Foul play debated in ex-wife's death
JOLIET -- A State police investigator downplayed the possibility of foul play in the death of a Bolingbrook cop's third wife nearly four years before his fourth wife disappeared.
The testimony from Special Agent Herbert Hardy at the May 2004 coroner's inquest of Kathleen Savio's death painted the 40-year-old's demise as anything but fishy.
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
(AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
Terence Guider-Shaw / The Herald News
"And our investigation shows that basically, after the coroner's report and toxicology that she died from drowning," Hardy says, according to a transcript of the inquest released Thursday by Coroner Patrick O'Neil.
"We believe that the laceration from her -- that she sustained to the back of her head was caused by a fall in the tub," Hardy said. "There was nothing to lead us to believe that anything else occurred. There was no other evidence that shows that anything else occurred."
O'Neil apparently feels otherwise.
"Certain aspects of Kathleen's death raised concerns for me as well," O'Neil said in a statement released Wednesday. "In my professional opinion, having served at the time as the coroner for 14 years, it was my opinion that, at the very least, her death should have been ruled undetermined. The coroner's jury, unfortunately, ruled otherwise."
O'Neil would not comment further on the case Thursday.
Savio died in March 2004, soon after she and her ex-husband, Bolingbrook police Sgt. Drew Peterson divorced, and even sooner after Drew Peterson married his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson.
Stacy, the 30-years-younger wife of 53-year-old Drew Peterson, fell off the face of the Earth 13 days ago and is the subject of a state police investigation of her own, although they have labeled it nothing more than a missing persons case.
The death of her predecessor as a Peterson wife was discovered after Drew Peterson attempted to return their two sons from a weekend visitation.
No one answered the locked door of her home and Drew Peterson, who lived down the street from Savio with new wife Stacy, sought help from a neighbor. The neighbor called a locksmith, and once entry was gained, went inside to find Savio's body in a waterless bathtub.
The coroner's jury ruled the death an accidental drowning.
While neither the coroner's jury nor -- according to Hardy's testimony -- the State Police seem to have seen anything amiss with Savio's death, O'Neil says he did. And it was up to the county's top prosecutor to do something about it.
"Any criminal charges that might have resulted against any individual would have been the responsibility of the former state's attorney," O'Neil said.
The former state's attorney, Jeff Tomczak, shot back at O'Neil Thursday.
"Given the fact that Coroner O'Neil made a finding of an accidental death in this case, what crime would the state police request to be charged?" Tomczak said. "The answer is, none."
The current state's attorney, James Glasgow, has revisited the Savio case, said his spokesman, Charles B. Pelkie. And not only that, but the authorities might actually dig up Savio's body from her grave in Queen of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Hillside.
"That's under serious consideration right now," Pelkie said. "(Glasgow's) got his team researching what they have to do legally."
Savio's family would have no objection to an exhumation, said the dead woman's nephew, Charlie Doman of Romeoville.
"Definitely, definitely, we have no problem with that," Doman said. "Anything that will help with the investigation, we'll do anything to help."
But with Peterson working as a cop, Doman has doubts his family will find justice on a local level, no matter who the state's attorney may be.
"He's helped the Will County State's Attorney to convict how many people?" Doman said. "Now you expect him to convict one of their own? There's nothing we can do about it."
Hardy did testify to Bolingbrook police receiving numerous calls of domestic disturbances between Drew Peterson and Savio. But while the agent spoke of a lack of evidence supporting foul play in Savio's death and the jury ruled it an accidental drowning, Savio's family revealed at the inquest the two were embroiled in a contentious, unresolved financial divorce negotiations.
The family also told of a million-dollar life insurance policy on Savio and that she foresaw her own death in the days before she was found drowned in a dry bathtub.
"She has seen that if she should die, it may look like an accident but it wasn't," Savio's sister, Susan Savio, testified at the inquest.
"She just told me last week, and she was terrified of him," Susan Savio said. "He always threatened her. He had her in the basement one time. He did many, many things to her. He wished only for her to go away."
Contact Joe Hosey at (815) 729-6054 or e-mail him at jhosey@scn1.com
