For the first time since her brother disappeared 20 months ago, Stephanie McNeil can say she knows where her brother is not.

Last weekend, McNeil teamed with friends and family of missing Bolingbrook women Stacy Peterson and Lisa Stebic, and with several professional search teams to try to find clues to the whereabouts her brother, John Spira of St. Charles. After three days of water and ground searches, the group covered more than 1,000 acres in the West Chicago area.

“We’ve done a couple of good searches, but I’ve never felt like we’ve done a search well enough where we could definitely cross it off our list and we did get that done this time,” McNeil said.

Spira, an accomplished blues musician and an aviation and racing enthusiast, was last seen at about 7 p.m. Feb. 23, 2007, at his business, Universal Cable Construction, in unincorporated DuPage County near West Chicago. Around that time, he called a friend to confirm their 8:30 p.m. dinner in Oak Brook.

Spira never arrived to the dinner, nor did he make it to a gig the next night with his blues band, the Rabble Rousers. His family said he hadn’t missed a gig in more than 25 years.

Months passed and the case went cold. Then in September 2007, Spira’s business mysteriously went up in flames. While investigating the fire, McNeil learned someone also had dismantled and removed a large missing person billboard that friends had hung up across the street from the business just days before the fire.

McNeil and her family had hoped the fire would provide clues about her brother’s disappearance. But the fire failed to produce leads in the investigation, led by the DuPage County sheriff’s department. Arson investigators have not determined the cause of the fire.

The only option left, McNeil said, is to try to find her brother.

“It’s really hard for me to be living my life in Phoenix, thinking no one is looking and nothing is getting done,” McNeil said. “I feel the need to come out and look. He deserves that, he deserves to be looked for and he definitely deserves to get some justice.”

And from now on, volunteers are working to make sure McNeil will have support whenever she organizes a search. Stacy Peterson search leader Roy Taylor, Lisa Stebic’s family and Aerial Image Inc. founder Sean Henady all volunteered last weekend. Henady hopes the group can continue compiling technology to assist in future searches.

“We’re trying to come together with as many tools as possible,” Henady said. “So, even when there’s resolution in John’s case or Lisa’s case or Stacy’s case, the tools will still be available in the next effort for the next family.”