Obscene Phone Calls and a Shattered Porch Light | The Springfield Three

In 1992, two teenage best friends and one of their mothers disappeared from a Springfield, Missouri home without a trace — their purses, cars, and even cigarettes left behind, but no sign of a struggle.

THE SPRINGFIELD THREE

Sherrill Levitt hung up the phone around 11:15 p.m. on June 6, 1992. She’d been talking with a friend about painting and varnishing an armoire in her bedroom — just a lazy Saturday night conversation about nothing in particular. It was graduation day in Springfield, Missouri. Her 19-year-old daughter Suzie had walked across the stage at Kickapoo High School that afternoon, and now Suzie was out somewhere in town, bouncing between graduation parties with her friends. Sherrill went to bed in her small house at 1717 East Delmar Street, probably expecting to see her daughter in the morning, probably thinking about what color to paint that armoire.

By dawn, three women would be gone from that house. And more than three decades later, nobody has any idea where they went.

The Women of East Delmar Street

To understand what happened — or rather, to understand everything we don’t know about what happened — it helps to know who these three women were.

Sherrill Elizabeth Levitt was born on November 1, 1944, and spent her childhood in Bellevue, Washington. She and her younger sister Debra grew up in a family that loved being outdoors. Camping trips, visits to the ocean, that whole Pacific Northwest lifestyle built around nature and rain and evergreen trees. The sisters were eight years apart in age, and Debra would later joke that she was “the annoying little sister” who spent her childhood tormenting Sherrill. Siblings say things like that when they love each other and miss each other terribly.

Sherrill married her first husband, Brentt Streeter, when she was young. They had two children together — first a son named Bartt, then a daughter, Suzanne, born on March 9, 1973. Suzanne came into the world with a small cosmetic birth defect on her chin. The marriage was already circling the drain by then. According to family accounts, Brentt floated a suggestion after Suzanne was born: they could get divorced but keep living together, which would allow Sherrill to collect welfare and afford medical care for their daughter.

Sherrill’s response was immediate. She divorced Brentt, kicked him out of the house, and committed herself to raising both children alone. She wasn’t interested in convenient arrangements or half-measures.

In 1980, Sherrill packed up and moved with her two kids to Springfield, Missouri. Her sister Debra had relocated there with her husband for his job, and Sherrill followed. The early years in Springfield were hard. She worked random jobs just to keep the rent paid, struggling to get by as a single mother in a new city. Eventually she found her footing as a cosmetologist and beautician, and that’s where she thrived. She had a talent for the work, and more importantly, she had a way with people.

She remarried in the 1980s to a man named Don Levitt. Don already had a daughter named Melinda who was around the same age as Sherrill’s son Bartt, and the blended family lived together for several years. Debra later described them as “kind of like the Brady Bunch.” When Debra’s husband lost his job in 1983 and her family moved back to Washington, Sherrill stayed put in Springfield. She’d built something there. She had a loyal clientele — more than 250 regular clients by 1992 — and she was making good money. Starting over didn’t appeal to her.

Sherrill and Don divorced in 1989. By most accounts, the split happened because of financial strain from a failed business venture, and it was amicable enough. Afterward, though, Sherrill seemed to lose interest in dating entirely. Friends said she had a “hermit side” to her. She threw herself into her work at New Attitudes Hair Salon, where she was known for being dedicated and warm with everyone who sat in her chair.

In April 1992, Sherrill hit a milestone that meant a lot to her: she bought her first home. The house was at 1717 East Delmar Street in Springfield, and she moved in with her daughter Suzie. That spring, Sherrill spent most of her free time working on the place — painting, decorating, fixing things up inside and out. She kept a tidy home, and she seemed genuinely happy making small improvements here and there. The house was hers, finally, and she was making it exactly the way she wanted it.

Her daughter Suzanne — everyone called her Suzie — had never really known her father. Brentt was out of the picture before Suzie was old enough to form memories of him. As a result, she grew up incredibly close to her mother. Friends said the bond between them was unusual for a teenager. Most 19-year-olds are pulling away from their parents, establishing independence, but Suzie would cancel plans with friends just to hang out with Sherrill. For most of Suzie’s life, the two of them were inseparable.

Suzie had a harder time in school than most kids. People who knew her well said she was dyslexic, that she struggled to shape letters into words on the page. She also had trouble adapting to the social dynamics of high school — the cliques, the hierarchies, all that unspoken stuff that can make those years miserable for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into a category. At Kickapoo High, she attended classes and did what she needed to do, but the environment was overwhelming for her at times.

Despite all that, Suzie had plans. She wanted to become a cosmetologist, just like her mother. She’d grown up watching Sherrill work, watching her build relationships with clients, watching her create something stable and successful out of a career that she loved. Suzie wanted that for herself.

At 19, Suzie stood about 5’2″ and weighed 102 pounds. She had shoulder-length bleached-blonde hair and brown eyes. She had a three-and-a-half-inch scar on her upper right forearm, a small mole in the left corner of her mouth, and pierced ears — her left ear was pierced twice. Her teeth were large and had never needed any dental work. A friend and coworker named Nigel Kenney described her as a “creature of habit,” someone particular about small routines, like always parking her car in the exact same spot in the driveway. Every single time.

Stacy Kathleen McCall was the youngest of three daughters born to Stuart and Janis McCall. She came into the world on April 23, 1974, which made her 18 years old in June of 1992. Her mother described her as a “daddy’s girl” — she and her father shared an easy, joking relationship. Stacy was giggly by nature, and she sometimes took a while to catch on to the jokes her family loved to throw around. This earned her a nickname that anyone named Stacy has probably heard at some point: “Spacy Stacy.” It was affectionate teasing, the sort that only lands when everyone knows you’re loved.

