Sadly, there has been little in the way of breaking news to report about Lauren Spierer since June, when IM last looked into the disappearance of the Indiana University student—namely information on her whereabouts, what happened to her, or publicized leads in the police investigation.
But Spierer’s parents, Robert and Charlene, have continued to bring media attention to their daughter’s story nonetheless, most recently in a nationally broadcast interview with Katie Couric that aired Monday. And they made it clear that even now, a full year and a half since the morning Lauren went missing, their questions about the young men with whom she spent the evening—voiced repeatedly in the immediate wake of her disappearance—have not been answered.
“I’m frustrated,” Robert Spierer said on the program. “And I’m angry at this point. We’ve been stonewalled to some extent by the last people to see Lauren. And despite their claims of doing whatever they could do, the fact of the matter is that they refuse to meet with us, except for one of the boys. They refuse to take a police polygraph, which we feel is important for a number of reasons, one of which is to help narrow down the field of people who really know what happened to her that night.”
That joint interview with Couric appears here:
In the meantime, the last known person to have seen Spierer, Jason “Jay” Rosenbaum, has broken his long-held media silence—but not to address the disappearance. In September, Rosenbaum gave an interview with a newspaper in West Bloomfield, Michigan, about his recently launched tech company. He was joined by business partner David Bleznak—a name familiar to Internet sleuths who claimed that Bleznak, a student at the University of Michigan and childhood friend of Rosenbaum, had tweeted from the Runcible Spoon, a Bloomington restaurant, the morning of Lauren’s disappearance on June 3. One of Rosenbaum’s attorneys later confirmed to IM that there were in fact “other people around” Rosenbaum’s apartment on the morning in question.
And yet another figure from the Spierer investigation has found his way back into the spotlight: “celebrity” New York detective Bo Dietl. A private eye hired by the Spierers to aid in the search for their daughter, Dietl famously called Bloomington police chief Mike Dietkhoff a “Gomer Pyle.” He now stars in a series of national TV commercials for Arby’s (ironically taking a slap at Subway, whose poster boy, Jared Fogle, began his famous “Subway diet” as an IU student residing in Bloomington).