The Fourth Wife: Stacy Peterson and the Bathtub Death That Wasn't an Accident

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 26, 2026

Stacy Ann Peterson was nineteen years old, working as a hotel receptionist, when she married Drew Peterson, a Bolingbrook, Illinois police sergeant thirty years her senior, on October 18, 2003. It was his fourth marriage. By the time Stacy disappeared four years later, on October 28, 2007, she had two young children with Drew and had also taken on the two sons from his previous marriage, a household she was, by her own sister's account, actively planning to leave.

Drew told investigators that Stacy left their home on Pheasant Chase Court sometime around ten or eleven that Sunday morning to help paint a house, and that the two of them spoke by phone around nine that evening, during which call, he said, she told him she was leaving him for another man. He reported her missing at four the next morning. Her purple 2002 Pontiac Grand Am turned up later at the parking lot of Clow International Airport, roughly four hundred yards from their home, though no flight records or witnesses ever placed Stacy on a plane or anywhere else consistent with the story Drew offered.

A Family Already Familiar With Death

What made Stacy's disappearance different from countless other missing spouse cases from the outset was the man at its center. Drew Peterson had spent thirty years as a Bolingbrook police officer, and his marital history included a second wife, Vicki Connolly, who later told investigators he had threatened during their marriage that he knew how to kill her and make it look like an accident. His third wife, Kathleen Savio, an accountant with whom he had two sons, was found dead in a dry bathtub in her home on March 1, 2004, her body unclothed, with a gash in her scalp that a coroner's jury, which happened to include a police officer personally acquainted with Drew, ultimately ruled an accidental drowning. Police had been called to the Savio household eighteen times between 2002 and 2004 over domestic disturbances before that ruling was made.

Reopening a Case Nobody Had Questioned

Stacy's disappearance changed how investigators looked at Kathleen Savio's death entirely. On November 16, 2007, less than three weeks after Stacy vanished, authorities exhumed Savio's body for a new forensic examination. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden's findings were markedly different from the original 2004 ruling. He documented extensive bruising and scraping across Savio's back, torso, and face, along with the previously noted gash to her scalp, and concluded she had died following a physical struggle before her body was placed in the bathtub to stage the scene as an accidental drowning. On February 21, 2008, Savio's death was formally reclassified as a homicide, a full four years after it had first been ruled otherwise.

A Blue Barrel and a Frightened Stepbrother

The investigation into Stacy's own disappearance produced its own disturbing, unresolved thread. Drew's stepbrother, Thomas Morphey, told investigators he had helped Drew carry a large plastic container from the house to his SUV in the hours after Stacy went missing, and Morphey later said he had come to believe, with mounting horror, that he might have unknowingly helped move Stacy's body. He attempted suicide two days after making that disclosure, reportedly overwhelmed by the possibility of what he had actually taken part in. Separately, a friend of Drew's named Rick Mims said the two of them had purchased three blue plastic barrels from a cable company back in 2003 and provided photographs of similar containers to police, and neighbors independently reported seeing Drew and another man hauling a fifty five gallon barrel, large enough to hold a person, out of the house not long after Stacy disappeared. Cassandra Cales, Stacy's sister, told investigators she had seen a blue container in Drew's garage just two days before Stacy went missing and pushed for him to be polygraphed specifically about it. Drew's attorney at the time, Joel Brodsky, denied any container had ever gone missing from the property, though Brodsky later made a considerably stranger public statement, telling reporters he knew everything about both of Drew's wives and that Stacy would be found only after Drew himself passed away, a comment he declined to elaborate on further.

A Law Named for the Case

Prosecutors pursuing Drew for Kathleen Savio's murder faced an unusual evidentiary problem, since much of what implicated him in Stacy's disappearance existed only as things Stacy herself had reportedly told friends and family before she vanished, statements that would ordinarily be excluded from a trial as hearsay from an unavailable witness. The Illinois legislature responded by passing what became known informally as Drew's Law, formally codified as 725 ILCS 5/115-10.6, which allowed prosecutors to introduce hearsay statements from a witness if they could show that witness had been killed specifically to prevent them from testifying, and that the statements themselves carried sufficient reliability. When Drew's trial for Savio's murder began in July 2012, a judge allowed eight separate hearsay statements attributed to Stacy into evidence under that new law, statements that jurors later said were the most compelling evidence presented at trial, more persuasive even than the forensic case built around Savio's actual death. On September 6, 2012, Drew was found guilty of first degree murder in Kathleen Savio's death. He was sentenced on February 21, 2013, to thirty eight years in prison. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld his conviction on appeal in September 2017.

Drew's legal troubles did not end there. In February 2015, he was separately charged with attempting to solicit the murder of Will County State's Attorney James Glasgow, the prosecutor who had built the case against him, an alleged plot uncovered when a fellow inmate agreed to wear a recording device. He was convicted of solicitation of murder in May 2016 and received an additional forty years that July, bringing his total sentence to seventy eight years. He was eventually transferred out of Illinois custody entirely, moving first to a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, and later to Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, where he remains incarcerated under an inmate number rather than any address connected to the Bolingbrook home Stacy once shared with him.

A Sister Who Refuses to Stop Looking

Despite everything uncovered in Savio's case, Drew has never been charged in connection with Stacy's disappearance, and he has consistently maintained that she left voluntarily with another man, a version of events his own sister in law, Norma Peterson, has publicly rejected, insisting the family knew Stacy well enough to know she would never have abandoned her children. Cassandra Cales, Stacy's sister, has spent years pushing for renewed search efforts, and in 2024 she announced that a privately funded dive team using sonar equipment had located what appeared to be a human skull, spine, and lower jawbone roughly twenty five feet below the surface of a canal in Lockport, Illinois, not far from where the couple once lived. Cales told reporters she was ninety nine point nine percent certain the remains belonged to her sister, though she also acknowledged that if she was wrong, the remains still belonged to somebody else's missing loved one who deserved to be brought home either way. She described a frustrating response from official channels, saying state police and the state's attorney's office did not act on her tip and that it took the FBI three months to send anyone out to investigate. Officials who did examine the site reported finding nothing conclusive, and the remains Cales identified through sonar have never been physically recovered or tested.

Still Missing, Still Unanswered

More than eighteen years after Stacy Peterson vanished from a quiet cul de sac in Bolingbrook, no body has ever been recovered, no charges have ever been filed in her disappearance specifically, and the man investigators have long considered their only real suspect is already serving what amounts to a life sentence for a different wife's murder entirely. What remains, alongside her missing children who grew up without her, is a canal that may or may not hold what is left of her, a sister still raising money and pressure to find out for certain, and a legal record built almost entirely around proving what happened to someone else, in the hope that it might eventually explain what happened to Stacy too.

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