Stacy and Suzie first became friends way back in second grade, the way kids do — thrown together by circumstance, discovering they liked each other, forming a bond that would last for years. When Stacy was eleven, her family moved out of state, and the friendship went dormant for a while. But they moved back eventually, and by the last semester of senior year, the two girls had grown closer than ever. They were picking up where they’d left off, except now they were nearly adults with their whole lives ahead of them.

Stacy was 5’3″ and weighed about 120 pounds. She had long dark blonde hair with sun-lightened ends and blue eyes. Freckles dotted her face, and she had a dimple right in the middle of her chin, along with birthmarks near her lip and on her right arm. While attending Kickapoo High School, she worked part-time as a secretary and receptionist at Springfield Gymnastics. She also did some occasional modeling for The Total Bride, a wedding dress shop owned by family friends in the Brentwood Center. She loved fashion, she loved music, and she’d been elected to the Homecoming Court during her senior year.

After graduation, Stacy planned to attend Southwest Missouri State University and rush a sorority. She was ready for the next chapter.

Graduation Night

June 6, 1992, fell on a Saturday. The Kickapoo High School graduation ceremony was held at Missouri State University’s Hammons Student Center, starting at 4 p.m. The building was big enough to hold all the graduates plus their families, and it was packed that afternoon with proud parents and restless siblings and grandparents dabbing at their eyes. Sherrill Levitt sat somewhere in those seats, watching her daughter walk across the stage. Stuart and Janis McCall were there for Stacy. The ceremony wrapped up around 6 p.m., and then the celebrating began.

Suzie and Sherrill went back to the house on East Delmar Street and had takeout pizza together — just the two of them, mother and daughter, before the night really got started. Stacy went home to her parents’ house to pose for photographs with her graduation cake. She also received a cocker spaniel puppy as a graduation present — exactly the right gift for a new graduate.

The school had offered an alcohol-free lock-in that would keep students safely inside the building until 8 a.m. the next morning. Suzie and Stacy passed on that. They wanted to celebrate with their friends, out in the world, not stuck inside school walls on the night they’d finally escaped.

Sherrill had been invited to join the Kirby family for dinner after the ceremony — the Kirbys were the parents of Janelle, one of Suzie’s close friends — but she turned them down. According to Kathy Kirby, Janelle’s mother, there was an understanding between the families. If Sherrill needed to reach Suzie during the night, she knew exactly where to call. “We had told her to call us if she needed to get ahold of Suzie,” Kathy later said. “Our phone did not ring one time.”

The original plan for the evening was ambitious: Suzie, Stacy, and Janelle were going to drive down to Branson after the parties, check into a motel for the night, and then meet up with friends at the White Water water park the next morning. Stacy’s mother, Janis, wasn’t thrilled about this idea. She worried about them driving that late at night, especially if any alcohol was involved. A car accident on graduation night was a tragedy that happened to other families, until it happened to yours. The girls agreed to a compromise — if they partied too late, they’d just crash at Janelle’s house in Battlefield instead of making the drive.

The evening unfolded the way graduation nights do. Suzie took photographs at various locations throughout the night, including some with her friend Nigel Kenney at the Delmar residence. She and Stacy bounced from party to party across Springfield with their friends, celebrating, probably talking about the future, probably not thinking too hard about anything. At one point, the group ended up at a gathering at the home of Stacy’s friend Michelle Elder. Springfield police showed up and broke that one up shortly before 2 a.m. — not because anything bad had happened, just routine party-busting on a busy night.

At that party, Stacy and Michelle made plans to get together the following evening, Sunday, June 8. They were going to reconnect, catch up, maybe start the summer the right way. Those plans would never happen.

Around 2 a.m., Suzie, Stacy, and Janelle headed back to Janelle’s house in Battlefield. They were still planning to hit White Water the next day, but the Branson drive seemed like too much at that hour. They’d just leave from Janelle’s place in the morning.

There was a problem, though. Janelle’s house was overflowing with out-of-town relatives who had come in for the graduation. There were people sleeping everywhere, not enough space for three more teenage girls to find a comfortable spot. So sometime around 2:15 a.m. on June 7, 1992, Suzie and Stacy made a last-minute decision. They’d spend the night at Suzie’s house instead, at 1717 East Delmar Street. Suzie was apparently excited about this — she’d recently gotten a new king-sized waterbed delivered to her room, and she wanted to show it off to Stacy.

Janelle’s mother, Kathy, was in bed but not quite asleep. She overheard the girls leaving. She later told police what she heard: Suzie told Stacy, “Follow me to my house.” Stacy replied, “Okay, I will.”

The two girls left Battlefield in separate cars. Suzie led the way in her red Ford Escort with the personalized license plate that read “SWEETR.” Stacy followed behind in her Toyota Corolla. They drove the short distance to Springfield and pulled into the driveway at 1717 East Delmar Street sometime before dawn.

And that was it. That was the last time anyone ever reported seeing Suzie Streeter, Stacy McCall, or Sherrill Levitt.

Sunday Morning

The plan had been to leave for White Water around 9 a.m. Suzie had promised her friend Nigel Kenney that she’d call him in the morning so they could coordinate meeting at the water park. Stacy had promised to call her mother. Neither of those calls ever came.

Janelle Kirby woke up on Sunday morning and tried calling the Levitt house around 8 a.m. The phone rang and rang. Nobody picked up. She figured maybe the girls were still asleep, so she waited a while and tried again. Still nothing. She and her boyfriend, Mike Henson, decided to just drive over and check on their friends.

