Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - The Murder of the Lyon Sisters

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

In 1975, two young girls, Kate and Sheila Lyon, disappeared from the Wheaton Plaza Mall in Montgomery County, Maryland. Investigators assumed the worst: that they were abducted by a stranger with sexual motivations. But the case went cold without answers — and all these years later, the truth is still complicated. Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of incest, murder, kidnapping, sexual abuse of minors and substance use. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Imagine you're driving to work in the morning. You've got your coffee, the sun's shining, your favorite music's playing, and there are barely any cars on the road. Then you pull up to a red light. There's a beige Ford station wagon in front of it.

you. It looks a little worse for where, but there's nothing out of the ordinary about it. Until you notice movement in the back seat. Before you can process what's happening, you're staring at the faces of two young girls, not yet teenagers, bound and gagged. Their eyes are racked with fear. You fumble to find a piece of paper and jot down the license plate, but the girl's muted screams draw the attention of the man in the driver's seat. Your eyes meet in the rear view. He sees you and runs the red light speeding away. All you're left with is a pit in your stomach and a partial plate. DMT6. You didn't even catch what state it was from. You don't know it yet, but you just became one of the only witnesses to a crime that will take more than four decades to

solve. This is the story of the Lion Sisters. I'm Vanessa Richard. And this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Whether you're hiring for a role or searching for a killer, the hunt can be exhausting.

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you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Amongst the many sources we used, we found the book The Last Stone by Mark Bowden, as well as the documentary Who Killed the Lion Sisters, extremely helpful to our research. This case gets complicated. It spans decades and travels across state lines into isolated communities. We still don't know how many people were involved, how many killers there were, how many more victims they might have had. But as a story, it starts out small, simple even, in the suburbs of Maryland in a town called Kensington. Believe it or not, I called that tiny town home for 16 years. It was small, it was safe, and it was not at all the place you'd expect a story like this to happen.

Let me take you back to March 1975. Kate and Sheila Lyon are sisters. Kate's 10, Sheila's 12, and since they're on school break, they decide to spend the afternoon at the local mall. Their mom, Mary, is letting them go on their own, unsupervised. They may be young, but it's a test of sorts. Can she trust them to behave and be home for dinner by 4 p.m.? Time will tell. Kate and Sheila leave the house sometime around 11 a.m. with the whole afternoon ahead of them.

They're looking forward to seeing the Easter decorations and grabbing a slice of pizza for lunch. Since the mall is the place to be for kids of all ages, Kate and Sheila's older brother Jay also ends up there with his own friends. He sees his sisters around 2 p.m., but he doesn't say hi. He assumes he'll see them at dinner. But Kate and Sheila never make it home. A family friend sees the girls walking away from the mall sometime between 2.30 and 3 o'clock, presumably on their way home. And no one knows what happens to them after that.

The girl's 4 o'clock curfew comes and goes with no signs. of them. At first, their parents, Mary and John Lyon, are worried they got their daughter's schedules wrong. With four active kids, it's hard to keep everything straight. Maybe Kate and Sheila had a sleepover they forgot about, or some extracurricular activity. But by the time night falls, panic sets in. Mary and John start placing phone calls, driving the streets, and knocking on doors. As I said, Kensington is considered safe. It's a small town with only about 20,000 residents. The girls couldn't have gotten far on their own, but by 8 p.m., the lion sisters still hadn't been found. Mary and John report their daughters as

missing to police. The next day, posters of Kate and Sheila are hung around town. The two sisters look strikingly similar. They both have blonde hair, blue eyes, but at 5'2, Sheila's slightly taller and wears wire-framed glasses. She was last seen wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and corduroy pants with a slight tear running down one leg. Kate had on a floral t-shirt, bell-bottom jeans, a bright red jacket and a beaded necklace with her name on it. Authorities do everything they can to try and find them.

Scuba divers dredge lakes. The National Guard scours the forest. volunteers trudge through storm sewers and search vacant lots. Their efforts ultimately amount to one of the largest missing person investigations ever performed in the D.C. area. But the lion sisters are never found. Their missing person posters wither and yellow with time as investigators wade through a sea of witness statements,

anonymous tips, and leads. Most are dead ends, ransom scams, psychics, false sightings, the scattered thoughts of lonely people calling just to talk. Only a few pieces of information stand out as promising. Like how on the day Kate and Sheila disappeared, a witness reported they saw a teenage boy following girls through the mall. They said he was about 5-11, 140 pounds, long dark brown hair, a mustache, and had a distinctive acne scar on his left cheek. An artist mocks up a sketch and the police added to their case files. But they're ultimately more focused on another person of interest, an individual who would come

to be known as tape recorder man. Multiple witnesses saw a man with salt and pepper hair interviewing children at the mall that day. The man had a briefcase and a microphone attached to a tape recorder. He apparently told his subjects he planned to put them on the radio. Police never learn the identity of tape recorder man, but they come to suspect it may be a man who's made their short list of potential suspects. A convicted, petty criminal named Raymond Moleski Sr. Maleski bears a striking resemblance to the physical descriptions of tape recorder man. Detectives can place him a block or two away from the Lion family house a week or two before the girls were abducted. Not to mention shortly after Kate and Sheila's disappearance, he contacts

authorities on two different occasions. Once to tell them that they may want to offer immunity to the person who kidnapped Kate and Sheila, then again to claim he saw tape recorder man at another mall trying to lure children into a car. But he doesn't provide authorities with any details that hadn't already been widely publicized. The strange, self-referrales, the strange, insertions draw suspicion. But investigators can't pursue Moleski the way they'd like to. They don't have any hard evidence to suggest he was actually involved, or even to confirm he was at the mall that day. The girls were just there one moment and gone the next. No witnesses remembered a struggle and no one heard any screams. And now, weeks after going missing,

