The Last Stone

by Mark Bowden

  All that interested the squad, however, was the story he’d told in 1975. Here was a potential eyewitness, albeit a sticky one, to the kidnapping of Sheila and Kate Lyon. He had failed every part of that old polygraph except his claim to have been in Wheaton Plaza at the same time the girls had disappeared, which was the part that most interested the detectives. If he had seen the girls with their abductor, he might be able to corroborate, all these years later, evidence against the squad’s prime suspect, a notorious pedophile and murderer named Ray Mileski.

  But Welch’s own history with little girls made them wonder. Could he have been involved? Did he know Mileski? Welch was under no obligation to talk and had every reason not to. For a convicted pedophile, the slightest link to the Lyon case might mean serious trouble. Any attorney worth retaining would advise him to stay silent. On the other hand, showing some willingness to help with an old case might earn him grace down the line with the Delaware parole board. It was a delicate situation. To prepare, the detectives had talked with several members of Welch’s family, few of whom seemed to know him well. Those who did remembered him with grudging kinship and scorn. The detectives didn’t know what to expect and weren’t sure how to proceed. At weekly staff meetings, their captain kept asking, “When are you guys going to do this?” But with only one shot, they weren’t going to just wing it. Thirty-eight years after the girls vanished, Welch was the last stone unturned. The two biggest questions they wanted answered were, in order: Could he identify Mileski? Had they worked together?

  From Montgomery County police headquarters in Gaithersburg to Delaware was a two-hour drive. The investigators bypassed Annapolis; crossed the long, high Chesapeake Bay Bridge; and then eased into the flat farmland of the Eastern Shore. Fields of brittle, head-high brown corn lined both sides of Highway 301. As he drove, Sergeant Chris Homrock talked last-minute strategy in the front with Montgomery County deputy state’s attorney Pete Feeney. In the back was Detective Dave Davis, the one who would actually be in the room with Welch. At the Dover, Delaware, police headquarters, to which Welch had been brought from the prison that morning, they would be joined by an FBI agent.

  Moving Welch to the police station was part of their strategy. Prisoners did not like to be seen talking to cops, and there were eyes and ears everywhere in a maximum-security prison. It had taken high-level persuasion to get Delaware’s corrections department to agree. This would be Welch’s first trip to the outside world in years. But he might become eligible for work release in just two years, and with freedom on his horizon the drive south from Smyrna might give him a taste of it and encourage helpfulness. They knew his instincts would make him wary. In an inmate’s world, an unscheduled summons from the Law rarely meant good news.

  Welch had not been told who wanted to see him or why. The squad wanted to catch him cold. First reactions were often revealing. Could the detectives get him talking? Lloyd would see the danger, so they had to entice him. But with what? He was under Delaware’s supervision, and they had no sway with that state’s prison system or parole board. With no carrot, they needed a stick, a way to convince Welch that it was more dangerous to stay silent than to talk. With nothing to hold over him, leverage would have to be invented.

  The longer they’d planned for this day the less likely it seemed they would succeed. Spooking Welch was just their first worry. If he agreed to talk, how should they proceed? Should they read him his Miranda rights, or would that alarm him? If they didn’t and he incriminated himself, they couldn’t use his evidence. Should they tell him about Mileski? Their theory of the case? How much? How little? If he balked, how could they keep him in the room?