They pulled up to the house on East Delmar Street around 9 a.m. and immediately noticed that both girls’ cars were sitting in the driveway. Suzie’s red Ford Escort was parked in the circular drive, and Stacy’s Toyota Corolla was right behind it. Sherrill’s blue Corsica was in the carport. So everybody was home — or at least their cars were.

Janelle noticed something else that seemed off. Suzie’s car wasn’t parked in its usual spot. Her friend Nigel Kenney would later explain to police that Suzie was extremely particular about where she parked. Every time she came home, she put her car in the same exact place. It was just one of her habits, a small personal ritual that defined her. The fact that her car was parked somewhere different suggested that maybe someone else had been in her spot when she and Stacy arrived before dawn, forcing her to park elsewhere. Or maybe it meant nothing at all. Nobody knows.

There was also the matter of the porch light. The glass globe covering the light fixture was shattered, and broken glass lay scattered across the concrete porch steps. The lightbulb itself was still intact — it hadn’t been smashed, just the decorative glass covering around it. Janelle was barefoot, so Mike helped her sweep up the glass before she cut herself.

They knocked on the door. No answer. They tried again. Nothing.

Figuring the girls had somehow already left for the water park without them, Janelle and Mike headed home. They decided to change their plans — instead of driving all the way to Branson, they’d just go to HydraSlide, a smaller water park right there in Springfield. But first, they wanted to track down Suzie and Stacy.

They drove to a nearby sub shop, thinking maybe the girls had stopped for food. No luck. Around noon, they circled back to the Levitt house. This time, they found the front door unlocked. They went inside.

The house was silent. Everything looked normal at first glance — no furniture knocked over, no signs of a fight, nothing obviously wrong. Suzie’s bed looked like it had been slept in. But on the floor outside Suzie’s sunken bedroom, all three women’s purses were lined up together. That was strange. The television was on, playing to an empty room. Sherrill’s bed also looked slept in, and the blinds in one window were bent in an odd way, pulled apart as if someone had been looking outside. Her reading glasses sat on the nightstand, right next to a book that had been placed face-down, like she’d been in the middle of reading when she stopped.

The family dog was there — a Yorkshire Terrier named Cinnamon — and she was agitated. More agitated than Janelle had ever seen her. The little dog was worked up about something.

Janelle also noticed that Suzie and Sherrill had left their cigarettes and lighters behind. Both of them were heavy smokers. Neither of them would walk out the door without their cigarettes. They just wouldn’t do that.

Then the telephone rang. Janelle answered it. A male voice on the other end started making sexually explicit comments, using crude language. She hung up. Almost immediately, the phone rang again — same thing, another obscene call. She hung up again.

Springfield Police Sergeant David Asher would later describe those calls in an interview: “Obscene… The individual would not identify himself… They were using the F-word and several other words and she just hung up the phone.” Janelle described the caller as sounding “teenish,” like a young man. She remembered that Suzie had been complaining about prank calls at the house ever since she and her mother had moved in that spring. Maybe this was connected to those. Maybe it wasn’t.

Janelle and Mike left the house without finding any trace of the three women.

A Mother Knows

All day Sunday, Janis McCall tried to reach her daughter. Stacy had promised to call that morning before heading to the water park, and the call never came. As the hours passed, Janis started making her own calls, trying to piece together where her daughter might be.

She learned from Janelle’s family that Stacy hadn’t stayed at the Kirby house after all — she’d gone to spend the night at Suzie’s place instead, a last-minute change of plans. Janis called the Levitt house over and over throughout the day. No one ever answered.

She had friends who knew employees at White Water, so she asked them to check if Stacy and Suzie had shown up at the water park that day. They hadn’t been seen there.

By late afternoon, Janis was beyond worried. She drove to 1717 East Delmar Street with her two other daughters, arriving around 7 p.m. Just like Janelle had found hours earlier, the front door was unlocked. Janis stepped inside.

The family dog, Cinnamon, came “barreling toward” her, yipping and crying, clearly upset about something. Janis looked around the house, searching for any sign of her daughter. She found Stacy’s belongings from the night before — the clothes she’d worn to the graduation parties were neatly folded on a chair. Her shirt and underwear were missing, which suggested she’d changed into sleepwear before bed. In the bathroom, there were recently used makeup wipes, the kind Suzie and Stacy had apparently used to take off their makeup before going to sleep. Their jewelry and keys were there, left behind as if they’d be picking them up again any minute.

All three women’s purses sat together on the floor outside Suzie’s bedroom. When Janis looked through Sherrill’s purse, she found a cash deposit of almost $900 from the salon — a week’s worth of work, just sitting there. Stacy’s migraine medication had been left behind, and that worried Janis. Her daughter needed that medication. In the refrigerator, she found a graduation cake for the girls, untouched.

The television was still on. A red light was blinking on the answering machine, indicating there was an unplayed message. Janis tried to listen to it. She heard what she would later describe as a “strange message” — but in the process of trying to play it back, she accidentally erased it. This was common with answering machines in the early 1990s. Many of them automatically deleted messages after a single playback, and Janis didn’t realize what she’d done until it was too late.

Police would later say they were “very interested” in that erased message. They believed it “may have contained a clue” to what happened to the three women. They also said they didn’t think it was connected to the obscene prank calls Janelle had received. Whatever was on that recording, it’s gone forever.

At this point, it had been roughly 16 hours since anyone had seen or heard from Sherrill, Suzie, or Stacy. Janis picked up the phone and called the police.

