Three Women, One House, Zero Trace — The Springfield Three

Nine in the morning, the seventh of June, 1992. A girl in bare feet walks up to her best friend's front porch. There's broken glass on the concrete — the porch light, smashed, the bulb still hanging there intact. She doesn't think much of it. She's barefoot. So she sweeps the glass off the porch and goes inside.

Copy[half-beat]

In doing that one small, kind, ordinary thing — she may have just destroyed the only piece of forensic evidence anyone would ever find. Because the three women who lived in that house? They're already gone. And thirty-three years later, nobody knows where.

Copy[two-beat pause. static burst — sharp, like a dial tuning. theme music in — 80s synthwave, mid-tempo, slightly lo-fi.]

INTRO (1:15, ~190 words)

LUCY: [theme under, warm, bubbly register]

Right then, hello you lot. You are listening to Static After Dark, I am Lucy, and if you are hearing this then you, my love, are an After Darker — and you are very, very welcome.

Before we get going, a quick word: the stories I tell on this show are real, and some of them get a bit dark in places. Tonight's one absolutely does. So if you are not in the right headspace for that this evening, please go and look after yourselves — I'll still be here when you're ready, and so will the case. For everyone else: settle in, dim the lights, do whatever it is you do.

Because tonight we're going to Springfield, Missouri. June 1992. A mother, her teenage daughter, and her daughter's best friend, all in the same house overnight. Three women. Three cars in the driveway. A dog. A porch light. And then, by morning, only the cars, only the dog, only the porch light. Three women — vanished without a single sign of how.

Copy[theme music up for one bar, then out. vinyl crackle in, low, under.]

How does that happen — in a quiet street, in a normal house, on the night after a high school graduation? How does a crime scene disappear before anyone even knows there is one?

Copy[static sting — short, soft]

SCENE 1 — Graduation Day, 6 June 1992 (5:00, ~725 words)

LUCY: [warm, narrative register, ~145 wpm]

Let me introduce you to them first. Because I think that matters. Before we get into what happened, before we get into the porch light and the answering machine and the thirty years of dead ends — I want you to know who these three were on the day before all of this started. Three women, very different points in their lives, who only had that one Saturday in common.

Sherrill Levitt was forty-seven years old. She was tiny — five foot nothing, about a hundred and ten pounds, short blonde hair, brown eyes. She was a cosmetologist; she worked at a salon in Springfield, did people's hair for a living, knew the regulars, knew their kids' names. She was a single mum, and by every account a brilliant one. She and her daughter Suzie were properly close — not in that performative way some mothers are, but in the kind of way where they actually liked each other's company. They lived together in a small one-storey house at 1717 East Delmar Street. Sherrill had a Yorkshire terrier called Cinnamon.

Suzie — Suzanne Elizabeth Streeter, but everyone called her Suzie — was nineteen. Five-two, just over a hundred pounds, shoulder-length blonde hair, brown eyes. She had a little scar on her right forearm and a mole at the corner of her mouth and her left ear was pierced twice. She'd just finished her senior year at Kickapoo High School. She was a creature of habit, according to her friends — particular about little things. Where she parked her car, for instance. There was a carport at the side of the house, and Suzie always — always — parked in the same spot in it. Friends noticed when she didn't.

And then there was Stacy McCall. Stacy was eighteen. Five-three, a hundred and twenty pounds, long dark blonde hair, light eyes. She and Suzie had been friends through school; they'd graduated together that same day, the sixth of June, 1992, at Hammons Student Center on the Missouri State campus. There's a photograph of the two of them from that night that's been doing the rounds for thirty years now — they're in their gowns, smiling, in front of the school. Both of them looking, you know, exactly like you'd expect two girls who'd just finished school to look. Ready for the summer. Ready for whatever was coming next.

What was coming next, for both of them, was a trip to a water park. White Water, in Branson, about forty-five minutes south. They'd planned it for the Sunday morning — graduation Saturday, water park Sunday. Classic.

