William Leith

Closure at last | 1 August 2019

A paedophile and killer from Maryland escaped justice for 38 years — until one determined detective extracted a confession

This is horrible. But it’s a book by Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, so it’s compelling: an almost perfect true crime story. Two sisters, aged ten and 12, disappeared from a shopping mall in 1975 and were never seen again. What happened to them was a mystery for 40 years. In The Last Stone, Bowden tells you about two things. He tells you how the mystery was solved, and he tells you what happened to the girls. The first thing is compelling. The second will make you sick.

The girls, Kate and Sheila Lyon, went to the Wheaton Plaza shopping mall in Montgomery County, Maryland on 29 March. They were supposed to be home by 4 p.m. They weren’t. They vanished. The police interviewed lots of people. They searched the surrounding area. There were sightings of the girls in the mall. A sketch was made of a young man with a skimpy moustache and long hair. He’d been staring at the girls.

And then, three days later, something weird happened. An 18-year-old man came to the mall. He had long hair and a ‘pathetic whisper of a moustache’. He was stoned. This was Lloyd Welch, ‘scrawny and acned and mean; life had treated him harshly, and it showed’. Lloyd was a motormouth. He approached a security guard and wanted to talk about the girls. The guard called the police. Lloyd told the police he’d seen the girls. He described them. Two blonde girls. One wore glasses. Said they’d been talking to an older man. All of these details had been reported in the press. At the Montgomery County Police Department, Lloyd was given a polygraph test. He failed on every count but one: he had, it seemed, really seen the girls.

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