Vintage Villains
For those who like a little old-time with their true crime, join host Allison Dickson of Ding Dong Darkness Time as she explores the villains of decades and centuries past.
Vintage Villains
8: Lloyd Welch and the Disappearance of the Lyon Sisters -- Part 1 of 2
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In this joint episode with the Silver Linings Handbook podcast, Allison and Jayson tackle what is to date the oldest no-body homicide case to receive a conviction in the US.
In 1975, sisters Sheila (12) and Katherine (10) Lyon were going for a slice of pizza at a popular Baltimore-area shopping mall when they disappeared without a trace. But there were witnesses, and one of them helped generate the sketch of a man it would take nearly 40 years to circle back around to: Lloyd Lee Welch.
Journalist and true crime author Mark Bowden called the Lyon sisters disappearance a case that struck at suburbia's idea of itself, and his book, THE LAST STONE (a major source for this episode) ,details law enforcement's labyrinthine investigation and interrogation of Welch and his family, a story that takes you to the heart of Appalachia and other dark corners that went decades before being exposed to the light of truth.
Allison's Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/warpedcortexmedia
Additional Music: "Late Night Radio" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Silver Linings Handbook Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-silver-linings-handbook/id1665733166
The Silver Linings Handbook Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheSilverLiningsHandbook
Sources:
The Last Stone, a 2019 book by Mark Bowden; the documentary Who Killed the Lyon Sisters?, which was directed by Bowden’s son, Aaron; articles in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore News American, The Washington Post and The Frederick News-Post.
Credits:
Main Theme Music -- Ken Dickson
Main Graphics -- Nathaniel Dickson
This week I traveled back to the year 1975 and I found a bad guy Actually, I found a few when young sisters, catherine and Sheila Lyon, disappeared from a popular Baltimore-area shopping mall. Reporter and author Mark Bowden described it as a story that struck at suburbia's idea of itself, namely that it was safe, at suburbia's idea of itself, namely that it was safe. Today, my friend Jason Blair and I are going to talk about a case that took 40 years and a miracle to solve, but many questions about this crime still linger, leaving us to wonder if justice really has been served.
Allison Dickson:We'll talk about that, and oh, so much more on this two-part episode of Vintage Villains.
Allison Dickson:Friends, I'm Alison Dickson and, wouldn't you know it, we are knee-deep in the 70s again. Talked about Patty Hearst. We took a cruise along the gritty boulevards of 1974, where, among other things, we glimpsed a freshly disgraced US president, a world in the grip of an energy crisis and the beginning of the end of our war in Vietnam. And if you were thinking, things somehow chilled out the following year. Well, listen. If you listen to this show or dig into history long enough, you'll probably notice right away that times of peace and safety only exist in the broadest view. Zoom in a little closer and you'll always find trouble skulking about in its various disguises. It's just a matter of if or when it decides to look in your direction. But from the safety of my ultra groovy, far out Zeitgeist Zeppelin, we can take a quick gander at the world as it was in 1975, the year sisters Kate and Sheila Lyon disappeared, a world that was gradually growing more dangerous, for young women in particular. Remember back in my 1974 discussion when I listed some of the women who were later discovered to be victims of serial killer Ted Bundy. Well, sadly, he would not be caught for a few more years, and so his nasty work continued in the Western US throughout 1975 with the deaths of Julie Cunningham, lynette Culver, denise Oliverson, melanie Cooley and Karen Campbell. And Bundy was only one of the serial killers who were active or were about to become active. During this time, the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was also beginning his murder career in the UK. Around this time his murder career in the UK around this time and I don't think we were too far away from the time when John Wayne Gacy started burying young men in his house's crawl space. Suffice it to say, we will be back here again and again, folks. The 70s are just thick with villainy.
Allison Dickson:But what else was going on in 75? Well, the resignation of President Richard Nixon didn't end the Watergate scandal entirely. Scores of the president's men were facing consequences for their involvement in the raid of the Democratic Party headquarters in DC. And January 1st saw the conviction of Nixon's chief of staff, hr Haldeman, among others, for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Those convicted would serve anywhere from two to eight years in prison of justice. Those convicted would serve anywhere from two to eight years in prison. Only a few days later, president Gerald Ford would release an executive order, 11828 to be precise, establishing a commission to govern the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency following the public revelations of many of their illegal activities over the years, namely MKUltra, but many others, which I promise you will be discussed in detail here in an episode this summer.
Allison Dickson:And rounding out what was one hell of a busy week in the new year was the premiere of the popular game show Wheel of Fortune, which might very well have been interrupted by a special newscast when the aforementioned Patty Hearst was arrested later. That fall Elsewhere in TV. Later in January, the sitcom All in the Family also premiered a satire depicting a cantankerous father who yearns for the simplicity of yesteryear while being exasperated by his hippie children. It was a far cry from Leave it to Beaver Beaver, excuse me. It was a far cry from Leave it to Beaver and brilliantly demonstrated the cultural crossroads of the post-Vietnam era. File it alongside MASH as comedies from decades past that were packed with a whole lot of biting social commentary, and maybe you can pull it out next time you encounter your own real life. Archie bunkers that insist. Such things didn't exist in entertainment before 2012. On January 30th, inventor Erno Rubik patented the magic cube that would later come to bear his name, and I'll just let it be known here that I have never once solved a Rubik's cube and probably never will, and in fact I have half a mind to make him a vintage villain for all the headaches he's caused me throughout my life. In February, 1,800 people were married in a mass wedding conducted by the Unification Church, and if you want to know more about Sun Young Moon's massive cult, I did an episode on them back on my other show, ding Dong Darkness Time. I'll link it in the show notes.
Allison Dickson:Elsewhere in the world, mozambique rid itself of its Portuguese colonizers and Ethiopia abolished its 3,000-year monarchy. Meanwhile, that very same year, spain restored its monarchy after 31 years, because some people just can't live without a king or queen. I guess this is also the year the communists, khmer Rouge and Cambodia captured the capital city of Phnom Penh, marking the end of the Cambodian Civil War and beginning a genocidal bloodbath that would kill an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people and drive millions more to flee the country. And in case you're wondering, pol Pot will absolutely be a vintage villain. Mark my words. And while we're hanging out in Southeast Asia, we might as well make mention of April 29th, marking the official fall of Saigon and the end of US involvement in the war, which had been deteriorating for many months as Ho Chi Minh's forces multiplied and advanced to the south. You might recall a famous photo of the helicopter on the rooftop picking up the last of the US citizens who remained. North Vietnamese troops would move in and capture the city the following day, marking a sobering and humiliating end of the Vietnam era, at least for us, that had dominated the American way of life for over a decade.
Allison Dickson:Over in Great Britain, margaret Thatcher ascended to the head of the Conservative Party, heralding a period for the UK that would go down in history as a rip-roaring good time of happiness and prosperity for all right. Meanwhile, june would also mark the first ever recorded snowfall for that month in London. Coincidence, I think. Not Speaking of actual good times, though, here's a smattering of songs released in 1975 that soared up the charts. Thank God, I'm a Country Boy by John Denver. Mandy by Barry Manilow. The Best of my Love by the Eagles. Fame by David Bowie. Fight the Power by the Isley Brothers, which would later inspire the Chuck D of Public Enemy to write his rap anthem. Rhinestone Cowboy by Glen Campbell would win Billboard's Song of the Year. Peter Gabriel announced his departure from the group Genesis, paving the way for Phil Collins to take the helm and later bring us the greatest drum fill of all time within the air tonight, and I don't want to hear any backtalk about that.
