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Hey true crime besties, welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly.
Hey everybody, welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly with me, Annie Elise. I am your true crime bestie, and I am here to break down another true crime case with you. If you're new, let me kind of just describe what it is my goal is here on my podcast. Whether or not I achieve that goal, I don't know, you be the judge. But what I try to do over here is give information and talk about a true crime case that I think
but do it in a conversational way almost as though you and I are just like hanging out at my house I'm sharing a case with you like you're my best friend so I put some opinions in there I try to keep it mainly to fact I'll let you know for sure if it is opinion based um anytime but really just have a conversation like we're friends and keep it casual kind of curb all the flowery language and just talk
like normal friends do. And so the case I'm talking about today, it's one that's actually pretty unforgettable, maybe because of how eerie it is. You may have heard of it, you may know it, or you may I should say you may think you know it because you know, when I like to do a deep dive, guys, I like
to do a mother effing deep dive. So I'm sure that there will be details that you haven't ever heard, even if you are familiar with this case. But the reason I wanted to talk about it is because, again, it's just one of those staple cases. Not even staple. It's one of those just truly unforgettable cases.
Now I feel like anytime we're talking about a case or a murder, we usually can understand or even speculate as to why the murder took place. That there was some sort of reason behind it, whether it was obsession, jealousy, a robbery, you know, some sort of motive, some sort of reason. Even if the explanations aren't good ones, you kind of make sense of it a little bit.
But that's what's so interesting about today's case, because there are so many open questions and so much that really just defies any kind of reason whatsoever. It also wasn't like there was a whole lot of evidence left behind or at the crime scene or just in the case in general. It was as if three women just vanished, phew,
poof into thin air they left behind this neat clean tidy home without any sort of evidence or trace of a break-in nothing made sense and because it was so eerie and there wasn't really any information it made it feel like it was something just kind of out of a horror movie in a way something very very spooky now before we get into all of that guys i want to take you back to june 6th 1992
because that was the day that all of the seniors at the high school, Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, celebrated their graduation. Now, Springfield had just over about 150,000 people for the population. And while it's not necessarily a small town in other cities and other states in comparison, it probably would be deemed a smaller side of the town. But here in rural Missouri, it was actually a huge town. It was the third biggest city in the state, as a matter of fact.
but it was still the sort of place where everybody knew everybody. It was a small town with lots of character. It's famous for its famous Route 66. I mean, a pretty well-known town on the map. So you have this group of high schoolers who are now graduating, and it wasn't just about the commencement ceremony. It wasn't just about the end of high school.
It was also the end of a simpler way of life because a lot of these kids, they were going to move on. They were going to move out of this small town. They were going to have their own independent lives elsewhere. Sure, some would stay behind, but it was kind of like that was the start of your new life. That was signifying a huge shift and closing of a chapter, not just traditionally closing high school and getting your diploma.
But before any of these big life changes were going to happen, these grads, they were going to party. And they were going to party their asses off. I mean, they were so excited to be graduating. And a lot of people had family in town, friends in town. It was a pretty big event. And of course, a ton of the teenagers were just making plans for the entire weekend. Everybody wanted to celebrate, right?
Now, there are three graduates that I really want to focus on here. It's three young women who had been friends since the second grade. Their friendship was so strong it even continued when one of the girls had moved out of town and then came back. And even though they kind of grew apart as they got a little bit older, the three of them had reconnected in high school. And now, they were pretty much as close as could possibly be. One of those young women was Susie Streeter. She was 19 years old, and she had a little bit of a rebellious streak.
Her social circle was known for getting into trouble, and Susie wasn't really planning on going to college. She just kind of liked to hang out with the wrong crowd, so to say. She also wasn't really making a big deal out of graduation. She didn't have any extended family in town. Things were a little bit more quiet for her out of everybody else who was raging and had all of their family in town. Originally, her older sister and her niece were supposed to be there for the graduation day, but at the last minute, there was a change of plans, and so it was just going to be Susie and her mom.
Which was actually okay, because Susie and her mom were extremely close. Her mom Cheryl worked as a cosmetologist, so she was super on top of all things fashion, all things makeup, all things kind of that lean, a bit younger you could say. So she and her daughter Susie were always both just, you know, like very done, very cool, very hip. They were always wearing what the current trend was. They were just very, very close. Almost like good friends, you could say. So her mom Cheryl was there for graduation, for the big day, and that's all Susie felt like she really needed.
After the ceremony, they picked up a pizza and they headed home. The two of them kept to themselves for the rest of the day, but Susie did have plans to hit some graduation parties later that night with her friends. Friends like Stacey McCall, who had the exact polar opposite experience when it came to graduation than Susie did. See, she was definitely part of the in crowd, so leaving high school meant leaving a place where she was like the top of social hierarchy, Miss Popular, had all of her friends, and really was just at like
a peak point in her life. Even if moving on was still an overall happy experience, she was leaving a lot behind. So after the ceremony, she went back to her house where a lot of her family, her grandparents, her parents were waiting for her. She took a photo with her high school diploma. She made her rounds talking to all of her family. And then she was just basically begging her mom for a break. She's like, I need a break. I need to just sit down. I need to catch my breath for a minute. This has been like go, go, go all day.
She had also received a brand new puppy as a graduation gift. They were so busy. In fact, they didn't even get a chance to bring out the cake that they had gotten for her graduation. It was just one of those days. You know what I mean? Where it's just like true chaos everywhere because it's either a birthday, it's a holiday, everybody's on high speed, you're running around. And that's basically what was happening. And so she's like, I need to just take a beat. I need to step back. I need to just breathe for a moment.
