6 replies to this topic

[Lori Davis]

http://abclocal.go.c...article-9161001

Joliet waitress Anne Gay missing more than 3 weeks

Wednesday, July 03, 2013


Anne Gay (WLS Photo)
 
July 3, 2013 (JOLIET, Ill.) (WLS) -- Police in Joliet are looking for a waitress who has been missing for more than three weeks.

The Herald News reports that family and friends last saw Anne Gay on June 9, and she didn't go to work the next day after her shift at Louis' Family Restaurant in Joliet.

Police are asking anyone with information to call the Will County Sheriff's Department at (815) 727-8574.

[Lori Davis]

http://wgntv.com/201...g-joliet-woman/

Family and friends search for missing Joliet woman
July 28, 2013
by Andrea Darlas
Reporter

Family and friends of a missing Joliet woman held a search again today.

Anne Gay, 52,  was reported missing June 22 by her boyfriend, but her family says they haven’t heard from her since June 9th.

The home she rented with her boyfriend exploded and burned July 13th.

Her boyfriend, James Borg, was critically burned in that arson.

Fire officials say the fire was intentionally set and there was evidence that the gas line to the home’s dryer has been tampered with.

Investigators say Borg is a suspect in Gay’s disappearance, but he is still unable to speak with investigators.

Police are asking anyone with information to call the Will County Sheriff's Department at (815) 727-8574. 

[Lori Davis]

http://chicago.cbslo...up-their-house/

Missing Woman’s Boyfriend Charged With Blowing Up Their House
October 23, 2013 6:15 AM

JOLIET, Ill. (STMW) – A missing Will County woman’s boyfriend has been arrested on arson charges for allegedly blowing up their house in July.

Deputy Chief Ken Kaupas said Will County Sheriff’s police obtained a warrant Friday after learning James J. Borg, 44, was expected to be released from the hospital.

At 11 a.m. Tuesday, Borg was walking out of the Rehab Institute of Chicago, 345 E. Superior St. in Chicago, when deputies arrested him on three counts of aggravated arson and one count of residential arson, Kaupas said. Bond has been set at $750,000.

Borg had been in medical care since the July 14 explosion that leveled 135 Southeast Circle Drive, in unincorporated Will County, near Joliet. Borg suffered burns over 70 percent of his body and was initially taken to the burn unit at Loyola Medical Center.

Police and the state fire marshal have determined the gas line to the clothes dryer was cut and the valve was left open when Borg’s rented home went up in flames. No one besides Borg was at the home, but four people were inside the house next door.

“This was no accident,” Kaupas said following the blaze.

Borg was reportedly “very despondent” when he was visited hours earlier. He is considered a suspect in the disappearance of Anne Gay, 52, a waitress who has not been heard from since June 10.

“The investigation remains open, but there have been no developments since the arrest to rule him out as a suspect,” Kaupas confirmed Tuesday.

Coworkers became concerned when Gay failed to show up for her shifts at Louis’ Restaurant and asked police to check on her. Gay’s daughter Kimberly Dore said that after the police left Borg called her to say he hadn’t seen her mother for a week. Dore filed a missing persons report. Borg and Gay had been living together since shortly after meeting last year.

Kaupas described the couple’s relationship as “contentious,” noting deputies were called for 13 domestic disputes since January, the last one hours before Gay made her last known phone calls to friends.

Borg has a pending sentencing after being found guilty of threatening to kill a neighbor and reckless driving during an incident in September 2012.

[Lori Davis]

NamUs profile for Anne Gay - Case 21048

https://www.findthem.../cases/21048/1/

 

[Lori Davis]

http://southtownstar...ng-7-years.html

 

Families of Lisa Stebic, Stacy Peterson press on, and authorities say they haven’t given up

  

BY JON SEIDEL Sun-Times Media July 25, 2014 11:34PM

Updated: July 27, 2014 2:10AM

 

Lisa Stebic’s sister always knew.

 

She knew on May 1, 2007, when a neighbor reported the Plainfield mother of two missing to police.

 

“I knew my sister was dead from the start,” said Debbie Ruttenberg, Stebic’s older sibling.

 

But in the eyes of the law, Stebic is a missing person, one of thousands of unexplained cases across the country: 119 from the Chicago area as of last week and 12 of those from Will County, according to one database.

 

She’s also one of two missing women who captured national attention when they vanished without a trace in 2007. Neither she nor Stacy Peterson, of Bolingbrook, ever was found, dead or alive.

 

But their husbands were swiftly named persons of interest by authorities. Seven years later, neither man has been charged in connection with either disappearance, though one is serving prison time for another murder. Both men have denied any wrongdoing.

 

This year, Stacy Peterson’s sister said she will file paperwork to declare her sibling legally dead — enough time has passed to make that process easier, legal experts said. No such move appears to be on the horizon for Stebic.

