Fatal Vows (22 page)

While the two towns share a border, the communities are quite different. Naperville, founded in 1831, boasts higher property values, a posh downtown, thriving nightlife, and pride in its traditions and history. Its downtown Riverwalk is a regional attraction. There was also the 2006
Money
magazine article, listing the town as the second-best place to live in the United States, and other magazines and organizations have bestowed similar recognition. Bolingbrook, meanwhile, was incorporated in 1965 and has, well, a very nice shopping mall.

McGury said he knew about these differences from the beginning but still was not prepared for what awaited him in his new position.

About six months into his tenure, the superintendent of the town’s public works department, along with his predecessor, were implicated in a theft scandal. Federal investigators were brought in to probe the matter, and in January of 2007, the two men, Donald Ralls and John Schwab, pleaded guilty to tax fraud. Since then, the federal investigation seems to have branched out.

“It’s no secret,” McGury said. “The mayor [Roger Claar] would tell you this if he sat here with you, is that the feds are looking at him.”

While the theft scandal was a big enough deal to attract news coverage in nearby Chicago, it was nothing compared to the media onslaught that was unleashed after October 29, 2007, when the fourth wife of the department’s overnight sergeant was reported missing.

A missing wife would have been bad enough without knowing what had befallen the previous Mrs. Peterson. As it happened, McGury did not know—he was hired more than a year after the first investigation into Kathleen Savio’s death—until he was confronted by Stacy’s sister and father a day after the young woman was last seen.

“I met with Cassandra [Cales] and her father,” McGury said. He had called the meeting himself and endured, he said, about “twenty minutes of them really, really being angry with me personally for allowing this to happen.” Then Cassandra brought up something that McGury had never heard, causing him to cast a questioning glance over to his deputy chief, who was also at the meeting.

“She says, ‘This is no different than with his third wife.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, with his third wife?’” McGury said. He had heard she passed away, but he never had any idea of the circumstances and controversy surrounding her death.

“And [Cassandra] said she was obviously murdered. I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘Oh, yeah, act like you don’t know.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about other than I know she is deceased. And that’s how he married Stacy.’

“So then it was like an hour long getting me caught up to speed,” McGury said. “After they left, I looked at my deputy chief and said, ‘This would’ve been kind of important for me to know.’ And he goes, ‘You’ve got to understand something: A) We weren’t involved in this. B) It was ruled a drowning. And we to this day never read any reports. We’ve never seen anything because state police did all of it.’”

That did not stop the public from slamming the entire Bolingbrook Police Department in general, and its chief in particular, even though he wasn’t working in Bolingbrook during the first investigation of Savio’s death. Of his twenty-seven years in law enforcement, McGury said, the first four to six weeks after Stacy Peterson disappeared were “probably the toughest.” He was bombarded with hate mail and death threats.

The threats and criticism have tapered off, but whenever a Drew Peterson program airs on television, McGury sees an uptick in nasty messages. “There’s a lunatic fringe out there that, you know, that’s going to come out of the woodwork. My major concern was the department, trying to keep the department together, keep it on track.”

While he’d doubtlessly like to keep the lunatic fringe at bay, McGury has invited federal investigators to delve into his department’s handling of Peterson and Savio’s domestic feud, as well as just about everything else from that time to the present day. He’s turned all files over to the FBI and asked the agency to comb through everything, and the FBI has obliged.

McGury said he knows some of his staff members didn’t welcome a federal investigation, but he feels it’s necessary for the future well-being of the department.

“I want to know from a department standpoint what we did either on purpose or by mistake,” McGury said. “One way or another I’ve got to get this department turned around. I have to. As long as I’m the chief, I have to do that.” If the feds turn up proof of wrongdoing, he has vowed to hold people accountable

“If we screwed something up with the Peterson marriage to Stacy, I got to know that.”

Besides opening his door to the feds, McGury has been up front with the public and press as well; shortly after Stacy went missing, for example, he appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News show. Other police agencies have not been as forthcoming.

