INSIDE EDITION speaks to the woman who had been receiving love letters from her prison pen pal, notorious suspected killer Drew Peterson.
"I love Drew. I think he's a wonderful person," says Diana Grandel.
She's the love letter pen pal of Drew Peterson. Even as he sits in jail awaiting trail for murdering his ex-wife, former Illinois cop Drew Peterson is looking for love.
"He writes, 'I hope you're not a smoker. I want to spend a lot of time with my lips on yours when I get out of here.' That certainly sounds like he has romantic intentions," says INSIDE EDITION's Les Trent.
"Yeah. It does," says Grandel.
Grandel says she met Peterson when she was just 14 years old. She says he was one of the cops who came to her house on a domestic abuse call.
"I looked at him like, as my savior, my dad," she tells Trent.
Trent says, "He says: 'I wish you would have hunted me down when you turned 17 or 18. I'm sure we would have been together since.' That seems a little creepy that a guy would say that he wishes you could have gotten together when you were 17. Did you not think that was a little strange?"
"I probably didn't pay very much attention to it," Grandel explains.
She says she reached out to Peterson when he became front-page news, after he was charged with murdering his third wife, Kathleen Savio. His fourth wife Stacy is still missing and presumed dead. Peterson was acting strange, and he was so cocky as to tape the reporters waiting outside his home.
Grandel says, "I reached out to him. Because I couldn't believe that he could have killed his wife."
She showed INSIDE EDITION a dozen jailhouse love letters Peterson wrote to her, many of them sexually charged. He begged her to send him a picture of her in a bikini, which she did, wanted to know if she has any sexually transmitted diseases, and described in graphic detail what he wants to do with her in bed.
Ageing
"There's a lot of mail from him where he's looking for something from you other than just a friendship. He wants something sexy, he wants a little romance," observes Trent.
Grandel says, "He's a guy in jail. What do you expect?"
She happily exchanged letters with the accused killer for a full year. Then one day she lost all her things in an apartment fire. That's when she says Peterson wrote her something that finally freaked her out.
" 'Hi sweetie, I have an idea. Don't ask questions, just answer mine, ok? Tell me your sizes. Height, weight, body measurements, bra size.' Why did he want to know that?" Trent asks.
"He was going to offer me Stacy's clothes, purses, [and] personal items," says Grandel.
Peterson, who claimed his missing wife Stacy walked out on him for another man, tells Grandel that she can have all of his missing wife's clothes!
Trent asks, "What did you think about the idea of him offering the clothes of his missing wife?"
"Well at first, I was jumping up and down for joy because I thought I would have something, because I had absolutely nothing…until I made the analogy that you can't just leave all your stuff behind without yearning for it, needing it, and wanting it. How could you leave your pictures, your things, let alone your kids," Grandel says.
"Do you think that Drew Peterson had something to do with the disappearance of his wife?" asks Trent.
"Yes," Grandel says.
"Do you think he killed her?"
"Yes I do," she says.
Grandel has stopped any correspondence with Peterson, who denies any wrongdoing in either of his wives' cases.
