The Last Stone
Author: Mark Bowden
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Date of Publication: April 2, 2019
Pages: 304
Bowden was a fledgling newspaper reporter in 1975 when two young sisters, ages 10 and 12 disappeared from the Wheaton Mall in Montgomery County, Maryland (a suburb of Washington, D.C.). John Lyon, the father of the two girls (Katherine and Sheila) was a popular D.C. area radio personality and the hunt for the girls and the mystery of what happened to them captured the attention of the entire area. Although exhaustive searches were conducted and a multitude of leads were followed, the case was never solved and there was no closure for the family. Bowden was haunted by it over the years. He was intent on following up on it when the story gained new life in 2013.
Credit goes to a group of Maryland investigators who in 2013 went back through the Lyons case with a fine-toothed comb. They had a person who they thought might be connected and were looking for any details which would link that person to the unsolved crime. What they found instead was a peculiar witness statement from an 18-year-old boy named Lloyd Welch who went to the police 5 days after the girls' disappearance. This teen claimed to have seen the girls leaving the mall with a man. This statement was discounted at the time as non-credible. Following up on the teen who gave the statement, these investigators located him and found a man with a long criminal record who was currently incarcerated in Delaware for child molestation. Photos of this man as a teen were eerily similar to a composite sketch from 1975 of a young man seen in the mall talking to Sheila and Kate Lyon.
The Lyon case was complicated over and above the age of the case. There were no bodies, no crime scene, and no other forensic evidence. These investigators began a three-year-long interrogation of Lloyd Welch. Welch turned out to be an inveterate liar. He cooperated with the investigation to a point, but always spinning a narrative which put him in the clear. These detectives ferreted through the disinformation and followed up every detail revealed by Welch. As time went on, Welch implicated many family members, including his father, an uncle, and a nephew. The Welch family had cousins in Thaxton on Taylor's Mountain. Lloyd Welch along with his girlfriend and his father visited this family farm after the Lyon sisters' disappearance and there were various reports from Virginia family members about a large bonfire and a bloody duffle bag being destroyed in the fire.
Eventually a joint investigation by the Maryland detectives, the Bedford Sheriff's office and the F.B.I. resulted in indictments and a trial. Unfortunately, even with this exhaustive work by law enforcement, many questions about the fate of the Lyon sisters remain.
Bowden discusses the psychological toll this investigation took on the detectives who were so invested in finding the truth and were constantly deceived by Welch. The book does not delve into the crime's effect on the Lyon family, except to note that the one remaining sibling, an older brother, went into law enforcement. This book gets a bit tedious at times, many long stretches being basically transcripts of the interview tapes with Lloyd Welch. It is fascinating, though, to see the dogged determination and old-fashioned detective work performed by the four Maryland investigators: Dave Davis, Chris Homrock, Mark Janney, and Katie Leggett. In these days of DNA evidence and genetic genealogy, they were able to piece together a case using psychology, hunches, and intuition to come to at least a partial resolution of the Lyon sisters' disappearance. Central Virginians will enjoy reading this if, like me, they have recollections of the case but want to know the whole story. The Last Stone is a reminder that we live in a dangerous, treacherous world and evil still lurks about even in the most unexpected places.
