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…
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
In secret police reports obtained by Patch, detectives say the business partner of missing man John Spira painted a negative picture of the vanished man — one Spira's sister vehemently disputes.
The business partner of missing St. Charles man John Spira accused him of racking up “massive debt” in “excess of $1 million,” and speculated that this prompted him to skip town, according to police reports recently obtained by Patch. Spira’s partner at Universal Cable Construction, David Stubben, also theorized that Spira “might have been taking money from the business” and “would not rule out” that the missing man had something to do with a suspicious fire that gutted the company building nine months after he vanished, the reports said. The DuPage County Sheriff’s Department surrendered about 350 pages of reports on Spira’s February 2007 disappearance following a request made under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Spira’s sister…
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 …
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Let's look at last week.
It's time for the Shorewood Rewind. We usually enjoy writing the rewind. It gives us a chance to look back at all the great things that happened during the week and to take pleasure in what a great place Shorewood is. But we don't really feel like doing it today. Let's just get on with it. It was Labor Day. The Shorewood Patch showed off some of the hottest properties in Shorewood. Shorewood Patch columnist Erin Gallagher gave us her take on outfitting a 4-year-old girl with "boob and butt padding" in preparation for a beauty contest. The DuPage County Sheriff's Department failed to unravel the mystery of what befell missing St. Charles man John Spira. Then they failed to withhold information on the case from Spira's sister. The sister, …
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 …
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
The detectives from the DuPage County Sheriff's Office have had few questions and little contact with John Spira's sister, brother, mother, father, girlfriend and best friend since the St. Charles businessman mysteriously vanished in 2007.
Stephanie McNeil wants more than anything to know what happened to her brother on that night he vanished without a trace more than four years ago. She also wouldn’t mind finding out what the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office has been up to for all this time while supposedly investigating the disappearance of her brother, St. Charles businessman John Spira. The Sheriff’s Office is refusing to tell McNeil, and is stonewalling her by claiming the case is active and open. But is it? Spira’s wife, Suzanne Spira, whom McNeil long suspected knew more about her brother’s disappearance than she was letting on, died in October. If the police had any idea of Suzanne Spira's passing, they did not share this information with McNeil or her family. But …
Sunday, May 15, 2011
The temperature is heating up, and so is the Shorewoodland area. Let's take a look at everything that happened last week.
Shorewood was hot this week, in every sense of the word. But that's the way we like it. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the Shorewood. We here at the Shorewood Patch CAN take the heat. That's one of the reasons we're so great. And we have to be great. Because this town won't accept anything less. You deserve the best, and the Shorewood Patch gives it to you. Every day. So let's take a look back at what we gave you last week. It's going to be even better the second time around as we check it out again with the Shorewood Rewind: Christopher Vaughn's two lawyers left him high and dry. The attorneys — John Rogers of St. Louis and Gerald Kielian of Joliet — were not able to rake in the money from the state's Capital Litigation Fund any…
Sunday, May 8, 2011
This week was so wonderful we wish we could live through it again. Let's do the next best thing with the Shorewood Rewind.
Shorewood is the greatest place on earth. It's true and you know it, so there's no sense in arguing. There is nowhere better than Shorewood. Still, for as irrefutably fantastic as Shorewood is universally recognized to be, every once in a while the most important stuff happens elsewhere. We know that's hard to believe but trust us, things play out that way from time to time. Case in point was last week. Some amazing, historic events unfolded, and they happened to unfold outside Shorewood. What's that? You want proof? Well, we'll give you your proof. It's all right here for you to look at. But in order to show you, we're going to have to get a little crazy this time and take things outside the box — the box of magnificence that is Shorewood…
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 ›