The Associated Press
JOLIET, Ill. — Authorities probing the disappearance of a police officer’s wife said Friday he is now considered a suspect and that the case has shifted from a missing persons investigation to a potential homicide.
They also received court approval to exhume the body of the previous wife of Bolingbrook Sgt. Drew Peterson after a coroner said her death was mistakenly ruled an accidental drowning.
The review of Kathleen Savio’s death comes as investigators search for Peterson’s current wife, Stacy, 23, who was last seen October 28.
Illinois State Police Captain Carl Dobrich said Peterson, 53, has moved from being a person of interest in the disappearance of his wife to “clearly being a suspect.”
Dobrich also said the case was now a potential homicide investigation.
Peterson has said his current wife phoned him and told him she had left him for another man.
His attorney did not immediately return calls for comment.
In the 2004 death of Savio, his third wife, a coroner’s jury ruled it an accident, even though there was no water in the bathtub where the 40-year-old’s body was found face-down, her hair soaked in blood from a head wound. Investigators theorized the water had drained.
But in a petition the Will County state’s attorney filed Friday listing the reasons authorities want to exhume Savio’s body, prosecutors said a review of evidence in the case “is consistent with the ‘staging’ of an accident to conceal a homicide.”
Prosecutors said they reviewed photographs of the crime scene and autopsy, the autopsy protocol, and police reports.
”... The one-inch gash in the back of Kathleen Savio’s head did not render her unconscious, which would have been necessary for her to accidentally drown in the bathtub,” the petition stated.
Will County Circuit Court Judge Daniel J. Rozak signed the petition granting the exhumation Friday. It was not immediately clear when the body would be exhumed.
No charges were filed in Savio’s death, but “at the very least, her death should have been ruled ‘undetermined,”’ Will County Coroner Patrick O’Neil said earlier this week.