‘We want survivors to know there is hope’
Family advocates for app that gives victims power
Norma Peterson is wellaware of how popular true crime is these days.
Fifteen years ago when her sister-in-law Stacy went missing, she was thrust squarely into the middle of a story that continues to make headlines.
As the aunt who helped care for Stacy’s small children, which included protecting them from a media onslaught, Norma has her own horror stories about what it was like to be a member of the family of the notorious Bolingbrook police sergeant who turned out to be responsible for so much violent devastation.
While she rarely mentioned the name of brother-in-law and convicted murderer Drew Peterson, Norma was in Aurora on Thursday - the day before the 15th anniversary of Stacy’s disappearance - to keep the still-missing mother’s name in the headlines.
Acknowledging several times the potent grief Stacy’s own family has endured all these years, she also asked that people “listen with an open heart, open mind,” to what it has been like “on the other side of the story.”
“We loved Stacy. We miss her. She was part of our family,” Norma Peterson said, emotions quickly overtaking her voice as she faced TV cameras and reporters a decade and a half later.
As they went through the nightmare, she noted, people expected their family “to rail against” Drew. But coming to grips with what he was capable of doing, she said, was extremely hard, “especially when you are being watched.”
So it was better “not to say anything” for fear of hurting people more. And besides, she added, “there was enough judgment ... there was nothing we could add
to change anything ... nothing that was going to make a difference.”
One of the reasons Norma Peterson decided to hold this remembrance event in Aurora was to change that narrative. It’s why the focus of her hour-long presentation was to emphasize “the good that came out of so much bad.”
Peterson was referring to her Aurora-based nonprofit Document the Abuse that was created by her and husband Paul to empower
victims of domestic violence through a web-based app that allows them to make an official record of their turbulent histories.
“We want survivors to know there is hope,” she insisted, while also acknowledging the nonprofit as part of “a healing process” for the family, including Anthony, Stacy’s son; and Tom, the oldest child of Kathleen Savio, the ex-wife Drew was convicted of murdering eight years after her body was discovered in a dry bathtub
and the death ruled accidental.
Both young men were at this event held at Society 57 in downtown Aurora to show support for what their aunt is doing.
“Part of the healing process is moving forward,” agreed Tom, adding that Norma’s nonprofit is “taking a nightmarish experience and making something beautiful out of it.”
But going forward also meant taking the audience back to the early morning of
Oct. 28, 2007, when Norma and Paul Peterson awoke to Stacy’s picture on their big screen TV with the news the 23-year-old mother of two was missing.
“He killed her,” Norma recalls telling her husband, convinced their sister-inlaw and Drew’s fourth wife would not have left her young children on her own volition.
That was also the morning they entered what Peterson described as “a fish bowl,” with scores of media planted at the end of the driveway of Drew’s Bolingbrook home, where “we were trying,” she insisted,
“to do what we could to protect the children, to protect what was left of our family.”
While Norma made it a point more than a few times to recognize what Stacy’s loved ones are going through, she also spoke frankly about the damage done to the Peterson family, who became quickly judged by a public hungry for dirt but with little regard for how many other victims Drew left in his path.
As years passed and Stacy’s still-unsolved disappearance led to the arrest, trial and conviction of Drew Peterson for Kathleen Savio’s 2004 death, “things that came out” finally revealed to them “the suffering” both women had been going through.
Hunting relentlessly in canals and in woods for Stacy’s body, Norma said, had become too painful, so she looked for other ways to make a difference.
It was while on that journey Peterson met author and violence expert Susan Murphy-Milano, who had became a national advocate for evidentiary abuse affidavits (EAA), which allow victims of abuse to officially document their histories so that hearsay testimony would not be the stumbling block it had become in Peterson’s murder trial.
Murphy-Milano died of cancer on the fifth anniversary of Stacy’s disappearance. But after a now-imprisoned Drew Peterson was convicted of plotting to have Will County State’s Attorney Jim Glasgow killed, she felt sure her vengeful brother-in-law would never be released on any appeal, and went public with her nonprofit plans to introduce EAAs to as many abuse victims as possible.
In the year since the launch of DocumentTheAbuse.com, hundreds have used the app, she proudly said, which only requires a username, password and the internet to file hospital and police reports, emails, texts and “anything to help corroborate” what those being abused are going through.
Which, she insisted, gives victims power and control over their own stories. Stepping into the public eye like this is giving control back to her family, as well.
Norma Peterson has not only appeared on multiple national true crime shows and traveled to other states to talk about Document the Abuse, locally she’s spoken to the Aurora Citizens Police Academy and is working with state’s attorneys in Kane, Kendall and DuPage counties to make EAAs another anti-violence tool.
Because there is no cost to victims, funding is critical, she added, while also expressing gratitude to the Aurora Women’s Empowerment Foundation for an $11,000 grant received earlier this year.
“We want to change the legacy so that Stacy and Kathy won’t be known as the victims of Drew Peterson but as two women who were able to change the outcomes of other victims,” said Norma.
“Forget the perpetrator who did this and remember their names going forward ... we will talk about it making a difference.”