Hickory Street Killers High on Bath Salts: Fellow Inmate

This story was written by Crime Editor Joseph Hosey.

Jamie Katro was locked up in the Will County jail for four months when the cops brought in two young men and two young women in connection with a brutal double murder on Hickory Street.

“They were in the holding cell laughing about the incident,” Katro said of Alisa Massaro, 19, and Bethany McKee, 18, in a letter to Patch. “I guess they were still high and then they put one in protective custody in F-pod and kept the other in medical.”

Katro, 35, said Massaro and McKee were out of their minds on bath salts, the potent hallucinogen sold over the counter at tobacco shops, convenience stores and other establishments before it was outlawed in 2011.

Katro recalled McKee telling how she and her three pals “were so (messed) up on that (stuff) they sell in gas stations, at least they used to. It's called bath salt. They sniffed it for days apparently and she doesn't remember anything. She said that she thought she had lost her mind literally and she now only gets flashbacks on the events that occurred. I guess she's going to plea out eventually.”

Katro has since been transferred from the county jail to Logan Correctional Center in Downstate Lincoln. She is doing time for aggravated driving under the influence and driving with a revoked or suspended license convictions out of Cook County. Her Will County cases are still pending.

Katro related her experiences with Massaro and McKee in the letter and during an interview at the prison.

Katro said jail officials tried to keep the two alleged killers away from each other and the rest of the facility’s population, but they still had contact with other inmates. Massaro and McKee spoke with other prisoners when they were being prepared for trips to court, she said, and other prisoners in segregation communicated with them by yelling from their cells.

“That’s all they do in seg,” said Katro, who was there herself. Katro also said correctional officers told them about the two alleged Hickory Street killers, whose male counterparts—Joshua Miner, 24, and Adam Landerman, 19—also are in custody at the county jail.

“They said, ‘There’s something wrong with that girl. She don’t care,’” Katro said jail guards told her of Massaro. In fact, Katro said, Massaro believed the two men she is charged with murdering—Eric Glover and Terrance Rankins, both 22—got what was coming to them.

“She even said that she didn't regret it, they deserved what they got,” Katro said of Massaro.

Massaro’s supposed lack of regret was evident in statements she reportedly made to police about having sex with Miner on top of the slain men’s bodies. Miner also wanted to keep the teeth of the dead men as trophies, according to police reports obtained exclusively by Patch.

McKee, on the other hand, was upset by what happened that January night in the Hickory Street house Massaro shared with her father, Phillip Massaro, Katro said.

“She’s sad about it,” Katro said. “She doesn’t remember everything that happened (but) she’s sad about it.”

McKee’s memory loss was due to her abuse of bath salts before the killings, Katro said. But as the night's events returned to her in jagged flashbacks, she became increasingly despondent.

The Will County judge presiding over the murder case against Massaro, McKee, Miner and Landerman imposed a gag order not only on the attorneys working the case, but any government agency with even tangential involvement. Deputy Chief Ken Kaupas of the Will County Sheriff’s Department cited the gag order when declining to comment on Katro’s claims about Massaro and McKee while she was in the jail with them.

The double murder, which Joliet Police Chief Mike Trafton called "one of the most brutal, heinous, really upsetting things” he had seen in his career, gained the two young women great notoriety in the county jail, Katro said.

“I was just looking at them, but the other girls, they were like, ‘How could you do this?’” Katro said. “A lot of people wanted to beat them up.”

And the high-profile murders had a lot of women in the jail claiming a connection with Rankins and Glover.

“So many inmates were acting out on it, like, ‘I knew them,’” she said. “I met like three girls who said, ‘That was my boyfriend.’”

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