A Scene That Made No Sense

When Springfield Police officers arrived at 1717 East Delmar Street, they walked into a situation that defied easy explanation. Three women had vanished, but everything they owned was still right there in the house.

Sherrill’s car sat in the carport. Suzie’s car and Stacy’s car sat in the driveway. All three women’s purses were inside, complete with money, driver’s licenses, and keys. Cigarettes and lighters were left behind. Medication was left behind. The family dog was there, barking at everyone who walked through the door. There was no blood anywhere. No sign of forced entry. No overturned furniture or broken objects. The house looked like its occupants had stepped out for a few minutes and would be right back.

The only physical evidence that something might have gone wrong was the shattered porch light globe and an awkwardly bent window blind inside. That was it. No fingerprints that didn’t belong there. No biological traces — no blood, no hair, nothing.

Officer Rick Bookout arrived to find a chaotic scene, but not from a crime. Several people were milling around in the yard. The front door stood wide open. Friends and family members were going in and out of the house, trying to help, trying to figure out what had happened. Police later estimated that between ten and twenty people had entered the home before officers arrived. Some of them had cleaned up — emptying ashtrays, washing coffee cups. The broken porch light glass had already been swept away.

Everyone there was trying to be helpful. Nobody realized they might be destroying evidence.

Sherrill had been scheduled to work at New Attitudes Hair Salon later that week. She also had a doctor’s appointment set for Monday, June 8. Stacy was supposed to show up at the Springfield Gymnastics Center on Monday for her receptionist job. Suzie was scheduled to work a shift at a local movie theater on Tuesday, June 9, starting at 4 p.m.

None of them showed up for any of it.

The Search Begins

The case moved fast in those early days. On Tuesday, June 9 — just two days after Janis McCall called the police — the FBI was brought in to help. By Wednesday, June 10, volunteers and law enforcement had hung more than 20,000 posters featuring photographs of the three women throughout Springfield. Some of those posters are still up today, faded but visible in a few storefronts around town. The faces in those photographs have been frozen in 1992 for more than three decades.

Community searches started immediately. Friends, neighbors, and complete strangers joined the effort. They fanned out across the area, looking for any sign of the missing women. Divers were sent into Lake Springfield and a stretch of the James River. Investigators ran polygraph tests on people who had been close to Sherrill, Suzie, and Stacy. The case drew massive media attention — features ran on 48 Hours, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Maury Povich, and America’s Most Wanted. Everyone was talking about the Springfield Three.

Darrell Moore was a former Prosecuting Attorney who worked the case. He was one of dozens of investigators who poured themselves into it, working long days and sleepless nights trying to find answers. “Everybody on this case wanted it resolved,” he said later.

David Asher, a retired Springfield Police Sergeant, reflected on the investigation years afterward. He felt like they’d been playing catch-up from the start. “I just felt like when we were given the case, when we actually got it late, we didn’t start from the very beginning.”

One of the earliest tips that came in involved a green van. Multiple witnesses reported seeing an older Dodge van in the area of 1717 East Delmar Street during the critical window — sometime between 2:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. on June 7, when the women were believed to have disappeared. One witness in particular stood out. She said she’d seen the van with a blonde woman behind the wheel. She also said she heard an unseen male voice from inside the vehicle tell the woman, “Don’t do anything stupid.” The witness identified the blonde woman as Suzie Streeter.

Police took the green van tip seriously. They searched thousands of vans across the region, checking them one by one. They even painted a van green and parked it outside the police department building, hoping someone would recognize it and come forward with information. The van sat there for a long time. Nobody ever identified it.

In 1992, somebody sent an anonymous letter to KY3, a local television station. The letter claimed to contain clues about the women’s whereabouts. It was found inside a newspaper stand. Former detective Mark Webb remembered it clearly: “It was found in an envelope, and they cut the words out just like in the movies.” Cut-out letters pasted onto paper, ransom-note style. Over the years, more letters would arrive at the station — some handwritten, some typed — offering vague details and theories about what had happened. None of them led anywhere.

The First Suspects

In those early days of the investigation, police were open about the fact that they were interviewing and polygraphing several people close to the missing women. One of the first names that came up was Bartt Streeter, Sherrill’s son and Suzie’s older brother.

Bartt was nine years older than Suzie. Back in the early 1980s, Sherrill had kicked him out of the house because of his drinking. She’d laid down the rules clearly: “If you want to live under my roof, then you have to abide by my rules.” Bartt didn’t want to follow the rules, so he grabbed his belongings and left. He stayed away from the family for roughly ten years after that.

Then, in the fall of 1991 — about eight months before the disappearance — Bartt showed up in Springfield again. He’d gone through a rough breakup with a girlfriend and needed somewhere to land. The family reconnected. Bartt and Suzie even decided to share an apartment together, trying to rebuild the relationship that had been broken for so long.

When police questioned Bartt about his whereabouts on the night of June 6, 1992, he told them he’d been drinking heavily and passed out. He cooperated fully with investigators. He took a polygraph test and passed. He was eliminated as a suspect.

Attention shifted to another name: Dustin Recla, Suzie’s ex-boyfriend.

Four months before the women disappeared, in February 1992, Recla and two friends — Michael Clay and Joseph Riedel — had broken into a mausoleum at Springfield’s Maple Park Cemetery. They vandalized the crypt, stole a skull and some bones, and Recla took the gold fillings from the skull to a local pawn shop, where he sold them for $30. Suzie had cooperated with police after the incident, giving them a statement about what the boys had done. Word was that she might be called as a witness against Recla in court.

