Lyons Sisters Media and Document Links **NO DISCUSSION**
- Thread starter Richard
- Start date
This article was written on the 35th anniversary of the girls' disappearance. Note that the writers borrowed heavily from my summary of the case, but they also interviewed a number of persons for their memories of those days.
------------------------------------------
The Gazette (Montgomery County, Maryland)
Intense search only left police, community frustrated
by Charlotte Tucker and Chris Williams
Staff Writers
March 23, 2005
Photo:
Dan Gross/The Gazette Retired Police Sgt. Harry Geehreng leafs through a scrapbook of old cases in his Damascus home. "Because we had nothing, we had no really substantial leads, we were just grasping at anything that came in, not wanting to disregard any tip," he said.
See related story: Innoncence lost
While investigators had few clues in the disappearance of Sheila and Katherine Lyon, one thing was almost certain -- the girls had not run away from home.Police did not keep statistics on missing children in 1975. But according to Carla Proudfoot, director of the Maryland Center for Missing Children, Sheila and Katherine, at 12 and 10, were younger than most kids who leave home by choice.
"Most runaways are between 14 and 17 years old," she said, adding that those ages haven't changed since 1986, when the state agency first began keeping the data.
The widespread search began in the early hours of March 26, 1975. Retired Sgt. Harry Geehreng, a plainclothes detective in the department's Juvenile Aid Unit at the time, remembers tearing up his leisure suit while searching through briars in the woods near the girls' Kensington neighborhood.
"You really cannot fathom the emotion involved in it, the intensity -- and the frustration," Geehreng said.Over the first few days, searchers combed back yards and the woods the girls would have had to walk through to get to the mall. Police dredged the pond near the Kensington Gardens Nursing Home on McComas Avenue. Officers wearing oxygen masks searched storm drains and sewers. Police looked in people's homes.
"They came around to all the neighbors," remembered Peg Dunne, who lives on Drumm Avenue near where the girls disappeared. "They asked if they could search basements, garages -- it was strictly volunteer."
Douglas DeLawter, who has lived in Kensington for 38 years, remembers the intensity of the police search.
"They came in the house, looked in closets and boxes and under stairs," he said. "The detectives interviewed everyone."If the search appeared desperate early on in the investigation, statistics validated the police's concern.
"For one thing, it's unusual that two girls, especially sisters, would go missing at the same time," said Ron Jones, a case manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who was a Metropolitan Police detective before working at the nonprofit. "It's happened before, but it's unusual. And at that time, we weren't hearing about too many child abductions. It was odd that they would just disappear off the face of the earth."
In talking to patrons and employees who had been at Wheaton Plaza that day, police learned that several people had seen the girls talking to a man holding a microphone attached to a tape recorder inside a briefcase. Witnesses said he was trying to record women's voices for an answering machine. When news of the man with the tape recorder broke, police were inundated with calls from other girls and women who had been approached by a similar man.
"That really set it off," Geehreng said. "By Sunday we were getting so many phone calls we had to call more people in."
The man was described as approximately 6 feet tall and 50 years old, wearing a brown suit and carrying a brown briefcase. Police released two composite sketches of the man based on witness descriptions, including an account by two salesgirls and a customer who said they saw the man on March 22 -- three days before Sheila and Katherine disappeared -- at Iverson Mall and Marlow Heights in Prince George's County.
As the search for the girls moved into its third week, a sort of mania about the case developed in communities around Washington, D.C.
First came the news that an IBM executive reported seeing two girls bound and gagged in the back of a station wagon stopped at a red light in Manassas, Va. The executive said the driver saw him looking at the girls and drove off, running the red light. He said the vehicle was a 1968 beige Ford station wagon with Maryland tags; he was able to make out the first four characters of the license plate, DMT-6, but the rest of the tag was bent and obscured, reports said.The announcement of the supposed sighting touched off a frenzy of activity. The Washington Post reported that C-B radio operators chased phantom suspects. Truck drivers forced beige Ford station wagons from the road and examined their contents.
"The governor sent the National Guard to help us search," Geehreng said. "We searched a wooded area on Muncaster Road [in Rockville]. ... A psychic had called in and said we would find a body there. Because we had nothing, we had no really substantial leads, we were just grasping at anything that came in, not wanting to disregard any tip."
Extortionists also took advantage of the case. An Annapolis radio station reported that John Lyon, the girls' father, was told to leave $10,000 at a location in Annapolis, but police would not confirm the extortion attempt. The station said that the money was not picked up, no arrest was made and investigators thought the attempt was fake.
Police have considered a few suspects over the years, including Fred Howard Coffey, a man convicted in 1987 of murdering a young girl in North Carolina. Police learned that Coffey was living in Silver Spring around the time that Sheila and Katherine disappeared, and they began considering him a suspect in March 1987, according to published reports and the national missing children center. Police were unable to connect him to the case, however, and he has never been charged.
Coffey, who is serving a life sentence in a North Carolina prison, did not respond to a request for an interview.
In 1982 police also dug up the yard of Raymond Rudolph Mileski, a Suitland man serving a 40-year prison term for killing his wife and teenage son in their home in November 1977. Police were looking for evidence connecting Mileski to the Lyon case but came away empty-handed.
Geehreng does not quite remember when the department's focus began to shift away from the Lyon girls."I really can't tell you, but you reach a point where you have other things to do, so you have to start turning your resources back to other cases," he said. "But the intensity level remained very, very high for a long time."
Today, the case file is spread out across two tables in a room at police headquarters in Rockville, said Lt. Philip C. Raum, Deputy Director of the Major Crimes Division. After 30 years, the investigation remains a high priority and sits atop the caseload of the department's Cold Case Unit.
LINK:
http://www.gazette.net/200512/montgomerycty/county/265842-1.html
------------------------------------------
The Gazette (Montgomery County, Maryland)
Intense search only left police, community frustrated
by Charlotte Tucker and Chris Williams
Staff Writers
March 23, 2005
Photo:
Dan Gross/The Gazette Retired Police Sgt. Harry Geehreng leafs through a scrapbook of old cases in his Damascus home. "Because we had nothing, we had no really substantial leads, we were just grasping at anything that came in, not wanting to disregard any tip," he said.
See related story: Innoncence lost
While investigators had few clues in the disappearance of Sheila and Katherine Lyon, one thing was almost certain -- the girls had not run away from home.Police did not keep statistics on missing children in 1975. But according to Carla Proudfoot, director of the Maryland Center for Missing Children, Sheila and Katherine, at 12 and 10, were younger than most kids who leave home by choice.
"Most runaways are between 14 and 17 years old," she said, adding that those ages haven't changed since 1986, when the state agency first began keeping the data.
The widespread search began in the early hours of March 26, 1975. Retired Sgt. Harry Geehreng, a plainclothes detective in the department's Juvenile Aid Unit at the time, remembers tearing up his leisure suit while searching through briars in the woods near the girls' Kensington neighborhood.
"You really cannot fathom the emotion involved in it, the intensity -- and the frustration," Geehreng said.Over the first few days, searchers combed back yards and the woods the girls would have had to walk through to get to the mall. Police dredged the pond near the Kensington Gardens Nursing Home on McComas Avenue. Officers wearing oxygen masks searched storm drains and sewers. Police looked in people's homes.
"They came around to all the neighbors," remembered Peg Dunne, who lives on Drumm Avenue near where the girls disappeared. "They asked if they could search basements, garages -- it was strictly volunteer."
Douglas DeLawter, who has lived in Kensington for 38 years, remembers the intensity of the police search.
"They came in the house, looked in closets and boxes and under stairs," he said. "The detectives interviewed everyone."If the search appeared desperate early on in the investigation, statistics validated the police's concern.
"For one thing, it's unusual that two girls, especially sisters, would go missing at the same time," said Ron Jones, a case manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who was a Metropolitan Police detective before working at the nonprofit. "It's happened before, but it's unusual. And at that time, we weren't hearing about too many child abductions. It was odd that they would just disappear off the face of the earth."
In talking to patrons and employees who had been at Wheaton Plaza that day, police learned that several people had seen the girls talking to a man holding a microphone attached to a tape recorder inside a briefcase. Witnesses said he was trying to record women's voices for an answering machine. When news of the man with the tape recorder broke, police were inundated with calls from other girls and women who had been approached by a similar man.
"That really set it off," Geehreng said. "By Sunday we were getting so many phone calls we had to call more people in."
The man was described as approximately 6 feet tall and 50 years old, wearing a brown suit and carrying a brown briefcase. Police released two composite sketches of the man based on witness descriptions, including an account by two salesgirls and a customer who said they saw the man on March 22 -- three days before Sheila and Katherine disappeared -- at Iverson Mall and Marlow Heights in Prince George's County.
As the search for the girls moved into its third week, a sort of mania about the case developed in communities around Washington, D.C.
First came the news that an IBM executive reported seeing two girls bound and gagged in the back of a station wagon stopped at a red light in Manassas, Va. The executive said the driver saw him looking at the girls and drove off, running the red light. He said the vehicle was a 1968 beige Ford station wagon with Maryland tags; he was able to make out the first four characters of the license plate, DMT-6, but the rest of the tag was bent and obscured, reports said.The announcement of the supposed sighting touched off a frenzy of activity. The Washington Post reported that C-B radio operators chased phantom suspects. Truck drivers forced beige Ford station wagons from the road and examined their contents.
"The governor sent the National Guard to help us search," Geehreng said. "We searched a wooded area on Muncaster Road [in Rockville]. ... A psychic had called in and said we would find a body there. Because we had nothing, we had no really substantial leads, we were just grasping at anything that came in, not wanting to disregard any tip."
Extortionists also took advantage of the case. An Annapolis radio station reported that John Lyon, the girls' father, was told to leave $10,000 at a location in Annapolis, but police would not confirm the extortion attempt. The station said that the money was not picked up, no arrest was made and investigators thought the attempt was fake.
Police have considered a few suspects over the years, including Fred Howard Coffey, a man convicted in 1987 of murdering a young girl in North Carolina. Police learned that Coffey was living in Silver Spring around the time that Sheila and Katherine disappeared, and they began considering him a suspect in March 1987, according to published reports and the national missing children center. Police were unable to connect him to the case, however, and he has never been charged.
Coffey, who is serving a life sentence in a North Carolina prison, did not respond to a request for an interview.
In 1982 police also dug up the yard of Raymond Rudolph Mileski, a Suitland man serving a 40-year prison term for killing his wife and teenage son in their home in November 1977. Police were looking for evidence connecting Mileski to the Lyon case but came away empty-handed.
Geehreng does not quite remember when the department's focus began to shift away from the Lyon girls."I really can't tell you, but you reach a point where you have other things to do, so you have to start turning your resources back to other cases," he said. "But the intensity level remained very, very high for a long time."
Today, the case file is spread out across two tables in a room at police headquarters in Rockville, said Lt. Philip C. Raum, Deputy Director of the Major Crimes Division. After 30 years, the investigation remains a high priority and sits atop the caseload of the department's Cold Case Unit.
LINK:
http://www.gazette.net/200512/montgomerycty/county/265842-1.html
Innocence lostMar. 29, 2005Charlotte Tucker and Chris Williams
Staff Writers
[font=arial,sans-serif][/font]
http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/104357/0/clickCGI?zone=gazette
Sheila and Katherine Lyon left their
Kensington home on a spring afternoon in 1975 to eat pizza and window-shop at a nearby mall.
As many kids did in that simpler time, the sisters walked the half-mile to Wheaton Plaza shopping center. Their mother just expected them to be home in time for dinner.
Instead, the girls vanished without a trace. And with them went a way of life.
The disappearance of the Lyon sisters on March 25, 1975, just days before their 13th and 11th birthdays, changed their neighborhood
and changed Montgomery County.
Theirs had been an idyllic suburban community, where families knew and looked out for each other, and the thick trees lining old streets lent an air of solid security. That illusion of safety was shattered by the terrible events of 30 years ago. In the days and weeks after the Lyon sisters disappeared, parents began to realize that the suburbs could be touched by tragedy just as easily as inner-city communities.
http://www.gazette.net/gazette_archive/2005b/200512/montgomerycty/county/265841-1.html
Staff Writers
[font=arial,sans-serif][/font]
http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/104357/0/clickCGI?zone=gazette
Sheila and Katherine Lyon left their
Kensington home on a spring afternoon in 1975 to eat pizza and window-shop at a nearby mall.
As many kids did in that simpler time, the sisters walked the half-mile to Wheaton Plaza shopping center. Their mother just expected them to be home in time for dinner.
Instead, the girls vanished without a trace. And with them went a way of life.
The disappearance of the Lyon sisters on March 25, 1975, just days before their 13th and 11th birthdays, changed their neighborhood
and changed Montgomery County.
Theirs had been an idyllic suburban community, where families knew and looked out for each other, and the thick trees lining old streets lent an air of solid security. That illusion of safety was shattered by the terrible events of 30 years ago. In the days and weeks after the Lyon sisters disappeared, parents began to realize that the suburbs could be touched by tragedy just as easily as inner-city communities.
http://www.gazette.net/gazette_archive/2005b/200512/montgomerycty/county/265841-1.html
This was posted on another thread, but I am putting it here as well for ready reference...
