The Springfield Three

Part Five: “Closure”

Despite decades of investigation and multiple efforts to revive the case, authorities have continually faced the same dead ends encountered in the initial probe. Over the years, the mystery has captivated amateur sleuths and online communities, who’ve developed countless theories in an attempt to explain the trio’s disappearance…

On June 7th, 1992, three women - 47-year-old Sherrill Levitt, her daughter, 19-year-old Suzanne Streeter, and Suzanne's friend, 18-year-old Stacy McCall - disappeared. Stacy and Suzanne ("Suzie") had just graduated from high school hours beforehand, and were last seen driving home after attending a graduation party nearby. Sherrill had spoken to a friend on the phone that evening, and was having herself a quiet night in. Despite indications that all three had been inside Sherrill's home that evening, all three vanished without a trace.

In June of 2007, the fifteen year mark of the strange case, a blog was published. Written by Ron Davis, it read as follows:

"The house is easy to miss. Just to its east is Glenstone Avenue, a clogged main drag. To the west, the homes get bigger, the neighborhood gets fancier, and so there is little reason to pay any attention to the one-story at 1717 E. Delmar St.

"But the unremarkable house is home to the most remarkable crime in Springfield history. Fifteen years ago Thursday, a mother and two teens were taken from the house on Delmar, and no one known has seen them since.

"Anyone living in Springfield 15 years ago will remember that summer for its frustrating intensity - search teams in the fields, a police command post in front of the house, daily stories on the front page of the newspaper and the top of every TV newscast.

"Most everyone we knew then thought the missing would eventually be found. A hunter or hiker would stumble over remains. A bad guy would confess. Something would break and the lost would be found.

"A week passed, then a month. A year. Five. Ten.

"Now this - a 15th anniversary, a milestone that in happiness is marked with crystal. This sad anniversary gets the media treatment...

"The next time you hear of Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall, it will be June 7, 2012."

While his final guess wasn't technically correct, the overall sentiment was. That year, 2007, the 15th mark of this strange disappearance came and went without any real fanfare. No arrests. No resolution.

Five years later, Suzie and Stacy's 20-year high school reunion came and went. Still nothing. Five years after that, the same thing. Now in 2024, more than three decades after these three women vanished into thin air, answers remain elusive in this mistifying case.

This is the story of the Springfield Three.

In January of 1998, authorities in Stone County, Missouri were called out to a sinkhole, where the well-preserved remains of a young woman were found in an eighteen-foot-deep pit, having been killed elsewhere and then dumped there. Based on the state of remains, she'd been there for at least five years. Authorities believed this could have been any of the missing women in the region, but police in Springfield were curious about a potential match for either Suzanne Streeter or Stacy McCall, hoping these remains could help shed light on the region's most frustrating cold case.

They were incorrect.

That same year, on the six-year mark of the disappearance, police searched a rural farm in Texas County. For that, they were joined by members of the FBI, the Missouri Highway Patrol, and the county sheriff's department, with Lt. Steve Hamilton of the Springfield P.D. telling reporters:

"We believed this could have been the one lead to solve it."

It wasn't.

Later in December of 1998, police in Taney County came upon the skeletal remains of a young woman in a wooded area near Rockaway Beach. The remains, like some of the other evidence recovered at the scene, were well-weathered, having been there for what looked like several years. The woman appeared to have been in her late teens or early twenties, and had been killed at the scene with what was determined to be a single bullet to the back of the head. Just like the remains found earlier that year, a connection to one of the younger victims in the Springfield Three disappearance was theorized, but was ultimately ruled out.

After this onslaught of disappointments, detectives in Springfield aimed to relaunch their investigation into the disappearance of Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and Stacy McCall in 2001, as the ten-year mark of the case approached. Steve Ijames of the S.P.D. would oversee the effort, later telling the Springfield News-Leader:

"That's a very, very touchy case for us. We didn't handle it perfectly at first, so some of the blame falls on us."

