Fatal Vows (26 page)

The many pundits, psychologists, and online chat rooms indulging in speculation about Peterson’s pathology didn’t deter Peterson from turning to a member of the mental health profession to rally to his defense.

“Renowned Psychotherapist Defends Care of Drew Peterson’s Children” trumpeted the press release issued by Peterson’s publicist, Glenn Selig. Selig’s company Web site, www.ThePublicityAgency.com, lists Peterson as a client, along with his attorney, Brodsky; “CarolAnn, Fitness Expert”; and Harper Realty of Tampa.

The “renown” of this psychotherapist, Daniel Budenz, is arguable to say the least. Budenz, a certified alcohol and drug counselor, bought a bar at one point, although he was denied the liquor license. His daughter eventually took over the property after her application for the license was approved. Selig’s press release quoted Budenz at length, while noting that the psychotherapist “was friends with Peterson twenty years ago and recently reconnected.”

Budenz said he got to know Peterson when they were both teenagers working at a Burger King. The pair shared interests, he said, including karate and flying.

“He had this very playful character, very sharp,” Budenz said.

The two lost touch as they aged, although Budenz said he did attend the wedding of Peterson and his first wife, Carol Hamilton. He and Peterson hooked up again after Budenz saw his old pal on television discussing Stacy’s disappearance.

“I figured I’d give him a call and tease him, that you’re having problems with your relationship,” Budenz said. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Budenz offered to lend a hand. He said he was most concerned about Peterson’s kids.

“The Peterson children are caught in the middle of dueling family members and a huge media frenzy,” Dr. Dan said in the press release. “The family has had to wake up at four in the morning to the roar of media generators, climb over the back fence to attend school and then hear the accusations against their dad on TV.”

Despite dealing with all this adversity, Peterson was doing a fine job with the children, the statement said.

“From what I see, Drew and the outside help he’s hired to help care for the children are doing a great job,” Budenz’s release claims.

Budenz got a chance to observe the children up close, as Peterson and his brood stayed with him at his home during their trip to Disney World during the winter break.

“We lived together with the kids,” he said. “They’re fine. They’re adjusted.

“Stacy and Drew have done a very fine job,” Budenz said, adding, “I’m not saying everything’s perfect. No family is ever perfect.”

“Drew is a very attentive father,” Budenz’s press release read. “The two oldest sons clearly understand what is happening—one is a police officer. The two teens are equally aware and are extremely helpful, wonderful, motivated young men who stand by their dad and help Drew with the youngest children.”

He pointed out that Thomas, the older of the two sons Peterson fathered with Savio, who was fourteen when Stacy disappeared, was “number one in a class of more than twelve hundred, academically.”

Budenz’s ringing endorsement of Peterson’s parenting skills makes no mention of the potential impact on the children of growing up without their mothers, or of their father’s regular bragging of meeting women in bars or of his gamely agreeing to participate in the aborted radio dating contest. Perhaps his two youngest, Anthony, nearly five when Dr. Dan made his way into Drew’s drama, and Lacy, three, could be sheltered from their father’s cavalier attitude toward the fate of his last two wives. However, for the sake of Peterson’s two school-aged sons, Kristopher and Thomas, one might wish their father would exercise a little restraint.

Nearly four months after Stacy vanished, Peterson was still telling Anthony and Lacy that their mother was on a “vacation.” One had to wonder how long he was going to, or would be able to, keep up this story. But, at least according to Budenz, Peterson was doing something right.

“The three- and four-year-olds are physically and emotionally vibrant and are well parented by Drew and the older family members,” he is quoted as saying in the press release. “These children are in great hands.”

And lying to the youngest two was “extremely appropriate,” as well.

“Drew told them, ‘Mom is on vacation,’” he said. “They don’t question it.

“When the time is right to introduce more information, we certainly will.”

Bonelli sharply disagrees with this approach.

“Drew Peterson is not a child psychologist,” he said and questioned the effect that lying to the children would have in the long run. Eventually, they’re going to start asking when Mom’s vacation will end and when she’ll come home.

“What is he going to tell them? She’s dead? She ran away? If you’re a normal person, you tell them when you know they’re not coming home. If you’re Drew Peterson, you tell them anything that makes Drew Peterson feel good.”

Because, Bonelli said, everything Peterson does is about Peterson.

“If Drew Peterson has an addiction, it is an addiction to power and attention,” he said. “These things are driving him. And he feels he has power because he’s really, in a sense, manipulating the whole country. I’d love to see [
America’s Most Wanted
host] John Walsh get a hold of him. Face to face, wouldn’t you love to see John Walsh and Drew Peterson go at it?”

As far as Savio’s sons, Kristopher and Thomas, Bonelli believes they may not be handling matters as well as Peterson and his posse are letting on.

“I have to think that they’re [Peterson’s sons are] devastated,” he said. “But they may have just drawn within themselves. But I can’t tell you because I’ve never seen them. I would speculate that there’s a good possibility that they’ve just become so withdrawn. I cannot contemplate them having a normal teenage life.”

While Bonelli has not had the opportunity to observe the two teenage boys, he says he knows the correct way for their father to handle their situation.

“Whether [Stacy] ran away or is dead, if you’re going to go through any kind of grief process, you’ve got to go through a lot of anger. Anger is necessary to get through any kind of grieving process.

“Anger towards her, anger towards him, anger towards his sister, anger towards school. Just anger, anger, lots of anger,” Bonelli said. “Doing grief counseling is enabling the person to express the anger and then deal with it, because that’s such a necessary process.”

