The sister of Stacy Peterson, the 23-year-old Bolingbrook mother of two who remains missing after vanishing more than 10 years ago, claimed Wednesday to know the location of Peterson's body and said she has sonar images to prove it.
"I have sonar images of her lifeless body on the bottom of the riverbed, which I will never release," Cassandra Cales wrote in a lengthy Facebook post. "That is not how I want the world to remember my beautiful sister."
Cales said she believes her sister's husband, Drew Peterson, a former Bolingbrook police sergeant, "disposed" of her body on Oct. 28, 2007, "in the Sanitary and Shipping Canal, after having dropped off his step-brother."
Cales asked in the post for donations to help her recover her sister's remains, to bring them "home to get her the proper burial she deserves."
Drew Peterson was sentenced to 38 years in prison in 2013 for the death of his third wife, Kathleen Savio, who was found dead in a dry bathtub in 2004. Savio's death was initially ruled accidental, but the case was reopened after the disappearance of Stacy Peterson, his fourth wife.
Drew Peterson remains a suspect in Stacy Peterson’s disappearance, though he has never been charged in the case. He is also serving a 40-year sentence after a conviction for soliciting the murder of James Glasgow, the Will County prosecutor who put him behind bars.
Cales said in the Facebook post she spends much of her free time searching for her sister and notes her income is split between bills and "search efforts."
"In all of my research and investigating and figuring out Drew’s timeline, travel, and whereabouts; I know the truth," she said. "It has come time for me to share with the world what I know, as I will no longer bite my tongue and wait."
She said she has "fought this fight for my sister alone as I trust very few," voicing distrust for law enforcement that she said never worked with her and who she said later in the post "messed up in 2007 and never sent divers down to recover her body."
She said she decided to write the lengthy post because she said the Will County State’s Attorney and Illinois State Police "are moving forward to charge Drew, in the near future and without her body, for the murder of my sister."
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Neither the Will County State’s Attorney nor the Illinois State Police responded to request for comment.
"That is not justice for me, not justice for her, and definitely not justice for her children," she wrote, pointing to people she said are profiting off of her sister's death through TV shows, a movie and interviews.
Cales has long been vocal about the search for her sister. On the 10th anniversary of Peterson's disappearance last October, she held a fundraiser to pay for Team Watters Sonar, which has helped look for Peterson.
As for the sonar images, Cales said they "already made it into the wrong hands of some of my past 'searchers' back when I trusted people and thought they were trying to help."
While she didn’t expand on who she was referring to, she said law enforcement in 2007 chose to pull cars out of the shipping channel in a different area from where Cales said her sister's remains were located.
"If law enforcement would have done their job, I would have had my sisters body home, in the flesh, 22 days after Drew murdered her," she wrote. "I would not be where I am at today spending everything I have to retrieve her skeletal remains."