Allison Dickson:In movies, the Godfather Part II would take home the Academy Award for Best Picture. Ellen Burstyn would win the statue for Best Actress for her turn in Alice Doesn't Live here Anymore. Great movie, highly recommend it. Chinatown would win for Best Screenplay, but Jack Nicholson would only take home a Golden Globe for his part in it.
Allison Dickson:In technology, june of 75 would see the release of Sony's Betamax technology, which would allow people to watch and record movies on videotape. In October of 75, the still-running sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live would air its very first episode. The host was George Carlin. When comedian Richard Pryor hosted the show in December, the live broadcast would introduce its first time delay, presumably to head off any of the more indecent jokes Pryor was known for. And speaking of indecent jokes, in July the US House of Representatives voted to restore American citizenship to Confederate General Robert E Lee, and the Supreme Court ruled in Owen v Baker that schools were allowed to administer corporal punishment to students, albeit with some guidelines in place. In sports, muhammad Ali continued to dominate as heavyweight champion of the world, with probably his most famous fight against fellow heavyweight Joe Frazier taking place in the Philippines, known as the Thrilla in Manila.
Allison Dickson:And now it's time, my friends, to bring the zeitgeist Zeppelin back into port. After a short glimpse at this rather dark and gritty time. I forgot to mention before that President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts that fall, one of which was by a former member of the Manson family, for that extra bit of spice. But it wasn't dark everywhere. In fact, while things might have been raging in the wider world, there were places people built in their communities that were meant to bring everyone together in the safety of boutique storefronts, food courts, fountains and movie theaters. I'm talking about shopping malls and they were really coming to the fore in 1975 for many suburban communities that lacked a traditional town square. Of course, there was a more sinister reason behind the creation of these places and suburbs in general, but we'll probably get to that throughout the episode.
Allison Dickson:Any of you listening can probably think of all the times you've spent in some of these shrines to modernist capitalism, and I bet most of you could say that you felt pretty safe there, except maybe you remember a time or two when someone followed you a little too close or stared a little too long. You probably also remember traveling in pairs or packs for safety. But safety, as we know, is largely an illusion we build for ourselves, so we don't have to think about the statistical gambles we're taking. My friend, jason Blair, host of the Silver Linings Handbook podcast, brought this story to my attention recently, and I knew it was something we had to talk about, not only because the story of Kate and Sheila Lyon itself is uniquely haunting, but because, sitting here in 2024, many of you listening now might think it sounds like some more recent cases you've heard of. So let's get into it, shall we All right?
Jayson Blair:Three initial thoughts. 1975 sounds like it was a lot, a lot. I'm ready to take a nap already. So the second thing I will teach you how to solve a Rubik's Cube. It's just an algorithm. It's like step, step, step, step. It doesn't matter what the cube is man.
Allison Dickson:if I could master an algorithm, I would be YouTube famous right now.
Jayson Blair:It's simple and then so I got you on the Rubik's Cube, and 75 was definitely a lot. And then the third thing before we really dive in, the one thing I want to say about this case the Loin sisters' disappearance is that it was one of those iconic cases. Like Delphi was to Delphi, indiana, or maybe the murder of Samantha Koning was to Anchorage, alaska, when she was killed by Israel Keyes, it changed everything, right. When you talk about an event that caused people to finally start to lock their doors in the Washington DC area and started, you know that notion of kids who couldn't stray far from their home and some adult always had to be washing them. This was really a case where, a case where that truly happened. And there's this quote that one of the detectives who later worked on the case said his wife's parents said to him that they remembered the case right. So he's about my contemporary. They remember the case and it was the permanent loss of innocence in the region. So that's the kind of impact of that.
Allison Dickson:It's interesting too to think about how regional this can be as well. I would say, you know, for that sort of mid-Atlantic DC area region, this case had that, and then, if you think of one, certainly, like you said, delphi in Indiana and I think that was one reason why we wanted to talk about this, because it's amazing the parallels that there are between these cases and, as we go through it, a lot of you that are listening right now as we record this live will probably be picking up on a lot of those parallels as well.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, and I wanted to sort of jump in and give credit. Right, we did some of our own original research on this. I looked at some court records, but also Mark Bowden's the Last Stone 2019 book on the case. Amazing, he covered it as a so good Non-reporter. Yeah, just amazing. There are some great reporting in the Washington Post, the Frederick News Post, baltimore News American, which some great reporting in the Washington Post, the Frederick News Post, baltimore News American, which you can get in the archives, and the Baltimore Sun, but also some really great stuff on the Charlie Project and other spots like that related to the case. The Lynchburg News in Advance in Virginia also did some amazing work on this.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, I think anybody who Googles this case will probably get the Washington Post article that Bowden wrote once the suspect was indicted or tried, I can't remember where he gives a whole kind of breakdown of the case which it makes for a nice summary for his own book. But the book just expands so much more onto it. Really well written.
Jayson Blair:And so for me, like I've always sort of taken this case so personally, you know there are a lot of intersections between my life. In this case. You know it happened not far from where I was born, you know, nearly. I was born a year later. Key events and locations we're going to be talking about are right beside the university where I went to college. Some of the key witness sightings are in Virginia, literally like a quarter mile from the church that I went to when we were there. And then, you know, my first semester of college I went to Liberty University in Lynchburg, virginia, 200 miles away, right near where we're going to end up at the end of this story. So I'll go ahead and, you know, get rolling. That's when 13 year old sheila loin and her 10 year old sister, kate or katherine who are, oh sorry, wrong, that is them um yes yeah, right, that is them, but this is the one I wanted to do.
Jayson Blair:Um, uh, her 10 year old sister, kate or katherine, left their suburban kington Maryland home. It's in a Washington DC suburb, right outside of the city. So they were headed, you know, about a half mile, little less than a half mile from the home, to a place called Wheaton Plaza, which is the local mall. Sheila was a student at the local junior high school, catherine was a student at a local elementary school. But Catherine and Sheila's father, john he was resting as they left.
Jayson Blair:He had worked the night shift as a DJ at WALAM Radio, which is one of our popular radio stations and it was an ABC affiliate, and their mom, mary, had gone bowling with some of her friends. The girls had sort of coordinated this with their mom and their brothers had gone to some of their friends'. Houses. And Mary, their mom, was really thrilled that the girls were going to Wheaton Plaza. She had later said that she had felt the girls hadn't been spending as much time together as they used to, so she was happy they really went there together, and so the girls agreed with their mom that they'd be home by their curfew at 4 pm and the girls had $2 between them to buy pizza at the mall and the classmates saw Catherine and Sheila at about 1 pm outside the Orange Bowl Pizza Parlor inside the mall Around the same time.
Jayson Blair:A witness later said that they noticed a man in the area with a slight limp younger man who appeared to be following different girls there and a man in his 50s or his 60s who was about six feet tall carrying a briefcase around the mall. People later said that man with the briefcase had a microphone in it and a cassette recorder and he was periodically sort of stopping to record children speaking from a script he had in the recorder. And one 13-year-old witness said that he and his friends thought the man was a reporter and joked about going over to be interviewed by him. And among the people who were at the mall that day was a man named Lloyd Lee Welch, an 18-year-old carnival worker who lived with his parents about 13 miles away at 4714 Baltimore Avenue, which we'll go into.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, and I wanted to make mention uh, keep in your head this tape recorder guy, um, not well, for a few different reasons, um, you're gonna hear. If you go and search about this story on reddit or um anywhere online, you'll see a lot of people talking about this tape recorder guy and um, I found it really interesting because multiple witnesses corroborated him, his presence there, and he was also seen at other malls in the area with that tape recorder and a lot of people said, or have ventured to say, that his job was probably getting like like B-roll or soundbites for like commercials or jingles or advertisements and stuff like that, and that maybe not necessarily a creep, but depending on what accounts you read, some people are going to read more into his presence or not. So I'm just putting that out there to keep in your mind as we go along here.