Threats had allegedly been made against Suzie and her mother after she talked to the police. Recla and his friends were known to be together and in the Springfield area on the night the women disappeared.

Investigators brought Recla in for questioning. He took a polygraph test, denied having anything to do with the disappearance, and passed. He later testified before a grand jury investigating the case in August 1994. When reporters asked him about it afterward, Recla shrugged it off. They were “asking the same old questions” about his relationship with Suzie, he said.

Recla received a suspended sentence and probation for the cemetery vandalism. He eventually moved to Colorado and hasn’t been charged with anything related to the Springfield Three.

The Gravedigger’s Son

Another name has floated around this case for years, though no direct connection has ever been proven.

Larry DeWayne Hall was born on December 11, 1962, in Wabash, Indiana. He had an identical twin brother named Gary. Their father, Robert Hall, worked as the sexton at Falls Cemetery in Wabash — a sexton is the person who digs the graves and maintains the grounds. The family lived in a big house right there on the cemetery property — a fact that sounds like fiction but was just their everyday reality.

Larry and Gary were monochorionic twins, meaning they shared a placenta in the womb. During the pregnancy, Gary got the better end of that arrangement. He received more nutrients and oxygen, while Larry struggled. After birth, Larry was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit because of oxygen deprivation. The complications he experienced left him with cognitive delays that would affect him for the rest of his life. His IQ was later measured at around 80, which placed him in the borderline intellectual functioning range.

Growing up, Larry was the target of constant teasing from other kids. He had a speech impediment. He wet the bed well into childhood. He was awkward and struggled academically, failing to connect with his peers the way most children do. His twin brother Gary would later describe their dynamic in an interview: Larry was “the backward twin,” while Gary was “the more dominant, outgoing twin.” Gary also claimed that his brother was “evil” and had tried to kill him on more than one occasion.

After graduating from Wabash High School in 1980, Larry found work as a janitor at a hospital. He also developed an obsession with the Civil War. He started traveling across the Midwest in his Dodge van, attending historical reenactments where hobbyists dressed in period uniforms and recreated famous battles. Gary would later suggest that the reenactments gave Larry a way to hide his personal hygiene problems and express whatever darker impulses were building inside him. Gary knew his brother better than anyone, and he was afraid of him.

The FBI believes Larry Hall started killing in the early 1980s. Over the following decade, a pattern emerged: the bodies of young women and girls started turning up in towns where Hall had recently visited for reenactments. Many of the victims had been strangled and showed signs of brutal violence.

In September 1993, a 15-year-old girl named Jessica Roach disappeared from Georgetown, Illinois, near her home. Two months later, her body was found in a cornfield in Perrysville, Indiana. She had been sexually assaulted. Witnesses remembered seeing a strange Dodge van driving through the cornfield around the time of the discovery. When police ran the license plate — Indiana plate 85B3752 — they got a hit. The van belonged to Larry Hall.

Investigators brought Hall in for questioning in November 1994. During the interrogation, they showed him a photograph of Jessica Roach. The moment he saw her face, Hall broke down crying. He confessed to everything — abducting her, raping her, strangling her, burying her body in that cornfield. He signed a written confession admitting that he’d transported Roach across state lines for sexual gratification.

In 1995, Hall was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That’s the mandatory federal sentence when a kidnapping results in death. He wasn’t charged with murder because authorities couldn’t figure out whether Jessica Roach had been killed in Indiana or Illinois, and jurisdictional issues prevented state murder charges from being filed.

Hall was transferred to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri — the same Springfield where three women had vanished three years earlier.

The Informant

In 1998, federal authorities came up with an unusual plan. They approached a convicted drug dealer named Jimmy Keene and made him an offer: if he could get transferred to the prison where Larry Hall was being held and convince Hall to confess to his crimes, Keene would earn his freedom.

Keene took the deal. He was moved to the Springfield federal prison and began the slow process of befriending Hall.

It worked. Over time, Hall started to trust Keene. He opened up to him.

At one point, Keene observed Hall in the prison wood shop. Hall was carving wooden falcons and studying a map that he’d marked up with various locations. When Keene asked about it, Hall told him that the falcons “watch over the dead.” Keene believed the marked locations on the map were burial sites.

Eventually, Hall confessed to Keene. He admitted to killing Jessica Roach and others. He provided graphic details about his methods — how he would strangle his victims with belts or ropes, how he would dispose of bodies in wooded areas or cornfields, how he would sometimes return to visit the remains. The confessions were detailed, specific, and deeply disturbing.

Hall also sent letters to Christopher Hawley Martin, an author who was researching a book about him called Urges: A Chronicle of Serial Killer Larry Hall. In those letters, Hall claimed that several girls were buried in the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. The Mark Twain National Forest covers more than 1.5 million acres across southern Missouri — an enormous wilderness where bodies could remain hidden for decades or forever.

This claim led some investigators and researchers to believe Hall might have been responsible for the Springfield Three. The theory made a terrible kind of sense. Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, a Civil War historical site, is located just five minutes from the Kirby residence in Battlefield, where Suzie and Stacy were partying on the night of June 6, 1992. Two Civil War reenactments took place on that very day — June 6 — in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, about 30 minutes north of Springfield. Hall was known to attend events like that.

The problem is that Hall has confessed to more than 35 murders over the years. He has also recanted every single one of those confessions. He has confessed to murders where he was later ruled out as a suspect. He has provided locations for buried bodies that turned out to be completely wrong. His credibility is essentially nonexistent, which makes it impossible to know what’s real and what’s fantasy.

