June 07, 2017 7:00 AM
25 years and no trace of 3 Missouri women: ‘People aren’t supposed to just disappear’
By Max Londberg | jlondberg@kcstar.com and Laura Bauer | lbauer@kcstar.com
Springfield
In the entryway of a southside bar hangs a tattered missing
persons flyer, preserved in its torn and yellowed state by laminate.
Back in the summer of 1992, this flyer was one of thousands
that blanketed the Ozarks. They hung in barbershops and grocery stores, gas
stations and rest areas, any place where people could see them. Many were a
bright yellow then with the word “Missing,” and they implored everyone to help
bring home Sherrill Levitt, her daughter Suzie Streeter and friend Stacy
McCall.
Today, on what marks a quarter century since the Springfield
women disappeared, this flyer inside Coyote’s Adobe Cafe & Bar is one of
the few that remain, its faded print proof that this southwest Missouri city
hasn’t forgotten.
And Stacy’s mother says she can feel it.
“There are still so many people who know about it,” Janis
McCall told The Star. “They come up to me, they talk about them. And it makes
me feel good when I know people are still caring.”
It was June 7, 1992, when the three women vanished. The
three haven’t been heard from since that day when friends showed up at Levitt’s
home on East Delmar Street and found a broken porch light. Little else seemed
out of place.
All three of the women’s cars were parked out front. Their
purses and keys were inside the small white home. A smoker, Sherrill, 47, had
left her cigarettes behind. And Stacy, 18, who battled migraines, hadn’t taken
along her medication.
The young women, friends who had graduated from Kickapoo
High School the day before, had already gotten ready for bed. Then they, along
with Levitt, just disappeared.
A lack of evidence or any real sign of foul play has
frustrated a long line of detectives who have taken their turn at trying to
solve the mystery.
“How do you wrap your head around three people literally
disappearing? With no idea where they went?” said Sgt. Todd King, who started
at the police department in 1994 and remembers as a rookie taking reports from
people who had information they thought would be helpful. “In a lot of cold
cases, you can look back and say this is probably what occurred, you just can’t
prove it. With this case, it’s anything goes. Anything could have happened.
“You don’t have anything that says they were abducted, they
were harmed. … It’s this big mystery.”
A bench in the Victims
Memorial Garden at Phelps Grove Park is dedicated to the three missing women.
The women’s names and the date of their disappearance are etched in its
surface.
The sergeant now oversees the open investigation, which is
assigned to Detective Scott Hill. Hill works the case and follows up on leads
as they come in. And they still do, about one or two a month. But anymore, many
of them are just rehashes of what came in years ago.
The mystery, too, has worn on the community and residents
who back in the 1990s lived through the anxiety and months of constant
headlines and newscasts about the case.
Nigel Holderby, now a 44-year-old mother living in Colorado,
was Suzie’s best friend at the time of her disappearance.
“We all who love them would love to have answers, would love
to know what happened, would love to have them here with us today,” Holderby
said. “All over this period of time we have wondered every day and every year.
It is mind-blowing to think about, something like that happening.
“People aren’t supposed to just disappear.”
That’s how David Bauer feels. He had owned Coyote’s Adobe
Cafe just six months when he promised Janis McCall he wouldn’t take down the
missing poster until her daughter came home.
His own daughter was just 3 years old that summer. And he
couldn’t help but think then what would happen if he had lost her like McCall
had lost Stacy.
“She was in such anguish,” Bauer said. “I kind of felt how
she was feeling in her eyes. … It’s burnt into my soul.”
Purses left behind
Stacy’s mother can still see the image of the women’s purses
in her mind. They were at the bottom of the steps leading down to Suzie’s room.
So many who lived this case, who have been haunted by it
since, have something about the home or that day that replays in their mind.
For some it’s the busted porch globe or the fact that the two friends had
already gotten ready for bed with their makeup-smeared washcloths in the
hamper.
For McCall, it’s the purses.
They were all lined up: First there was Sherrill’s, then
Suzie’s and Stacy’s was next, sitting on top of Suzie’s overnight bag.
McCall remembers how things were rolling out of the purses.
And inside Suzie’s room — where the TV was left on — Stacy’s flowered shorts
were folded and put on top of her sandals. Stacy’s jewelry had been tucked
inside the pocket of her shorts.
Looking around the house in the night hours of June 7,
McCall and her husband, Stu, knew something wasn’t adding up.
The recent graduates weren’t supposed to spend the night
there. They had planned to go to parties that June 6 evening and then, with
others, head to Branson and stay in a hotel. The next morning they’d go to a
water park.
On graduation night, Stacy called her mom at 10:30 and said
she planned to stay with another friend and the group would go to Branson in
the morning. But plans changed again, and Stacy decided to go home with Suzie
and sleep on her new, king-sized waterbed.
Suzie led the way to Delmar Street and Stacy followed in her
car.
When a friend of the two came looking for them the next
afternoon to go to Branson, no one was home. The door was unlocked, and
Cinnamon the family’s Yorkie yapped at the friend’s ankles.
The last known
location of Stacy McCall, Suzie Streeter and Sherrill Levitt is this home on
East Delmar Street.
Initially, no one thought anything bad had happened, they
just wondered where in the world the women had gone.
Officers weren’t called to the home until some 10 hours
after friends had discovered the three were gone, King said. By then, a friend
of the girls had swept up the broken glass on the porch as a favor to Levitt.