Jayson Blair:And for those of you who are joining us online as we go along here, and for those of you who are joining us online, you can see a picture. This is, you know, catherine and Sheila's childhood home in Kensington, and this is and like you said, allison, we were talking about it's so 1970s. This is Wheaton Plaza, the mall that they were going to, and you can see on this map here. You know, here's where the Loin's home was and here's where Wheaton Plaza Mall was. So it was a very short walk in a really populated area, not a very far walk for the girls.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, I think the last stone said it was maybe about two miles, something like that wasn't, wasn't too far. And also, this mall is sort of an outdoor mall. It has, um, like a long promenade and the stores you can walk in front of, and then there's like there was like a little, uh, covered thing, almost like how you would imagine, like a carport or something like that, that you could walk under and there were. There was an access tunnel that had buses I think was it buses or trains, I can't remember that could come into it. The mall is, yeah, buses and the mall is still there, but it was enclosed. So it's an enclosed mall now and it's a lot more modernized. I actually went and looked to see if it was like one of those abandoned malls that you kind of sit around, but it's still renovations.
Jayson Blair:It got in when I was in college and then redone in the last few years as well. But yeah it's weird to go there, having grown up in an area like I bet very weird to be like shopping for jeans.
Jayson Blair:Where this happened, you know, one of the things sort of following in that timeline. It was about what 2.30 pm, sheila and Catherine, their older brother actually shows up with his friends and spots them eating pizza at the Orange Bowl and the girls curfew, like I had mentioned before, was supposed to be 4 pm. But an important caveat to that is Sheila was supposed to be home at 3pm to begin her route delivering the Washington Evening Star newspaper in the neighborhood and she didn't show up and that was the first sign that there was something wrong. Mary became really concerned. She later told police and newspapers that they were almost always on time by 7 pm, after the family had sat down for dinner and the girls still hadn't showed up.
Jayson Blair:Mary called the Montgomery County Police Department and a massive manhunt began immediately, which you know we constantly hear about cases where someone's missing and there's a delayed response.
Jayson Blair:We don't normally see a delayed response when it comes to children. Right, and you know the police report searching the mall, like you said, that bus sub-basement under it, heating ducts, looking for the girls. The next day the Maryland State Police added helicopters to join the search, but three days later, by the 28th, the police report that they were just running out of places to search and they noted that they had handed out by that point like 5,000 flyers at motels, hotels, banks and other locations. Flyers had the girls' pictures on them and descriptions of them and what they were wearing. The police had also entered the girls' information into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database. It was something that was created, I think, in 1969. But it was a database that we commonly hear about today as NCIC and it was a computerized and it is a computerized index of all sorts of criminal justice information not just charges and evidence that's available to state, federal, local, tribal law enforcement 24 hours a day, 365 days a week.
Allison Dickson:I wanted to ask you really quick, this just occurred to me do you think their location being sort of in the DC like Baltimore area, kind of spurred some of of that, because it's such a populated area with a lot of a lot of law enforcement around stuff like that?
Allison Dickson:or wealthy suburban area outside of the nation's capital, with a local celebrity, and it's two white kids right, right, and that that needs to be noted as well, that you know this, this setting, this suburban setting, and a lot of suburban settings and shopping malls, as I alluded to earlier.
Allison Dickson:You know, they largely came into existence due to a lot of white people fleeing their urban environment or being encouraged to leave the urban environment, and there was a lot of problems in a lot of the cities at the time, you know, in the 1970s a lot of crime and drugs, and you know things like that, and so what it ended up creating, though, was this facade, this illusion that, oh, we've left this city and so we have these beautiful front yards, white picket fences and this beautiful little shopping mall that we can all go to and be safe, and that is why I think, largely, that this case shocked so many at this time was because they I think a lot of people just thought that kind of thing doesn't happen here. We're, we're in the suburbs, but, as we know, anybody, you know that's not true.
Jayson Blair:Well, I think it's true, I think your point's true, but I also think it's exasperated. By being the Washington DC suburbs, you know you're talking about a place that has one of the highest rates of college graduates and master's degree holders at the time. You're talking about one of the wealthiest areas and I'm not to say, not to say that crime doesn't happen in those places, because we're not dumb and we know it does and it's often right. Uh, it's often hidden. Um, but the perception or the impression that people can buy their safety by safety by moving out into the suburbs, it was a big thing in the 70s. It was also a reaction to desegregation To move out to the suburbs. People thought they were buying their safety on a lot of levels by moving to suburban areas. So, just keeping with the timeline, so we're at the 28th, when they're really worried that they're running out of options.
Jayson Blair:So a day later is Catherine's 11th birthday and there's still no traces of the girls. By the 31st, the Montgomery County police release a composite sketch that's based on the view of a 13-year-old, the view of a 13-year-old witness, who we'll talk about in a second. So this gives you an idea of some of the searching that they were doing. But here in this image, for the people who are online, these are the two sketches of what would become known as tape recorder man.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, in addition to tape recorder man, several extortion-type phone calls were made to the Loin family in the week. This is all the adherence. Yeah, I, oh, I couldn't agree more. The most serious call came from an unidentified man on april 4th. Uh, he demanded that, um, mr loin, leave a briefcase with ten thousand dollars inside of an annapolis m Maryland courthouse restroom, which. Let me pause there to say that, like, if you want to get ransom money, you may not pick a law enforcement building as the best place to do it, because, needless to say, it was not hard for them to scout the area. So the money was left per the instructions, but it was never claimed. Perhaps he realized what an insane idea that was was please drop off the ransom money at the police station.
Allison Dickson:Um, god so unbelievable right.
Jayson Blair:So the caller later maintained that police had surrounded the courthouse and he couldn't retrieve the ransom, which I also found funny, because police are already in the courthouse but before the money would be offered to the man. Again, they said to him that you've got to show evidence that you have the girls, and the caller said he'd be in touch with the family, but never called back.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, and I know that John, john the father, had spoken about numerous things. They'd been led astray by psychics, um, I think somebody who claimed that they had solved some high profile murder. It's not in my notes, but I I read it yesterday. Um, and they, uh, you know, they decided, after all these tips, like this psychic said that oh, they're buried, they're like in a lake or something, and then they went and dragged a lake that was nearby and it was just. You know, after a whole bunch of that, they just kind of started closing themselves off, which was unusual for them Because, again, john was a radio personality, he was a known quantity and this family was used to that. They were used to having people over, they were used to having people over, they were used to being open to the public. And so, while it created this groundswell of public response, it kind of started to bite them a little bit, because when you let everybody in to give you tips, you're going to end up with charlatans and liars as well.
Jayson Blair:And publicity has its upsides and downs downsides, as you'll see in this case. Um, there are moments where there's evidence that 40 years later we would not have without publicity, and you could also make the argument the reason why it took 40 years to solve the case is because so much publicity. Um, so you know, we'll talk about this more later but there was another composite sketch that didn't really match the description of the tape recorder man, the guy with the microphone recorder. This sketch describes a five foot, uh, 11 inch man in his late teens or early twenties, acting on his face, scars on the left cheekbone, light mustache, wearing a Peter's jacket, a blue and white horizontal striped shirt and white pants. He was said to have dark hair that was slightly below his shoulder.
