Nearly a month after his fourth wife went missing and a week after the body of his third wife was exhumed, former Illinois police sergeant Drew Peterson is finally doing what many legal experts said he should have been doing from the start.
Peterson is “lawyering up.”
In contrast to his exclusive appearance last week on TODAY, Peterson, 53, left most of the talking to attorney Joel Brodsky during a second live interview on Monday. TODAY co-host Matt Lauer spent much of the interview trying to get Brodsky to let Peterson answer questions about his reaction to pathologist Michael Baden’s opinion that the 2004 death of Peterson’s third wife, Kathleen Savio, was a homicide staged to look like an accidental drowning in a bathtub.
Brodsky answered for Peterson, whom police have named a suspect in both the death of Savio and the Oct. 23 disappearance of the woman Peterson married soon after Savio died, 23-year-old Stacy Peterson. Brodsky said that Baden, who conducted a second autopsy last week at the request of Savio’s family, had made up his mind that the third Mrs. Peterson was murdered before he examined her remains on Friday.
“Dr. Baden, with all due respect to him, is a renowned pathologist, but he had a pre-existing opinion before he did the autopsy,” Brodsky said, pointing to interviews Baden granted a cable news network. “His conclusion was a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
After a back-and-forth with Brodsky about what Peterson would and would not be allowed to comment on, Lauer finally got to ask Peterson a question.
“Mr. Peterson, are you upset to learn that she may have been murdered?” he asked.
“Yes, I am upset to hear something like that. Very much so,” Peterson said.
Brodsky took issue with Baden’s statement on another program that people rarely die in bathtub accidents, saying statistically it is quite common.
“We do disagree with his finding. The first autopsy, from what I understand, was very thorough. They concluded it was an accident,” Brodsky said.
‘Walking a fine line’
Noting that Brodsky was continuously blocking questions intended for Peterson, Lauer appeared a bit frustrated but was determined to get answers from him.
“It appears now that I’m going to be walking a fine line between what you want to tell me, Mr. Brodsky, and what Mr. Peterson is allowed to tell me,” Lauer said.
Peterson did say that there is clearly animosity between himself and his second wife, Vicki Connelly, but he was not aware of it until she spoke to the “Chicago Tribune.” Connelly said Peterson, who resigned last week from the Bolingbrook, Ill., police department, told her he could kill her and make it look like an accident.
“He has the experience, the knowledge, the means and the mind to do that,” Connelly told the newspaper.
Asked about the comment, Peterson said only, “I thought we were friends.”
Brodsky would not allow Peterson to confirm or deny the comment.
“People that are divorced are always making accusations and comments about each other. This is simply a comment by someone who went through a divorce with Mr. Peterson,” the lawyer said.
‘Kids need a mom’
Peterson, who is not charged with any crime, repeated his public plea last week for Stacy Peterson to return home to care for the couple’s two young children. He continues to believe that she ran off with another man, leaving him to answer questions about her strange and sudden disappearance.
“Are you worried about her, Mr. Peterson?” Lauer asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “Your wife leaves and I have kids at home, you are very much worried about her.”
“Although you think she is with another man, are you worried that she may never come back to be a mother to these children?” Lauer pressed, after wrestling with Peterson’s lawyer again to find a question he could answer.
“Yes, I am,” Peterson said.
“Kids need a mom … Basically, I’d like to have her publicly show herself now and clear all of this up.”
A county coroner’s report on the second autopsy of Kathleen Savio’s body is expected to be finalized in late December. Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City, has said publicly that his examination of Savio’s body on Friday leads him to conclude that she struggled with her killer and that the scene was staged to look like an accidental drowning.
“I’m convinced she was the victim of a murder. ‘Who done it’ is up to the police to resolve,” Baden told the Associated Press.
Attorneys, as a rule, do not like targets of criminal investigations to give interviews at all. Peterson, however, has said that he has been speaking to NBC News, in part, to get the media to stop camping outside of his home. But he does so at his own peril.
If he is charged, his public statements about the disappearance of Stacy Peterson, Savio’s death and his rocky relationship with both women could be used to impeach his credibility if he were to testify differently at a trial.