Nearly 50 years ago two sisters went for pizza and vanished. Investigators have now unearthed new evidence
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 was on the way.
Divers, dogs and planes were deployed in the 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 search came 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 of the sisters’ abduction and murder in 2017. To this day, their remains have never 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, Virgina, the US Marshals Service said on Monday, although they did not specify what the evidence was or which case it related to.
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,” mom Mary Lyon 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.
A prevailing theory was that the girls were snatched by a man whowas seen speaking to them on a bench outside a pizza parlor. He was recording the conversation on a tape machine, according to witnesses.