Copy[static sting — short]

Now I want to walk you through the day, because this is one of those cases where every tiny ordinary choice ends up mattering. There was a graduation ceremony in the afternoon. Sherrill went and watched her daughter walk. The girls hit a couple of parties that evening with their friend Janelle Kirby — first one out in Battlefield, which is a little town just southwest of Springfield, then a few more in town. The plan for the night was that all three of them — Suzie, Stacy, Janelle — would crash at Janelle's place in Battlefield, drive to White Water in the morning.

The last party of the night was at a friend's house — a girl called Michelle Elder. Stacy was there, and she and Michelle, they got talking. They were old friends who hadn't seen much of each other lately, and they made plans to meet up properly on the Sunday evening, after the water park. Sunday evening. Remember that. Stacy went into that Saturday with plans for the next day, and the day after that.

The party at Michelle Elder's got broken up by the Springfield police at one fifty in the morning — apparently neighbours had had enough. The three girls drove back to Janelle's house in Battlefield. Got there around two.

And then this is where things change. Because Janelle's place was packed — out-of-town family in town for her own graduation, every spare bed taken. Suzie and Stacy decided, fine, we'll just go to Suzie's instead. King-sized waterbed at Sherrill's house, brand new, just delivered. Suzie was excited to show Stacy. They'd drive over, sleep there, drive back in the morning to meet Janelle for the trip.

Janelle's mum, Kathy, was already in bed. She told the police later that she heard the girls leaving. She heard Suzie say to Stacy: follow me to my house. And she heard Stacy answer: okay, I will.

That is the last time either of them is heard from. Two in the morning. Battlefield, Missouri. Seventh of June, 1992.

Copy[static sting — short, slightly sharper. transition to next scene.]

SCENE 2 — The Drive, the House, the Last Hour (5:30, ~800 words)

LUCY:

Right. So here's what we know about the rest of that night. And here's where the case starts doing the thing it does, where the more you look, the less you actually have.

Suzie and Stacy left Janelle's around two a.m. and drove to 1717 East Delmar. That's the only direction they were heading. Sherrill's house. Less than fifteen minutes away. We know they got there. We know that because everything they brought with them — their clothes, their purses, their jewellery, their car keys, both their cars — every last thing was in that house the next morning, exactly where you'd expect it to be.

Stacy's clothes from the party were folded neatly in Suzie's bedroom. The same clothes she'd worn out that night — the only clothes she'd brought with her. There were make-up wipes that had been used, just used, like in the last few minutes before bed. Suzie's contact lenses were sitting on the side. There was an unfinished can of Coca-Cola next to Suzie's pack of cigarettes. The lights in Suzie's room were off, but her television was on — and it was just showing static. Snow, we used to call it. The end-of-tape signal. So they'd watched something, maybe a film, fallen asleep — or started to — and never got round to turning the TV off.

Copy[half-beat]

Sherrill's bed, in the master bedroom, looked slept in. Not made, not torn apart — slept in. A blind on one of the windows was bent at a slightly odd angle. The dog — Cinnamon — was in the house, agitated, but unharmed.

Sherrill herself, by the way — we know what she was doing that evening too. At around quarter past eleven, before any of the girls got home, Sherrill was on the phone with a friend. They were talking about an armoire. Specifically, about painting and varnishing an armoire that Sherrill was redoing in her bedroom. That's her last known conversation. Eleven-fifteen at night, talking about decorating. Hung up the phone, presumably went to bed, presumably went to sleep, with the dog, in the house she'd lived in for years.

By two a.m. Suzie and Stacy are pulling into the carport. Or — well. Are they?

Copy[beat]

Because here's a small thing. A small, possibly nothing, possibly everything thing. I mentioned earlier that Suzie was a creature of habit about where she parked. Always in the carport. Always the same spot. The morning after, both Suzie's car and her mother's car were outside the carport, not inside it. Now — it's two in the morning, she's exhausted, she's got her best friend with her, maybe she just parked badly for once. But her co-worker, Nigel Kenney, looked at it later and said: Suzie wouldn't do that. Someone else parked there first.

