smile22 said:
very intresting. how long was the man at the mall? does anyone know if he was there when the girls were on the way home maybe he was secretly following them from a distance and saw them walking home and deicided to follow them
Here is what the Washington Post of Tuesday, April 1, 1975,(one week after the girls disappeared) had to say about the Tape Recorder Man Suspect when they ran the first sketch for the first time:
Quote: Last Friday, police said they were told that a man, described as a white male, about 6 feet tall, wearing a brown suit and carrying a brown briefcase, talked to the young girls at 1 p.m. outside the Orange Bowl Restaurant at Wheaton Plaza. The informant, police said, was a 13-year-old boy who knows the two girls well.
Police said the boy told them that he walked past the girls and the man and saw the girls speaking into a microphone attached to a cassette tape recorder inside the briefcase. After drawing up a composite sketch from the boy's description, police said they interviewed store officials and clerks in Wheaton Plaza and showed them the sketch, but did not come up with any leads. A WMAL spokesman said some people at the station also were shown the sketch before it was released, but that no one recognized the man.
"We're checking the sketch with known sex deviates and ... against everything we got," said Capt. Gabriel Lamastra, head of the county's juvenile section. "To be honest, I wouldn't tell you if we made a hit or not." Unquote.
(After the sketch was published, there were some store clerks who stated that they had seen the man at Wheaton Plaza on Monday, 24 March the day prior to the girls disappearance.)
The very next day, 2 April 1975, the Washington Post reported that: (quote) From more than 300 callers who responded to publication and televising of the sketch, police said they discerned a "pattern" emerging of a man with a tape recorder approaching young girls in suburban shopping centers. (unquote) and that further: (quote) Police... had received at least 15 phone calls from mothers of teen-aged girls who said their daughters had been "bothered" recently by an man with at tape recorder at suburban Maryland shopping centers. (unquote)
That is a lot of tips about the suspect. Unfortunately, there are no further reports of any sightings of the man past 1PM on Tuesday 25 March 1975. No person ever came forward to say "Hey, that was me, and I was only doing..." It was their last solid lead in the case.
Now what you have to wonder is this: Did this weird guy have nothing whatever to do with the girls disappearance, and another person or persons abducted them within the next two or three hours? Or was there a connection? Most logical thinkers would tend to see a connection. But not necessarily an immediate one. The girls were seen by their brother in the Restaurant at 2 PM and later by a 15 year old boy who knew them between 2:30 and 3:30 PM walking home.
The girls' mother stated at one point that she believed that someone in a vehicle may have come up to the girls and might have told them that their father had been hurt and that their mother wanted them to go with him to the hospital. She felt that such a ruse might have worked on them.
Such a person might have been the Tape Recorder Man, or perhaps an accomplice working with him. Perhaps his tape recording was done only as a way to interview potential victims and to build some rapor with them for the next encounter.
Subsequent police interviews with sales clerks and girls who had been approached led to a slight alteration of the origional sketch, and that new sketch was published on Friday, 4 April in the Washington Post. The accompanying article stated that Police spokesman Phillip Caswell said: "There are no new leads and no suspects have been developed in the case. We just continue to pound leather and wear out the tires on our cruisers". This was immediately after a paragraph that stated: "Montgomery police said they had checked out a number of tips yesterday, including one that led them to interview a man in Prince George's County, but that these had 'washed out' by early evening." So clearly the Montgomery County Police were making seemingly contradictory statements almost simultaneously.
The end of the article included some quotes from a Capt. Charles Goddard, who headed the 16 man security force at Iverson Mall. He stated that they had been looking for the suspect, but that they had detained no one. Interestingly, the last paragraph stated the following:
(Quote): Goddard added that Montgomery police had told him in connection with the Lyon search, to be on the lookout for a blue Falcon Station Wagon covered with stickers and slogans, including a bumper sticker from Walt Disney's Florida resort known as Disneyworld. (unquote)
This was the first time that any specific vehicle was mentioned, and there was never any further elaboration on it or why it was a suspect vehicle.