The world was not a safer place 40 years ago when 12-year-old Sheila Lyon and her 10-year-old sister Katherine went missing … it’s just that children in their era were more naive and trusting.
Now, after several long and tumultuous decades, there has been a break in their cold case disappearances and assumed murders, even though the little girls’ bodies have yet to be located.
Police this week charged known pedophile Lloyd Welch Jr. for the Lyon girls’ abductions and suspected slayings in 1975, after a young investigator “connected all the dots” in a missing-persons case that has vexed detectives ever since the siblings vanished only blocks from their Maryland home.
Welch is a repeat sexual offender and is in fact currently incarcerated for at least two incidences of child molestation, but police have long suspected he was the fiend responsible for kidnapping, defiling, and then disposing of the two young Lyon sisters.
“A conspiracy” to conceal evidence “and noncooperation has prolonged this investigation and made it difficult,” a law enforcement official explained, when asked by reporters to address the inordinate length of time between first interviewing the prime suspect in 1975 and charging him after 40 years.
Within that timeframe -- and undoubtedly because of the unjust fate of these two innocent victims -- things have drastically changed, and, as a result, criminals like Lloyd Michael Welch are meeting up with far more savvy youngsters than they did in the 1960s and 70s.
“These were wonderful, wonderful, naive, young children,” said the Montgomery County Maryland attorney about the still-missing sisters.
So too the Lyon investigation, which is once more classified as active, has slowly progressed throughout those years. In recent times, leading to the conviction of a Welch family member on charges of perjury, plus a credible tip that launched a body search in 2014 in a mountainous region of Virginia.
So what else was learned that ultimately led to the now 58-year-old Welch being charged this month for a crime he is believed to have committed when he was only 18 years of age?
That, in 1975, the budding sexual predator not only admitted to being the last person to see and interact with the girls, but asked a relative to wash his bloody clothes days after they were reported missing.