Copy[short pause]

Make of that what you will, After Darkers. It might be nothing. It might be the only thing that matters.

So that's the picture by, let's say, two-thirty in the morning. Three women in one house. Mother in her own bed, daughter and best friend in the daughter's room, television on. Television's still going. Dog's downstairs. Outside, in front of the porch — somewhere between two a.m. and nine a.m., we know one thing happened, and we know it because of the glass.

The porch light, the glass shade, the globe over the bulb — got smashed. Just the globe. Not the bulb. The bulb was intact and still hanging there. Whoever broke the globe was deliberate enough to leave the bulb alone, or unlucky enough to break only the outer shell of it. Either way: someone, at some point during the night, hit that porch light with something hard enough to shatter the glass cover.

Why? We have absolutely no idea. The most innocent reading is that one of the girls accidentally knocked it on the way in — but the carport is on the side of the house, and they wouldn't have been coming in through the front. The less innocent reading is that someone deliberately took out the porch light from the outside. To stop anyone seeing what was about to happen. To call somebody to the front door. We don't know.

We don't know an awful lot of things, actually. We don't know what time the women were taken. We don't know if all three were taken at the same time. We don't know if they went voluntarily or under threat. We don't know if there were one, or two, or more attackers. We don't know if it happened in the house, or whether they were lured outside.

What we do know is: by nine in the morning, the seventh of June, 1992, all three of them were gone. And the first person to walk through that front door wasn't a police officer. It was an eighteen-year-old girl in bare feet with a broom.

Copy[static sting — sharper. tempo up slightly.]

SCENE 3 — Nine in the Morning (6:00, ~870 words)

LUCY: [hushed, scene work register, drop pace to ~135 wpm]

Janelle Kirby woke up on the morning of the seventh of June expecting to drive to a water park with her best friends. The plan was: meet at Janelle's, leave from Janelle's, get to White Water by lunchtime. Easy day, easy summer.

Suzie and Stacy didn't show.

Janelle called the house. No answer. Called again. No answer. So she got her boyfriend, Mike Henson, in the car with her and drove over to Sherrill's house at 1717 East Delmar to see what was going on.

They got there around nine in the morning. And the very first thing they noticed — Janelle noticed — was that the porch light. The glass globe was shattered. Smashed all over the concrete. The bulb still hanging in mid-air. She thought, that's odd. Then she thought, I'm not wearing any shoes.

Mike Henson, like the good lad he was, swept it up for her so she wouldn't cut her feet. Just brushed it all off the porch in a couple of swipes. He told the police later he did it because she was barefoot. There was no reason at that point for either of them to think anything was wrong. The front door wasn't broken. The windows weren't broken. Nothing was on fire. The cars were in the drive. Sherrill's car, Suzie's car, all of them sitting there like normal. Why would you think anything other than: they're inside, they slept in, knock on the door.

The front door was unlocked. They went in.

Copy[half-beat. vinyl crackle a little louder.]

Cinnamon, the dog, came running. Agitated. Whining. The kind of energy a dog gives off when it's been in the house alone for hours and something has gone wrong. Janelle and Mike walked through the house, called out, looked in the bedrooms. Sherrill's bedroom — empty, bed slept-in, no Sherrill. Suzie's bedroom — empty, television still showing static, no Suzie, no Stacy. Bathroom, kitchen, living room — nothing.

They figured, all right, the three of them have gone out somewhere. Forgotten about the water park. Whatever. They were teenagers, Sherrill was an adult, this wasn't their problem to solve. Janelle was, you have to remember, eighteen years old, the morning after her friends' graduation parties. Not in a position to mount an investigation.

And then the phone rang.

