Plea ends cold case of sisters murdered in ’75

Witnesses in rural Va. kept quiet for 38 years

THAXTON, Va. — The disappearance of two young Maryland sisters shook the suburbs of Washington and remained an agonizing mystery for more than four decades.

Now another region 250 miles away is linked to the crime. Authorities say convicted sex offender Lloyd Lee Welch Jr. burned at least one of the sisters’ bodies in a fire on his cousins’ property on Taylors Mountain, in west-central Virginia.

Following Welch’s guilty plea this week, the people of Taylors Mountain are hoping to put an end to any association between their home and the slayings of 10-year-old Katherine and 12-year-old Sheila Lyon. The sisters vanished in 1975 after walking to a shopping mall near their home in Kensington, Maryland.

“All of us feel like he stained all of our reputations. We had nothing to do with it. It’s something we’d rather have not had happen here. We wouldn’t want to see it happen anywhere,” said Danny Johnson, who runs an apple orchard and winery on the mountain.

A 1924 article in The Washington Post describes a confrontation when officers went up the mountain to shut down a still during Prohibition. Several residents warned them not to go any farther. When they continued up the mountain anyway, shots were fired at them from several directions.

The mountain kept its reputation for decades thereafter as a roughand-tumble place where people watched out for one another and were reluctant to deal with outsiders.

Welch did not live on the mountain, but he had cousins, an aunt, uncle, and other relatives who did. And for 38 years, the mystery remained unresolved, despite what they and their neighbors saw back in 1975.

Only when detectives from the cold case unit in Montgomery County, Maryland showed up in 2013 did people on Taylors Mountain start talking. Welch, long imprisoned for sexually assaulting another girl, had become a person of interest in the sisters’ disappearance by then, based on a review of evidence in the case file.

Two of his cousins told police they remembered an unexpected visit to their home on Taylors Mountain that spring. The Lyon sisters disappeared on March 25, 1975.

Other people who lived on the mountain told investigators they remember a fire that burned for days that had “the stench of death,” Bedford County Commonwealth’s Attorney Wes Nance said during Welch’s plea hearing Tuesday.

Welch’s relatives sold their home on the mountain five years ago now. Locals bristle at the renewed attention the case has brought.

Now people are hoping Welch’s guilty plea will finally remove the spotlight.

Lathan Goumas The Associated Press Lloyd Lee Welch Jr. during a plea agreement hearing Tuesday in Bedford, Va., for the killings of Sheila and Katherine Lyon in 1975.