Woman says she was questioned in Peterson case

April 16, 2009
By Joe Hosey

Bolingbrook--A local woman says state police paid her a visit while she was doing time in Dwight Correctional Center and grilled her about what she knows of Stacy Peterson's disappearance.

The woman, 31-year-old Jamie Katro, did not tell them much during the two-hour interview.

"No — uh, uh, nothing," Katro said of what she told troopers when they questioned her in late February. "To me, that's what they're getting paid for. Let them do their job."

But Katro says she has heard a few things about what may have befallen Peterson, who vanished in October 2007 and has been the subject of a massive and lengthy state police investigation.
"Like she's not at the bottom of a lake," Katro said. "I heard they ran her through a funeral home and cremated her, her ashes."

Katro said she has never met Peterson or her husband, Drew Peterson, who is the only suspect named in the case worked up by the state police, and that her knowledge of the matter is at best secondhand.

"A lot of it's just hearsay, from what I hear," she said. Katro was released from prison last month. She was doing time for drugs and obstructing justice convictions when the state police showed up.

She figures her mail was monitored and some of her correspondence raised red flags. Katro specifically believes a Christmas card sent by Anthony "Bindy" Rock, a convicted cop killer reputed to have ties to organized crime, got the state police worked up enough to come down and see her in Dwight.

"What got them really interested was Bindy wrote his daughter was mad at him because she thought he had something to do with the ... Peterson murder," she said.

Rock has links to Drew Peterson. In fact, Rock was a central figure in an unsanctioned undercover investigation Peterson undertook while he was on loan from the Bolingbrook Police Department to the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad in 1985. That investigation led to Peterson's indictment on charges of official misconduct and failure to report a bribe.

Peterson was fired following his indictment when the Bolingbrook Police and Fire Commission found him guilty of those charges, as well as disobedience and conducting a self-assigned investigation. The criminal charges were eventually dropped and Peterson ended up getting his job back.

When asked about Katro and her questioning by the state police, Rock declined to comment.
Likewise, state police Sgt. Juan Valenzuela said he was precluded from commenting about ongoing investigations and witness interviews. He would not confirm or deny whether Katro was interviewed.

Katro said she was reluctant to sit down with the state police. "I didn't want nothing to do with them," she said. "I just told them Bindy was like an uncle to me. He's helped me out, got me work."

And even though Katro hears things, she says she has learned not to ask too many questions.
"I just don't want to know," she said. "Especially when you're dealing with those kind of people. When you know too much, sometimes those people disappear."