Nearly 50 years ago two sisters went for pizza and vanished. Investigators have now unearthed new evidence
One spring day, Katherine, 10, and Sheila Lyon, 12, vanished without a trace. With their bodies not found after 50 years, this week, police and the FBI search returned to the land linked with their disappearance, James Liddell writes
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For decades, an unsolved cold case has haunted residents of a sleepy Maryland neighborhood.
Two days into the spring school holidays in 1975, and just days away from celebrating their 11th and 13th birthdays, Katherine and Sheila Lyon went out for pizza.
When they didn’t return home by curfew, their mom panicked. Hours later, police were alerted, and an active search got underway.
Divers, dogs and planes were deployed in one of the largest investigations the Washington, DC metropolitan area had ever seen. The little girls’ parents even sought help from a clairvoyant, but their efforts were to no avail.
The case sat cold for 42 years until, finally, investigators unearthed the file of a troubled young man with a pockmarked face who was interviewed by police days after the Lyon sisters’ disappearance.
Lloyd Lee Welch Jr — now aged 67 — was convicted in 2017 of the sisters’ abduction and murder. To this day, their remains have not been found.
This week, investigators began examining an area of land long linked with Katherine and Sheila’s disappearance.
There was “new evidence” from a cold case in Taylor’s Mountain, Virginia, the US Marshals Service said on Monday, although they did not specify what the evidence was or which case it related to.
Katherine and Sheila vanish
Katherine, 10, and Sheila, 12, lived with their parents and two brothers in Kensington, a tightly-knit, upper-middle-class town in Maryland.
After breakfast on March 25, 1975, the girls left for Wheaton Plaza shopping center, about half a mile down the road, carrying $2 each in their pockets. Their mother, Mary Lyon, had given them strict instructions to return home by 4pm.
“Why don’t you stop off and get some pizza,” she told the girls, as per her interview with the Toledo Blade on April 8, 1975.
At about 2.30pm, a friend spotted the girls walking home. While cooking fried chicken in her kitchen at 5.45pm, Mary began to worry that her girls were still out of the house.
By 7pm, Montgomery County Police Department was alerted of the missing sisters, and an active search began.
The Tape Recorder Man
A prevailing theory was that the girls were snatched by a man who was seen speaking to them on a bench outside a pizza parlor. He was recording the conversation on a tape machine, according to witnesses.
Two composite drawings were rendered, with investigators nicknaming the suspect “Tape Recorder Man”.
One of the Lyon sisters’ friends, who was slightly older than Sheila, also described a young, long-haired man ogling the children.
“Why don’t you take a picture of us? It’ll last longer!” the friend told the man, according to Mark Bowden’s exposé, The Last Stone.
Police rendered a sketch of a disheveled young man with a pitted face and scars on his left cheek.
On April 1, 1975, an aloof 18-year-old traveled to the shopping center to inform security he had seen a man matching the description.
The eyewitness provided his name: Lloyd Lee Welch Jr.
The long-haired drifter came from a withdrawn family who lived in the Appalachians. Welch had a penchant for drugs and alcohol — and he was already building up an extensive criminal record.
The teen provided police with a six-page statement recounting his version of events, and consented to a polygraph test.
He failed the test, received a lecture about lying to police, and was sent on his way.
Hunt for the Lyon sisters
Police sent scuba divers into ponds and storm sewers, searched from the sky in planes, and combed through acres of woodland and vacant buildings.
Specially-trained dogs were flown in to catch the girls’ scent in the Wheaton Plaza car park, only for it to be lost.
A $9,000 reward was offered for the sisters’ safe return.
On May 23, 1975, Maryland Lieutenant Governor Blair Lee ordered 122 National Guardsmen to participate in a search of a Montgomery County forest for the missing girls — again to no avail.
A tap was placed on the family’s telephone, and a policeman lived in their home for nearly a month, investigating every tip, according to the Lewington Tribune in August 1975.
By August, the girls’ mother Mary had lost hope, and believed them to be dead.
As the leaves started to yellow and summer drew to a close, the case was considered cold.
Case reopened
By 2013, many of those investigating the case were dead. The Lyon sisters’ case had been cold for almost 40 years.
One day, the deputy sergeant for the Montgomery County Police Department, Chris Homrock, was trawling through the case files and stumbled on a document from 1975 he had never seen before.
It belonged to an 18-year-old called Lloyd Lee Welch.
The policeman noticed something peculiar: Welch looked suspiciously similar to the composite drawing of the adolescent who was reported to have leered at the girls.
On further investigating Welch, Homrock learnt that he was incarcerated, at the back end of serving a 33-year sentence in a Delaware prison for molesting a 10-year-old girl in 1998.
He had accrued a serious criminal history between 1973 and 1997 for offenses including rape, domestic violence, and assault with a knife.
On October 16, Homrock traveled to Dover to visit Welch for the first in a string of eight interviews.
“I know why you’re here,” Welch muttered. “You’re here about those two missing kids.”
Welch went on to tell a series of contradictory tales, spinning one story after the next to explain what had happened to the Lyon sisters, always placing the blame for the crime on others.
By July 2014, his narrative became consistent: the girls had been abducted, raped and incinerated.
Grim details emerge
Welch admitted to investigators that the girls had been taken to the concrete basement at his uncle’s residence in Hyattsville. There, one of the sisters was allegedly sexually abused, the other dismembered, he told investigators.
After stuffing the girls’ remains into a duffel bag, Welch said, he buried their bodies on family-owned land on Taylor’s Mountain in Thaxton, Virginia.
Both the Hyattsville and Taylor’s Mountain residences were searched in September 2014.
Welch’s cousin Henry Parker told detectives that in spring 1975, he had helped move two army-style duffle bags from Welch’s vehicle that weighed up to 70lbs and smelled “like death”.
Welch claimed that the smell was rotten ground beef.
The bags were tossed in a fire, Parker testified.
A forensic search of the Taylor’s Mountain home uncovered small degraded fragments of human bone, a single tooth, a beaded necklace believed to have been worn by Katherine, and a section of charred wire, which may have been from Sheila’s glasses.
A May 2015 forensic examination of the rear room of the basement — using Bluestar spray — revealed extensive traces of blood, from the concrete floor to the ceiling. Samples were too degraded to conduct a genealogical analysis.
Welch pleads guilty
Welch continued to deny culpability for the girls’ actual murder — giving revised accounts in January, February and May 2015.
By July 2015, Welch was indicted on charges of second-degree murder, and this time, he admitted to abducting the girls in order that both he and his uncle could sexually abuse them in the basement of the Taylor’s Mountain home.
“They were killed in order for their captors to escape detection,” Bedford County Sheriff Mike Brown told The Post.
By the time of Welch’s indictment, cold case investigators had devoted more than 16,000 hours to the re-investigation of the sisters’ disappearance, issued more than 50 search warrants, and conducted more than 100 formal interviews with family members, eyewitnesses, and other persons of interest.
On September 12, 2017, Welch pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. He received two concurrent 48-year sentences in relation to two counts of first-degree murder.
On completion of his prison term in Delaware in 2026, Welch will be transferred to the Virginia facility.
Every day, Welch wakes up worrying that someone might “put a shank” in him for his crimes, he told Bowden in 2019.
Welch was prosecuted in Bedford County, Virginia, because authorities believe the children’s bodies are most likely buried in this location — the same area investigators have suddenly begun searching again.
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