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of the girl he was getting to know.
    “I didn’t like him, I can tell you that,” Rossetto told me. “It was like he was trying to impress me that he was a Bolingbrook cop, and he was on a special team or whatever.”
    In his younger years, Peterson had been a member of the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad, a multi-jurisdictional, undercover drug unit. He considers his work with this team to be the finest in his law enforcement career. An episode during his time with the unit led to him not only being fired from the Bolingbrook Police Department, which had loaned him out to the unit, but also being brought up on criminal charges. Peterson weathered that storm, as he always seemed able to do. The charges were dropped and he got his job back, but it was the end of his days as an undercover narcotics agent.
    All that was far behind Peterson by the time he was sniffing around after Stacy at the SpringHill Suites, supposedly so his partner could chase some other woman working there. Peterson and Stacy’s romance may have been a fortuitous by-product of their colleagues’ flirting, but their liaison unleashed a storm of events beyond anything even they might have anticipated at the time.
    For one thing, Peterson was still married to Kathleen Savio, although nothing as flimsy as marital vows had ever stopped him from cheating on the two wives before her. And Savio, Stacy would learn before long, was not going to set her husband, and their financial assets, free without a tenacious fight. Within a few months, police cruisers responding to Savio and Peterson’s domestic battles would become a common sight on the street where all three—Savio, Peterson and Stacy—ended up living.
    For another, Peterson’s supervisors on the police force most certainly were not as delighted as he was with his new girlfriend.
    “When the department found out I was a forty-seven-year-old sergeant, and I was engaged to a seventeen-year-old, there was a big scandal,” Peterson said.
    Once the department brass caught wind of their involvement, the higher-ups approached prosecutors to determine if Peterson was violating sexual-abuse statutes by romancing a girl practically a third his age. Apparently, he was not. In Illinois, seventeen is the age of sexual consent, unless the older person is in a position of authority—such as a teacher, counselor, or coach—in which case the age of consent is eighteen. The state’s attorney’s office decided that Peterson’s status as a police officer did not constitute a position of authority over Stacy.
    “The state’s attorney said, ‘He’s not doing nothing wrong,’” Peterson recalled, visibly pleased by the memory of getting the green light to carry on with his young love, whom he clearly intended to marry as soon as he was legally free of Savio.
    That Drew Peterson was able to take three ladies to the altar before Stacy is evidence enough of his charisma. And with each trip up the aisle, the age difference between himself and his wife grew wider.
    With his first wife, high school sweetheart Carol Hamilton, the gap in age was a mere three years. With his second wife, Victoria Rutkiewicz, it had stretched to five: her twenty-three to his twenty-eight. Then, a thirty-eight-year-old Peterson tied the knot with twenty-eight-year-old Kathleen Savio.
    To put the icing on the wedding cake, Police Sergeant Drew Peterson, forty-nine, made an honest woman out of nineteen-year-old Stacy Cales in October 2003. She had given birth to their son, Anthony, not three months before they wed.
    Peterson married his first wife, Hamilton, in 1974, two years after he graduated from Willowbrook High School, which she also attended. She accompanied Peterson to his senior prom.
    Peterson and Hamilton had two sons together, Eric and Stephen, but divorced in 1980. Hamilton, later Carol Brown after remarrying, did not accuse Peterson of anything sinister or violent. Asked by Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America if there were