“They are known simply as the Springfield 3.”
18-year-old Stacy McCall wanted to attend Missouri State University.
“I wanted to hear about Stacy. I would say she was so funny and bubbly and she would do things and we called her Spy Stacy because she would come out with things that would be kind of space cadet things.”
Susie Streer, just 19, wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and be a hairdresser.
“Very outgoing, fun, happy. Susie was a creature of habit, almost OCD to some degree. There were some things that I teased her about. Where she parked her car in the driveway was always the same.”
And Susie’s mom, Cheryl, she had just bought her dream home in a nice, safe part of Springfield, Missouri.
“She is pretty fierce. Pretty fierce lady. She didn’t do a lot of half measures in her life.”
It was supposed to be one of the happiest times in the teenagers’ lives. Susie and Stacy were graduating from Kickapoo High School.
“And were Susie and Stacy good friends?”
“They used to be friends, good friends back in grade school, and they’d kind of grown apart. Susie went with a different crowd than Stacy did.”
Susie was the popular girl who dated a bad boy. Stacy was pretty, a local model who hung out with the goofy crowd. But fate was about to reunite the former grade school friends in the cruelest of ways.
Just hours after receiving their diplomas, the teens head out for the same graduation party.
“Stacy had said she was going to go on to some parties.”
After the party, the grads plan to drive to Branson, Missouri, about an hour away, and go to the Whitewater Amusement Park in the morning.
“I’m saying, ‘No, please don’t go down tonight. You can go tomorrow.’”
“Were you afraid there was going to be trouble on the way?”
“Well, actually, I think I was afraid of a car accident.”
But once at the party in Springfield, destiny sends the girls in a different direction.
“She called me at 10:30 and said, ‘Mom, don’t worry. We’re not going to go to Branson tonight.’ And I said, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’”
Instead, everybody decides to sleep over at another classmate’s house. Stacy promises to call her mom in the morning before heading to the water park.
“You know, you say, ‘I love you’ again on the phone, and I had no idea that was the last time I was going to hear her voice.”
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, plans change again. The sleepover is so crowded, Stacy asks her friend Susie to spend the night at her house.
“And Susie said, ‘I’ve got a brand new king-size water bed. Why don’t you come and stay at my house with me, and we’ll get ready and go to Whitewater and meet them?’”
The girls leave the party just after 2:00 a.m. Cops believe Stacy and Susie walk through the front door of Cheryl’s house on Delmar Street about 15 minutes later.
That’s where the mystery begins.
Early the next morning, Susie’s best friend, Nigel, calls to find out when they’re leaving for the water park.
“I got the answering machine. I left her a message. I hung up and laid back down and waited for her to call me back. She never called me back.”
Janice is also getting antsy waiting to hear from Stacy.
“And I said, you know, she should have called me by now. I don’t think she’s still asleep.”
“And then I left another message probably an hour or two later. And by the third message, I was getting pretty frantic.”
When the girls fail to contact anybody about the trip to the water park, everyone makes their way to the little house on Delmar Street.
“I knew there was something bad wrong, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.”
At first, there’s relief.
“All three cars were there.”
Stacy, Susie, and Cheryl’s cars are all lined up in the circular driveway. Then Nigel notices something wrong. That’s not where Susie normally parks.
“She would always pull right into the carport. That’s not where her car was, you know.”
“And then I instantly was thinking, you know, was somebody parked in the driveway? Was somebody already there?”
As they walked toward the house, more signs of trouble.
“There was glass on the porch. A lamp post was shattered.”
Two friends quickly sweep up the mess and throw it in a dumpster across the street.
“They cleaned it off because they knew that Cheryl wouldn’t like that.”
They knock. There’s no answer. Then they slowly turn the doorknob.
“And I thought, why would they leave their front door unlocked?”
“And I hollered and I said, you know, ‘Stacy, Susie,’ and called for Cheryl. Nobody was answering.”
The lights are off and the television is on, but the screen is snow.
“Like they had been watching this show or a movie or something and it went off.”
