RANDOLPH COUNTY (AP) — The former suburban Chicago police officer convicted of killing his third wife and suspected in his fourth spouse’s disappearance was in court Tuesday on charges of trying to hire someone to kill the prosecutor who helped put him in state prison.

Randolph County State’s Attorney Jeremy R. Walker and Attorney General Lisa Madigan today announced that defendant Drew Peterson waived his right to a preliminary hearing and entered a plea of not guilty in the state’s case charging him with one count of solicitation of murder for hire and one count of solicitation of murder.

Peterson, 61, an inmate at the Menard Correctional Center, waived his right to a preliminary hearing and entered the plea before Randolph County Circuit Judge Richard A. Brown.

The charges, both Class X felonies, allege that between September 2013 and December 2014, the defendant solicited an individual to carry out a murder-for-hire plot against Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow. The case is being jointly prosecuted by the Randolph County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.

Also today, the state filed a required notice disclosing the case involved the use of a court-ordered eavesdropping device on two occasions – from Oct. 24 to Nov. 23, 2014 and from Nov. 23 to Dec. 22, 2014.

Peterson, a former Bolingbrook police sergeant, has been in prison since being convicted in 2012 in Kathleen Savio’s bathtub drowning death eight years earlier. His fourth wife disappeared in 2007.

The murder-for-hire charges were filed in Randolph County, where Peterson is an inmate at the Menard Correctional Center.

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