The sisters were 12 and 10 years old when they went missing.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Forty years after two young sisters vanished from a suburban Maryland mall, an imprisoned sex offender has been charged with murder, authorities released Wednesday.
Lloyd Michael Welch Jr., 58, told authorities he was with the girls when they were abducted in March 1975 but denied any role in their deaths.Follow @ambazaarmag
Sheila Lyon, 12, and Katharine Lyon, 10, had walked a few blocks from their house to the Wheaton Plaza Mall to shop for Easter decorations and eat lunch and never came home.
At the time of the girls’ disappearance, he was an 18-year-old carnival worker and drifter who’d been spending time in the Wheaton area, reported CBS affiliate WDBJ. Authorities have established that he was at the mall the day the girls vanished and was seen paying attention to them.
According to police affidavits obtained by The Washington Post, Lloyd Welch told investigators that he left the mall with the two girls and that he saw his uncle sexually assaulting one of them at his home the next day. Lloyd Welch told investigators he left the home and never saw the girls again, according to the affidavits.
“We know what Katharine and Sheila were like. … These were wonderful, wonderful, naive, young children,” said John McCarthy, state’s attorney for Montgomery County, Maryland, per to the Star Tribune.
Welch, who is serving a lengthy prison term in Delaware, was indicted by a grand jury in Bedford County, Virginia, on Friday on two charges of first-degree felony murder, though the girls’ bodies were never found. The indictment, unsealed Wednesday, says the murders were committed during an abduction with intent to defile, disclosed the Associated Press.