Qualla: Murders of Katherine and Sheila Lyon

Murders of Katherine and Sheila Lyon: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Studio portraits commissioned by John and Mary Lyon., Public domain. On March 25, 1975, ten-year-old Katherine and twelve-year-old Sheila Lyon walked to Wheaton Plaza, a shopping center in the Maryland suburbs just north of Washington, D.C. They planned to look at the Easter exhibits and grab some lunch. They never came home. Their disappearance shattered the comfortable assumptions of a generation of suburban families who believed that a trip to the local mall was among the safest errands a child could run. What followed was one of the largest police investigations in the history of the Washington metropolitan area -- a search that stretched across decades, burned through every promising lead, and ultimately depended on a detective's sharp eye for a detail buried in a forgotten witness statement.

Image: Studio portraits commissioned by John and Mary Lyon. | Public domain

Murders of Katherine and Sheila Lyon: A Radio Man's Daughters

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit trconrad2001, CC BY-SA 2.0. Katherine and Sheila Lyon grew up in Kensington, Maryland, in a close middle-class household on Plyers Mill Road. Their father, John Lyon, was a well-known radio personality at WMAL-AM, a local station affiliated with the ABC network and the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper....

Image: trconrad2001 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Murders of Katherine and Sheila Lyon: The Witness Who Lied

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit trconrad2001, CC BY-SA 2.0. Within days, a man named Lloyd Lee Welch appeared at a police station and gave a six-page statement. He claimed to have witnessed the girls being forced into a red Chevrolet Camaro with white upholstery by a man with a tape recorder. The account briefly electrified investigators ...

Image: trconrad2001 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Murders of Katherine and Sheila Lyon: Thirty-Eight Years in the Dark

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit trconrad2001, CC BY-SA 2.0. For decades, the Lyon sisters' disappearance received periodic reviews but yielded no breakthroughs. Investigators explored other suspects, including a convicted sex offender named Fred Coffey who had been in Montgomery County the week after the girls vanished and was known to lu...

Image: trconrad2001 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Murders of Katherine and Sheila Lyon: The Last Stone

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit trconrad2001, CC BY-SA 2.0. Homrock compared a 1977 mug shot of Welch, taken for an unrelated burglary, with the 1975 composite sketch of a young man witnesses said had been leering at the Lyon sisters inside Wheaton Plaza shortly before they vanished. The resemblance was striking. By this time, Welch had c...

Image: trconrad2001 | CC BY-SA 2.0