She picked it up. A man's voice on the other end. Sexual innuendo. Janelle, understandably horrified, hung up. The phone rang again — same caller, same kind of thing. She hung up again. She told the police later the voice sounded young. Teenish, was her word. Springfield Police's David Asher described the calls as obscene. Repeated f-words. The kind of call where you put the phone down and your skin's crawling for the rest of the day.

Now — here's a wrinkle. Janelle wasn't completely caught off-guard. Because Suzie had told her, a few weeks earlier, that the house had been getting prank calls. Ever since Suzie had moved back in with her mum in the spring of '92. Random sexual phone calls. Hang-ups. They'd been going on for a while. So Janelle, in the moment, registered the calls as creepy but kind of normal-creepy. Not as evidence.

She and Mike left. They decided they'd go to a different water park instead — there was one in Springfield itself, a place called HydraSlide, doesn't exist any more. They drove off. They had a fine afternoon. They assumed they'd hear from the girls when they got home.

Copy[short pause]

Several hours go by. The afternoon stretches on. Stacy McCall's mum, Janis, can't get hold of her daughter on the phone — Stacy isn't picking up at Sherrill's, isn't picking up anywhere. Janis has friends who know people who work at White Water. She gets one of them to check. They check. Stacy and Suzie never showed up at White Water.

Now Janis is scared. So she drives over to 1717 East Delmar herself.

She opens the front door — same door Janelle opened that morning, still unlocked, hours later — and Cinnamon comes barrelling at her again. Dog has now been in the house alone for, what, the better part of a day. Janis walks through. Same as Janelle did. Empty house. But she looks closer. Because she's a mother and her daughter isn't where she's supposed to be.

She finds the three purses. All three of them. Sitting on the floor of Suzie's bedroom. Sherrill's purse — and this is the detail that lives with you — Sherrill's purse still had over eight hundred dollars in cash in it. From a deposit she was meant to make from the salon. Eight hundred dollars. In a purse. Sitting on the floor. Untouched.

Stacy's clothes from the night before, folded. Suzie's contact lenses on the side. The Coke can. The make-up wipes. Sherrill's cigarettes — and Sherrill, by every account, was a chain smoker, the kind of smoker who would not leave the house without her cigarettes — her cigarettes were still on the side. Suzie's too.

Janis picked up the phone in the kitchen and rang the police. And then, while she was waiting for them, she pressed play on the answering machine. There was a message on it. A strange one. She listened to it.

And then the answering machine, the way old answering machines used to, played the message and erased it. Gone. The recording was on one cycle. Played once, deleted once. And whatever was on that tape — whatever clue, whatever voice, whatever scrap of evidence — was gone before any investigator ever heard it.

Copy[two-beat pause. dead air.]

By the time the Springfield police arrived at 1717 East Delmar, between ten and twenty people had been through that house. Friends. Family. Neighbours. Janelle. Mike. Janis. People had touched the door handles, walked through the rooms, opened the fridge, picked up the dog. The porch had been swept clean. The answering machine message had been erased.

The single most important crime scene in Springfield, Missouri, in 1992, had — by the time anyone in a uniform stepped into it — already been wiped.

Copy[static sting — sharp. transition.]

SCENE 4 — The Scene That Wasn't a Scene (6:30, ~940 words)

LUCY: [low, steady, the centre of the episode]

I want to sit in this for a minute, because I think it's the thing about the Springfield Three that doesn't get talked about enough. People focus on the suspects. People focus on the theories. People focus on the parking garage and the prison interviews and the alibis. And those bits are important, we'll get to them, but they're not the centre of this case. The centre of this case is what wasn't there.

Think about what a crime scene normally gives you. In any case, anywhere — when something violent happens in a house, there are signs. A broken window. A toppled chair. Blood spatter. Hair. Fibres. Defensive wounds on the people who lived there if they get away, evidence of a struggle on the people who didn't. Footprints. A weapon. A neighbour who heard a shout. Something.

