Moms of the Missing, page 10
When Donna tells her story she often brings her picture frame with the drawing that portrays how Raymond might look today based on facial characteristics of his siblings. The drawing has been made by certified forensic artist Diana Trepkov, who uses cognitive memory interview techniques to help create composite sketches. The two women met almost ten years ago to create the first sketch of Raymond. For six hours the forensic artist interviewed Donna about what happened on the day Raymond was taken. Donna just poured out details about everything from what the weather had been like, to what the air had smelled like, to specific features of both Raymond and the abductor. The details led Diane Trepkov to create two sketches—one of Raymond and one of the kidnapper. When Donna saw the image of “Lisa” she was aggravated.
“It felt like I was face to face with the woman who kidnapped my baby,” Donna says.
However, she was pleased by the drawing of Raymond, which Diane created using age-progression techniques to show how he might look at the time Donna met with the forensic artist. Donna hopes one day to replace the drawing with an actual photograph of her son.
6
LONG-TERM MISSING
Almost all missing children in the United States make it back home alive. Of all children reported missing, as many as 99 percent return home. In regards to abduction cases specifically, nine out of ten recoveries are made within three days of the abduction; almost half of the recoveries are made within three hours.
The cases that take the longest to solve are family abduction cases. In these cases, an average of 326 days passes before an abducted child is returned home.
Even though an overwhelming majority of abduction cases are resolved relatively quickly, one percent of all abductions do not have a happy ending. In some cases law enforcement and parents search for the missing children for years—and at times, even decades—investigating every lead but without recovering the missing child.
Janis McCall has been searching for her daughter, Stacy, for almost three decades.
A Graduation Girl Gone
Missing: Stacy Kathleen McCall
Date of Birth: 04/23/1974
Missing From: Springfield, Missouri
Missing Since: 06/07/1992 (18 years old)
Classification: Endangered Missing
Interview: Janis McCall, mother of Stacy
Janis had been looking for her pink slippers for weeks. Every inch of the house was searched again and again, but the eye-catching footwear was nowhere to be found. Then one morning Janis woke up and the slippers were next to her bed, as if they had been there the whole time.
Janis was puzzled. She could not understand how the slippers had ended up right in front her. But this was not the first time something odd had happened in the house. Once, Janis had been reading a book—and suddenly it was gone. In that case, too, she had searched in vain…and then one day the book was lying right in front of her on the kitchen counter.
The inexplicable events did not upset Janis. She soon came to a conclusion regarding who had found the slippers and the book for her.
“It was Stacy’s way of showing that she cared about me, and that she did not want me to worry about things,” Janis explains.
At times the mother had also felt her daughter’s physical presence while she went about with her daily routines. One day, Janis was preparing dinner…and when she turned around she caught a glimpse of Stacy sitting in the wooden chair, where she always used to relax before going to school. That particular afternoon she was sitting watching her mom cooking—but as soon as Janis felt her daughter’s presence, she was gone again.
“Sometimes her spirit shows up. When it happens I always feel her right here next to me. I just wish it would happen more often,” Janis says, knowing that she can never expect to see her daughter again in real life. Because only one person knows where Stacy has been for the last twenty-six years. The person who took her.
Therefore, Janis clings to the memories she has of her daughter…and she remembers the last time she saw Stacy as if it were yesterday.
Stacy was eighteen years old and had just graduated from Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri. That afternoon, Janis felt proud when her daughter walked out the front door, heading for a graduation party. She was wearing a yellow shirt, flowered bikini pants, and a fourteen-inch gold herringbone chain necklace. On her fingers she wore two rings: a flat gold initial ring and a ring with a small diamond. However, one of her most distinguishing characteristics was her long, dark-blonde hair that always flowed down below her waist.
When Stacy left the house that afternoon Janis never imagined that a few days later she would find herself printing missing persons posters—posters that displayed her daughter with various lengths and colours of hair.
“We went to a salon where they changed her hair [in the original portrait] into different styles and colours so we could put out posters with different photos of her. We wanted people to be able to recognise her even if she was forced to change her looks. I will never forget how hard it was putting my daughter’s picture on those missing persons posters. Once I did, reality sank in. Stacy was gone,” Janis says.
When Stacy went to the graduation party she met her friend, Suzie Streeter, who was a year older. The girls decided to spend the night at a motel in Branson, Missouri, to give them an early start in the morning, when they planned to visit the White Water amusement park.
Janis did not like the plan. She was worried that the girls would get involved in a car accident while driving for almost an hour to Branson at night. She was therefore thrilled when Stacy called at ten thirty p.m. to tell her mother they had changed their plans. They would stay in Battlefield and sleep at a friend’s place, where they were also celebrating their graduation.
“I was so relieved they were not driving at night,” Janis remembers, “but had I only known.…When I told Stacy ‘I love you’ and said goodbye, I never imagined it was the last time I would speak to her and hear her voice.”