In 2002, investigators received information about a pair of men that had worked for a concrete company at the time of the women's abduction, who had reportedly left town a short time later. It was claimed that they had driven a green van similar to the one described by law enforcement, and this information had been submitted to police on multiple occasions (including by one individual following up a decade later). This resulted in police checking out the lead again, determining that the two men had left town shortly after the Springfield Three had gone missing, and did indeed work for a concrete company in Webster County.

That July, investigators obtained a search warrant and searched a rural area in Webster County, where the concrete company had once been located. Despite cadaver dogs finding two "suspect areas," nothing of note was found after multiple digs and extensive searches at the site.

Authorities would conduct a similar dig in March of 2003 in an area south of Cassville, not too far away from Springfield, using backhoes to dig up the terrain there. That extensive search, however, failed to turn up anything, despite multiple anonymous tipsters pointing investigators to this specific stretch of land near the Roaring River. This location had also been the site of a similar tip back in 1996, in which someone had claimed the three women were buried on the property under some scrap metal.

A woman that spoke with police at the time claimed that not only had the three women been abducted and buried there, near Cassville, but that the van they'd been abducted in had also been buried. However, no such van was found during this dig. But certain evidence was recovered and sent off to be tested at state crime labs, the details of which were sealed by a circuit court judge in Barry County.

That same year, 2003, saw an old farmhouse near Mount Vernon searched by authorities following the discovery of a young woman's bones. She was described as being between 19 and 33 years old, was right-handed, stood between 5' and 5'2" tall, and sadly, no skull or pelvis was found. At the scene, though, police also found an inexpensive chrome-plated copper band that had been commonly manufactured in the 1940s and 1950s. DNA testing would later rule out a match to any of the Springfield Three. Springfield Police Lt. Rich Headlee told reporters at the time:

"I continue to hope that one day we'll receive the lead that really counts."

At this point, investigators had spent countless hours looking into this case, exploring more than 5000 tips, searching through hundreds of fields and marshes, and following leads into 21 states (including foreign nations as far away as Germany). Despite re-launching the investigation in 2001, however, those detectives would end up reaching the same roadblocks that their predecessors had encountered... a recurring problem with this investigation over several decades.

In 2006, a collection of amateur sleuths began urging police in Springfield to look into a parking garage near Cox Health, a large healthcare facility near the Hulston Cancer Center. The structure had been built a short time after the Springfield Three had disappeared in the early 1990s, and this group had begun organizing online in an effort to draw attention to it. Kathee Baird, a retired reporter from the region that had become a prominent crime blogger, had become their point person in Springfield. Her blog can still be found at crimesceneinvestigations.blogspot.com today.

Baird helped oversee this group’s effort to scan the parking garage in question, using ground-penetrating radar to analyze the soil underneath the concrete structure. Using GPR, this group reportedly produced video showing what were three patches of disturbed soil several feet underneath the concrete, which they alleged were consistent with the buried bodies of the Springfield Three. They’d then begin petitioning for the Springfield Police Department to use this information to dig up that section of the parking garage and search for the women's bodies. The S.P.D., however, would reject their proposal, stating that there was no credible evidence pointing to the bodies being there; that this was little more than a hunch made by some people online without any credible information.

And to Springfield P.D.’s credit… there were some credibility problems with the information offered up by this collective of web-sleuths. Namely, that the origin of it – what had led them to this parking garage in the first place – was a psychic, who claimed that the spirit of Stacy McCall had guided her to this location in a vision. Kathee Baird and the others would claim that they had anonymous tips pointing them to the parking garage, but Springfield detectives – starved for leads – did not find any of these tips to be credible.