Some authorities believe Hall could be responsible for between 40 and 50 deaths. No direct connection between him and the Springfield Three has ever been proven. The Mark Twain National Forest is still there, keeping whatever secrets it holds.

A Man Named Cox

There’s another name that comes up in this case more than any other: Robert Craig Cox.

Cox had been the Army’s “Soldier of the Year” at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1979. He was a former Army Ranger with a distinguished military career that included participating in the invasion of Grenada in 1983. He was also a convicted kidnapper. And according to one Florida jury, he was a murderer.

On December 30, 1978, a 19-year-old woman named Sharon Zellers left her job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, around 10 p.m. She was driving home to Pine Hills. She never made it.

Six days later, Sharon’s body was found stuffed into a manhole at a sewage pumping station on Sand Lake Road in Orange County. Her Ford Falcon, stained with blood, was discovered abandoned in a nearby orange grove.

A medical examiner testified about what had been done to Sharon Zellers. She had been struck in the head 14 times, with enough force to dent her skull. Despite the severity of those injuries, she probably lived for 20 to 30 minutes after the attack. The judge who would later sentence her killer wrote: “It is impossible to know the tremendous suffering that Sharon experienced. Those minutes before her death must have been a time of complete and total terror.”

Robert Craig Cox became a suspect almost immediately. He and his parents happened to be vacationing in Orlando at the time, staying at a Days Inn located roughly 340 feet from where Sharon’s body was found. On the night she disappeared, Cox burst into his parents’ hotel room bleeding heavily from the mouth. An inch of his tongue had been bitten off. He couldn’t speak and had to communicate by writing notes. He passed out and was rushed to the emergency room, where surgeons worked to repair his damaged tongue.

Two weeks later, Cox gave his story to police. He said he’d been at a skating rink called Skate World when a fight broke out in the parking lot — eight people, four Black men and four white men, throwing punches. Cox claimed he got hit in the face and accidentally bit off part of his own tongue during the scuffle. He said he got in his car, drove around looking for a hospital, couldn’t find one, went back to the skating rink parking lot, and was eventually picked up by a Good Samaritan who dropped him off at the hotel.

Investigators started poking holes in that story almost immediately. Two Orange County deputies who had been working security at the skating rink that night said no such fight had occurred. When Cox’s father accompanied a deputy to retrieve Cox’s car from a parking lot near the rink, the deputy looked inside the vehicle. There wasn’t a single drop of blood anywhere — despite Cox’s claim that he’d been driving around bleeding heavily after his tongue was bitten off. The surgeon who operated on Cox testified that he would have been losing profuse amounts of blood before he got to the hospital. The car should have been a mess. It wasn’t.

Prosecutors developed a theory: Sharon Zellers had bitten off part of Cox’s tongue while fighting for her life.

The physical evidence supported this theory, at least circumstantially. Blood found in Sharon’s car matched Cox’s blood type. Hairs found in her car were consistent with his chest hair. A boot print in the car matched the kind of sole worn by Army Rangers at the time. Years later, a surgical technician who had assisted in Cox’s tongue surgery contacted prosecutors after reading about the case in the newspaper. She remembered something strange about the wound. When doctors went back and reviewed the records, they found that the bite marks on Cox’s tongue didn’t match the pattern consistent with a self-inflicted bite. The pattern of teeth marks made it far more likely that someone else had bitten him.

The trial lasted four days. The jury deliberated for more than 14 hours. In July 1988, Robert Craig Cox was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Sharon Zellers. The jurors voted 7 to 5 to recommend the death penalty, and Judge Richard Conrad agreed. Cox was sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair.

And then, in December 1989, the Florida Supreme Court did something rare. They reviewed the case and voted 7-0 to throw out the conviction entirely. The justices ruled that the evidence against Cox, while suspicious, only established suspicion — not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. They didn’t send the case back for a new trial. They ordered Cox acquitted outright and released.

The jurors who had convicted him were furious. One of them, Nancy D’Aurora, wrote an angry letter to the justices, calling their decision “all wrong.” She predicted that Cox would kill again “because you have provided him the opportunity.”

The Zellers family was devastated. Sharon’s father, Charles, had spent nine years pushing prosecutors to bring charges against Cox. Now the man he believed had killed his daughter was walking free.

Cox was transferred to California, where he still owed time on a 1985 conviction. In that case, he had kidnapped two women in their early twenties, holding them at either knifepoint or gunpoint. He’d been sentenced to nine years for those crimes.

Cox Comes to Springfield

Robert Craig Cox was released from California prison on parole in December 1990. He went back to his boyhood hometown: Springfield, Missouri.

His parents still lived there, and Cox moved in with them while he got back on his feet. He found work as an underground utility locator in the south-central part of the city. The job would have made him familiar with the area — familiar with the streets, the houses, the neighborhoods. It also would have given him a plausible excuse to approach homes and properties under the guise of utility work.

Cox also took a job at a car lot. His coworker there was Stuart McCall — Stacy’s father.

When the Springfield Three disappeared in June 1992, Cox had been living in Springfield for roughly a year and a half. Police questioned him early in the investigation. Cox told them he’d been at his parents’ home on the night of June 6. His parents backed him up. He also claimed that on the morning of June 7 — the morning after the women vanished — he’d gone to church with his girlfriend. His girlfriend confirmed this story.

Years later, she took it back. She admitted that Cox had asked her to lie for him. He’d told her to say they’d gone to church together if police ever asked about that weekend. She’d done what he asked.

Cox Behind Bars Again

Robert Craig Cox couldn’t stay out of trouble for long.