Below is the text of a front page article which appeared in The Washington Star newspaper on Thursday, April 3, 1975. It is an interview with the boy who saw and described The Tape Recorder Man talking with Sheila and Katherine Lyon on the afternoon of 25 March 1975, at Wheaton Plaza shortly before they disappeared.
The headline is a bit misleading, because the girls were actually seen a short time later by their brother, Jay and possibly a little later by another boy.
Aside from "Jimmy's" detailed statement and description to the Montgomery County Police on 28 March 1975, this is as close as it comes to a first hand account of exactly what he saw and heard in regard to TRM and the Lyon sisters. To my knowledge, it is the only newspaper interview that he gave.
Also interviewed in this article is Davis Morton, the Montgomery County Police officer who drew the two composite sketches of TRM. A print of the second or "updated drawing" was included with the story.
After reporting on their interview with Jimmy and his mother, and with Davis Morton, the article shifted theme to give an account of what people were saying about the case and about how they were all reconsidering safety and security issues.
The Washington Star newspaper went out of business in 1982, and to my knowledge, there are no "on line" archives of their articles. I obtained a copy of this interview from a microfilm file in a library.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Eyewitness: Last Time the Lyon Girls Were Seen
Thursday, April 3, 1975
By Mary Ann Kuhn and Rebecca Leet
Washington Star Staff Writers
Jimmy sat in a blue armchair in the living room of his family's Kensington home, letting his 13-year-old legs with their high-top sneakers stretch out on the turquoise rug as he talked publicly for the first time about the man he saw with the missing Lyon sisters last week at Wheaton Plaza.
Jimmy is the teen-ager who provided Montgomery County police with a description of the 50 to 60-year-old man he saw talking to the girls, Sheila, 13, and Katherine, 11, daughters of John and Mary Lyon of 3xxx Plyers Mill Road.
With his help, police drew a sketch of the man's face which has been published in newspapers and shown on television. Police have kept Jimmy's identity a secret. Jimmy (not his real name) did not seek publicity. His parents, fearful of retaliation, requested that his real name not be used.
Last night, four women who called police saying they recognized the man in the sketch went to the Wheaton Police station to offer help in drawing a new composite.
According to Pfc. Davis Morton, a robbery squad detective who does composites "to help out whenever it's needed," the 13-year-old's description of the man was accurate.
"I showed the composite to four women (separately) and it seemed to be basically the guy they had seen," he said. "They suggested a few minor changes, but I don't know if they would even be noticeable."
"Sometimes you're close and sometimes you're way off (in making a composite) but I feel better about this one because of the other witnesses."
"It was about 1 or 2 o'clock." Jimmy related. "I was out with a friend. We were down near ... um ... Peoples (Drug Store) and the Orange Bowl (pizza carryout) and we saw the two girls talking to a man with a tape recorder."
"I heard the man ask one question: ' Are any of you two involved in sports?'"
"And then ... um ... 30 seconds later I looked back. He was walking away toward Wards (Montgomery Ward) and the girls were walking the other way toward the fountain."
Jimmy stopped talking. Up to then, the words had tumbled out. He sat there and crossed his hands over his maroon lettered football jersey.
His parents didn't say anything.
His mother sat on the sofa with an untouched glass of red wine on the next table while her husband sat across the room with the newspaper opened across his folded legs. Jimmy was asked to give more details about what he had seen.
He smiled when he told how he and his friend had joked about going over to the man and asking him to interview them so they could get on television.
"I said to my friend, 'Hey, look over there. I wonder what's going on. It looks like a reporter.' We thought he was some kind of a reporter," Jimmy explained. "We were joking around that maybe we should go over there and get him to interview us."
"The man was holding a microphone in his hand between the girls, and asking questions. He had a tan briefcase on the ground. It was one of those hard ones that sat up." the boy said, adding that the tape recorder was sitting next to the man, out of the briefcase.
The man was sitting on the ledge next to an island of (illegible word - bushes?) in the middle of the plaza, Jimmy said. People sit on the ledge to rest during their shopping sprees or to eat a snack or pizza from the carryout.
Jimmy said he had never seen the man before or since. He said the man was well dressed in a brown suit.
Jimmy, who lives several blocks from the Lyons said he and his friend rode their bikes up to the plaza that day "to see friends. We just went up there to ride around. We had nothing else to do so we decided to go up there and look around."
Jimmy's mother said that right after the news came out that the Lyon girls were missing, her son told her he had seen them at the plaza. But it wasn't until Friday that he mentioned anything about the man with a tape recorder, she said.
"On Friday, he said that the girls were talking to a reporter. I said, 'How do you know he was a reporter?' He said because he had a microphone. I told him that could have been anybody and notified police."
At the police station on Friday, Jimmy said, the police "had me look through two files of mug shots."
(The beginning of the next sentence seems to have been left out of the printed article)
... in a while, a police officer would ask me if everything was all right (with the sketch). I'd tell them what was right and what was wrong." Jimmy said he thought the sketch was a good likeness. His mother said he was at the police station 2 1/2 hours that day.
Jimmy's friend who was with him the day the Lyon girls were seen with the man at the plaza verified virtually everything Jimmy said except that he said he did not hear any of the conversation between the man and the girls.
"I hope they find them." Jimmy said.
Meanwhile, fewer kids are "hanging" at Wheaton Plaza in the days since the Lyon sisters disappeared.
"Kensington, Md., isn't all that exciting a place, " 15-year-old Rachel Farr explained the mall's magnetism for teen-agers yesterday. "This (the plaza) is the best place to hang."
But now, "There's a kind of eerie feeling around the mall.... You can really see it," said 16-year-old Eric Provost, assistant manager at the Orange Bowl. "There's less talk. Less fooling around. When somegody goes up now (to the plaza) they have a reason."
Karen McGhee, 11, said that when her friend's coat fell as they were walking through the plaza yesterday and a man stopped to point it out, "I got my lungs ready to scream if he grabbed her."
A spokesman in the plaza manager's office said calls have come in from people wanting to know if it is safe to come there and shop.
If Montgomery County teen-agers are not gathering at the mall, they also are not running away from home as much since the Lyon girls disappeared, according to the county's Juvenile Bureau, which is investigating the case.
After eight tense days, the investigation of the Lyon girls' disappearance is settling into the tiring, colorless and seemingly endless routine of tracking down one fruitless lead after another - remembering, the police often note, that it may take only one good lead to resolve the mystery.
Yesterday, specially trained tracking dogs from Philadelphia spent the morning sniffing the area behind Oakland Terrace Elementary School and Newport Junior High, where the girls are students, in a re-check of an area officers already have searched twice.
Police said the dogs turned up nothing. Their two day role in the continuing drama ended as have so many apparently hopeful starts - quietly, uneventfully, sadly.
"We don't have anything," one officer said yesterday. "We're right back where we started."
Below is the text of a front page article which appeared in The Washington Star newspaper on Thursday, April 3, 1975. It is an interview with the boy who saw and described The Tape Recorder Man talking with Sheila and Katherine Lyon on the afternoon of 25 March 1975, at Wheaton Plaza shortly before they disappeared.
The headline is a bit misleading, because the girls were actually seen a short time later by their brother, Jay and possibly a little later by another boy.
Aside from "Jimmy's" detailed statement and description to the Montgomery County Police on 28 March 1975, this is as close as it comes to a first hand account of exactly what he saw and heard in regard to TRM and the Lyon sisters. To my knowledge, it is the only newspaper interview that he gave.
Also interviewed in this article is Davis Morton, the Montgomery County Police officer who drew the two composite sketches of TRM. A print of the second or "updated drawing" was included with the story.
After reporting on their interview with Jimmy and his mother, and with Davis Morton, the article shifted theme to give an account of what people were saying about the case and about how they were all reconsidering safety and security issues.
The Washington Star newspaper went out of business in 1982, and to my knowledge, there are no "on line" archives of their articles. I obtained a copy of this interview from a microfilm file in a library.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Eyewitness: Last Time the Lyon Girls Were Seen
Thursday, April 3, 1975
By Mary Ann Kuhn and Rebecca Leet
Washington Star Staff Writers
Jimmy sat in a blue armchair in the living room of his family's Kensington home, letting his 13-year-old legs with their high-top sneakers stretch out on the turquoise rug as he talked publicly for the first time about the man he saw with the missing Lyon sisters last week at Wheaton Plaza.
Jimmy is the teen-ager who provided Montgomery County police with a description of the 50 to 60-year-old man he saw talking to the girls, Sheila, 13, and Katherine, 11, daughters of John and Mary Lyon of 3xxx Plyers Mill Road.
With his help, police drew a sketch of the man's face which has been published in newspapers and shown on television. Police have kept Jimmy's identity a secret. Jimmy (not his real name) did not seek publicity. His parents, fearful of retaliation, requested that his real name not be used.
Last night, four women who called police saying they recognized the man in the sketch went to the Wheaton Police station to offer help in drawing a new composite.
According to Pfc. Davis Morton, a robbery squad detective who does composites "to help out whenever it's needed," the 13-year-old's description of the man was accurate.
"I showed the composite to four women (separately) and it seemed to be basically the guy they had seen," he said. "They suggested a few minor changes, but I don't know if they would even be noticeable."
"Sometimes you're close and sometimes you're way off (in making a composite) but I feel better about this one because of the other witnesses."
"It was about 1 or 2 o'clock." Jimmy related. "I was out with a friend. We were down near ... um ... Peoples (Drug Store) and the Orange Bowl (pizza carryout) and we saw the two girls talking to a man with a tape recorder."
"I heard the man ask one question: ' Are any of you two involved in sports?'"
"And then ... um ... 30 seconds later I looked back. He was walking away toward Wards (Montgomery Ward) and the girls were walking the other way toward the fountain."
Jimmy stopped talking. Up to then, the words had tumbled out. He sat there and crossed his hands over his maroon lettered football jersey.
His parents didn't say anything.
His mother sat on the sofa with an untouched glass of red wine on the next table while her husband sat across the room with the newspaper opened across his folded legs. Jimmy was asked to give more details about what he had seen.
He smiled when he told how he and his friend had joked about going over to the man and asking him to interview them so they could get on television.
"I said to my friend, 'Hey, look over there. I wonder what's going on. It looks like a reporter.' We thought he was some kind of a reporter," Jimmy explained. "We were joking around that maybe we should go over there and get him to interview us."
"The man was holding a microphone in his hand between the girls, and asking questions. He had a tan briefcase on the ground. It was one of those hard ones that sat up." the boy said, adding that the tape recorder was sitting next to the man, out of the briefcase.
The man was sitting on the ledge next to an island of (illegible word - bushes?) in the middle of the plaza, Jimmy said. People sit on the ledge to rest during their shopping sprees or to eat a snack or pizza from the carryout.
Jimmy said he had never seen the man before or since. He said the man was well dressed in a brown suit.
Jimmy, who lives several blocks from the Lyons said he and his friend rode their bikes up to the plaza that day "to see friends. We just went up there to ride around. We had nothing else to do so we decided to go up there and look around."
Jimmy's mother said that right after the news came out that the Lyon girls were missing, her son told her he had seen them at the plaza. But it wasn't until Friday that he mentioned anything about the man with a tape recorder, she said.
"On Friday, he said that the girls were talking to a reporter. I said, 'How do you know he was a reporter?' He said because he had a microphone. I told him that could have been anybody and notified police."
At the police station on Friday, Jimmy said, the police "had me look through two files of mug shots."
(The beginning of the next sentence seems to have been left out of the printed article)
... in a while, a police officer would ask me if everything was all right (with the sketch). I'd tell them what was right and what was wrong." Jimmy said he thought the sketch was a good likeness. His mother said he was at the police station 2 1/2 hours that day.
Jimmy's friend who was with him the day the Lyon girls were seen with the man at the plaza verified virtually everything Jimmy said except that he said he did not hear any of the conversation between the man and the girls.
"I hope they find them." Jimmy said.
Meanwhile, fewer kids are "hanging" at Wheaton Plaza in the days since the Lyon sisters disappeared.
"Kensington, Md., isn't all that exciting a place, " 15-year-old Rachel Farr explained the mall's magnetism for teen-agers yesterday. "This (the plaza) is the best place to hang."
But now, "There's a kind of eerie feeling around the mall.... You can really see it," said 16-year-old Eric Provost, assistant manager at the Orange Bowl. "There's less talk. Less fooling around. When somegody goes up now (to the plaza) they have a reason."
Karen McGhee, 11, said that when her friend's coat fell as they were walking through the plaza yesterday and a man stopped to point it out, "I got my lungs ready to scream if he grabbed her."
A spokesman in the plaza manager's office said calls have come in from people wanting to know if it is safe to come there and shop.
If Montgomery County teen-agers are not gathering at the mall, they also are not running away from home as much since the Lyon girls disappeared, according to the county's Juvenile Bureau, which is investigating the case.
After eight tense days, the investigation of the Lyon girls' disappearance is settling into the tiring, colorless and seemingly endless routine of tracking down one fruitless lead after another - remembering, the police often note, that it may take only one good lead to resolve the mystery.
Yesterday, specially trained tracking dogs from Philadelphia spent the morning sniffing the area behind Oakland Terrace Elementary School and Newport Junior High, where the girls are students, in a re-check of an area officers already have searched twice.
