Mother of missing woman: Don't call it an anniversary
Giacomo Bologna , GBOLOGNA@NEWS-LEADER.COM Published 11:15 p.m. CT
May 31, 2017 | Updated 11:17 p.m. CT May 31, 2017
Standing in that bedroom on June 7, 1992, Janis McCall had
no way of knowing her daughter would become part of Springfield's
most puzzling unsolved disappearance.
Instead, McCall was angry.
Her daughter Stacy had just graduated from Kickapoo and was
spending the night at a friend's home, but when Stacy didn't call her the
next day, McCall went over to the central Springfield home.
The doors were unlocked. And inside a room were Stacy McCall's
shorts, shoes and bra in a neat pile on the floor next to the bed. Nearby
were her keys, her bathing suit, her purse and her make-up kit.
"I thought, 'This is absolutely stupid' — that she left
her stuff here and she left her car and she didn't have any sense to call
me," McCall said.
Stacy was a beautiful, vibrant girl, McCall said. She used to
model wedding dresses, and her long hair reached past her waist.
Even now, when McCall sees a girl with hair that long, she has to
get a glimpse of the girl's face just to see that it's not Stacy.
Why didn't she call? And why was her car still parked outside?
"Her shirt and her panties were all that she had,"
McCall said.
The TV in the bedroom was turned on, but only static was on the
screen.
McCall went outside to her daughter's car and realized — this
doesn't make sense.
In the ensuing days, one of the largest missing-person searches
ever began in southwest Missouri.
They were looking for Stacy McCall, 18, Suzanne "Suzie"
Streeter, 19, and Streeter's mother, Sherrill Levitt, 47.
Janis
McCall, the mother of Stacy McCall, looks at an old newspaper from the days after
her daughter and two other women went missing. (Photo: Nathan
Papes/News-Leader)
Stacy McCall and Streeter had left the graduation party in
Battlefield together. They went to the central Springfield home of Streeter's
mother, Levitt. That's the last known place the three missing women were
believed to have been.
Within a week, divers from the fire department had scoured Lake
Springfield, police officers on horseback had searched fields, and more than
20,000 flyers had been distributed across the area.
The day after their disappearance, a captain with the Springfield
Police Department said: "We think we're heading in the right direction ...
Our hopes remain high to get that one clue or that one phone call that
really gives you a break in the case."
Police detectives and a former prosecutor reflect on the 25th
anniversary of the Three Missing Women case. Andrew Jansen/News-Leader
Nearly 25 years have passed, and that clue or phone call
still hasn't come.
McCall said she's felt as though the case was on the brink of
being solved countless times, calling those feelings an "emotional roller
coaster."
"You're at the lowest low and then you go up and you're at
the highest high and you think 'I'm gonna have her home tonight. I'm gonna have
my baby home,'" she said. "Then within a few hours or a few days,
you're back to the lowest low again."
How many times has she ridden that roller coaster? "I can't
even begin to tell you," McCall said. "Truly, I don't believe that
they're alive; I think they're probably gone. I don't know why or when or
how long they were kept alive. ... I would love to find them in white
slavery somewhere or sold to a sheik over in Iraq."
Next Wednesday will be the 25th marker — not
anniversary, she said — of their disappearance.
"Anniversaries are something people celebrate," she
said, "and we don't celebrate when the three missing women
disappeared."
The last time McCall said she saw her daughter was June 6,
1992, around 8:30 p.m.
The family had just eaten and was taking pictures outside before
cutting Stacy's graduation cake, McCall said.
Stacy wanted to go to a party and then head to a water park in
Branson later that night, McCall said, but McCall had a "horrible
feeling" her daughter would get into an accident if they drove to Branson
at night.
Stacy hugged her mom and told her she would call.
"She didn't cut her cake that night," McCall
said. "She was going to cut it the next day."
Just two hours later, Stacy called. They weren't going to Branson.
Instead, she would be staying the night at a friend's house and she would call
her mother in the morning.
However, a little after 2 a.m., Stacy and Suzie left the party and
went to Suzie's home.
"I didn't ever get that call in the morning,"
McCall said.
McCall would get thousands of phone calls about her daughter —
tips, crank calls, cruel jokes and more — but no call from her daughter.
McCall said she still gets calls about the missing women.
"We had people call us and tell us they put them in a vat,
and some people said they'd all been frozen and cut up into pieces and put into
a kiln."
It has
been 25 years since the disappearance of three women in Springfield, a cold
case that remains under investigation. (Photo: News-Leader file photo)
Even the most unlikely tip gets forwarded on to police, McCall
said.
For a while, she said, she and her husband paid an
"ex-con" to search for their daughter.
"He said he could get in places that the police
couldn't," McCall said. "He led us up and down the garden path and
took our money."
McCall said she had even arranged through friends to have a
helicopter ready in case her daughter needed to be immediately picked up
somewhere.
"I had a lot of people who were willing to help us," she
said. "I think people would have done anything to help us find
them."
Sometimes people still recognize McCall as the mother of Stacy,
McCall said, especially when she's out with one of her other two daughters.
Often people tell her they're praying for her and her missing daughter, she
said.
"I love the community. I love Springfield," McCall said.
"The people have been friendly."
Looking back at the initial investigation, McCall said she is
thankful for all the officers, sheriff's deputies, state troopers, law
enforcement agents, firefighters and volunteers who helped search.
The flyer
for the three missing women, Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter and Stacy
McCall. (Photo: News-Leader File Photo)
However, McCall said law enforcement officials didn't always
work well together.
There were weekly conferences on Wednesday afternoons where representatives
from Springfield police, the Greene County Sheriff's Office, the highway patrol
and more would sit around a table.
"I think sometimes they came and they didn't check their egos
at the door," McCall said.
She said she still believes the organizations haven't shared all
their information about the three missing women with each other.
McCall recalled how early in the investigation, the highway patrol
volunteered to bring a "whole truckload of computers" down to help
with the investigation, but the Springfield Police Department declined.
Computers would have been much more effective at tracking
information than the 3x5-inch note cards used by police, McCall said.
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