Jayson Blair:So, part of what happens in the desperation, they reach out to the Philadelphia police and Allison had mentioned the Patty Hearst case before the Philadelphia Police Department brings down that dog handler and two 90-pound, nationally known German shepherds that were used to track Patty Hearst in her location at the Symbionese Liberation Army Outpost. They brought them down to Montgomery County to help with the search for the sisters, the search near the girl's home, the mall locations in between, uh, yeah, yeah, one of those fascinating connections it is, and you know, I mean, like I said, a lot of these stories throughout the 70s sort of dovetail into each other.
Allison Dickson:you know, just mentioning, you know, the mansons and how one of them tried to kill the president, and and then here we are with another big, sensationalist story that was going on at this time. In this point of 1975, in April, patty Hearst would be lying low with her few remaining members of the SLA, after most of them had been killed in a gunfight the year prior. So by August of 75, they would be blamed for planting pipe bombs under police cars. But then by September she and her remaining cohorts would be arrested. And but really the case was still making really big news at that time, at the same time that this was happening. So, as you said earlier, jason, 75 was a lot and this is just one slice of it, and so the news had to be so just brimming right.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, but coming back to that point, that's actually a decent point Because one of the things that really surprised me in going back because as a negative one-year-old I did not get a chance to see the coverage- I was a negative four-year-old Imagine how I felt stories.
Jayson Blair:It bumped everything off the the page, you know. So I found, I found that piece of it relatively fascinating, um for you, for just in general, you know, and I mentioned that sketch because that sketch comes back um, uh, and it's really important later in the case, but not to put a too fine point on the publicity problem is that it's really important later in the case, but not to put a too fine point on the publicity problem is that it's really easy to lose great tips in those situations. We saw that in the Delphi murders case that I had mentioned before, where the murders happened in 2017. The girls' bodies were found in February 14th of 2017. It wasn't until the summer of 2022 that they found a tip from the first week that led there and hold on to that original sketch that eventually um becomes lost um, we're later in the story.
Jayson Blair:We're going to find out because I'm not hiding the ball that um, that a man named lloyd lee, welch uh is, eventually goes within a week of the um of the discipline. He goes. He says, or his mother says, high on weed to provide the description of the older man who's stopping the young girls. So that's our guy, we've got on the screen now tape recorder man. Just just remember this part the the. The description that he gives fits the man with the briefcase who is providing the script to the children. But do not forget, keep in mind, that that description of that man has been in the newspapers, on TV, in radio, days before the witness. Is that fair?
Allison Dickson:Yes, okay, it is absolutely fair. And if that, you know, sounds familiar, like this whole thing of like a couple different sketches, competing sketches, here that might sound a little familiar Again, as we talk about parallels to Delphi, again two young girls go disappear from a public place and then there's multiple witnesses seeing different people and then you know we're not sure who to be on the lookout for. But then we have a guy here who goes and inserts himself into the investigation. Uh, purportedly to assist heavy air quotes here, if you're seeing me on the screen, um, but most likely to miss. Uh, to redirect.
Jayson Blair:And also Allison. The cops know that right. Anybody who inserts themselves into the investigation, like Richard Allen did in Delphi, anybody who inserts themselves into an investigation, is always going to get the attention of the police, or should always. So Lloyd is eventually interviewed, given a polygraph which we failed. You and I have some theories about why this kind of gets written off, a Polygraphs. You know, yeah, you know as much weight as you and I do.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, and and that's the thing is that any podcast you listen to on true crime, you know we'll say mostly pretty much the same thing about polygraphs that they are, of course, we all know, not admissible in court, and they come with a lot of packed with a lot of problems, a lot of biases. They are used, however, as an investigative tool, and as we talk later whether in this episode or the next one we're really going to bring to the fore about how it really was used in an investigative way, that may or may not bolster your faith in the technology or maybe tell you to say, yeah, we really need to stop using this tool. But hold on here. Oh, what I want to say, though, about why they wrote it off. He failed the polygraph.
Allison Dickson:But the thing that gets me is that Welch comes in there and says this, gives this statement and provides this information, fails the polygraph. They go oh, he's just a stupid pothead, Just turn him loose. But they had the composite sketch given by the girl who spied him at the at the mall that day, talking to the girls, leering at the girls. In fact, she was so disturbed by what she had seen that she I can't remember Jason, was she the one who taunted him and said take a picture, it'll last longer?
Allison Dickson:or something like that right yeah, and then, and then she went and immediately informed security. They get the sketch artist out there. They draw up a sketch of a guy who looks a heck of a lot like lloyd lee welch, but the cops somehow well, because they were overwhelmed at the time with tips.
Jayson Blair:I'm not sure if it's just that I think so many people reported the tape recorder guy, it became a volume of reports as opposed to.
Jayson Blair:You know, lloyd's behavior was definitely weirder, but the volume of reports and you can get. You know, I hate to use the phrase tunnel vision, but it's, you know, confirmation bias. Everybody's pointing to this. And then all of a sudden, this guy who happens to meet the description of the other guy comes in and gives me a description of the guy I already think is my means yes, and that was the other thing.
Allison Dickson:He wasn't really bringing anything new to the table. If anything, they just kind of like okay, this is a neutral. This is a wash and he's he and he's a lying druggie, whatever. Just turn him loose.
Jayson Blair:Um, so very much, uh, a thing that will probably haunt them for a very long time, yeah, so and then thinking about that, you know, as you start to follow in the timeline and you start to follow the story, I don't think it's unreasonable for the police to pursue the tape recorder guy angle. I think the hard thing for investigators, same thing with reporters, same thing with anyone else who does any investigation, is keep your mind open. Sometimes you have separate teams looking at different leads, even if they aren't as strong. Because on April 6th and there's some disputes about whether this happened on the 6th or not but about 38 miles from Wheaton Plaza, an 11-year-old boy named William Krebs is sitting in a car in a parking lot of a tire store on Route 29. I mean like a mile away from where my current office is right now, and well, a mile in another direction from the church, and he was waiting for his mother when he noticed a two-door sedan with what he believed were two girls who were bound and gagged in the car.
Jayson Blair:Cars headed southbound on Route 29 toward Warrington, virginia, and that road goes to Culpeper, charlottesville, where UVA is, and eventually to Lynchburg, virginia. It carries on beyond that to the state border. But Krebs said he noticed one of the girls who fit the description of Catherine in the front seat of the car and then a second girl appeared to be in the back seat. And what caught his attention, krebs said, was that it appeared as if both girls were trying to stand up. He said the girl in the front seat who matched that description of Catherine appeared to be crying. So he couldn't make out the other woman or girl in the back of the car, but he did see one that matched the description of Catherine and he said the car was moving really slowly. And so Krebs and his mother immediately make a report to the Fairfax County police and by the next day in the area people are jumping on CB radios to look for the girls.
Allison Dickson:And I want to talk a little bit about the use of CBs citizens band radios back in the 70s especially. You know, we might not realize sort of the historical impact and kind of the good that they did and why people were using them and why it sounds like everybody had one sort of like a predecessor to cell phones, smartphones. Social media Found a great article on this. Basically, in the mid-1970s there was this whole sort of culture that formed around it, largely because of the energy crisis that was going on at the time.
