For those who watched Kathleen Savio come to class with a black eye and heard her worry that her husband was going to kill her, yesterday's guilty verdict for an ex-Bolingbrook, Ill., cop was the resolution they had long been waiting for.
Drew Peterson was convicted yesterday in the 2004 death of Savio, his third wife.
And for Savio's former nursing instructor, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution for speaking to the press, this verdict has been a long time coming.
"I knew he did it all along," the instructor told Business Insider in an exclusive interview.
She recalled a time Savio came to nursing class in 2003 with a black eye. When the instructor told Savio she couldn't treat patients while looking like that, "she said 'My husband beats me.'"
The instructor told Savio to go to the police, something the deceased mother of two knew wasn't an option.
"She said 'He is the police. They will do nothing,'" the instructor recalled, choking up when talking about her former student.
Savio soon dropped out of the program because of Peterson's abuse. She came back about a year later after she left her husband.
But she wasn't back in classes long before she died.
When she heard Will County State's Attorney James Glasgow was re-opening the investigation into Savio's death, which had originally been ruled an accidental drowning, the instructor got involved.
"The state police interviewed me because she told me he was going to kill her," she said.
For the instructor, Peterson's guilty verdict is the result she's long been waiting for.
"I've been sick over it this whole case," she said of the possibility Peterson could be acquitted.
But when the guilty verdict was read, the instructor "jumped up and started screaming" in celebration.
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