When speaking to officials with Cox, the healthcare provider that had built the garage, reporters learned that the concrete structure had been built many months after the Springfield Three had gone missing. To be exact, construction started in September of 1993, more than fifteen months after the disappearance of the three women. Cox officials said that the soil beneath the garage had been treated and prepared before the parking garage was built, as they wouldn’t have wanted tree roots or other obstacles in the soil disrupting the concrete building months or even years later. And they insisted that during this process, they would have found the bodies if indeed they’d been buried there. When asked about the patches of disturbed soil underneath the building, which this group of online commenters claimed were bodies, Cox officials claimed that they were consistent with tree roots, limbs, or other normal debris in the soil. Nothing about them indicated bodies.

It was also learned that the individual this group recruited to conduct the ground-penetrating radar test of the soil underneath the parking garage, Rick Norland of Paolo, Kansas, was using a device that he himself had designed. And even then, while this group believed the disturbances he noted may have been bodies, Norland himself stated that his findings were inconclusive… that they could have been bodies, maybe, or they could have been nothing at all.

When questioned about this, then-Greene County Prosecutor Darnell Moore told the Springfield News-Leader:

“If the expert had told us the only thing (the disturbance) could be was bodies, we would have dug it, but he couldn’t. He said it’s just as consistent with concrete or rubble being removed to prepared the soil for concrete… Absent any reliable information there are bodies there, there is no reason for digging up the concrete floor of the garage. I can’t get a probable cause search warrant on the basis of a psychic vision.”

When asked for comment themselves, Cox Health would state:

“Digging up the area and subsequently reconstructing this structure would be extremely costly, and without any reasonable belief that the bodies could be located here, it is illogical to do so, and for those reasons SPD does not intend to. Investigators have determined this lead to not be credible.”

Over the years, this issue of the parking garage has become a contentious issue in online circles, with many commenters believing that it provides one of the most promising leads in this longstanding cold case. While others – myself among them – believe that it is little more than a red herring, borne out of nothing but a misplaced sense of suspicion. Many seem to think that there’s no harm in checking, but unfortunately that’s not quite how the world works. Maybe if this was a dirt pit somewhere, I’d say why not, go dig it up. But it’s not. It’s a concrete structure that the government and/or a private company would have to go out of pocket to deconstruct and then repair, and I dunno… the information pointing to this being a potential burying site is sketchy at best. At worst, it’s just absolute gibberish thought up by an overactive imagination, and I’d rather not have our criminal investigators chase down every wild goose chase offered up by psychics. Maybe that makes me sound like an asshole, and if it does, apologies. But I side with investigators on this one.

If I’m mistaken, I’d be happy to be proven wrong. But after watching this parking garage saga unfold online over the past decade or so – and doing my own deep dive over the last month – nothing to date has given me any indication that Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and/or Stacy McCall may actually be buried there.

In 2007, at the fifteen-year mark of the investigation, police officials admitted that they had continued to struggle with the Springfield Three case. Despite re-launching the investigation in 2001 and going through several starts and stops since then, investigators had again reached the end of the road with empty hands. S.P.D. Sgt. Mike Owen told the Springfield News-Leader that June:

"It's in a lull again. We just don't have anything solid, in terms of evidence or testimony, to lead us any further right now."

Major Steve Ijames, who'd overseen the detective division since 2001, stated:

"The answer to the question is not contained within the 5,000-plus pages of investigative reports. It's been looked at by enough sharp people... it's not a situation of having a smart person look at the file and figure it out."

At around this point, another suspect showed up, and he was a name that had been loosely linked to the case very early on. And again, it is worth pointing out that there seems to be nothing definitive pointing in this individual's direction, but the crimes he committed in the same area at the same time gave many pause that he may have had some involvement. And considering what we know of him and his actions, it's hard to believe that police never once seriously considered him a suspect in the Springfield Three case.

But to tackle his story, we need to back up quite a few years, to June of 1985, seven years before Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and Stacy McCall disappeared. A separate story would begin to unfold in Nixa, a small town about twelve miles south of Springfield.

