42 years after young Md. sisters vanished, man pleads guilty in case that stunned D.C. region [View all]
Source: Washington Post
42 years after young Md. sisters vanished, man pleads guilty in case that stunned D.C. region
By Dan Morse September 12 at 9:52 AM
BEDFORD, VA. A sex offender accused in the 1975 abduction of sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyon from a Maryland shopping mall pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree felony murder on Tuesday morning answering some but not all of the lingering questions in one of the Washington regions most painful mysteries.
Wearing a bright orange prison jumpsuit, Lloyd Lee Welch, 60, stood before a judge and admitted he participated in the abduction of the sisters, ages 10 and 12, who were last seen at Wheaton Plaza Mall where theyd gone to have lunch, see friends and look at Easter decorations. ... I plead guilty to felony first-degree murder, Welch said for each of the two counts. ... Welch did not admit to directly killing either girl but he was held accountable for their deaths under a felony murder doctrine for killings in the commission of abduction with intent to defile.
Lloyd Welch in 1997 and 2015. (Maryland and Virginia law enforcement)
Welch received a sentence of 48 years in prison, as part of an earlier agreement with prosecutors. Given his age, and the fact he still must finish a prison sentence in Delaware for the unrelated sexual assault of a 10-year-old, it is unlikely Welch will ever be released. He was prosecuted in the Lyon sisters case in Bedford County some 200 miles southwest of Washington because authorities established that the remains of at least one of the girls may have been buried there.
....
It was about five years ago that the Montgomery County Police Department decided to make one final push to solve the mystery. ... The approach: Let’s act as if a call had just come in for the two missing girls and scour the boxes and boxes of case records as if starting from scratch. ... One of the most intriguing finds, early on, was a brief report — written by investigators a week after the disappearances — about an 18-year-old named Lloyd Lee Welch who had gone up to a security guard at the mall a week after the disappearance and said he’d been at the mall on the day the girls disappeared.
....
Dan Morse covers courts and crime in Montgomery County. He arrived at the paper in 2005, after reporting stops at the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of The Yoga Store Murder. Follow @morsedan
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/suspect-in-1975-lyon-sisters-murders-set-to-plead-guilty/2017/09/12/06d968d0-8d93-11e7-8df5-c2e5cf46c1e2_story.html
Retweeted by David Fahrenthold: https://twitter.com/Fahrenthold
BREAKING Four decades after abducting Lyon sisters from a Maryland mall, Lloyd Welch pleads guilty to their murders.
Link to tweet
= new reply since forum marked as read