BEDFORD COUNTY, Va. — Nearly 50 years after the disappearance of two Montgomery County sisters from a Wheaton mall, their convicted killer, Lloyd Lee Welch, will be transferred to a Virginia prison to begin serving two concurrent 48-year sentences for their murders.
Authorities believe the remains of Katherine Lyon, 10, and Sheila Lyon, 12, are in the Lynchburg area, approximately 400 miles from where they were last seen alive. Welch, who was prosecuted in Virginia, admitted to burning at least one of the sisters on Taylor’s Mountain in Bedford County. Neighbors reported smelling burning flesh in the area around the time of the girls’ disappearance in 1975.
Welch, now 68, was 18 at the time of the murders. He has been serving a prison sentence in Delaware since 1997 for unrelated crimes. Delaware corrections officials confirmed that his sentence there will conclude in late December, after which he will be transferred to Virginia.
The Lyon sisters vanished on March 25, 1975, after leaving Wheaton Plaza Mall (now Westfield Wheaton). They had been given $2 by their parents and promised to return home by 4 p.m. The case remained unsolved for nearly 40 years until a reinvestigation in 2013 linked Welch to the crime. He confessed in 2014 and was convicted in 2017.
The sisters’ parents, John and Mary Lyon, attended Welch’s sentencing, where he received two 48-year sentences for the murders and an additional 12-year sentence for an unrelated child sexual assault in Prince William County during the 1990s.
The abduction of Katherine and Sheila had a lasting impact on the community, with parents in the D.C. area becoming more vigilant about their children’s safety. Shirley Yania, whose daughter was friends with the Lyon sisters, recalled the heightened caution: “I used to keep my front door open. Kids would run in and out. I didn’t keep it open after that.”
