Less than an hour after jurors announced a guilty verdict in Drew Peterson’s murder trial, news trucks lined the cul-de-sac outside his home in the Pheasant Chase subdivision in Bolingbrook.
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Peterson’s oldest son, Stephen, politely declined interview requests as his younger stepsiblings peered through the living room blinds. Occasionally, gapers cruised slowly past the well-groomed houses to stop near Peterson’s driveway, at least one holding up a camera phone.
The verdict, and the arrival of the media and gawkers, was greeted with little surprise by residents of the usually quiet neighborhood where Peterson lived until his arrest in 2009, in a house just a few blocks away from the home where Peterson’s victim, Kathleen Savio, was killed in 2004.
While some of Peterson’s former neighbors offered criticism of prosecutors’ miscues during the five-week trial or debated the nuances of hearsay evidence — all topics that seemed popular among the half-dozen neighbors who spoke to the Tribune on Thursday — none would say for certain that Peterson was innocent in Savio’s murder or that he wasn’t involved in the mysterious disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson.
“The verdict is what it is,” neighbor Russell Breed said as he crossed his lawn to play chess at a friend’s house. “I’m not saying he’s guilty, but if he isn’t guilty, then he’s the unluckiest guy in the world to have all that happen to him.”
Drew Peterson’s next-door neighbor Sharon Bychowski returned home from work Thursday elated with the news that Peterson won’t be returning home, at least not anytime soon.
For months after Stacy Peterson went missing, Bychowski maintained a makeshift shrine to Stacy in her front yard with a sign that read, “Where’s Stacy.”
Bychowski said only Drew Peterson knows the answer, and while he may never tell, Bychowski said she believes Stacy would be proud to know that statements she made to her pastor and divorce lawyer about Peterson’s behavior the night Savio died provided valuable — if controversial — hearsay evidence against her husband.
“Stacy’s words were wonderful,” Bychowski said. “She would have been proud she was able to have helped.”
Another neighbor, who would not give his name, said he wasn’t impressed with the evidence against Drew Peterson.
“The prosecutors didn’t have any evidence, from what I saw, that put (Peterson) at the scene when it happened, and that hearsay evidence, I think hearsay is BS,” he said. Asked his opinion on whether Peterson had anything to do with Stacy’s disappearance, he said: “Well, you can about toss a coin on that one.”
While opinions may vary about Peterson in the neighborhood, his children are adored. Stephen Peterson has raised his four younger stepsiblings since his father’s arrest. He was fired from his job as an Oak Brook police officer after his superiors found out that he didn’t tell a grand jury investigating Stacy Peterson’s disappearance about $236,000 and several guns his father gave him after she disappeared.
“Those children are wonderful. They are being cared for; they are being nurtured,” Bychowski said. “That’s the real tragedy here. These children have all lost a mother, a stepmother and now a father.”