Allison Dickson:Gas shortages were a big thing and you might have heard of the movie Convoy or the song Convoy or Smokey and the Bandit and some of these other movies that sort of popped out around this time and it was mostly because the truckers could set up these convoys and look ahead to see where they could find gasoline and sort of people could listen in and find out, because that's how bad it was you couldn't go to your corner gas station and likely get any gas. It was a pretty messed up time period. So in response to a lot of this, the FCC set aside 40 channels on the radio dial for citizen use and so it became a very big fad at this time, and so of course, overnight, americans sort of adopted these handles or nicknames and learned this language of communicating by radio handles or nicknames and learned this language of communicating by radio, and so it was just very common that you would see like a lot of people in the neighborhood would have a CB, and so it played an interesting role in this case.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, and so also around the same day or the next day. Reports really vary on this one as well. A motorist on Route 234, about five miles from Centerville in Manassas, virginia, where the Battle of Manassas and the Battle of Bull Run were fought. An IBM employee notices a station wagon and he said he saw one girl who appeared to be gagged in the car. This is quickly reported to the Prince William County Police and the Virginia State Police send out helicopters. When the driver of the car with the girls in it spots a witness, he runs a red light and heads toward Interstate 66 in Virginia which heads south. The station wagon, or what is now Interstate 66, the station wagon had Maryland license plates with a possible combination of DMT-6. Couldn't see the last two numbers because the car's license plate was bent A very common thing when you steal a car. You don't want to be at the front back then Bend. It doesn't work so well now with license plate readers from cops. Bend the license plate or distort it slightly, and so that known combination.
Jayson Blair:I mentioned Cumberland, maryland, which is out west, hagerstown, which is the middle of the state, baltimore, which is east, on the Chesapeake Bay. So a search of the plate numbers fails to produce any good information. At the time Databases are not as good as they are now. It wasn't as easy to search state records by the license plate numbers you can even see in the list killings up in Long Island. Part of what they did was they identified. They used driving records. And even in the 2000s in New York you could only search certain ways by name or by X, y or Z. You couldn't search by all the fields and so you know. The witness report at first is treated really credibly but later marked questionable by police. But when cold case detectives reopened the case they believe that this is the last credible sighting of one of the girls, according to the last stone, of one of the girls, according to the last stone.
Allison Dickson:So the trail eventually goes cold but witnesses are able to sort of see that partial license plate, not entirely sure what state it came from, but it's got those letters, yeah, and they said that every state up in that area had its own bicentennial plate, which was a new plate and, of course, just a reminder, the bicentennial would be the following year. So there was a lot of that in the air as well.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, and I just want to point out you know there are thousands of missing children cases every year. Those children that are taken by strangers are only one, one hundred one percent, so about 100 cases a year in the United States and that number has changed very little since statistics on it have been capped. So most missing children are found quickly. They're often with a relative or somebody who knows them. So for one, two to be taken once and disappear completely is so rare that you can almost say it virtually never happens. We hear about it because those are the big cases but it's very rare. The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit and the National Center for Violent Crime Apprehension they have crime analysts who collaborate there. They can't even draw conclusions about it. It's that rare they won't even profile it.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, and it's usually the first thing people think. If two disappear, then obviously more than one person had to be involved. I mean, you hear that a lot with Delphi, but we're going to have a lot to say about that as well, well, and we know.
Jayson Blair:the reality is, the statistics are if two people are killed, it's likely one perpetrator, even though people feel as if there needs to be more. I think we underestimate, particularly when it comes to children, how much the voice of authority can push people into compliance.
Allison Dickson:And if you threaten one in order to get the compliance of the other. That is usually how you manage that. And yes, if it is a person of authority usually, yeah, man or woman, honestly, a child will obey authority. That's what we train them to, kind of do.
Jayson Blair:Worth it to keep in mind that in a lot of these cases it's not using authority, it's about convincing them or giving them something, or it's persuasion is a tool that's used. Lloyd and his girlfriend Helen Carver, who was pregnant at the time, showed up 230 miles away at the home of Lloyd's aunt, lizzie Parker in southwestern Virginia on what's known as Taylor's Mountain. Unlike suburban Maryland or northern Virginia, taylor's Mountain is deep in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, deep in coal country. It's a few miles from a small town called Bedford mountains. Deep in coal country. It's a few miles from a small town called Bedford. It's about 40 miles west of Lynchburg and about 20 miles east of Roanoke. So it's really deep within the southwest Virginia mountains. And you know southwest Virginia is a really mountainous region, westernmost part of the Commonwealth. Most of southwest Virginia is west of the eastern continental divide and on the Appalachian Plateau itself, but Taylor's Mountain is sort of on the eastern side, right on the edge of that.
Jayson Blair:Historically the area has been remains, pretty rural. In the 20th century coal mining was an important part of the economy around there. With its decline, or the decline in the number of coal jobs and the decline of tobacco as a cash crop in the area east of there. Southwest Virginia really has tried to boost its economy through things like tourism but you know the 1970s, 80s and 90s were sort of some of the darker times in the mountains and the hollers. You know.
Jayson Blair:Like much of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Appalachian Mountain communities, the people who live near Taylor's Mountain were quite isolated. Taylor's Mountain was populated by a small group of insular families. In fact people would later report that the Bedford County Sheriff's deputies considered Taylor's Mountain a quote no-go zone and residents would later report that the deputies were afraid to go there. One of Lloyd's cousins would later say when being interviewed for a documentary on the Lyons sisters, his quote was do I think bad things happen on the mountain? Yes, if they were to take those new forensic equipment, would they find all these things? Then she nodded before adding what happens on the mountain stays on the mountain.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, I remember watching the documentary for this which who Killed the Lion Sisters? And it's on right now. Well, investigation Discovery did it. I found it on the Roku channel on my own device so you'll have to do a search for it to see if you can find it. And when it got to this part of the documentary because I had not known the entirety of this case yet, it really took a turn into Hills have Eyes territory.
Allison Dickson:It's no joke about the isolation and the sort of lawlessness that happens up there. It's very remote. You have these families that sort of owned that piece of land. This is not a place that if you were lost in the woods, that you had taken a wrong turn off of a path somewhere on the Appalachian Trail, you would not want to turn up at Taylor's Mountain asking for aid. So knowing that these girls were taken from this mall, this very populated mall, and then eventually very likely delivered here and we'll get to that much later it really added another layer of depth and, you know, fear to this case. Wow, you know this is what's kind of on the back door of civilization. You go just 40 miles outside of town and you're on. You know you're in a place like Taylor's Mount.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, and because you know, years later Lloyd's cousin Connie says that Lloyd and Helen show up in a station wagon with a large green army duffel bag that was bloody and had clothes in it. Connie says she had noticed a really foul smell and when Connie asked Lloyd what was in the bag he said that he and Helen had picked up hamburger meat and that it had gone bad. Connie said Helen was pregnant. So the police concluded that was probably the spring of 1975.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, and again, the girls disappeared in March, early March or mid-March, so this would be roughly, you know, some weeks after the disappearance and so connie's brother, henry parker, uh would say that he didn't look at the bag, but lloyd told him he had a dead dog in it. Henry helped, uh, lloyd tossed the bag in a bonfire. That became sort of infamous on the mountain. People talked about it decades later. They said they raged. It raged many days, smelled terrible too.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, a lot of people reported the smell was very distinctively that of burning flesh decades later, and after years of not speaking to each other, they were estranged and they had had a falling eye out over the inheritance, including their mother's house on Taylor Mountain.
