Fatal Vows (19 page)

“It was absolutely crazy,” Sharon Bychowski said. “This is the biggest thing in our whole life we’ll ever be through. I mean, think about it. Could there be anything bigger than somebody murdering their wife next door to your house? I don’t think so.” (Despite what his next-door neighbor may think, Peterson still has not been charged—at least as of the beginning of summer 2008—with murder or any other offense related to the death of his third wife or the disappearance of his fourth.)

Bychowski said Geraldo’s staff members had wormed their way inside her house earlier in the day. They began by asking if they could do a feed from the backyard; then they wanted to move onto the patio. Bychowski agreed. Afterwards, they asked if Geraldo could actually sit at her kitchen table but leave the booms and equipment outside. Again, she agreed.

“But now the booms are inside,” Bychowski said. “So it gets crazier and crazier. Finally they say, ‘We’re just going to do it, we’re just going to stand up.’” They took down a $300 lamp, to protect it from being hit by a boom. “And they moved my kitchen table. Now all the cameras are here, then he moved my husband’s chair. You’re kind of in the middle of it, what are you going to do? You’re going to say no? He said, ‘I promise you, no matter what, we are going to put every single thing back where we found it. You will be absolutely one hundred percent happy when we leave.’ And we were. They were very nice. They called me the next day: ‘Did we put back everything we moved in your house? Is there anything we didn’t do? Is there anyone I can call for you? Cleaning? Did you check out everything?’”

Everything, Bychowski said, checked out just fine.

Bychowski had spent the previous night in a La Quinta hotel to get away from all the media lunacy on the street—and from Peterson, who she says was shouting at her over their fence and standing at her window the night before that. When she returned to her home, the scene outside it had only grown more surreal.

“Out in front are all the Stebic people,” she said. “They all come in. They’re all on my couch. It was nuts. Charlie and Melissa [Doman] were here. It was crazy. It wasn’t supposed to be in my house. [Rivera] wanted to use my backyard. It wasn’t that cold. He just had his jacket on. Charlie, Melissa, Stebic people, [Steve] Carcerano… It was absolutely crazy.”

Not all the action was in Bychowski’s house, or even on Pheasant Chase Court. Geraldo had conducted an earlier interview in the back seat of a car in an “undisclosed location” with Ric Mims, who only days before had been Peterson’s staunchest supporter. Mims, who had steadfastly defended Drew and proclaimed his close friend’s innocence, apparently had an abrupt change of heart. He also seemed to be very afraid, hence his backseat interview in the undisclosed location.

Meanwhile, at Bychowski’s house, Geraldo moved from subject to subject, and at one point appeared to instigate a confrontation between Savio’s nephew, Charlie Doman, and Carcerano, the man who would eventually take Mims’ place as Peterson’s chief flunky.

The role of Drew’s friend and defender provided Carcerano with some notoriety, but it was not all cable television interviews and curious gazes while he was out on the town with Peterson. In fact, Carcerano told me of a nasty confrontation with a disapproving woman who recognized him as supporter of Peterson when he was just trying to get some color at a local tanning salon. But in the same conversation he also mentioned to me that—if he could not appear as himself—he hoped former ’N Sync boy-bander Joey Fatone (whom he believes resembles him) would play his part when a movie is made of Drew Peterson’s story.

But before there was a movie, there was Geraldo, and Carcerano told the Fox News Network personality how he was there the night Savio’s body was found in her bathtub. Doman did not believe this, and later told me he had never heard of Carcerano before the Geraldo taping. He had always been under the impression that another neighbor and friend of his aunt had been the only one to go into the house and make the grisly discovery while Peterson waited outside.

Visibly angry, Doman seemed on the verge of attacking Carcerano before Geraldo stepped between them. When I spoke with Carcerano about this incident, he told me he was not scared. If Doman had attacked him, he told me, it would have been a big mistake. But that wasn’t what came across on television.

