Fatal Vows (9 page)

At the inquest Doman also told of assets Peterson stood to gain if his ex-wife happened not to be alive by the time they settled the financial issues of their divorce. Peterson, she said, had taken out a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy.

“She also had a one-million-dollar policy that I’m not sure if he knew that she had changed,” Doman said. “He was the original beneficiary. She did change it to—down the road—to put her boys, plus the equity in her house, which was worth a little over three hundred thousand [the net proceeds were actually $287,154]. It was paid for. But he was trying to claim the whole house on joint tenancy, which should have been hers. It was pretty much a deal that was cut between them. Yeah, so there was a lot of financial gain.”

While on the stand, Hardy said he knew nothing of any large insurance policies from which Peterson might have been able to profit. He didn’t mention any probe of Peterson’s financial gain from his ex-wife’s death. But Anna Marie Doman asserted that financial gain was at the forefront of Peterson’s mind.

“He wants the whole house, wanted to be named the executor of the assets, which means he would have controlled the one-million-dollar policy, and plus he also took out a separate policy himself on her, the one hundred thousand,” she said.

As it happened, Peterson did not become the executor of his ex-wife’s will
.
Instead, his uncle, James B. Carroll, was named the executor of the two-page handwritten will that coincidentally popped up only about two weeks after Savio died. It was produced by Peterson himself.

The will, which was written on lined paper and dated March 2, 1997, had Peterson and Savio leaving everything to each other, except “in the unlikely event we should die on or about the same time,” in which case their two sons, and Savio’s stepsons, would get to split it all up. As Peterson was still very much alive when Savio was found drowned in an empty tub, he stood to get everything.

And Carroll did right by his nephew, allegedly awarding him nearly complete control of Savio’s assets even though the two were divorced, at least halfway, and Peterson was married to another woman with whom he had a child.

Of the will, Peterson said, “We just tucked it away, and I found it after she died,” according to a
Chicago Sun-Times
article dated January 25, 2008. “There’s nothing sinister and out of line about it. Everything was done proper.” Interestingly, Savio’s divorce attorney, Harry Smith, said Savio had told him that she didn’t have a will. And the court-appointed administrator for Savio’s estate made a statement claiming that “the actions of the Executor were not in the best interest of the Estate or its beneficiaries,” calling the will itself “purported.” Nonetheless, in 2005, a Will County judge accepted the will as valid, because two of Drew Peterson’s friends testified that they had witnessed both Peterson and Savio sign the document.

After Stacy Peterson disappeared, three and a half years later, the state police would take a close look at the financial dealings of Drew Peterson and Kathleen Savio, but at the 2004 inquest, the topic did not appear to interest them much.

The inquest had other business to cover, anyway. O’Neil briefed jurors on Savio’s autopsy, which had been performed by forensic pathologist Bryan Mitchell.

Savio’s remains were delivered to Mitchell in a body bag. Save for a yellow metal necklace, she was naked, and her hands were bagged. In his physician’s report to O’Neil, Mitchell wrote, “The decedent appears to be of normal development, an adequately nourished and hydrated adult, and white female weighing 154 pounds and measuring 65 in. in length.

“The hair is long, brown, and straight,” he wrote. “The hair is soaked with blood. The eyes are closed.… There is a foam cone emanating from the nostrils… The lips are purple…. The tongue is partially clenched between the teeth. Each earlobe is pierced once…. The fingernails are short and clean. There is wrinkling of the fingers and palmar surface of the left hand.”

Mitchell cut into Savio’s body, making a Y-shaped incision on her torso. His autopsy revealed that she had suffered from no tumors, significant trauma, infection or congenital anomalies. There was moderate pulmonary edema, or buildup of fluid in Savio’s lungs, and water in the ethmoid sinuses. In his report, Mitchell ascribed the immediate cause of Savio’s death to drowning. In the space on the report to list “other significant conditions contributing to death but not related to the terminal conditions,” Mitchell wrote nothing.

Toxicological testing showed Savio had been living clean, free of alcohol and drugs, both street and prescription, when she died.