Police said the dogs turned up nothing. Their two day role in the continuing drama ended as have so many apparently hopeful starts - quietly, uneventfully, sadly.
"We don't have anything," one officer said yesterday. "We're right back where we started."
Kathy Lynn Beatty was abducted, assulted, and left for dead on 24 July 1975 in Aspen Hill, Maryland - only four miles north of where the Lyon sisters were last seen on 25 March 1975. Although the two cases have never been linked forensically, it is possible that the two cases were connected.
Montgomery County Police looked into the possibility that convicted child molester and child murderer Fred Howard Coffey, Jr. might have committed one or both of these still unsolved crimes.
-----------------------------------------------
From the Washington Post Newspaper 6 January 1977
Maryland Weekly Section, Page 1:
The Beatty murder: "we have ideas about who was involved"
By Martha M. Hamilton
Washington Post Reporter
The posters are still there, taped to the window of the Aspen Hill barbershop asking for someone to come forward with information to help solve the killing of Kathy Lynn Beatty.
The police still believe someone will, and her mother prays that it is so. "The police seemed so sure in the beginning that they would find the person responsible, but now I am not so sure," said Patricia Beatty. So far there is no answer to who left her 15-year-old daughter dying from head injuries in the rocky area behind the K-Mart in Aspen Hill.
Kathy didn't die until 11 days later in the intensive care unit at Suburban Hospital. "The hospital personnel led us to believe that she would be able to talk. That's what we needed - a little break" said Maj. Wayne Brown, Chief of the Criminal Investigations Division of the Montgomery County Police.
It was July 24, 1975, when Kathy received the fatal blow to her head and was left lying behind the K-Mart at Georgia and Connecticut Avenues. She and her mother and older sister were just back from vacation in Atlantic City. A friend of her mother's was a contender in the millionaire lottery drawing to be held in Baltimore that night, and her mother was going to Baltimore. Kathy and her sister decided to stay home.
Her mother last saw her about 4 p.m. Kathy had been inside all day watching television, "and she asked me if she could go outside and ride her bike," said Mrs. Beatty. Her mother said she could, invited her to Baltimore again, and told her to fix her own supper since Kathy declined again.
"I said I would be home at 9. She knew she had to be home by 8:30, because she wasn't allowed out after dark. We said goodbye and she went off on her bike," her mother recalled.
Instead of 9 p.m., it was closer to 11 when Mrs. Beatty returned, and when she saw the dark house, she was frightened, she said. But when she turned on the lights there was a note from Kathy saying she had gone to a friend's and would be back at 10 p.m. It was raining, and Kathy's mother assumed her daughter was waiting for a ride home.
She headed for the friend's house, but when she arrived, Kathy wasn't there. "The children said she had been there but had left," said Mrs. Beatty. As it happened, Kathy had not been there at all. "I think they were trying to cover for her".
At that point, she began to worry again, she said. She called other friends of her daughter until she had only one more to try - a boy on whom Kathy had a crush. The two had been sweethearts in 8th grade, and Kathy continued to be fond of him, said Mrs. Beatty. She thought that Kathy might have found an excuse to be wherever he had been and that he might have seen her.
The boy and a freind were supposed to be sleeping outside in a camper, she said the boy's father told her. When the boy's father checked outside, the boys were not there, she said. She asked him to call when they returned and began driving around, looking for Kathy.
She looked at Parkland Junior High School and drove by the K-Mart. Kathy was infatuated with mini-bikes and would go up to the store to look at them she said. She said she also kept returning to the house, hoping Kathy would have called.
On one of her outings, she encountered a police officer. "I told him what the problem was and asked him if he would go up to K-Mart. I had been up there, but it had been so dark," she said. The police officer told her to go home and wait for an hour. If she did not hear from him, it would mean that he hadn't found Kathy and she should file a missing person report, she said.
That was what she did. Then she sat waiting for dawn, so she could call the boy's house again. When she did call, about 7 a.m., the boy came to the phone and said that he had not seen Kathy either.
Kathy's older sister, Theresa, called her boyfriend. Together they went up to search the area around K-Mart. "I didn't have much hope there", said her mother. "I didn't think she would be at K-Mart." But Theresa and Theresa's boyfriend found her purse nearby.
"Her boyfriend was running to K-Mart to call the police when he heard Theresa screaming her head off," said Mrs. Beatty. Theresa, just turned 17, had found her sister lying in a ditch that runs through the wooded area behind the store with a depressed fracture of the skull. "Kathy was barely alive," said her mother.
Theresa's boyfriend ran back, then called the police, an ambulance, and Mrs. Beatty. He didn't tell her that Kathy was hurt. As she was driving toward the K-Mart, an ambulance passed. Mrs. Beatty said she pulled over and said to herself, "Dear God, don't let it go to K-Mart."
Kathy died of complications, including blood poisoning. "At that point she was too weak to live," said her mother.
"We feel and have felt that the assailants lived in the community," said Brown. There were several persons who saw her the night she disappeared, about 8:30 p.m. near Parkland Junior High School. Several of them, youngsters Kathy's age, refused to take polygraph tests.
A boy who lived next door had seen Kathy at home about 6:30 or 7 p.m. the night she received the injuries. He had brought her a shirt from Ocean City, chatted with her awhile, then left, said her mother. After that, she was not sure what happened. Although several youngsters said they saw her at the school, "none of them claimed they were with her," Mrs. Beatty said.
"We feel sure that Kathy would not have gone up to K-Mart alone." said her mother. For one thing, although the area was littered with broken glass and stones, she was barefoot, her mother said. "I think someone down at Parkland Junior High that night must be responsible for her death. She wouldn't have gotten in a car with a stranger and she wouldn't have gone up to K-Mart by herself," her mother said.
Brown thinks that it may not have been meant to end the way it did. "We're still working on that. We still have some investigative techniques to apply," he said. "I have always felt that someone should come forward on that case."
Kathy had been sexually assaulted but not raped. More specifically than that, police will not say. "I have a feeling that the person or persons who did it didn't intend to kill her," said Brown. "It's highly possible that she ran from her assailant and fell against a blunt object. I've always felt the result wasn't intended, and that would be mitigating, if a person came forward to ease his or her conscience," he said.
"We've interviewed hundreds of people, and we have ideas about who was involved," said Brown.
Life goes on, said Mrs. Beatty, but Kathy's death has been hard on her and very hard on Theresa. "Life will never be the same for me, a part of me has died," said Mrs. Beatty.
In the hospital, Kathy never regained conciousness. "We talked, and hoped and prayed that she could hear," her mother said.
"Everyone liked her. I don't understand why they had to kill her," said Mrs. Beatty. "I think somebody knows.....I have a feeling sombody knows who's responsible and is not talking. I hope somebody will come forward."
Montgomery County Police looked into the possibility that convicted child molester and child murderer Fred Howard Coffey, Jr. might have committed one or both of these still unsolved crimes.
-----------------------------------------------
From the Washington Post Newspaper 6 January 1977
Maryland Weekly Section, Page 1:
The Beatty murder: "we have ideas about who was involved"
By Martha M. Hamilton
Washington Post Reporter
The posters are still there, taped to the window of the Aspen Hill barbershop asking for someone to come forward with information to help solve the killing of Kathy Lynn Beatty.
The police still believe someone will, and her mother prays that it is so. "The police seemed so sure in the beginning that they would find the person responsible, but now I am not so sure," said Patricia Beatty. So far there is no answer to who left her 15-year-old daughter dying from head injuries in the rocky area behind the K-Mart in Aspen Hill.
Kathy didn't die until 11 days later in the intensive care unit at Suburban Hospital. "The hospital personnel led us to believe that she would be able to talk. That's what we needed - a little break" said Maj. Wayne Brown, Chief of the Criminal Investigations Division of the Montgomery County Police.
It was July 24, 1975, when Kathy received the fatal blow to her head and was left lying behind the K-Mart at Georgia and Connecticut Avenues. She and her mother and older sister were just back from vacation in Atlantic City. A friend of her mother's was a contender in the millionaire lottery drawing to be held in Baltimore that night, and her mother was going to Baltimore. Kathy and her sister decided to stay home.
Her mother last saw her about 4 p.m. Kathy had been inside all day watching television, "and she asked me if she could go outside and ride her bike," said Mrs. Beatty. Her mother said she could, invited her to Baltimore again, and told her to fix her own supper since Kathy declined again.
"I said I would be home at 9. She knew she had to be home by 8:30, because she wasn't allowed out after dark. We said goodbye and she went off on her bike," her mother recalled.
Instead of 9 p.m., it was closer to 11 when Mrs. Beatty returned, and when she saw the dark house, she was frightened, she said. But when she turned on the lights there was a note from Kathy saying she had gone to a friend's and would be back at 10 p.m. It was raining, and Kathy's mother assumed her daughter was waiting for a ride home.
She headed for the friend's house, but when she arrived, Kathy wasn't there. "The children said she had been there but had left," said Mrs. Beatty. As it happened, Kathy had not been there at all. "I think they were trying to cover for her".
At that point, she began to worry again, she said. She called other friends of her daughter until she had only one more to try - a boy on whom Kathy had a crush. The two had been sweethearts in 8th grade, and Kathy continued to be fond of him, said Mrs. Beatty. She thought that Kathy might have found an excuse to be wherever he had been and that he might have seen her.
The boy and a freind were supposed to be sleeping outside in a camper, she said the boy's father told her. When the boy's father checked outside, the boys were not there, she said. She asked him to call when they returned and began driving around, looking for Kathy.
She looked at Parkland Junior High School and drove by the K-Mart. Kathy was infatuated with mini-bikes and would go up to the store to look at them she said. She said she also kept returning to the house, hoping Kathy would have called.
On one of her outings, she encountered a police officer. "I told him what the problem was and asked him if he would go up to K-Mart. I had been up there, but it had been so dark," she said. The police officer told her to go home and wait for an hour. If she did not hear from him, it would mean that he hadn't found Kathy and she should file a missing person report, she said.
That was what she did. Then she sat waiting for dawn, so she could call the boy's house again. When she did call, about 7 a.m., the boy came to the phone and said that he had not seen Kathy either.
Kathy's older sister, Theresa, called her boyfriend. Together they went up to search the area around K-Mart. "I didn't have much hope there", said her mother. "I didn't think she would be at K-Mart." But Theresa and Theresa's boyfriend found her purse nearby.
"Her boyfriend was running to K-Mart to call the police when he heard Theresa screaming her head off," said Mrs. Beatty. Theresa, just turned 17, had found her sister lying in a ditch that runs through the wooded area behind the store with a depressed fracture of the skull. "Kathy was barely alive," said her mother.
Theresa's boyfriend ran back, then called the police, an ambulance, and Mrs. Beatty. He didn't tell her that Kathy was hurt. As she was driving toward the K-Mart, an ambulance passed. Mrs. Beatty said she pulled over and said to herself, "Dear God, don't let it go to K-Mart."
Kathy died of complications, including blood poisoning. "At that point she was too weak to live," said her mother.
"We feel and have felt that the assailants lived in the community," said Brown. There were several persons who saw her the night she disappeared, about 8:30 p.m. near Parkland Junior High School. Several of them, youngsters Kathy's age, refused to take polygraph tests.
A boy who lived next door had seen Kathy at home about 6:30 or 7 p.m. the night she received the injuries. He had brought her a shirt from Ocean City, chatted with her awhile, then left, said her mother. After that, she was not sure what happened. Although several youngsters said they saw her at the school, "none of them claimed they were with her," Mrs. Beatty said.
"We feel sure that Kathy would not have gone up to K-Mart alone." said her mother. For one thing, although the area was littered with broken glass and stones, she was barefoot, her mother said. "I think someone down at Parkland Junior High that night must be responsible for her death. She wouldn't have gotten in a car with a stranger and she wouldn't have gone up to K-Mart by herself," her mother said.
Brown thinks that it may not have been meant to end the way it did. "We're still working on that. We still have some investigative techniques to apply," he said. "I have always felt that someone should come forward on that case."
Kathy had been sexually assaulted but not raped. More specifically than that, police will not say. "I have a feeling that the person or persons who did it didn't intend to kill her," said Brown. "It's highly possible that she ran from her assailant and fell against a blunt object. I've always felt the result wasn't intended, and that would be mitigating, if a person came forward to ease his or her conscience," he said.
"We've interviewed hundreds of people, and we have ideas about who was involved," said Brown.
Life goes on, said Mrs. Beatty, but Kathy's death has been hard on her and very hard on Theresa. "Life will never be the same for me, a part of me has died," said Mrs. Beatty.
In the hospital, Kathy never regained conciousness. "We talked, and hoped and prayed that she could hear," her mother said.
"Everyone liked her. I don't understand why they had to kill her," said Mrs. Beatty. "I think somebody knows.....I have a feeling sombody knows who's responsible and is not talking. I hope somebody will come forward."
Here is the text of a UPI feed story which was picked up and printed by a California newspaper on 8 April 1975. It provides some details about the story of the Beige or Tan Ford Station Wagon which was reported by an IBM executive to police as possibly containing the Lyon Sisters and their abductor.