While Bychowski willingly opened her home to Geraldo from the beginning and has given numerous interviews in the months since Stacy disappeared, another neighbor was not as welcoming to the army of media; apparently, he considered the state of his lawn to be of a significantly higher priority. This homeowner strung yellow police tape around his front yard to keep the press from trampling over it. Peterson himself at one point posted no-trespassing signs and placed orange traffic cones at the edge of his driveway, but they did little to keep the media away. Warning signs and traffic cones aside, Peterson did not particularly seem to
want
the media to stay away.

Peterson displayed his zeal for appearing on television—or, at the very least, seeing his name in print—within days of Stacy’s disappearance. By Halloween, he had started entertaining reporters inside his home. The same night, Greta Van Susteren—who drove this story in the media as she did the Natalee Holloway missing-person’s case less than three years earlier—broadcast live across the street from his home for the first time.

On Halloween, Peterson granted me an audience as he sat behind his desk, the one topped by boxes disguised as classic books like
A Tale of Two Cities
and
War and Peace
. He took questions and was gracious and expansive with his answers. As I listened, the inherently creepy Ric Mims lurked in the background. At the time, Mims was Peterson’s staunchest supporter, whose responsibilities involved answering the door for Peterson and running interference for him. In fact, when I got inside and noticed Mims lingering mere inches from Peterson, I asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m his brother,” Mims said.

“No, he’s not,” Peterson said from behind his desk, not bothering to glance at the longtime friend who was about to betray him in his greatest time of need.

Mims continued to skulk around throughout my conversation with Peterson. He also answered the door when trick-or-treaters rang.

Peterson’s children, back from their own trick-or-treating, also milled about. It was disturbing to have a four-year-old playing at my feet while his father detailed the death of his third wife and the supposed adulterous affair that prompted his fourth wife, the four-year-old’s mother, to abandon the family.

“I believe, like I tell everyone, she’s not missing,” Peterson told me that night. “She’s gone on her own. And it’s not by nothing that I did.”

This could not have been an easy thing for a man like Peterson to admit. Granted, closing in on fifty-four he was no longer young, and it must have been tough to keep up with a woman who had thirty years less mileage, a woman who had blossomed from the seventeen-year-old kid he’d first met into a twenty-three-year-old with bigger breasts, surgically sculpted legs, and a new flatter stomach. Still, he was Drew Peterson, former undercover narcotics officer, then sergeant in charge of the overnight shift, when the streets of Bolingbrook are at their most desolate. And he was a Lothario, married four times and, by his own admission, unfaithful to the first three wives. As Mims put it in an interview on CNN, “He was a big flirt with the ladies,” and a lot of people in town knew it.

“I wouldn’t say a womanizer,” Mims added, “but just overly flirtatious, chasing a little bit here and there.”

Still, Drew was man enough to admit it when the tables were turned and he was the cuckold, left home alone with the kids while his young wife was off gallivanting only God knew where. And that was just what he did on Halloween night, suggesting that the rabbit gene might run in the family, since Stacy’s mother had run off herself about eight years before.

The day after Halloween, things became even more curious. The cliché “media horde” could have been defined by an aerial photograph of Peterson’s cul-de-sac. And the legion only grew once the state police showed up to execute a search warrant.

The cops seized both Peterson’s GMC Denali and the Pontiac Grand Prix he had purchased for Stacy. They grabbed computers, compact discs, iPods and his collection of eleven guns. Cadaver dogs and their handlers poked around Peterson’s property and home. Rumors—repeated to this day despite a lack of evidence to confirm them—swirled in the packed cul-de-sac that the dogs had hit on something in the master bedroom, although that was never found to be true.

For much of this spectacle, Peterson was sequestered next door at the Bychowski’s. Perhaps as a cop-to-former-cop courtesy, he allowed Fuhrman in to speak with him, but managed to stay out of view, at least until he could no longer resist stepping—or catapulting himself—into the media spotlight.

Peterson accomplished this by ambling out the Bychowskis’ back door in the late afternoon and down their driveway. He made sure he attracted attention by masking himself with an American flag bandanna and dark sunglasses, and pulling an NYPD baseball cap low over his eyes.