  As the sergeant and prosecutor rehashed these questions in the car, Dave Davis clapped on earphones and tuned them out. He watched the flat farmland fly past. They weren’t going to come up with anything new. Dave was a wiry, boyish-looking man with an engaging, toothy smile. His close-cropped dark hair was beginning to show flecks of gray, but he still wore it spiked in front like a teenager, and he was always meticulously groomed—his colleagues teased him about it. Even when he was dressed informally, as was his norm, his slacks and sport shirts were spotless and unwrinkled. His weekend passion for extreme mountain biking kept him tan and very fit. After graduating from Florida Southern College with a criminology degree, he had worked for his father’s heating and air-conditioning company before becoming a cop, and he still supplemented his paycheck with carpentry and general contracting. He liked his job, but for him, unlike many of his colleagues, it was just a job, not his mission in life. When asked what he did for a living, Dave would answer, “I work for local government,” because if he said he was a cop, the mood instantly stiffened. As Dave saw it, the work was what he did, not who he was. He came from a military family and as a teenager had seriously considered West Point or the US Naval Academy—he was a good athlete, which would have helped—but he had decided against military service because it was too defining. Being a civilian—“a regular guy,” as he put it—was a conscious choice. Many of the cops he knew found ways to moonlight in work related to policing—security work or consulting—but Dave did not. He preferred time away from it. Off duty, he liked himself better. That didn’t mean he took the job less seriously; in fact, it made him better at it. People didn’t see Dave as a cop; they saw him as just a friendly, outgoing guy, but this sunny demeanor hid a quick, calculating mind.

  Chris considered him the best interrogator in the department. It was work that particularly suited Dave. Criminals saw the man, not the badge, and they liked him, sometimes enough to tell him surprising and damaging things. As one of his colleagues put it, “Dave is very genuine, even when he isn’t genuine.” The department had nabbed a gang of armored-car robbers after a string of violent, sophisticated heists—in which the gang had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. The ringleader, a man with an extensive record that included murder, had, at the end of a long conversation with Dave, not only confessed but also told him where the loot was buried. They dug it up at two in the morning on a golf course in Howard County, right where he’d said it would be. Years later Chris was still amazed by that. He didn’t understand how it had happened. He just knew that when they met Lloyd Welch, he wanted Dave to be the man in the room.

  The earphones bought Dave some time to relax. He was anxious. He knew there was no road map for this session. That was not how interrogation worked. Conversations were improvisational. You never knew when an offhand remark might give you the answer you needed, when a poorly worded question might instantly shut down a suspect, or how an important insight might leap from a slip of the tongue. Chris and Pete would be in an adjacent room watching and listening. Dave would be able to consult with them at intervals, but what happened in the moment would be up to him.

  It wouldn’t just be an interview—it would be a performance.

  A PEBBLE IN THE SHOE

  The taking of Sheila and Kate Lyon had cried out for justice over decades. It wasn’t just a mystery; it was a regional trauma. The crimes that most terrorize us are those that occur where we feel happy and safe. This one struck to the hearth, a shock to anyone who has ever loved a child or remembered being one.

  For the Montgomery County Police Department, it was also an embarrassment, a blot both professional and personal. Professional because it was unsolved, the most notorious such case on its books in a half century. Personal because one of the girls’ two brothers, Jay, had grown up and joined the force. With its fierce fraternal tradition, that had made it a family tragedy.

  It was a pebble in the department’s shoe. Generations of county detectives had come and gone, and many had taken a crack at it. Periodically, a new cold case team would start over, combing through the many boxes of yellowing evidence, hoping to find something missed. Ed Golian, now retired, had worked the case off and on for his entire career, from before he had even earned his badge. He had been in the academy when the sisters disappeared. His entire cadet class was
pressed into the search, striding an arm’s length apart in long rows through wet spring fields, beneath the staccato thrum of a helicopter that swept a moving spotlight. Golian and the others had manned long tables late into the night sorting the flood of tips and sightings. They were also asked to assemble a list of every known sex offender in the area, compiling, they were told, something called a “database.” At the time, Golian wasn’t sure what that meant.

