The Springfield Three

Who Was Involved

Before they became a case file, they were a family and a friendship at the start of summer. Sherrill Levitt was 47, a cosmetologist who worked at a local salon and lived in a modest house on East Delmar Street in central Springfield, Missouri. By every account she was close to her daughter, Suzanne, the 19-year-old everyone knew as Suzie. The two shared the home, and on the night everything changed they were doing the most ordinary of things: Sherrill spoke by phone with a friend around 11:15 on the evening of June 6 about painting a chest of drawers.

Suzie Streeter, 19, had just reached a milestone. The day before, she and her 18-year-old friend Stacy McCall had graduated from high school. Stacy was the youngest of the three, remembered by her family as a daughter whose homecoming her mother waited up for. Janis McCall, Stacy’s mother, would go on to spend decades speaking publicly for all three women. “I expected her home that night, the next day, maybe a couple of days afterward,” she said in a 2017 interview. “Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think that it would be 25 years later, and I would be saying Stacy is still missing.”

These three women, two teenagers stepping into adulthood and the mother who anchored them, are the center of this story. They are not a mystery to be solved so much as people who were loved and who are still missed.

What Happened

On the night of June 6, 1992, Suzie and Stacy celebrated their graduation, moving between parties as new graduates do. They had considered staying at a friend’s house but found it too crowded, so in the early hours of Sunday, June 7, they drove to Sherrill’s home at 1717 East Delmar Street. According to the Springfield Police Department, Stacy and Suzie were last seen at roughly 2:15 a.m. when they left a graduation gathering for the house.

That they arrived seems beyond doubt. Their cars sat outside. Inside, their clothing, jewelry, purses, money, keys, and cigarettes were all left behind, along with the family’s small dog. There was no note, no message, no sign of where they had gone. The bed appeared slept in. By the time worried friends and family reached the house later that morning, the women were simply gone.

The only physical anomaly was small and strange: a broken globe from the porch light. There was no sign of forced entry. Everything that should have been there was there. The only thing missing was the three women themselves.

The Investigation

The case drew immediate and sustained attention. The Springfield Police Department led the effort, joined within days by the FBI and the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Over the years investigators would log more than 5,000 tips, search rural sites across the region, and build a behavioral profile of a possible offender. That profile suggested a single perpetrator who likely knew the area, kept odd hours, and would have needed a larger vehicle, probably a van, to move three people at once.

Some early circumstances complicated the work. An answering machine at the home held messages that family and friends listened to and, investigators later believed, may have inadvertently erased before the recording could be preserved, removing a potential clue. The broken porch globe, too, was reportedly swept up early by someone trying to help, before its evidentiary value could be assessed.

Several names surfaced over the decades, though it is essential to be precise: no one has ever been charged in connection with the disappearances, and everyone discussed below is entitled to the presumption of innocence in this matter. Robert Craig Cox, imprisoned elsewhere on unrelated offenses, told a reporter in 1997 that he believed the women were dead and would never be found; investigators have publicly described him as lacking credibility, and his claims were never corroborated. Dustin Recla, a former boyfriend of Suzie’s, was looked at and took a polygraph examination in 1992, which he passed. Other figures were examined and connected to unrelated crimes, but nothing has ever tied any of them to this case in a way that produced charges.

The Breakthrough

There has been no breakthrough. That is the honest and difficult truth at the heart of this case, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than dressed up.

There have been moments that briefly looked like they might lead somewhere. On December 31, 1992, a man called the America’s Most Wanted hotline claiming knowledge of the disappearances; police said he appeared to have real information, but the call was lost when an operator tried to connect him to investigators, and he never called back despite public appeals. In 2007, a tip pointed to a hospital parking garage, and a private scan using ground-penetrating radar detected three anomalies; investigators ultimately declined to act on it, citing cost and a lack of substantiating evidence. Each lead flared and then faded.

What remains is a case that has resisted resolution for more than three decades. No remains have been recovered. No confirmed sighting has ever been made. No arrest has been tied to the women’s fate.

Where the Case Stands Today

As of mid-2026, the disappearance of Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and Stacy McCall remains unsolved, marking 34 years since they vanished. The Springfield Police Department still carries the matter on its official rolls as a missing-persons case, even though Levitt and Streeter were declared legally dead years ago. “Few new leads have emerged in recent years,” the department acknowledges, “but the push for information continues.”

A reward fund of roughly $43,000 remains available for information leading to the location of the women and the prosecution of anyone responsible. Police continue to accept tips, and the case is periodically revisited by local news outlets each June. The investigative file stays open. What it lacks is the one thing it has always lacked: a credible answer.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Springfield Three endures in the public memory not because it is lurid but because it is so quietly impossible. Three people vanished from inside an ordinary home on an ordinary summer night, leaving behind everything they owned and no trail at all. It unsettles precisely because it could be anyone’s house, anyone’s daughter coming home after a graduation party.

It matters most, though, to the people who loved them. For more than three decades, family members like Janis McCall have refused to let the women fade into an unsolved footnote, returning each year to say their names aloud and ask the public to remember. That persistence is its own form of testimony. Cases like this one are kept alive by attention, and attention is sometimes the only thing that turns a long-buried memory in someone’s mind into a phone call. Sherrill, Suzie, and Stacy deserve to be more than a mystery. They deserve to be found.