The Springfield Three and Me

I am an avid watcher of true crime mysteries. Growing up, I would watch all of the unsolved murder shows that spanned the late 90’s to now with my mother. Stories of dangerous strangers following their victim home, kidnappings, or even worse: murders with witnesses who did nothing. I remembered being too scared to even leave the room alone after watching them sometimes.

Hell, I still get that feeling sometimes.

Despite becoming acutely in touch with my inner rage and tendencies toward physical stress outlets (think BDSM, exercise, dance and more) I simply have never been able to understand what prompts a human being to kill someone in cold blood outside of self-defense. Don’t get me wrong, I *LOVED* Dexter more than anyone else probably did, but a wall of actual experience separates my ability to grasp what a murderer is thinking and feeling as they commit the crime. I can speculate as to the bucket of ingredients that eventually caused a person to snap and do it, but at the end of the day, that's all it is.

Eventually, that would change. I would get my own insights into the mind and firsthand experience of a murderer... perhaps even a serial killer.

One case in particular has always held my attention, much to my deepest terrors. It’s stuck with me since my kindergarten years, because it happened that long ago. Twenty-nine years to be exact. At first, I would see these photo printouts of three women all over my hometown; McDonald’s drive-thru's, Walmart customer service boards, and just about any place you could post an ad for services or missing persons. The three women were titled The Springfield Three.

To this day, the case has yet to be solved. Our local newspaper posts an article every year on the anniversary date of the women’s missing persons reports. Over the years, people from all over have attempted and failed to contribute knowledge and theories to this case. All clues have led to a dead end and continued fears.

The only thing authorities can get clear on is this timeline:

June 6th, 1992: Stacy McCall and Suzanne (known as Suzie) Streeter graduated high school. The two friends were thought to have attended a couple of graduation parties that night. The girls had planned to drive to Branson after the parties to go to a water park the next morning. Stacy’s mother pleaded with her to go in the morning instead. Stacy told her mom around 10:30 PM that they decided not to go after all. Her mother was relived. The sleepover that the two girls were at became crowded and Suzie asked Stacy to come stay the night at her house, so they went to Suzie’s mother’s house. Her name was Sherrill Levitt.

June 7th, 1992: Stacy’s mother is concerned because Stacy has neither returned from hanging out with Stacy nor contacted her mother. So, Stacy’s mother goes with a couple concerned friends and family members to Sherill’s home to try to get in contact with Stacy. Upon arrival, she finds Stacy’s car in the driveway along with Suzie’s and Sherrill’s, but Suzie’s car was in a different spot than she always parked. Everyone commented on how she would put her car in the exact same spot, so it stuck out to their family and friends. According to statements, the front door was open and there was broken glass on the front porch. One of the window blinds was bent in a strange way.

Going inside the home, things just got even weirder. The television was on but had static snowy screen.... as if the women had been watching a movie and failed to stop the tape once it ended. The family’s dog was still in the home along with the women's purses, which still had money and keys inside. Even Sherrill’s cigarettes, which she reportedly never left home without. Wanting to be helpful, the family and friends cleaned up around the home but gave report that it was rather spotless when they arrived.

(At this point I will note that Suzie's brother, Bart, was a suspect at one time in this investigation. What I always wondered, and cannot seem to find out, is if he was with the crew of friends and family that came to the house that day. A statement that the house was spotless makes you wonder why they were cleaning up. Do YOU clean up the house of someone you haven't heard from and are aworried about...?)

At that point, the phone in the home rang and a stranger was sexually explicit with them. Stacy’s mom stated that the message got erased somehow. As night fell upon the worried Springfield citizens with no word from Suzie, Stacy, or Sherril, a 911 call was placed to report the women missing. Police suspected foul play once they looked in the home. Much to the panic of the family, having cleaned the home and deleted the lewd message on the answering machine, the police had no evidence or clues to go on.

Now at this juncture, things just start looking crazy. It comes out that Stacy and Suzie had actually lost touch for a while before hanging out the night before. It was discovered that Suzie had recently dated a guy with a seriously shady character, which was outside of her norm. The guy had been caught up in a grave robbing group who got busted for taking gold teeth from a skull. This happened not long before the women went missing. Suzie was reported to have broken up with this man once she found out about the robbery. But Suzie wasn’t exactly looking squeaky clean, either.

In Suzie’s bedroom, there were books on her shelf about satanic worship and rituals. This was confusing to everyone at the time of the women going missing, because Suzie was thought to have been the person that turned her boyfriend and his gang in to the cops. She even agreed to testify against them. Not surprisingly, the women went missing just a couple months before the trial was set to take place.

Over the time that the police investigated the disappearances, there were many tips called in. How depressing it must have been for everyone involved that none of them were ever substantial. A concerned citizen called the Springfield police to say they thought they saw a scared looking Suzie driving an old green van with a man in the backseat right behind her. He was yelling at her to keep driving and threatening her. Others speculated that the women were kidnapped and trafficked or raped and chopped to pieces. Theories were flying around about what kind of horrible fate the three women were subjected to.