Allison Dickson:And it's important to keep that in mind too that this information came independently, separately, many years later, because people are going to have questions about this. So we should set that stage, because we'll be kind of dovetailing back to some of these things.
Jayson Blair:Right, right, right right. It just adds you know, when people aren't speaking to each other and they've got the same story, it's a lot of credibility. So right, you know. Connie would later say in a Facebook exchange with a relative, amy Welsh Johnson, that quote my biggest fear is that my last family member, henry, was a part of it on the mountain. She would later tell a grand jury that her brother often hung out with Lloyd when Lloyd visited. She also told the grand jury in reference to that message when she was asked about that message Henry wouldn't murder a child.
Jayson Blair:He wasn't in Maryland. I meant help bury it If he helped bury the bodies on the mountain. And so Henry had been questioned by the Bedford police the first day. They visited Connie on that same day and he said and I think this is pretty significant that when Lloyd had visited in 1975, there had been talk even then among family members about Lloyd's involvement in the Lloyd and sisters case. So almost 40 years before his name is publicly linked to it, henry says his family was talking about it. Henry said even before Lloyd came to Taylor's Mountain his mom and dad had said it out loud to him and wondered about whether he was involved, but the detectives, the cold case detectives had reason to suspect that Lloyd had been more than a help. I mean, henry had been more than a helper. His sister, connie, had told them about a sexual interest that he had had in her as a child, including one preplanned assault that she had escaped.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, this family is, as we'll soon find, and it gets a good bit more disturbing as it goes on. One of our listeners here, leslie, said it's Virginia's deliverance and Taylor's Mountain is and, and she is familiar with this part of the country as well. So and I have not been, but I've been to like West Virginia and you know and that, so they, they have that isolation, they have that ability to kind of like, do a lot of these depraved things and not be observed.
Jayson Blair:I've had those moments in Appalachia when I'm driving in a mountain, certainly when I was reporting, and then, you know, just living near, near the Blue Ridge mountains, the Allegheny mountains I'm not too far where I've definitely taken a turn on the street and gone up a little bit and literally backed out without, without like turning the car around, because I'm like we need to get out of here right now. It's just right, it's not a um. You know, and you also see these places in other places other than appalachia you go up to oh yeah northern vermont or northern northern New York along the Canadian border.
Jayson Blair:Honestly, Washington. State so it's not just an Appalachian thing, but there's it's a rural thing. I don't even think it's that because you can see it in really urban cities. I could take you into areas in New York where you walk instantly and you'd be like I am not welcome here.
Allison Dickson:There is that feeling of they could tell you're not from around there and it does have a territorial feeling to it. It is interesting how some places are like that and some places are not.
Jayson Blair:I think there are two things at play. When you look at Appalachia in particular we'll talk about this there's a lot of anger and resentment, right Right, and you know we'll talk about this a little bit more as we go on, and I think that's a commonality in other places, that they're insular there's a lot of anger and resentment. You're coming in as an outsider with already negative five points which completely, I think on some levels it's really understandable that there's a reason why a lot of people in the Appalachian are suspicious of outsiders. They have not brought good things often. So just jumping into Lloyd a little bit Lloyd was born on December 30th 1956. His childhood got really ugly fast. He would later say that his father, lee Welsh, killed his mother, margaret Ann, when Lloyd was two years old and when Lee was driving drunk and crashed the car.
Allison Dickson:Oh, do you have a picture of him? My chance that we might be able to put it OK.
Jayson Blair:The two twin sisters she was carrying also died in the accident. Lloyd cycled through a series of foster homes until he was seven years old when Lee and his new wife, edna, his stepmom, picked him up and brought him home to Hyattsville, maryland, in the Edge City on the northeast edge of DC. It's sort of east and south of where Wheaton Plaza is and it's an area, hyattsville's an area where many members of Lloyd's large sort of extended family lived, and Lee, edna and Lloyd lived at 4714 Baltimore Avenue. Lloyd lived at 471 or 4714 Baltimore Avenue. It's a stone's throw from the entrance to the University of Maryland, but a wholly different world. By 16, lloyd was hanging out on the street and in abandoned buildings fending for himself, staying at different homes and shelters.
Jayson Blair:That area of US Route 1 along Baltimore Avenue was known at one point as Hillbilly Highway because Scotch-Irish Appalachian families had made their way to northern cities like DC and Baltimore after World War II. Billy Town, if you've ever heard about it in Baltimore, is another one of those places where folks from Western Maryland had come, often for labor, jobs and industry. Lots of folks from Western Pennsylvania, west Virginia and sometimes, in the example of Hillbilly Highway and BillyTown, created their own cultures. That seemed a lot like Taylor's Mountain within these suburban communities, so it has the same appearance as the rest of the suburbs around, but there's really this subculture there. And one of the points I want to make, allison, is that Appalachian families have prospered over the past 40 years and clans like the Welsh family are hardly the most persecuted minorities in American history, but I do want to acknowledge that they were persecuted, but elements of their exclusion and isolation really remain and can kick up that resentment and anger I was talking about.
Allison Dickson:Oh, absolutely, and you know you could look at some of the more famous stories, for instance the stories of the Hatfields and the McCoys. You know these feuds between families that happened in that region of the country or thereabouts and so, yeah, I can absolutely see that that exclusion, that isolation that you know led to some unfortunate incidents.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, and so later it would become clear in the investigation that almost all the women who were cousins in Lloyd's family had said they had been sexually abused by other family members. Lloyd portrayed himself as an innocent victim of sexual abuse in his family. However, he pleaded guilty to molesting one little girl in Virginia, arguing that the girl used to get in bed with her mom before he came around and he thought one night that he was cuddling her mom and it must have been the girl and he touched her private area. I think it's really important to uh note that you will find out as we go on.
Allison Dickson:Lloyd is one of the most exceptional liars I've ever seen oh he, he lies so much that I don't even think he realizes it. Have you a remorse for being called? I mean not, not at all. I mean, and he will say he will spend hours spouting out lie after lie after lie and then all of a sudden do a reverse and give you a half truth. That will then send you on a goose chase. And I want to say that this kind of reminded me a little bit of the testimonies of Israel Keyes when he was being interviewed by the FBI. He toyed with them so much that you know, giving them little bits and pieces of things, and then they would get him up against the wall and then he'd pivot and you just couldn't nail him down. And Welch is very similar here.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, and it's. You know, some of it can be to save face, some of it can be for other reasons, but I think a lot of them Julia Cowley over at the console podcast and my friend who is a former FBI profiler and I talk about this notion of like when you find a killer, particularly a sexually motivated killer, who gets gratification from sexual gratification from killing, once you've caught them they have no opportunity for that gratification anymore and one of the ways that they can get gratification is by duping you. So they're duping you just becomes a extension of the same sexual gratification that they were getting from murder. But you know, lloyd went on to have quite a criminal career. His resume of crimes is quite impressive. His criminal record stretched, you know, from across many states, across many states, long after he walked into Wheaton Plaza.
Jayson Blair:There wasn't much progress in the case between 1975 and 2001. But one suspect did emerge in, you know that one suspect. So at one point in 2011, the cold case team goes to Quantico and they visit the FBI's BAU to discuss the case child abduction cases and make a lot of assumptions. You know that point Allison was making. Like that, there are two victims, you know, and it requires multiple perpetrators. The second one is that each sexual predator who's murdered a child victim has done it before or has either done a sexual crime before you know. Julia will remind you everybody's got to start somewhere.