Of interest is that news of the LYON sisters disappearance seems to have been spread through out the country. Although it was major news in the Washington DC metropolitan area for weeks.
------------------------------------------
The Daily Review
Hayward, California
Tuesday, April 8, 1975
MISSING GIRLS MAY BE ALIVE
Fairfax VA, (UPI) The sighting of a car monday carrying two girls, reportedly bound and gagged, has raised hopes that two young Maryland sisters who disappeared two weeks ago may still be alive, law enforcement officials said today.
Maryland and Virginia authorities began the search for the elusive beige station wagon, a 1968 Ford with 1975 Maryland plates, early Monday, after a Manassas Virginia citizen reported seeing two blonde haired girls, both tied in the rear of the car. It was subsequently spotted by citizens in several Northern Virginia towns, but disappeared early Monday evening south of Falls Church.
The girls reportedly resembled Sheila Lyon, 13, and her 11-year-old sister, Katherine, of Kensington MD, who were last seen on March 25 in a shopping center at Wheaton MD. A massive ground, air, and water search had failed to turn up any clues to the whereabouts of the two girls.
Authorities said they were told by the Manassas citizen that the driver of the car, a white-haired man in his fifties, resembled a composite sketch last week of a man believed to have talked to the girls shortly before they disappeared. The witness said when he tried to get a closer look, the car sped off through a red light.
Of interest is that news of the LYON sisters disappearance seems to have been spread through out the country. Although it was major news in the Washington DC metropolitan area for weeks.
------------------------------------------
The Daily Review
Hayward, California
Tuesday, April 8, 1975
MISSING GIRLS MAY BE ALIVE
Fairfax VA, (UPI) The sighting of a car monday carrying two girls, reportedly bound and gagged, has raised hopes that two young Maryland sisters who disappeared two weeks ago may still be alive, law enforcement officials said today.
Maryland and Virginia authorities began the search for the elusive beige station wagon, a 1968 Ford with 1975 Maryland plates, early Monday, after a Manassas Virginia citizen reported seeing two blonde haired girls, both tied in the rear of the car. It was subsequently spotted by citizens in several Northern Virginia towns, but disappeared early Monday evening south of Falls Church.
The girls reportedly resembled Sheila Lyon, 13, and her 11-year-old sister, Katherine, of Kensington MD, who were last seen on March 25 in a shopping center at Wheaton MD. A massive ground, air, and water search had failed to turn up any clues to the whereabouts of the two girls.
Authorities said they were told by the Manassas citizen that the driver of the car, a white-haired man in his fifties, resembled a composite sketch last week of a man believed to have talked to the girls shortly before they disappeared. The witness said when he tried to get a closer look, the car sped off through a red light.
You ask some very good questions about Mr. Coffey and his move from Virginia to Maryland. I don't think that anyone has ever been able to answer those specifics, mainly because of the long time between the events of March and April 1975, and the time that he came to the attention of Montgomery County Police in 1987.
Fred Coffey was a First Class Petty Officer in the US Navy, just finishing his third (4-year) enlistment in Norfolk, Virginia when he was arrested and charged with the rape of a 13-year-old girl in Virginia Beach. The Navy did not prosecute him (that was done by Civil Authorities there), but they did not allow him to re-enlist for a fourth "hitch". He was discharged from the Navy 17 September 1974.
Coffey had entered the Navy in 1962, when he had just turned 17. His prior duty station (before being stationed in Norfolk) was in Southern California, so he also had contacts on the West Coast. During his West Coast time, he had been deployed to VietNam. This would have been roughly in the 1966 - 1970 time frame.
It is possible that Coffey may have actually left the Norfolk, VA area prior to his discharge date, because he may have had unused leave on the books. So his exact Virginia departure date is not known - but it probably would have been some time after August 1974 and before April 1975.
Coffey had family and connections in Bristol, Va and in North Carolina. Bristol is in the extreme west part of Virginia, close to Tennessee and North Carolina. He may have spent some time there in 1974 and 1975.
When exactly he came to Maryland has not been definitely established, to my knowledge. A newspaper reported (in 1987) that he interviewed for his job at Vitro Laboratories in Wheaton/Aspen Hill/Rockville (they had several offices), Maryland on 1 April 1975, and that he actually began work there on 23 April 1975. LE, however, have indicated that they believe he already had the job prior to leaving Virginia and that he may have gotten assistance through his Navy connections to obtain that employment. Vitro Laboratories was a defense contracting firm which had many contracts with the Navy.
Coffey listed on his VITRO job application that his address was the Holiday Motel in Gaithersburg/Rockville, northwest of Wheaton, but within an easy commute of all VITRO offices.
Coffey left his job at Vitro without prior notice in late July 1975. (His departure coincided with a vicious attack on another young girl, Kathy Lynn Beatty,14, of Aspen Hill, MD.) He later sent his employer a letter of resignation, with the explanation for his sudden departure being that his wife and daughter had been injured in a car accident in Kentucky. This was a fabrication and one which he used again with another employer following a departure under suspicious circumstances. So, although the car wreck story was made up, it is possible that he did have a wife and daughter living in Kentucky.
Coffey was back in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area of Virginia in October 1975 when he was arrested for "Contributing the the Delinquency of a Minor" in an incident involving a 15-year-old girl. By the end of 1975, he had enlisted in the North Carolina National Guard with an Artillery unit.
Coffey is reported to have owned many vehicles, and as you can see, livid in, or traveled to many different places in the 1974-1975 time frame.
Regarding the search for the girls, you are correct in that the initial police search centered on the shopping center, nearby woods, and the residential area of Kensington adjacent to Wheaton Plaza. No sign of the girls was ever found there, leading most investigators to think that they were probably taken from the area shortly after the last sighting of them.
About a month after the girls disappeared, there was a very large scale search involving National Guard, police, helicopters, and numerous volunteers. This search was conducted in wooded areas to the west of Kensington. Articles of clothing were found, but they were determined to NOT belong to the girls. No trace of Katherine or Sheila has ever been found.
CrimeSolver
Active Member
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2007
- Messages
- 521
- Reaction score
- 123
Richard, have you considered submitting this case to the Dateline producers? With the innumerable details and suspects contained in this thread alone one could create a fascinating two-hour episode.
New publicity could be just enough to jog the right person's memory.
New publicity could be just enough to jog the right person's memory.
Chesapeake
New Member
- Joined
- May 20, 2007
- Messages
- 294
- Reaction score
- 1
Below is a link to a book being written as a novel.
I saw the author being interviewed in Baltimore's Channel 13 morning show called "Coffee With" with Marty Bass and Don ?
Maybe in her research she has found something that may help
http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780061128851
I recall watching a show in the early 80's titled 'what happened to the Lyon Girls?'. (This title may not be exact ). To my knowledge there has never been another show of this nature, except for News stories, or TV shows where John Lyon speaks.
While I haven't read the book, from what I can tell, she merely used the story of the Lyon sisters' disappearance as a jumping off point for her novel. Her book has a woman claiming to be one of the two missing girls appear 30 years later and explores things from that perspective. The author has made a point of repeatedly saying that she did not investigate the Lyon sister case or take any further inspiration from them or their family.
But, what I think the book may do is draw more attention to the fact that the real Lyon sisters' case has never been solved. Perhaps, renewed interest in this mystery will bring forth new evidence.
I don't mean to answer this question for Richard, and I'm not generally a watcher of Dateline and shows of their ilk, but it seems to me that the few times I happen to catch one of these shows on TV, they are only highlighting crimes where the case has been already been tried to a jury. The shows structure seems to be to present first the prosecution's case and then the defense's case through re-enactments, footage of the crime scene and crime scene evidence and then to "announce" the jury's (possibly surprising) verdict (or perhaps the appeals court's ruling) at the end. They don't actually engage in any "sleuthing" of their own (relying instead on the lawyers and court record to spoon feed them) and, it seems to me, are too lazy to actually investigate a case that hasn't been prosecuted.
Since I first posted the story of Sheila and Kate's disappearance, about nine or ten years ago on a long defunct website, the story has been picked up and repeated over and over, usually with the same basic facts and often with verbatim wording. Here are a few links that I found on a recent search.
I do not vouch for the accuracy of all these sites, and I have no ownership of or commerical interest in any of them. I have not intentionally left any sites out, and I am sure that there may be many more - especially in many Newspaper archive sites.
Please feel free to add other links you find.
--------------------------------------------
I searched on: Sheila and Katherine Lyon, 1975.
Results:
Sheila and Katherine Lyon-sisters missing since 1975 - Websl...
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6560
The Charley Project: Katherine Mary Lyon
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/l/lyon_katherine.html
The Charley Project: Sheila Mary Lyon
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/l/lyon_sheila.html
Case Files of Katherine and Sheila Lyon
http://www.forthelost.org/lyon.html
The Doe Network: Case File 65DFMD
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/65dfmd.html
WUSA9.com | Unexplained - Cold Case: Lyon Sisters Disappeara...
http://www.wusa9.com/news/unexplained/unexplained_article.aspx?storyid=34358
Innocence lost
http://www.gazette.net/gazette_archive/2005b/200512/montgomerycty/county/265841-1.html
Lyon Sisters - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyon_Sisters
Neal J. Conway: Montgomery County's Biggest Mystery:The Lyon...
http://www.nealjconway.com/essays/whyweliketobe/lyonsisters.html
Amazon.com: Comment on this review Laura Lippman's "What the Dead Know" was inspired by the 1975 case of Sheila and Katherine Lyon, two sisters who disappeared one day and were never heard ...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-r...iewID=R1QTMKX6KSPDDY&displayType=ReviewDetail
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children http://www.missingkids.com/missingk...NCMC&seqNum=1&caseLang=en_US&searchLang=en_US
Poster
http://www.missingkids.com/missingk...aseNum=793205&orgPrefix=NCMC&searchLang=en_US
Crime and Justice - true crime and justice cases from around...
http://www.crimeandjustice.us/forums/index.php?showtopic=8609&view=getlastpost
Powell's Books - What the Dead Know: A Novel by Laura Lippman...
http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780061128851
The Doe Network: Unexplained Disappearances; Index Five
http://doenetwork.org/cases/disappear5.html
Brian has been voted as the world's most accurate real psych...
http://.com/MISSING/publicr/342.htm
Meca Newsletter_Fall.indd
http://www.mecamd.com/meca_winternews.pdf
A Virtuoso Reappearing Act - washingtonpost.com ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/18/AR2007031801292.html
The Flibbertigibbet: March 2005
http://letahall.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_archive.html
Neal J. Conway: Updates on Various Essays The 30th anniversary, March 25, 2005, of the disappearance of Sheila and Kate Lyon ... http://www.nealjconway.com/essays/updates0105.html
Taken from our Midst — Missing Girls
http://www.william1.co.uk/w118.htm
Laura Vandervoort Laura Lippman has taken the true-life disappearance in 1975 of two sisters ...
http://www.searchgossip.com/celebs/laura-vandervoort.html
Maryland Missing Persons Network Kate / Sheila Lyon (March 25, 1975) ...
http://www.marylandmissing.com/missingpersonsii.html
I do not vouch for the accuracy of all these sites, and I have no ownership of or commerical interest in any of them. I have not intentionally left any sites out, and I am sure that there may be many more - especially in many Newspaper archive sites.
Please feel free to add other links you find.
--------------------------------------------
I searched on: Sheila and Katherine Lyon, 1975.
Results:
Sheila and Katherine Lyon-sisters missing since 1975 - Websl...
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6560
The Charley Project: Katherine Mary Lyon
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/l/lyon_katherine.html
The Charley Project: Sheila Mary Lyon
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/l/lyon_sheila.html
Case Files of Katherine and Sheila Lyon
http://www.forthelost.org/lyon.html
The Doe Network: Case File 65DFMD
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/65dfmd.html
WUSA9.com | Unexplained - Cold Case: Lyon Sisters Disappeara...
http://www.wusa9.com/news/unexplained/unexplained_article.aspx?storyid=34358
Innocence lost
http://www.gazette.net/gazette_archive/2005b/200512/montgomerycty/county/265841-1.html
Lyon Sisters - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyon_Sisters
Neal J. Conway: Montgomery County's Biggest Mystery:The Lyon...
http://www.nealjconway.com/essays/whyweliketobe/lyonsisters.html
Amazon.com: Comment on this review Laura Lippman's "What the Dead Know" was inspired by the 1975 case of Sheila and Katherine Lyon, two sisters who disappeared one day and were never heard ...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-r...iewID=R1QTMKX6KSPDDY&displayType=ReviewDetail
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children http://www.missingkids.com/missingk...NCMC&seqNum=1&caseLang=en_US&searchLang=en_US
Poster
http://www.missingkids.com/missingk...aseNum=793205&orgPrefix=NCMC&searchLang=en_US
Crime and Justice - true crime and justice cases from around...
http://www.crimeandjustice.us/forums/index.php?showtopic=8609&view=getlastpost
Powell's Books - What the Dead Know: A Novel by Laura Lippman...
http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780061128851
The Doe Network: Unexplained Disappearances; Index Five
http://doenetwork.org/cases/disappear5.html
Brian has been voted as the world's most accurate real psych...
http://.com/MISSING/publicr/342.htm
Meca Newsletter_Fall.indd
http://www.mecamd.com/meca_winternews.pdf
A Virtuoso Reappearing Act - washingtonpost.com ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/18/AR2007031801292.html
The Flibbertigibbet: March 2005
http://letahall.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_archive.html
Neal J. Conway: Updates on Various Essays The 30th anniversary, March 25, 2005, of the disappearance of Sheila and Kate Lyon ... http://www.nealjconway.com/essays/updates0105.html
Taken from our Midst — Missing Girls
http://www.william1.co.uk/w118.htm
Laura Vandervoort Laura Lippman has taken the true-life disappearance in 1975 of two sisters ...
http://www.searchgossip.com/celebs/laura-vandervoort.html
Maryland Missing Persons Network Kate / Sheila Lyon (March 25, 1975) ...
http://www.marylandmissing.com/missingpersonsii.html
CrimeSolver
Active Member
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2007
- Messages
- 521
- Reaction score
- 123
You're right. I'm a voracious viewer of these shows, and they almost invariably tackle solved cases. Worse, they tend to gravitate towards trashy, uninteresting "marriage, infidelity, murder" stories.
