On March 25, 1975, two young girls went missing from a shopping mall in Wheaton, Md., a suburb north of Washington. Sheila and Kate Lyon were sisters, just 12 and 10 years old, from a solid, middle-class family. Until that day, their lives seemed to lack the slightest hint of drama; they had no reason or plan to run away. Decades after the leads ran dry and the searches stopped, the disappearance of the Lyon sisters resonated. Here was every parent's nightmare — or, as Mark Bowden remembers it, “a regional trauma.”
Bowden was 23 that year, starting his career on the police beat of The Baltimore News-American. Recalling his visits with the girls' parents, he writes, “I could not witness their pain dispassionately.” Since then, Bowden has written more than a dozen books, including “Black Hawk Down,” and returned often to the subject of police work, including a provocative 2003 piece in The Atlantic about the problematic gray areas between coercion and torture. When, in 2013, detectives in Maryland started to question the first solid witness in the Lyon case in nearly 40 years, Bowden was ideally positioned to revisit the first major story of his career.
A native of one of the destitute hollows of Appalachia, Lloyd Welch was 18 when the Lyon sisters vanished. He had been at the mall that day, and a few days later he told police he'd seen another man talking with the girls there. When, years later, cold-case detectives learned about the crimes Welch had committed in the intervening decades — including child molestation — they could not help wondering if he should be less a witness than a suspect. But when they visit Welch in prison, where he is hoping for an early release, he gets the jump on them, saying he knows exactly why they're there (we learn later how he found out). And for much of his questioning, Welch seems almost drunk with power — “like a fairy-tale goblin guarding a treasure, speaking in riddles.” The challenge facing the detectives: “How do you get a compulsive liar, one with every reason to lie, to tell the truth?”
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