She had also just gotten her acceptance letter in the mail from Missouri State University, and the plan was for Stacey to open this letter in front of everybody and kind of make this entire event out of it. But the day was just so jam-packed that Stacey really didn't even have a moment to enjoy or celebrate anything. She was just making her rounds. So she told her parents, she's like, let's pick up the celebration tomorrow, but for now, I just, I need to get out of the house. So that evening, she and Susie met up with one more person, another new graduate named Janelle Kirby.
Now Janelle and Stacey specifically were almost like sisters. They actually met before either one of them even began preschool, and they just had been attached at the hip ever since. I mean, they were the true definition of best friends. They were also both planning on going to Missouri State together. Maybe they were going to see if they could even get into the same sorority, live together. I mean, they had no plans of splitting up.
And like Stacey, Janelle had a ton of family members over for graduation. Everybody was celebrating. Everybody was jam-packed in like sardines. It was definitely a party. Now as all of this was happening over at Janelle's house, it ended up being the perfect setup because another high school graduate happened to be a neighbor of hers, and she was throwing a graduation party over at her house. So this was the perfect place for Janelle to escape if she needed to just
get a break, take a break from her relatives, and just kind of like sneak her way out. And in fact, Janelle, Susie, and Stacey were all planning to meet at Janelle's house at 8 p.m. that night, and then they were going to walk over to this party together.
And the plan was that Susie and Stacey would leave their cars parked out front of Janelle's house. So at the party, once they kind of had their fill of all of the hugs, the cake, the celebrating, they decided that they were going to hit the road, and they were going to drive 45 minutes or so to Branson, Missouri. See, there's a water park there called Whitewater, and the girls all wanted to go first thing in the morning and hit all of the water slides. So the whole night pretty much went as planned.
They all went to Janelle's house, they met up there, then they went to that other party, and then they were at that party till about 10.30pm, and then they hit the road. Now around this time, for whatever reason, Stacey started feeling nervous. She either was nervous because her relatives were still celebrating without her, and maybe she felt a little bit of guilt. She also kind of felt a little bit bad because of her parents, because apparently...
They were not on board with this plan of them driving to Branson the night before. There had been a car wreck a couple years earlier with the graduating class, so they really didn't like Stacey driving at night. So she was starting to think, like, hey, Whitewater is less than an hour away, so why do we need to go there tonight? Why don't we just drive there in the morning? We can get up a little bit earlier than planned, and we can still make it in time. That kind of thing. So she called her parents to say that she and Susie were going to spend the night at Janelle's house.
Then they would hit that water park in Branson tomorrow, and then she would be home later that afternoon. So Stacey's mom Janice was really relieved by this news. She was excited that Stacey wasn't going to be driving super late at night. So she said, okay, sounds good to me. Just call me again tomorrow before you head out there. And Stacey was like, yeah, no problem. I definitely will. And they hung up.
Except the trio of girls didn't just go to bed after this. Instead, without telling any of their parents, Susie, Stacey, and Janelle decided that they wanted to head to a different party. And they were there until the police actually came to this party and busted it right around 2 a.m. Then they finally returned back to Janelle's for the night.
But when they got back to Janelle's house, they kind of realized like, uh, wait, we didn't really think through this plan. We were originally planning on driving to Branson, sleeping there before we go to the water park in the morning. Now that we're staying at Janelle's, she still has all of her family and her relatives in town for graduation. Every single bed is spoken for. Where the heck are we going to sleep? I mean, we're not going to go kick grandma out of the bed at 2 a.m. and take that bed from her.
we didn't really think through this plan. What are we going to do? There was an empty couch for Janelle to sleep on, which was great, but it certainly wasn't big enough for all three of the girls to sleep on it. So Stacey and Susie just said like, hey, look, you stay here. We're going to actually just go back and sleep at Susie's house. Because remember, Susie didn't have a ton of relatives in town for graduation. So she's like, it's just me and my mom. I have a waterbed, which happened to be brand new. And she's like, me and Stacey will sleep on that. It's fine. I've got plenty of room.
So Janelle agreed and she's like, okay, sounds good. I'm just going to sleep on the couch. So Stacey and Susie drove back and parked in front of Susie's house, went inside and then got ready for bed. Now I'm not sure if Susie's mom Cheryl was still up, but she might have been. So the absolute latest that she could have possibly gone to bed was around 11, 15 PM. That's when she got off the phone with a friend of hers. But if she didn't hang up and then just like instantly crawl under the covers, she might've heard her daughter and Stacey coming home through the front door.
it's hard to say for sure because nobody's entirely clear on what happened between then and the next morning when janelle woke up so janelle wakes up on this couch she got dressed got ready and she checked in with her family to see if stacy and susie had come back yet but everybody said that they hadn't heard from them which fair enough they had a big day celebrating they also had a late night maybe they were sleeping in so janelle gave them a call around 8 or 9 a.m but nobody picked up
But again, that would make sense if everybody was still in bed, if everybody was still recovering. So Janelle got on her swimsuit and she got everything ready so that she could just like jet out the door when her friends got there. But the thing was, they didn't turn up. They never showed up. So she kept calling them. But the phone just rang and rang and rang before an answering machine would pick up.
Then when noon rolled by and they still weren't there or picking up the phone, Janelle was feeling pretty impatient and kind of pissed off. She wasn't worried or anything like that because she was still operating under the assumption that they probably just slept in and everybody was just sleeping late. But now they were losing that valuable time of getting to this water park early like they had planned before it got overcrowded, before the lines got too long. So she was getting a little upset by this. So she decided to call her boyfriend Mike and they decided they were just sick of waiting.
