By Steve Schmadeke, Matthew Walberg and Andy Grimm, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — Seeming nervous and his voice at times quaking slightly, the Illinois State Police investigator who prosecutors allege botched the inquiry into Kathleen Savio’s drowning took the witness stand Tuesday to describe and defend his work.
Robert Deel told a prosecutor that he kept an open mind during the 2004 investigation but now considers Savio’s death a slip-and-fall accident based on what he saw in her bathroom that night.
“I believe that is consistent with someone who could slip fall and bang her head,” Deel said of her body’s position in the bath tub. He said there was a “consensus” among investigators that night that Savio’s death was likely an accident. And the pathologist who performed the original autopsy told him he believed the death was not a homicide and should have been classified as undetermined, Deel said.
As the Drew Peterson trial entered its second week, prosecutors were in the unusual position of calling and attacking a state investigator who disagrees with the basic premise of their case — that Savio’s death was a homicide. A coroner’s jury working off the original investigation concluded it was an accident.
On Tuesday, prosecutors tried to pick apart Deel’s policing skills and questioned what he didn’t do during the Savio investigation. Prosecutors also called to the stand an assistant coroner who testified he had suspicions Savio had been murdered, though he didn’t voice them for years.
After Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy, disappeared in 2007, authorities exhumed Savio’s body, performed a second autopsy and declared her death a homicide. Peterson, a former Bolingbrook, Ill., police sergeant, is on trial for Savio’s murder.
Not only is there no physical evidence tying Peterson to Savio’s death, prosecutors must convince jurors that her drowning was a murder. That push began Tuesday and is expected to continue Wednesday, when another crime scene investigator and the pathologist who performed the second autopsy may be called to testify.
Defense attorneys attempted to burnish Deel’s reputation Tuesday, asking him about his extensive criminal investigation experience gained with his 26 years with the Illinois State Police.
Deel said he processed more than 500 crimes scenes, investigated about 50 drownings while serving on a police marine unit and also investigated about 10 murders in his career. But his career took another turn after Stacy disappeared and prosecutors asked that he never process another crime scene in Will County.
He was then reassigned to patrol.
“If (prosecutors) want to say this is the worst police investigator on the face of the earth … I can’t stop them from doing that,” Judge Edward Burmila said with the jury outside the courtroom. “But I don’t see how that prejudices Mr. Peterson.”
Deel testified that none of the bruises that prosecutors have based much of their case for a homicide on raised any suspicions for him. “Most of it just appeared to be typical bruising that people have on their body as a part of daily life,” he said, adding that there were no signs Savio had been in a fight for her life.
He said he knew Savio was bleeding from a head injury but he didn’t investigate it, saying that was the role of the pathologist at a later autopsy.
“When we took her out of tub, we got blood all over our gloves, but I didn’t conduct an examination of her head to see where that blood was coming from,” he said. “That’s beyond the scope of what I’m supposed to do.”
But Will County deputy coroner Michael VanOver, who assisted Deel that night, testified that he always thought the death was suspicious. Yet he never told anyone until the case was reopened in 2007, and he signed off on labeling Savio’s death an accident.
VanOver’s suspicions about Savio’s death were aroused, he testified, when he noticed how clean the tub was and that there were rows of shampoo bottles and other bath products arrayed around the edge of the small tub.
“If a person would have fallen in that bathtub, I’m of the opinion that those bottles around the edge of that bathtub would have gone flying,” he said.
The missteps that have dogged prosecutors since opening statements could continue Wednesday when Burmila rules whether to strike testimony from yet another witness. The defense said it was not given complete information about an FBI report regarding a conversation Peterson allegedly had with Bolingbrook Police Lt. James Coughlin.
Coughlin testified Tuesday that he bumped into Peterson at the Will County courthouse and the two talked about his divorce from Savio.
Peterson said, “my life would be easier if she was dead — or died, I don’t recall which word,” Coughlin testified.
The conversation stuck with him, Coughlin testified, because Savio was found drowned in her bathtub just weeks later.