The party at the friend’s house ended abruptly when the police showed up after receiving a complaint of loud noise coming from the house. The girls decided to leave.
Today, Janis wishes Stacy and Suzie had gone straight to Branson, no matter how dangerous driving in traffic at night would have been, because sometime after the two teenagers went back to Suzie’s mother’s house to get some sleep before heading out the next morning, the worst nightmare a parent could ever imagine became a reality.
“We don’t know what happened in the house, only that the two girls disappeared without a trace. For twenty-six years we have lived not knowing if our daughter is dead, if she is being held captive, or if she is living a life far away, brainwashed by the person or persons who took her,” Janis says.
One thing is for certain though. On June 7, 1992, a crime took place at the Streeter house on East Delmar Street sometime after two a.m., after the girls had arrived at the home.
Later that morning, when the girls failed to show up for their ride to the amusement park, two friends went to the Streeters’ house to see if Stacy and Suzie had overslept. But Janelle and her boyfriend, Mike, had not even gotten to the front door before they felt something was wrong.
THE MESSAGE
The lampshade over the porch light was broken and shattered all across the floor. Three cars were parked in front of the house, but no one answered the door when Janelle and Mike knocked.
The cars belonged to Stacy, Suzie, and Suzie’s mother, Sherill. Janelle and Mike realised it was unlikely that the girls would have gone to the park without using at least one of the cars.
The friends decided to enter through the unlocked door. They called out for the girls, but they were met only by the family’s Yorkshire terrier, Cinnamon. The dog appeared anxious, to the point where Janelle believed it wanted to be held in her arms. She picked the dog up, and it calmed down.
While the friends searched the house they noticed that the blinds in Suzie’s room had been bent as though someone had tried to look through them to peer out onto the driveway. They found Sherill’s reading glasses in her room, next to an open book. It seemed as if Suzie’s mother had been interrupted in the middle of the night, while she was reading.
When they continued their search, Janelle and Mike grew even more confused as to why Stacy, Suzie, and Sherill were not in the house: all of their personal belongings were there.
Stacy’s clothes were neatly folded next to Suzie’s bed. The friends found three purses lined up next to each other on the stairs, all untouched. Later, investigators discovered that Sherill had almost $900 in her purse that she was apparently going to deposit in the bank. Law enforcement quickly concluded that whatever had happened in the house, it was not a robbery that had gone wrong. There were no signs of a struggle.
“If a crime had taken place the girls would have been taken by surprise in their sleep, or they would have been the victims of someone able to subdue three women,” Janis says. “One thing is sure, if Stacy had the chance, she would have fought back.”
None of the friends thought a crime had been committed. Instead, they decided to wait for the girls to return and offer a logical explanation for their disappearance. While waiting the friends decided to be helpful.
They quickly grabbed a broom and swept up the glass on the porch. They also turned off the television that was on when they had first walked into the house. Strangely, however, it was set on a station that wasn’t available.
Then, suddenly, the phone rang.
When Janelle answered the phone she heard a man’s voice. The caller refused to identify himself, he just whispered foul words that were of a sexual nature. The verbiage was so unpleasant that Janelle immediately hung up.
Meanwhile Janis was trying to get in touch with her daughter. She did not have Sherill and Suzie’s phone number on her, but when she finally tracked it down she left three messages for Stacy. Late that afternoon, when her daughter still hadn’t replied, Janis decided to go to the house.
“I knew something was dead wrong when I found out Stacy’s clothes were still there,” Janis recalls. “Stacy would never go out in just her underwear and expose herself. But I did not want to admit to myself that something might have happened. Instead I tried to find relief in the fact that all the cars were still there.”
When she got to the house on Delmar Street that afternoon Janis did not listen to the messages on Sherill’s answering machine. If she had, she would have realised that her voice was not the only one on the machine—there was a man’s voice as well. He had chosen not to identify himself, as someone who later listened to the messages reported. And because the messages were of a sexual and rude nature, the person who listened to the messages also deleted them, making it impossible for the police to follow any traces of the vocal tracks when friends of the three missing women later told investigators about the calls.
Janis stayed at the house throughout the evening together with Janelle and Mike, hoping that Stacy would come back, though the feeling that something was wrong constantly grew. So many things did not add up, big and small details alike. Like the fact that Sherill’s cigarettes were still in the house when everyone knew she never went anywhere without them. Sherill was a chain-smoker, and her son, Bartt, later said that his mother would not even leave her bedroom to go into the living room to give him a message without bringing her cigarettes. She always took them. It seemed more and more unlikely that the three women would have left of their own free will.
“It was a very stressful night,” Janis remembers. “We just sat and waited for a sign. Slowly I started to realise that perhaps Stacy had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Stacy and Suzie used to be good friends, but over the years they lost contact. More or less they spent the night together by coincidence, because they went to the same graduation party. Stacy was probably taken by whoever had already planned on taking Suzie or Sherill,” Janis suggests.