And nearly a dozen people had been in the home, all walking on carpet and
sitting on chairs and couches.
All of that hindered police as they began to investigate.
For months, officers searched parks and lakes, woods and
subdivisions. They were told to watch for circling buzzards and to check
foul-smelling trash cans. They followed up when people swore they’d seen the
women at a restaurant or the airport.
“We followed leads, we followed tips — some of them that
were a little extreme,” said Terry Knowles, the Springfield police chief when
the women disappeared. “But we did everything we felt was needed to be done. We
committed untold resources to this case.”
But many through the years have criticized Knowles for what
they called his micromanaging of the case. They said he ran the investigation
out of his office rather than allowing his detectives to do their jobs.
Knowles, now living out retirement in Kansas, defended his
leadership and the early investigation.
“We worked as a unit, as a team at the time,” he said.
“Everyone was committed to this case and we did the best we could.”
In the first days, information surfaced about an old Dodge
van. One woman said she saw a young woman driving the van who looked like
Suzie, her face frightened, and heard a man’s voice saying, “Don’t do anything
stupid.”
At one point, police parked a similar van outside
headquarters, asking for help.
Today, investigators aren’t sure if the van was actually a
true clue or a distraction that was never part of the case.
“I want to say we’re kind of in the same place we were 10
years ago,” King said. “We have those persons of interest, people we can’t rule
out. We’re still looking for those handful of pieces to put in the puzzle that
will help us solve the case.
“It may not be while I’m here, but I do think it will be
solved.”
‘It changes how you view the world’
After Suzie disappeared, Holderby, then 19, had recurring
nightmares where she frantically searched for her best friend.
The two had met while working at the Town & Country
movie theater in town. Holderby said their bond was immediate, the pair
connecting during their very first shift together in the box office.
“You know those people you just meet and it’s like you’ve
known them forever? This is how it was,” she said.
For months after the disappearance, some memory would
surface from their time together, some detail Holderby hadn’t yet shared with
investigators. She’d contact them, desperate to provide the clue that led to
more clues, to a resolution.
“As human beings, I feel like we look at all these things
and think, ‘That is the one weird thing, that’s the clue.’ We want to be
helpful and share every little thing,” Holderby said.
But clues never materialized. Suzie never returned. Two
years passed, and Holderby had her first child — a daughter that she named
Elizabeth, Suzie’s middle name.
Another two years went by, and Holderby had a second
daughter and named her Suzann, again in memory of her friend.
She later had a third daughter and raised her children in
Springfield before moving to Colorado nine months ago. The vigilance with which
she parented is because of Suzie, and Stacy, and Sherrill, and how they all
simply vanished.
“My kids will probably say I’m crazy overprotective and
overbearing. I never let them have any fun. But when you lose something like
that, it changes how you view the world,” she said.
Holderby keeps two photos of Suzie, placed on a bookshelf in
her dining room. One is Suzie’s senior photo, placed in front of another
picture of Holderby’s three children.
The other was taken June 6, 1992, hours before the women
disappeared and the last time Holderby saw Suzie and Sherrill.
“I took her a (graduation) cake, and her mom took a picture
of us together,” she said.
Suzie Streeter (left)
and Nigel Holderby (right) celebrated Suzie’s graduation with James Cornelison
on June 6, 1972, hours before Suzie disappeared.
Others in the community may be less familiar with the case,
but still it creeps into their minds on occasion.
“It kind of looms over,” said Kaitlin Baker, 24, a mother of
two young children.
“I wish they would solve it. … You think about it sometimes.
You’re like, ‘Wow, there were three girls — three of them and they still got
taken.’”
‘They deserve to be remembered’
Before students at Springfield’s Kickapoo High headed into
summer this year, their school’s magazine, KHQ Today, ran a lengthy piece about
those who have simply become known as The Three Missing Women.
Student Tony Madden, who wrote the article with Magdelaine
Mueller, grew up knowing about the case.
But too many students and teachers, he discovered, didn’t
know what had happened in the summer of 1992. It’s why he wanted to write the
story, which has been shared on social media 2,000 times.
“As so many years go by we kind of forget it’s a big deal,”
said Madden, whose journalism adviser graduated with Stacy and Suzie. “I wanted
the students at Kickapoo High School to know we hadn’t forgotten. … I think we
forget that each is a person not just a missing person.”
It’s one reason McCall wants people to gather Wednesday
night inside Springfield’s Victims Memorial Garden. She plans to have people
share stories about each of the women and talk about who they were not what
happened to them.
“They deserve to be remembered,” McCall said. “But let’s
remember the fun things, not the dark and dreary. Let’s not remember how I felt
back then, not remember that I used to get in the shower and cry.”
She plans to share a few stories about her daughter. Maybe
the one where the family went out to eat the night before her graduation and
instead of filling a bowl full of ice cream, she loaded it with gummy bears. Or
maybe the one when she was a toddler and continued to say she was sick so she
could go see the doctor she liked so much.
For years, McCall insisted she had hope that her daughter
would come home. She’d be different, but she’d be home.
This year, a quarter century after she last saw her
daughter, she admits that “facing reality has become more prominent.”
“It’s been 25 years and I know the chances of finding her
are slim to none,” McCall said. “It’s not good to keep going on, thinking she’s
going to come home every day.”
Max Londberg: 816-234-4378, @MaxLondberg
Laura Bauer: 816-234-4944, @kclaurab
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