On June 17th, 1985, a young woman named Jackie Johns was seen leaving work at the Nixa Livestock Auction at around 11:00 PM. She was last seen at a gas station, and her vehicle was found abandoned along the side of a road, roughly one mile north of the livestock auction, at around 6:00 the following morning. One door was still open. Jackie's purse and keys were still inside the vehicle, and a small amount of blood left on the back seat led to the belief that something terrible had happened; that Jackie may have been forcefully abducted from her own vehicle. That suspicion was confirmed when her unclothed body was found just days later, pulled from nearby Lake Springfield by a pair of fishermen that found her just after 8:00 AM on Saturday, June 22nd. An autopsy confirmed that her cause of death was a severe blow to the side of her head, believed to have come from a tire jack. She had also endured multiple facial injuries and had been raped.

In the immediate aftermath, investigators struggled to build a case against anyone, but they undoubtedly set their sights on a suspect early on. Witnesses had seen a vehicle parked behind Jackie Johns at the gas station she visited before her abduction, and separate witnesses saw a similar vehicle parked behind hers on the road where her vehicle was found abandoned. That vehicle belonged to 27-year-old Gerald Carnahan, the heir to a prominent company in the region called Springfield Aluminum and Brass, and he worked there as their director of industrial sales. As such, he was well on his way to becoming a well-known and influential member of the community, so police suspicion in him soon became the talk of the town.

Police questioned Gerald Carnahan early on, and during their conversations, he reportedly lied about his whereabouts on the evening of Jackie Johns' abduction and murder. Weeks later, investigators believed that he was trying to flee the country by booking passage to Taiwan; Carnahan would claim this was a simple business trip. Regardless, he was soon arrested on a warrant for felony tampering with evidence, prosecutors claiming that his false testimony was tantamount to tampering. A grand jury empaneled months later failed to hand down any indictments against Carnahan for murder, but his stepdaughter was later charged with perjury in connection with testimony she gave to the grand jury. She was later acquitted of those charges, and the case against Carnahan was similarly thrown out during the trial by the judge, who ruled that he hadn't altered any physical evidence... thus nullifying the lone charge against him (tampering with evidence). Darnell Moore, the prosecutor for Greene County years later, would say about Carnahan:

"He was born in a wealthy family and could hire the best defense attorneys you could find."

Carnahan remained the primary suspect in the Jackie Johns' murder, but investigators struggled to build a case against him. They had very little physical evidence, and what evidence they had wasn't very useful... at the time. More on that in a bit.

Years began to pass, and in March of 1993, Gerald Carnahan made local headlines yet again when he was charged with the attempted kidnapping of 18-year-old Heather Starkey on a Saturday morning. Starkey, still a high school student at the time, was walking to a friend's house that morning when Carnahan pulled up beside her. At first, he asked if she needed help, but he then tried to pull her into his vehicle, a white Chrysler LaBaron. Starkey was able to break free and run away, seeking help at a nearby convenience store. A witness nearby wrote down the license plate number, leading directly back to Gerald Carnahan.

Investigators soon learned that months beforehand, Carnahan's wife had sought a restraining order against him. She'd claimed that he was a drug addict and an alcoholic with a violent temper, who'd not only gotten physical with her in the past, but had even threatened to kill her. She also painted him as someone whose mental state was slipping, becoming more impulsive and dangerous to not only himself - but others. That would seemingly get confirmed when, following his arrest in 1993, he was let out on bond. In the weeks that followed, he continued to commit several crimes - later getting charged with arson, burglary, and destruction of property - in a strange crime spree that included trying to burn down a competitor's business and destroying a neighbor's vehicle. He also threatened to kill himself before firing a handgun in his house, and was taken in by police for an involuntary mental evaluation. During that time, he attacked a police officer and then threw a cup of urine on authorities. So... yeah. Quite the banner year for Gerald Carnahan.

During his trial for the attempted kidnapping, Gerald Carnahan literally tried to use the "I slipped and started to fall so I grabbed ahold of" the victim defense, which didn't play to the jury at all. They deliberated for a couple of days before finding him guilty. He was sentenced to two years in prison for the kidnapping, and his sentence was later upgraded to four when he was held to account for the other crimes he'd committed that year (arson and burglary among them).