At 1717 East Delmar, there was — let me list it — a smashed porch globe. An intact bulb. A slightly bent window blind in Sherrill's bedroom. Some used make-up wipes. A pack of cigarettes. A can of Coke. Three handbags. Eight hundred dollars in cash. A dog. A television showing static.

And three women who were no longer in the building.

Copy[beat]

That's it. That is what the investigators had to work with. There is no forensic evidence in this case — not because none was left, necessarily, but because by the time forensic people were in the house, they were working in an environment that had been comprehensively contaminated. Twenty people through it. Glass swept off the porch. Door handles touched. Coke can possibly moved. Answering machine wiped. Sheets disturbed. The dog moved around between people.

And the heartbreaking thing about that contamination, After Darkers, is that nobody did it maliciously. Nobody who walked through that house meant to make things worse. Janelle didn't sweep the porch because she was destroying evidence — she swept it because her boyfriend didn't want her to cut her feet. Mike didn't pick up the broom thinking, I am about to delete the only forensic detail in the most important missing persons case Springfield will ever see. He thought, my girlfriend is barefoot, let me help. Janis didn't press play on the answering machine to wipe a clue — she pressed play because that's what you do when you're a worried mum and the answering machine has a message on it.

Every single act of contamination at that scene was a small act of kindness or concern. And cumulatively, they may have destroyed any chance the case ever had.

Copy[short pause]

There's something almost unbearable in that. The case wasn't undone by a killer being clever. It wasn't undone by a cover-up. It was undone by ordinary people, doing ordinary, decent, human things, in the gap between when the women disappeared and when anyone realised they were really gone. Twelve hours. Maybe fifteen. That's all it took.

And it's not the families' fault. To be very clear, After Darkers — I'm not laying this at anybody's door. Janelle Kirby went on to live with this for the rest of her life. She's spoken about it. She knows. She was eighteen and confused and the porch had broken glass on it and she wasn't wearing shoes. That's not on her.

It's on the era. It's on the fact that in 1992, the average person did not have, in their head, a programme that said: if your friend is missing from a house, do not touch the house. That programme didn't exist in popular culture yet. Forensics on television was Quincy. It wasn't CSI. Nobody walked into a friend's empty house in 1992 thinking crime scene preservation. You walked in, you looked around, you swept up the glass.

Copy[static sting — soft, like a held breath.]

The answering machine, though. That one I want to come back to. Because of all the things lost that morning, the answering machine message is — I think — the thing that haunts this case the most.

Janis McCall heard it. She is the only person, as far as the public record knows, who ever heard that message in full. She has described it as strange. Disturbing. Police, when they got there, were extremely interested in it. They believed it may have contained a clue — possibly a critical one. They did not believe it was connected to the prank calls Janelle had taken earlier that morning. It was something else.

But it was gone. And what Janis remembers of it, and how reliable that memory is after thirty-plus years of trying to remember the worst sound she ever heard once — that's not something I'm going to put a definitive line on in this episode. Because I don't think anybody can.

Copy[half-beat]

We will never know what was on that tape, After Darkers. We will never know if it was the killer's voice. We will never know if it was Sherrill calling from somewhere, trying to leave a clue. We will never know if it was a wrong number that just happened to land at the worst possible time.

It is one of the great unrecoverable pieces of evidence in American true crime. And it was destroyed by a button press. By a worried mother trying to find her daughter. In her dead-quiet kitchen at half past five on a Sunday afternoon, with a dog sitting at her feet, in a town called Springfield, Missouri.

Copy[three-second pause. dead air. then static sting — slow, like a frequency settling.]

SCENE 5 — Suspects, Theories, and 5,000 Tips (5:30, ~800 words)

LUCY: [lift register slightly, back to ~145 wpm, narrative pace]

Right. So that's what the police had to work with. Almost nothing. And in spite of that — almost because of that — the case has attracted, by Springfield Police Department's own count, upwards of five thousand tips over the years. Some serious. Some psychic. Some from prison inmates with axes to grind. Let me walk you through the main ones.