In November 1995, he walked into a hair salon in Decatur, Texas, and held a 12-year-old girl at gunpoint while he robbed the place. Nobody was physically hurt during the holdup, but Cox was arrested, convicted of aggravated robbery, and sentenced to life in prison. He also received a consecutive 15-year federal sentence. He’s been behind bars in Texas ever since.

With Cox locked up again, Missouri investigators saw an opportunity. In January 1996, Springfield Police Sergeant Dave Smith and other investigators traveled to Texas to interview Cox about the Springfield Three.

The conversations were strange. Cox was described as friendly, even charming in his own way. He also shared information about the disappearance that investigators had never heard before — details that, according to Smith, were “things that make us say we can’t eliminate him” as a suspect.

During the interviews, Cox brought up Ted Bundy. He’d been housed near Bundy on Florida’s death row before his murder conviction was overturned. Bundy had been executed in 1989, and Cox apparently liked to talk about him.

That same year, KY3 investigative reporter Dennis Graves traveled to the Texas prison to interview Cox on camera. The exchange that followed has shaped how people think about this case ever since.

Cox looked at Graves and said: “I know that they are dead. I’ll say that. And I know that.”

Graves asked if that was just a theory.

Cox shook his head. “I just know that they are dead. That’s not my theory. I just know that. There’s no doubt about that.”

He wouldn’t say anything more. He told authorities and journalists that he would only reveal what happened to the three women after his mother died.

The interview was subpoenaed and presented to a grand jury in 1996. The grand jury didn’t hand down any charges.

In 1997, Cox spoke with Springfield News-Leader reporter Robert Keyes. He claimed he knew where the women were buried. He said their bodies would never be found.

Janis McCall, Stacy’s mother, later addressed Cox directly in an interview: “I would like him, if he knows something, to tell what he knows. 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.”

Police have never been sure what to make of Robert Craig Cox. He enjoys attention. He enjoys playing games with investigators. He lied about his alibi. He may know something, or he may be stringing everyone along for the thrill of it. No investigator involved in the case considers him a credible source of information. He remains a person of interest anyway.

The Call That Got Away

On December 31, 1992, the case was featured on America’s Most Wanted. The broadcast generated 29 calls to the show’s hotline, which was a decent response for a case that was already six months cold.

One of those calls stood out from the rest.

A man called the hotline claiming to have specific information about the disappearance of the Springfield Three. Whatever he said got the immediate attention of investigators. According to Springfield Police Sergeant David Asher, authorities were later able to corroborate some of what the caller told them. He mentioned a motive. Based on the details he provided, police believed the crime could have happened the way he described.

Then something went wrong. A switchboard operator tried to patch the caller through directly to Springfield investigators. The call was dropped. The man got spooked and didn’t call back.

Police went public with appeals for the caller to reach out again. They described him as someone with “prime knowledge of the abductions.” They needed to talk to him. They needed to know what he knew.

He never called back. His identity has never been established.

Other Leads, Other Dead Ends

Steven Eugene Garrison was a member of a motorcycle gang when he was arrested in 1993 on an unrelated weapons charge. During plea negotiations, he told police he knew what had happened to the Springfield Three. He claimed he’d overheard a drunken friend confess to killing them at a drug party. He offered to lead investigators to the burial site if they’d help him get out of jail.

Garrison provided one detail that hadn’t been made public, which gave his story some credibility. He led police to a 40-acre hog farm in Webster County. The property was owned by Francis Robb Sr., a man who had been convicted of two murders in 1990. Robb died in 1995.

On August 28, 1993, investigators searched the farm. Whatever they found — or didn’t find — has never been disclosed. A judge issued a gag order preventing police from talking about what happened at the site.

Garrison himself was later arrested for violent assault after fleeing police. He was convicted of rape, sodomy, burglary, and robbery, and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Gerald Carnahan was another name that circulated in connection to this case. He first drew public attention in 1985, when a 15-year-old girl named Jackie Johns was beaten to death and her body dumped in Lake Springfield. Carnahan was named as a suspect and accused of lying to a grand jury about his alibi. The charge was dismissed.

Over the years, police connected Carnahan to other homicides. In 1987, a woman named Debbie Sue Lewis vanished from her car on U.S. Highway 160. Her purse and keys were left inside the vehicle, and the driver’s door was standing open — just like Jackie Johns’s car had been found. Lewis’s skeleton turned up months later in Newton County. Carnahan was never charged.

In the spring of 1993, less than a year after the Springfield Three disappeared, Carnahan was arrested for trying to kidnap a woman off a sidewalk near Sunshine Street and Ingram Mill Road in Springfield. He served two years for that crime.

In 2007, DNA evidence finally linked Carnahan to Jackie Johns’s murder. He was convicted of first-degree murder and forcible rape and is currently serving a life sentence. When a reporter from the Springfield Daily Citizen contacted him in prison and asked about the Springfield Three, Carnahan wrote back: “I did know Jackie, and Debbie Lewis. Both good people.” As for Sherrill, Suzie, and Stacy: “Really have no idea what happened or where they ran off to, the three girls.”

The Green Van

More than a year after the disappearance, in October 1993, police got a break on the green van tip.

A van matching the description witnesses had provided was found abandoned at a public campground in Ripley County, Indiana. A couple had been staying at the campsite over the summer, using the van and a pickup truck. When they left, they abandoned the van.

Investigators checked the vehicle and found it had no license plates. They ran the VIN number. The van had been stolen from Springfield, Missouri, the same week the three women disappeared.

