As another newbie to this discussion, I need to first state that it is with great humility that I offer a long post about a subject that many of you, most especially Richard, have spent untold hours of your lives trying to make sense of: the disappearance of Sheila and Katherine Lyon. Particularly because, after having read almost every post in the Lyon Sisters forum over the past month, re-reading, imagining, percolating it in my brain, I’ve arrived at what is a distinctly minority position: that it was in all likelihood a neighborhood friend-of-the-family who got them into his home under pretext, and then, well, unimaginably horrible things happened to those two innocent girls.
But now that I’ve given away my conclusion, I’ll step back and try to explain how I reached this point, though I’m certainly not trying to present this as some great insight I’ve come to that others have missed. Most of my thoughts are recycled from the work others here have done long before I’d ever heard of the Lyon sisters, and even theories and posts that I’ve ultimately come to disagree with have still proven very valuable to me in thinking about this case, and in testing or challenging my assumptions. Which is what I’m striving to do here. Even if many find my theory/ies unlikely (or offensive, to some of you) I hope my musings will at least cause someone, about some aspect of the case, to say to him/herself, “I never thought of it that way before.”
One of the most fascinating/troubling/confusing things about the Lyon sister’s disappearance is that on one hand there is just the barest of ‘evidence’: they went to the mall, a handful of eyewitnesses place them at the mall or on the way home, they never arrived home, and no trace of them has ever been found. But on the other, it’s very difficult to weave even those few eyewitness reports into a coherent narrative.
i.e., if the girls and Tape Recorder Man were seen walking away from one another at the mall between 1:00-2:00 and they were seen walking home between 2:30-3:00 (I’m aware the latter is viewed with some skepticism) it’s very difficult for me to conceive how this is a sensible modus operandi for TRM. It involves him approaching them briefly at the mall (apparently without being seen by anyone else, save for ‘Jimmy’ and his friend, or interviewing anyone else that day) then going out of the mall, driving away and into their neighborhood, and lying in wait for them. I have a hard time buying the idea that he was able to garner enough information from them during his interview to then intercept them an hour later.
But let’s say one discounts the 2:30-3:00 sighting. It’s still hard for me to reconcile this idea that he went through the risk and rigmarole of interviewing them, just to seize them in the parking lot. If one’s goal is to abduct a child or children, why not just wait by the back entrance? Why interview anyone?
And, as others have noted, even if one accepts that these two girls would have taken that brief encounter as a sign that this individual could be trusted, he still has to provide a convincing reason for them to then get in his car. It was not a long walk home and the weather was not terrible. It just doesn’t ‘ring right’ to me.
(I discount the idea of a forced abduction because it would almost certainly require two men, and once two are privy to crime, it’s far more likely one starts talking, at some point, than if a single individual harbors a terrible secret for many years. And even with two men, it would be very risky and hard to pull off in a quiet, residential neighborhood, or a mall parking lot, even an isolated one, without anyone noticing it.)
But there are other problems with the ‘they voluntarily went with him’ abduction scenario. It requires not only that the man or men get them into the car, but since it’s a short drive home (or even to the hospital under the ‘your mother is hurt and your dad sent us to pick you up’ or ‘I/we am/are L.E.’
the girls will quickly realize that something very wrong. One then has two crying, screaming girls who have to be subdued, and quickly, then upon arrival at the destination transported from the car sight unseen to wherever they were assaulted and/or killed. That’s a helluva a lot caution-to-he-wind behavior for someone who ends up executing a ‘perfect crime’.
But, of course, any theory that does not involve TRM still has to explain him, because it does seem truly improbable, given everything that has been reported about him, that this individual encounters them and then they coincidentally fall prey to someone else a short time later. So, I think the possibility has to be seriously considered that there was no TRM, not that day, not ever. (I realize a number of you will become angry or stop reading, but please bear with me.)
My reasons to be skeptical are as follows: as has been noted, ‘Jimmy’ did not mention TRM to anyone for three days. For all of Wednesday and Thursday what was surely the number one topic of conversation, among his family, his friends, is the disappearance of the Lyon sisters. And yet in his re-tellings of his sighting, he does not once mention he saw them talking to this strange middle-aged man with a tape recorder. That seems odd.
And while the corroboration of the other boy would seem to back up ‘Jimmy’s account, that assumption can just as easily be stood on its head, as it requires two different boys, no doubt telling everyone they knew over the course of two days that ‘I/we saw them that day!’ but neglecting to include what I’d think even an incurious 13 year old would note as the most significant part of his account.
As noted, no one else saw the man interviewing them or claimed to have been interviewed by the man on that day, another odd aspect given how busy/crowded the mall was. As for the other witnesses who stepped forward after the sketch and public appeal was broadcast, I find it telling that there were no contemporaneous reports of this man**, but only after the fact. And that those folks who reported him never reported seeing him after the abduction (another item that works equally well with a ‘there was no TRM’ theory, as much as one in which he is responsible, because since the inference from the police/media was: TRM is the guy, they ‘knew’ a sighting reported after that date, but before Jimmy’s account became public, made no sense).
**I note the objections about not applying 2011 norms about reporting suspicious behavior to 1975, but I’ll also note that, while male, I’m just three years younger than Katherine, and also grew up in a ‘safe’ neighborhood near a big city. I still think it more likely than not someone would have reported to somebody, just the mall security, if no-one else, about a middle-aged man with a tape recorder trying to talk to children.