Budenz fired a warning shot at Bonelli and others who would dare make a psychological evaluation of his old friend without spending a significant amount of time with him, much less even meeting him.

“I have one word for that, especially for the professionals: malpractice,” he said.

Besides, Budenz said, just watching Drew from the outside, observing his playful and often condescending facade, is no measure of the man he once worked with at Burger King.

“Drew has been bombarded for four months now,” he said. “He will play games and play tricks on the interviewer. That’s his personality.

“And that’s what the media is seeing,” Budenz said of what he termed Peterson’s outsized “Chicago style” personality. “I don’t think the media is seeing the kids.”

Budenz also cautioned the public to keep an open mind about Peterson.

“Americans like to lock people up,” he said. “We have people who are retarded, who have severe alcohol and drug problems, and we lock them up. We don’t treat them.”

Budenz also pointed out, “There are a lot of people who are locked up who didn’t really do it.”

Of course, there are also a lot of people who aren’t locked up who really did do it.

“You know, I can’t sit here and tell you what happened to her,” Bonelli said in our interview. “I don’t think anyone can. My gut feeling is that she’s dead. He’s not waiting for her to come home. He’s just waiting for this whole thing to blow over. And start romancing number five.”

W
hen the volunteer searchers resumed their efforts the last weekend of March 2008, it seemed like Stacy Peterson had been missing not five months but forever. Since November 9, 2007, when state police announced that her husband was a suspect in her disappearance and the state’s attorney announced that he was ordering Kathleen Savio’s body to be exhumed for another look, no one from the criminal justice system had said much of substance regarding either case.

About the only development that broke this dry spell was the announcement in February 2008 that, according to forensic pathologist Larry Blum, Savio’s death had been a homicide, not an accident.

How Blum determined this was a mystery, because Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow refused to release the report of the do-over autopsy. For all the public knew, when Blum examined Savio’s exhumed corpse he found a knife stuck in her back that the state police and first forensic pathologist failed to notice in 2004. Realistically, though, little if anything is likely to have changed regarding the circumstances surrounding her death. The thing that did change, the reason that Savio’s death was reexamined in the first place, was that Drew Peterson’s next wife vanished.

One might think that Glasgow’s limited release of Blum’s findings, on top of Peterson being the only suspect in Stacy’s disappearance, was a damning development for her husband. Peterson’s frequent and sometimes cocky media appearances hadn’t helped to dampen the public outcry that he obviously had something to do with the death of one wife and probable death of another. The months dragged on and yet he remained a free man, fueling much speculation about why this was. Were the boys in blue protecting one of their own? Were the state police incompetent? Or did Peterson, as a savvy ex-cop, know how to get away with murder?

One attorney who has worked both sides of the street in criminal law—as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney—had a different, less sensational take: Mainly, the case against Peterson was a tough one to try.

“The biggest problem with the fourth wife is they simply don’t have a body,” said Chuck Bretz, one of the premier criminal defense attorneys in Will County. His courtroom experience is not limited to defending the accused; he was a Will County assistant state’s attorney from 1982 to 1986 and the first assistant state’s attorney—under Glasgow—from 1992 to 1994.

Without a body, Bretz said, there is no scientific evidence to work with, no proof anyone was in fact killed.

“There’s a lot of conjecture,” he said. “There’s marital problems. She’s getting ready to leave. ‘If anything happens, look at my husband.’ As far as she’s concerned, although it’s possible to prosecute a case without a body, certainly it’s the exception and not the rule.”

Bretz himself, however, was involved with such an exception. While a prosecutor, he brought a murder charge in 1993 against Gilbert Bernal in connection with the December 1988 disappearance of his wife, Joan.

There was no body, but Bretz did have an eyewitness who would testify to observing Bernal battering his wife and inflicting what could have been fatal injuries.

“There was no other physical evidence forthcoming,” Bretz said. “From the [witness’] description, it was apparent that there were no other witnesses.” Joan Bernal also supposedly told a relative her husband threatened that he could kill her, stuff her in a barrel and hide her where she would not be found. And Gilbert Bernal reportedly bought two barrels shortly before the disappearance; afterward, only one barrel was still in his garage. Unfortunately, neither the second barrel nor Joan Bernal was ever found, and almost a year later, soon after Bretz resigned from his post in the state’s attorney’s office, the charges against Bernal were dropped.

Another high-profile murder case without a body resulted in the 1996 conviction of Thomas Capano, a rich, well-known Delaware lawyer who was charged with killing his mistress, Anne Marie Fahey, the appointments secretary for Governor Thomas R. Carper. Her political connections likely ensured that her case, despite lacking a body, wouldn’t be brushed under the rug.

Capano’s own brother, Gerard Capano, testified on behalf of the prosecution that he and Capano took a boat off the coast of New Jersey and dumped a woman’s body into the water. Thomas Capano was condemned to death, but seven years later the Delaware Supreme Court sent the case back for resentencing. The prosecution did not go after the death penalty the second time, and Capano is serving a life sentence.

But that was Delaware. In Illinois, said Peterson’s attorney, Joel Brodsky, the laws make it very tough to prove a murder when no one can say for certain the victim is actually dead. Brodsky said his research shows prosecutors last succeeded in such a venture more than a hundred and fifty years ago, although this research seems to have missed the slaying of Stephanie Lyng and the murder conviction of her husband, Edward Lyng, seventeen years later. Nonetheless, Brodsky did not plan to represent the first man in a century and a half—that he knew of—to go down that way.