Vanished. Murdered. Unsolved.

3 Missouri Mysteries

Three women disappeared from a Springfield home without a trace. In the tiny town of Skidmore, a notorious bully was shot to death in broad daylight while surrounded by witnesses, yet no one would identify his killers. A young woman was abducted while talking to her fiancé on a pay phone.

Thee cases are strikingly different, but they share something unsettling: Despite years of investigation, countless tips, and decades that have passed, fundamental questions remain unanswered. What happened to the Springfield Three? Who pulled the trigger on Kenneth McElroy? And who abducted Angela Hammond?

The Springfield Three

Disappeared Without a Trace

This case has left some in Springfield struggling to sleep at night for the past 34 years.

The summer night in June 1992 started as a happy occasion. Nineteen-year-old Suzanne “Suzie” Streeter and her friend, 18-year-old Stacy McCall, were celebrating their high school graduation from Kickapoo High School in Springfield by attending parties around town. The next morning, they planned to meet their friend Janelle Kirby at her house and then continue the celebration at a water park in nearby Branson.

The two women were last seen around 2 am leaving a party for Suzie’s home, where they planned to spend the night. When they failed to show up the next morning at Janelle’s house, she and her boyfriend went searching for the women at Suzie’s home, where Suzie lived with her mother, 47-year-old Sherrill Levitt.

The front door was unlocked, but the three women were not there. Only the family dog, which Janelle later described as agitated, was found. A glass light fixture on the porch had been shattered, and Janelle’s boyfriend had swept up the glass because Janelle was barefoot, inadvertently interfering with potential evidence.

Several hours later, Stacy’s mother, Janis McCall, went to the house because she was worried that she hadn’t heard from her daughter. The dog was going crazy, and she found the women’s purses. She called the police from the house and reported them missing. She also played what she described as a strange message on the answering machine, but the message was accidentally deleted. Many answering machines back then automatically deleted messages after they were played, unless it was specifically saved. The message could not be recovered.

Each of the women’s cars were parked outside. Their purses, keys, and cash remained in the house. Some of Stacy’s clothes were neatly folded, and makeup-remover wipes were found in the bathroom trash. There was no obvious sign of a struggle. All three were simply gone.

“I don’t think anyone imagined that something nefarious could have happened,” says investigative reporter and writer Anne Roderique-Jones, a former Springfield resident and host of the Ozarks True Crime podcast. “Because of that, so many people were coming in and out of what was unknowingly, and likely, a crime scene.”

Local police, the Missouri State Highway Patrol, and the FBI investigated the case. Thousands of posters were distributed around Springfield and surrounding towns, and authorities pursued a flood of leads.

“This story dominated our news cycle in Springfield,” Anne says. “I vividly remember the yellow missing posters plastered all over town. I think that anyone living in the Springfield area could easily call them to mind, even now. I lived in a house where we didn’t lock our doors, and I was free to roam our neighborhood unsupervised, even at the age of 12,” Anne says. “All of that seemed to change after the three women went missing.”

The case made state and national headlines and has since been featured on Dateline, 48 Hours, and America’s Most Wanted.

No trace of the three women has ever been found, and the case continues to bewilder people. “Time, as in it being in the early ’90s, was not on their side,” Anne says. “There were no Ring cameras or phone tracking devices. Essentially, they lacked all of the technology we have today that would have likely solved this case.”

One prominent suspect was Robert Craig Cox, a utility locator living in Springfield. Cox, 32 years old at the time, had previously been convicted of a 1978 Florida murder, although the conviction was overturned in 1989. In 1997, while imprisoned in Texas for kidnapping and robbery, he told journalists the three women had been murdered and that their bodies would never be found. Authorities suspected he was seeking attention, and his claims remain unverified.

Another theory came from a psychic, who claimed the women were buried beneath a parking garage at Cox Hospital. Ground-penetrating radar reportedly detected three anomalies, but Springfield police rejected the theory as unsupported, especially since the garage wasn’t built until more than a year after the women disappeared, and excavation for construction would likely have led to their discovery.

The case still resonates with people in Springfield and elsewhere. “People—even those who never knew the women—still care deeply about this case,” Anne says. “I think it’s really hard for anyone, not just a Missourian, to wrap their head around how three healthy women could essentially vanish.”

No One Will Tell

Who Shot the Town Bully

Kenneth McElroy was well known in Skidmore. His alleged crimes included assault, child molestation, rape, arson, animal cruelty, burglary, and cattle rustling. McElroy had stalked his future wife, Trena, when she was an eighth grader, burning her family’s house, shooting their dog, and eventually bullying her family into allowing him to marry her to avoid statutory-rape charges.

Wherever McElroy went, fear and violence followed. Even law enforcement and judicial authorities were reluctant to challenge him. In one case, he burned down a judge’s barn and stalked jury members. In another, he shot 70-year-old grocer Ernest Bowenkamp in the neck. Although McElroy was convicted of assault, he was quickly released on bond.

Journalist and author Harry MacLean became familiar with the case over four decades ago. His best-selling book In Broad Daylight chronicles McElroy’s reign of terror.

A 1991 movie of the same name, starring Brian Dennehy, was based on the book.