Mitchell did find a one-inch blunt laceration to Savio’s scalp, a red abrasion to her left buttocks, three bruises on her lower abdomen, a bruise on the back of her thigh, purple bruises on both shins, two abrasions to the right wrist, an abrasion to her right index finger and a red abrasion on her left elbow. Other than the head wound, O’Neil told the jury that the injuries had been on her body for some time.

“There are six—or there are seven other bruises noted to the decedent, all of which are old. There are no new bruises noted to the decedent,” O’Neil testified. He also said, strengthening Hardy’s assertion, “The laceration could have been related to a fall.”

The jury took it all in—Hardy’s testimony, the family’s version of events, and the contents of Mitchell’s autopsy report. They retired, deliberated and returned to announce that they found Kathleen Savio’s death to be, indeed, an accidental drowning.

The verdict stunned Savio’s family. “We were all standing in the hallway like, ‘Holy shit. Is that it?’” said Anna Marie Doman.

Furious that her family had been denied justice, Doman told me that after the inquest she tried to get the state police to take another look at her sister’s death, but her pleas went unanswered.

“I was screaming my head off,” she said. “I was calling everyone I could. I had a suitcase full of stuff. They [the state police] said, ‘The coroner said it’s closed. It’s an accident.’ I asked [the coroner’s staff] more than once, ‘Is there further testing you can do?’ I’m thinking exotic drugs. Is there strange poison?”

But the answer from the state police was clear: the jury’s decision essentially ended their interest in the matter. As State Police Master Sergeant Thad Lillis said at the time, the jury’s conclusion would likely close the investigation of Kathleen Savio’s death.

And so it was for three and a half years, until Stacy Peterson vanished. Only then, after Stacy had disappeared, did anyone pay attention to the sordid tales of Kathleen Savio’s marriage to Peterson and the appeals of Savio’s sisters that her death had been no accident.

The same day the state police declared that Stacy Peterson’s death was a “potential homicide” and named her husband Drew Peterson as their only suspect, the Will County prosecutor announced he had secured a court order to exhume Savio’s body from Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, for additional postmortem testing.

On November 9, 2007, State’s Attorney James Glasgow’s petition to disinter Savio’s body from the suburban Chicago cemetery was granted. In his petition, Glasgow said Savio’s death scene appeared “consistent with the ‘staging’ of an accident to conceal a homicide.”

Four days later heavy equipment ripped open Savio’s resting place and her leaky—or, as one police source put it, “cheap”—casket was pulled from the ground.

Savio’s body was taken back to Will County for another autopsy, this one performed by forensic pathologist Larry Blum. Months passed before Blum’s findings were returned to the county and his determination released to the public. During that time, another forensic pathologist, not from Will County and more accustomed to the bright lights and big stage, did an autopsy of his own. The autopsy, performed with the approval of Savio’s family, was paid for with private funds, but the disclosure of the findings was quite public.

By November 16, just three days after Savio’s body was taken out of the ground, Dr. Michael Baden—former chief medical examiner of New York City, author, and frequent guest on television-news shows—had reached his conclusion about how Savio died. When, after several commercial-break teasers, he announced his verdict at the end of Greta Van Susteren’s program on the Fox News network that night, Susteren treated the event as though it were the Oscars and Baden held an envelope with one of the winner’s names inside.

“It’s my opinion, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, it’s a homicide, and that’s what I would put down on the death certificate,” Baden proclaimed.

While Baden’s pronouncement carried no legal weight, it certainly packed a dramatic punch, given the circumstances leading to Savio’s exhumation. And Baden was not done talking. Detectives and doctors, Baden said, should have realized there was something rotten afoot in 2004.

“Even initially, there was enough information that it was a homicide because of the fact that she was an adult, healthy, hadn’t been drinking or anything, found dead in a bathtub. It does not happen accidentally,” he said. “No history of seizures or illness. And in addition, there were indications then of multiple blunt-force traumas, of being beaten up. And one of the things we were able to look at today is those bruises [that] were still there, and we could see with the naked eye that they were fresh.”

