DuPage County Cops Still Not Abiding By AG’s Decision

Stephanie McNeil has waited more than four and a half years for the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department to figure out what happened to her missing brother. Now she’s waited more than a month for the sheriff to make good on a ruling from the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.

I’m not surprised about that,” McNeil said of the department’s delay in turning over the police reports on her brother’s case.

McNeil said she has received little — if any — information or cooperation since her brother John Spira disappeared in February 2007, and none at all following her successful appeal of their refusal to share information on her brother’s case Aug. 12.

“I thought they would take a long time,” said McNeil, who grew up in Winnetka but now lives in Phoenix.

“I just hope they send the documents like they’ve been instructed to do by the attorney generals’ office,” she said. “I just hope they don’t redact them so much we can’t read them.”

If the DuPage County sheriff fails to comply with the ruling from Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office, McNeil said she will pursue a “binding order” forcing the department to surrender the information.

McNeil first requested the information directly from the sheriff’s department but was denied. The department claimed the records remain "part of an on-going investigative file."

McNeil was unconvinced. In fact, she has long doubted the sheriff’s department was actually investigating her brother’s disappearance.

From the beginning, McNeil said, detectives speculated that her brother ran off and, for some unexplained reason, remained in hiding.

McNeil has said she finds this “insulting.”

Spira was 45 when he disappeared. He was last seen at the West Chicago office of his cable construction company, where he left his parked car.

At the time of his disappearance, Spira, an accomplished blues musician who went by the stage name "Chicago Johnny," was in the midst of a tumultuous divorce, McNeil said. He and his wife, Suzanne Spira, were living in the same St. Charles home throughout their divorce proceedings and the domestic arrangement was “hellish,” McNeil said.

Suzanne Spira died in her Orchard Park, NY, apartment Oct. 30. McNeil, who insisted for years that her brother's estranged wife knew more about his disappearance than she was letting on, learned of her death six months later from one of Suzanne Spira’s associates.

It is unclear of the sheriff’s department had any idea Suzanne Spira died before McNeil told them about it in May.

Along with depriving her of information and, in her view, neglecting to investigate her brother’s disappearance, McNeil questioned why the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department has refused to ask the FBI for assistance.

“I asked them to get the FBI involved and they said they’re not going to do that,” McNeil recalled.

Asked if anyone from the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department gave a reason for keeping the FBI out, she said, “Because they’re doing such a good job on their own.”

The FBI issue came up again when a relative recently showed McNeil the bureau’s website for kidnapped and missing persons. McNeil saw no mention of her brother’s case on the site and called the FBI to find out why.

FBI spokeswoman Cynthia Yates explained that her agency cannot put Spira’s case on the site unless the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department requests it.

“We can’t just step into other jurisdictions,” Yates said, pointing out that the FBI does lend its vast resources to local departments when asked for assistance.

Dawn Domrose, the spokeswoman for the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department, failed to respond to questions about why the FBI has not been brought into the case. Likewise, Domrose failed to explain the delay in complying with the decision from the attorney general’s office.

McNeil said pleading with the DuPage County cops to have her brother’s case forwarded to the FBI is beyond her at this point, and that she doubts they would do it anyway.

“I don’t even want to waste my time asking,” she said.