The first name you have to know is Robert Craig Cox. Cox is a convicted kidnapper and armed robber currently serving time in Texas. He's also, separately, a suspect in a Florida murder. In 1992, when the Springfield Three vanished, Cox was living in Springfield. When investigators first interviewed him, he told them he was at his parents' house the night the women disappeared, and his then-girlfriend confirmed he was with her at church the following morning.

Years later, his girlfriend recanted that alibi. She told investigators that Cox had asked her to say they were together. He had not, in fact, been with her.

Then, in 1996 and 1997, from prison, Cox started talking to journalists. He told a Springfield News-Leader reporter that he knew the three women had been murdered. He said he knew their bodies would never be recovered. He said he would tell the full story when his mother died.

His mother, as far as the public record goes, is no longer living. Cox has not told the story.

Now — Springfield Police are clear about Cox. They have publicly said they do not believe Cox has any credibility in this case. He is, in their assessment, somebody who likes the attention. He has issued statements they consider self-serving false claims. He was in the area. He had a shaky alibi. He has made suggestive comments. He has not, as of any public record I can find, produced a single verifiable piece of information that only the killer would know.

That doesn't make him innocent. It doesn't make him guilty either. It makes him a man in a cell who has spent thirty years half-confessing without ever quite saying anything that can be confirmed.

Copy[short pause]

The second name is Dustin Recla. Recla was an ex-boyfriend of Suzie Streeter's. A few months before the women disappeared, Recla and two friends broke into a Springfield mausoleum and stole gold fillings — about thirty dollars' worth — from a corpse. Just sit with that for a second. Thirty dollars' worth of gold fillings from a dead body. That's the kind of person we're talking about.

Suzie had given a statement to investigators about the mausoleum break-in. There was a strong likelihood she was going to be a witness against Recla in court. He and his two associates were known to be together and in the area of Sherrill's house on the night the women went missing.

Did Recla do it? I don't know. The police investigated him. He was never charged. But of all the people in Suzie Streeter's life with a possible motive, he is, on paper, the one with the cleanest reason.

Copy[static sting — soft]

The third thing I want to mention isn't a suspect — it's the parking garage.

In 2007, a crime reporter named Kathee Baird brought a mechanical engineer called Rick Norland to a parking garage on the south side of Cox Hospital in Springfield. They scanned a corner of it with ground-penetrating radar. The reason: there was a tip — and I want to be honest with you about where that tip came from, After Darkers — the tip came from somebody who either claimed to be psychic, or claimed to have had a dream, or claimed to have had a vision about the case. The Greene County Prosecutor's Office has been pretty open about that.

The radar scan did find three anomalies. Roughly the same size as each other. Two parallel, one perpendicular. Consistent, the engineer said, with what you'd expect to see at a grave site.

The Springfield Police Department's response was — and I'll be straight with you — pretty unsentimental. Their spokesperson, Lisa Cox, no relation to Robert Craig Cox, pointed out two things. One: the person who provided the tip had given no evidence, no logical reasoning, no actual case knowledge. Two: the parking garage was not built until September 1993. Over a year after the women disappeared. So whoever buried whatever's down there — if anyone's down there at all — would have had to dispose of the bodies somewhere else for fifteen-plus months, then dig them back up, then re-bury them under a hospital parking garage that was being actively constructed. Which is, to put it gently, not the most efficient murder.

The radar anomalies are real. The geometry is suggestive. But the Springfield Police Department, who actually have the case file, do not consider this a credible lead. And they have publicly said they have no intention of digging up the parking garage.

Copy[beat]

And then there's the call. December 31st, 1992. A man rings the America's Most Wanted hotline and tells the operator he has information about the disappearance of the Springfield Three. The operator, doing exactly what she was meant to do, tries to connect him through to the Springfield investigators on the case. The line drops. The call disconnects. He is never heard from again. The police later said the caller had — quote — prime knowledge of the abductions. They publicly begged him to call back.