He stood there in the driveway until a few reporters noticed him and walked over to ask questions. He accepted a compliment for his bandanna but had time for little else. When the camera crews finally caught sight of him and rushed over, Peterson said, “Oh, I got to run away,” and did just that.

Mims, who on November 1 was still in Peterson’s corner, denied that the man behind the mask was his pal Peterson. Few, if any, took Mims seriously, which was a running theme throughout the saga of Stacy’s disappearance. And Mims soon showed himself to be a pretty lousy friend, much less a brother. Once the embattled cop’s most vocal ally, Mims turned on Peterson and sold a story to the
National Enquirer
which included the line, “Mims says [Drew’s son Kristopher] had heard his parents fighting, an argument that police and Mims believe ended in murder.”

Mims would not say how much he was paid for the story. When asked about the friend who betrayed him, Peterson said, “Our hero. He was out to make some money, and he got his thirty seconds of fame, so God love him.”

The sight of Peterson standing in his next-door neighbor’s driveway, resplendent in his red, white and blue bandanna, NYPD cap and glasses, became an enduring visual in the case. Other images also became instantly memorable: Peterson, again in his bandanna mask, on his motorcycle, roaring down his driveway past the press, and earning the
Chicago Sun-Times
headline “Easy Rider”; Peterson, armed with a handheld video camera, filming the camera crews outside his home while they filmed him; the broadcast of Peterson on the
Today
show, blaming his marital problems with the wife nobody could find on “her menstrual cycle.”

“I’m not trying to be funny here,” Peterson said to preface his remarks, all the while clearly trying to be funny, “but Stacy would ask me for a divorce after her sister died on a regular basis. I’m not trying to be funny. And it was based on her menstrual cycle.”

One thing Peterson was consistent about was his effort to be funny. And as he grew increasingly glib, one attorney told me that if the embattled ex-cop had retained him, he would have “fired him” as a client if he did not agree to shut up. Peterson’s first two attorneys, Fred Morelli and Gary Johnson of Aurora, Illinois, might have actually fired him, or maybe he gave them the sack. Either way, the relationship was obviously not working, because while Morelli and Johnson were representing him, Peterson went on the
Today
show and asked for a lawyer to come forward and take his case.

Peterson mentioned to host Matt Lauer—during the same appearance in which he discussed how Stacy’s menstrual cycle took a toll on their marriage—that he was frightened by the prospect of funding his legal defense. “Talking to lawyers Monday night, it could cost as much as a quarter-million dollars to defend one of these cases,” Peterson said. “So, basically, I’m reaching out to attorneys of America for help.

“If anybody would like to take my case and help me out here, please call,” Peterson said. “Let me know what you can do for me. Help me out.”

Sure enough, Peterson did get a call. It came from Chicago attorney Joel Brodsky. And in Brodsky, Peterson may have found legal counsel who enjoyed attention as much as he did—as long as the attention was not on his personal life or questionable professional actions.

Brodsky bristled when it surfaced that the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission suspended his law license for three months for forging a dead man’s signature to get paid. On May 8, 2001, the commission administrator filed a one-count complaint against Brodsky, alleging that he “forged a signature on bank forms in order to withdraw client funds from the bank, falsely endorsed a cashier’s check issued by the bank, failed to deposit the proceeds in a separate identifiable trust account and kept the funds for his own purposes.”

Later, the Illinois Supreme Court agreed with a review board that Brodsky did not commit forgery, because he did not intend to defraud anyone.

Brodsky again got bent out of shape when it came to light that in September of 2002 a SWAT team had responded to his home in the upscale Chicago suburb of Wilmette.

A report of the incident, which was classified as “mental-suicidal subject,” said that Brodsky’s wife, Elizabeth Brodsky, went to the police station about 6 p.m. and claimed her husband was “inside the house armed with a shotgun.”

Elizabeth Brodsky later said she did not think her husband was suicidal and had no intention of conveying that to the police. She said she had merely argued with Brodsky and had gone to the police station in hopes of talking to a counselor. The police asked her if there were any guns in the house, she said, and she told them there were two. She insists she never said her husband was “armed with a shotgun,” and she was very critical of the Wilmette Police Department in general.