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http://www.kansascity.com/2011/02/19/2668202/springfields-new-police-chief.html

Posted on Sat, Feb. 19, 2011 10:15 PM
By LAURA BAUER

SPRINGFIELD - Before this city's new police chief took the job last summer, he pulled up the department's website to find out more about the place.

Paul Williams could see where officers had busted meth labs and which businesses had been robbed. Next, he clicked on "Unsolved Cases." You can learn a lot about a town by its unsolved crime.

Just one case popped up. Grainy photos of three women filled his screen, and his eyes fell on three words that have echoed through this community and region for 18 years.

Three Missing Women.

"I thought, 'Wow, that's unusual to have just this one thing on the website, just one unsolved case,'" says Williams, who spent nearly 29 years with the Tulsa (Okla.) Police Department before landing in Springfield in July. "It must be a big deal."

Since then, and since he announced the department would put more focus and energy into the mystery that has haunted this city, he has learned just how big.

Stacy McCall and Suzie Streeter had just graduated from Kickapoo High School on June 6, 1992. Stacy was 18, Suzie 19. In their gold graduation gowns they smiled for cameras, wrapping arms around friends and family.

That night they partied with classmates and planned to go to a Branson water park the next morning.

But by that morning, they - along with Suzie's mom, Sherrill Levitt - were gone. The three vanished from Levitt's home, where the two girls had decided to spend the night.

Family and friends who went to the house looking for them found no obvious signs of foul play. Nothing more than a broken globe on the front porch light and a Yorkie named Cinnamon left alone inside.

The women's cars? Parked out front. Their purses? Inside the house, with money and keys, Stacy's migraine medicine and Levitt's cigarettes and lighter. Friends say the chain-smoker didn't go anywhere without her cigarettes.

Within days, family, friends and volunteers - led by Stacy's parents, Janis and Stu McCall - posted fliers across the region. Many hung tattered and torn for much of the '90s, a constant reminder of the mystery.

"How can you have three women disappear from the face of the earth?" says former Greene County prosecutor Darrell Moore. 'That's what was on everyone's mind."

It still is.

At least one detective has always been assigned to run down leads and tips. Investigators have interviewed people of interest and possible suspects over the years. They've ruled out some, but not others.

Yet in the last three months, a new set of eyes - Williams's - has amped things up for the first time in years.

Three detectives and one sergeant work on the case, following new information and revisiting some leads from the past. The new chief announced the department could dig beneath a Springfield hospital parking garage, where some think the three are buried.

And, on March 7, the 1992 mystery will be the subject of a national television show on Investigation Discovery. The Springfield police will bring in extra staff to handle calls after the show.

"I do feel a surge in energy, momentum that hasn't been there in the last 10 years," says Janis McCall, who has become a national advocate for the missing since the youngest of her three daughters disappeared. "This is something that everybody in the community wants an answer to … not just me, not just the police.

"So many thought this case couldn't be solved, and that doesn't help the families," she says. "I think if they put a new outlook and new perspective on it, they will find it is solvable."

A change of plans

Suzie and Stacy weren't supposed to stay at Suzie's that night. Levitt would have the time to do home projects, like refinishing a chest of drawers.

The two new graduates and others - including close friend Janelle Kirby, who was the glue between Suzie and Stacy - initially thought they'd attend parties in town and then go to Branson and stay at a hotel there.

But they decided that wasn't a good idea. It was getting late. Stacy called her mom at 10:30 and said they'd go to Branson in the morning. She'd spend the night at Janelle's.

The girls went to another party and left before 2 a.m. when police showed up to shoo partiers home. Instead of staying at Janelle's and sleeping on a pallet her mom had made on the floor, the two decided to go to Suzie's house and sleep on her new waterbed.

"I did stuff with Suzie, I did stuff with Stacy and we did things together," Janelle says now. "It was the very first time the two had done something together, without me or other without other friends."

Stacy followed in her car and Suzie led the way to Delmar Street.

Where they vanished.

By the next afternoon, when Janelle came looking for her friends, no one was home. The door was unlocked, so she walked inside. Cinnamon the Yorkie yapped at her ankles.