Then out of the shadows, a tiny figure comes barreling toward them. It’s Susie’s little dog, Cinnamon, and she’s freaked out.
“The dog was in there just going crazy, just yipping and crying.”
They cautiously creep toward the bedroom.
“Cheryl’s house is immaculate.”
“And I said, either she’d already made up her bed or she hadn’t gone to bed.”
“No signs of struggle, right?”
“No signs of struggle. Everything was nice and neat.”
Then something stops them in their tracks. All three of the women’s purses are neatly lined up beside each other.
“We opened up their purses and went through them. That’s when we found out that Cheryl had almost a $900 deposit in her purse.”
Nothing seemed to be missing. But there was something else strange. Cheryl never went anywhere without her cigarettes.
“Cheryl is a chain smoker. Her cigarettes and purse are right here.”
Then their hearts jump. The phone rings, but it’s not the girls. A stranger is on the line.
“It was a very rude phone call.”
“Like rude meaning lewd sexual content.”
Stacy McCall and Susie Streeter came home after a late-night graduation party. By the next morning, both teens and Susie’s mom, Cheryl, are gone.
“All their cars are there and their purses are there, and it’s all very strange.”
At first, Stacy’s mom, Janice, tells Kim Goldman no one hit the panic button.
“I didn’t want to call 911.”
“Why?”
“Because that would be an emergency, and I thought they were going to come back any minute.”
“I thought they were going to come back in that door and walk in.”
While patiently waiting for the women to return, friends and family tidy up the house, even repair an awkwardly bent window blind.
“They were just trying to be helpful.”
“But it will come back to haunt them.”
“You have a dozen people in a house emptying ashtrays, cleaning coffee cups, but nobody could grasp that this was anything but a misunderstanding.”
Suddenly, Cheryl’s house phone rings. They let her answering machine pick it up. Everyone expects to hear one of the women, but it’s a stranger calling.
“It was a very rude phone call.”
“Like rude meaning lewd sexual content.”
Everyone assumes it’s simply a post-graduation prank call. So someone hits delete.
“Somehow it got erased.”
As night falls in Springfield, a sinking feeling soon turns into full-blown panic. It was time to make that 911 call.
“It’s three grown women that just disappeared.”
“One person may be something that you could sit back and go, ‘Okay, I can see that.’”
“Two people are difficult to imagine and three is almost unfathomable.”
The Springfield police immediately know something bad happened inside the house.
“And they said, ‘We’re going to take a report and this is going to be as missing persons and not only that, but foul play suspected.’”
“How did they start an investigation when three women disappear?”
“They started with the house and they treated the house like a crime scene.”
Now there’s a big problem. Remember, friends and family had unknowingly cleaned up and that completely contaminated the crime scene.
“There’s nothing. You have no threads, hair, blood, no DNA.”
And that lewd phone call the friends deleted.
“It was just nothing that we could do to recover that message.”
So police dig deeper into the background of the women and find something odd on a bookshelf in Susie’s room.
“Turned out there were a lot of things about devil worship, satanic things that she was looking into.”
Police discovered Susie had dated a bad boy who’d recently been arrested for being part of a grave-robbing gang.
“They’d broken into a mausoleum and they took gold teeth out of some skulls.”
Friends say Susie was so disgusted by the grave robbery, she broke up with him.
“And the theory was that they always suspected Susie being the one that had turned them in and got them charged with the grave robbing.”
Susie had even agreed to testify against her ex and his buddies at trial. A trial that was coincidentally just a few months away. Friends now wonder if he was out to shut her up.
“That raised an issue. And if they got mad at her, did they get sufficiently mad to actually try to kidnap her and kill her?”
The Springfield police tracked down the young men. They deny any involvement. And one of the prosecutors on the case tells Kim Goldman that without any DNA or fingerprints from the house, there was simply nothing to link them to the disappearance of the Springfield 3.
“Have they been cleared?”
“Well, the chief of police at the time cleared them. Some of us do not believe they should be cleared.”
Two torturous weeks pass. Still no word from Susie, Stacy, or Cheryl. Just as hope is fading, cops get a much-needed break.