 

That doesn’t give the families of these missing women the closure they seek. In her first public comment in more than two years, Ruttenberg said Lisa Stebic was “made to be ‘missing.’ ”

 

“It’s been more than seven years since Lisa was murdered,” Ruttenberg said, “and my sister’s killer needs to be brought to justice.”

 

There are 10 other cases of missing people in Will County, nine of them involving females. The oldest case dates to 1975 when 33-year-old Delores Griffin, of Romeoville, disappeared; another one involves Robin Abrams, an auxiliary sheriff’s deputy who disappeared in 1990; and the most recent is Anne Gay, 52, a Joliet waitress who went missing in June 2013.

 

Meanwhile, prosecutors lack a key piece of evidence to prove Stebic or Peterson was murdered: bodies. If either case went to trial, they would be challenged by defense attorneys to prove the victim truly is dead.

 

That’s a high bar. Prosecutors can’t try someone twice for the same murder, and there’s always a chance new evidence could surface.

 

But authorities say they “absolutely haven’t given up.”

 

It’s possible to convict a person without a body. The Alameda County district attorney’s office in California took this risk and won in 2008. Prosecutors there convicted a man of his estranged wife’s first-degree murder after she disappeared. He rewarded them by confessing after his conviction, leading authorities to her body.

 

“We would have never, ever, found her,” said Paul Hora, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case.

 

But as Hora points out, when it comes to cases like these, the devil is in the details.

 

‘I want to bring her home’

 

Cadaver dogs still hunt for Stacy Peterson.

 

Her sister, Cassandra Cales, leads them. She never stopped looking. She conducted one search for Stacy’s body this month, and she’s planning another soon.

 

Cales said she has given authorities time to investigate her sister’s disappearance, but now she doesn’t know where the case stands. So by the end of the year, she said she’ll set out to declare Stacy Peterson legally dead.

 

“That way it’s known that she didn’t run off,” Cales said.

 

The circumstances of Stacy Peterson’s and Lisa Stebic’s disappearances were eerily similar. Both mothers of young children wanted out of their marriage. They lived fewer than 10 miles apart. Stebic vanished just six months before Peterson.

 

Stebic disappeared after mailing paperwork to evict her husband, Craig, from their Plainfield home. He lives there still, having raised the couple’s children.

 

No one answered the door when a Sun-Times reporter recently visited the Stebic home, and Craig Stebic’s attorney declined to comment.

 

Lisa Stebic’s family members say they never had a chance to mourn her properly.

 

“There is no grave,” said her cousin, Melanie Greenberg. “There’s never been an official funeral, because we don’t have a body. We don’t have the answers.”

 

Peterson vanished shortly after asking a divorce attorney whether she could gain leverage over her husband, Drew, with information she claimed to have about the death of Drew’s previous wife, according to courtroom testimony.

 

Drew Peterson, a former Bolingbrook police sergeant and 30-year veteran of the department, has long denied wrongdoing in either of his wives’ demise. In 2012, he was convicted of the murder of his previous wife, Kathleen Savio, and is serving a 38-year prison sentence.

 

But Cales wants justice for Stacy, and that includes a trial. Meanwhile, she’s been told to let authorities dig if something catches the cadaver dogs’ attention.

 

A state police spokeswoman said they follow every lead. But Cales said they’ve been slow to respond.

 

“I don’t follow that rule any more,” Cales said. “If they want the evidence, they can be out there looking. I want my sister. You figure out your case. I want to bring her home.”

 

‘We absolutely haven’t given up’

 

After Drew Peterson’s conviction in 2012, Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow promised to “aggressively review” Stacy Peterson’s disappearance and put the Lisa Stebic case “on the front burner.”

 

“It’s a promise that’s being kept,” said Chuck Pelkie, a spokesman for Glasgow’s office.

 

Both cases are high priorities involving top prosecutors in Glasgow’s office, Pelkie said. They’re exploring new theories, taking advantage of improved technology and considering whether new legislation could open doors.

 

“These are not cases that are gathering mothballs right now,” Pelkie said.

 

And while he said prosecutors cannot have someone declared legally dead, such a declaration could “open access to records at least in one of those cases.” He wouldn’t say which case.

 

State police spokeswoman Monique Bond offered no updates on the Peterson case.

 

Plainfield police Detective Sgt. Kevin McQuaid acknowledged there have been no major revelations in recent years regarding Stebic, but he said investigators pursue leads as they come in. “We absolutely haven’t given up.”

 

Earlier this month, cameras on street lights could be seen overlooking the backyard of the Stebic home. McQuaid acknowledged that police cameras are there, but he wouldn’t say if they’re because of Stebic.