However, because it seemed so unlikely that someone had actually vanished without a trace no one called 911 until late that night.
“If I had called 911 earlier I would have admitted that we had an emergency situation. I didn’t want that. I just wanted to keep the hope of them walking unharmed through that door alive,” Janis says.
But she could not help starting to fear that a movie she and Stacy had watched three nights earlier might now become her reality. The movie was about Adam John Walsh, who was abducted in 1991 from a mall in Hollywood, Florida. Adam was six years old, and he had gone to the mall with his mother. While she did her shopping, the son asked permission to watch some older boys play video games in a nearby store. When the mother returned ten minutes later, Adam was gone. The older boys had been causing trouble, and a security guard had asked them to leave. Authorities believe that Adam followed the boys outside the mall, as he did not want to be alone. When the older boys left he was probably kidnapped.
A couple of weeks after Adam disappeared, his severed head was discovered by two fishermen in a canal one hundred miles from the mall. The rest of Adam’s body was never found. Two years later his fatal story was told in the movie Adam.
“I cried and cried when we watched that movie, saying I could never handle going through the experience of having a child abducted. Then at the age of forty-five, I was,” Janis explains.
GRAVE ROBBING
The police were alerted, but investigators did not have many leads. Many people had entered the house while waiting for the women to come back, and the crime scene was contaminated. Even the broken glass on the porch, which could have contained DNA evidence, was useless: It now lay in the Dumpster across the street. Investigators were forced to look for leads in other ways. They found one on Suzie’s shelf. A book about Satanism.
When investigators began digging deeper and looked over their files of past arrests, they realised that Suzie had previously been dating a guy who had been arrested for being part of a grave-robbing gang.
“It turned out they had broken in to a mausoleum and taken the gold teeth out of some skulls,” Janis says.
Suzie had been so disgusted by her boyfriend’s actions that she broke up with him. And when officers interrogated Suzie regarding her ex-boyfriend’s arrest, she agreed to testify against him at the upcoming trial. Now friends started to speculate whether Suzie was “disappeared” so she couldn’t testify.
“But police could not prove the boyfriend had anything to do with the girl’s disappearance, and he was cleared,” Janis explains.
The mother was questioned by the police the day after her daughter went missing. But she was so shaken by the situation that she almost missed her appointment at the police station.
“I have gone by the police station a thousand times. I knew exactly where it was, but that morning I just could not find it. I drove around the police station twice without realising I was already there. Everything was so stirred up that I could not think straight,” Janis says.
It didn’t help that investigators had asked Janis to bring her daughter’s dental card. Janis figured that this request meant they suspected something serious might have happened, namely, the death of Stacy.
But once Janis was in the interrogation room her coolness returned. A female officer asked Janis all sorts of questions, and the mother was happy to answer. Several investigators were listening to her responses in another room.
“I gave them so much information, and I told them so many personal things about Stacy, because I wanted the investigators to feel that they knew the person they were searching for. I wanted it to be personal,” Janis explains.
She was not the only one giving the investigators information. A couple of weeks after Stacy, Suzie, and Sherill vanished, another woman came forward. She told police that on the morning of the women’s disappearance she had seen Suzie drive an avocado-coloured Dodge “panel” van. Suzie had looked scared while driving the vehicle, the woman said. The woman also reported that she had even heard a man screaming threats at Suzie from the back seat.
Still, months passed without any significant leads coming in; but Janis and her husband, Stuart, were not going to give up. They continually handed out posters with Stacy’s picture. They created billboards. At the same time, Janis did numerous interviews with both local and national media. The family frequently called the media themselves to ask for interviews, because Janis knew it was important to keep the women’s disappearance at the top of people’s minds.
“I also knew it was important not to cry on TV. I was afraid it would be turned around and used on Stacy if she was watching us…and if she should get upset with seeing me crying, that might aggravate her kidnapper and get him aggressive,” Janis explains. “Every time we were being interviewed we felt we were talking directly to Stacy and to her kidnapper. We were saying to Stacy that we loved her and would never give up and we were saying to the kidnapper that we needed Stacy back in our lives.”
While the police conducted their investigation the McCall family conducted their own investigation as well. Stacy’s father and a couple of friends went to search a house where the missing daughter was rumored to be. Not because they did not believe in law enforcement, but because the family simply wanted to do anything they could to get their daughter back if she was trapped nearby.
“My husband almost got himself killed when they went around looking for her, because not everyone appreciated what they were doing and instead they got aggressive,” Janis recalls.
The family’s search always proved to be in vain, but after a few months Janis felt they might be getting a step closer to knowing who the kidnapper might be. The police unexpectedly received a tip from the family of a woman named Sharon Zellers. The family was living in Florida.
