The case of the Springfield Three is an older cold case that we have been asked many times to cover.
On June 7, 1992, Suzanne ‘Suzie’ Streeter, Stacy McCall and Sherill Levitt (Suzie’s mother) all went missing from Springfriend, Missouri. Now, almost 32 years later, they all still remain missing.
We will start with some background into location and the women.
In terms of Springfield, the population in 1992 was around 142k. It is hard to find any confirmed crime stats from 1992, but as of 2021, Safewise put out a list of the 10 most dangerous cities in America. Springfield came in at number 5, the only spot in Missouri.
With a crime rate of 63 per one thousand residents, Springfield has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes – from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One’s chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 16.
Sherill Elizabeth Levitt was born on September 1, 1944 in Los Angeles, California to parents James Dale Williams and Edna Maxine Winn.
In 1964, Sherrill married her first husband, Brentt Streeter. She gave birth to a son Bartt and then she gave birth to Suzie in 1973. She divorced Brentt not long after Suzie was born. She told friends that Brentt believed that should divorce and keep living together which would mean that Sherill could get welfare. She ended the relationship instead. In 1980, she met her second husband Don Levitt and moved from Seattle to Springfield. She divorced Don in 1989. His creditors began asking Sherill to pay his debts and she was unable to locate him in order to get him to settle his finances. She and Suzie moved into the smaller house on East Delmar St in an effort to lessen the impact on her finances.
You can see Sherill and Suzie’s home here – https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1717-E-Delmar-St-Springfield-MO-65804/50239821_zpid/
Sherill was 47 at the time she disappeared. She was 5 feet tall (or around 1.52m), and weighed 100lbs or 50 kgs. She worked as a cosmetologist at New Attitudes Hair Salon where she was said to have had over 250 customers. She was a single mother to Suzie and the two were said to be very close.
Suzie was born on March 9, 1973, in Seattle, Washington, to parents Sherrill Levitt and Brentt Streeter. When she was only six months old, her parents divorced. She never lived with her father.
In April 1992, Suzie and Sherill moved into a home at 1717 East Delmar Street in Springfield. Suzie planned to follow in her mother’s footsteps and enrol in cosmetology school after she graduated. She was working at the time at a local move theater. Suzie was said to have had difficulty reading and may have been dyslexic. She was in a class for students with learning disabilities.
Suzie was 19 years old when she disappeared and she was 5’2 or 1.57m. She weighed 102lbs or 46kgs. Suzie had shoulder length blonde hair and brown eyes. She also had a scare on her upper right arm, a small mole on the left corner of her mouth and had pierced ears, with her left ear being pierced twice.
Stacy was born on April 23, 1974 to parents Janis and Stu McCall. She has two older sisters. When she vanished was 18 and was 5’3 or 1.6m, she weighed around 120lbs or 54kgs. She had long dark blonde hair and light eyes.
Stacy and Suzie originally became friends during the second grade. When Stacy was 11, her family moved out of state and would return a few years later. After Stacy graduated, she planned to enrol at Southwest Missouri State University and she planned to join a sorority.
Stacy worked as a receptionist for Springfield Gymnastics and she occasionally modeled wedding dresses for a store owned by family friends, called The Total Bride.
Stacy and Suzie graduated from Kickapoo High School on June 6, 1992. That night all three women attended the graduation ceremony which was held at Missouri State University Hammons Student Center.
After the ceremony ended, Suzie and Sherill had takeout pizza at their home at around 6pm.
Stacy told her parents that she wanted to go to some parties with Suzie later that night. She told them that she would spend the night at a hotel in Branson, Missouri before going to the Whitewater theme park with friends the next day.
At 8.30pm, Suzie and Stacy arrived at a friend’s party on Coach Drive in Battlefield, Missouri.
At 10pm, Stacy called home and she told her mother that she would not be going to Branson after all. She said she was going to stay with her friend Janelle Kirby in Springfield. Suzie told her mother the same information.
Sherill was last heard from by a friend at around 11.15pm on June 6. She spoke on the phone with his person about painting a piece of furniture.
The girls kept partying into the early hours of June 7, 1992. They went to another party in the 1500 block of East Hanover St in Springfield. They arrived there at around 130am, but the party ended soon after as the police were called.
The girls decided that they didn’t want to spend the night at Janell’s house as it was too crowded, so they decided to go back to Suzie’s home to spend the night. Suzie had received a brand new waterbed as a graduation present and the girls wanted to try it out.
