CHICAGO – Drew Peterson, appearing on the cover of People magazine on Friday, tells the publication he’s braced for his possible arrest.

“I believe the state’s attorney and the cops will be under scrutiny if they don’t arrest me, so I’m prepared for it,” he says in the magazine.

Peterson, 53 and married four times, is considered a suspect in the Oct. 28 disappearance of his wife, Stacy, 23.

The former police sergeant’s third wife, Kathleen Savio, died in her bathtub in March 2004. The death was ruled accidental, but her body was recently exhumed for more tests after the investigation was reopened.

Peterson describes in the magazine how the women in his life disappointed him.

He was the oldest of three children born to a “strict ex-Marine” and “diligent housewife,” according to a news release supplied by People.

“My dad would get up to go to the bathroom in the morning, and my mom would have the bed made,” Peterson said. “I expected all of my wives to be like my mom – meticulous housekeepers – and they weren’t.”

People reports that Peterson “teared up only once, when discussing the day Stacy disappeared,” in contrast to his first “Today” television show appearance, when he appeared to chuckle as he told Stacy to come home.

The ex-cop admitted to cheating on Savio with Stacy, telling People that when he learned, at age 47, that he was 30 years older than she, he was shocked. “But I was a lonely old man,” he told the magazine.

Peterson continued to blame his marital strife on Stacy Peterson’s menstrual cycle and “mood-altering medication”; her family has said she was taking medicine because of the stress he was causing in her life.

Pam Bosco, a spokeswoman for Stacy’s family, said she was disgusted by Peterson’s “narcissistic” comments, saying, “It’s just another nauseating (facet) of his personality.”

Bosco said Peterson constantly harassed his wife for spending time with her terminally ill sister Tina in the weeks before her death from cancer.

“He added the extra stress because he was jealous that she was gone all of the time attending to Tina,” Bosco said. “He thought she was having an affair. This is a man who needs a woman at a certain place at a certain time and then he goes off and does his own thing.”

She said Stacy did her best to keep house and take care of the two children but that her husband held her to an unfair standard.

“He had set ways of what a woman and a man should do,” she said.

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(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-11-21-07 2038EST