William C. Schneck

William C. “Bill” Schneck, 67, died Sept. 8, 2026, of glioblastoma at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. A technology and intellectual property attorney, Bill practiced law for over 40 years, most recently at New York City’s Financial Information Services Agency-Office of Payroll Administration.

Born in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1958 to Arthur Schneck, a commercial lawyer with his own New York City practice, and Mildred Schneck, a medical librarian, Bill and his family moved to Croton-on-Hudson in June 1961, when he was two years old. His elder brother Matthew described theirs as a “typical free-range childhood”: walking and biking for miles, unfettered coming and going to friends’ houses, roaming the undeveloped woods. When Bill was nine, he began attending the To-Ho-Ne sleepaway camp — and was devastated when the camp closed two years later. Matthew recalled a typical evening at the kitchen table when their mother “was angry or annoyed about something one of us had said or done. Bill smiled and quietly said to her, ‘You’ll get over it.’” His younger sister Jennifer thought for years that their parents found Bill the most challenging of the three children — “not that any of us were hugely rebellious.” She has since come to understand they thought he was a delight. He was famous in the family for “his mischievous nature and unbelievably quick wit.”

Before graduating from Columbia Law School, Bill studied philosophy at Kenyon College. He began his career in 1983 as an associate at Kay Collyer & Boose in New York, combining corporate, computer, intellectual property and entertainment law. In 1988, he joined Prodigy Services Company — the United States’ first consumer online service — as lead counsel for intellectual property, online communications and privacy. Colleagues credit him with drafting the first online user privacy policy, and one described his writing as “exquisite in its flow, construction, logic and precision.” At work, Bill was “always cool, always measured.” He joined the city agency in 2006 and spent the last 20 years of his career there, rising to assistant executive director and lead project attorney.

As his first marriage was ending amicably, Bill met the love of his life, Elizabeth, on Prodigy’s chat servers where the two would play trivia games. A mother of two girls living in East Tennessee, Elizabeth was also about to divorce — and the couple formed from afar. Elizabeth’s younger daughter Mary Beth Greiss remembers chatting with TheBigCat (that’s Bill, a lifelong cat-lover) online in those early days of the internet. “TBC is a cool cat. He and me can really chat. Yeah!” the 10-year-old cheerleader told him in a video she’d created for him. Elizabeth and her older daughter Lena Helm visited Bill in New York, where he took them on a tour. “Everywhere we went it seemed the Empire State Building was in view,” remembers Lena, and Bill pointed it out every time. It became a running joke. On September 11, 2001, when the couple were finally able to communicate, Bill told Elizabeth, “Life is too short to be away from the people you love.” By December, she and Mary Beth had moved into Bill’s one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment, and Lena joined them after graduating high school (and after the family had secured a larger abode).

Bill met Lena’s high school sweetheart Jason at her graduation in Greenville, South Carolina. His eyes lit up when he discovered the young man aspired to the bar. Jason remembered Bill spending hours quizzing him after Thanksgiving dinner to help him prepare for his finals, and the advice he gave once Jason was practicing: always treat opposing counsel with “respect and kindness — until they prove they don’t deserve it,” and it’s “okay to be a little cheeky.” Bill had a habit of answering questions with questions, and taking his partners in conversation down a Socratic path of self-discovery. It drove his wife and daughters mad, but it also made him an excellent teacher.

Trivia remained a fixture of Bill and Elizabeth’s lives together. They played weekly at local Upper East Side bars with an unlikely crew of 20- and 30-year-old transplants. Adriane Santos, “one of many who got pulled into their orbit,” saw Bill as a “friend and father figure” — and appreciated his clever wit that often took their team to victory. Bill and Elizabeth were also talented ballroom dancers. Their first dance as a couple — an improvised East Coast swing at a 1999 Knoxville zoo fundraiser — drew enough compliments to convince them to take lessons. By the time they danced the foxtrot at their wedding in 2017, they had years of lessons behind them and a roomful of friends they had met dancing.

Bill proposed to Elizabeth on Christmas Day 2016 using a diamond she had inherited and given him years earlier for exactly that purpose. It’s unclear what took him so long to ask (the family jokes that he was a known procrastinator), but the two were wed at the Church of the Holy Trinity on May 20, 2017, in a ceremony officiated by their daughter Mary Beth. Bill later co-officiated at Mary Beth’s 2019 wedding to Ryan Greiss along with the groom’s father. “Becoming a grandfather was the joy of his life,” Elizabeth said. Even though he always wanted to be a father, he never thought he’d have children — much less grandchildren.

Their last dance was on June 13, 2026. Bill had been bravely battling glioblastoma for nearly two and a half years. His first brain tumor was caught early, an unintended result of his enrollment as a healthy control in a Parkinson’s disease study, giving him the gift of more time with his family.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Schneck; his daughters, Lena Helm and her husband, Jason Helm, and Mary Beth Greiss and her husband, Ryan Greiss; his grandchildren, Charlotte and Logan Greiss; his brother, Matthew Schneck, and his wife, Laurie Aron, and their children Adam, Rachel and Rosmarus Schneck; and his sister, Jennifer Schneck.

A funeral service will be held Friday, Sept. 11, from 6 to 8 p.m., with visitation from 4 to 6 p.m., at Schwartz Brothers-Jeffer Memorial Chapels at 114-03 Queens Blvd., Forest Hills, Queens. Live-streaming will be available at: https://fweb.tv/260646.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in his memory to:

Glioblastoma Research Organization

The Susan G. Komen Foundation

REACH

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