Hosey: Sister’s search for Stacy Peterson not over

You wouldn’t think a corpse, or much of anything else for that matter, would stay in the same stretch of a canal for nearly 14 years.

Water moves, after all, and of course there are barges and boats that might knock about a body, or even a blue barrel holding a body.

If you were to drop a body or barrel in, say, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal 14 years or so ago, it’s reasonable to imagine it might have moved a bit and may even have found its way down to the Gulf of Mexico by now.

Currents and barges aside, the sister of Stacy Peterson, Cassandra Cales, believes she’s still in the same general area of the canal since she vanished in October 2007. In fact, Cales claims she first found the body just 22 days after Stacy disappeared.

Cales said she found Stacy another four times over the years, most recently in May, but couldn’t convince the cops to try recovering her remains until Tuesday.

“It’s been a circus since Day 1 with the state police,” Cales said.”I’m treated like a criminal. Even yesterday at the canal.”

No human remains were located that day. Cales blames the law for waiting too long and not looking hard enough.

“The area wasn’t cleared to my standards, so I will be back,” she said.

In the meantime, Cales started a GoFundMe page in hopes of bankrolling an independent recovery effort.

“What happened yesterday, so be it,” Cales said. “They had their chances.”

At the time of her disappearance, Stacy was 23 and married to Bolingbrook police Sgt. Drew Peterson. She was Peterson’s fourth wife and 30 years his junior.

After Stacy vanished, the state police labeled Peterson the only suspect in her “potential homicide,” but he was never charged with anything, even with his stepbrother telling how he helped Peterson carry a blue barrel he believed contained Stacy’s body out of the Petersons’ home.

While Stacy was never found and no one was held responsible for her disappearance, her case did draw renewed attention to the wife before her, Kathleen Savio, who was found drowned in a dry bathtub in March 2004.

Curiously, the state police decided Savio perished in a bathing mishap and closed the book on her. Then Stacy disappeared three and a half years later and Savio’s passing suddenly seemed a bit more suspicious to them.

Peterson was charged with murdering Savio almost two years after Stacy disappeared. He was found guilty and sentenced to 38 years in prison.

Peterson is 67 now and still has 26 of those 38 years left to serve, which might be why he was never charged in connection with Stacy’s disappearance. Still, Peterson’s certain death behind bars did not stop Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow from pushing for charges against Peterson for supposedly plotting from prison to have him killed. So it’s probably some other reason.

If it’s because no one has been able to bring back Stacy’s body, Cales says she won’t stop working on that.

“I’m not going to stop,” she said.

“Drew should have killed me first, then he wouldn’t be in this situation,” Cales said. “Then again, I should have killed him first.”

• Joe Hosey is the editor of The Herald-News. You can reach him at 815-280-4094, at jhosey@shawmedia.com or on Twitter @JoeHosey.