The last person known to have spoken with Stacy Peterson before her 2007 disappearance testified Monday that she was so desperate to leave her husband that she considered sleeping with someone else “so he wouldn’t love her anymore.”
Bruce Zidarich, 45, of Downers Grove, said he and Stacy had grown closer in the weeks before she vanished because they both were having relationship problems — he with Stacy’s sister Cassandra Cales and she with Drew Peterson, then a Bolingbrook police sergeant.
“She said she didn’t want anything — she wanted out,” Zidarich said. But Stacy told him Peterson, who had been tracking her whereabouts with a GPS system on her cell phone, wasn’t about to let her go, telling her that even if she slept with someone else in front of him he would still love her.
Monday was the fourth day of a pre-trial hearing on whether certain hearsay statements will be heard in the trial of Peterson, who is charged in the 2004 drowning death of third wife Kathleen Savio. As expected, much of the testimony so far has been about Stacy’s disappearance. Prosecutors are trying to convince a judge that Peterson caused Savio’s death or Stacy’s disappearance in order to have hearsay admitted under a new state law.
Zidarich said he was increasingly worried about Stacy’s safety. He recalled a July 2007 incident when Peterson came to his Yorkville home looking for Stacy, who had left 10 to 20 minutes earlier. Peterson asked to see a computer, and Zidarich said he took him to his home office.
“He showed us how he had all the phones on GPS,” Zidarich said. Peterson showed him where Stacy was on the map.
On Oct. 27, the day before Stacy vanished, Zidarich talked to Stacy about her increasing desperation to leave Peterson. They exchanged a series of text messages just after midnight, where Zidarich suggested they meet for coffee. Stacy asked if they could “go to breakfast in the morning w/my babies instead” because it had been a long day.
But the planned meeting on Oct. 28 never happened. Instead, Zidarich spoke to Stacy by phone later that morning about helping him repaint the inside of his Yorkville rental home.
Stacy never responded to his 4:30 p.m. text message — “Whatcha doin 2marrow?” and within a few hours Stacy’s family and friends were frantically searching for her.
Zidarich said he and Cales drove past the Petersons’ home, spotting both of their cars in the driveway — and when he called Peterson about 2:25 a.m. Drew Peterson told him that Stacy had taken $25,000 and gone to Jamaica with her boyfriend.
Sharon Bychowski, Stacy’s friend and next-door-neighbor, broke down Monday and had to be helped from the witness stand as she recounted seeing Stacy sobbing in the parkway outside her home shortly before her disappearance.
“Drew won’t go — he won’t leave,” Stacy said, according to Bychowski, showing her 10 boxes of his stuff she’d packed in their garage.
“If I disappear, Sharon, it’s not an accident — he killed me,” said Bychowski, crying and holding her hand to her chest.
When she urged Stacy to write down what was happening, Stacy told her: “I’m already dead,” Bychowski said. “He’s going to kill me.”
In 2006 and 2007 before she disappeared, Stacy got a tummy tuck, liposuction and breast implants.
“She told me that’s what Drew wanted,” Bychowski said.
But if Stacy had hoped it would improve things at home, friends said it didn’t work. In the days before she disappeared, Stacy showed Bychowski a ring that Peterson recently had given her and commented: “He thinks it’s going to keep me. No way.”
Stacy also showed Bychowski a hole in the garage ceiling she said was made when Drew fired a gun through the bedroom floor.
Prosecutors on Monday also called three Bolingbrook residents who testified they saw Peterson on Oct. 28. One woman who saw him walking away from a car parked about a mile from Peterson’s home around 6:30 p.m. said Peterson seemed extremely suspicious, testifying that she later told her daughter, “It was as if he had killed somebody.”
One of Peterson’s defense attorneys questioned Bychowski about her numerous television appearances and whether she had enjoyed or stood to profit from them.
“There’s nothing in this two and a half years that makes me feel special, sir — it makes me feel sick,” she said.
– Steve Schmadeke and Erika Slife
Click HERE for a WGN-TV report on this story.
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Pacific line near that location, but had no additional information available about the person’s condition or other details.
at 11:46 p.m., was stopped near the Lombard station..
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