The state police, McGury said, “just are awful” at handling the media. He said they tried to forbid him from appearing on Van Susteren’s show. “And I said, ‘Last time I checked, I’m the chief of police. So you’re not going to forbid me from doing anything.’”

Cooperative as he was with the press, by the end of November 2007, the police chief had had enough of the national media caravan camped out in his town, as well as the snide allusions to small-town police corruption and incompetence, and the cloud of scandal hovering over the department he had headed for a little more than two years. He also was angered by the way the veteran sergeant comported himself while in the public eye, like the time Peterson popped up in front of television cameras with the American flag bandanna tied over his face, dark sunglasses covering his eyes, and an NYPD hat situated low on his forehead.

“It’s an embarrassment,” McGury said of Peterson’s conduct. Others in the department shared his opinion, he added.

“They’re cautious, though, and they should be, in that he’s only been named a suspect,” the chief said. “He hasn’t been charged with anything. So we can’t leap to the judgment that he’s responsible for the deaths of his third and now-missing fourth wife.”

With all his attendant drama, Peterson may have worn on his colleagues by the end of his career, but many have said that in his heyday, he was a talented undercover narcotics officer. Peterson will tell you that himself.

“I excelled at that,” he said.

While Peterson obviously enjoyed discussing his exploits as an undercover drug agent, a few months after the state police announced that he was their only suspect in the “potential homicide” of his missing wife, Peterson clammed up. He had retained the services of Glenn Selig, who, Peterson said, advised him to keep his mouth shut when asked about entertaining tales from his past. After all, there was money at stake.

“If the networks are paying for it, I can’t give it away,” was how Peterson put it.

Before the vow of silence, though, he’d shared a few stories with me about his undercover work on a narcotics squad he clearly loved being a part of. Oddly enough, it was during this time that Peterson found himself in the most precarious jam of his career—at least until Stacy disappeared.

Peterson took that particular hit in 1985, while working under a different chief, William Charnisky. At the time, Charnisky had loaned Peterson out to the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad, a drug enforcement task force based on the outskirts of nearby Joliet.

Agents in the unit were drawn from various law enforcement entitites, including the Illinois State Police, with officers assigned to the squad generally serving three years. Peterson logged five and a half years in two separate tours of duty. Peterson speaks fondly of one of his supervisors from the narcotics squad, Mike Kraft, another officer from Bolingbrook who eventually rose to the level of assistant chief of that department. Peterson was less impressed with another supervisor, Ronald Janota, who came from the ranks of the Illinois State Police to head up the squad.

“I have nothing good to say about Ron Janota, other than I feel he was truly an incompetent leader,” Peterson said of the state police lieutenant colonel after both had retired from their careers in law enforcement. He eventually sued Janota and others whom he charged with harassment and trying to discredit him.

According to court documents, Peterson’s problems in the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad started when he revealed to his supervisors that he had embarked on an unsanctioned investigation to nail Anthony “Bindy” Rock, a high-profile criminal in Joliet in the 1970s and 1980s who shared with Peterson a knack for slipping out of serious trouble, perhaps most notoriously avoiding a lengthy prison stay after his conviction in a cop-killing case. It just so happened that at the time Peterson went off on his solo pursuit of Rock, the state police had their own case going against the man, and Peterson knew it. He disclosed his after-hours investigation only after it ultimately failed.

Peterson has his own take on the matter, of course. The way he tells it, he was the victim of a petty prosecutor, Ed Petka, who was jealous of his success in undercover narcotics endeavors.

Rock had been convicted of murder, burglary and criminal damage to property in connection with a 1970 robbery of a wine-and-liquor warehouse that resulted in the slaying of Joliet Police Officer William Loscheider, one of seventeen cops participating in surveillance of the building. Loscheider was actually shot by another officer, who mistook him for one of the fleeing burglars, but Rock was convicted of murder. After a series of appeals, the state Supreme Court upheld the original conviction, but a judge gave Rock a sentence that amounted to a little more than time served. He was concurrently serving time for other convictions, so he stayed in prison another couple of years, but in all, considering the seriousness of a murder conviction in a cop-killing case, he ended up spending very little time behind bars.