The connection seemed far too significant to ignore. But police were never able to prove that the van had been used in the abduction. They couldn’t connect it to anyone involved in the case. The lead went nowhere.

In 2002, another green van tip came in. Two women told police that a group of men working at a concrete company in Webster County owned a green van matching the description from 1992. Investigators went to the site with trained cadaver dogs. The dogs hit on three spots. When police dug, they found bones.

Testing revealed the bones were far too old to belong to the missing women.

In April 2003, tips led investigators to farmland south of Cassville, Missouri. They brought backhoes and dug massive holes across the property. They found two things that seemed promising: what appeared to be blood, and a section of a green vehicle that might have matched the van witnesses described.

The blood was sent to a specialized lab for testing. The results came back inconclusive.

Buried Under the Hospital?

One of the strangest theories in this case involves Cox Hospital in Springfield.

At some point, investigators received a tip claiming the three women’s bodies had been buried beneath the south parking garage at the hospital. In 2007, crime reporter Kathee Baird decided to investigate the tip herself. She hired a mechanical engineer named Rick Norland to scan a section of the garage using ground-penetrating radar.

Norland found three anomalies beneath the concrete. They were “roughly the same size,” he said. Two were parallel to each other; the third was perpendicular. Norland told Baird the pattern was consistent with a burial site.

Springfield Police spokeswoman Lisa Cox (no relation to Robert Craig Cox) dismissed the tip as improbable. She pointed out that construction on the parking garage didn’t begin until September 1993 — more than a year after the women disappeared. If the bodies had been buried there, workers would have noticed something during construction.

“Digging up the area and subsequently reconstructing this structure would be extremely costly,” she said, “and without any reasonable belief that the bodies could be located here, it is illogical to do so.”

Cox Hospital gave consent for police to dig if they determined it was warranted. The Springfield Police Department declined. They decided the tip wasn’t credible enough to justify the cost and disruption.

The parking garage is still there. Nobody has ever dug beneath it.

Legally Dead, Officially Missing

In June 1997, a memorial bench was placed in the Victims Memorial Garden at Phelps Grove Park in Springfield. The bench was dedicated to Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and Stacy McCall.

That same year, Sherrill and Suzie were declared legally dead. It had been five years since anyone had seen them. The declaration allowed their estates to be settled and their affairs to be closed.

The McCall family made a different choice. They refused to declare Stacy dead.

“Until I know a hundred percent that Stacy is deceased, I will never declare her dead,” Janis McCall said. “They’re going to have to find some remains somewhere before I call her legally dead. It’s not for any reason other than if I do and she’s not dead, think of how mad she’d be when she gets back.”

The case remains officially open. All three women are still classified as missing. Age-progression photographs have been created over the years, showing what they might look like today. Sherrill Levitt would be in her early 80s now. Suzie Streeter would be in her early 50s — older than her mother was when she vanished. Stacy McCall would be 51.

A Family’s Fight

Stuart and Janis McCall never stopped searching for their daughter. For more than 30 years after Stacy disappeared, they advocated for continued investigation. They worked with law enforcement. They did interviews with every media outlet that would listen. They followed up on every lead, no matter how unlikely.

In the years after the disappearance, Stu and Janis co-founded a nonprofit organization called One Missing Link. The organization was created to help families dealing with abductions, runaways, and missing-person cases — all the people going through the same nightmare the McCalls had been living since 1992. Janis also worked with the National Center for Missing Adults, turning their family’s tragedy into something that might help others.

Stuart McCall passed away on October 6, 2025, at the age of 82. His obituary noted that he “never stopped looking for her.”

He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Janis; their daughters Lisa and Meridith; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Services were held at First and Calvary Presbyterian Church in Springfield.

Janis continues to hold onto hope. A reward fund was established back in 1993 and has grown to more than $43,000 over the years. The family has set up online donation options to help increase the reward, hoping that money might convince someone with information to finally come forward. Someone out there knows something. Someone always does.

What Remains

The Springfield Police Department has processed more than 5,000 tips since June 1992. The FBI, Missouri State Highway Patrol, and numerous other law enforcement agencies have been involved in the investigation at various points. None of them have found the answer.

Mark Webb, a former Springfield Police detective who worked the case and is now the Police Chief in Bolivar, Missouri, has thought about the Springfield Three for decades. In interviews, he’s talked about how the case changed law enforcement in Springfield — how the department started looking at new technologies and computer programs, preparing themselves in case they ever faced another case of this magnitude.

“What I think about the most,” Webb said, “is what happened to them? What were their last hours on earth like? Again, I don’t know that, I can’t prove they’re deceased, but what things happened…”

The house at 1717 East Delmar Street still stands. It’s changed owners several times over the years, and the people living there now have no connection to what happened in 1992. But for a lot of people in Springfield, the house is still a reminder of that summer morning when three women simply vanished and never came back.

Every few years, media attention resurfaces around the case. The story has been covered extensively on Investigation Discovery’s Disappeared and on multiple podcasts including Ozarks True Crime and The Springfield Three: A Small-Town Disappearance. The flyers and billboards that once covered the Ozarks have faded over the decades, but a handful still hang in storefronts around Springfield. Three faces, frozen in time. Three women, waiting to be found.

“They were wonderful people, fun people, just normal people,” said Stephanie Appleby, a friend of both Stacy and Suzie, in a 2017 interview. “We all carry them with us in our hearts and pray that, still pray, that they come home and that we get some sort of closure.”

Three women. Three cars in the driveway. Three purses on the floor. A graduation cake sitting untouched in the refrigerator. A little dog that wouldn’t stop barking. And 33 years of silence.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.