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The screaming headlines in Wednesday's Sun-Times were misleading at best.
Page one: "DREW'S PALS WORE WIRE." On page eight, where the story began, "DREW'S CHILLING 'I SHOULD HAVE HAD THAT B---- CREMATED.'"
The front page was nothing but headlines. "Two of Drew Peterson's closest friends," said the drop head, "recorded months of intimate conversations with him for the State Police."
Smaller headlines at the bottom of the front page announced: "On His Murdered Wife Kathleen: 'I should have had the bitch cremated.'"
And,
"On the Investigation of Kathleen's Drowning: 'It was in a dry bathtub, what a bunch of idiots.'"
Wow! What else is on the tape?
Apparently, not even the above. Read the story. The dry bathtub line is something Peterson's pal Paula Stark says Peterson told her in 2004, when Kathleen Savio, his third wife, was found dead. The should-have-had-her-cremated line is something pal Len Wawczak says he remembers Peterson telling him when authorities decided early last November -- after Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared -- to exhume Savio's body. The story indicates that Wawczak and Stark (who are married) started wearing wires later in November.
As far as a reader can tell, reporter Joe Hosey didn't hear the tapes, didn't read a transcript of the tapes, and didn't even confirm there are tapes, those spurious quotations notwithstanding. A token of the Sun-Times's meretriciousness is that despite the paper's ostentatious claims that the story was a "Sun-Times Exclusive," Hosey's a reporter for Joliet's Herald News, a Sun-Times News Group daily that also carried the story.
If he did say this (and if he didn't kill her), why - as a police officer - didn't he work the system to get her death investigated more thoroughly? Sure, they were divorced, but she was the mother of his two small kids.
That question pretty much answers itself, doesn't it?
The guy has condemned himself with his own asinine behavior. Unfortunately that cannot (rightly so) be used in court.
I've always figured that a body would never be found, and that the cops would have to rely on Peterson's own boastful arrogance to convict him. I just hope these publicity-seeking numbskulls haven't screwed everything up.
Rich
BY DAN ROZEK Staff Reporter/drozek@suntimes.com
Drew Peterson's own words may be used against him.
Investigators have amassed an "extensive" collection of secretly recorded conversations involving Peterson, a Will County judge disclosed at a hearing Thursday.
It's the first independent verification that police investigating Peterson used electronic surveillance in an effort to collect evidence against the former Bolingbrook cop.
In July, Len Wawczak and Paula Stark, former friends of Peterson, claimed they had secretly taped months of conversations with him for investigators probing the October 2007 disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy, and the 2004 drowning death of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. Authorities haven't confirmed their claims, but on Thursday, Judge Richard Schoenstedt said investigators used court-approved electronic eavesdropping to compile tapes, CDs and DVDs focusing on Peterson.
"It is extensive," Schoenstedt said of the material. He didn't disclose how the recordings were obtained.