Drew Peterson Juror Speaks, Says Trial Was Emotionally Draining

CHESTER, IL — Justin Lanton figured it wasn’t just another day at the Randolph County Courthouse when he showed up for jury duty and saw federal marshals, FBI agents and assault rifles.

“I knew it was something kind of high profile, said the 25-year-old resident of Sparta, a small southern Illinois town.

When he got into the courtroom and saw the defendant, Lanton still wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.

“At first, I didn’t know who he was because it’s been so long since he was on the news,” Lanton said.

And then he learned the defendant was Drew Peterson, and he made the connection.

Lanton was picked for the jury that found Peterson guilty of plotting the murder of Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow from behind the bars of Menard Correctional Center. Glasgow led Peterson’s prosecution in 2012 and got him sentenced to 38 years in prison for drowning his third wife, Kathleen Savio.

The trial lasted six days, and for three of them, the jury listened to hour after hour of secretly recorded conversations between Peterson, 62, and 25-year-old convict Antonio “Beast” Smith.

Smith befriended Peterson behind bars, only to betray him by urging prosecutors to let him wear a wire and record their talks.

Peterson is never heard on the recording explicitly ordering Glasgow’s murder, but Lanton said he and his fellow jurors firmly believed he wanted the prosecutor dead.

“He didn’t say anything about ‘kill’ or ‘murder,’ but you don’t have to be intelligent to know what he is saying on the tapes,” said Lanton, who is in the process of starting up his own Farmers Insurance agency.

“Peterson’s an intelligent man,” he said. “You could tell he was making it hard for him to be incriminated.”

Lanton said he and other jurors weren’t completely convinced of Peterson’s guilt when they began deliberations.

“Some of us were on the fence and I was too,” he said. “It’s kind of like a set up at first. It’s kind of like, is Beast trying to set him up?”
The 12 came to a conclusion quickly, sending word that they had a verdict in less than an hour.

“He is guilty, obviously. You hear him talking about it, you hear him talking about the money,” he said.

“It would be hard to take Antonio’s word for it,” he said of the fat, slope-shouldered bespectacled snitch who recorded Peterson, but, “The tapes can’t lie.”

The days of reading along from a transcript as he listened to Peterson and Beast talk and talk talk — often with other inmates shouting, barbells clanging and basketballs thumping in the background — took a toll on Lanton.

“It was just emotionally draining, listening to all the wire tapes,” he said. “When I got home I was just exhausted.”

The tapes may have been tiresome, but they also proved educational.

“I learned more about prison terms and convicted murderers that I ever thought I would in my life,” he said.

On top of the grind of just getting through the tapes, some of the jurors found them offensive.

“Oh yeah,” Lanton said. “Some of the women. They were like, ‘He and Beast definitely degrade women.’”

After spending a week in a front-row seat watching what has to be the most notorious criminal trial in the area’s recent history, Lanton did not realize the significance of what he’d seen until it was all over. The judge had ordered him and the other jurors to stay off the Internet and avoid media coverage until the conclusion of the trial, and Lanton complied.

And few among his friends and family knew what was he up to the week and a half either, as he was not allowed to talk about it.

“Not too many people knew,” he said, although a friend noticed his car on the television news as he was driving to the courthouse behind the motorcade transporting Peterson to the trial.

Lanton said he remembered watching the media accounts of Peterson’s 2012 murder trial, how the brash former cop “had an arrogant smile or laugh when he went for his first case.”

Now that he’s spent a few years in prison, he feels Peterson appeared a lot less cocky. And hearing the recordings of his good friend Beast probably didn’t help either.

“Embarrassed, stupid, maybe just hurt,” Lanton said of watching Peterson as he listened to the recordings. “Like, ‘This guy was my buddy.’”