At around this time, local journalists - citing investigators - began to speculate on Gerald Carnahan's alleged involvement in other local crimes. Whenever a woman had gone missing or been murdered in a similar manner as Jackie Johns, police began to speculate that Carnahan might have been involved. This included the 1987 slaying of Debra Sue Lewis, who was kidnapped from her car alongside U.S. 160, just north of Springfield. Her remains were found later that year in Newton County. This also included the 1989 death of Kelle Ann Workman, who worked at a cemetery in Douglas County and was abducted from her workplace while mowing the grass. Her body had been found ten days later in Christian County.

Then, of course, there were the 1992 disappearances of Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and Stacy McCall, a strange abduction case that unfolded at the same time that Gerald Carnahan had been experiencing his supposed mental break. Like the other unsolved murders, investigators had no evidence linking Carnahan to it, but suspicion lingered.

Carnahan was released from prison in 1997 after serving out his sentence, and spent the next decade as a free man. But the original case that put him on investigators' radar eventually caught up with him.

When the body of Jackie Johns had been found in 1985, a swab of DNA had been logged into evidence. This was a small amount of DNA recovered during a vaginal swab during the autopsy, and authorities were not able to use forensic testing to determine who it came from. But decades later, in 2007, technology had progressed and the Missouri Highway Patrol tested the sample, resulting in a positive match. Gerald Carnahan's defense attorney, Dee Wampler, later told KY3:

"It got down to about eight millionths of a gram of DNA."

After an extensive amount of delays, Gerald Carnahan's trial finally started in September of 2010, and after six days of testimony and thirteen hours of deliberation, a jury found Gerald Carnahan guilty of rape and murder. The murder came with an automatic life sentence, but the jury recommended an additional life sentence for rape, and that sentence was later affirmed. The conviction has since been appealed multiple times, but the various courts have upheld Carnahan's sentence for murder and rape. He is still incarcerated today, and is almost assured to die behind bars without the possibility of parole.

Following the arrest, resident J.P. Normal told the Springfield News-Leader about the case of Jackie Johns and the impact it had on the community:

"It's like those three missing girls from Springfield that still haven't been found... it's just been an ongoing thing."

While Gerald Carnahan hasn't been directly tied to the Springfield Three case in any meaningful way, their stories have seemed to overlap each other in strange ways over the years. Jackie Johns' murder precedes the Springfield Three by roughly eight years, but Carnahan was arrested for trying to kidnap an 18-year-old months after Sherrill, Suzie, and Stacy went missing. As I touched on earlier, 1992 through 1993 saw Carnahan in the midst of a deteriorating mental state, with him committing multiple crimes and attempting to take his own life with a handgun, resulting in him being confined to a mental health facility against his own volition. He was also a native Springfieldian, was a graduate of the same high school that Stacy and Suzie attended, Kickapoo High School.

Some online have tried to connect Gerald Carnahan to Sherrill Levitt, claiming that the two were dating before her disappearance, but I've found zero evidence to support that claim. That seems to be the type of weird rumor/fan fiction that a certain subsect of the online sleuthing community dream up the absence of any resolution.

Regardless, Gerald Carnahan has become a favored suspect of many online, due in no small part to the type of crimes we know he committed. On one occasion, he attempted to abduct an 18-year-old alongside a road. On another, he abducted and murdered a 20-year-old late at night, not too far away from where Sherrill, Suzie, and Stacy disappeared. His deteriorating mental state in 1992 and 1993 makes him a prime suspect, and many believe that investigators' original inability to build a case against him in the Jackie Johns' murder may have made him feel emboldened to act again. And in her case, it was only a minute trace of DNA that led to his conviction. If we assume that was his first crime, and he only made a small mistake... is it possible that in additional crimes, he'd be even more careful? More prepared? Perhaps more willing to take risks, and abduct three women from a home? We know he was losing his shit throughout this time period, so it's hard to think otherwise.