They never called me in the morning, so I called them. And I called and I called and I called and I got no answer. So I went over there.
and they weren't there. So it was time to head over to Susie's house and wake everybody up. When they got there, Janelle noticed that both Susie and Stacey's cars were parked out front. So that was a good sign. They were there definitely solidifying that they probably just had overslept. There was no indication that they had gotten into a car accident or anything like that. So okay, good. Annoying, but good. So Janelle and her boyfriend Mike start walking up to the front porch.
But as they're walking, they noticed that there was broken glass all over the place. Janelle also saw that a porch light was broken. The bulb itself was fine, but the fixture around it had shattered. It wasn't entirely clear how it could have broken that way either, but Janelle just figured like, oh, okay, Stacey or Susie probably bumped it as they were walking into the house last night. They were too tired to fix it or pick it up. It can't be anything major. That's probably what happened.
So, before even going any further, Mike and Janelle started sweeping up the glass. Now I know what you're thinking: obviously, in a retrospect, this was a bad move. I mean, clearly, we know now that something bad happened there, right? After sweeping up the glass, the two of them rang the doorbell, and they started looking through the windows. Nobody let them in, but when they started looking inside through these windows, they didn't see anything that made them worry or think that they had anything to worry about either.
the living room still looked super tidy, like how her mom always kept it. There were no signs of a struggle. There was nothing out of place. There wasn't anything concerning. But at one point, Janelle realized that the front door was unlocked. So she and Mike let themselves in. And even though Susie, Stacey, and Cheryl weren't around, the house looked normal. The beds were unmade, like all three women slept there during the night, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
So Janelle and Mike still weren't really concerned. I mean, if anything, I've got to imagine that they were more annoyed than anything else. Like they probably figured that Stacey and Susie were just being flaky. Maybe they left. Maybe they ran an errand. Maybe the mom took her car to drop them off at the water park. I mean, nothing sinister looked to have taken place here.
This was all in spite of the fact, though, that Cheryl and Susie's dog was acting super nervous and anxious. And then the fact that Mike and Janelle found cigarettes and lighters just sitting out, it made them second-guess things, because Susie and her mom were huge heavy smokers, so they definitely wouldn't have left and left that behind. But it still didn't really stand out as a problem to Janelle or Mike. Then, right before the two of them were about to leave this house, the phone rang. So Janelle went, she picked it up,
and there was a man on the line, and he was making very uncomfortable sexual comments. Now, Janelle didn't recognize his voice, but she did remember something that Susie had told her recently. Somebody had been making disturbing prank phone calls. So that's what Janelle thought was going on. She thought it was a prank call, so she hung up and basically just shrugged this call off.
but she didn't connect the fact that Susie and the others were mysteriously missing at this point. So after leaving, Janelle and Mike decided to swing by a local sandwich shop. They wanted to check in and see if maybe they had just come by to get a quick lunch. They asked some friends if they had heard from Susie or Stacey, but nobody knew anything.
So after that, they finally decided that if Stacey and Susie were just going to be no-shows and flake, they'd just go to a water park together on their own. Now, they had already wasted way too many hours to go to Branson. It was too far away. So instead, they decided to just hit a local slide.
Again, their behavior just illustrated that they were not in any type of way registering that this was a super worrisome situation. Violent disappearances were things that happened in faraway cities, not in little towns like Springfield, so their mind was definitely not going in that direction.
This was also 1992, let me remind you. So there weren't any true crime YouTubers or podcast channels back then. Nobody was spending hours and hours on end hearing about every potential bad thing that can happen to them and their friends. I mean, they were pretty oblivious to what was going on.
But some other people were starting to figure out that something wasn't right, including Stacey's parents. If you remember, she had promised on the phone the night before that she was going to call them before she headed to Branson, a call that never came. Now, for the first few hours of the morning, Stacey's mom, Janice, thought the exact same thing that Janelle did, that everybody was just still asleep.
And just like Janelle, she didn't start to question any of that until around noon. So that's when Janice called Janelle, because she hadn't gotten that update that Stacey had slept at Susie's house instead. The plan had always been to sleep at Janelle's house. And by this point, Janelle was gone. She and Mike were at Susie's place looking for the girls.
So instead, Janelle's sister answered this call. And there were a few minutes of confused back and forth, trying to figure out what was going on. Janice wanted to know where Stacey was, and Janelle's sister didn't understand why anybody was asking her. I don't know. Stacey wasn't even supposed to stay here. She didn't sleep here. What do you mean, where is she?
So finally, everybody did sort out the details, and Janice realized where her daughter was supposed to be. Now, even though she still hadn't heard from her, she and her husband, Stu, figured, okay, maybe she forgot to call. Maybe she and Susie did head into the water park, but she just forgot, especially since Janelle wasn't also home by this point. They're probably all together at the water park.
So Janice called Susie's house, and she left a message on the answering machine saying something like, Hey Stacey, it's your mom, you were supposed to call, so please do it as soon as you can, as soon as you get this message, I just want to check in. And then she and her husband Stu pretty much just dropped the matter. They weren't worried. Nobody had heard from Stacey, Susie, or Cheryl since, what, 2am that morning, but also nobody seemed nearly as alarmed as you would expect them to be.
Stacey's mom did leave a few more voicemails over the course of the day, and her tone in those voicemails was indicating that maybe she was getting more worried as the hours were taking by, more worried and probably more frustrated. But then, Stacey's family got a call, and it wasn't from their daughter, but this call was from a friend who lived close to Cheryl and Susie's house.