Occasionally though, "Dateline" and "48 Hours Mystery" do stray from sensationalism and pat endings, and with the background, detail, and hypotheses extant, the Lyons sisters case might prove to be one of those exceptions to the rule.
Sisters `vanished without a trace'; History: Now that the case of Michele Dorr has been closed, the Lyon sisters remain the only unsolved missing-child case in Montgomery County.
The Sun - Baltimore, Md.
Author: Frederick N. Rasmussen
Date: Jan 22, 2000
Start Page: 8.E
Section: TODAY
Earlier this month, Hadden Clark, convicted of killing 6-year-old Michele Dorr, who disappeared from her Montgomery County home in 1986, finally led Montgomery County police to her grave in a park near the Capital Beltway.
As the discovery of the grave brought an end to the 13-year-old mystery, it recalled the mysterious and still unexplained disappearance of the Lyon sisters nearly a quarter of a century ago from Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center.
Katherine and Sheila Lyon, who lived in nearby Kensington, had gone to Wheaton Plaza on March 25, 1975, to buy a pizza. They vanished without a trace. ...
Source:
The Baltimore Sun
LINK:
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/baltsun...he+Sun&desc=Sisters+`vanished+without+a+trace
The Sun - Baltimore, Md.
Author: Frederick N. Rasmussen
Date: Jan 22, 2000
Start Page: 8.E
Section: TODAY
Earlier this month, Hadden Clark, convicted of killing 6-year-old Michele Dorr, who disappeared from her Montgomery County home in 1986, finally led Montgomery County police to her grave in a park near the Capital Beltway.
As the discovery of the grave brought an end to the 13-year-old mystery, it recalled the mysterious and still unexplained disappearance of the Lyon sisters nearly a quarter of a century ago from Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center.
Katherine and Sheila Lyon, who lived in nearby Kensington, had gone to Wheaton Plaza on March 25, 1975, to buy a pizza. They vanished without a trace. ...
Source:
The Baltimore Sun
LINK:
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/baltsun...he+Sun&desc=Sisters+`vanished+without+a+trace
Although there have been many, many "persons of interest" connected with the disappearance of Sheila and Katherine Lyon, only one of those persons has ever been named publicly by Montgomery County Police. That person was Fred Howard Coffey, Jr. and he did not become known to investigators until March 1987, some 12 years after the Lyon sisters went missing from Wheaton Plaza.
Here is an article about Fred Howard Coffey, Jr. which appeared in Montgomery County's daily paper "The Journal" some time in mid March 1987. Note that much of the information was given to the reporter by police officers of Montgomery County, Maryland and of North Carolina.
It should be noted that later that same month, Montgomery County Police announced to the press that they did not have enough evidence to bring charges against Coffey in the cases of the Lyon Sisters and of Kathy Beatty.
This article is a snapshot in time which alternates between the known facts of the Lyon case and what police then knew about Fred Coffey. Some events in this narrative are not in chronological order, but remember that it was written 12 years after the girls disappeared.
I have put a few factual corrections in parens( ), but otherwise the article is as written in March 1987. Note that the author correctly refers to the girls by their last name of LYON, but incorrectly referers to them as the LYONS sisters.
See here how much was known about Coffey in 1987. Note in this article that Montgomery County Police are careful to say that Coffey is NOT considered a suspect in the Lyon case.
Also note the very brief mention of a Tape Recorder Man and that police say that they DO NOT believe that Coffey was the man with the tape recorder. The article also mentions that Montgomery County Police had NOT interviewed Coffey.
The article mentions that Coffey was at the time facing trial for the murder of Amanda Ray in North Carolina. He was subsequently convicted of her abduction and murder and was sentenced to death. A re-trial resulted in the same conviction and sentence. In 1995, during a third re-sentencing, his death sentence was changed to life in prison and he became immediately elligible for parole. He has been denied parole every year since.
From time to time, prosecutors have promised to bring Coffey to trial for the murders of Neely Smith and Travis King, but to date, no formal charges have ever been brought against him.
The Article:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Police Seek to Tie Carolina Molester to Lyons (sic) Sisters
By Jaleh Hagigh
Journal Staff Writer
March 1987
County police are looking for information that may link a convicted child molester in North Carolina to the disappearance of two sisters who have been missing since 1975.
Police are trying to trace the activities of Fred Howard Coffey Jr., 41, who began working in the county shortly after Sheila and Katherine Lyon of Kensington vanished from Wheaton Plaza March 25, 1975.
Police have not questioned Coffey in the Lyons case and he has not been arrested or charged in their disappearance, police said at a news conference yesterday. They also said Coffey is not a suspect in the case.
Coffey is at the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, N.C., awaiting trial on first -degree murder charge in the death of a boy (actually a girl named Amanda Ray). He also has been sentenced to 50 years in Caldwell County for molesting two (actually three) other children. He could not be reached for comment last night.
The disappearance of the Lyons (sic) sisters began the most thorough investigation in the history of the county police. The case has baffled police for almost 12 years because no bodies have been found and most leads turned up nothing.
Det. William C. Campbell said the Coffey tip "is probably the best lead in the case since I've been on it."
While police have no major leads or suspects in the case, Campbell said they have not given up.
"Even after 12 years, the interest is still there. The concern is still there," Campbell said. "This is probably one of the best shots that we've ever had. You have to remain optimistic in a case like this."
Campbell said they also will see if Coffey is connected with the death of Kathy Beatty, 15, whose body was found July 25, 1975, in the woods along Georgia Avenue near the K-Mart store in Aspen Hill.
Coffey, a 12-year Navy veteran, worked in the data systems section of Vitro Corp. of Silver Spring, from April 24, 1975 to July 31, 1975. Police are asking anyone with information about Coffey and his activities while in the county to call the Wheaton District station.
The residence Coffey gave to his Vitro boss was the Holiday Motel at 807 S. Frederick Ave. in Gaithersburg, police said. Managers there told The Journal last night that they did not remember Coffey.
Campbell said police have subpoenaed Vitro's records and are having difficulty finding Coffey's co-workers. Vitro, one of the first scientific firms to locate in the county manufactures defense systems for the Navy, Army, Air Force, and NASA.
Campbell said Coffey has used the aliases Bobby Davis and Chick in his travels.
On March 25, 1975, 12-year-old Sheila and 10-year-old Katherine Lyon vanished from the Wheaton Plaza shopping area, one half-mile from their Kensington home.
Police launched an extensive search for the girls, tracked numerous leads and even contacted Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos, but all to no avail.
Hurkos, who reportedly had several documented success in criminal cases, sent police a cassette tape indicating where he thought the girls could be found. About 135 national guardsmen and police searched a two-mile area east of Gaithersburg on the north branch of Rock Creek but found nothing.
One man even said he thought he saw two girls bound in a car in Manassas, Va. while another witness said he saw a man interviewing the sisters with a tape recorder.
Campbell said Coffey usually chose victims who lived near his home and would lure them into a friendship through his hobbies. One victim was last seen fishing with Coffey. Campbell said they do not believe the man with the tape recorder was Coffey.
The Lyons (sic) sisters' disappearance evoked a groundswell of support for the family, including the father, John Lyon., a popular announcer at WMAL radio. Lyon declined to comment on the new direction of the case yesterday.
Police said Lyon does not know Coffey and his name has never surfaced in the investigation until now.
Campbell called the Coffey lead the best in about 12 years because Coffey was in the area at the time of the sisters' disappearance and has a history of crimes involving children.
Coffey, a Bristol, Va. native, was convicted of nine counts of child molesting and sentenced Jan 21 (1987) to 50 years in jail, Lt. Henrietta Lane, of the Caldwell County (N.C.) Sheriff's Department, told the Journal. Coffey sexually abused three youths, all under 13 at the time, in Caldwell between 1983 - 1986, she said.
Several days after Coffey was convicted of child molesting in Caldwell, he was charged in the 1979 death of Amanda Ray, 11 (actually 10) who disappeared July 19, 1979, in Mecklenburg County. Ray died by asphyxiation. Lane said. No trial date has been set for the murder charge.
Lane said Coffey threatened suicide after he was charged with killing Ray.
In April 1973, Coffey pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent exposure in Virginia Beach, Va., and in May with two counts of child molesting, also in Virginia Beach, Lane said.
For both incidents, Coffey was sentenced to a total of three years to be served on supervised probation, Lane said.
On October 9, 1975, Coffey was convicted of two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor while in Norfolk, Va. and was sentenced to one year's probation and fined $50, Lane said.
Coffey is also a suspect in several other cases, including the death of Neely Smith, 5, who lived in the same neighborhood and Ray and who disappeared in 1981.
Scattered remains of Smith and Ray were found by police who said witnesses told them Ray and Smith were seen talking to a man fitting Coffey's desctiption before they disappeared, the Charlotte Observer told The Journal.
Coffey is also a suspect in the Aug. 21, 1986 strangulation death of Travis Shane King, 8, of Bristol, Va. who lived near Coffey's mother, Lane said. King's body was found in Sullivan County, Tenn.
Coffey went to Bristol High School and served in the Navy from about May 1962 to December (actually September) 1974, Campbell said. Coffey, who had planned a career in the Navy, was discharged from the service because of the Virginia Beach child molesting investigations.
While Bristol, Va. police were investigating Coffey in the King death, they learned Coffey had spent time in Montgomery County and notified FBI agents in Silver Spring who in turn notified Campbell.
Police efforts to interview Coffey have been blocked by Coffey's lawyer, Campbell said.
Coffey lived in Mecklenburg from about 1974 - 1981 and was in Caldwell from 1982 - 86, Lane said.
Coffey was well spoken, fastidious, but a loner, who liked to associate more with children than adults, Lane said. Coffey, who was raised in a broken home, was married three times and did not hold a job long.
While in Caldwell, he worked in a furniture manufacturing plant, and convience stores. In Mecklenburg, he worked for an exterminator company and as a dispatcher for a private ambulance service.
Lane, who has been following Coffey since September 1986, said Coffey applied for jobs where he could be close to children, including camp counselor, and counselor of troubled youths.
She added, "The people who talked to him and who remembered him all referred to him as different and strange."
Here is an article about Fred Howard Coffey, Jr. which appeared in Montgomery County's daily paper "The Journal" some time in mid March 1987. Note that much of the information was given to the reporter by police officers of Montgomery County, Maryland and of North Carolina.
It should be noted that later that same month, Montgomery County Police announced to the press that they did not have enough evidence to bring charges against Coffey in the cases of the Lyon Sisters and of Kathy Beatty.
This article is a snapshot in time which alternates between the known facts of the Lyon case and what police then knew about Fred Coffey. Some events in this narrative are not in chronological order, but remember that it was written 12 years after the girls disappeared.
I have put a few factual corrections in parens( ), but otherwise the article is as written in March 1987. Note that the author correctly refers to the girls by their last name of LYON, but incorrectly referers to them as the LYONS sisters.
See here how much was known about Coffey in 1987. Note in this article that Montgomery County Police are careful to say that Coffey is NOT considered a suspect in the Lyon case.
Also note the very brief mention of a Tape Recorder Man and that police say that they DO NOT believe that Coffey was the man with the tape recorder. The article also mentions that Montgomery County Police had NOT interviewed Coffey.
The article mentions that Coffey was at the time facing trial for the murder of Amanda Ray in North Carolina. He was subsequently convicted of her abduction and murder and was sentenced to death. A re-trial resulted in the same conviction and sentence. In 1995, during a third re-sentencing, his death sentence was changed to life in prison and he became immediately elligible for parole. He has been denied parole every year since.
From time to time, prosecutors have promised to bring Coffey to trial for the murders of Neely Smith and Travis King, but to date, no formal charges have ever been brought against him.
The Article:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Police Seek to Tie Carolina Molester to Lyons (sic) Sisters
By Jaleh Hagigh
Journal Staff Writer
March 1987
County police are looking for information that may link a convicted child molester in North Carolina to the disappearance of two sisters who have been missing since 1975.
Police are trying to trace the activities of Fred Howard Coffey Jr., 41, who began working in the county shortly after Sheila and Katherine Lyon of Kensington vanished from Wheaton Plaza March 25, 1975.
