Kriti Mehrotra
With Netflix’s ‘American Murder: Laci Peterson’ delving deep into the 2002 disappearance of 8-month-pregnant Laci Peterson, there has been a lot of talk of the connection between her case and that of Kathleen Savio. However, there have been differences too, with the primary one being that while the former’s case transpired in late 2002, the latter was panned out in 2003, and both the suspects are different. Yes, their last names are the same — Peterson — but that’s it. Scott Peterson and Drew Peterson are not related to one another, but they have one commonality – both their spouses went missing under suspicious circumstances.
Scott Peterson Was a Suspect From Nearly the Get-Go
Since 26-year-old Laci vanished at over eight months pregnant on Christmas Eve 2002, the first priority of the entire community of Modesto, California, was to find her. Therefore, once they noticed her husband, Scott Peterson, was actually not at the front of any volunteer search operations or trying to spread the word about his wife’s case through the media, things took a turn. It was initially believed he was camera shy and preferred to deal with his grief privately, only to soon turn out that he’d been avoiding the press altogether since he had a girlfriend who knew nothing about what was going on.
That’s when the name Amber Frey came to light, only for her to concede she had no idea her boyfriend was married before apologizing to Laci’s family and fully cooperating with officials. Suspicions on Scott thus grew, just for him to be arrested shortly once the bodies of his late wife and son Conner were found washed up on the shores of the Bay area. The fact he had claimed to have gone into the waters on the day they vanished hence connected him to this double homicide too, and he was eventually found guilty following a 2004 trial.
Drew Peterson Became a Person of Interest After the Disappearance of His Fourth Wife
It was back in 2007 that Drew Peterson’s name first came into the limelight as his fourth wife, Stacy Ann Cales Peterson, disappeared from their Illinois home without a trace left behind. The police sergeant had married the then-19-year-old hotel receptionist back in 2003, following which they welcomed two children of their own — Anthony (born 2003) and Lacy (born 2005) — before she legally adopted all his other children, too. The truth is she treated all of them as her own and was doing very well for herself, close to completing her nursing degree from Joliet Junior College, when she vanished on Sunday, October 28, 2007.
After Stacy disappeared, several questions regarding Steve began coming to light, with the primary one being if he had an involvement in not only her vanishing but also his ex-wife’s murder. After all, his third wife, Kathleen Savio, had been found dead in the dry bathtub in the master suite of her Pheasant Chase Drive residence on March 1, 2004, mere months after their divorce was finalized in October 2003. Her cause of death was initially ruled as an accidental drowning, only to be changed following a reexamination after the events of 2007.
One of the primary reasons was also the fact that between 2002 and 2004, police were called out to his ex-wife’s house eighteen times on domestic disturbance calls, including calls for returning children late after visitation, making it clear Scott and Kathleen were not on amicable terms. But alas, in the end, on September 6, 2012, he was found guilty of Kathleen’s murder before being sentenced to 38 years behind bars in February. However, he has never been charged in Stacy’s case, and she is considered missing to this day. That’s despite suspicions of him having murdered her and him having joked about it too — in early 2024, he told a News Nation reporter, “I promise, unless you marry me, I’m not gonna kill you.”
Read More: What Was Scott Peterson’s Profession Before His Arrest?