The neighbor told them that they had noticed Stacey's car parked out front all day, and that it seemed a bit weird. Now, this shouldn't have been news to anybody, though, because Stacey's parents already knew that she spent the night at Susie's. I guess the only part that was surprising, or could have been surprising, was that Stacey didn't drive herself to Branson to the water park.
but she could have carpooled, so that could easily be explained away. And honestly, reading some of the interviews from later on, it sounds like Stacey's mom was more pissed in this moment than anything else. So she headed over and picked up Stacey's car to drive it home. She wasn't even going to tell Stacey, though, that she grabbed the car and drove it home. She wanted her daughter to get back from the water park and kind of be like, "Oh shit, my car's missing," and freak out a little bit. Kind of teach her a lesson about what happens when you don't communicate with your parents, right?
Except when Stacey's parents, Stu and Janice, got to Susie's house to get the car, there were a ton of other people at the house as well, including Janelle and Mike. Janelle and Mike had come back to the house because apparently they left the water park and realized that their friends were still missing and they started getting worried and something wasn't right so they returned to the house. And a few other concerned friends and neighbors were all sitting in the kitchen just kind of asking themselves, what do we do now? We can't find anybody. We haven't heard from anybody.
Now, the obvious answer here, of course, is call the police, right? But Janice pushed back pretty hard when somebody suggested that. She said 9-1-1 is for emergencies. We don't know if this is an emergency yet.
yet. And everyone apparently agreed with that reasoning because they started investigating the situation on their own without the police's help. Somebody noticed that Stacey, Susie, and Cheryl's purses were all sitting together on the floor in a bedroom. They were almost lined up one by one. It looked also like somebody might have gone through them. However, nothing was missing.
Between the three bags, there was a total of $900 in cash, so whoever was digging in the purses must not have been looking for money. Janelle also saw that there were a bunch of messages on the answering machine, so she started playing them. One message was from a man, and it was that same man who had that gross prank call earlier when Janelle was at the house. But this time around, again, he didn't say who he was, and nobody there recognized his voice. But the message was him.
And he was saying these really awful and sexually explicit things. I don't know what exactly he said, but apparently after Janelle played this message, she deleted the message, which I know what you're probably thinking now. Oh my God, this is the second time that she destroyed key evidence.
First, she swept up the glass on the porch. Now she's deleting a message from some creepy guy. Like, what the heck is going on? What is this girl doing? Now, in her defense, she didn't know how to work the machine exactly. She didn't actually mean to erase this message, but it did erase. It was all an accident.
though. But still, who knows how much time and pain and heartache could have been saved if maybe the police had gotten a chance to hear that recording. The rest of the messages that were played were all from Stacey's parents just repeatedly asking for her to call whenever she got a chance. Now, let me just say this, guys. If you are absolutely dumbfounded and outraged that Janelle deleted the message by accident, yes, but deleted the message,
cleaned up the front porch with all the glass you're gonna really hate this next part because janelle cleaned the entire house now again i get it she was really young and her friends at this point had vanished and she didn't know why so i'd have to imagine that even if nobody was willing to say it out loud everybody had to have suspected that maybe something bad happened to susie stacy and cheryl
And when you feel powerless in a situation like that, sometimes it's natural to want to find different ways to help. It's the same reason why people will bring food or casseroles after a funeral. You can't actually fix the problem of somebody being dead, but you still want to feel like you're doing something, that you're helping, and that you're being productive. So from a strictly psychological perspective, yes. Janelle, I get you. I get what you were trying to do. You were trying to clean up the house and tidy things up.
Plus, there's nothing like cleaning to work out all of your nervous energy, right? And feel like you're doing something nice for your friends. But who knows what kind of valuable evidence could have even been there, I mean, up until the moment when Janelle Windexed it away, right? Now, while she was scrubbing everything down, Janice finally called the police to report Susie, Stacey, and Cheryl as missing. It was after 7 p.m. by now.
So basically, the entire day went by between the first time that Janice and Janelle started to feel worried and when they finally looped in the police. And while Janice was giving all of this information to the dispatcher, they asked her if she had any dental records for her daughter. And her heart stopped. She knew what that meant. The police would definitely not ask for dental records unless they needed to match Stacey and the others to a dead body. So it was the first moment when it all felt real for her.
the possibility set in that her daughter might be dead. So after she hung up, the investigators headed right over to the house, and unsurprisingly, they didn't find much. And as tempting as it might be to blame Janelle and all of her cleaning, it also sounds like there wasn't a whole lot of evidence to even find, even before she made the decision to start sweeping it all away and scrubbing down the house.
There were no signs of forced entry, and everything was in order. Other than that broken fixture and that light out front on the porch, nothing suggested any kind of struggle. So this made the police think that Stacey, Susie, and Cheryl must have left with somebody willingly.
That could mean that they were taken by somebody they knew. But it also was possible that whoever did this could have just tricked them. For example, somebody could have knocked on the door and been like, hey, knock knock, I work for the gas company, I smell a leak, please exit the house, and then blitz attacked them or did something that way. That said, there was a little piece of evidence, not much, but some. This episode of Serialistly is brought to you by Huggies.
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The detectives found two makeup remover wipes in the trash. They figured that one came from Stacey and the other came from Susie. This confirmed that they most likely did make it home from the party and they got inside the house, and that they were there long enough to remove all of their makeup before getting ready for bed. Plus, like Janelle and Mike had noticed earlier, all of the beds were like rumpled up, blankets were all messy, it looked like they had been slept in. So again, whatever happened must have happened after all three of them went to bed for the night.
In fact, the police knew that Stacey took off her shorts and jewelry before she went to bed. She put the accessories in her pockets, then she folded her shorts and set them right on top of her shoes. So presumably, she slept in her t-shirt and underwear. They knew this because the shorts, the shoes, and the jewelry were all just still sitting there. And since Stacey didn't have a change of clothes with her at all when she went there, because remember, she wasn't planning on spending the night there, that means that when she left the house, she wasn't fully dressed.
