West Suburban Bureau

The Naperville Sun's Jennifer Golz contributed to this report.
PLAINFIELD, Ill. (CBS/Naperville Sun) ― Mortgages on the Plainfield home of Craig and Lisa Stebic exceed the home's value, public records show.

As CBS 2 News partner the Naperville Sun reports, while it is not uncommon for couples going through a divorce to find their main residence drained of its value, the records indicate that couple may have overextended themselves financially.

Lisa Stebic, a Libertyville High school graduate, was reported missing May 1, and her family has since celebrated Mother's Day and her 38th birthday in her absence.

The mother of two was last reported seen by her estranged husband at 6 p.m. April 30 in the Plainfield home they shared. It is believed that her purse and cell phone were with Lisa at the time she left; however, neither her credit cards nor cell phone have been used since her disappearance.

Within the past week, reports have surfaced that Craig Stebic recently was laid off from his job as a pipefitter, and Lisa Stebic was moving forward with a petition to evict Craig from the couple's shared home.

According to Lisa Stebic's petition, she earns less than $10,000 a year as a lunchroom worker and Craig Stebic had earned more than $80,000 annually at his union job.

While only liens on a property are public record, the couple's history of taking multiple mortgages on their Plainfield home and later refinancing for larger amounts shows they were looking for cash.

Assuming Craig and Lisa Stebic had no other outstanding debt such as credit cards or student loans, they are paying as much as $3,000 per month for the two outstanding mortgages on their property when taxes and homeowners insurance are included. Utilities and other household expenses, such as groceries, would be additional expenses the couple would have to cover each month.

The Stebics' Plainfield home that was purchased in 2000 for $208,411 now has $313,000 in mortgages on it, according to records from the Will County recorder of deeds' office. Many homeowners liquidate the equity in the homes, a mortgage broker said.

Each time the Stebics' Plainfield home increased in value, Craig Stebic took a second mortgage on the home.

According to documents obtained from the Will County recorder of deeds' office, those smaller second mortgages would later be rolled into a larger refinanced mortgage, the latest in 2002 for $248,000. But once again, a second mortgage was taken out two years later, drawing the equity from the home to the tune of an additional $65,000.

To qualify for the $248,000 mortgage without insurance, the Plainfield home would have had to been valued at $310,000 or more during the refinance in 2002, Papiernik said.

But the Will County assessor's office only values the property at about $260,000 in today's dollar. According to Zillow, a real estate sales tracking Web site, comparable properties in the same block of the Stebics on Red Star Drive in Plainfield are selling for about $283,000.

"One of the challenges with second mortgages is sometimes they don't get appraisals," Papiernik said.
With $313,000 financed on the home, the couple may be overextending themselves in their credit-to-income ratio, Papiernik said.

"As a broker, I cannot do loans above the value of the property," he said. "You don't want anyone upside-down on the house. You can't refinance, or if you transfer, you have to come to the table with a lot of money," he said.


Custody Hearing Scheduled
A custody hearing is scheduled for Tuesday morning for the two children of Craig and Lisa Stebic.

Craig Stebic is seeking full custody of the two children he has with Lisa, who has been missing from their Plainfield home since April 30. The two have been in the process of getting a divorce.

Police say Craig Stebic is not a person of interest in the case, but DNA matched stains from a tarp in Craig's truck to Lisa Stebic's blood.

When CBS 2 asked Craig about reports that Lisa's blood was found in his truck he said, "There's nothing there."

He also said he hunts all the time and had last used his truck to haul deer in November. When I asked him about using the truck for recent hunting trips he referred to the last weekend before Lisa disappeared saying, "We used it to hunt rabbits that weekend."


Expert: No Evidence For Criminal Charges
The possible blood evidence in Craig Stebic's van is not enough to bring criminal charges against him or anyone else, says CBS 2 legal analyst Irv Miller.

"They're not even close at this point in time. If you're going to charge someone with murder or some criminal act, you have to prove a couple things. One – you have to prove a crime occurred, and we don't know that a crime occurred. People suspect a crime occurred," Miller said. "But even if you have a crime, you have to prove that the person who committed it did it. Right now, from what we know, we're not even close on that aspect of it."

But Miller said the fact that the discovery of blood in Craig Stebic's truck reportedly leading to a search warrant that was executed at night was "very significant."

"What they're looking for are traces of blood in the house – large traces of blood," and investigators have methods to find it even if it is not visible, Miller said. With those methods, blood can glow when the lights are turned off and even cleanup patterns can be visible, he said.

A grand jury has been convened in Will County to get information, Miller said.

Meanwhile, Miller said, Craig Stebic has made some "outright bad decisions" in the case, including refusing a polygraph, filing for custody, and not participating in a search.

"He has just done everything wrong, and if you remember the Scott Petersen case, he made every wrong decision out in California, and this guy is just following in his footsteps," Miller said. "He should be out there helping the police. He should say to the police, 'My door is open. Search whatever you want. Here's my car – take it. Search it. Do whatever you want with it.'

"What he's doing is he's forcing the police to look at him as a suspect, and if there is somebody else out there that may have committed this crime, if a crime was committed, he's diverting police resources to himself," Miller added, "and that's just outrageous."

(CBS 2, the Naperville Sun and the Aurora Beacon-News are news partners covering stories in the western suburbs of Chicago.)