"Police pinpoint Va. mountain for 2 girls missing since ’75; Detectives piece together case out of decades-old scraps" by Dan Morse, Washington Post March 22, 2015
TAYLORS MOUNTAIN, Va. — Three detectives pulled up to a rugged piece of land here, a 220-mile drive from their offices in suburban Maryland.
To their right was a small white house. Beyond that, a rutted dirt road extended up a steep slope, bending through towering trees.
The detectives walked up a 100-foot driveway and knocked. Nikki Arrington, 30, answered, telling them she just started renting the place and it would be fine for them to look around. She pointed to the dirt road. ‘‘There’s a family graveyard up there on the hill,’’ she said.
The trip, six months ago, had come after significant progress in their efforts to solve an indelible, heartbreaking mystery — the 1975 disappearance of two Montgomery County girls, Sheila Lyon, 12, and her sister, Katherine, 10. The girls vanished after walking to a Wheaton shopping mall to look at Easter decorations and eat pizza.
The detectives had zeroed in on a man who had family connections to the land — a sex offender who had gone so far as to tell detectives he’d left that mall with the Lyon sisters, according to court papers.
To search the land, though, the detectives and their colleagues in Virginia have had to call in FBI specialists trained to dig up dirt, run it through sifters, and look for clues that could be smaller than the eraser on a pencil.
‘‘This is a tough case, trying to piece together things from 40 years ago,’’ said Randy Krantz, the top prosecutor in Bedford County, the area where the digs are taking place.
Over the years, a series of investigators have worked the case, many going over the same aged records stored in files.
In May 2013, detective Dave Davis had just joined the investigation when he and others set fresh eyes on a report in those files: an interview detectives had with a man named Lloyd Welch in 1975, just a week after the Lyon sisters disappeared. Welch had not been considered a suspect back then, but the more present-day detectives looked at him, the more interested they became.
By early 2014, two more detectives were on the case: Katie Leggett and Mark Janney. She had spent 12 years investigating child abuse. He had spent much of his career putting together complicated drug conspiracy cases.
Both had young daughters of their own — something that became part of their conversations about the case and made them think constantly about the family of Sheila and Katherine. The girls’ parents are still alive, still looking for answers, as are their brothers, one of whom had gone on to become a cop for Montgomery County.
Janney, Leggett, and Davis — along with their sergeant, Chris Homrock — agreed to speak generally about the case. Citing an ongoing grand jury inquiry, they declined to talk about any evidence collected.
The day the trio first arrived at the land, they headed up on foot, passing through dense woods on either side, and came to a clearing. At first the headstones were hard to see — small and unmarked — but there were more than 30. Only one marker could be read, that of a woman who died in 1906.
The detectives checked into a hotel that night, and the next day they paid a call to the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office, which summoned Krantz, the top prosecutor. They brought him up to speed on their case.
A request for a search warrant in Bedford court outlines how detectives had begun to focus on the Virginia mountain.
Their interest in Lloyd Welch led to an interest in his relatives, including an uncle, Richard Welch of Hyattsville. Richard Welch owned a parcel of land in Bedford. Next to that parcel is 34 acres formerly owned by Richard Welch’s sister, according to the affidavits.
The detectives also learned that in the months after February 2014 — when police officials in Montgomery County announced that Lloyd Welch was a ‘‘person of interest’’ in the case — Richard Welch and his wife, Patricia, had made several trips to Bedford County, according to the affidavits.
Richard and Patricia appeared ‘‘extremely interested’’ in whether their relatives had spoken with investigators. The detectives spoke with one Welch relative who said she remembered Lloyd Welch visiting his family’s property in the spring of 1975.
With about two dozen people, including county and state investigators, police were ready to search the mountain known as Taylors Mountain.
To members of the Welch family, the detectives’ efforts amount to an obsession.
‘‘I tried to tell them I had nothing to do with this, and look where it got me. My family’s and my lives turned upside down,’’ Lloyd Welch wrote in a letter to the Washington Post from prison.
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