CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A REPORT BY WMAL’S NICOLE RAZ
Nicole Raz
WMAL.com
GAITHERSBURG — Nearly 40 years after their disappearance from the Wheaton Plaza shopping center, Montgomery County Police say they are getting closer to solving the case of the missing Lyon sisters – Sheila, 12, and Katherine, 10.
“We are zeroing in on the people that were responsible, and putting together the pieces of what exactly happened to the girls,” Montgomery County Police Detective Mark Janney told WMAL.
It’s been two weeks since WMAL reinstated its $7,000 reward for information leading to a resolution of the case. The girl’s father, John Lyon, was an on-air personality at WMAL at the time of his daughters’ disappearance, and during the initial search for the sisters, the radio station offered the reward.
As the investigation has warmed up in recent months, Montgomery County Police asked WMAL if it would cover that reward now. After several changes in ownership since 1975, the station’s current owner, Cumulus Media, agreed to honor that commitment.
“We started making a lot of progress about a year and a half ago, and we discovered Lloyd Welch as a person of interest. That’s kind of where we feel the investigation really took off,” he said.
Investigators believe Welch abducted the sisters from Wheaton Plaza, and then possibly took them to Bedford County, Virginia. Welch is a convicted child sex offender who is currently serving time in a Delaware prison for a separate crime. He has family in southern Virginia, including his uncle, Richard Welch, who has also been named as a “person of interest” in the case.
WMAL’s reward is helping to generate interest in the case, and has brought a steady stream of tips, Janney said.
“It’s been closer to a handful than hundreds [of tips], but we’re more interested in quality than quantity,” he told WMAL. “Most of them were in the few days following the announcement but they’re still coming in,” he said, adding that there are some that they are “very interested in.”
Investigators believe a station wagon may have been used in the abduction of the sisters and that the vehicle may still exist.
“Some of the tips have been specially about suspicious station wagons that we’re looking into, and we are currently actively following up on all of them,” he said.
The tip that’s worth the $7,000 will directly lead to the successful prosecution of those responsible. That could mean it’s a tip that links the station wagon to the girls, or leads to recovering their remains.
“It may not just be one person, it may be a couple of people that provide tips that are that valuable that we could split the award.”
Copyright 2014 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Montgomery County Police)
