News reports that a relative helped former police officer Drew Peterson remove a barrel or container from his Chicago-area home around the time his fourth wife went missing last month are false and not credible, Peterson’s lawyer said Thursday.
During an appearance on TODAY, attorney Joel Brodsky also criticized the media for stories based on anonymous sources claiming that before she went missing, Stacy Peterson told an unnamed clergyman that Drew Peterson admitted killing his third wife and used Stacy as an alibi.
“What we have here is an unnamed, unauthorized source telling a gossip columnist that Stacy told an unnamed clergyman [something],” Brodsky told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira.
Brodsky was responding to a Chicago newspaper story that reported that Stacy Peterson had told others that her husband had murdered his third wife, Kathleen Savio, shortly after they were divorced, and that Stacy Peterson provided him with an alibi.
Savio had been found dead in her bathtub, but the death was ruled an accidental drowning at the time. Her body was recently exhumed for a second autopsy.
The story, Brodsky said, doesn’t hold water.
“Nobody goes to the police, nobody tells anybody, Stacy stays married to Drew and lives with him and has two children with him,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem logical. It’s more rumor and speculation. It’s not evidence, that’s for sure.”
But NBC’s legal editor, Dan Abrams, sitting next to Brodsky, said that the lawyer was not being realistic.