  Fruitless suspicion had fallen at first on the girls’ father, John Lyon, for no reason other than statistics—most crimes against children were committed by family members—and sheer desperation. But the Lyon family was a happy one. Their photos—four sunny children posing on the beach or dressed in their Sunday best in the front yard or peering out happily from the back window of the family station wagon—depicted a contemporary suburban ideal. Sheila stood out in all the pictures, with her glasses and bright blond pigtails, from early childhood to the picture taken of her dressed all in white, her legs grown long and lean, posing before a shrub on the day of her First Communion. Kate looked like more of a tomboy, with even brighter blond hair, cut shorter than her sister’s, and a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. The drawings and cards and notes the girls left behind in their bedrooms were heartbreakingly innocent and joyful. John and Mary were loving parents, guilty of nothing more than letting their girls walk unsupervised down the street to the mall to buy slices of pizza. They were bereft.

  That much was plain to anyone who saw them those first days, as I did, working the story as a new reporter for the Baltimore News-American. Knowing that any attention might help, the couple opened up their small white stucco house on the corner to everyone, family, friends, and even reporters. They passed out cans of beer and cups of coffee. Mary was unusually composed—she was on a diet of tranquilizers—but her face was red and drawn. John was a study in well-contained panic, a man with a wry sense of humor about himself, someone cool, trapped in a circumstance for which there was no cool way to behave. I remember sitting with him in the enclosed side porch of his house as he vacantly strummed a guitar and tried patiently to answer my useless questions.

  They were a handsome pair, John rugged and hip, Mary pretty, small, and slender, with short dark hair. Both were in their thirties. They had met at Xavier University in Cincinnati, when John had been a full-time student and Mary a part-time one. He was from Chicago, and she was from nearby Erlanger, Kentucky. They married in Erlanger and had their first child, Jay, shortly before moving to Chicago, where they lived with John’s parents while he completed his degree by taking night classes at Columbia College. He worked days at Sears in the Loop. After graduation he’d gotten a job at a radio station in Ohio, where Sheila was born, and then one in Streator, Illinois, where Kate was born, and then a bigger job, in Peoria—“The big city!” Mary joked—where John worked in both radio and TV. He appeared on a daytime kids’ show, introducing movies with his guitar and banjo. He and Mary sometimes performed with a folk band in those years, during which she gave birth to their youngest, Joe. The job at WMAL was a big step up. It was the most popular radio station in Washington, DC, and by now John was a seasoned on-air personality. He had long, dark hair beginning to show strands of gray and a droopy mustache and spoke with the deep, melodious tones of a radio pro. He worked as a fill-in disc jockey and sometimes read the news and still performed with a band, called Gross National Product, that played gigs in the area. John and Mary were charming and witty and fun, accustomed to the spotlight, which helped explain their remarkable poise at the center of this awful one. Tragedy felt like a complete stranger in their home, a reminder of the most banal of truths: you can do absolutely everything right and still be rewarded with unconscionable cruelty.

  In those first days there was disbelief and hope. Maybe it was all a snafu and the girls would turn up. John went on the air at WMAL the day after they vanished, speaking calmly and modestly.

  “I’m sure we’re going to feel stupid about this,” he said. “They probably told us they were going to a sleepover and we forgot. If anybody knows where they are, please send them home.”

  Kensington, where the Lyons lived, was north of Washington, well outside the Capital Beltway, adjacent to the booming edge city of Silver Spring. It had been farmland until the end of the nineteenth century, when an Anglophile DC developer bought lots and replicated a Victorian village, which would lend a quaint character to the suburban homes that sprang up around it. First popular as an escape from the swampy district summers, it was overtaken by the suburban explosion that followed World War II. By the 1970s Kensington was a bedroom community for Washington commuters, most of them government workers, nearly all of them white, and still something of an escape, not so much from DC’s climate as from its crowded, increasingly black, restive, and troubled core. Together, Kensington and the larger, adjacent suburb of Wheaton were home to fifty thousand people and distinctly middle to upper class. They were like thousands of other suburbs ringing American cities, havens for whites fleeing the black urban migration, seeking comfort in racial and demographic homogeneity. Largely new, green, clean, and prosperous, Kensington was considered an idyllic place to raise a family.

