Dead or alive?
Sherrill, Suzie and Stacy vanished without trace
The high-school graduation photos of Suzie and Stacy should’ve been framed, displayed proudly. Instead, they ended up on ‘missing person’ posters.
It was 6 June 1992. For Suzie Streeter, 19, and Stacy Mccall, 18, school was out.
They’d just graduated from Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri.
There was a long summer holiday ahead before college.
Stacy hoped to get into a university. Suzie wanted to study Cosmetology, become a hairdresser like her mum Sherrill Levitt, 47.
But for now they had one priority…to party!
That night, Suzie and Stacy planned to hop from one house party to the next, then crash back at Suzie’s. Suzie’s mum didn’t mind. She liked Suzie having her friends over.
Sherrill had done well for herself. She’d brought Suzie up on her own, and had worked hard to make it as a hairdresser.
While the girls were out partying that night, Sherrill was at home, making plans to redecorate.
She called a friend at 11.15pm, wanted advice about a cabinet… Should
she paint it or varnish it?
Three hours later, Suzie and Stacy were on their way home to Sherrill’s. Their friend Janelle was picking them up at 9am, so they could spend the day at White Water Park in Branson, an hour’s drive away.
But when Janelle got to Sherrill’s house as arranged, Stacy and Suzie were nowhere to be seen. And neither was Sherrill. Janelle found the porch light broken, and the front door open. Nothing else was out of place. She went inside, calling for her friends. No reply. Then the phone rang. Janelle answered. But the caller wouldn’t identify himself, just started talking about sex. So Janelle hung up.
Stacy’s mum Janis called round soon after, hoping to see her daughter before she went to the water park.
Straightaway, Janis knew something was wrong.
Her daughter was missing. So were Suzie and Sherrill. Janis called the police. But things were about to get a lot stranger.
Police knew Suzie and Stacy had made it home that night. They found the girls’ make-up bags in the bathroom, and the wipes they’d used to clean their faces before bed.
There was no sign of a disturbance. In fact, on the contrary, everything seemed too tidy, too organised.
The women’s handbags had been lined up in front of the door to Suzie’s room. And the clothes the girls had been wearing were left in a neatly folded pile – with the exception, Janis noticed, of Stacy’s T-shirt and underwear.
Then police noticed that two slats of the window blinds at the front of the house had been separated, as if someone had been looking out…
Witnesses came forward saying they’d seen the three women. Some said they’d been spotted driving a white van, others had apparently seen them in a diner next to a far-off motorway.
Police received over 5,000 calls, but none led anywhere. And the question remained…
Why would three successful women with promising futures decide to vanish?
The police also considered the possibility that they’d been kidnapped. And they
The clothes the girls had been wearing were left neatly folded
had a suspect in mind – a man who lived locally.
He’d parked his van outside Sherrill’s empty house and watched while police investigated the potential crime scene.
Officers had confronted him, asked what he was doing there.
‘Why watch it on television when you can watch it in person?’ he’d replied.
When police looked into the background of the man in question, they found he’d been accused of murder before…
Initially sentenced to life for beating his girlfriend to death in 1978, he’d been acquitted when a court deemed the evidence insufficient. Could he be behind the disappearance of Sherrill, Stacy and Suzie? Apparently not. The man had an alibi for the night in question. And police weren’t convinced this was the work of one lone person.
Five years later, in 1997, the three women were declared legally dead, although the case remains open…
Though the women are legally dead, the case remains open