Police have not questioned Coffey in the Lyons case and he has not been arrested or charged in their disappearance, police said at a news conference yesterday. They also said Coffey is not a suspect in the case.
Coffey is at the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, N.C., awaiting trial on first -degree murder charge in the death of a boy (actually a girl named Amanda Ray). He also has been sentenced to 50 years in Caldwell County for molesting two (actually three) other children. He could not be reached for comment last night.
The disappearance of the Lyons (sic) sisters began the most thorough investigation in the history of the county police. The case has baffled police for almost 12 years because no bodies have been found and most leads turned up nothing.
Det. William C. Campbell said the Coffey tip "is probably the best lead in the case since I've been on it."
While police have no major leads or suspects in the case, Campbell said they have not given up.
"Even after 12 years, the interest is still there. The concern is still there," Campbell said. "This is probably one of the best shots that we've ever had. You have to remain optimistic in a case like this."
Campbell said they also will see if Coffey is connected with the death of Kathy Beatty, 15, whose body was found July 25, 1975, in the woods along Georgia Avenue near the K-Mart store in Aspen Hill.
Coffey, a 12-year Navy veteran, worked in the data systems section of Vitro Corp. of Silver Spring, from April 24, 1975 to July 31, 1975. Police are asking anyone with information about Coffey and his activities while in the county to call the Wheaton District station.
The residence Coffey gave to his Vitro boss was the Holiday Motel at 807 S. Frederick Ave. in Gaithersburg, police said. Managers there told The Journal last night that they did not remember Coffey.
Campbell said police have subpoenaed Vitro's records and are having difficulty finding Coffey's co-workers. Vitro, one of the first scientific firms to locate in the county manufactures defense systems for the Navy, Army, Air Force, and NASA.
Campbell said Coffey has used the aliases Bobby Davis and Chick in his travels.
On March 25, 1975, 12-year-old Sheila and 10-year-old Katherine Lyon vanished from the Wheaton Plaza shopping area, one half-mile from their Kensington home.
Police launched an extensive search for the girls, tracked numerous leads and even contacted Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos, but all to no avail.
Hurkos, who reportedly had several documented success in criminal cases, sent police a cassette tape indicating where he thought the girls could be found. About 135 national guardsmen and police searched a two-mile area east of Gaithersburg on the north branch of Rock Creek but found nothing.
One man even said he thought he saw two girls bound in a car in Manassas, Va. while another witness said he saw a man interviewing the sisters with a tape recorder.
Campbell said Coffey usually chose victims who lived near his home and would lure them into a friendship through his hobbies. One victim was last seen fishing with Coffey. Campbell said they do not believe the man with the tape recorder was Coffey.
The Lyons (sic) sisters' disappearance evoked a groundswell of support for the family, including the father, John Lyon., a popular announcer at WMAL radio. Lyon declined to comment on the new direction of the case yesterday.
Police said Lyon does not know Coffey and his name has never surfaced in the investigation until now.
Campbell called the Coffey lead the best in about 12 years because Coffey was in the area at the time of the sisters' disappearance and has a history of crimes involving children.
Coffey, a Bristol, Va. native, was convicted of nine counts of child molesting and sentenced Jan 21 (1987) to 50 years in jail, Lt. Henrietta Lane, of the Caldwell County (N.C.) Sheriff's Department, told the Journal. Coffey sexually abused three youths, all under 13 at the time, in Caldwell between 1983 - 1986, she said.
Several days after Coffey was convicted of child molesting in Caldwell, he was charged in the 1979 death of Amanda Ray, 11 (actually 10) who disappeared July 19, 1979, in Mecklenburg County. Ray died by asphyxiation. Lane said. No trial date has been set for the murder charge.
Lane said Coffey threatened suicide after he was charged with killing Ray.
In April 1973, Coffey pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent exposure in Virginia Beach, Va., and in May with two counts of child molesting, also in Virginia Beach, Lane said.
For both incidents, Coffey was sentenced to a total of three years to be served on supervised probation, Lane said.
On October 9, 1975, Coffey was convicted of two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor while in Norfolk, Va. and was sentenced to one year's probation and fined $50, Lane said.
Coffey is also a suspect in several other cases, including the death of Neely Smith, 5, who lived in the same neighborhood and Ray and who disappeared in 1981.
Scattered remains of Smith and Ray were found by police who said witnesses told them Ray and Smith were seen talking to a man fitting Coffey's desctiption before they disappeared, the Charlotte Observer told The Journal.
Coffey is also a suspect in the Aug. 21, 1986 strangulation death of Travis Shane King, 8, of Bristol, Va. who lived near Coffey's mother, Lane said. King's body was found in Sullivan County, Tenn.
Coffey went to Bristol High School and served in the Navy from about May 1962 to December (actually September) 1974, Campbell said. Coffey, who had planned a career in the Navy, was discharged from the service because of the Virginia Beach child molesting investigations.
While Bristol, Va. police were investigating Coffey in the King death, they learned Coffey had spent time in Montgomery County and notified FBI agents in Silver Spring who in turn notified Campbell.
Police efforts to interview Coffey have been blocked by Coffey's lawyer, Campbell said.
Coffey lived in Mecklenburg from about 1974 - 1981 and was in Caldwell from 1982 - 86, Lane said.
Coffey was well spoken, fastidious, but a loner, who liked to associate more with children than adults, Lane said. Coffey, who was raised in a broken home, was married three times and did not hold a job long.
While in Caldwell, he worked in a furniture manufacturing plant, and convience stores. In Mecklenburg, he worked for an exterminator company and as a dispatcher for a private ambulance service.
Lane, who has been following Coffey since September 1986, said Coffey applied for jobs where he could be close to children, including camp counselor, and counselor of troubled youths.
She added, "The people who talked to him and who remembered him all referred to him as different and strange."
This article is also posted under the thread titled "Remembering Sheila and Katherine
-------------------------------
One of the best articles I have read about the Lyon family and the tragic date of 25 March 1975 was written by Mary Ann Kuhn, a reporter for the Washington Star newspaper. This feature story appeared in the Sunday edition on 6 April 1975, only twelve days after Sheila and Kate disappeared.
Ms. Kuhn interviewed Mrs. Lyon extensively as well as many others mentioned in this article in preparing her story. She wrote down their recollections of events while they were still fresh. And she does so with a style that puts you there with the girls and their family.
The Washington Star shut down its presses and went out of business in 1982. Star articles are available on microfilm and in bound editions only, because they did not survive into the age of the internet.
Just a couple of notes; the story gives the girls' and their brother Jay's ages as of their birthdays which occurred between the girls' disappearance date and the date of publication. The words in parens included in the text are all origional to the story itself, not my additons.
Three photos accompanied this story: One of John and Mary Lyon standing in the girls' bedroom. Another of them walking arm and arm back into the house after speaking to police. And a close-up of Mary Lyon which clearly shows the strain she was under.
What follows is Mary Ann Kuhn's story as it appeared on 6 April 1975.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Step by Step in Agonizing Hunt for Sisters
By Mary Ann Kuhn
Washington Star Staff Writer
Sunday, 6 April 1975
Pages B-1 and B-2
On the morning of Tuesday, March 25, Mary Lyon awoke slowly, at the sounds of her two daughters, Sheila Mary, 13, and Katherine Mary, 11 and her two sons stirring upstairs in their second-floor bedrooms.
It was 10 a.m. Mary Lyon glanced at her husband, John, 35, a radio announcer for WMAL. "He had worked on the show all night and he had just gotten to sleep," said Mrs. Lyon.
It was the second day of Easter vacation - the day Mary Lyon also was to sub in a bowling game. It was sunny. Thank God. The day before it had rained and the children had stayed inside most of the day, helping her houseclean.
Mrs. Lyon, 34, quickly slid from the double bed and stepped onto the dark Oriental design rug beneath her. She wanted to tend to the children before they woke her husband. She tiptoed down the hallway of the white two-story house, past the living room and into the kitchen.
Someone already had put the morning paper on the kitchen table. She started the coffee. The youngsters came in: Joe, 9, Jay, 15, and her two daughters. All in pajamas and robes.
Mrs. Lyon sipped coffee from a blue mug. The girls got their breakfast of cereal and toast. Nothing fancy, although Sheila was capable of handling omelettes and french toast. She had learned that in her home-ec course this year.
Jay, Sheila and Kate Looked at the paper. Mrs. Lyon didn't nag them about what they were eating. It was vacation, and she let the youngsters, at such times eat pretty much what they wanted.
The girls cleared the table and carried the dishes over to the sink. They didn't bother to load the dishwasher.
Decision Time. The children had to make up their minds what they were going to do the rest of the day. No sitting around, making a lot of noise and waking their father up.
"They tend to sit around and sit around and sit around until I tell them to go upstairs and get dressed," said Mrs. Lyon.
"Come on," she had told the girls, "you've got to make up your minds about what you want to do today."
That was the scene in the Lyon kitchen nearly two weeks ago, a few hours before Sheila and Kate seemingly vanished into thin air to become the subjects of an unrelenting search that still has not yielded a successful clue as to their whereabouts.
Picking up the scenario of that Tuesday morning in a conversation in her living room at 3121 Plyers Mill Road, Kensington, Md., the other day, Mrs. Lyon recalled that the phone rang at 11:15 a.m. It was Melanie Ganas, 11, a fifth grader and Kate's best friend. She had called, Melanie said later, "to ask if she could come up and play."
Melanie and her sister, Cassandra, 16, are frequent companions of Sheila and Kate. The night before they had played gin rummy together until 10 p.m. in the Ganas' Kitchen. They live several doors from the Lyons on the other side of the street.
"Kate said no, that she couldn't come up to play with me," Melanie, a beautiful dark-eyed little girl, recalled later. "She said she had to go to the Plaza (Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center) and get out of the house because her father was sleeping.
"She wanted me to go with them and I said, No, my mother doesn't let me walk up there by myself." At that, Melanie cast a glance at her mother, sitting on the other side of the Ganas living room.
"I believe I said you don't have any business up there," said Mrs. Ganas. "I just never believed in it. I thought there was a possibility of danger with girls going up there at a young age."
"Everybody walks up there," said Melanie. "Anne does, and her mother is so strict."
Mrs. Lyon said she hadn't thought it was a good idea for her daughters to go over to the Ganas house that day because "I knew they would be right back over here." She said she was worried they might be too noisy, awakening her husband.
"I had asked Kate what time she was going to be home," Melanie recalled. "Kate said, 'three.' I said, 'I'll call you then; and Kate said. 'all right.'"
So Melanie Ganas didn't accompany the Lyon girls that spring afternoon, 12 days ago.
.......
Sheila and Kate went to Wheaton Plaza by themselves. First, though, they went upstairs to the pale yellow bedroom they share with their stuffed animals and dressed.
Sheila put on a navy blue sweatshirt and wheat colored jeans that she called her "Cheap jeans" and tennis shoes.
Kate had on Wrangler blue jeans, a bright gold turtleneck, a red knit jacket and brown shoes.
Mrs. Lyon told the girls she thought 3 o'clock would be "a good time" to be home.
"I didn't give them any money," recalled Mrs. Lyon. "They had their own money." She took a sip of her coffee and lighted up a Viceroy. "They get an allowance. They have chores to do. Sheila, Joe and Kate split the Advertiser (newspaper) route every Wednesday. Sheila had just started to babysit."
"I said to them," she took a drag on her cigarette, "Why don't you stop off at the Orange Bowl (pizza carryout) and get some pizza. I remember Kate complained that a slice of pizza used to be 40 cents and now it's 45 cents."
It was 11:30 a.m. as the girls got ready to leave. Mrs. Lyon had a half hour to get dressed, wash her short hair, and be on time for her bowling game, her fourth venture at duckpins.
"I was trying to wash my hair. I was in the bathroom, and they kept saying: 'I'm going now, Mom. I'm going now, Mom.' Then the boys kept asking where the basketball was."
Mrs. Lyon took another drag. "I was feeling a little bugged," she said. "I don't function well in the morning."
Sheila and Kate Lyon walked out the front door of their home together, down the flagstone path, out the chain link gate, around the corner to Jennings Road and down Jennings to a wooded path on the left.
This is the route the girls customarily use to the plaza, their mother said, and the one she often has walked herself.
It is a 15 minute stroll that took the two sisters beyond a series of red brick houses, past the brick home of Fred Sigmon, a retired federal employee, and his wife, who have lived there 16 years, past the home where Don Anderson, 18, an Einstein high school student lives with his parents, brother and puppy, and through a wooded area the size of two city blocks.
The wooded path brought them out to a clearing behind the white two-story house of Mrs. Mary Tolker, mother of four, and a former principal of Potomac Elementary School. But Mrs. Tolker wasn't out gardening in her backyard the day the Lyon girls walked to the plaza. She had a dentist appointment at 11 a.m.
The clearing near Mrs. Tolker's garden opens onto McComas Avenue where the Kensington Gardens Nursing Home sits on the right. The route to Wheaton Plaza continues across McComas, up Drumm Avenue to Faulkner and on top of that street looms Montgomery Ward's and Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center.
.....
