Stacy Peterson’s sister wants to raise $250,000

The sister of missing woman Stacy Peterson launched a GoFundMe page in hopes of raising $250,000.

"All monies donated will be used to continue the search for my sister, retrieve her remains, and provide her a proper funeral service and burial," Stacy's sister, Cassandra Cales, said on the GoFundMe page.

“Anything extra will be used to pay off debts accumulated from this search over the last decade,” Cales said.

Cales claims volunteer searchers located Stacy's body at the bottom of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal
22 days after she disappeared in October 2007. She said she went to the Illinois State Police with this information but they refused to recover the body.

The state police did eventually go into the canal for Stacy’s remains, Cales said, but not where she told them the body was seen.

“They did a blind dive,” Cales said. “Just to say they did something.”

Trooper DeAnn Falat, a District 5 state police spokeswoman, referred questions about Cales' claims to
Zone 3 Investigations. Nobody from Zone 3 answered the phone nor responded to messages.

Stacy was only 23 when she vanished. Her husband, 53-year-old Drew Peterson, was a sergeant with the Bolingbrook Police Department at the time of her disappearance.

Stacy was Peterson’s fourth wife. His third wife, Kathleen Savio, was found drowned in a dry bathtub in March 2004.

Savio and Peterson were in the midst of a contentious divorce when she drowned. The Illinois State Police investigated Savio’s death and quickly determined she perished in a freak bathtub accident.

After Stacy disappeared, the state police reopened Savio’s death investigation. Her body was exhumed from its grave and additional postmortem testing was conducted.

Peterson was charged with Savio’s homicide a year and a half later. He was found guilty of murder in 2012 and sentenced to 38 years in prison.

The state police identified Peterson as a suspect in Stacy’s “potential homicide,” but he has never been charged with harming her.

Peterson was charged and convicted of plotting – while he was incarcerated in maximum security Menard Correctional Center – to have Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow killed. Peterson was sentenced to another 40 years behind bars for his supposed homicide scheme.

Peterson is locked up in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Cales, on her GoFundMe page and in a telephone interview, insisted that prosecutors now are planning to charge Peterson with killing her sister without first recovering her remains. The charges are imminent, she said, but she does not want to see this happen.

“That is not justice for me, not justice for her, and definitely not justice for her children,” Cales said.

Charles B. Pelkie, the spokesman for the state’s attorney’s office, said that while the “case is under review, there are no immediate plans to charge” Peterson with Stacy’s homicide.

“State’s Attorney Glasgow has said, on multiple occasions over the past year, and possibly longer, that we will meet with state police and review the case with state police with an eye toward possibly charging it,” Pelkie said.

On the GoFundMe page, Cales said she has already raised $415 in donations made through PayPal. As of Wednesday afternoon, $160 of the $250,000 Go Fund Me target had been realized.