And she definitely didn't borrow anything from Cheryl or Susie because their body types were way too different. So more than anything else, this really just drove home the idea that the women weren't just out having a fun day or running errands. There was no reason for Stacey to be out running around town half-naked unless something happened to her. But beyond that, the police didn't have any good theories. All they had figured out so far was that Stacey, Susie, and Cheryl were home the night before—
And now they were gone. But everyone knew that even before the detectives got involved. So obviously the police needed way more than they were able to figure out so far. So they expanded the investigation, putting more and more detectives on the case. And when they didn't get any bigger leads right away, the team just kept growing. They printed 20,000 missing persons flyers and they hung them up on basically every single bare wall and bare pole that they could find. I'm Mrs. McCall and this is my daughter. Okay.
And they're missing. One guy, a barber named Bill Stokes, promised he would not take this flyer down until the three women were found. And they ended up becoming known as the Springfield Three. Tips started rolling in, and eventually there were over 5,000 of them.
A lot of them had to do with a van that has been described by different witnesses as either moss green, dark blue, or brown. One woman told the police that she actually saw a young blonde woman driving a van like that, and she thought that the driver of that van was Susie. That witness also heard a man's voice from inside the van say, "'Don't do anything stupid.'"
So the detectives tried to find everything they could about any vans that fit that description right, and they pulled more registration records than I could even count, but none of it led anywhere. Meanwhile, some of the police officers were thinking that these van tips were pretty flimsy, like they were wasting time chasing these false leads, and because of this, they weren't allowed to check out more promising leads.
See, the police chief at the time was a man named Terry Knowles, and he came under a ton of fire for how he handled the case, with lots of people saying that he micromanaged things and micromanaged them so much to where his officers couldn't do their jobs. So basically, the detectives, they would hear a tip or they would notice some detail that wasn't adding up, and they would want to go and they would want to investigate it.
But instead of just following the evidence and, I don't know, figuring things out, they had to go back to Chief Knowles and explain what they were looking into and why. Then, if Knowles didn't think that a particular theory was compelling enough, he would tell them to drop it. So who knows how much key information might have come through in those first couple of days or even weeks after the Springfield 3 disappearance.
only for police to ignore it and then let the trail get cold. I do know that the leads that the detectives did look into went absolutely nowhere. On top of that, Chief Knowles was super transparent with the press. Like, too transparent. Get this, he actually let some of the reporters film when a few people of interest took their polygraph tests.
tests. And Knowles was more or less an open book about every single new development, or lack of development, I should say. So this made his officers very, very nervous. Usually, police departments withhold some information from the public. That's one tool that they have and they use to separate the false confessions from the real ones. They want to make sure that there are some details that only the real killer would know, that only they would be able to share, or Kidnapper would share.
But it seemed like just about everybody knew everything about Cheryl, Susie, and Stacey's disappearance. And there was no good reason to share all of these details, at least not from the perspective of a crime scene investigator or anybody else involved in the case. I mean, if his goal was to get his face on TV, he was doing a really good job at it.
So through all of their pointless and directionless investigating, the police ran up a huge bill, letting the taxpayers send them all over the country trying to track down these false sightings, false leads, which never panned out. And they visited a grand total of 21 states because of all of these leads. Yet they ended up with nothing to show for it. And it was so bad that the department had to dial back on traffic patrols because they didn't have any money left in their budget. They had spent all of their resources.
Which all of that would be worth it if any of that led to Susie, Stacey, or Cheryl coming home safe. But instead, the next big lead that they got was a super disappointing one. Somebody spotted freshly disturbed soil in a wooded area near Lake Springfield, which was about 10 miles south of town. So the investigators mentally prepared themselves for what was going to be a very grim discovery. They grabbed their shovels, they headed to the site, and they
and they found the area that the person had described. And sure enough, there was a patch of the ground where the dirt was dark and it was wet, like somebody had just dug it up. And this part of the forest was also super remote. It was definitely the exact sort of place that a person would go and bury a body if they didn't want to get caught. So the officers, they started digging, and they found nothing. Whoever dug that hole hadn't put anything in it.
Which does kind of make sense because it later came out that the spot that they were digging at was a massive anthill. So we really can't blame them for looking because this does sound like a mistake that anybody would make. But still, I have to think that everyone involved in this case, from the women's families and friends to the investigating officers, that they were just worn down by this point because it was just an endless investigation that seemed to be going nowhere.
But finally, the police identified one suspect, a guy named Dustin Reckla. Dustin was Susie's ex-boyfriend. And while they were together, he and his friends were actually part of what was described as a, quote, grave robbing gang.
I don't know, guys. I guess they do teenage rebellion things different in Missouri. For me, it was just like drinking a little, maybe even smoking a little. But here they had a grave robbing gang, which feels really scary. So Dustin and his friends were, again, and this is kind of wild and hard to wrap my mind around, they were digging up people's graves to steal their valuables.
And Susie found out, which was a major deal breaker for her. And honestly, I can't say that I blame her. So she dumped Dustin around this same time. And people think she specifically dumped him because of the grave robbing. Then she went straight to the police to tell them what she knew. The state ended up deciding to press charges against Dustin and his friends. And Susie agreed to be a witness at the trial. But here's the thing. She didn't get to go and be a witness in this trial.
because she went missing before the hearing could even begin so this did make for a pretty solid motive dustin might have wanted to shut susie up before she could testify against him but it's not clear why he would have taken stacy and cheryl as well if that were the case he didn't have anything against them i mean specifically at least but i suppose one theory could be that they were all in the wrong place at the wrong time maybe he only wanted to hurt susie but
but he also had to kill or kidnap her mom and her friend because they were also at the house when he broke in, and they saw his face. So sure enough, when the police asked if Dustin had an alibi for the night of the disappearances, he couldn't give one. But Dustin and the entire rest of his grave robbing gang managed to pass a polygraph test.
