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Under Suspicion

By Alex Tresniowski and Nicole Weisensee Egan

Originally posted Wednesday November 21, 2007 05:00 PM EST

"I just want to find her," says Stacy's sister Cassandra (at the vigil). "She was loved." Photo by: Mark Peterson / Redux

From Peterson's own words to PEOPLE, and the record of his four troubled marriages, a portrait of the ex-police sergeant emerges – confident and charismatic but also controlling and sometimes abusive; drawn to vulnerable women and eager to buy them things to make them feel secure, but just as quick to intimidate them to get his own way. The eldest of three children, his father was a strict ex-Marine, and his mother a diligent housewife. "My dad would get up to go to the bathroom in the morning, and my mom would have the bed made," says Peterson. "I expected all of my wives to be like my mom, meticulous housekeepers, and they weren't." Peterson was 20 when he married his high school sweetheart Carol Brown, then 17; when she had a miscarriage, Peterson was "very supportive," Brown, 50, told the Chicago Tribune. But after six years and two sons together, she discovered he cheated on her, and they divorced in 1980. "I take full responsibility for that," Peterson says. "Carol was a good woman and I was unfaithful."

Two years later he met Vicki Connolly in a bar; they married six months later and raised each other's children from their previous marriages. "When it was good, it was wonderful, it was great," Connolly, 48, told the Tribune. "But when it was bad, it was really bad." She accused Peterson of playing "mind games" and claimed he bugged their house so he could keep tabs on her even while he was having an affair. Peterson admits he "sought romance in other places" but denies he ever bugged the house. "Vicki was a loving, warm person," he says, "until things started deteriorating."

After they divorced in 1992, Peterson met Kathleen Savio on a blind date. "He seemed wonderful," recalls Savio's sister Anna Marie Doman. "He was Mr. Romance, the nice, upstanding young cop." Savio's other sister Susan Doman says, "in the beginning their marriage was great. Kathleen had things like she never had: a beautiful home, fur coats, everything. She felt like a princess." Peterson calls their early years "very romantic. We had a lot of fun together and I thought she was beautiful. I loved being next to her."

But after she gave birth to their two sons, claims Peterson, "she became repeatedly violent." Records show 18 calls to the police from their home, and in 2002 Kathleen obtained an order of protection, claiming in court papers that Peterson "restrained me, held me down, knocked me into a walls, come after me . . . ripped my necklace off, left marks on my body."