SPRINGFIELD | Before this city’s new police chief took the job last summer, he pulled up the department’s website to find out more about the place.
Paul Williams could see where officers had busted meth labs and which businesses had been robbed. Next, he clicked on “Unsolved Cases.” You can learn a lot about a town by its unsolved crime.
Just one case popped up. Grainy photos of three women filled his screen, and his eyes fell on three words that have echoed through this community and region for 18 years.
Three Missing Women.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s unusual to have just this one thing on the website, just one unsolved case,’ ” says Williams, who spent nearly 29 years with the Tulsa (Okla.) Police Department before landing in Springfield in July. “ ‘It must be a big deal.’ 
Since then, and since he announced the department would put more focus and energy into the mystery that has haunted this city, he has learned just how big.