He never did.

Copy[static sting — sharp. transition to final scene.]

SCENE 6 — Thirty-Three Years (3:30, ~510 words)

LUCY: [reflective register, pace dropping back to ~135 wpm]

Sherrill Levitt would be seventy-nine years old this year, if she were alive. Suzie Streeter would be fifty-one. Stacy McCall would be fifty.

In 1997, five years after they disappeared, Sherrill and Suzie were declared legally dead. Stacy McCall's family has, I believe, never sought the same declaration. The case files, all three of them, are still officially filed as missing. In the NamUs database. In the FBI's ViCAP records. In the Springfield Police Department's cold case unit. They are not closed. They have never been closed.

The case has been featured on 48 Hours. On America's Most Wanted. On Investigation Discovery's Disappeared. On People Magazine Investigates. There have been podcasts. There has been a small-town disappearance series from a journalist called Anne Roderique-Jones. There is, in Phelps Grove Park in Springfield, a bench. A simple wooden bench, dedicated in 1997 to the three of them. People still leave flowers there. Stacy McCall's father, Stu, died in October of 2025 — eighty-two years old — without ever knowing what happened to his daughter.

Copy[beat]

I want to come back to where we started, After Darkers. Because I've thought about this case for a long time and the thing I keep coming back to is that porch light.

Whoever broke that porch globe, on the night of the sixth or the morning of the seventh of June 1992 — they will have known what they were doing. They will have known they were taking the light out. They will have known, in some way, what was about to happen next.

And whoever they were, they left almost nothing behind. No print. No print I'm aware of, anyway. No fibre that ever led anywhere. No witness who saw a car at the kerb. Three women — a mother, a daughter, a daughter's best friend — taken from inside a small one-storey house on a quiet street, in a town where, by every account, that sort of thing didn't happen — taken so cleanly that, thirty-three years later, the most concrete piece of evidence we still have is the answering machine message that nobody can quite remember.

Copy[short pause]

This is a case that lives in absences. The absence of the women. The absence of the message. The absence of the answer. The absence of an arrest. There's a kind of grief that hardens into routine — Stu McCall went to that bench in Phelps Grove for thirty years. Did the same thing every June. And the case did not move.

Maybe one day it does. There's still DNA technology being applied. There are still people, in the Springfield Police Department, who are paid to think about this case. There are still tips that come in. There is still — somewhere — somebody who knows.

The dog, Cinnamon, lived out her years with a family member of Suzie's. She, of course, never told anybody anything. She was the only living thing in that house when whatever happened, happened. And like the women themselves, she was taken at her word, and her word was silence.

Copy[two-second pause. dead air. then very soft synth pad in.]

OUTRO (1:00, ~150 words)

Copy[soft synth pad in, low. theme music creeping back, slow.]

LUCY:

Three women. One house. Zero trace. Thirty-three years. If you live in Springfield, Missouri, or anywhere in the Ozarks — or if you've ever heard a story about that night, from anybody, however small — the Springfield Police Department's tip line is still open. There's a link in the show notes. Somebody, somewhere, knows what happened on East Delmar Street.

Until then — make of that what you will, After Darkers.

Copy[half-beat]

That's it from me this evening. Thank you, genuinely, for spending part of your night with me — it means the world that you keep tuning in.

Now — a quick one before we go. We are independent over here, just me and the static, and we are trying to get this show to five hundred subscribers on YouTube. If you've got a spare three seconds and you're enjoying what we're doing on this little frequency, head over there and hit subscribe — it genuinely, properly helps. And if you want a bit more from us between episodes — merch, the blog, every episode in one place, all of it — that lives at staticafterdark.com. Link is in the show notes, you know the drill.

Until then — look after yourselves, lock your doors, and stay tuned.

Copy[two-beat pause]

I'm Lucy. You've been listening to Static After Dark.

Copy[half-beat. theme music lifting under.]

END OF EPISODE