Wheaton Plaza. For the past 15 years it has been there, a neighborhood shopping center if it can be called that with 70 stores, but still much smaller than many of today's huge shopping malls, and more friendly. It's a hangout for some kids. It's an outdoor shopping center surrounded by apartment buildings and private homes where youngsters go as toddlers tugging at their parent's hand and return years later to buy engagement rings and wedding bands.
"The people who settled here keep on coming back," said John S. Grega, manager for the past 15 years of Winthrop Jewelers. "Some youngsters have brought me in the first cookies they ever baked. The kids knock on the window when they pass by and wave."
Grega added, "We also have some unusual characters. But not as bad as three or four years ago. Kids on drugs come in."
March 25, with school out, was one of the busiest days at the plaza. Easter was just five days away. The weather was warm and sunny.
"It was a madhouse," said Frank E. Pratt, manager of Lerner's. "People were waiting in lines to get into the dressing rooms."
Next door, at the Orange Bowl pizza carryout, business was booming. Between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., that Tuesday, The Orange Bowl almost doubled its normal hourly business and by the end of the day had sold 2,400 slices of pizza.
It was into this busy, teeming shopping scene that the two Lyon sisters walked. Two blond haired girls: Kate, the youngest, "sort of the silly one - the outgoing one" as some friends affectionately put it, and Sheila, the oldest, who they said is "quiet - she would talk when you talked to her."
Sheila is the cook, the honor roll student at Newport Junior High, the artist, the bowler, a young girl just starting to take outside babysitting jobs - with a secret ambition to be a cheerleader.
Kate likes to garden, play volleyball, roller skate, read books - and run. "She is really a fast runner - like a bullet," one friend said. And Kate is especially fond of her youngest brother, Joe. She often would dress him and walk him every day to their school, Oakland Terrace elementary.
Sheila's school is Newport Junior High, to which she rides a bus.
Sheila's and Kate's faces are not unfamiliar at Wheaton Plaza. The girls like candy and frequently browse through the shops, especially to look at clothes. At least six persons saw them there that Tuesday afternoon.
One of the first persons to see the girls there was Mrs. Sarah Biosca, a retired seamstress who noticed them at Beckers Leather Goods store, at about 11:45 a.m.
Mrs. Biosca said one of the girls had stepped in front of her to look at a woman's wallet on display. "The one with the glasses (Sheila) was walking with the other one behind her, and had said, 'Oh, excuse me' to me. She was looking for a wallet, and I heard her say something to her sister like, 'Look at this. Isn't this nice?'"
Five shops away, Brian McAbee, 18, a clerk at Up Against The Wall, a clothing store featuring jeans and shirts, said, "They were in here. They just came in and looked around. I saw them walk throught the arch."
Sheila's and Kate's oldest brother, Jay, a ninth grader at Montgomery Hills said he saw his sisters over by the big Easter bunny display in the center of the plaza at about 1 p.m. "I walked past them. They kind of looked like they were waiting there," he said. "I think they saw me but they didn't make any signs."
Moments later, another 13-year-old boy saw the girls. Sheila, he said, was sitting on one of the Easter bunny's arms listening to the little children come up and tell the Easter bunny what they wanted for Easter.
Another 13-year-old boy also says he saw a 50 to 60 year-old man recording a conversation with Sheila and Kate at about 2 o'clock. He overheard the man asking one question: "Are any of you two involved in sports?"
And the youngster says he then saw the man walk away in one direction and the girls in the other. That was the last time they were seen at Wheaton plaza. Police have circulated a composite sketch of the man with the tape recorder, but he has not been located.
Only one person has reported seeing the girls later that day. At 7:30 that night, David Reed, 12, a seventh grader at Sheila's school, said he saw the two sisters walking in the opposite direction of their home near the intersection of Drumm and Faulkner headed toward the plaza. "I was coming from a friend's house from playing basketball," said David, "I passed them (on the sidewalk) and then I looked back. Why? They're girls." David said he had seen both girls before up at the community swimming pool and had seen Sheila at school.
At 3:30 p.m., Mrs. Lyon arrived home from her bowling trip. The girls weren't there. She said it was her worst bowling performance ever - so bad, in fact, that she is embarrassed to tell her score.
Her husband had met her outside the Wheaton Triangle bowling alley. From there they went together to the Kensington bank before it closed and then on to a used bookstore.
Back home, Mrs. Lyon recalled, "John went in and lay down. I changed my clothes and worked in the front yard for three hours. The boys had come home by then."
As she was gardening throughout the afternoon, Mrs. Lyon wondered about the girls. "I hadn't told them absolutely they had to be home at 3. So I thought that maybe they had stopped off at a movie or a friend's house."
The Lyons customarily do tell their children to be home at 6 o'clock for dinner, although the food usually isn't served until 45 minutes later.
Six o'clock came and went, however, with no sign of the girls. "As we sat down to eat fried chicken," Mrs. Lyon was more angry than worried, so much so that "I even thought I wouldn't give them any chicken when they got home."
By 7 o'clock, however, the anger had given way to anficty. "I said to John, 'I don't understand this," Mrs. Lyon said, so she and her husband drove in their Ford station wagon down Jennings and up Drumm to Faulkner to see if they could spot their daughters walking home.
"Back home," said the mother, "I got out my little phone book and started calling their freinds." "John left and went to the Plaza to look some more. He got home at 8 p.m."
"We were really scared by then. John called the police. I knew when it started to get dark they'd know to come home. But they didn't."
The Montgomery County Police took the Lyons' call "seriously as soon as I told them how old they were." said Mrs. Lyon "They sent a police car over and took a complete description and the police called all the kids who were friends of my daughters'."
Still no luck.
That night, Jay Lyon went upstairs to his sisters' bedroom where Sheila kept her money in a metal tea can. Jay counted the money in it and there was $17 and some odd cents.
"We go to Myrtle Beach every year," Mrs. Lyon said. "And we encourage the children to save their money for that. I remember Sheila said the day before, 'Hey Mom, I have $20 already.'"
"Kate had some money but she didn't have near what Sheila did."
....
The telephone rings frequently in the Lyon home these days, and a number of people are there. Family, friends, and neighbors. All waiting.
The other day, as Mrs. Lyon sits on the living-room flowered couch, the phone in the kitchen rings again. Someone answers it. She looks up. They away.
John's mother sits patiently, knitting. Mary's mother is there, too, as well as two sisters who arrived from out of town. Mrs. Lyon's sisters leave for a brief time and return with a pocketbook plant for her. They bought it at the 7-11 - the last one there.
Jay arrives home from school. He gets engrossed in a chess game with this cousin, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the green rug.
Joe comes in from school in his overalls, shirt sleeves rolled up. He puts his arms around his mother's waist and buries his head in her chest.
They go into her bedroom where he gives her a home-made cupcake which a neighbor up the street had prepared for him. Joe wants his mother to have it.
Then he opens a folder he had left on the bed. Inside is a color photograph of Kate and her class. He shows his mother a picture of his class.
Mother and son walk out into the living room. There's no place to sit. She stands in the middle of the room, fussing with Joe's shirt, unrolling his sleeves, straightening his overalls.
Photographers, cameraman, an anchorman, a reporter are among the new faces. A photogtrapher wants to take a picture of Mary and John Lyon. They sit down at the kitchen table and talk. The camera click, clicks. The photographer leaves.
Then out to the front stoop where WMAL has a cameraman ready to roll and an anchorman to do an interview. And then back inside the house again because another photographer wants to shoot pictures.
This time, upstairs. In the girls bedroom with the dainty vanity and the pink flowered vanity skirt and the ruffled white curtains. A poster of rock star John Denver hangs over Sheila's bed -- over Kate's one of Loggins and Messina.
Mary Lyon hurriedly straightened the pink blanket on Kate's bed before the camera clicks. She says to no one in particular that she is going to let her sisters sleep in the girls' room tonight because last night one of the cots broke.
The photographer snaps a few pictures of the stuffed animals piled high on Sheila's pink sheets and blue flowered blanket. He does the same for Kate's.
Mrs. Lyon stands over by the bookcse in a corner of the room pointing out Kate's Bobbsey Twins books. "Kate likes to read," said her mother. " She likes very sad, sentimental stories about orphans and poor little girls. She takes after me that way."
Neighbors and friends have been wonderful, said Mrs. Lyon, bringing in hams and turkeys and cakes. Friends stop by continually to chat and to help out. Women in the community are busily collecting money, going from house to house, to increase the reward money initiated by WMAL. Even children chip in from dimes to dollars. Nearly $600 was handed over at the end of the week from that source. The Oakland Terrace school where Kate is a pupil gave $100 and the school's PTA donated $50. At St. John the Evangelist Church in Silver Spring, the 9 a.m. Mass was said yesterday for the Lyon sisters - for their safe return.
.....
It's April 6 and the wait is still on. Mrs. Lyon has changed her mind about a lot of things. "When they come home, Kate can get her ears pierced. And Sheila can wear eye shadow."
Melanie has two transistor radios wrapped up and waiting as birthday presents for Sheila and Kate, both of whom had birthdays last weekend. There will be a promised birthday dinner out. They'll get their Easter baskets that have been sitting by the fireplace.
And Kate will have her little brother Joe to walk to school again.
-------------------------------
One of the best articles I have read about the Lyon family and the tragic date of 25 March 1975 was written by Mary Ann Kuhn, a reporter for the Washington Star newspaper. This feature story appeared in the Sunday edition on 6 April 1975, only twelve days after Sheila and Kate disappeared.
Ms. Kuhn interviewed Mrs. Lyon extensively as well as many others mentioned in this article in preparing her story. She wrote down their recollections of events while they were still fresh. And she does so with a style that puts you there with the girls and their family.
The Washington Star shut down its presses and went out of business in 1982. Star articles are available on microfilm and in bound editions only, because they did not survive into the age of the internet.
Just a couple of notes; the story gives the girls' and their brother Jay's ages as of their birthdays which occurred between the girls' disappearance date and the date of publication. The words in parens included in the text are all origional to the story itself, not my additons.
Three photos accompanied this story: One of John and Mary Lyon standing in the girls' bedroom. Another of them walking arm and arm back into the house after speaking to police. And a close-up of Mary Lyon which clearly shows the strain she was under.
What follows is Mary Ann Kuhn's story as it appeared on 6 April 1975.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Step by Step in Agonizing Hunt for Sisters
By Mary Ann Kuhn
Washington Star Staff Writer
Sunday, 6 April 1975
Pages B-1 and B-2
On the morning of Tuesday, March 25, Mary Lyon awoke slowly, at the sounds of her two daughters, Sheila Mary, 13, and Katherine Mary, 11 and her two sons stirring upstairs in their second-floor bedrooms.
It was 10 a.m. Mary Lyon glanced at her husband, John, 35, a radio announcer for WMAL. "He had worked on the show all night and he had just gotten to sleep," said Mrs. Lyon.
It was the second day of Easter vacation - the day Mary Lyon also was to sub in a bowling game. It was sunny. Thank God. The day before it had rained and the children had stayed inside most of the day, helping her houseclean.
Mrs. Lyon, 34, quickly slid from the double bed and stepped onto the dark Oriental design rug beneath her. She wanted to tend to the children before they woke her husband. She tiptoed down the hallway of the white two-story house, past the living room and into the kitchen.
Someone already had put the morning paper on the kitchen table. She started the coffee. The youngsters came in: Joe, 9, Jay, 15, and her two daughters. All in pajamas and robes.
Mrs. Lyon sipped coffee from a blue mug. The girls got their breakfast of cereal and toast. Nothing fancy, although Sheila was capable of handling omelettes and french toast. She had learned that in her home-ec course this year.
Jay, Sheila and Kate Looked at the paper. Mrs. Lyon didn't nag them about what they were eating. It was vacation, and she let the youngsters, at such times eat pretty much what they wanted.
The girls cleared the table and carried the dishes over to the sink. They didn't bother to load the dishwasher.
Decision Time. The children had to make up their minds what they were going to do the rest of the day. No sitting around, making a lot of noise and waking their father up.
"They tend to sit around and sit around and sit around until I tell them to go upstairs and get dressed," said Mrs. Lyon.
"Come on," she had told the girls, "you've got to make up your minds about what you want to do today."
That was the scene in the Lyon kitchen nearly two weeks ago, a few hours before Sheila and Kate seemingly vanished into thin air to become the subjects of an unrelenting search that still has not yielded a successful clue as to their whereabouts.
Picking up the scenario of that Tuesday morning in a conversation in her living room at 3121 Plyers Mill Road, Kensington, Md., the other day, Mrs. Lyon recalled that the phone rang at 11:15 a.m. It was Melanie Ganas, 11, a fifth grader and Kate's best friend. She had called, Melanie said later, "to ask if she could come up and play."
Melanie and her sister, Cassandra, 16, are frequent companions of Sheila and Kate. The night before they had played gin rummy together until 10 p.m. in the Ganas' Kitchen. They live several doors from the Lyons on the other side of the street.
"Kate said no, that she couldn't come up to play with me," Melanie, a beautiful dark-eyed little girl, recalled later. "She said she had to go to the Plaza (Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center) and get out of the house because her father was sleeping.
"She wanted me to go with them and I said, No, my mother doesn't let me walk up there by myself." At that, Melanie cast a glance at her mother, sitting on the other side of the Ganas living room.