Eventually the authorities were led to Robert Craig Cox, a man Stacy’s dad worked with at a car dealership. He had been in trouble for abducting women down in Florida previously and was even suspected of murder at one point. The guy was ex-army and people believed he could be responsible for the Springfield 3 going missing. Everyone thought it was strange at best that Robet moved to Missouri just a few weeks before the women went AWOL. His girlfriend stated that they were at church together during the time in question. It was a solid story. Later on, Cox’s girlfriend changed her story; she said she didn’t know where he was the night of the women going missing.

An investigative reporter hears that the girlfriend recanted and went to Texas where Cox was serving time for robbery. The reporter, Dennis Graves, questioned Robert Cox to try to sniff out any new information. What Cox stated was bone chilling. You can look up video footage of him telling Dennis Graves that, “I know they’re dead. That’s not my theory, I just know that.” He refused to give “specifics” until his mother passed away. To this day, Cox’s mom is still alive at 82 years old and the world awaits his input.

Another reporter, Kathy Baird, thought she might take a stab at cracking this case. She was tipped off that Suzie, Stacy, and Sherrill may be buried under a patch of dirt that is now a parking garage for one of the main hospitals in the town, Cox South. Obviously she was going to let the cops know about this, and when she did, she said the cops laughed at her. She wanted to get to the bottom of things so she hired someone who used ground-penetrating radar to search the lot for anything that might be unusual. The man she hired said he picked up three distinct images that are exactly like what he sees when he scans over old graves.

WHAT. ON. EARTH.

Seemingly even more bizarre is that the police never called for another look into things, arguing that the excavation needed to build the parking lot over the dirt lot would have uncovered the bodies. Baird went on live television to interview and share the information I just told you. When asked to share her theories, all she would say is that Stacy was collateral damage, wrong place wrong time. The intended target, she believes, was Suzie or Sherrill. She said she would not talk about why she thought that or what she thought the motive was behind this incident. Her reason? Her life was threatened multiple times and she was told to “leave the case alone.” She said, “There is a reason this case has not been solved. There is something very dark at the bottom of it.”

Maybe she’s right. That’s truly the last bit of information known to the public. No information comes out anymore.

This case has plagued the community here in Springfield since it happened, but it has particularly haunted me because I have had dreams that disturb me and I have wondered if they were related to this case as they seemed. I’ve always had dreams that either came true or dreams of things that actually happened, either in real time or in the past.

For example, I was in high school and dreamt that a kid I vaguely knew but didn’t speak to (a fellow middle school student) gave me a letter and we were dating. That day I woke up and went to school to receive a letter from this kid, stating he has always had a thing for me and asking me to be his girlfriend. Another instance was a dream of a friend (we’ll call her D) who was my then-boyfriend's roomie. In the dream, she was complaining that her camera memory card was not working. I woke up from the nap and talked to my boyfriend on the phone, who laughed so hard when I told him the dream. He said, “Wow, she really was just complaining about that, just now!” Other dreams have predicted a car wreck I would be injured in, breakups or relationship issues, and a dead relative coming to me to tell me that an event I was going through in my waking life would be over soon...which it was.

I have had some terrible dreams of my own death as well, but the ones that concern me most are the ones of gruesome acts and events in which I only observed.

From 2013-2015 I had some terrifying nightmares. In one of the worst ones, I specifically remember the scene of the crime. As a Springfield native myself, it was even more peculiar that the dream took place off West Sunshine out behind what is now Route 66 Auto Auction. The dream took place before the building was there. Through the course of it, I took turns looking at the perspective of the killer and the victims, which I remember there being at least 3 of. It was a wooded area and the victims didn’t intend to go out there but somehow ended up in this place. At first, one killer hunted them with rope, bows, knives, and an axe. Eventually the victims were in a house they found near the woods, captured by the killer, but there was now a second person helping to keep them hostage and torture and kill them. I awoke as I was the killer, chopping into a body. Out of that dream, the most prominent aspect I remembered was the blood and the fear of the victims.

Later on, the case of the Springfield Three was brought up amongst a couple friends. That night I had a series of terrible dreams where I was torturing and killing people again. I had a couple haunting night imaginings that I was given clues as to the women’s whereabouts. Many years had passed in another dream I had. I was marching through the snow to dig up some bodies. I had on big black boots and I remembered being a very masculine man with long dark hair. I awoke with a deep sense of uncalm. It felt too real, like I had actually just seen the whole thing. I almost don’t want to share it to this day. I have told very few people in my life about these experiences.

I have had so many dreams where I am either being murdered, which perhaps speaks volumes to my inner self and psychology. I’m no stranger to analyzing them. I remember being drugged with a paralytic in an alleyway during a nightmare I had just last year. The killer caught me as I fell, and people were passing by in the distance but were too far to hear my cries for help. I could not move or feel anything but the person hurting me was calmly and quietly chopping me up with a cleaver while I was wide awake. I won’t ever forget that feeling in these dreams. The visceral, graphic nature. The smells. The sounds of flesh being separated from bone. But the dreams of being the perpetrator of violence are infinitely more disturbing to me.

In no manner do I mean to speculate on, belittle, or insert myself into the case of these missing women. I do not know what they endured, and could possibly still be enduring. I am simply sharing my perspective and the way in which this case has stuck with me my whole life. I hope the dreams I had were nowhere near correct and I hope the women are alive and well, at peace wherever they might be.