State police and the U.S. Coast Guard combed a canal adjacent to the Des Plaines River on Wednesday for clues into the disappearance of Stacy Peterson.
Divers searched a roughly one-mile portion of the Sanitary Drainage and Ship Canal between Romeoville and Lockport, concentrating in an area behind the Will County Power Plant. The canal runs parallel to the river.
While State police confirmed the search was related to the Peterson investigation, they wouldn't comment specifically on if divers were searching for evidence or Stacy herself.
"Whenever the investigation leads us to an area that investigators feel needs to be searched, it's done when it's feasible," said State Police Sgt. Tom Burek.
Since her disappearance in October of 2007, the focus of the investigation has been on her retired police officer husband, Drew. His attorney, Joel Brodsky, called Wednesday's search a waste of time.
"They did it all last summer," Brodsky said. They're doing it again, so I don't think it's of any significance."
But the spokeswoman of Stacy Peterson's family said that it's searches like these that give the family hope.
"I think what we can take from that is that they're still considering this a very important investigation, and that it's very active," said family spokeswoman Pam Bosco. "We believe she can be found yet, and so we want to put all our efforts into doing our searches. Yet we believe that eventually we will find Stacy."
Brodksy said that the search, coupled with an apparent leak of internal police documents about the day Stacy disappeared is an attempt to bait Drew Peterson into making a mistake. To Brodsky, that document is a detective's hour-by-hour timeline of what Drew Peterson was doing the day Stacy Peterson disappeared.
"I think that the state may be doing both of these things on the same day in order to provoke some sort of reaction from Drew," Brodsky said. "It's time for authorities to start pursuinig the possibility that Drew Peterson is telling the truth when he says Stacy ran away."
