Nearly nineteen years after Stacy Peterson vanished from her Bolingbrook home, the pastor who counseled her is speaking with renewed urgency about the warning signs that preceded her disappearance. Rev. Neil Schori sat down with CBS News Chicago during Domestic Violence Awareness Month to describe a couple’s counseling session with Stacy and Drew Peterson that ended in a moment he still describes as threatening. Schori links Stacy’s disappearance directly to a pattern of coercive control that experts now recognize as a precursor to lethal violence. Drew Peterson, the former Bolingbrook police sergeant, has never been charged in Stacy’s disappearance and has consistently denied any involvement.
The Couple’s Session That Left a Pastor on Edge
Schori counseled Stacy individually and also conducted a small number of joint sessions with the couple. The final joint session ended abruptly when Drew Peterson terminated the meeting in a manner that left Schori uneasy. “This is a police officer with weapons. It was a very, very scary moment,” Schori told CBS News Chicago. The pastor’s account places the moment within a broader context of escalating control that Stacy described but initially minimized.
Stacy characterized her husband’s behavior as ordinary marital friction. She told Schori that Drew accused her of affairs and defended his conduct by saying, “‘It was because Drew loves me so much’”. Schori pressed for specifics. Stacy recalled that a routine trip to the grocery store could trigger forty or fifty phone calls from Drew if she took too long. What Stacy called jealousy now fits the clinical framework of coercive control—a pattern of behavior designed to control and diminish another person.
Coercive Control as a Precursor to Disappearance
The timing of Schori’s interview matters. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and Stacy disappeared on October 28, 2007—a date that now functions as a grim annual marker. Schori argues that Stacy’s story is not merely a notorious true-crime narrative but a case study in the warning signs that communities still fail to recognize. Coercive control often precedes physical violence, and in relationships where the abuser holds a position of authority—such as a police officer—the barriers to escape multiply.
Stacy was thirty years younger than Drew when they met; she was a teenager and he was a veteran law enforcement officer. The power imbalance extended beyond age. Drew controlled the household, monitored her movements, and conditioned her to treat his surveillance as affection. Schori’s account illustrates how coercive control normalizes escalating intrusion until the target loses the vocabulary to name what is happening.
The Starbucks Confession and the Savio Murder
Two months before she vanished, Stacy met Schori at a Starbucks in Bolingbrook and disclosed what she had witnessed years earlier. She described waking in the night around the time of Kathleen Savio’s death in March 2004 and finding Drew gone. He returned at dawn dressed in black and carrying a bag; Stacy later saw him place the bag’s contents—including women’s clothing that was not hers—into the washing machine. Savio was found dead in her bathtub, and her death was initially ruled an accident.
Stacy told Schori that Drew had coached her for hours on what to tell investigators. When officers from Drew’s own department arrived to question her, they allowed Drew to sit beside her during the interview—a procedural failure Stacy described as horribly inappropriate. She provided an alibi. In Schori’s testimony at Drew’s 2012 murder trial, he recounted Stacy’s tearful admission that she had lied to police. Her disclosure—“He did it. Drew killed Kathleen and made it look like an accident”—became a central piece of hearsay evidence that the judge permitted the jury to hear.
A Legal Architecture Built on a Missing Witness
Stacy’s disappearance triggered the reexamination of Savio’s death. Investigators exhumed Savio’s body in November 2007, and a second autopsy reclassified the death as a homicide. Drew Peterson was arrested in May 2009 and convicted of first-degree murder in 2012. He received a thirty-eight-year sentence for Savio’s murder and an additional forty years for soliciting the murder of the prosecutor who tried him. He is now seventy-two years old and serving a seventy-eight-year term.
The legal paradox remains unresolved. The man convicted of killing his third wife has never been charged in the disappearance of his fourth. The Illinois State Police continues to classify Drew as the prime suspect in Stacy’s disappearance; a spokesperson confirmed in October 2026 that the case remains active and unsolved. Schori’s testimony provided the evidentiary bridge that prosecutors used to secure the Savio conviction, yet Stacy herself has never been found. Drew has maintained that Stacy ran off with another man, a claim her family and investigators reject.
- March 2004: Kathleen Savio found dead in her bathtub; death ruled accidental.
- August 2007: Stacy confides in Schori at a Starbucks; discloses Drew’s alleged confession and the coached alibi.
- October 28, 2007: Stacy Peterson vanishes from Bolingbrook; never found.
- November 2007: Savio’s body exhumed; death reclassified as homicide.
- September 2012: Drew Peterson convicted of Savio’s murder; later sentenced to thirty-eight years.
- 2016: Drew sentenced to an additional forty years for murder-for-hire plot.
- October 2026: Schori revisits the coercive-control warning signs in a CBS News Chicago interview.
What Drew Peterson’s Prison Status Means for the Stacy Peterson Case
Drew Peterson is incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center, and his appeals have been exhausted. His conviction for Savio’s murder is final. The absence of charges in Stacy’s case reflects the evidentiary difficulty of a no-body prosecution, not a lack of suspicion. Will County authorities have never named another suspect. Stacy’s sister, Cassandra Cales, has continued to organize searches and believes Stacy’s remains may be in a canal near the couple’s home.
Schori’s decision to speak again in October 2026 is not a legal maneuver. It is a public-education intervention. He told CBS News Chicago that Stacy’s story offers a “masterclass” in the warning signs of domestic abuse that society is only now learning to recognize. The pastor’s account moves the narrative away from the sensational details of Drew Peterson’s crimes and toward the structural failures that allowed a young mother to be isolated, surveilled, and ultimately silenced.
The Cultural Shift Around Coercive Control
Since Stacy’s disappearance, several states have enacted coercive-control legislation, and law enforcement training has begun to incorporate patterns of isolation, monitoring, and financial restriction alongside physical violence. Schori’s testimony in 2012 was among the first high-profile courtroom moments to translate those patterns into a narrative a jury could understand. Stacy described forty or fifty phone calls during a grocery run; today, that detail is legible as a control tactic rather than a romantic quirk.
The Peterson case also exposed the particular danger of officer-perpetrated domestic violence. When the abuser is a police officer, the target faces a closed loop: the person causing harm has access to weapons, knows the investigative process, and may have colleagues who extend informal deference. Stacy’s account of being interviewed with Drew seated beside her illustrates how that deference can compromise an investigation before it begins.
Why the Pastor’s Account Still Matters
Schori’s interview arrives at a moment when true-crime coverage often prioritizes the perpetrator’s psychology over the victim’s experience. By centering Stacy’s voice—her fear, her attempts to leave, her disclosure to a trusted counselor—Schori restores the human dimension that headlines can flatten. He has said he believes Stacy’s testimony helped secure justice for Kathleen Savio, and he continues to pray that Drew will confess what happened to Stacy.
That confession has not come. Drew Peterson has given interviews from prison, including a 2025 conversation with NewsNation in which he claimed he “had a thing” for Stacy; Schori responded that Drew “wants attention”. The pastor’s latest remarks are calibrated to redirect attention toward the warning signs that preceded the disappearance rather than the spectacle that followed it.
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Nearly two decades after Stacy vanished, the case remains open, the body has never been recovered, and the man convicted of killing his previous wife has never faced a jury for Stacy’s disappearance. Schori’s account does not resolve those facts. It does, however, provide a framework for understanding how coercive control operates before it becomes lethal—and why the signs Stacy described should have been recognized long before October 28, 2007.
VVIPTimes will continue to track verified developments in the Stacy Peterson case and the broader legal and cultural response to coercive control.
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