"I believe I said you don't have any business up there," said Mrs. Ganas. "I just never believed in it. I thought there was a possibility of danger with girls going up there at a young age."
"Everybody walks up there," said Melanie. "Anne does, and her mother is so strict."
Mrs. Lyon said she hadn't thought it was a good idea for her daughters to go over to the Ganas house that day because "I knew they would be right back over here." She said she was worried they might be too noisy, awakening her husband.
"I had asked Kate what time she was going to be home," Melanie recalled. "Kate said, 'three.' I said, 'I'll call you then; and Kate said. 'all right.'"
So Melanie Ganas didn't accompany the Lyon girls that spring afternoon, 12 days ago.
.......
Sheila and Kate went to Wheaton Plaza by themselves. First, though, they went upstairs to the pale yellow bedroom they share with their stuffed animals and dressed.
Sheila put on a navy blue sweatshirt and wheat colored jeans that she called her "Cheap jeans" and tennis shoes.
Kate had on Wrangler blue jeans, a bright gold turtleneck, a red knit jacket and brown shoes.
Mrs. Lyon told the girls she thought 3 o'clock would be "a good time" to be home.
"I didn't give them any money," recalled Mrs. Lyon. "They had their own money." She took a sip of her coffee and lighted up a Viceroy. "They get an allowance. They have chores to do. Sheila, Joe and Kate split the Advertiser (newspaper) route every Wednesday. Sheila had just started to babysit."
"I said to them," she took a drag on her cigarette, "Why don't you stop off at the Orange Bowl (pizza carryout) and get some pizza. I remember Kate complained that a slice of pizza used to be 40 cents and now it's 45 cents."
It was 11:30 a.m. as the girls got ready to leave. Mrs. Lyon had a half hour to get dressed, wash her short hair, and be on time for her bowling game, her fourth venture at duckpins.
"I was trying to wash my hair. I was in the bathroom, and they kept saying: 'I'm going now, Mom. I'm going now, Mom.' Then the boys kept asking where the basketball was."
Mrs. Lyon took another drag. "I was feeling a little bugged," she said. "I don't function well in the morning."
Sheila and Kate Lyon walked out the front door of their home together, down the flagstone path, out the chain link gate, around the corner to Jennings Road and down Jennings to a wooded path on the left.
This is the route the girls customarily use to the plaza, their mother said, and the one she often has walked herself.
It is a 15 minute stroll that took the two sisters beyond a series of red brick houses, past the brick home of Fred Sigmon, a retired federal employee, and his wife, who have lived there 16 years, past the home where Don Anderson, 18, an Einstein high school student lives with his parents, brother and puppy, and through a wooded area the size of two city blocks.
The wooded path brought them out to a clearing behind the white two-story house of Mrs. Mary Tolker, mother of four, and a former principal of Potomac Elementary School. But Mrs. Tolker wasn't out gardening in her backyard the day the Lyon girls walked to the plaza. She had a dentist appointment at 11 a.m.
The clearing near Mrs. Tolker's garden opens onto McComas Avenue where the Kensington Gardens Nursing Home sits on the right. The route to Wheaton Plaza continues across McComas, up Drumm Avenue to Faulkner and on top of that street looms Montgomery Ward's and Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center.
.....
Wheaton Plaza. For the past 15 years it has been there, a neighborhood shopping center if it can be called that with 70 stores, but still much smaller than many of today's huge shopping malls, and more friendly. It's a hangout for some kids. It's an outdoor shopping center surrounded by apartment buildings and private homes where youngsters go as toddlers tugging at their parent's hand and return years later to buy engagement rings and wedding bands.
"The people who settled here keep on coming back," said John S. Grega, manager for the past 15 years of Winthrop Jewelers. "Some youngsters have brought me in the first cookies they ever baked. The kids knock on the window when they pass by and wave."
Grega added, "We also have some unusual characters. But not as bad as three or four years ago. Kids on drugs come in."
March 25, with school out, was one of the busiest days at the plaza. Easter was just five days away. The weather was warm and sunny.
"It was a madhouse," said Frank E. Pratt, manager of Lerner's. "People were waiting in lines to get into the dressing rooms."
Next door, at the Orange Bowl pizza carryout, business was booming. Between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., that Tuesday, The Orange Bowl almost doubled its normal hourly business and by the end of the day had sold 2,400 slices of pizza.
It was into this busy, teeming shopping scene that the two Lyon sisters walked. Two blond haired girls: Kate, the youngest, "sort of the silly one - the outgoing one" as some friends affectionately put it, and Sheila, the oldest, who they said is "quiet - she would talk when you talked to her."
Sheila is the cook, the honor roll student at Newport Junior High, the artist, the bowler, a young girl just starting to take outside babysitting jobs - with a secret ambition to be a cheerleader.
Kate likes to garden, play volleyball, roller skate, read books - and run. "She is really a fast runner - like a bullet," one friend said. And Kate is especially fond of her youngest brother, Joe. She often would dress him and walk him every day to their school, Oakland Terrace elementary.
Sheila's school is Newport Junior High, to which she rides a bus.
Sheila's and Kate's faces are not unfamiliar at Wheaton Plaza. The girls like candy and frequently browse through the shops, especially to look at clothes. At least six persons saw them there that Tuesday afternoon.
One of the first persons to see the girls there was Mrs. Sarah Biosca, a retired seamstress who noticed them at Beckers Leather Goods store, at about 11:45 a.m.
Mrs. Biosca said one of the girls had stepped in front of her to look at a woman's wallet on display. "The one with the glasses (Sheila) was walking with the other one behind her, and had said, 'Oh, excuse me' to me. She was looking for a wallet, and I heard her say something to her sister like, 'Look at this. Isn't this nice?'"
Five shops away, Brian McAbee, 18, a clerk at Up Against The Wall, a clothing store featuring jeans and shirts, said, "They were in here. They just came in and looked around. I saw them walk throught the arch."
Sheila's and Kate's oldest brother, Jay, a ninth grader at Montgomery Hills said he saw his sisters over by the big Easter bunny display in the center of the plaza at about 1 p.m. "I walked past them. They kind of looked like they were waiting there," he said. "I think they saw me but they didn't make any signs."
Moments later, another 13-year-old boy saw the girls. Sheila, he said, was sitting on one of the Easter bunny's arms listening to the little children come up and tell the Easter bunny what they wanted for Easter.
Another 13-year-old boy also says he saw a 50 to 60 year-old man recording a conversation with Sheila and Kate at about 2 o'clock. He overheard the man asking one question: "Are any of you two involved in sports?"
And the youngster says he then saw the man walk away in one direction and the girls in the other. That was the last time they were seen at Wheaton plaza. Police have circulated a composite sketch of the man with the tape recorder, but he has not been located.
Only one person has reported seeing the girls later that day. At 7:30 that night, David Reed, 12, a seventh grader at Sheila's school, said he saw the two sisters walking in the opposite direction of their home near the intersection of Drumm and Faulkner headed toward the plaza. "I was coming from a friend's house from playing basketball," said David, "I passed them (on the sidewalk) and then I looked back. Why? They're girls." David said he had seen both girls before up at the community swimming pool and had seen Sheila at school.
At 3:30 p.m., Mrs. Lyon arrived home from her bowling trip. The girls weren't there. She said it was her worst bowling performance ever - so bad, in fact, that she is embarrassed to tell her score.
Her husband had met her outside the Wheaton Triangle bowling alley. From there they went together to the Kensington bank before it closed and then on to a used bookstore.
Back home, Mrs. Lyon recalled, "John went in and lay down. I changed my clothes and worked in the front yard for three hours. The boys had come home by then."
As she was gardening throughout the afternoon, Mrs. Lyon wondered about the girls. "I hadn't told them absolutely they had to be home at 3. So I thought that maybe they had stopped off at a movie or a friend's house."
The Lyons customarily do tell their children to be home at 6 o'clock for dinner, although the food usually isn't served until 45 minutes later.
Six o'clock came and went, however, with no sign of the girls. "As we sat down to eat fried chicken," Mrs. Lyon was more angry than worried, so much so that "I even thought I wouldn't give them any chicken when they got home."
By 7 o'clock, however, the anger had given way to anficty. "I said to John, 'I don't understand this," Mrs. Lyon said, so she and her husband drove in their Ford station wagon down Jennings and up Drumm to Faulkner to see if they could spot their daughters walking home.
"Back home," said the mother, "I got out my little phone book and started calling their freinds." "John left and went to the Plaza to look some more. He got home at 8 p.m."
"We were really scared by then. John called the police. I knew when it started to get dark they'd know to come home. But they didn't."
The Montgomery County Police took the Lyons' call "seriously as soon as I told them how old they were." said Mrs. Lyon "They sent a police car over and took a complete description and the police called all the kids who were friends of my daughters'."
Still no luck.
That night, Jay Lyon went upstairs to his sisters' bedroom where Sheila kept her money in a metal tea can. Jay counted the money in it and there was $17 and some odd cents.
"We go to Myrtle Beach every year," Mrs. Lyon said. "And we encourage the children to save their money for that. I remember Sheila said the day before, 'Hey Mom, I have $20 already.'"
"Kate had some money but she didn't have near what Sheila did."
....
The telephone rings frequently in the Lyon home these days, and a number of people are there. Family, friends, and neighbors. All waiting.
The other day, as Mrs. Lyon sits on the living-room flowered couch, the phone in the kitchen rings again. Someone answers it. She looks up. They away.
John's mother sits patiently, knitting. Mary's mother is there, too, as well as two sisters who arrived from out of town. Mrs. Lyon's sisters leave for a brief time and return with a pocketbook plant for her. They bought it at the 7-11 - the last one there.
Jay arrives home from school. He gets engrossed in a chess game with this cousin, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the green rug.
Joe comes in from school in his overalls, shirt sleeves rolled up. He puts his arms around his mother's waist and buries his head in her chest.
They go into her bedroom where he gives her a home-made cupcake which a neighbor up the street had prepared for him. Joe wants his mother to have it.
Then he opens a folder he had left on the bed. Inside is a color photograph of Kate and her class. He shows his mother a picture of his class.
Mother and son walk out into the living room. There's no place to sit. She stands in the middle of the room, fussing with Joe's shirt, unrolling his sleeves, straightening his overalls.
Photographers, cameraman, an anchorman, a reporter are among the new faces. A photogtrapher wants to take a picture of Mary and John Lyon. They sit down at the kitchen table and talk. The camera click, clicks. The photographer leaves.
Then out to the front stoop where WMAL has a cameraman ready to roll and an anchorman to do an interview. And then back inside the house again because another photographer wants to shoot pictures.
This time, upstairs. In the girls bedroom with the dainty vanity and the pink flowered vanity skirt and the ruffled white curtains. A poster of rock star John Denver hangs over Sheila's bed -- over Kate's one of Loggins and Messina.
Mary Lyon hurriedly straightened the pink blanket on Kate's bed before the camera clicks. She says to no one in particular that she is going to let her sisters sleep in the girls' room tonight because last night one of the cots broke.
The photographer snaps a few pictures of the stuffed animals piled high on Sheila's pink sheets and blue flowered blanket. He does the same for Kate's.
Mrs. Lyon stands over by the bookcse in a corner of the room pointing out Kate's Bobbsey Twins books. "Kate likes to read," said her mother. " She likes very sad, sentimental stories about orphans and poor little girls. She takes after me that way."
Neighbors and friends have been wonderful, said Mrs. Lyon, bringing in hams and turkeys and cakes. Friends stop by continually to chat and to help out. Women in the community are busily collecting money, going from house to house, to increase the reward money initiated by WMAL. Even children chip in from dimes to dollars. Nearly $600 was handed over at the end of the week from that source. The Oakland Terrace school where Kate is a pupil gave $100 and the school's PTA donated $50. At St. John the Evangelist Church in Silver Spring, the 9 a.m. Mass was said yesterday for the Lyon sisters - for their safe return.
.....
It's April 6 and the wait is still on. Mrs. Lyon has changed her mind about a lot of things. "When they come home, Kate can get her ears pierced. And Sheila can wear eye shadow."
Melanie has two transistor radios wrapped up and waiting as birthday presents for Sheila and Kate, both of whom had birthdays last weekend. There will be a promised birthday dinner out. They'll get their Easter baskets that have been sitting by the fireplace.
And Kate will have her little brother Joe to walk to school again.
joellegirl
Active Member
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2004
- Messages
- 346
- Reaction score
- 104
Thanks Richard for posting that! What a great article, rich with detail. I wish I could see the pictures, especially of their room.
I wish it had rained that March 25, as they most likely wouldn't have gone to Wheaton Plaza that day, as it was an open air mall.
I saw the neighborhood and shopping center in 2005. Isn't the Lyon house on a angle at the corner of Jennings and Plyers Mill?
I wish it had rained that March 25, as they most likely wouldn't have gone to Wheaton Plaza that day, as it was an open air mall.
I saw the neighborhood and shopping center in 2005. Isn't the Lyon house on a angle at the corner of Jennings and Plyers Mill?
SharetheLight
Share the Light, Share the Love
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2008
- Messages
- 2,077
- Reaction score
- 21
In this last report it state Melanie Ganas was supposed to call again at 3pm. I wondered if she ever called??