“He had a really good Kansas City lawyer who was skilled at exploiting each and every loophole in the Missouri criminal code,” Harry says. “McElroy understood that if there’s not a witness, there’s no crime. He was an expert at terrorizing the witnesses.”

But his 1980 shooting of Ernest Bowenkamp finally caught up with him. McElroy was convicted in 1981 and sentenced to two years. He was later released on an appeal bond.

Days later, he violated his bond by pulling a gun and threatening to kill the grocer and others. Witnesses signed an affidavit against him, and a bond hearing was set for July 10. Skidmore residents organized to protect those threatened by McElroy until the hearing.

Then they learned the hearing had been postponed.

As a group of uneasy citizens met at the American Legion Hall to discuss how to guard the witnesses until the hearing, McElroy left his farm and headed into town with Trena.

While sitting in his truck with Trena, McElroy was shot and killed by gunfire from across the street.

Was the killing planned or a spontaneous reaction?

“Those witnesses—45 or 50 people standing there—would not have stood there if they knew what was going to happen,” Harry says. “If they had reached a decision that two people were going to kill him, 43 of them would’ve gone home, and two would’ve gone down there and done it. It was spontaneous.”

Despite the daylight shooting and dozens of witnesses, no one came forward. Someone had called the Missouri State Highway Patrol and reported that McElroy had been shot and killed. Because tiny Skidmore did not have its own police department, state troopers and the county sheriff arrived about a half hour after the shooting. They found the scene deserted and McElroy’s truck still running. Trena, covered in blood and screaming, had been helped into a nearby building.

“He had terrorized that little town for over 20 years and never paid a price for it,” Harry says. “The system failed them, time and time and time again. They were at the point where they believed the only choice they had was to protect themselves.”

Investigators repeatedly questioned potential witnesses, but everyone said they didn’t see who shot McElroy. “They tried everything,” Harry says. “It didn’t crack anybody. The town closed up tight around the killers. Everybody knew who the killers were, but you had to get somebody to say it.”

Authorities recovered casings from two firearms, and Trena identified bar owner Del Clement as the shooter. The FBI investigated whether people in the town had conspired to deprive McElroy of his rights but found no evidence of a conspiracy. The Nodaway County prosecutor declined to prosecute, as Trena was the only witness to identify the suspect.

More than 45 years later, the case remains unsolved. Shortly before this article went to press, the FBI released more than 500 pages of McElroy files, including witness statements with names redacted.

“It’s not really that big a mystery who the killers were,” Harry says. “The people generally considered to be the killers are both dead. Forty-five years, and no one’s talked in this small little town.”

She Was Abducted

While on the Phone

Angela “Angie” Hammond of Clinton was 20 years old, four months pregnant, and engaged to be married. On April 4, 1991, she was talking to her fiancé, Rob Shafer, from a pay phone outside a local grocery store.

She told him a green 1970s Ford truck with a fish decal on the back had circled the parking lot several times before stopping. An unkempt, bearded man wearing glasses and overalls got out, entered the phone booth next to Angie’s, and stood there briefly before returning to his truck.

Then Rob heard Angie scream.

He jumped into his own truck and raced toward the grocery store. Nearing the scene, he met a green truck traveling in the opposite direction and thought he heard Angie shouting his name. He made a sharp U-turn to pursue the truck, but after about two miles, his truck’s transmission failed. A passing motorist took him to the Clinton police station where he reported what had happened.

But the green truck was gone. Angie was gone.

Friends, family, and authorities struggled to find a motive. Clinton police and other agencies conducted an extensive investigation. Multiple witnesses reported seeing the green truck, and investigators found several vehicles matching its description. Rob passed a polygraph test and was ruled out as a suspect. Investigators also explored possible connections to other missing women in Missouri but found none.

No trace of Angie has ever been found. With no forensic evidence and hundreds of leads exhausted, the case went cold.

Then in 2021, nearly 30 years after the kidnapping, an anonymous tip came in. Back in 1991, a confidential informant had reported an illegal drug operation at the Lake of the Ozarks. Soon afterward, the informant received a letter made with cut-and-paste letters, threatening his daughter, saying the sender knew where she was and “she will see us soon.”

The daughter’s name was Angie. Her home was in Clinton.

The letter was postmarked April 4, 1991—the same day Angie Hammond disappeared.

The theory: Angie was abducted by people seeking revenge against the informant but mistakenly identified Angie Hammond as the informant’s daughter.

After the tip came in, Clinton police made the threatening letter public in a 2021 Facebook post. The cut-and-paste letter had not been released to the public before the tip, and names in the letter were redacted for its release.

The police post reads in part: “Very recently, a person left an anonymous telephone message for us regarding the Angela Hammond case. That person specifically mentioned two names. You did not provide a means for us to recontact you. If that person is reading this message, please recontact us so that we can speak with you in real time. We will protect your identity or assure your anonymity.” The public was urged to reach out with any related information, as well.

The tipster had provided information about the letter and specifically mentioned two names that had not been released but were related to the drug case.

More than three decades later, the disappearance of Angela Hammond remains one of Missouri’s most chilling unsolved mysteries.

---

This article was originally printed in the October 2026 issue of Missouri Life.