It is not known exactly what time Suzie and Stacy arrived home, but it is assumed that they did make it back as their clothes, jewelery, purses and vehicles would be found at the home. Some reports do say they arrived back at around 2.15am.
On June 7, Janelle and her boyfriend went to Suzie’s home. As we mentioned earlier, they had planned to goto the water park together. They had originally planned to leave from Janelle’s residence after all spending the night together, which is why Janelle went to collect them. She had apparently tried calling the home and got no answer. Some reports say Janelle went to the home at 9am and others say that it was around noon.
Janelle found the home’s front door was unlocked. She entered and no sign of any of the three women was found. Suzie and Sherill’s dog , a Yorkshire Terrier, named Cinnamon was inside and Janelle has said that the dog appeared agitated. While she was in the home, the phone rang and Janelle answered it. She said the call was ‘strange and disturbing’. The caller was an unidentified male who made ‘sexual innuendos’. She hung up and the person called back, again speaking sexually.
Janelle and her boyfriend found that the glass lamp shade on the porch was shattered although the light bulb inside was intact. They swept the glass off the porch in an innocent gesture of helping to clean, but this was later thought to have contaminated evidence. Janelle and her boyfriend left the home.
A few hours later, Stacy’s mother Janis went to the home after Stacy had failed to answer phone calls. When she entered the home. She noticed that the purses of all the women were on the floor in the living room. She also saw Stacy’s clothing from the night before, neatly folded. Suzi and Sherill’s cigarettes were also inside the home. The television had also been left on. Stacy’s migraine medication had also been left behind. A graduation cake for the girls was found in the fridge. It also appeared that the women had gotten ready for bed – each had washed off their makeup and put damp cloths in the hamper and jewelery was left on the sink.
Some reports say that Sherill’s glasses were found next to her bed, as well as a book that had been turned over, indicating that she was in the middle of reading when the incident occured.
The blinds in Suzie’s room had been pulled apart as if someone may have been looking outside of the window.
All three vehicles belonging to the women were parked in the driveway. Sherill’s blue Corsica was in the carport, Suzie’s red Ford Escort was on the circle drive and Stacy’s Corolla was parked behind it. The keys to all the vehicles were found in the house.
Janis realized that something was wrong and she called police from inside the home to report the three women missing. After she made the call, she checked the phone’s answering machine and has said there was a ‘strange message’ on it. She accidentally erased the message from the tape.
It is believed that around 16 hours had passed before the women ended up being reported missing. Worried friends and family had arrived and entered the house during that period. It is estimated that between 10-20 people had been inside the house which contaminated the crime scene.
When police arrived, there was no sign of a struggle apart from the shattered porch light. They noted that Sherill’s bed had been slept in. They left a note on Sherill’s door, asking her to call the police and to cancel the missing person reports once she and the girls arrived home.
“The only thing unusual about this house was that three women were missing from it,” retired Springfield Police Capt. Tony Glenn says. “You had this feeling as you looked around that something was missing, that something had to be missing. But there wasn’t. Just them.”
When the women did not turn up, on June 15, 1992, police released a composite sketch of an unidentified transient man that had been seen in the area. This man had long hair and a full beard and neighbors had reported seeing him near the house.
Within days, more than 20,000 posters of the women had been printed and were stuck on store windows and telephone poles.
Police even dug up ant hills that callers thought might be fresh graves. They also looked for circling buzzards in the hope that would lead them to the bodies of the women.
The disappearance of the women was featured on America’s Most Wanted during the first week of their disappearance and it sparked 29 tips being called in.
A possible sighting of the women was called in on June 24, 1992. A waitress at George’s Steakhouse, which was one of Sherill’s favourite restaurants, said that the three women had dined there on the night they vanished between 1am and 3am. The waitress said that Suzie appeared intoxicated and that Sherill was trying to calm her down. This sighting has never been able to be verified.
Another possible sighting was called in days after the women vanished. A witness reported seeing a woman matching Suzie’s description driving an older model moss green Dodge van later in the day on June 7. The witness said the women appeared terrified and that she heard a male voice say ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’ Additional witnesses reported seeing the Dodge van in the area at the time of the disappearances. Another man told police he saw a blonde female sitting in the driver’s seat of the van while it was parked at a grocery store. The man said he wrote down the van’s license plate as it seemed suspicious but that he threw out the paper he wrote it on. This man was hypnotized to see if he could remember the license plate but he was only able to recall the first three digits of the plate.
