Fatal Vows

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Book: Read Fatal Vows for Free Online
Authors: Joseph Hosey
less than fifteen months into her marriage, she had given birth to her second child. Plus, there were the two boys from Peterson’s marriage to Savio that stayed with them during visits with their father and would, before long, become permanent members of their household.
    “She was out here with the kids all the time,” said Bychowski. “Those kids were so important to her.”
    Stacy was a natural when it came to motherhood, according to her neighbor. But it took some work to get Stacy looking, or at least dressing, the part of an adult, married woman with a slew of kids to take care of and what many have called a jealous, controlling husband. Luckily for Stacy, her next-door neighbor and best friend was there to help the young girl transform into a grown woman.
    “She went, in the short time I was with her, from dressing in junior sizes to dressing elegantly and changing the way she looked,” Bychowski said. “She really, I feel, in three and a half years, she went from dressing like a kid to dressing like a mom.”
    Bychowski knew something about appropriate professional dress. As an Avon district manager with eight hundred people working for her, she had to, and she tried to impart that wisdom to Stacy.
    “We would be in Kohl’s shopping somewhere and she would say to me, ‘Does this look okay?’ And I would say, ‘I probably wouldn’t buy that.’
    “Like it was too short, or it was too punky, you know?” Bychowski explained. “If your objective is to dress like a mom now, then what you wear has to change.”
    It wasn’t just her clothes that transformed. After the birth of her second child, daughter Lacy in January of 2005, Stacy embarked on a series of upgrades that included breast enlargement, Lasik eye surgery, and a tummy tuck. Peterson portrayed himself as an indulgent husband, paying for the procedures.
    When Lacy was born, Stacy was nineteen days shy of her twenty-first birthday. If her life had followed a different course, she might have been just a college kid hanging out with other college kids, instead of a mother of two and stepmother of another two. She still had some growing up to do. One neighbor told of Stacy wearing a bikini when she went out to cut the grass. The same neighbor said she cautioned a friend who came to her house not to look too long at Stacy or be overly friendly, because Drew was always watching.
    “He would be at the door, looking out,” she said.
    This was not unusual behavior for Peterson, as many who were close to Stacy said. Bychowski claimed that he would follow Stacy while he was supposed to be working and when she was doing nothing more sinister than clothes shopping for herself and her children.
    “He would come there in the cruiser,” she said. “He would be in the parking lot of Kohl’s, [asking,] ‘Hey what [are] you guys doing?’”
    Bychowski initially thought Peterson’s suspicions were focused more on family finances than infidelity.
    “At first I thought he was checking on how much she was spending, because he always picked on her for spending,” she said. “It didn’t matter if she bought a toothpick. It cost too much.”
    She soon learned otherwise.
    “[He was] constantly calling,” Bychowski said, telling how Peterson was fixated on his wife’s whereabouts, checking on the places she was going and who was in her company when she went there.
    It was strange then, that after Stacy had vanished, Peterson seemed to suddenly have little interest in tracking down her location.
    “He had such an obsession and compulsion to control her, at what point did he decide to kill her?” Bychowski pondered one winter day close to five months after Stacy was last seen alive, making no secret of her theory of what had happened to her friend. However, while the state police have ruled Stacy’s disappearance to be a “potential homicide” and have named Peterson a suspect, still today, he has not been charged with anything.
    “After all that money he

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