Fatal Vows: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson

Reviewed by Sara Porter

Fatal Vows is not really a whodunit at least as far as its author is concerned. It’s more of a howdunnit or a whydunnit.

In October 2007, Stacy Peterson disappeared from her home in suburban Chicago and never returned. Nor was her body ever recovered. Speculation ran high that her husband, former police sergeant Drew Peterson may have killed her.

Nobody could ever have accused the Peterson’s marriage as being perfect. Stacy was Peterson’s fourth wife whom he had began seeing while still married to his third wife, Kathleen. Kathleen herself came to a messy end, found dead in her shower two and a half years before Stacy disappeared.

Peterson and Stacy’s marriage was a series of fights, abuses towards Stacy, jealousies, and suspicious natures. This is the type of marriage that not only should have ended in divorce, but perhaps never should have happened in the first place.

Peterson is definitely the villain of the piece, according to Hosey. Hosey writes Peterson almost as a caricature: the violent tempered husband who gets away with murder. He dominates and bullies Stacy to the point of hysteria. When she attends her sister’s funeral, Peterson only assumes that she attends just to get back together with an old boyfriend.

He sleeps with the women who would become his wives before the ink is dry on his previous marriages. If this were a murder mystery, Peterson would be the most likely to murder and therefore not the murderer, but because this is based on real life, he is just as hard to fathom. It’s not enough to wonder whether Peterson killed his fourth wife, but it is enough to wonder what she ever saw in him.

Stacy is every bit the innocent victim in this story. A 17-year-old bride when she married Peterson, Stacy bore him two children and adopted Peterson’s sons from a previous marriage. She is naïve and childlike in the early chapters and tortured in the later ones. She becomes obsessed with keeping Peterson once they are married. She gets cosmetic surgery, cuts friends and family out of her life, and fits many of the patterns of an abused wife. Hosey seems to imply that Stacy stayed with Peterson out of a need to compensate for an unhappy childhood, but Peterson is so reprehensible that it’s hard to believe.

Fatal Vows tells a story of a marriage gone wrong. Like many tell-alls it doesn’t tell us what we haven’t already heard dozens of times on T.V. or in the Internet. But it gives us the inside information on who the Petersons were, and why they should never have been together.