Police promise more arrests in the 1975 cold case disappearance and suspected murders of two young Maryland sisters.
This week jailed pedophile and repeat-offender Lloyd Welch Jr. was indicted on kidnapping, rape and murder charges in the deaths of Sheila Lyon, 12, and her sister Katherine, 10.
Neither missing child’s body has been found yet, but prosecutors recently revealed their theory in the 40-year unsolved case, and, if proven accurate, it’s every parent’s worst nightmare:
Four decades ago, the two siblings left on foot together for a mall close to their Wheaton MD home to have lunch and do some shopping. But neither made it back again, after accused rapist and killer Welch intercepted the girls.
Thereafter an untold number of Welch’s relatives and friends assisted him in concealing the two slain sisters, as well as any evidence -- such as Welch’s bloody clothes -- that would have linked him to the double abduction, assault and homicide.
Investigators say those “accessories after the fact” unlawfully aided Lloyd Lee Welch in an effort to dispose of the girls’ then-decaying remains in two separate duffle bags somewhere in a remote and mountainous region of neighboring Virginia.
There, they believe, the corpses were destroyed in a bonfire.
The gruesome facts of the 1975 cold case were finally extracted from Henry Parker, a cousin of the prime suspect who, in addition to Welch, has been a focus of the on-again off-again missing persons investigation for years.
Parker’s belated confession last winter paves the way to finally solving the terrible crimes that befell the Lyons in 1975, and in bringing all the parties involved to justice at last.
Therefore the recent charges brought against incarcerated sex-offender Lloyd Welch this week are "just the beginning of indictments," vowed the commander of Maryland County’s major crimes division, Darren Franke.
He said prosecutors from both Maryland and Virginia will be pursuing every individual who aided Welch in eluding detection and arrest 40 years ago, no matter how minor a role they might think they played in that criminal undertaking.