Which, I do want to say, it isn't the be-all, end-all of a criminal investigation. It definitely is possible for a guilty person to pass a lie detector test, and also for an innocent person to fail one. In fact, both of these things happen a lot. That said, I do think it's interesting that Dustin's entire gang all took the test.
and every single one of them passed. It does make it feel a little more likely that they weren't actually involved in the disappearance if they all were able to pass. Even if one of them was feeling guilty, you would think that that would come out at some point, but no, they all aced it. And it seems like the police kind of felt this same way, especially when they weren't able to find a single shred of hard evidence that connected Dustin to this crime. So they dropped Dustin as a suspect altogether. Maybe they felt like they just had better leads by that point.
Because before long, the police focused in on another man, a man named Bart Streeter. He was Cheryl's son and Susie's brother. And apparently, there had been some mega tension in the family. Bart had a very long history of heavy drinking, and apparently, he also had a bit of a temper. Now, I have to imagine that those two factors were a big part of the reason that he wasn't on great terms with his mom and his sister.
But in fairness, that's also just speculation. I don't know a ton about his background or their background as a dynamic as a family. But either way, on the night of June 6th, Bart supposedly went out drinking. Then he went home and passed out. He was alone. Nobody confirmed that he was there when he said he was. So once again, the police had a person of interest, but they had no alibi. But kind of like history repeating itself, Bart got ruled out for the exact same reason that Dustin had.
He passed a polygraph test, and there was nothing firmly connecting him to the crime, to the disappearance. There was nothing proving his innocence, though, either. But I guess that the police thought that they knew enough to rule him out. Or maybe Chief Knowles pressured them to move on like he did with so many other leads. I'm really not sure. But in any event, they did let him go. Now, this was especially frustrating.
because Bart went on to get charged with another violent crime decades later. In 2019, when he was then 54 years old, he was at a nail salon in Tennessee, and he walked up to a 15-year-old girl, told her that he was a friend of her grandfather's,
and he needed her to come with him. Now, to be clear, Bart didn't know the girl, not at all, and he also didn't know her grandfather, so he was certainly up to no good. Luckily, the girl recognized that his behavior was, like, super suspicious. I mean, red flags were waving all over the place, so she refused to go with him. But the next thing you know, the police were involved.
and Bart was slapped with charges of public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and attempted false imprisonment. Now what's important here is that Bart basically revealed himself to be like a super mega creep who was willing to commit a violent crime, because we know he wasn't planning on bringing this 15-year-old to her grandfather.
So what was he planning on doing to that poor girl, right? So in light of what they had just learned about Bart's character, the police decided to reopen their investigation, see if after all of these years they could look into him and see if they could link him to the Springfield Three. There were still some open questions in the investigation after all, so if he was involved in some way, maybe he could help settle them. But instead, they ended up coming to the exact same conclusion that they had before—
There was still nothing connecting Bart to the crime. Now let's go back to 1992. The detectives were making their way through all of the people of interest, but they completely missed one huge red flag that was right in Cheryl and Susie's neighborhood.
See, a man named Robert Craig Cox lived right across the street from Cheryl and Susie. And four years before the Springfield Three disappearance, he was convicted of murder. Yeah. So way back in 1978, Robert was a 19-year-old Army Ranger who went to Disney World with his parents while he was on leave.
At the same time, there was a woman who worked in the Frontierland gift shop, a 19-year-old named Sharon Zellers. Now, I actually don't know when and where Robert and Sharon met, if it was while she was at work at that gift shop, or if they bumped into each other later, when she was maybe off of her shift.
I do know that Sharon clocked out, left the park at 10 p.m., and then the next time that she was ever seen, she was dead. She was murdered. Her body had been dumped right outside Robert's motel. So it took the police a really long time to make an arrest for Sharon's murder. But eventually, they figured out that Robert's military boots were a very similar match to the boot print that they found in Sharon's car.
His blood and hair were potential matches to what they found on Sharon's body as well. Remember, keeping in mind this crime was in 1978, so it wasn't exactly easy to get exact DNA matches the way it is today. But the biggest, creepiest piece of evidence in my mind was Robert's tongue. Yes, you heard that right. Tongue.
tongue. The night that Sharon was killed, Robert was seen with blood coming out of his mouth, and about an inch of his tongue had been bitten off. He also didn't do this himself. The angle of the bite mark meant that somebody else took a chunk of it off. So it really does sound like Sharon fought for her life as hard as she possibly could. I mean, ripping a part of Robert's body straight from his mouth.
But sadly, it still wasn't enough to save her life. So like I said, the police were investigating for a while before they were confident enough to arrest Robert and press those charges. Then in 1988, a full decade after the murder, he finally stood trial. Robert was found guilty, and he was sentenced to death. And that should have been the end of the story.
right? Well, he sat behind bars one single year before he filed an appeal, and the higher courts decided that he should have never been convicted because there wasn't enough evidence against him. I mean, this guy's tongue was straight bitten off, and his DNA fit the murderer's samples, so if that's not enough evidence, uh, I don't know what is, but I guess the courts, they felt differently.
because in 1989, Robert's conviction was overturned. He was back on the streets as a free man. Naturally, Sharon's family was less than thrilled with this development, but there also wasn't anything that they could do. Sharon's mother knew Robert was the killer, and if police weren't going to lock him up, she decided that she was going to keep an eye on him on her own. And sure enough, he did re-offend.