 

McQuaid and Pelkie expressed sympathy for the women’s families, and Pelkie said prosecutors have shared information with both.

 

Because prosecutors only get one chance to put someone on trial for a murder, he said they sometimes have to “hang tough” until they have the evidence they need.

 

Will County prosecutors charged Drew Peterson with Savio’s murder in 2009 — five years after her death was ruled a slip-and-fall accident. The evidence used to prosecute the case was roundly criticized, but jurors returned a guilty verdict.

 

Those jurors, however, saw photos of Savio’s body. That wouldn’t be the case with Stacy Peterson or Lisa Stebic. Their missing bodies are a “significant hurdle,” Pelkie acknowledged, but “not necessarily an insurmountable hurdle.”

 

And he said the Savio prosecution proves that Glasgow is willing to take on tough cases. “He’s got the record to prove that,” Pelkie said.

 

‘Society has no reward’

 

Before Nina Reiser vanished in California in 2006, after dropping her children off at her estranged husband’s home, she bought $144 worth of groceries. They were found rotting in her car.

 

She paid rent. She accepted a new job. She invested in her future “down to every single detail,” said Hora, the California prosecutor.

 

Hora used those details to persuade an Alameda County jury to convict Hans Reiser in 2008 of his wife’s murder. He did so with little forensic evidence and no confession. That came later.

 

Further complicating things, Nina Reiser’s Russian citizenship offered Hans Reiser’s lawyers another theory: Nina Reiser was living overseas.

 

But that didn’t fit with her investment in the future or her commitment to her children, Hora said, which he used to prove her death. Nor did it explain Hans Reiser’s strange behavior at the time of her disappearance, which Hora used to prove the murder.

 

Nina Reiser’s death at the hands of her husband “explained everything,” Hora said — all the bits of evidence discovered after she vanished added up.

 

For example, Hans Reiser’s car mysteriously vanished, but authorities followed him to it. The car’s carpets were “soaking wet,” and the front passenger seat was missing, Hora said.

 

Hans Reiser also called his mother on his wiretapped phone to tell her “what a rotten person” his wife was, Hora said.

 

That’s the kind of evidence that distinguishes the Reiser case from Lisa Stebic’s or Stacy Peterson’s, even though the narrative sounds familiar.

 

“These things depend so much on the details,” Hora said.

 

The Reiser case is, however, one example of how murder charges can be prosecuted without the victim’s body.

 

But Pelkie pointed out that laws can be applied — and jurors selected — differently from state to state. “You have one opportunity to prove your case, and after that, it’s over,” Pelkie said.

 

Today, Hans Reiser is serving 15 years to life in prison. He confessed after his conviction in a plea deal and led authorities to Nina Reiser’s body, buried 4 feet deep on a remote hillside.

 

Making a deal with Hans Reiser was not difficult, Hora said. The “gutsy” call was filing charges in the first place, he said, and the decision wasn’t his. But he ultimately was surprised by the power of the evidence.

 

In his closing argument, Hora borrowed from a California appellate ruling in a case against Charles Manson that involved a murder victim whose body had not yet been found: “The fact that a murderer may successfully dispose of the body of the victim does not entitle him to an acquittal.

 

“That is one form of success for which society has no reward.”

[Lori Davis]

http://patch.com/ill...blowing-house-0

 

Man Investigated For Girlfriend's Disappearance Pleads Guilty To Blowing Up House

A police dog had found evidence of a corpse being in the house, the sheriff’s department said.

 

By Joseph Hosey (Patch Staff)

January 26, 2015 at 1:25pm

 

A Joliet man under scrutiny in connection with the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend pleaded guilty Monday to blowing up his own home while he was inside it.

 

James Borg, 46, was sentenced to six years in prison. In exchange for his plea to a charge of residential arson, three counts of aggravated arson were dismissed.

 

“I’m sorry this happened,” the high school dropout told Judge Amy Bertani Tomczak.

 

Borg’s girlfriend, waitress Anne Gay, 53, who disappeared a year and a half ago, remains missing.

 

Borg and Gaye lived together in a rented house on Southeast Circle Drive in unincorporated Joliet. A few weeks after Gay vanished, a police dog trained to locate cadavers was taken into the house. During a search, the dog indicated there was evidence of a corpse having been inside the residence, police said.

 

The following week, Borg disconnected the line to a gas dryer and blew the house up. Borg shot out of the house and landed in the front yard, said Assistant State’s Attorney Fred Harvey.

 

Borg was severely burned in the explosion but he no longer uses a wheelchair and his eyebrows have sort of grown back.

 

Several of Borg’s neighbors were pleased that he was taken away to the hospital and then to jail following the explosion.

[Deborah]

Anne has not been located/recovered.

 

https://www.findthem.../cases/21048/1/