By Stacy St. Clair, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — If Stacy Peterson hadn’t vanished, the past few years would have turned out much differently for her husband.
It was her suspicious disappearance that prompted authorities to restart a death investigation into his third wife’s drowning. Without her disappearance, there’s no reason to believe Drew Peterson ever would have been charged with killing his third wife, Kathleen Savio, or spent the past three years in jail.
Yet, Stacy Peterson — whose case remains open — will play a very minor role in the upcoming trial.
Opening statements are set to begin Tuesday, and Will County, Ill., Judge Edward Burmila has severely limited the amount of information jurors will hear about her. The jury, for example, will not be told the details of her October 2007 disappearance or her rocky marriage to Peterson, a retired Bolingbrook police sergeant 30 years her senior.
In one of his first decisions after inheriting the case this spring, Burmila ruled that witnesses will not be allowed to mention that authorities believe Peterson killed Stacy, then disposed of her body.
“There will be no mention … that she is dead, presumed dead, killed by the defendant or anything of the kind,” the judge said.
Peterson, 58, is charged with killing Savio, 40, who was found dead in a dry bathtub on March 1, 2004. Officials initially ruled the death an accidental drowning, but after Stacy Peterson disappeared, authorities reopened Savio’s case and determined she had been killed.
Peterson has not been charged in Stacy’s disappearance. He denies wrongdoing in both cases.
Just 23 when she vanished, Stacy had the kind of back story — and face — that drove round-the-clock media coverage. She was a pretty blonde, young mother and the wife of a much older police sergeant.
On television and in newspapers, Drew Peterson fueled the frenzy as he smirked about her whereabouts, complained about how her menstrual cycle made her moody and publicly taunted the authorities investigating her disappearance.
When prosecutors charged Peterson with Savio’s murder in May 2009, Stacy continued to have a prominent role in the case. After a 2010 hearing on the admissibility of several hearsay statements attributed to Savio and Stacy, a judge ruled that the preponderance of evidence showed Peterson killed both women, according to documents obtained by the Tribune.
The preponderance standard is much lower than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt threshold imposed at trial. The jury will not be told of the judge’s ruling, which remains under seal.
However, the evidence that led to the judge’s decision was widely reported in the media at the time, including testimony from Peterson’s stepbrother, who said he may have helped dispose of Stacy’s body when he carried a heavy blue container from the couple’s home on the night of her disappearance.
The jury will not hear about the blue container or the ensuing search for Stacy during the trial, but some jurors could know she is still missing and Peterson is the only suspect. Her name was never specifically mentioned during jury selection, but several people questioned acknowledged they knew about the case.
“There are some things that are impossible to avoid,” one prospective juror said.