“A person called in, said she thought she saw Susie Streeter, or a person looking like Susie, driving the van.”
The woman says she saw Susie the morning she went missing driving an older model avocado green panel van like this one.
“The van was seen two miles away from where Cheryl Levitt’s house was.”
The caller also tells police Susie looked scared and then adds this terrifying detail, claiming she heard a man yelling at Susie from the back seat.
“Saying some kind of threat. ‘You better keep driving if you know what’s good for you,’ something like that.”
“The police department stopped lots of vans and ID’d people.”
Police even park a similar van in front of their station, hoping it will jog someone else’s memory. But the lead about the van hits a dead end.
“It was just one of the many leads that they grabbed hold of with hope of getting something.”
For weeks, then months, bizarre theories trickle in to the Springfield PD.
“What you have here, you just have overall reports after reports after reports.”
“We’ve seen theories everything from space aliens to they were grabbed up in a human trafficking angle.”
“A lead that maybe a guy that was a notorious criminal out in Webster County may have taken them, raped them, and chopped them into pieces and fed them to the pigs.”
Even Nigel Holderby, Susie’s best friend, had her own theory.
“For there not to be anything, a sign of a struggle, anything like that, I just really felt like this person knew them.”
“You know, they had some knowledge of who this person was or someone came to the door.”
But who could have stormed a house with military precision and subdued three strong young women? Then a tip comes in all the way from Florida that sends shivers down cops’ spines.
“One lead led them to Robert Craig Cox.”
“We did receive information reference Mr. Cox.”
Robert Craig Cox, a highly trained Army Ranger, once named Soldier of the Year, now a suspected killer.
“He’d been believed to be responsible for a homicide in Florida of a girl.”
Cox had been convicted and sentenced to death in Florida for the brutal murder of 19-year-old Sharon Zellers. But that verdict was reversed and he was handed over to authorities in California.
“There was never enough to say definitively that he was involved.”
Cox served nine years for abducting two women there. So what’s his connection to the Springfield 3?
“Robert Cox worked at the dealership where Stacy’s dad worked.”
“Is this the last face Stacy McCall, Susie Streeter, and Cheryl Levitt ever saw?”
“We’re talking about Robert Craig Cox.”
“Robert Craig Cox was a highly decorated, highly skilled Army Ranger with a horrifying history of abducting young women.”
“He was even suspected of a brutal murder, but later cleared.”
“Through investigation, he became a person of interest with this case.”
Cops learned Cox moved to Springfield just weeks before Stacy, Susie, and Cheryl mysteriously disappeared. And here’s the most intriguing part. Family members tell Kim Goldman this monster actually worked with Stacy’s dad at a local car dealership.
“Do you think that she was the intended target?”
“Obviously, it wouldn’t take long to stake out.”
The families now wonder if Cox took a liking to Stacy and followed her to Susie’s home.
“And did Stacy just happen to be there that night?”
Cops haul him in for questioning.
“A lot of the things that he said didn’t add up.”
The biggest problem? His girlfriend gives him an ironclad alibi, claiming they were at, of all places, church.
Cops keep their eye on Cox, but start chasing other leads.
“We would get phone calls about bones being found or this suspect or that suspect, but everything would turn out to be nothing.”
“Pretty soon, you just didn’t believe.”
And then a familiar face resurfaces. Robert Craig Cox is arrested again, this time in Texas for aggravated robbery. And now his girlfriend is singing an entirely different tune, recanting his alibi, claiming she has no idea where Cox was the night the Springfield 3 went missing.
“He was charged down in Texas and he’s currently serving prison time in Texas.”
When investigative reporter Dennis Graves from Springfield affiliate KY3 gets wind of the recanted alibi, he heads to Texas on a hunch. Graves is hoping to find out if Cox knows anything about the missing three in Springfield. Instead, he gets what sounds like a confession from a killer.
“I know that they’re dead. I will say that. I know that.”
“That’s not a theory?”
“Yeah, but I know that they’re dead. That’s not my theory. I just know that.”
When pushed for details, Cox tells Graves he won’t give specifics until his dear mother passes.
