‘Either Get Me or Don’t’

Peterson's lawyer accused Morphey of having a history of alcohol and mental health problems, and Peterson denies the existence of the blue container or asking his stepbrother for help.

The day Stacy vanished, she reportedly told Peterson she wanted a divorce. "She had all his stuff packed up," said Bychowski, who said that her friend had become tired of Peterson's controlling ways. Peterson contends Stacy left him for another man. But Bychowski doesn't buy that, even though an old friend of Stacy's has admitted trading flirty e-mails with her in the weeks before she disappeared. The man, Scott Rossetto, a registered nurse, told the media he hadn't talked to Stacy in years when she called him out of the blue recently, and they resumed their friendship. He denied they had a romantic relationship.

"She thought he might be able to help her with her career," said Bychowski of Stacy, who was taking nursing classes. "It's not possible" she was having an affair, Bychowski added. "That girl did not have five minutes to herself. [Peterson] was always following her."

But Peterson is not looking for Stacy now. He maintains he doesn't know where she is. "Either she's going to see all this media coverage and come out," he told NEWSWEEK, "or she's going to be scared and go deeper."

Peterson lashed out at the families of his third and fourth wives. "I want it out there that these two women had very abusive childhoods," he said. He contends Savio was sexually abused as a child by a stepfather, who is now deceased, and that Stacy's mother had drinking problems and abandoned the family in 1988 after telling them she was on her way to church and never returning. Stacy Peterson's family did not respond to requests for comment. Savio's sister, Anna Doman, 52, denied that Kathleen was sexually abused. Doman said that Kathleen's childhood was "pretty happy" and that she had no out-of-the-ordinary problems with her parents or stepparents. Doman believes Peterson is "grasping at straws right now because he has nothing left. I wish Drew would stop trashing everyone in the world … He must be guilty if he has to make up things to make himself look good."

Peterson, not surprisingly, sees things differently. He said the only reason he is under suspicion is because "the spouse is always a likely suspect." But he noted that in his nearly three decades as a suburban Chicago cop he became known as someone who could defuse tense domestic disputes. "They used to call me the old 'silver tongue'," he said. "I could go into domestic situations, and by the end I had everyone hugging each other." (A fellow officer, though, told NEWSWEEK that Peterson's career was unremarkable. "He was average," said Lt. Ken Teppel.) Peterson maintains he's the wronged party in all of this. "It kind of hurts," he said. "I've led a pretty honorable life."

© 2007