Richard -...How about someone they really knew, in the general neighborhood, being the culprit? Doesn't it fit all the criteria for Criminology 102????
Why do we have to keep have some mysterious abductor that goes to other states undetected??...
There are a wide range of possibilities any time a person goes missing. The vast majority of young kids who are reported missing have simply run away or stayed out too late. I do not know the facts and figures for it, but most missing child cases end up with the child returning home safely.
That was discussed early and often in the case of the Lyon sisters, but was not likely and the passage of time has pretty well convinced me that they were abducted - either in Wheaton Plaza parking lot, or an area nearby, perhaps while they were walking home.
Let's consider the possibility that they might have been abducted by a home owner or renting tenant along their route. There were not that many houses and the police did go door to door asking everyone questions. All garages, sheds, ponds, etc were carefully searched.
Police looked up every pervert and pediphile in the area that they knew and questioned them.
The family was interviewed, as were neighbors. In the end, no family or neighborhood suspects were developed.
I suggested the possibility of a neighborhood person named Michael Pearch being their abductor. (See the Suspects and Persons of Interest thread). Pearch's mother lived in a house only a few blocks from the Lyon house and very close to Kate's middle school. He traveled the residential roads often in his green VW, and liked to shop in Wheaton and at the Mall.
Pearch had moved to a farm in or near Friendsville, Maryland in westernmost Garret County - a good two and a half or three hour drive from Wheaton. But he came home often, and could very well have been in the neighborhood when the girls disappeared. He was mentally disturbed, paranoid, and very much a loner. He was into guns and knives and had prior Army service. He had been involved in counterintelligence and had told his mother and sister that he had been involved in kidnappings, fake passports and badges, and other such activities when stationed in Germany. How much was true and how much was simply made up in his imagination is not known.
In a way, you may be right about police giving him a "free ticket". Probably partly for the reason that he had never been in any kind of trouble prior to the girls' disappearance - so he was not on anyone's radar at the time. Also, because he was shot to death by police following an April 1975 shooting spree which started right at Wheaton Plaza. Pearch seemed to be singling out black adults to shoot at, mostly males. Police did not see any connection between the two cases.
The Pearch case was "open and shut". Police did what they had to do when faced with a mad man shooting people on the streets, who refused to put down his weapons. They shot and killed him.
But what made Pearch do what he did? And could he have done other things as well - like abducting the Lyon sisters?
Unfortunately, all you have to connect the cases is the closeness in time and place - and coincidence. You couldn't ask Pearch questions after he was dead, but it seems that no questions were even formulated regarding Pearch as a potential suspect in the girls disappearance. To my knowledge, no search was ever conducted for the girls at his Friendsville farm.