“She is 82.”
“There’s no doubt about that.”
“He’s made different statements that of course keeps him as a person of interest, but never has made any true statements to point us in one direction or another.”
“But then he was ruled out.”
“He’s never been ruled out.”
The case cools off, and it may have stayed that way if not for this woman, Kathy Barrett, a freelance journalist in Springfield.
“What connects you to the story of the Springfield 3?”
“I was here when they went missing. I was like, ‘Just let’s give it a shot, you know? Let’s see if we can help bring justice for three women that nobody knows what happened to.’”
But soon, the reporter becomes the lead story. Kathy gets a tip: the women are buried beneath this hospital parking structure, which at the time was a dirt lot.
“Did you bring that information to the police department?”
“Yes.”
“And what did they do with it?”
“Pretty much laughed at me.”
Undeterred, Kathy hires a man who uses high-tech ground-penetrating radar capable of finding graves hidden under concrete.
“This area right here, right in here.”
“He said, ‘I’m getting two images over here and one over here.’”
“And I said, ‘Oh.’”
“And that’s when I told him, ‘I’m working the disappearance of three women.’”
“And he was kind of like, ‘Well, this is exactly what I see when I go over old graves.’”
But police say the timeline doesn’t add up.
“A year after they went missing is when that parking garage started construction.”
“Couldn’t the theory have been, though, that they were buried in the ground there and then the hospital parking lot was just on top of it?”
“You’d also have guessed that excavation in order to build the parking garage should have unearthed them.”
When Kim Goldman asks Kathy who she believes murdered the women and buried their bodies under the parking lot, the interview takes a bizarre and unexpected turn.
“Do you have strong theories of what happened to Cheryl, Susie, and Stacy?”
“I believe I know what happened.”
“I believe they were killed before morning.”
“Who do you think was the target?”
“It wasn’t Stacy.”
“So that leaves Susie or Cheryl?”
“Yeah.”
“And Stacy was just collateral damage?”
“Unfortunately.”
“What do you believe the motives were for the people that took Stacy, Cheryl, and Susie?”
“I am not going to talk about that.”
“But wait a minute. Kathy says she knows and she’s not going to tell.”
“You’re on national television. You’ve got the world at your fingertips. Why won’t you share it here?”
“Why are you doing this interview with us?”
“Because their story needs an ending. That’s why.”
Frustration boils over and then the producer jumps in.
“I continue to be confused why we’re doing this interview.”
“We’ve already said that.”
“I mean, you know what? I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s not real clear because you’re talking in code.”
“Sorry you don’t think that I’m giving you the answers that you need or you want, but I live here and yeah, I’m afraid for my safety.”
“What kinds of things have happened?”
“We’ve been boxed in by cars before and somebody came up to me and asked if I was Kathy Barrett and I said yes.”
“And then he said, ‘Well, people I work for make people like you disappear, too.’”
“So, death threats?”
“I’ve been advised to leave this case alone.”
Kathy will not even tell investigators who’s threatening her, but vows she will never leave this case alone until she can prove who’s responsible for making the Springfield 3 disappear.
“There’s something really, really dark in this story.”
“There is something very dark in this story.”
“Something super frightening when you get down to it of who you trust.”
“Just be very careful.”
“There’s a reason this case hasn’t been solved.”
Springfield police say they have big questions about Kathy’s story. In fact, they say some of her tips come from psychics. But Sergeant Todd King says they welcome every possible lead. This room is dedicated to the nearly 10,000 tips that have come in over the past quarter century.
“It’s just a reminder that the ladies are still missing.”
“We still need to be diligent in what we’re doing in hopes of finding them.”
He assures us no one wants to solve this 25-year-old mystery more than they do.
“I can’t even imagine what the conversations must be like with the families when you do talk to them that you just can’t seem to give them answers.”
“I would love nothing more than to be able to show up at their doorstep and say, ‘We figured it out.’”
“I do believe they’re probably gone. They’re probably deceased.”
“I don’t have anything that tells me for sure. So until they have found their remains, I have to believe that they’re still alive and well.”
