The Springfield Three. Those three words are nothing but fear for those of who grew up in southwest Missouri in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s one of the most fascinating crime cases you’ll read about, and I’ve written about it twice in this space (Part I and Part II).
To recap, Stacy McCall, Suzie Streeter and Sherrill Levitt disappeared in the early hours of June 7, just hours after McCall and Streeter graduated from high school. They vanished from Levitt’s home, where all three were spending the night, with few clues left behind.
Thousands of hours of investigation and hundreds of tips later, the case remains a mystery. Tuesday marks 30 years since the women went missing, and law enforcement is no closer to solving the riddle than they were in 1992.
Though the case was a big story in the region, it didn’t take off nationally until the advent of the Internet and a slew of true crime TV shows. Now, you can watch the ID channel and count on a Springfield Three re-run at least once a month.
The early 1990s were a simpler time. While the video game console era was hitting its stride, 99 percent of us didn’t have mobile phones, and most of us were cruising around town as teenagers, listening to Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard and the like. That explains why I had no clue about this case until I saw a documentary years later.
As I’ve written, Dad and Mom moved us from Lebanon, Missouri, located less than an hour from Springfield, in 1989. By 1992, I was fully entrenched in the Burlingame lifestyle of driving around the town’s red brick main street and the occasional (OK, more than occasional) keg party.
Though I’d been obsessed with true crime since reading “The Search for the Green River Killer” in 1991, I was more intrigued by another case near Springfield: the abduction and disappearance of Angela Marie Hammond. Like the Springfield Three, she’s still missing.
When I asked my father why we moved from Lebanon, where my brother and I were happy as pre-teens, the answer was thorough, ranging from the construction of our new house falling through, to it making sense for the family business. He finished by saying Lebanon had one of the highest murder rates per capita in the country.
That last statement made sense at the time. Two years later, I came to realize that bad things happen everywhere. Less than a year before McCall, Streeter and Levitt vanished, poor Brenda Keller disappeared while riding her bike in, of all places, tiny Dover, Kansas.
Like the Springfield Three, Brenda’s murder was big news regionally. She was, after all, a pastor’s daughter and a beloved little girl. Through the years, however, that case got lost in the shuffle. There are no documentaries, “People Magazine Investigates” episodes or podcasts.
The intrigue, of course, is in the mystery, and no case has more of that than the Springfield Three. People want to know what happened. Unfortunately, those questions may never be answered.
But many of the folks in Dover have questions about what and why it happened on the night of Oct. 19, 1991, and I hope my book will provide some of the answers. Like the Springfield Three, Brenda’s case still haunts many of those who knew her.
AN UPDATE ON THE BOOK
I’m in midst of the second revision of the book. After the first round, I cut more than 14,000 words out of 120,000. My hope is to have a refined version by sometime next year.