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“any signs of controlling behavior, the things that you’re hearing about now?” Carol told her, “No, there really wasn’t. You know, in the beginning, we just had a normal relationship.”
    But that normal relationship did not last.
    “Apparently we somewhat grew apart, and then one day I did discover that he was having an affair,” Carol told Sawyer.
    Peterson also cheated on his next wife, Rutkiewicz, whom he married in 1982. By the time Stacy disappeared, Rutkiewicz was going by the name Vicki Connolly and living in the tiny downstate Illinois town of Paxton. I met with Vicki Connolly one night while she was at the home of her daughter, Lisa Ward, also in Paxton. Vicki said she did not wish to talk about her marriage to Peterson and also told me she was afraid. I spoke to Ward as well, both in person and on the telephone, and exchanged e-mail messages with her. Ward, who lived with Peterson as his stepdaughter from the age of eight until she was seventeen, said she and her mother were not interested in discussing their time with the ex-sergeant.
    But Ward did go on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren . To protect her identity, Ward’s last name was not given, and she was shown only in silhouette. In the interview, Lisa Ward described her stepfather as “strict, extremely strict, sometimes not a very nice person” and prone to be “extreme with the punishment sometimes.”
    “I was hit with a belt for many years,” Ward said.
    She continued, saying that despite outward appearances, she knew her mother was not happy in her marriage to Peterson and that he was “abusive to my mother. He was very controlling to her, watched every move that she had made.”
    And just as with his first wife, Carol, Drew lost his second wife when she got fed up with his having sex with other women.
    “My mom [wanted out] because he was not being faithful to her, and he had not been faithful for many years,” Ward said to Van Susteren. “And I think that she knew and finally had just had it, just wanted out.”
    At least one of the other women Peterson was having sex with was Kathleen Savio, who became wife number three; reportedly, she didn’t know Peterson was married at the time she started seeing him.
    Besides being wives of Drew Peterson, Rutkiewicz and Savio had something else in common, at least according to relatives. They both thought he could kill them and make it look accidental. As Ward told Van Susteren, “I mean, I told her she doesn’t have to be afraid of him anymore, but obviously, he had hurt her, you know, so badly all those years ago that she still thinks about that. He used to tell my mother that he could kill her and make it look like an accident.”
    When told about the threats he supposedly made against his second wife and ex-stepdaughter, Peterson, who has had no reservations about admitting his extramarital affairs, had an explanation.
    “Vicki’s just mad ’cause I cheated on her,” he said. He also said Ward resented him for being “a strong disciplinarian.”
    Besides Peterson’s four brides, there was the one that got away: fiancée Kyle Piry. Peterson fit her in between his first and second marriages.
    Piry claims she called it quits with Peterson; Peterson says he was the one to give her the heave-ho. Either way, Piry was twenty when the four-month engagement was called off. Keeping with his pattern of everwidening age discrepancies, Peterson was twenty-seven.
    Years later, with Peterson the subject of intense scrutiny by the police and public for both the disappearance of Stacy and the mysterious death of Savio, Piry accused Peterson of stalking her and of abusing his power as a police officer to make her life miserable for ending their relationship back when they were dating and engaged to marry.
    Peterson denied this, saying Piry was just bitter over their breakup and even angrier for his spurning her attempts to rekindle the romance. He went on to explain that he dumped