Read Fatal Vows for Free Online

ceremony.
    Savio’s sister, Anna Marie Doman, said she found the notion of Peterson taking up with a girl fresh out of high school creepy.
    “It’s like a child molester,” she said. “Stacy looked like she weighed ninety pounds—no tits, no boobs. She’s not a woman.”
    And from the get-go, she predicted their marriage would come to no good.
    “Back then I said it’s not going to last, because when she hits twenty-one and sees there’s a whole world out there, the shit’s going to hit the fan, which is pretty much what happened.” Doman might have been off by a couple years, but there are many who believe her prediction was dead-on accurate.
    Savio learned of her husband’s philandering through an anonymous note. The revelation turned her world upside down, but Doman said her sister was not particularly surprised. In fact, she had caught him cheating before, prior to Stacy’s entry into their lives.
    “He had this humungous cell phone bill, and she was like, ‘What the hell?’” Doman described.
    The same number was listed on the bill again and again, so Savio sought her sister’s advice.
    “I said, ‘Ask Drew. I don’t know what to tell you.’ She asked, and he gave her some bullshit. She called. It was some young girl named Heather.”
    Savio invited Heather to her home. Face-to-face, Savio informed Heather that her boyfriend happened to be married—to her—and that he had two sons.
    “That girl disappeared after that,” Doman said.
    Clearly, whatever disapproval he faced in his choice of new love had no effect on Drew Peterson. Between playing the expansive provider and thrilling at their clandestine moments in his basement, the middle-aged Drew Peterson was, without question, quite a happy man in 2002 and 2003.
    He fondly recalled the joy he felt with Stacy and her antics to attract attention to them and leave onlookers scratching their heads. For example, Stacy would grab him in public and kiss him passionately, then earnestly ask, “Do I kiss the best of all my sisters?”
    It was not the only way they turned their fatherd-daughter age difference into a game. In the supermarket, Stacy sometimes acted like she was trying to get him to buy alcohol for her and the “friends” she had left outside, loudly badgering him to buy her wine to shock other shoppers.
    “She’d say, ‘Come on, all the kids are waiting in the parking lot,’” Peterson recalled, smiling at the memory. He even owned a ceramic figurine of a cop and a little girl, which he displayed on a shelf behind his desk. He pointed it out and quipped, “That was me and Stacy in 1988,” when Stacy would have been four years old to his thirty-four.
    While Aikin said it was not her place to criticize her legally adult niece or to tell her what to do, she did say she spoke to Stacy about her affair with the married middle-aged man.
    “I did talk to her a little bit,” Aikin recalled. “I can’t remember what I said.”
    Even if Aikin had spoken to Stacy more than just a little bit, she would have been working against the clock. After all, if she had plans of talking her niece out of the ill-fated romance, there was little time to do so. Stacy and Drew were on the fast track, with the young girl pregnant by eighteen and married by nineteen.
    “They got married eight days after the divorce with Kathleen,” Aikin said. “It was a very private wedding.”
    Stacy and Drew married and settled into their home on Pheasant Chase Court, a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, a mere five hundred yards away from his old home, where Savio was still living. Peterson had actually closed on his new home in April 2002, nearly a year and a half before he and Stacy tied the knot, so they did have the opportunity to set up house before exchanging vows.
    The married life must have afforded Stacy the security she had lacked throughout childhood, but it also kept her tied down with the duties of a wife and mother. Before she turned twenty-one, and