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invested in her,” Bychowski wondered, “at what point did she just become expendable bullshit?”

B olingbrook doesn’t have much in the way of heritage or tradition. It can’t; it’s only been around since 1965, which makes it eleven years younger than its most famous resident, Drew Walter Peterson.
    The town, which was developed as a bedroom community whose first homes were priced at ten thousand dollars, is connected to Chicago by the Stevenson Expressway. According to a “History of Bolingbrook,” the first residents of the mid-1960s did not always get what they thought they were paying for.
    “Lesson #1 learned the hard way through teary eyes: everything you see in the model home isn’t in your finished house, necessarily,” the official town history says. “In the case of Dover homes that meant no carpeting or even floor tile in some area [ sic ] unless you paid extra. And there certainly were no trees or lawns. And not always paved streets.”
    When Bolingbrook was incorporated in 1965, it was a modest burg of 5,300 people in 1,200 homes. The village has been growing ever since and in 1975 became the proud home of Old Chicago, the world’s first completely enclosed amusement park and shopping center. However, Old Chicago struggled and closed six years later.
    By the time Peterson was in the midst of his romance with young Stacy Cales, U.S. Census Bureau estimates put Bolingbrook’s population at about 66,000. The median home value in 2005 was more than $225,000, over twenty times the price of an abode in the town’s first days.
    Bolingbrook features some impressive homes, but the town—essentially a series of subdivisions—has forever been a less successful, even faceless, little sibling to neighboring Naperville. More than a hundred years older than Bolingbrook, Naperville not only has some history, it also has a bustling city center. While Bolingbrook is a series of subdivisions, Naperville is home to a quaint downtown area and charming Riverwalk, which draws visitors from across the Chicago area.
    “Ranked as a top community in the United States to raise children, retire and start a home-based business, the city boasts nationally acclaimed schools, the best public library system in the country, an exceptionally low crime rate and a lower unemployment rate than the state’s average,” Naperville boasts on the city’s Web site. “In 2005, the city was once again named as one of best places to live in the United States by Money magazine. Naperville ranked third of 100 finalists and was the only Illinois town to make the 2005 ‘Best Places To Live’ list.” In 2006, Naperville placed even higher, coming in at 2nd on the Money list.
    Bolingbrook might never be Naperville—contrary to its middle-class, lily-white portrayal in the media, Bolingbrook has pockets of low-income and minority residents—but in the early part of the new millennium, it was still forging its own identity. In 2002, Bolingbrook unveiled the ostentatious Bolingbrook Golf Club, a 270-acre course with a 76,000-square-foot clubhouse. The village got another jewel in its crown when the Promenade mall opened in April 2007. An upscale, open-air shopping plaza, the Promenade was an ambitious project for Will County.
    In April 2002, Drew Peterson paid about $220,000 for the house he moved into with Stacy: a two-story domicile with an attached garage and above ground pool on Pheasant Chase Court in a subdivision abutting Clow International Airport, a single-runway facility whose south end practically borders Peterson’s backyard. Peterson of course wasn’t new to the street, and the house he had lived in with Savio was even larger, according to his third wife’s sister, Anna Marie Doman.
    “There were so many rooms,” Doman said.
    The prices of homes in the Bolingbrook area soared soon after Peterson’s 2002 purchase, then swiftly plummeted. Like many homeowners living in a volatile local market, Peterson seemed quite