Some crimes stay with a community long after the police have stopped looking into them. One of those cases is the disappearance of Sherrill Levitt, her daughter Suzie Streeter, and Suzie’s friend Stacy McCall. They are now known as the Springfield Three. It began in Springfield, Missouri, on the night of June 6, 1992, at the end of a night that should have been filled with happiness. It was Suzie and Stacy’s last day of high school at Kickapoo. Party, pictures, and a new king-sized waterbed that Suzie couldn’t wait to show off. The two girls drove back to Sherrill’s house on East Delmar Street around 2:00 in the morning. The next morning, their cars were still there. Their purses, keys, cigarettes, and an unfinished Coke can that was next to Suzie’s bed were also there. The women weren’t.
Even now, more than 30 years later, it’s not just the fact that there are no answers that makes this case so hard to deal with. The disappearance seems almost impossible because of all the small, everyday details that add up to them. A lot of people who knew Sherrill said she smoked a lot. It looks like she forgot her cigarettes. The clothes that Stacy wore the night before were folded up nicely. When Levitt got home from work, she still had almost $900 in cash in her purse. There were no signs of a fight inside the house, but there was a broken porch light globe outside. The family dog, Cinnamon, a Yorkshire Terrier, was found inside, pacing and acting very upset.
Janelle Kirby went to check on them the next morning after the girls didn’t show up for their water park plans. The front door was unlocked and the dog was barking like crazy. She also took two calls while she was inside the house. Springfield police said the calls were obscene, which is what Suzie had been getting since she moved in with her mother that spring. No one has ever been able to say for sure if those calls had anything to do with what happened that night. It’s just one of many threads that go somewhere and then stop.
That message on the answering machine might be the most painful part. Stacy’s mom, Janis McCall, went to the house later that day because she was worried when her daughter didn’t call. She saw that the message light was blinking and pressed play. The police say that message could have had a clue in it, maybe something important. But after playback, it erased itself, which was how most answering machines worked in the early 1990s. It was gone in an instant. That call got the police’s “very interested” attention. They never got it back.
Kidnapper Robert Craig Cox told reporters in 1997 that he knew the women had been killed and that their bodies would never be found. Investigators publicly threw him out because they didn’t believe him. Still, what he said stuck with me, in part because it echoed what families in these situations often quietly believe: that the lack of remains does not mean there was no tragedy.
It’s hard to miss the pattern in situations like this. When someone goes missing, their family doesn’t just lose that person. They lose the power to fully grieve and move on in a healthy way. Since Stacy McCall went missing more than thirty years ago, her family in Missouri has spent more than thirty years doing the same things that Stacy McCall’s family in Dubuque did during their own long search: knocking on doors, hanging flyers, and waiting for phone calls that don’t come. “We shouldn’t have to beg for closure,” Jennifer Herrig said about her sister Crystal, who went missing. Anyone with ties to the Springfield Three could feel the same way.
We still don’t know what happened at 1717 East Delmar Street in the early hours of June 7, 1992. There is still no answer. Someone may know something but has never said it. They may live in Springfield or somewhere else. Because of that chance, families keep looking and the community can’t fully turn their heads away.