Allison Dickson:That's exactly what I was going to say. So, yeah, Welcome somewhere.
Jayson Blair:That's exactly what I was going to say.
Allison Dickson:So yeah, love you, julia, right Exactly.
Jayson Blair:That woman. She really puts it succinctly, she does you know. Either way, it makes sense. None of you will be shocked that the detectives focused on known pedophiles and one suspect they came across was a petty criminal named Roy Molesky. He turned out to be a petty criminal, a killer, an audacious pedophile who, like very much, had inserted himself into the investigation.
Jayson Blair:In 1975, he called the Montgomery County police two times, first with a suggestion that they should offer immunity to the person who kidnapped the girls which, by the way, would raise a red flag for me if the person returned them. And then he called two weeks after the girls disappeared with a tip for where he said he had seen the gray-haired tape recorder man weeks before the sisters disappeared, trying to lure children into a car at another mall. He gave a super detailed account. Two years later, so 1977, Molesky shot and killed his wife and one of his sons. In prison for those crimes he constantly talked a lot about the Loin sisters, telling other inmates he knew where the girls were. Police who investigated those claims excavated his backyard when he killed his wife and his daughter. The police found a note about the Loyan sister that he had written on the table, but in that excavation, they were unable to find anything.
Allison Dickson:I really want to drive that home too, that Ray Molesky is probably the biggest red herring in this story, Because again, I'm not going to hold all my cards back.
Jayson Blair:I don't know.
Allison Dickson:We haven't gotten to my theories yet yeah, okay, well, yeah, because our theories will be interesting, to say the least, I think. But there are a number of tape recorder. Man is probably the the ultimate king. Daddy red herring, I, I feel, um, but meleski, oh yeah, yeah, just a little bit, don't, don't you dare, I mean I think there's a way that some of these stories could come together yeah, but then that just kind of makes me feel like the guy on on um.
Allison Dickson:Uh, it's always sunny, you know, with the big board behind him, with the strings tying everything together.
Jayson Blair:I have a firm belief that lying is a difficult art, as someone who has mastered it. So when you tell a big lie and you were trying to con someone and you're doing a detailed lie, you tell a big lie about the big thing, but all the details around it are often based on real things, so I'm not.
Allison Dickson:I'm not writing anything off at this point no molesky, though I will say uh, I I do think he is largely a red herring, however, a bad guy known quantity and known to lloyd lee welch. I think welch tried to underplay his association with moleski for whatever reason. Um, and I find this incredibly interesting for a number of reasons. Uh, one, the police end up honing in on moleski as you know, their guy Right and they focus on him. Like Jason mentioned, they wanted to excavate this basement. They even went to a judge to try to get clearance for it and couldn't do it. They scoped out property and watched it. I mean, they really focused hard on Molesky, um, so when Welch had an opportunity to pin it all on him, he didn't.
Allison Dickson:Uh, so we'll get to that in a bit, but it's just interesting to me. Here's your perfect guy right here. He's a known pedophile. He has victims that were a lot like, although he went after boys as well. Um and uh. And yet here we are. So I I find I find the element of this case fascinating yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't rule anything out quite yet I mean you can't rule anything out completely because we don't we literally don't have all the answers here.
Jayson Blair:Keep your mind open. It could have been odinous. No, I'm just kidding, it wasn't um.
Jayson Blair:So there's always the odinous so a young police cadet named ed cullen um. He had joined the search effort for the lion sisters as a cadet 30 years, uh, before this time. He was uh assigned to the cold case team in 2011, around the time that they had gone down to the FBI and that's usually in most police departments the last stop before you hang up your badge and, like many detectives before him, he reopened and this is a common thing in Montgomery he reopened the loin files, ending his career with the same case. He started it and still there were no bodies, no crime scene, but after 30 years, the girls are presumed to be dead. He felt that computers held promise. They made it easier to compile lists of sex offenders, develop timelines, cross-check names and incidents things like that. Look around what was happening around the plaza. The old list of car registrations could be examined for the partial license plate.
Jayson Blair:One of the things I would say about cold case teams and if anybody Restless Sleep, it's a great book about the New York City Police Department cold case team they really do turn over the last stone. It's like they're pushing that sisyphine rock up the up the hill and he worked with four other detectives at the time. Instead of sort of adding more to the files. The team decided to take a different approach, and this is the same thing we saw in 2022 in delphi. They decided to weed the files instead of adding to them, and they worked to identify every plausible suspect and reinvestigate them enough to either eliminate them or keep them in the file, and that work took two years. So we're in 2013. The suspects in the files included a guy named Fred Coffey, who is a South Carolina man and sexual predator, another one named Arthur Goob, predator, another one, um, our name arthur goob uh, infamous sexual sadist and serial killer, james mitchell.
Allison Dickson:Uh, not gonna get this right, I think it's gotta wear, yeah, a deep blur dilibin some like you'll understand it's a, it's a.
Jayson Blair:It's a tough one, it's a tough and so all of them had stories with potential links to the land girls. So when you're thinking about things like red herrings, there are a lot in in in any, in any investigation, there are a lot of people who can meet, meet the profile. It's different to have evidence, though, so none can be completely eliminated. You know it by 2013, out of the five detectives who are on the Loyan Sisters reinvestigation, only one was left, a detective named Chris Homrock. By the early summer of that year, chris was ready to give up. He felt really weighed down. But there was one suspect, ray Molesky, that kind of kept him going, that really believed it was him and that kept him going. And so, after the work in 1982, the cold case team took another hard look at Molesky. They reviewed the old witness interviews from after he was arrested for the murder and learned one possible motive for the killings had been to prevent his wife and son from revealing his connection to the Loyan case. Because on a bedside table the night of the murders the police found a slip of paper with Catherine and Sheila's father, john's, phone number on it. The more Detective Hemrock looked, the more he found.
Jayson Blair:Several witnesses said Molesky was known to pick up young boys and girls for sex. One witness said he had done it at Wheaton Plaza. Another said they saw two little blonde girls in his basement. One woman said Molesky had raped her on two different occasions as a teenager then that he had sex parties in his Maryland home. He's looking pretty good right now. So several men admitted under questioning as boys they had been intimidated by Molesky in the sex acts.
Jayson Blair:Detective Homrock also learned that Molesky had been part of a group of men pedophiles, who shared victims at parties. So Detective Homrock had what looked like a great fed, a pedophile associated with other sexual predator pedophiles at the time who swapped victims at parties and pornography at other times. And these people groomed a small group of people together. And so the detective spoke with a couple who owned Molesky's old Maryland home, talked them into letting him rip out the carpet in the basement. Look at the concrete floor nothing. He later learned that Molesky had bought land in Lancaster, virginia, where my mom grew up. Another connection it's a rural coastal area. Hemrock spent weeks there living in a motel, overseeing a dig of the property. Yeah, nothing.
Allison Dickson:There it is yeah nothing. They found nothing.
Jayson Blair:He wanted to dig up the concrete in Molesky's old basement, took it to a judge. None of the judges were okay with it. So even when you have a lot of as Allison is alluding to circumstantial evidence, your gut doesn't count right.
Allison Dickson:But you cannot blame Homrock here for having that hunch as hard as he did, I mean, as you were going through it.
Jayson Blair:Oh no, I would have gone at him just as hard.
Allison Dickson:And that is the thing that will again further confound you folks listening right now even more is that Molesky seems like the perfect guy for this, and yet that's not where we land. Well, not where the investigation lands, I'll just say Yep.
