to her friend. However, while the state police have ruled Stacy’s disappearance to be a “potential homicide” and have named Peterson a suspect, still today, he has not been charged with anything.

“After all that money he invested in her,” Bychowski wondered, “at what point did she just become expendable bullshit?”

B
olingbrook doesn’t have much in the way of heritage or tradition. It can’t; it’s only been around since 1965, which makes it eleven years younger than its most famous resident, Drew Walter Peterson.

The town, which was developed as a bedroom community whose first homes were priced at ten thousand dollars, is connected to Chicago by the Stevenson Expressway. According to a “History of Bolingbrook,” the first residents of the mid-1960s did not always get what they thought they were paying for.

“Lesson #1 learned the hard way through teary eyes: everything you see in the model home isn’t in your finished house, necessarily,” the official town history says. “In the case of Dover homes that meant no carpeting or even floor tile in some area [
sic
] unless you paid extra. And there certainly were no trees or lawns. And not always paved streets.”

When Bolingbrook was incorporated in 1965, it was a modest burg of 5,300 people in 1,200 homes. The village has been growing ever since and in 1975 became the proud home of Old Chicago, the world’s first completely enclosed amusement park and shopping center. However, Old Chicago struggled and closed six years later.

By the time Peterson was in the midst of his romance with young Stacy Cales, U.S. Census Bureau estimates put Bolingbrook’s population at about 66,000. The median home value in 2005 was more than $225,000, over twenty times the price of an abode in the town’s first days.

Bolingbrook features some impressive homes, but the town—essentially a series of subdivisions—has forever been a less successful, even faceless, little sibling to neighboring Naperville. More than a hundred years older than Bolingbrook, Naperville not only has some history, it also has a bustling city center. While Bolingbrook is a series of subdivisions, Naperville is home to a quaint downtown area and charming Riverwalk, which draws visitors from across the Chicago area.