He was convicted of kidnapping somebody else in California. He spent some time in prison, then he got out on parole. And as soon as he was free, he moved to Springfield, Missouri. Now, Sharon's mom, Dorothy, remember, she had been keeping track of his movements, keeping track of his whereabouts. So sometime in mid-June 1992, all of these news reports about the Springfield Three started playing on her TV. And the very first thought that popped into her mind was that Robert Cox did this. He had to be the killer. She knew he had moved there.
But of course, Dorothy, she didn't have any proof. So before she did anything else, she checked in with her husband and also with her son to see what they thought about everything. As soon as her son learned that Robert was in Springfield, he figured they shouldn't waste any more time. So he called the Springfield 3 tip line. He explained everything.
and the police officer that he talked to basically admitted that he had never even heard of Robert Cox, but he said that the department would check and they would see if he came up in the system. Now I have to say, it is beyond wild to me that the investigators didn't find this guy on their own. Robert might have slipped through the cracks entirely if it wasn't for Sharon's family speaking up.
I also can't imagine that it's all that hard, all that difficult to look up records for anybody who lives close to a crime scene. And even though Robert's conviction was overturned, they should have at least seen that he had been arrested and tried for Sharon's murder, not to mention that he also had been successfully convicted of a different kidnapping altogether, one that stuck.
I mean, it was Red Flag City, guys. So it's a really good thing that Sharon's family shared this tip. Except when the police brought Robert in for questioning, he had an alibi. He said that when the Springfield Three went missing, he was spending the night at his father's house. Then the next morning, he went to church with his girlfriend.
Now, I do find the mention of church a little weird. Now remember, the police didn't exactly know when Stacey, Susie, and Cheryl all went missing. Stacey and Susie were last seen on Saturday night at around 2am, and then they missed a call from their friend Janelle at 8 or 9 in the morning. So there was this huge window of about 6 or 7 hours when they could have been taken, all in the middle of the night or even the early morning. So when Robert had brought up that he had gone to church that morning, it didn't make a lot of sense as to why he would bring it up.
I mean, I know that there are some churches that do sunrise services, but unless Robert was trying to claim that he was at church at like 2, 3, or 4 in the morning, I don't get why it was worth bringing up at all. Especially because from what I can tell, it doesn't sound like the police actually asked Robert's dad to even corroborate the part about him sleeping over the night before. They only asked the girlfriend if they really went to Sunday service. She said that they did, and so because of that, the police crossed Robert off of their list of suspects.
Which they really shouldn't have done, because as it turns out, after the police ruled him out, Robert headed to Texas. And there, he committed a robbery and got arrested again. And while he was in an interrogation about that crime, somehow the conversation turned towards Cheryl, Susie, and Stacey's disappearance. ♪
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That's when Robert admitted he wasn't actually at church that day. He had asked his girlfriend to lie for him, specifically because he did not have an alibi. So the fact that he lied and didn't have an alibi did not look good for him. So the police called the girlfriend in, but by this time she was Robert's ex-girlfriend.
And she explained that while they were together, Robert had called her one day and told her what to say if the police ever asked about his whereabouts on June 6th in 1992. The truth was, she hadn't been at church with him, and she had no idea what Robert had been up to that night. So now the detectives asked Robert point blank, did you have anything to do with Stacey, Susie, and Cheryl's disappearance? Do you know anything? And he denied having any knowledge about their disappearances.
But in 1996, while Robert was in prison for the robbery, a reporter asked him the same question. This time around, Robert didn't explicitly confess or deny anything, but I think his answer was pretty telling. He said,
And I know that. So naturally, the reporter asked a follow-up question about where the bodies were. And Robert, again, was pretty vague. He just said that they were buried somewhere in or near Springfield. He knew exactly how to find them, but he wasn't going to say where they were or how to find them because he didn't want to incriminate himself.
Now you would think that if Robert didn't want the police to think that he was guilty, he probably should have thought through those answers where he basically says confidently he knows that they're dead. It sounded like he was saying just enough though to hint that he knew more about the case without actually sharing anything useful.
which is actually one of the big reasons that the detectives never acted on his comments. They knew that Robert was all but confessing to the crime in the press, and he's been considered a top suspect ever since the authorities realized he lied about his alibi. But he also actually never shared any true information, other than the details that were already public knowledge.
Sure, he said that Cheryl, Stacey, and Susie were dead and that they were buried near Springfield, but nobody knew if that was true because their bodies hadn't been found. So even if somebody had heard Robert's statement and then somehow dug up their remains the very next day, nobody could be sure that he didn't just make a lucky guess because his answers were just vague enough. So lots of people could guess that, that they were either in or near Springfield. So it's possible that Robert was only pretending to be the killer.
Maybe because he liked the attention. I honestly don't know. And if he is lying, all I can think of is that this guy is just like beyond cruel to be giving false hope to the Springfield Three and that they might be found. And if he was telling the truth, I mean, he's a heartless murderer. Enough said.
So either way, I think we can all agree that Robert is complete garbage scum. But with no bodies and no new evidence, the investigation pretty much stalled out. By 2007, it had been 15 years since the Springfield Three went missing. And there were still all sorts of different wild rumors going around about what really happened to them.
Now, I'm not here to tell anybody what to believe about life after death or supernatural powers, but I will say...