Jayson Blair:So one day, right around the point where Detective Homrock was feeling particularly discouraged, he's at his desk looking at a bunch of familiar papers. He sees a file he didn't ever remember seeing. It was a six-page transcript of Lloyd Welsh's April 1, 1975 statement to the police. He couldn't believe that he had missed it. At the end of the statement he saw something that really caught his attention. Welch had told the interviewers that he'd seen a man who led the girls from the mall, who walked with a limp and, by the way, this is another Molesky connection walked with a limp.
Jayson Blair:So the detective thought they had hit the lottery and that it must have been Molesky. It described the limp that he had. But another detective, dave Davis, who Detective Homrock showed the statement, thought it was odd that a witness who is a teenager, like Welch, would recall the girls with that level of detail, because most teenagers, as you can imagine, wouldn't look twice at two young girls. Still he flunked the polygraph. That didn't bother the detectives that much of the time. They put little stock in the machine and we talked a little bit about polygraphs. But they found a 1977 photo of an arrest that Welsh, that Detective Hemrockrock found and they realized that it looked like a lot like the alternative sketch yep, there he is.
Allison Dickson:And again this is shades of delphi a little bit here, with the two sketches and how, although Delphi is a little different, because you could almost say that Richard Allen kind of looks kind of like a weird amalgamation of both the sketches that were in that case, but this pretty, pretty definitive in a lot of ways. You know, and again I want to bring it back and remind people when I and in teasing this episode I was talking about like how the miracle piece of paper kind of broke this case wide open, and Chris talks about how that paper was just sitting there on the pile when he came back from the restroom. It was just there. He just looks down and he sees it. It's almost just like the fresh eyes, you know.
Jayson Blair:Just something popped out finally, I think an important thing is like they're looking at him right now as a witness but like half in the back of the mind of one detective is like, oh, this is a little weird, right, like I don't have any evidence, much less evidence than you do on malaski. But this is a little weird. He's a potential witness. So the detectives start looking at him. Look for links between malaski and welch. Welch didn't really fit the profile of a child kidnapper, but there are three instances of uh sexual abuse child sexual abuse on this record, each daughters of girlfriends and each time in their homes. So a little bit different than what happened in an abduction. It was bad, but far cry from kidnapping two unknown girls and potentially murdering them. So maybe they thought Welch was just a straight-up witness who also happened to be a pedophile and that's why he noticed the girls. And maybe also an alternative was that he and Malaski were working together.
Allison Dickson:And that's totally feasible. And remember, the witnesses had seen Lloyd leering at these girls. I mean there is witness testimony to that that he was staring intently at them.
Jayson Blair:And so what I want to do is just jump ahead a little bit. So when Lloyd's stepmother because I think we're probably going to wrap in the next few minutes and come back tomorrow We'll be back tomorrow to finish this. So when Lloyd's stepmother, edna Welch, who lived with him in 1975 at 4714 Baltimore Avenue address, was called before a grand jury in Bedford County, virginia, she said she knew nothing about the Lloyd sisters. She said she knew nothing about the Lloyd sisters, but from a letter recovered in a search of Edna's home, it suggests that there was more to the story. She told police you're wasting your time, but Edna wrote letters back and forth with Lloyd while he was in prison in Delaware. We'll get to why he was in prison in Delaware and in them, according to a Washington Post report, lloyd told Edna that he had completed two alternative to violence programs in 2004, got his high school GED. In one 2008 letter, according to the Post, he reflected on his life and said I did a lot of bad things in my life and I guess I'm paying for it. In other letters he wrote about his hope of getting out early, his relationship with God.
Jayson Blair:Eventually, investigators end up at Edna Walsh's house in this rural patch of East Tennessee. The investigators said this 81-year-old stepmother at the time initially tried to create an alibi for Lloyd, saying she remembered that he went to Wheaton Plaza a week after the girl's disappearance because he had watched a news report about the case and was trying to get reward money. But investigators said in affidavits that were later filed in court that Lloyd admitted to them that he had conducted that whole story and put his stepmother up to telling it to remove suspicion that he was involved in Sheila and Catherine's disappearances. Edna denied lying in the interview with the Post, but she did admit that when she was visited by Montgomery County detectives she fired off a letter to Lloyd saying that if he had done what the police were alleging he should stay in prison. And he wrote back telling her that he couldn't hurt anyone like that and added I can't believe you would think that. Edna later suggested that the investigators talk to Lloyd's younger half-brother, roy, who told them quote I know he's incarcerated, he's in Delaware for something to do with little kids. This is a first moment where they realize, huh, this Delaware incarceration. So at this point they didn't know he was in Delaware. He's incarcerated for serious time for something with kids and those words really jumped in the detectives' heads and they began to cast a wider net and this led detectives to finding Lloyd in the Delaware prison.
Jayson Blair:And here's a state-by-state sampling of what else they found. In Maryland he was charged with larceny in 1977, burglary in 1981, assault and battery in 1982. In Virginia, he had been charged with sexual assault on a minor, manassas in 1996, and simple assault in 1997. Same town where the girls were believed to have been seen in 1975 in the car. In Florida, he was charged with burglary in Orlando in 1977, burglary in Miami in 1980. In South Carolina he was charged with public drunkenness and grand larceny in Myrtle Beach. Burglary in Horry County, sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl in Lockhart and in 1992, of a 10-year-old girl in Lockhart and in 1992, drunk driving in Clover. Finally, he lands in Delaware, and this is just, please note, this is just what they found out at this time. There's more to come.
Jayson Blair:Yeah, Finally he lands hard in Delaware where he's charged with sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl in Newcastle. You know it's quite a record. It's quite an amazing record that he has and the FBI's VICAP unit helped the squad build a timeline for Lloyd Welsh cross-checking his travel across the country. Bau and VICAP do amazing jobs supporting investigations like this. They found a number of hints and one was strikingly similar to the Loyan sisters case and Welsh had worked as a carnival worker and I guess this would be a great spot to stop and pick it up tomorrow.
Allison Dickson:Yeah, yeah, a carny and. I mean, we just have all this sort of.
Allison Dickson:you know, the stereotypes are just really hitting us hard, uh in this episode, but uh, but it was just amazing like, oh, another level uh to this, and the ride continues to have a lot more twists and turns from here. We are not nearly uh through it. So so we will wrap it up for this episode and we will pick back up with what happened when lloy Lloyd Welch went from witness to suspect and the disappearance of the lion sisters. And it gets considerably more disturbing from here and more than a little perplexing. And Jason and I will be presenting our theories at the end as well and look forward to hearing what you think about this one too, if you're watching this on YouTube.
Allison Dickson:We thank you so much for joining us. Feel free to email me at vintagevillainspod at gmailcom or over on Instagram. You can also swing on over to the Facebook group, the Vintage Villains Soiree and say hello. We're always happy to see new faces and discuss any of the cases covered on this show or any you'd like to see covered. And special thanks to all the Patreon members who get access to these live recordings as a thanks for their support. It's only a few bucks a month, but it helps more than you realize, and all the necessary links to that will be in the show notes.
Jayson Blair:And if you'd like to join me for more discussions with me and other listeners, we can be found on most social media platforms, including a listener-driven Facebook group called the Silver Linings Fireside Chat, For deeper conversations with our guests and live conversations with other listeners. We have fun like this over on our Patreon, which you can join at wwwpatreoncom. Forward slash the silver linings handbook.
Allison Dickson:In the meantime, get out there and make good history, and I'll see you again soon, in another century.