  Before the age of continuous cable TV news and the Internet, children’s disappearances were primarily local tragedies and did not automatically attract strong news coverage. In big cities like Washington and Baltimore, newspapers were the primary medium, and they had come a long way from their sensationalist roots. Journalism was now a white-collar profession. Reporters for the big papers saw their work as public service—the Washington Post was fresh off the triumph of Watergate. In Baltimore, the most respected paper was the Baltimore Sun, a dignified modern daily that headlined those stories its editors deemed important—an amendment to a piece of tax legislation in Annapolis would get better play than a lurid local crime. With its news bureaus all over the country and the world, the Sun was in the business of educating and informing readers. My paper, the Baltimore News-American, on the other hand, was a throwback. It was part of the Hearst chain. It had nothing like its competitor’s resources (or talent), took itself less seriously, and, for better or worse, still showed its yellow roots. Its priority was still whatever sells. In keeping with that approach, my job was to show up in the newsroom at four in the morning and phone every police barracks in the state, asking whether anything interesting had happened overnight. This was a mind-numbing task and usually produced nothing, but when, on the morning of March 26, 1975, the desk officer in Wheaton told me about the missing children, I drove directly to the scene. Ours was an afternoon paper, so if the story was interesting enough—which this clearly was—and I moved fast enough, it was possible to slap a story on the front page later that day. It was sure to attract attention. Millions of families in the region lived in neighborhoods just like Kensington, shooing their kids out the door in the morning and catching up with them at mealtimes, unconcerned about where they went, because every house on every block was inhabited by families just like their own. A story like this struck at suburbia’s idea of itself.

  My first story ran on a Thursday, two days after the girls vanished, under the headline, “100 Searching Woods for 2 Missing Girls.” It had photos of Sheila, in pigtails and glasses, and Kate, with her hair cut in a cute bob. By the next morning, Good Friday, the FBI and the Washington, DC, police department had joined the effort, and the story led the local news in the Washington Post: “Police Press Search for Missing Girls.” As days passed with no good news, the tale turned grimmer. No one wanted to imagine the girls’ fate. In my newspaper the story was still on the front page at the end of the week: “Hope Fades in Search for Girls.” Every TV and radio news broadcast led with it, sparking a huge public response. More than three hundred people phoned the police in the first three days alone to say they had seen the girls, and all these tips had to be checked out. The family heard from everyone they’d ever known.

  “We’ve had hundreds of phone calls f
rom well-wishers,” John told me, two days after the girls had disappeared. “Most are from perfect strangers. They want to know what they can do to help. I wish I knew what to tell them.”

  Every stand of woods or weeds was searched. Storm sewers were explored, as was every vacant house for miles. The residents of a nearby nursing home were interviewed, one by one. Scuba divers groped through mud at the bottoms of ponds. John stood by one chilly afternoon, shivering, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his white Levi’s, as divers disappeared into a small lake on the grounds of the nearby Kensington Nursing Home. He waited awkwardly … for what? How did one both want and desperately not want to find something? Nothing was found. Nothing came of anything the police did, despite occasional moments of excitement. Thirteen days after the girls vanished, on April 7—long after hopes of finding them alive had faded—there was a call from an IBM employee who, on his way to work in Manassas, Virginia, had stopped at a red light behind a Ford station wagon. He had been startled to see in its rear the head of a blond child, bound and gagged. He jotted down the license-plate number, all but the last digit, which he couldn’t see because the plate was bent. The driver of the station wagon, apparently noticing the other driver eyeing him from behind, had suddenly accelerated through the red light and sped off through the intersection. In that pre-cell-phone era, the IBM man phoned in the tip when he got to his office and later that day was questioned and polygraphed. He wasn’t sure whether the plate had been from Maryland or North Carolina—the new bicentennial plates of these states were similar—but his story was sound. Lists were compiled of all cars with plates that matched the description, from both states, and efforts were made to find them. Nothing came of it.