The Springfield Three

It was graduation night.

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 6, 1992, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall walked across the stage at Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, and received their diplomas. Suzie’s mother, Sherrill Levitt, was in the audience. Afterward there were photographs, hugs, cards and congratulations, and then the long, warm, giddy summer night that every high school senior looks forward to.

The two friends went to graduation parties around town. Their plan was to stay over at another friend’s house, and in the morning they would all drive to a water park in Branson. Around ten o’clock, Stacy called her mother to tell her the plans had changed a little: they wouldn’t be going to Branson that night after all. She’d see her the next day.

At about two in the morning, the girls left the last party. Instead of going to their friend’s house, which was crowded, they drove to Suzie’s home on East Delmar Street, a quiet residential neighborhood near Missouri State University, where Suzie lived with her mother.

Sometime between then and the next morning, all three women vanished.

The Morning

When the girls didn’t show up for the Branson trip the next morning, friends went to the house on Delmar to find them.

The front door was unlocked. All three women’s cars were parked outside. Inside, everything looked almost normal. The family’s little Yorkshire terrier, Cinnamon, was agitated and barking. But there was no sign of the women.

Their purses were there, lined up together, with their money, keys and IDs. Sherrill’s purse held nearly nine hundred dollars in cash. Their cigarettes were there. Their clothes from the night before were there. Sherrill’s bed looked slept in. The television in her bedroom was on, showing static. The window blinds in one room were bent, as if someone had pushed them aside to look out.

The only obvious sign that anything was wrong was on the front porch. The glass globe over the porch light was shattered. The light bulb itself was undamaged.

One of the people who came looking for them, trying to be helpful, swept up the broken glass.

The Lost Hours

Over the course of that Sunday, more friends and relatives came by the house, wondering where the women were. Ten or twenty people came through. They answered the phone. They straightened up. They moved things. Janelle Kirby answered a call that she later described as obscene and sexual. Stacy McCall’s mother, Janis, came to the house that afternoon, and while she was there, she listened to a message on the answering machine — a strange, unclear message that seemed odd to her. She erased it, without thinking much of it, the way people erased messages back then.

By the time police were called and began treating the house as a crime scene that evening, it had been walked through, tidied and contaminated by many people. If there was evidence in that house — a footprint, a fingerprint, a clue in the broken glass, a voice on the answering machine — much of it may have been lost.

No Trace

Springfield police launched a massive investigation. They searched fields, woods, lakes and abandoned buildings across southwest Missouri. They interviewed hundreds of people. They received thousands of tips. The case was featured on national television. Billboards and posters with the women’s faces went up across the region.

Nothing.

The women had disappeared from a house in the middle of a city, sometime in the hours before dawn, apparently without a struggle loud enough to wake the neighbors, and without taking their purses, their shoes or their cars. They had left with someone, or been taken by someone, and gone.

The Suspects

Over the years, investigators looked at many people.

The most prominent suspect is a man named Robert Craig Cox. Cox was a convicted kidnapper and robber who had served time in Florida for an abduction and murder before his conviction was overturned. In 1992, he was living in Springfield and working at a car dealership. His alibi for the night the women vanished came from a girlfriend, who later recanted and said Cox had asked her to lie.

In 1997, while in prison in Texas for an unrelated robbery, Cox told a reporter that he knew the three women were dead and that their bodies would never be found. He said he would not reveal anything more until his mother died. Investigators have said they don’t consider him credible, and he has never been charged in connection with the case. He has remained in prison in Texas on other convictions.

In 2007, a tip suggested the women’s bodies were buried beneath a parking garage at a Springfield hospital that had been under construction in 1992. Ground-penetrating radar showed anomalies, but police concluded the tip was not credible and did not dig. Others have continued to call for the site to be excavated.

Three Women

It’s easy, in cases like this, for the women to become a kind of puzzle, a set of clues. I want to tell you who they were.

Sherrill Levitt was forty-seven, a cosmetologist who ran her own hair salon. She was small, warm, a hard worker, a devoted mother. She had recently bought the house on Delmar, and she’d spent the evening of the sixth varnishing a piece of furniture and talking on the phone with a friend.

Suzie Streeter was nineteen, her mother’s daughter, independent and a little rebellious, excited about her future now that she’d finished school.

Stacy McCall was eighteen, a sweet, quiet girl who loved her family and was planning to go to college. She had called her mother that night to let her know where she would be, the way she always did.