Crime & Safety

State Cops & FBI Searching For Stacy Peterson in Hammel Woods

A helicopter, police dogs, state cops and federal agents were searching for missing mom Stacy Peterson in Hammel Woods Monday.

Federal agents and state cops searched through Hammel Woods forest preserve in Shorewood Monday looking for signs of missing mom Stacy Peterson.

READ MORE: 

  • Hammel Woods Search For Stacy Peterson: Day 4
  • Search For Stacy Peterson Day 3: FBI & ISP & A Dog
  • FBI & State Police's Search For Stacy Turns Soggy

A state police source confirmed that the operation—which included at least one helicopter and police dogs—was part of the search effort for the Bolingbrook mother, who disappeared in October 2007.

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Weeks after Stacy vanished, state police officials named her husband, Drew Peterson, 58, as the sole suspect in the investigation the then-23-year-old's disappearance.

Peterson has never been charged with harming Stacy, but was convicted in September of .

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Savio, the third of Peterson's four wives, was found drowned in her dry bathtub in March 2004. The state police quickly concluded Savio perished in a freak accident but were forced re-examine that theory after Stacy mysteriously disappeared.

Prior to the search, the state police told forest preserve officials they were doing nothing more in Hammel Woods than training, said Bruce Hodgdon, the spokesman for the Will County Forest Preserve.

Joan Hyde, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Chicago office, confirmed that agents were in Hammel Woods "working with ISP as part of an ongoing criminal investigation."

The state police source said the operation was not prompted by a recent tip or breakthrough in the investigation, but was merely one of a number of periodic searches. These searches are conducted in areas that investigators believe Stacy's body may have been left, and Shorewood contains a number of them.

Peterson's stepbrother, Thomas Morphey, has said Peterson enlisted him in an effort to frame former Shorewood resident Scott Rossetto for Stacy's murder. Peterson believed Stacy and Rossetto were carrying on romantically behind his back, Morphey and other sources have said.

Officials have said they found cell phone activity from Stacy's cell phone in the Shorewood area around the time she disappeared.


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