A lot of so-called psychics out there are frauds. Even if you believe that ghosts and spirits can definitely communicate with us, that doesn't mean that everybody who claims that they have had a vision is telling the truth. Cough, cough, Chad Daybell. So understandably, the officials didn't put a whole lot of stock into this whole Cox South Hospital tip. But
But then, a local hired somebody to scan the area around the medical facility with a ground-penetrating radar. Basically, that's a machine that can analyze the soil without anyone needing to dig anything up. But it doesn't offer a ton of information. It can say something like, "Okay, in this spot, there's an area that's a little more or less dense than the rest of the dirt around it." But it can't definitively say like, "Hey, here's a body." More like, "Hey, here's something that could be a body."
but it also could be an old decomposing log, or a pile of trash, or just about anything else. So the radar results said that there were three promising spots under the Cox South Hospital's parking garage, which were about the right size and shape to maybe be adult human bodies. And that parking garage was built in 1993, a year after the Springfield 3 disappearance. Meaning again that there is just a lot of speculation again here.
beginning with the fact that this tip came from an alleged psychic, and also that ground-penetrating radar scans aren't exactly slam-dunks in terms of evidence. But beyond that, everything did sound right. There were the right number of potential bodies, they were the right shape, the right size, and they had been buried around the right time. It had been 15 years, too, by this point. So you would think that somebody, anybody, would at least want to follow up on it, right?
Well, the police decided not to do anything with this information. They said it was specifically because the parking garage was built after the Springfield 3 went missing. The detectives figured that if the women were buried there, the construction crew would have found their bodies when they were digging the foundations. And if they didn't see anything down there, that meant that there was nothing to find. Plus, excavating the area would be way too expensive.
and it would damage the parking garage, and they would have to pay for that too. So to them, it just didn't seem worth the cost, when the odds were so low that they would find anything. Now, I do get this to an extent, but the thing is, construction crews do sometimes find bodies when they're digging for foundations. However, they're not actively searching for remains. That's not their job. They're just there to build the thing to build. So sure, if they happen to dig up a corpse and notice it and realize what it is, they'll call in the authorities.
But if a body is buried, say, I don't know, six inches to the side of where they're digging, and they have no reason to look a little bit more to the left or a little bit more to the right, they're not going to find or look for anybody's corpse. So it would actually be super easy for a crew to completely miss a body if it was dumped anywhere except the exact same area that they were planning to dig. But since the Springfield Police Department never followed up on the report, there's no way for anyone to say if Cheryl, Susie, and Stacey are buried there, which
Which brings us to today. It has been 32 years since they went missing, and the case is still unsolved. And it really does break my heart thinking about how Cheryl, Susie, and Stacey still have family members who are waiting for some kind of resolution, some kind of closure. And they might have all the answers, they might have all the answers they need right there in that parking lot, but nobody is even bothering to look.
Back in 1997, which was five years after the disappearance, Susie and Cheryl were legally declared as dead because by that point their surviving relatives were confident that they weren't coming back home and it seemed right to let them go, to have that piece of closure. But Stacey, Stacey is still alive in the eyes of the law. That's because her family doesn't want to give up hope.
In multiple statements to the press, her parents have vowed to keep their spirits high. Her mom Janice posted online saying, Although the families of Susie and Cheryl have legally declared them dead, I cannot bear the thought of doing that. If there's one chance that she is still alive, I choose to call her missing and hope that someday she will be back.
And this isn't totally unsurprising because when somebody does go missing, it is very difficult to think that it's real. Everybody wants to hold out hope, so I'm not very surprised by this. Stacey and Susie's best friend Janelle said that she still doesn't really believe they're gone either, still to this day. It's surreal to me now because I look back and I think, oh, they'll be back, you know, and here we are still waiting. And it was just...
really strange. I think t after a week went by and that this was not going t The police keep releasing pictures showing what th if they are still alive. T against the odds, somebody and recognize a living, br then come home and be reu
And remember that barber, Bill Stokes, where he hung up their missing persons poster and said, "I'm not taking this down until they're found?" That poster was still up in his last interview, which he gave to the press in 2002. He said that he didn't think the case was ever going to be solved at that point, but that he was keeping it up and holding out hope. Sadly, though, he passed away in 2013, so I don't know if that poster is still up.
but it's sad that he never got to see the girls come home in his lifetime. Now sometimes when I cover cases like this, I feel super furious at the people who caused so much pain and hurt. It doesn't make sense to me how people can just rip someone away from people who love them. But when it comes to Cheryl, Stacey, and Susie,
I'm more sad than anything else. Not that there's nothing to be angry about here. I mean, certainly, there's plenty. And honestly, the Springfield police made some pretty big fuck-ups, in my opinion. And whoever took these three women obviously did something truly horrible to them, and they don't get a pass either. But we still don't know who it was. We don't know why they did it. We don't even know exactly what they did. So I'm not even really sure which part to be the most outraged about, honestly. The
The police have said that they do have a short list of about 10 possible suspects, and that includes Robert Cox, that convicted murderer and kidnapper who somehow just managed to keep walking free. I mean, there is something to be said about him indicating that the bodies were buried, right? And then the coincidence about that parking garage. Are they really there? And why the hell won't anybody dig and just find out and get some answers and get some closure? Let me know what you guys think, and let me know if you think that the police were right to just ignore that
tip or if maybe we're missing out on a huge chance of solving the case right now. I mean there's so many different possibilities here there's so many different layers to it so I definitely want to hear everybody's thoughts so leave that either in the Q&A section on Spotify or over on Apple Reviews. I know today was a longer one guys but I hope you appreciated the case coverage
And let's just hope that someday, hopefully someday soon, we get answers for the missing Springfield Three. All right, guys, thanks again for tuning in to another episode of Serialistly. I will be back on the mic with you very, very soon. And until then, be nice, don't kill people. All right, bye.