"She was just so happy to see me," Janelle says. "It was like she was glad to see someone she knew."

Janelle remembers when she first walked to the front door in her bare feet, she saw broken glass on the small porch. Her boyfriend grabbed a broom and dustpan from the carport and swept it up as a favor to Levitt.

The two started driving, looking along the street, inside storefronts and at a nearby mall. No sign of the three.

Stacy's mom showed up at the Levitt home around 9 that night.

"We didn't think anything had happened," Janis says. "We were just wondering where the heck they'd gone. I didn't expect anything bad."

Before long, more than a dozen people had been inside the house, worried and wondering.

At the bottom of steps leading down to Suzie's bedroom sat the women's purses. Levitt's, then Suzie's, then Stacy's, a red clutch sitting on top of Suzie's overnight bag.

"Things were rolling out of the purses," McCall says.

Levitt, 47, a popular hairdresser, had a large sum of money in her purse.

In Suzie's room, the TV was on. Clothes were scattered about - it looked like a typical teenager's room - and the covers on her king-sized waterbed were disheveled.

Stacy's sandals were on the floor, under her folded flowered shorts. Her jewelry was tucked into the pocket.

It was then McCall realized, "This isn't really fitting in here."

Two slats of the window blinds in Suzie's room were pushed apart as if someone had been looking out.

"I figured, headlights pulled in and Suzie looked out of the blinds to see who was there," Janelle says.

In Levitt's room, one side of the covers was pulled back, as if she'd been in bed.

In the bathroom were signs the two friends had gotten ready for bed. Suzie's jewelry lay on a washcloth, and makeup-smeared washcloths were in the hamper.

Janis didn't call 911. That's for emergencies, she thought. She instead dialed 411 to get the number for the Police Department's front desk.

"This wasn't an emergency. Not then," Janis says. "I was expecting them to walk in at any time. Just within seconds."

More than 5,000 leads

Springfield Police Sgt. Allen Neal keeps a large version of the old flier hanging in his small office, a reminder of work left to be done.

When the women disappeared, he had been on the department only a year. He was one of dozens of patrol officers who helped in the investigation. They searched parks and lakes, woods and subdivisions.

Officers 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.

From day one, there wasn't much to go on.

"It's a very frustrating case," says Neal, now the sergeant over the investigation.

For starters, officers didn't really have a crime scene to work. Most criminal investigations have something to go on. A body. Signs of a struggle. Blood. Something.

Not here.

"It wasn't like you could go there and say here's the fingernails or button left from the shirt," says Mark Webb, sergeant in investigations in 1992 and now police chief in Marionville, Mo. "It was pretty much an empty house with a dog in it."

The glass from the globe may have held clues, but the shards were tossed a good nine hours before the first two officers arrived. More than a dozen people had been in the house, walking on the carpet, sitting on chairs and couches.

"You always want a pristine, uncompromised crime scene when you get there," Neal says. "In this case you wonder. … It would have been nice for nobody to have been in there."

But Neal is quick to say no one is to blame. No one had a clue what this case would become.

Since the summer of 1992, more than 5,000 leads have come in, creating more than 10,000 police reports and documents. Officers have received tips from just about every state and several countries. They've analyzed similar cases and reached out to departments investigating serial killers.

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.

Then-Police Chief Terry Knowles has been criticized in the past for micromanaging the case and not allowing detectives to do their jobs.

Commanders and detectives from the early days have told the new chief about the early investigation and how it can affect follow-up today.

"The investigation was way too top-driven," Williams says. "I think that hindered the investigation in the onset. I don't know to what extent.

"It's disheartening to me as someone trying to come in and do something, that we may not be able to do anything based on everything that happened in that first year."

Knowles, who teaches at Washburn University, stands behind his leadership style in such a massive case and disagrees with detectives who said it undermined the investigation.

"This was a major case, not a case you assign and wait for briefings and updates," he said Saturday. 'This is a case that demanded attention. Any decision I made was to help solve this case. … I would never offer a critical opinion on something that happened 18 years ago if I wasn't a part of it. I don't know where that comes from."