“Nobody could get him,” Peterson said. “The state couldn’t get him. I got him.”

Peterson said he nailed Rock for possession of ten thousand hits of amphetamines in November 1980. While the case ended up with a conviction, Rock beat it on appeal. But Peterson, saying he was determined to collar Rock, tried a second time in 1985.

The “investigative report” Peterson turned in on his dealings with Rock from April 28, 1985, to May 3, 1985, starts with Peterson making plans with Jerry O’Neill, the brother of his second wife, for the purpose of “purchasing cocaine from Anthony Rock.”

Peterson said he hoped to lure Rock into selling him cocaine by convincing him he was a “dirty cop.” In his report, Peterson said he told Rock he was “tired of watching everyone else get rich and that [he] now had an entire system set up to ‘move cocaine’” and “if anybody could help him, it would be Bindy.”

The whole “dirty cop” ruse, Peterson later explained to me, was why he took his ex-brother-in-law along to set Rock up. O’Neill—with whom Peterson remained close even after divorcing O’Neill’s sister—was described in Peterson’s report as a member in good standing of the Hell’s Henchmen motorcycle gang. Peterson told me he brought O’Neill with him in hopes of appearing more genuinely criminal. (Their adversarial occupations notwithstanding, Peterson and O’Neill’s friendship ended only with O’Neill’s getting his face shot off in Cook County, Illinois. The man or men who gunned him down have never been brought to justice.)

A local police officer who worked in an undercover narcotics unit said enlisting one’s civilian brother-in-law for assistance in a solo drug operation is highly unusual. Nonetheless, Peterson managed to set up a meeting with Rock. During this meeting, they felt each other out, and at one point played a “what if” game, each speculating on different ways one could set the other up.

One way, Rock suggested, was if the state’s attorney, Petka, was granting Peterson immunity while he was behaving like a “dirty cop.” Rock then asked, “Why does Petka want me so bad?” Peterson stroked Rock’s ego, telling him it was because Rock was “the ultimate in criminals.”

Peterson said he proposed a business arrangement with Rock in which he would buy cocaine from him in exchange for twenty percent of the front and ten percent of what was sold afterward. In his report, Peterson said he agreed but told Rock he would look for a better connection elsewhere once he was started.

Rock has seen Peterson’s report and told me it was dead-on accurate, “just opposite” in terms of the business arrangement. Rock told me Peterson approached him with a plan in which Peterson would supply Rock with cocaine ripped off from his drug raids with the narcotics squad, expecting Rock to move it and surrender a percentage of his net sales. Rock told me he was not interested in Peterson’s scheme. In other words, according to Rock, there was no “dirty cop” pretense at all. Peterson genuinely wanted to sell drugs through Rock; he truly was a dirty cop.

“Yeah, okay,” Peterson said when told about Rock’s take on his undercover operation. “That never happened, so he’s got to put his spin on it.”

When Chief Charnisky learned of Peterson’s ploy, he went after Peterson’s job.

Bolingbrook’s board of fire and police commissioners found Peterson guilty of disobedience, conducting a self-assigned investigation, failure to report a bribe immediately, and official misconduct. The board fired him. Two months earlier, a grand jury had indicted Peterson on charges of official misconduct and failure to report a bribe.

Peterson blamed Petka for this, saying, “He shotgunned me.”

But then the criminal charges were dropped. The special prosecutor appointed to try the case, Raymond Bolden, who later became a judge, said at the time that the charges were not provable. And in March of 1986 Peterson got his job back. Judge Edwin Grabiec ruled that the fire and police commission did not have sufficient evidence to find him guilty of the charges. Not even the chief of police could shake Peterson off the force.