Death Foretold

BOLINGBROOK, Ill.Kathleen Savio predicted her own murder. She told her sister it would be made to look like an accident. She even named her killer, her ex-husband, police sergeant Drew Peterson.

Not long afterward, Kathleen Savio, 40, was found deaddrowned in a bathtub, her long dark hair matted with blood from a one-inch gash on the back of her head.

The county coroner ruled her death an accident.

She was Drew Peterson's third wife. With Kathleen's death, Drew Peterson got control of a million-dollar life insurance benefit for the couple's two sons, and he inherited all of his ex-wife's money and property, including her suburban Chicago home and her half of their joint business investments.

Kathleen's dire prediction to her sister was not the first time she foretold her own murder. In November 2002, two years before her death when her divorce from Peterson was at its nastiest, Kathleen wrote to the Will County State's Attorney's Office, begging the prosecutor to charge Peterson with breaking into her home and holding a knife to her throat.

Kathleen wrote that her police sergeant ex-husband was furious over having to pay her child support. "He knows how to manipulate the system, and his next step is to take my children away," Kathleen wrote. "Or kill me instead."

In the end, prosecutors now say, he did both. Three years later, Drew Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy, disappeared.