In the past two years, new tips have come in mentioning names that never surfaced before, Neal says. The tips are about people who have a track record of violent crime.

The fact that leads still come in, sometimes once a week, encourages police.

"No, we don't know for sure what happened," Neal says. "But I do think we're farther along by identifying potential suspects. How close we are is hard to tell at this point."

Some point to parking garage

When the women disappeared, the Internet hadn't exploded yet. Now that it has, the case has taken on a life of its own.

For years now, a large group of bloggers and sleuthers have dedicated hours and hours to trying to solve the case. Among their convictions: The women are buried under a hospital parking garage.

Kathee Baird, a Springfield area reporter and crime blogger, has repeatedly asked the department to dig at the site and doesn't understand why they haven't. She has spent six years investigating the case on her own, tracking down retired detectives, known people of interest and suspects, and family members of the three.

"There are three women who can't tell us what happened to them," says Baird, who often refers to the three as "my girls' or 'our girls.' 'This community as well as friends and family members deserve to know what happened to them and why."

Several times, she says, people led her to the Cox South hospital site. A psychic also pointed at the parking garage.

Baird arranged for underground radar technicians to peer through the garage surface. Rick Norland of Paola, Kan., used ground penetrating radar at the site years ago.

"At that time, she didn't give us much information," Norland says. "She wanted us to come in blind.... I think she implied it was a cold case."

He hit on three 'anomalies' inside a 10-by-10-foot space. Anomalies are what he calls disruptions under the ground and these were similar to what he has seen when trying to find buried graves. But he doesn't know what the anomalies are.

Two were close together and the third was at an angle not far away.

"When we tell you something is down there, something is down there," Norland said. "We just can't identify what that target is.'" Police aren't sure if that location is even a possibility. Some timelines for the garage's construction say crews weren't working there until September 1993, 15 months after the women vanished.

"We're going to put it to rest one way or another," Chief Williams says. "No, I'm not dedicated to digging in the garage at this point. It's a possibility."

Family and friends of the family, though, want police to dig, just to squelch the rumors and some of the rhetoric on the Internet.

Bartt Streeter, Levitt's son and Suzie's brother, said he thinks of his mother and sister every day. He wants to know that police are doing everything they can to find answers to so many lingering questions.

"The Cox hospital site may not be probable, but it's possible," he said. "Until they look at these locations that are possible, law enforcement will never be able to say they left no stone unturned.

"And where does that leave the families?"

Not giving up

In the last year, the Springfield department cleared three cold-case homicides, two from more than 20 years ago and a third from 2004. Two were solved through police work and confessions, the third through DNA.

That gives Janis McCall hope.

Every night she goes to bed saying the Lord's Prayer first and then something more for her youngest daughter.

"Watch over Stacy, wherever she may be."

One day last week, Janis sat inside the Victim's Memorial Garden in Springfield's Phelps Grove Park. Years ago, family members dedicated a dark gray stone bench to the three women.

"Do you believe she's been missing longer than I had her?" Janis says, softly, glancing over at the bench. "That's hard."

Janelle also comes to the bench. She brings her children and talks about her two childhood friends. She keeps a picture near her kitchen sink of the three of them on graduation day.

"I always think, ‘What if I had done things differently?'" Janelle says. "What if they had just stayed at my house? What if we had gone to Branson that night?"

Levitt and Suzie's family had the two declared dead several years ago. Stacy's family didn't and Janis McCall says they never will.

She knows the three are most likely dead, but even if there's 1 percent chance they're not, she'll keep hold of that.

"Until they find their remains or find my daughter," McCall says, "they better keep looking."

The new chief plans to continue. Williams is considering bringing in national cold-case investigators.

In his eight months as chief, he says, he has come to understand how important the three missing women are to the city.

"It bothers people inside the department, people in the community," Williams says. "If we can do something as an agency to reconcile that, we're going to try to do that.

"Or at one point say we've done everything we can."

Where to call
Anyone with information on the three missing women can call CrimeStoppers at 417-869-TIPS (8477) or the Springfield Police Department at 417-864-1810.

To reach Laura Bauer, call 816-234-4944 or send e-mail to lbauer@kcstar.com.

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