While there are many discrepancies between the crimes Gerald Carnahan committed and the disappearance of the Springfield Three, it's hard to fully eliminate him as a suspect based off publicly-available information.

In 2010, a new police chief was elected in Springfield, Missouri, and upon starting the job, he ordered the investigation into the Springfield Three to be re-launched yet again. This would lead to a brief surge in new publicity, but even that was short-lived. However, it seems like the analysis done on the case file during this time completely reorganized things, modernizing it in a way that hadn't been done thus far.

In 2012, the twenty-year mark of the case, a similar push was made to begin gathering new leads. Following a two-year reorganization of the case file, Springfield Police published a dedicated webpage for the case, highlighting information about the three victims - as well as a potential suspect. That same year, Springfield P.D. would present their newly-analyzed information to a panel of 25 criminal justice investigators assembled by NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children). Lisa Cox, the police spokeswoman for the S.P.D. as of 2015, told the Springfield News-Leader in an email:

"Several recommendations by the panel were incorporated into the ongoing investigation. Those recommendations received are not items we can publicly release."

At this point, investigators had made it clear that there were two feasible paths for them to finally wrap up their ongoing investigation:

1.) Someone had to come forward. In doing so, they'd need to confess to their own involvement or provide information proving someone else's, and lead police to some credible evidence.

2.) A scientific breakthrough: some kind of new forensic testing that would make existing evidence even more valuable. However, seeing how investigators didn't have much physical evidence to begin with - no crime scene, no bodies, etc. - this seemed like an impossibility. Barring, of course, a huge discovery.

In 2017, Sgt. Todd King would tell the Springfield News-Leader:

"How do you wrap your head around three people literally disappearing? With no idea where they went? 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... anything could have happened.

"You don't have anything that says they were abducted, they were harmed. It's this big mystery."

Bartt Streeter, the brother of Suzanne Streeter and the son of Sherrill Levitt, is someone that has played a strange role in this saga over the years. At times, he has seemed to be a person-of-interest for investigators. At others, he’s demanded answers for his missing family members, a vocal advocate for justice. I’ve detailed Bartt’s story at various points throughout this series, mostly in parts two and four. However, as we draw closer to the end I realize that I never quite touched upon why police were so interested in him as a suspect from the very beginning… what had led to his original estrangement from his family.

When Bartt was just 17 years old, he moved out of his mother, Sherrill’s, home. A rebellious youth, Bartt wasn’t particularly close with either his mom or his sister throughout most of his twenties. His aunt, Debra Schwartz, told producers with People Magazine Investigates that despite their familial relationship, the two weren’t particularly close. She even described him as a toxic personality that she didn’t respect, who spent most of his early adulthood slumming it with who she described as “lowlives.”

That People Magazine Investigates special, which came out in 2019, portrayed Bartt as an alcoholic with a violent temper, who had reportedly lashed out at Sherrill in the past. In fact, this was what had reportedly caused him to get kicked out of the family home. And as a result, caused him to get, in essence, disinherited by the family.

A year or so before Sherrill and Suzie’s disappearance, Bartt had tried to rebuild his relationship with them. Suzie was beyond happy to have a relationship with her older brother, but Sherrill was more withholding. For a time, Suzie even went to go live with her brother in the summer before her senior year of high school, but Bartt began slipping back into his old ways. He got drunk one night, and when Suzie asked him to turn down his stereo, he got angry and reportedly pushed her to the ground. After that, she and their mother, Sherrill, had steered clear of Bartt, growing a wedge between the family members that hadn’t healed by June 1992.

After his two closest family members disappeared, Bartt was questioned extensively by investigators, telling them that on the night of the disappearance – June 6th, 1992 – he had been drinking with a neighbor of his. This neighbor confirmed that they’d been drinking that night, but also claimed that Bartt left his home at some point between 11:00 PM and 12:00 AM on June 7th. After this, Bartt says he went home and passed out.

