Monday, February 27, 2012
Friends, family and supporters of John Spira sent up hundreds of balloons during a ceremony to honor the missing St. Charles man.
The hundreds of red balloons sent skyward by the friends and family of John Spira read "Justice For John." But the missing man's sister said they held another message for those that might have seen them floating above Winnetka Saturday afternoon. "Those who did this can't rest easy. We're coming after you," said Stephanie McNeil, Spira's sister and the organizer of the event outside New Trier West High School, from which both she and her brother graduated. "We're coming after you and John will have justice," McNeil said before she and dozens of relatives and friends released balloons into the air. The event recognized the fifth anniversary of Spira's disappearance. The St. Charles resident was 45 when he vanished without a trace. He was …
Monday, February 20, 2012
It took years, but the sister of missing St. Charles man John Spira got another sign installed to raise awareness of her brother's case.
The first time Stephanie McNeil put up a sign for her missing brother, it didn't last through the weekend. The second sign she had installed didn't last much longer, and the third was taken down by forest preserve officials. Years passed and McNeil's brother John Spira, a popular St. Charles businessman and musician, remained missing. McNeil sometimes feared her brother would be forgotten. But today she gets the chance to remind the world that he has not been found and that whoever made him vanish has gone unpunished. "I'm totally ecstatic we've got (a sign) and the land owner agreed" to let it be posted on his property, McNeil said. The new sign will face Universal Cable Construction, the West Chicago business Spira co-owned with Winfield…
Monday, September 19, 2011
The sister of missing St. Charles man John Spira may have to seek a court order forcing the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department to follow a ruling handed down by the attorney general’s office.
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 …
Thursday, September 8, 2011
The DuPage County Sheriff’s Department has kept the family of missing St. Charles man John Spira in the dark about how they’ve handled his case. Spira’s sister forced them to shine some light on it.
In the more than four years since her brother mysteriously vanished without a trace, Stephanie McNeil has struggled with the DuPage County cops to find out what — if anything — they have been doing to find out what happened to him. McNeil resorted to filing a freedom of information request for DuPage County’s police reports on her brother John Spira’s disappearance, only to be denied on the grounds that the records remain "part of an on-going investigative file." But McNeil did not quit. She appealed the denial to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office. And she won. “They said it was an ongoing investigation — I figured there was nothing really going on,” McNeil said following the ruling by the attorney general’s office that …
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sided on the public's right to know in a similar appeal.
If the attorney general’s recent ruling on a Freedom of Information Act appeal is any indication, the Shorewood Police may not get the answer they are hoping for. The sister of a missing St. Charles man, Stephanie McNeil, won her appeal against the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department. She claimed that Sheriff Zaruba failed to reveal public information about the case. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan agreed, ruling that the sheriff's office should turn over the documents. That case involved the disappearance of John Spira who was 45 when he vanished in February 2007. In a parallel situation, the Shorewood Police have denied the public’s right to know details about the murder of David Wolfson in 1987. Patch requested the police report …
A.J. Hough
7:14 am on Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Has anyone thought of writing an article or calling the Northside "Reader" to do an exclusive on this story? The Reader is a KNOWN and free Chicago Northside news paper released every Friday afternoon. They have been known to write feature stories about missing persons and murder cases. This story needs to get ALL the way OUT to all of Chicagoland. The Reader is the very best and I have been … more ›