The Springfield Three

At 4 p.m. on 6 June 1992, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall walked across the stage at the Hammons Student Center on the Southwest Missouri State campus and graduated from Kickapoo High School. Within twelve hours both eighteen-year-olds and Suzie's mother Sherrill Levitt had vanished from a small ranch house at 1717 East Delmar Street in Springfield, leaving behind their cars, their purses, their shoes, and a Yorkshire terrier named Cinnamon. Thirty-four years later not one of them has ever been seen again.

Sherrill Levitt was forty-seven, five feet tall, a hairdresser at New Attitudes Salon. Suzie Streeter was nineteen, working at a Springfield movie theatre with a shift booked for the following Tuesday. Stacy McCall was eighteen, scheduled to teach at the Springfield Gymnastics Center on Monday morning. Levitt had a doctor's appointment for that same Monday. Three women, three jobs to show up to, three sets of plans for the week.

The trio of teenagers was supposed to spend the night at the home of their friend Janelle Kirby in nearby Battlefield, then drive an hour south to Branson at sunrise to meet friends at the White Water park. Stacy's mother Janis warned them off driving drunk, and Stacy phoned at 10 p.m. to report a change of plans. Their last party, at Michelle Elder's house, was broken up by Springfield police at 1:50 a.m. The girls returned to Kirby's at 2 a.m., found it overrun with out-of-town graduation relatives, and decided to drive instead to Levitt's house on East Delmar so Stacy could see Suzie's new king-sized waterbed. Suzie told Stacy "follow me to my house." Janelle's mother Kathy heard them leave from her bed.

The last call from Sherrill Levitt was at 11:15 p.m., to a friend, talking about painting and varnishing an armoire in her bedroom.

When Janelle Kirby and her boyfriend Mike Henson arrived at 9 a.m. on June 7 to collect Suzie and Stacy for the Branson trip, the front door was unlocked, the cars were all parked outside, and the porch lamp's glass globe was shattered on the concrete. Henson swept up the broken glass because Kirby was barefoot — police later said that act may have destroyed evidence. Inside, Cinnamon was agitated. Suzie's TV was hissing static. A copy of Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" sat on her headboard. An unfinished Coca-Cola can sat by her cigarettes. Levitt's bed looked slept-in. A window blind was bent at an odd angle. While they were inside the phone rang twice in succession with an obscene male caller making sexual remarks; Kirby hung up both times and left.

Janis McCall arrived hours later, also let in by the unlocked door. All three purses were on the floor of Suzie's bedroom. Levitt's purse still held nearly nine hundred dollars in salon cash. Stacy's clothes from the night before were folded neatly — but her shirt and underwear were missing. Used makeup wipes from both girls sat in the bathroom trash. The chain-smoking Levitt's cigarettes were on the table; she never went anywhere without them. Janis dialled the police from inside the house. While she was waiting she pressed play on the answering machine and listened to a message investigators would later describe as "strange" and possibly the single most important clue in the case. The 1990s machine erased it after one play.

By the time Officer Rick Bookout arrived the front door was open and people were walking in and out of the yard. Police later estimated that ten to twenty friends and relatives had been through the house, emptying ashtrays and washing coffee cups, before a single forensic technician set foot inside.

What survived the contamination: the shattered porch globe, the bent blind, the slept-in bed, the abandoned cash and cars, and Cinnamon. There was no blood. There were no footprints. There was no sign that more than one perpetrator had been inside. Three adult women left a small house on a residential street in the middle of the night, with their purses and shoes still inside, and no neighbour heard a thing.

On 31 December 1992 a man called the America's Most Wanted hotline claiming knowledge of the abduction. The switchboard operator tried to connect him to Springfield investigators and the line dropped. He never called back. Police said publicly he had "prime knowledge of the abductions."

Robert Craig Cox, a convicted Texas kidnapper who had been living in Springfield in June 1992, told reporters in 1996 he knew the women were murdered and that their bodies would never be found. His girlfriend at the time first corroborated his alibi, then recanted and said Cox had asked her to lie. He has said he will only name names after his mother dies. Dustin Recla, Suzie's ex-boyfriend, was about to be testified against by Suzie in a Springfield mausoleum-robbery case where he had pried gold fillings out of a corpse's teeth; he and his accomplices were near the house that night. Suspected serial killer Larry Hall was in southern Missouri that weekend for one of two Civil War reenactments at Pleasant Hope, thirty minutes north of Springfield, and his confirmed murders cluster in March, June, August, and September between 1980 and 1994. Gerald Carnahan, later convicted of the 1985 rape and murder of Jackie Johns, is also a suspect; he is linked to the Galloping Goose motorcycle gang and to convicted rapist Steven Garrison, whom police described as having given credible information on the case.

Levitt and Streeter were declared legally dead in 1997. The case file is still classified missing. In 2007 mechanical engineer Rick Norland scanned a corner of the south parking garage at Cox South Hospital with ground-penetrating radar after a tip and found three anomalies "roughly the same size," consistent with grave sites — two parallel, one perpendicular. The garage was poured in September 1993, fifteen months after the disappearance. Springfield Police declined to dig.