Bartt was then polygraphed, which he reportedly passed. However, even back in 1992, investigators had to wonder to what extent could the polygraph be trusted, since someone under the influence of alcohol may not even remember what they’d done. And of course, this goes without saying: polygraph tests are bullshit, a useless technology that unnecessarily hampered criminal investigations for decades… but that’s a spiel I’ve made many times before that I don’t need to re-tread.

Regardless, though, Bartt Streeter was seemingly eliminated as a suspect in the case, although Springfield P.D. have insisted over the years that no one has been ruled out as a suspect.

Well, after being questioned extensively and cooperating with the police investigation, Bartt Streeter moved out of the area. Throughout the journey, he ended up getting sober (for a time) and settling down, returning to Springfield a few years later to try and get answers. He’d remain on the periphery of the case in the years ahead, speaking out on behalf of his mother and sister on occasion, but he wasn’t a constant figure in the case a la Janis McCall.

Well, in February of 2019, Bartt Streeter would make headlines again and not for anything good. He was arrested for public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and attempted false imprisonment in Smyrna, Tennessee, reportedly showing up at a nail salon on February 28th. In the subsequent police report, it was claimed that Bartt claimed he was there to pick up his granddaughter, a 15-year-old girl at the nail salon, but the girl did not know Bartt Streeter and refused to go with him. Cops were called, and Bartt was apprehended nearby, taken to the county jail on a $4,000 bond.

The Streeter family, which had begun operating a blog highlighting information in the Springfield Three case, would refute the allegations that Bartt had attempted to kidnap anyone. On the blog, they’d claim that the entire incident was just a big misunderstanding, and that surveillance footage from the business showed Bartt arriving and shaking hands with the owner, then reportedly asking whether or not the granddaughter was one of the salon’s patrons. However, on the blog, the Streeter family did address Bartt’s longtime issue of alcohol abuse, something he’d struggled with for a while.

While I personally don’t have any reason to believe Bartt Streeter is still a suspect in this case, I understand why others might be wary of him. His troubling relationship with alcohol, his alleged temper when drinking, and his splintered relationship with his mother and sister provides maybe the clearest – or perhaps the only – tangible motive in this case. However, was this enough for him to orchestrate the disappearance of three women? Two of whom were extremely close to him? That, I doubt.

Before long, the 25th mark of the case came and went, as did the 30th in June of 2022. Now, as I record this in the waning days of 2024, we're closer to the 35th mark of the case in 2027 than even then (which seems improbable).

In the time since Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and Stacy McCall strangely disappeared, their absence - dubbed the Springfield Three in press coverage - has been covered in multiple formats. It has been featured in various true crime shows such as America's Most Wanted, People Magazine Investigates, Disappeared, and others. Multiple books have been written about it, and it's been featured on multiple podcasts (many of which I'm sure you've all heard or at least heard of). This includes a podcast originally dedicated to this story, The Springfield Three: A Small Town Disappearance, hosted by Anne Roderique-Jones, which came out in 2021. That show has since gone on to cover additional crime stories in the region, and has redubbed itself Ozarks True Crime.

The Springfield Three is one of the defining mysteries of our time, becoming a story that thousands have argued about online for decades now. A bizarre cold case that everyone has an opinion on, with most of those that comment about it online having a theory about what happened: who was responsible, where the three women went, and what happened. And to their credit, there's not exactly a lack of suspects. Running down the list, we have:

- Bartt Streeter, Suzie's brother and Sherrill's son, who was a known alcoholic with a strained relationship with his family and a shaky alibi on the night they went missing

- Mike Kovacs, Suzie's ex-boyfriend that had been harassing her in the months before she went missing, resulting in a restraining order the prior Autumn

- Dustin Recla, another of Suzie's ex-boyfriends, who along with his friends - Michael Clay and Joseph Riedel - had been arrested for graverobbing months beforehand