Also, given what I know about eyewitnesses, and again, things which have been used to prove his existence can be used to the opposite effect---I’ve really never heard of 15 witnesses, spread over time and distance, recalling what they witnessed, and finding unanimity. That the police artist’s sketch hardly had to be modified, even after all this other input, frankly makes me more, rather than less, skeptical that these folks saw TRM, but rather were merely confirming the sketch itself. If the accounts differed more, I would, ironically, give them more credence than everyone agreeing on everything about the man.
Two more points. Though I’m hardly an expert in serial murderers, and I have no doubt many, if not most, of you are better versed in such things than I, it’s my impression that while these men may ‘experiment’ with method of killing or body disposal, once they’ve come up with a successful approach (‘could you help me look for my puppy?’, Ted Bundy and his casts, etc.) they rarely vary that aspect of their crime. So I find it almost a red flag that Richard, truly a thorough, dedicated researcher, says he’s
never heard of ‘speak into my tape recorder’ outside of this case.
The other involves one of two coincidences that I feel, if I may, has been somewhat under-discussed in the otherwise exhaustive examinations here of the Lyon sister’s disappearance: namely that this seemingly unique approach of utilizing a tape recorder happens to be associated with two girls whose father was a well-known radio personality. That borders on the ‘too weird’, for me, anyway.
If those things are related, it suggests to me one of two things: that if TRM did exist, he specifically targeted these girls and with this particular approach because the microphone would provide an ‘in’ with them (which presents its own array of difficulties, including all the other ex post facto ‘witnesses’
. Or that ‘Jimmy’, consciously or not, included that bit of information because he knew their dad was a ‘microphone guy’ himself.
The most compelling reasons for treating Jimmy and his friend’s account as true are that a) it is a highly-detailed one and b) there are two of them (though I’ve noted above that the latter does raise its own questions.) Thirteen year old boys are usually pretty lousy liars, and one would think either he and/or his friend would have been tripped up initially during police questioning or recanted their tale over these many years.
All I’ll say is that by Friday, with absolutely no leads and nothing to go on, the police desperately wanted to believe ‘Jimmy’s story, and so maybe their collective ‘BS Detector’ wasn’t working as well as normal, and that that is the kind of lie, perhaps said somewhat casually to one’s mom, that quickly mushrooms way out control and becomes almost impossible to retract.
As to all the other witnesses to TRM, including members of this community, while I cannot control what you feel about what I say, the only person I would characterize as having ‘lied’ in any kind the usual sense of that word, is ‘Jimmy’. As a somewhat analogous situation, all I can do is point to such things as the ‘Bogus Social Worker’ phenomena in the UK: for more than 30 years now, many sincere, salt-of the-earth, non-delusional people have reported (usually after a press report about a similar incident) that they were visited at home by folks claiming to be social workers, who asked the parents questions, examined the child/children in the home, and left.
The only trouble is, despite intensive police investigations, there has never been an arrest or prosecution in any of these BSW cases. At some point, one is forced to conclude that as sure as these parents are that the events happened as described, there’s no objective evidence these visitors ever existed, and indeed probably need to be classified as the manifestation of a social panic of some sort. And the fear that gripped parents and children in the DC area in April ’75 must have been palpable.
It doesn’t make the witnesses ‘liars’ (people who are saying things they know to be false) or crazy or attention-seekers or what-have-you. But working from the assumptions that because they’re honest, regular people who reported it, that they had no reason to make it up, and that lots of other people reported the same thing, so it must be so, doesn’t square very well with the fact that no-one’s ever actually been identified as being either TRM or one of these BSWs.
(As an aside, I don’t find the ‘second TRM’ or the station wagon sighting particularly credible and would gently suggest that these two individuals did have “issues”.)
If the person responsible was someone who was known to the family, that’s where the other coincidence that I mentioned comes into play and that I feel might be part of how these terrible events unfolded. Katherine was turning 11 the following Saturday and Sheila 13 the very next day, Easter Sunday that year. (And though I don’t know the day, IIRC, some of the press reports had their mother celebrating a birthday soon.). While it’s been offered that religious symbolism might be part of the killer choosing who he did when he did, I’m speaking merely of the ruse the predator used to set things up.
A neighborhood friend/acquaintance of the family could have easily found out about such a thing, from Sheila having told people ‘Guess what…?’ or from the church newsletter , or being aware of the Lyon’s Easter weekend plans, or what-have-you, and that became the basis for luring her (and perhaps he thought it would just be her) into his house. (‘Easter Sunday and you’ll be 13? Well, that’s a very special birthday then, if you stop by sometime his week, I’ll have a surprise present for you!’ ) Or maybe it involved something regarding a gift for Katherine or their mom or an Easter display. I’m not utterly convinced of this, it could all be merely happenstance, but I do find it curious and perhaps a useful angle to pursue.
I do take Thrasher’s (and others) points to heart, that there was a huge police investigation, the authorities took it very seriously from the get-go, and that friends, neighbors, etc. were all looked at closely. But it’s not unheard of, even in well-investigated cold cases, for the perpetrator to eventually be found, and it turns out that it was indeed, not a stranger. So I understand the doubts about it being someone known to the family, but I don’t think it can be dismissed out of hand, either.
I think the suggestion that has been made about looking for a college-age male who was home for spring break is a good thought, though under my scenario the young man’s family would have to have been away. This was a crime that required being absolutely alone, with no interruptions, over a period of hours.
If anyone is still reading, my apologies for the length and to anyone who is upset by what I’ve written. I just hope, whatever its shortcomings, it’s taken in the spirit that we all want a resolution to this mystery and those responsible brought to justice, This just reflects what this pair of ‘fresh eyes’ has taken away from all the many hours labor you-all have already put into it and been gracious enough to share on this board.
