Update: Appellate Court Upholds Drew Peterson Murder Conviction

Updated at 10:45 a.m.

It took more than five years for the state police to actually charge Drew Peterson with killing his third wife, and then another three years for him to be found guilty of her murder.

Now, three years after that, the Third District Appellate Court upheld the guilty verdict and 38-year prison sentence Peterson got for drowning his estranged wife Kathleen Savio in March 2004.

“He is where he is and I hope he knows he’s never getting out,” said Savio’s sister Susan Doman.

“I never believed that we were going to lose and I always had faith in (Will County State’s Attorney) Jim” Glasgow, Doman said.

Steve Greenberg, one of the six attorneys who represented Peterson, 61, during his 2009 murder trial, and one of the lawyers who argued his appeal before the Ottawa court in May, felt that his case fell on deaf ears.

“They ignored everything we cited,” said Greenberg, who also questioned how the appellate court could put restrictions on the length of his argument before producing such a voluminous decision.

“They limit us to 15 pages for a statement of fact and they take, what, 70 pages?” he said. The appellate court’s decision on the complex case was no less than 87 pages long.

In his argument to the appellate court, Greenberg claimed the lead attorney for the murder trial, Joel Brodsky, was ineffective. Greenberg’s co-counsel for the appeal, Harold Krent, claimed 10 hearsay statements introduced at trial should never have been allowed as evidence.

Brodsky and Peterson, along with a Florida-based publicist, entered into a media contract soon after the disappearance of Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, in October 2007, Greenberg said. He argued that the ill-conceived idea to make money and gain fame was improper and against Peterson’s interests.

Greenberg also criticized Brodsky’s decision to call Savio’s divorce attorney, Harry Smith, as a witness at the murder trial. Brodsky had apparently hoped Smith’s testimony would sully Stacy’s character. Instead, Smith repeatedly hammered home to the jury that Stacy told him Peterson killed Savio. Jurors later said Smith’s testimony clinched the guilty verdict for them.

“It was so frankly boneheaded to do,” Greenberg said of Brodsky’s trial strategy.

On Friday, Greenberg said he will confer with Peterson before deciding his next step in attempting to win the disgraced Bolingbrook cop’s freedom.

Savio’s death was initially considered a freak bathing accident when she mysteriously turned up drowned in a dry tub. The authorities came to this conclusion despite a history of accusations by Savio that Peterson, a Bolingbrook police sergeant, had harmed and threatened her. The couple was also engaged in a contentious divorce and the police were called numerous times to intercede in their disagreements.

Still, investigators from the Illinois State Police found nothing suspicious about Savio’s death and quickly decided she was merely an unlucky victim of circumstance.

Savio, who was 40 when she died, was quickly forgotten but the police were forced to once more pay attention to her after Stacy vanished. Stacy, whose disappearance captured and held the attention of the national media for years, prompted the state police to quickly identify Peterson as a suspect in her “potential homicide.” Eight years later, the state police have yet to charge Peterson with actually harming her.

Doman remains resentful of the short shrift the state police gave to her sister’s death investigation after she was found drowned in 2004.

“It angers me, I have so much anger because of that still,” she said.

“A lot of people don’t realize how much we’ve suffered,” Doman said. “I hope (the investigators) aren’t doing any cases like this because it’s still a torment, how it happened.”

Even if he had triumphed in his appeal, Peterson faces new charges of solicitation of murder for hire and solicitation of murder. According to a criminal complaint, Peterson, while he was behind bars and serving his murder sentence, “procured” an unnamed person to “find another to kill” State’s Attorney Glasgow, the prosecutor who secured the guilty verdict in the Savio case.

That case remains pending in Downstate Randolph County court, where Peterson is locked up in maximum security Menard Correctional Center.

Doman said she feared for Glasgow’s safety when she learned of the alleged murder plot.

“I was very concerned about Jim because of Drew and his cronies and connections,” she said. “Drew has nothing to lose. He’s in jail and he’s staying in jail.”