Baden’s assertions of fresh bruises and an obvious homicide were a direct contradiction of the inquest testimony of both Special Agent Hardy and Coroner O’Neil. O’Neil, an elected official who is not a forensic pathologist, could say he was merely repeating what was related to him by Bryan Mitchell, the doctor who performed the initial autopsy. The state police, on the other hand, had some explaining to do.

Digging up Savio’s body not only put fresh pressure on the state police—and, certainly, on Peterson—but unleashed a flurry of activity from Savio’s family to right what they saw as long-ignored wrongs.

Anna Marie Doman and her brother, Henry Martin Savio, started to put a wrongful-death civil lawsuit in motion, going so far as to hire New York City attorney John Quinlan Kelly, who’s no stranger to high-profile cases. He represented the parents of Natalee Holloway, the young woman from Alabama who vanished during a high school graduation trip to Aruba in May of 2005. Like Baden, Kelly frequently appeared on Fox News programs and, in fact, one night in February, 2007, was a guest on Greta Van Susteren’s show that featured both the Natalee Holloway and Savio cases.

Kelly also represented the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson in a multi-million-dollar civil suit against disgraced football legend O.J. Simpson.

Like Nicole Brown Simpson’s family before her, Doman suggested her family might pursue the wrongful-death suit against Peterson if the case broke that way.

“If it flies from there, that’s the direction we’ll go,” Doman said.

Doman and Henry Martin Savio also felt emboldened enough to try to wrest control of Savio’s estate from the suddenly embattled Peterson.

In February 2008, the brother and sister filed court papers to have Carroll removed as executor and replaced by themselves. They alleged that allowing Peterson’s uncle to be the executor was a conflict of interest, and leveled accusations that he “wasted and mismanaged the estate.”

That opinion was echoed by Richard J. Kavanaugh, who was a court-appointed administrator for Savio’s estate. In January 2008, the
Chicago Sun-Times
reported, Kavanaugh said he was concerned about the way the handwritten will “just popped up” after Savio died. “It gives you the sense that it’s something that’s concocted.”

According to the
Sun-Times
, Kavanaugh had become involved in the case because no Savio family member showed up to represent the estate in court at the time that the will was being handled, a point Peterson, in the same article, made hay of: “If they didn’t like it, well, they should have done something. They didn’t.”

Now, apparently, there were plenty of Savio family members who wanted to be put in charge of the dead woman’s estate, not only Doman and her brother but Savio’s thrice-married father, Henry J. Savio, and his twenty-three-year-old son, who filed suit to be executors themselves.

Doman and Henry Martin Savio, however, asserted that they should be executors rather than their father, Henry J. Savio, whom they claimed was “unfit to serve due to hostility in that he has had no relationship with any of the children while they were growing up…failed to support them during their minority and first met his grandchildren at the funeral of Kathleen and has no relationship with them.”

According to the petition to reopen Kathleen Savio’s estate, Henry Martin Savio and Anna Marie Doman have, in addition to full sister Susan Savio, three half siblings from their father’s two subsequent marriages, and another half sibling from their mother’s remarriage. Despite the existence of Savio’s full sister and four half siblings, Henry Martin Savio and Anna Marie Doman maintained that “they had the closest relationship with [Kathleen Savio] prior to her death and have been instrumental to pursuing the investigation into her death.” Doman did live the closest to her sister, first in Bolingbrook—at one time living on the same street that Peterson’s stepbrother, Tom Morphey, would move onto—and then in nearby Romeoville with her two children, Charlie and Melissa Doman, and Melissa’s children. Anna Marie Doman also said she was vocal in her futile attempts to get police and prosecutors to take a hard, serious look at her sister’s death.

She and her brother, she insisted, were not angling to strike it rich by seizing control of their sister’s estate. In fact, she said, they would probably lose money when legal fees were factored in. They were doing it, she said, to ensure Kathleen’s two sons, Kristopher and Thomas Peterson, got what they deserved of their deceased mother’s worldly possessions.