Who is Lloyd Welch Jr? Man behind Lyon sisters' death confessed to crime 40 years after their disappearance
It has been decades since the disappearance and death of two young sisters - Katherine,10, and Sheila Lyon,12. The sisters had gone missing on March 25, 1975, after walking half-a-mile from their home to a shopping mall in Wheaton, Maryland. They were not seen since. Their case had made headlines everywhere, and despite massive search efforts, the case had gone cold.
Almost four decades later, a team of cold-case investigators came across a promising lead which led to the unraveling of the gruesome and disturbing crime. The case has been extensively covered in Investigation Discovery's documentary, 'Who Killed the Lyon Sisters?' which releases on November 28 at 9 pm ET.
Who is Llyod Lee Welch Jr?
The name of Lloyd Lee Welch Jr had come up by accident after an investigator came across his witness statement from the year the girls had vanished. Welch Jr was 18 at the time the girls disappeared and had said that he had been at the mall on the same day. He had reportedly seen a man talking to the two sisters while holding a tape recorder. However, Welch Jr was taken to do a polygraph lie detector test regarding his account and failed it. He was brushed off by detectives as an unreliable witness.
When the cold case remerged, Welch Jr who had been serving time for an unrelated sexual assault case was interviewed by the investigators when his story started to fall apart in 2014. When asked what had happened to the sisters, he said he believed that they had been "abducted, raped, and burned" which caught the attention of the investigators as there had been no mention of any "burning" before during the time of the case. The cold case squad later dubbed Welch Jr as a person of interest in the case.
Over the course of his interrogations, Welch Jr maintained that he had been telling the truth despite providing contradicting statements. "Never killed anybody, never kidnapped anybody, and I never would," Welch Jr says in the documentary. He even agreed with another polygraph test after flunking his first one in 1975. He did not fair well on his second one either which gave rise to the fact that he was definitely hiding the truth.
Multiple interrogations and bits of truth
The detectives repeatedly interviewed and interrogated Welch Jr for the truth which he gave in bits and pieces. He kept changing his story and would provide names of his relatives he said he had seen abduct the Lyon sisters. He also said he had seen some of his relatives abuse and kill at least one of the girls.
He said that his uncle Dicky who was a security guard who worked close to the mall where the girls disappeared, chopping up one of the girls' bodies in the basement of a house, and his father Lee Welch breaking the neck of the girl. He said that uncle Dicky had wanted to make pornographic films especially child porn and had hence decided to abduct the girls. He narrated an incident where he placed himself in the car of Dicky along with the young girls, putting him at the scene of the luring and kidnapping.
Welch Jr maintained that he had seen this but was threatened many times by his relatives to keep shut and was forced to help clean up the murder scene. There was also no verifying Welch Jr's accounts as there had been a lack of any evidence.
Welch Jr's father Lee Welch's house
Detective Dave Davis who had tried to retrace and verify Welch Jr's story, was almost at a dead end after investigating yet another false lead provided by Welch Jr that the girls were likely killed off near a bridge on Buchanon Street in Hyattsville. After visiting the location, Davis found that the bridge is wide open and with such shallow water, this was most likely not the place where the crime had occurred especially since it was highly visible to all surrounding neighborhoods.
While leaving the bridge, he noticed a house 4714 Baltimore Avenue which he recognized from snapshots in the files. It was the house of Welch Jr's father Lee and the address that Welch Jr had provided during his original false statement. He had described seeing his uncle drive out of the driveway with the Lyon sisters and the location fit perfectly. Davis was able to visit the house and decided to take a look at the basement. In every single story that Welch Jr had narrated, the crimes had taken place in a basement area where the girls had been kept. Upon entering it, it felt eerily similar to all of Welch Jr's stories and it was the kind of place where a person could hide two kidnapped, scared, and drugged children.
The next day, he returned with the forensics team and they started to spray the area with a blood detection agency. The floors and outer walls of the basement had nothing but the back room in the basement lit up from the floor all the way up to the ceiling indicating that someone or something had been slaughtered. Due to this find, the case against Welch Jr was solid enough to charge him with the crime.
Confession and sentencing
In 2017, Welch Jr pleaded guilty to two counts of felony murder in a Bedford courtroom. He denied that he had raped or killed the sisters but his confession and admission fell within a Virginia legal doctrine defining as murder a killing "in the commission of abduction with intent to defile". He accepted the guilty plea and was spared from death row but was sentenced to 48 years in prison.