Other witnesses reported hearing a women scream and squealing tires in Greene County, Missouri, early on June 7.
On January 2, 1993, an anonymous caller called America’s Most Wanted and appeared to have information regarding the disappearance of the women. The call was cut off though when the switchboard operator tried to put the call through to Springfield police.
Police said the caller had “prime knowledge of the abductions” and publicly appealed for the man to contact them, but he never did.
In August 1993, police searched an area of land in Webster County, Missouri for the women. They refused to say what was located at the site and if anything was found that pertained to the case. An additional tip would come in 2002 from two women that left officials back to the same area.
The two women said that they knew two men who had been employed at a local concrete company that once owned the site in Marshfield, Missouri. The women said the individuals drove a van that may have been used to abduct the women. They said the men left Springfield shortly after the disappearances.
Police did confirm that the men worked at the company in 1992 but they were unable to identify them or confirm they drove a van. Jumping ahead slightly, Cadaver dogs did locate two possible areas of interest at the site in 2002 but authorities said that did not prove there were human remains buried there. Police also eventually said that it is unlikely the sites were connected to the disappearance.
Five years after the disappearances, Sherill and Suzie were declared dead in court by their family.
They did this so the assets of Sherill’s adoptive father could be freed up.
Stacy’s parents said they would not declare her dead at that point as they had hope she was still alive.
At the ten year mark of the disappearances, Janis spoke to the media.
“I want them to find my daughter,” Janis said, pictures of Stacy scattered around the sofa in her suburban Springfield home. “You can go through so much, but you still want an answer. For them not to give us an answer, that was difficult.”
By 2015, 5,000 tips had come in over the years and investigators had compiled over 27,000 documents. They said that around 100 tips per year were coming in by that point.
One of these tips involved information that the women had been buried in the foundations of a parking garage at Cox Hospital in Springfield.
Darrell Moore, who was first assistant in the Greene County Prosecutor’s Office at the time the women vanished later spoke about that tip.
The tip came from someone who either claimed to be a psychic or claimed to have a dream or vision about the case, he said. He can’t recall the specific details.
“It was in the category of — ‘My dog is psychic and he is telling me there are bones there.’ It was along that line,” he says. “If we had sought a search warrant based on that we would have been laughed out of court.”
Despite this, in 2007, crime reporter Kathee Baird asked Rick Norland, a mechanical engineer to scan the corner of the parking garage with ground penetrating radar. Rick apparently found three anomalies ‘roughly the same size’ that were consistent with a ‘grave site location.’ Two of the anomalies were parallel and the other was perpendicular.
Springfield Police Department (SPD) spokesperson Lisa Cox said that the person who reported the tip “provided no evidence or logical reasoning behind this theory at that time or since then.” She also said the parking garage began construction in September 1993, over a year after the disappearances. “Digging up the area and subsequently reconstructing this structure would be extremely costly, and without any reasonable belief that the bodies could be located here, it is illogical to do so, and for those reasons SPD does not intend to. Investigators have determined this lead to not be credible.”
Darrel Moore spoke about other instances where they investigated tips in the case.
He said once a psychic called to say the bodies were in a blanket buried near water.
“People have dreams and visions,” he says. “I’m sure they mean well. But it was a waste of police resources.”
He also recalled two additional times when search warrants were granted to dig for bodies.
One tip was that the bodies were in a cave or some type of depression in Webster County, he says.
The other tip was that they were buried in an abandoned farmhouse in Barry County.
“The allegation was that a green van was involved,” he says. “The tip was that the van and the bodies were buried on this property.”
Investigators tore up the flooring of the house and dug. They dug outside, as well. Nothing was found.
In terms of suspects in the case, two main names seem to pop up. The first is Dustin Recla, an ex boyfriend of Suzie.
Dustin broke into a mausoleum a few months before the women vanished and he stole $30 worth of gold fillings from a skull. Suzie ended up giving a statement to investigators about the robbery and she was rumored to be a probable witness against him in court. Dustin and two other friends (Michael Clay and Joseph Riedel) who were involved in the robbery were known to be together and in the area on the night the women vanished.
Dustin also apparently had connections to the Galloping Goose Motorcycle Club, a group with a known history of violence.
