Spouse under scrutiny

MISSING BOLINGBROOK MOM

BOLINGBROOK -- The police have searched his house and seized his property. A media horde has camped in front of his home. A crowd of in-laws criticize him. But at least one man feels for the police sergeant whose wife disappeared nearly a week ago.

"I know what he's going through," said Craig Stebic, the Plainfield pipefitter who has a missing wife of his own. "Especially with you media and everything."

Stebic, the husband of the vanished Lisa Stebic, has weathered police and media scrutiny for more than six months.

Sgt. Drew Peterson is on Day 6 and already has shown signs of strain, briefly venturing out in front of the media with an American flag bandanna covering his face, dark sunglasses and an NYPD baseball cap pulled low over his eyes before running back inside Thursday. Then on Friday, witnesses say he drove away from the media throng on his motorcycle with the same bandanna covering his face.

Peterson's missing wife, 23-year-old Stacy Peterson, last was seen Sunday morning. She apparently was heading to meet the boyfriend of her sister Cassandra to help him paint a house but never reached her destination.

Cassandra and other family members since have expressed their suspicions of the 53-year-old Drew Peterson in the media.

Drew Peterson was still married when he met 17-year-old Stacy Cales while she was working as an overnight desk clerk at Spring Hill Suites on Remington Boulevard. Their March-November romance spelled the end of his marriage to his third wife, Kathleen Savio.

Within years of Drew Peterson filing for divorce, Savio died under mysterious circumstances.

Her body was discovered after Drew Peterson attempted to return their two sons from a weekend visitation. No one answered the locked door and Drew Peterson, who lived down the street from Savio with his 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.

State's Attorney James Glasgow has revisited the case to see if it warrants criminal charges, but "the missing persons case is the immediate concern right now," said Glasgow's spokesman, Charles B. Pelkie.

The missing persons case continued Friday with police divers searching a retention pond near the Petersons' home on Pheasant Chase Court.

State police also have turned an eye to a micro-light airplane owned by Drew Peterson. Investigators were at a hangar at Cushing Field in Newark, about 30 miles west of Joliet, for about an hour Friday morning, said Michael Hudetz, a flight instructor who also sells micro-lights.

Hudetz said he showed investigators Drew Peterson's two-seater Aquilla Trike and the hangar where Peterson keeps it.

"They asked a lot of questions," Hudetz said. "They seemed very interested in how it works. They wanted to know where the people sit, where they put their feet. They wanted to know how the (aircraft's) parachute works."

Investigators also asked Hudetz if there were any "barrels" at the airfield.

About two years ago, Hudetz trained Drew Peterson to fly his micro-light, which run about $20,000 new, the flight instructor said.

"He was actually a private pilot before that," Hudetz said. "He flew regular airplanes. He seemed like a very nice guy."

Sometimes Peterson flew alone, but he had also flown with his wife, Hudetz said.

The search for Lisa Stebic, which passed the six-month mark last week, continues as well.

But police working that case have dropped the nicety of labeling it a missing person investigation, revealing in July that they had concluded Lisa Stebic was not involved in an accident or forcibly abducted. They believe she was a victim of foul play, and that Craig Stebic knows something about her disappearance.

Contact Joe Hosey at (815) 729-6054 or jhosey@scn1.com Sun-Times reporter Stefano Esposito contributed to this story