On the night of June 6, 1992, three women vanished from a rented house on Delmar Street in Springfield, Missouri: Suzanne “Suzie” Streeter, who was celebrating her graduation from high school that same day; her mother, Sherrill Levitt; and Suzie’s friend Stacy McCall, who had stopped by after a night out. By the next morning, the house told a story with no ending — the porch light globe unscrewed and left on a table, Sherrill’s shoes and glasses still inside, both cars parked outside, and every sign that whoever left, left in a hurry or not by choice at all. Nothing was stolen. No struggle marked the rooms. The three women were simply gone, and despite one of the largest missing-persons investigations in Missouri history, none of them has ever been found, alive or dead.
The case, known as the Springfield Three, has drawn thousands of tips over more than three decades, a reward that grew past $100,000, and repeated searches of ponds, wells, and abandoned mines across the Ozarks. A man named Robert Craig Cox was investigated and later ruled out. Another named Robert Len Ray, who died in prison in 2014 on unrelated charges, was named a person of interest by investigators who believed he may have had information about the women’s fate, but no charges, confession, or physical evidence ever closed the file.
The House That Springfield Never Forgot
The Delmar Street house itself was eventually torn down, but locals say the empty lot where it stood has never quite lost its reputation. Neighbors in the years after the disappearance reported unexplained sounds from the vacant property — footsteps on a porch that no longer existed, and, more than once, the sensation of a porch light glowing at night when no light fixture remained. True-crime tour groups and paranormal investigators who canvas the Ozarks’ unsolved cases have named the site as one of the region’s most persistently reported “residual haunting” locations, theorizing that the abruptness and violence implied by that unscrewed porch light left an imprint even after the physical evidence was gone.
For Springfield, the case functions less as ghost story than open wound. Sherrill Levitt’s son, Bartt Streeter, who discovered the empty house the next morning, spent decades pushing investigators and the FBI to keep working leads until his own death in 2023, never learning what happened to his mother and sister. The Springfield Police Department has said the file remains active, periodically retesting evidence as forensic technology improves, still hoping that somewhere in the thousands of unresolved tips lies the answer that has eluded three generations of investigators — and an entire city that has never been able to let the story rest.