Then we have multiple suspects without known ties to the victims, but who are equally suspicious, if not more so:

- Robert Craig Cox, a convicted armed robber and alleged killer, who seemed to toy with authorities and confessed to knowing where the women were buried

- Steven Garrison, a convicted rapist with ties to the Galloping Goose Motorcycle Club, who also confessed to knowledge of the case; ultimately using said knowledge to get out of jail, before committing a violent rape that sent him right back

- Larry DeWayne Hall, a convicted serial killer that traveled throughout the Midwest for historical re-enactments, who at one point confessed to killing the Springfield Three but later recanted

- Gerald Carnahan, a convicted killer and serial abductor that was born into a wealthy Springfield family, whose victims were in the same demographic as Suzie and Stacy

In recent years, some online have started to speculate that another local businessman that's well-known in the Springfield area had the three women killed and buried in the parking lot of his business. But that's the kind of rumor that is impossible to verify barring some kind of extraordinary evidence.

Then there are the unknown individuals... the people who were reported to police in the hours or days after the three women went missing, but whose identity remains unknown to the public. This includes:

- The person who made phone calls to Sherrill's home just hours after the women's disappearance, which were prank calls that were sexual or explicit in nature

- The person who left behind a voicemail on Sherrill's answering machine, which was reportedly heard by Janis McCall as she attempted to find her daughter

- An unknown transient seen near Sherrill's home in the days preceding the abduction

- The multitude of potential persons-of-interest seen in the area at around the time of the disappearance, including the men who may have been driving an older-model green van

This incredible list of potential suspects or persons of interest really highlights what investigators have had to work with over the years. In a case that is so tough to comprehend - where there's no discernible crime scene, where the women's bodies have never been located, etc. - having a cast of characters like this doesn't make things any easier. It's very possible that any of these men may have been responsible, or may know something that can lead police to the person who was...

... but at the same time, recent history has shown us that the most common suspects are often not it. Think of any recently-solved cold case. Now think back to whether the person who did it is the one that journalists and reporters had been circling for years. Decades even. The odds are that they weren't. When people get away with crimes like this, it's usually because they managed to shake any suspicion, despite matching the suspect profile to a 'T'.

If and when this case ever gets solved, I wouldn't be surprised if we find out it was committed by a person (or people) that were never originally tied to it. And as I said earlier, if I'm proven wrong, I'd be more than happy to admit it. But based on the dozens of crimes I've covered over the years that have since been solved, the suspect was almost always someone that had never once popped up on Reddit, Facebook, or Websleuths. If I was a betting man, that's where my money would go.

According to the Springfield Police Department, a $43,000 reward has been established for the "location and prosecution of the persons responsible for the abduction of" Sherrill Levitt, Suzanne Streeter, and Stacy McCall.

If you know anything, or think you may know anything, you are encouraged to reach out to authorities. You can reach the Springfield Police Department at (417) 864-1751 or the FBI Violent Crime Apprehension Program at (800) 634-4097. You can also reach out to Crime Stoppers at (417) 869-TIPS (8477).

The families involved continue to wait for justice to be served in this cold case that's been haunting them for the past 32 years. Many of them have long since rid themselves of any notion of closure or resolution, with Janis McCall telling People Magazine in 2019:

"There's not a word called closure in the dictionary for families missing someone. My baby is gone. We want some justice."

Janis and Stuart McCall have had to go through the latter half of their lives without Stacy, their youngest daughter that would now be fifty years old. The same could be said for Sherrill's and Suzie's surviving family, who have all had to endure the last three decades without them. While most have long since abandoned any hope that the three women will be returned to them safely, they hope that the person(s) responsible for this strange disappearance will one day be identified and held responsible for their actions.

Until they are, the stories of Sherrill Levitt, Suzanne Streeter, and Stacy McCall will remain unresolved.

Episode Information

Episode Information

Writing, research, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on December 21st, 2024

Sources and Other Reading

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