Dustin and the men cooperated with police regarding the grave robbing and they all received probation.
Larry Dewayne Hall and his twin brother Gary are often brought up in connection to this case. Larry is a suspected serial killer and it is thought he worked in conjunction with Gary.
It has been confirmed that Larry has killed two women but he has confessed to killing up to 39. He confessed to a number of these and later recanted. Police suspect he may have killed up to 50 women.
There is no confirmation that Larry and Gary were in the area at the time. There are some rumors that Gary confessed to stalking and killing the women but this has never been confirmed.
Larry did own a Dodge van at the time which matched the description provided by witnesses.
The Streeter Family have a blog where they outline possible suspects in the case.
They have named Gerald Carnahan on their website.
Gerald has been convicted of first degree murder and forcible rape in another case.
His family owns Springfield Aluminium which is a foundry in the area. Gerald was known to be a repeat offender and he was in the area at the time the women disappeared.
The Streeter Family website also mentions Steven Eugene Garrison. This info about him is from the News Leader.
Garrison told police a friend had confessed to killing the three women during a drunken party. He told police information unknown to the public that led investigators to serve three search warrants at two sites in western Webster County; that they would find the women’s bodies and clues about their abduction and deaths. He also said a moss green van believed used to take the women would be found about 12 miles away, south of Fordland.
Police were so convinced of Garrison’s information, a judge issued a gag order on the search warrants. No one knows what was on them, or if anything of substance has been found.
Garrison is serving 40 years in prison for raping, sodomizing and terrorizing a female Springfield college student in the summer of 1993.
In 1997, a man named Robert Craig Cox told journalists that he knew the women had been murdered and claimed their bodies would never be found. Robert is a convicted kidnapper and robber and is also a suspect in a Florida murder. He was convicted of the murder of Sharon Zellers in Florida in 1978 but his conviction was later reversed by the Florida Supreme Court due to lack of evidence.
He had been living in Springfield in 1992. He was interviewed at the time the women went missing and he told police he had been with his girlfriend at church when the women vanished. His girlfriend corroborated the story but she later recanted. She then told police that Robert had told her to say they were at church.
Robert had previously been employed as a mechanic at the same workplace as Stacy’s father. When the women disappeared, he was working as a locator at SM and P Conduit, a Springfield company that locates and marks underground utilities.
Robert wrote to the News Leader in 1997 about how Sgt Kevin Routh had asked him during an interview to reveal where the bodies were.
“I told them that I wanted closure, too. I’m tired of the harassment I have received because of my association to this case,” he wrote. “Then I told Sgt. Routh if I could tell him where the bodies were, then he would come after me with an indictment and seek the death penalty.”
Robert went on to write that he could tell the News-Leader reporter where the bodies were, but he wouldn’t do so because the reporter would have to give him up to police.
He would write another letter to the News Leader in 2014 saying “I have done locates all over Springfield,” he wrote. “I have done work in the area of the house where the abduction occurred.”
Sharon Zeller’s mother Dorothy has spoken to the media about his possible involvement in this case. “I just knew it was him. I just knew it,”Dorothy said “I said to myself, `Cox did this.’”
Robert has stated to journalists that he will reveal what happened to the women once his mother passes away.
Sgt Mike Owen has spoken about Robert’s apparent confessions.
“All our eggs are not in Cox’s basket,” he said “We’re still looking at lots of different people. … If tomorrow we had a lead and solved this case and it wasn’t Cox, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Sherill’s dad Jim Williams died in 1997 and he told people that he believed Robert was the perpetrator in this case. “He told me, `I’m sure that’s the guy. I just don’t know if they’ll be able to prove it,’” said Cliff Williams, Levitt’s uncle.
“I would like him, if he knows something, to tell what he knows,” Janis McCall said. “He’s going to be in prison another 20-some years. His appeals are gone by the wayside. …. He’s said they were dead and buried around Springfield. How does he know that? I don’t know if he’ll ever give up the right information. I want to know where my daughter is, that’s what I would ask the man.”
SOURCE LIST
https://streeterfamilyblogg.blogspot.com/p/person-of-interest.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Three
https://web.archive.org/web/20090328110626/http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/l/levitt_sherrill.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20141031034010/http://archive.news-leader.com/article/20020603/NEWS01/60608049/Three-Missing-Women-Ten-Years-Later-Part-1-5