they could be anywhere, even miles away in another state. 13 days after the lion sisters disappear, a man living 40 miles away in Manassas, Virginia, calls police with a story. Around 7.30 that morning, he stopped at a red light behind a beige Ford station wagon. In the back seat of the car, he saw what looked like two blonde girls around Sheila and Kate's age, and they appeared to be bound and gagged. He tried to jot down the license plate, but before he could finish, the driver drove through the red light and sped away. He couldn't remember what state it was from. The man provides police with a partial plate, but when authorities run it through their system,

they don't find a match. It's another dead end, and eventually the case goes cold, even as suspicion around Raymond Moleski deepens. Two years after the lion sisters disappear, Moleski's shes, shoots and kills his wife and 17-year-old son. According to Moleski, he and his wife had gotten into a fight over the use of their car. But detectives suspect there may have been another motive for the killings. On the night of the double homicide, authorities found a slip of paper on Moleski's wife's

bedside table, and it had John Lyon's phone number on it. They wonder if maybe Moleski's wife and son were about to reveal that he was a little bit of had a hand in Kate and Sheila's disappearance, and he killed them before they could. Either way, if Moleski also killed the lion sisters, detectives have a serial killer on their hands. According to the book The Last Stone by Mark Bowden, police interview multiple witnesses who claim Moleski was known to, quote, pick up young boys and girls for sex. Male and female survivors come forward in testimony. One says Moleski would throw sex parties at his home with groups of pedophiles.

They would apparently swap child pornography and groom and share victims. Adding fuel to the fire, while in prison, Moleski talks about the lion sisters to other inmates, claiming he knows where their bodies are buried. The comments lead investigators to excavate his old backyard and basement, but the searches come up empty. Without a confession or more evidence, investigators can't tie Moleski to Kate and Sheila. Everything they have is too circumstantial. And so the disappearance of the Lion's Sisters remains a prominent stain on the Montgomery County Police Department's record.

The most notorious cold case they have. Generation after generation of detectives tries their hand at cracking it. But progress, real progress, doesn't happen for decades. By 2013, it's been 38 years since the Lion Sisters disappeared. Detective Sergeant Chris Homrock has spent a good portion of his career obsessed with their case. It's taken a toll on his mental health. He knows John and Mary Lyon are in their 80s now, and they might not get answers before they die. He's convinced Ray Moleski abducted Kate and Sheila, and has tried every angle possible,

ripped out the old carpet in his basement to inspect the concrete floor, dug up a plot of undeveloped land Moleski owned, but he never found the girl's remains, and he needs that kind of evidence at this point. Because a confession is out of the question. Moleski died in prison in 2010. One night, Homrock decides he's ready to give up.

According to him, he's come to terms with never knowing what happened, and he's confident the lion family will understand his decision. But then, as he's getting ready to put all the case files away, he stumbles upon something new. He's familiar with every single paper inside the 20 boxes of the Lion's sister's case files. And yet, here's this six-page statement made by an eyewitness back in 1975 that he's never seen before. He has no idea where it came from,

but he doesn't question it because it changes everything. Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigue, ask your doctor about Zepbound, terse appetite, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea,

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and 20 years of scientific expertise, Activia is one of the easiest and tastiest ways to start your gut health ritual. Try Activia today. Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle may help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort, which includes gas, bloating, rumbling, and abdominal discomfort. In the summer of 2013, Detective Chris Homrock finds a six-page witness statement in the Lion's sister's case files. It was made on April 1, 1975, about a week after Kate and Sheila went missing by an 18-year-old named Lloyd Lee Welch. Lloyd was a seventh grade dropout,

a carnival worker and a drifter. He showed up to the Montgomery County Police Department, stoned, and said he wanted to tell police what he witnessed that day at the Wheaton Plaza Mall. This is the story he gave. Lloyd was at the mall with his wife, Helen. He saw two girls who fit the lion's description talking to a man with a tape recorder.

The man looked older. His hair was graying around his ears. He stood about six feet tall and wore a brown suit with a white shirt and black tie. He had a briefcase with him. Okay, none of this information was new to police. It had all appeared in the papers, except for what Lloyd claimed next. He said he watched the two girls leave the mall with tape recorder man and drive away. They got into a red Camaro with white seats.

The car had a dent on the back bumper and one of its tailors. lights was busted. Before ending the interview, Lloyd added one final detail. He said the man with the tape recorder walked with a small limp. Back in 1975, police didn't take Lloyd seriously. They had no reason to. They administered a lie detector test that Lloyd failed. And while polygraphs are now considered less than reliable, Lloyd admitted he made everything up after the results came back, and many of his lies could easily be debunked. He said he was 22 years old and married when he was actually 18 with a girlfriend.

To police, Lloyd was just one of many liars inserting themselves into the case to collect reward money, a con man. As Mark Bowden wrote in his book The Last Stone, Lloyd, quote, seemed stupid, not suspicious. But investigators working the case in 1974, missed an important connection. You'll remember there was a witness who saw a teenage boy following young girls around the mall that day.

He had long hair, a mustache, and acne scars on his left cheek. Detective Homrock pulls out the composite sketch made in 1975 and compares it to a photo of a young Lloyd Lee Welch. The similarities are self-evident, which means Lloyd might have been a legitimate witness to the the lion's sisters kidnapping after all. Suddenly, that 1975 testimony takes on a whole new meaning. Detective Homrock stares at some of the final words Lloyd told police, that tape recorder man walked with a small limp. It must have been Moleski. Years before the Lion's sisters disappeared,

Molesky was shot in a leg by police during a home break-in. He walked with a limp and ever since. Detective Homrock brings his findings to his colleagues, and he can barely contain his excitement. It could be the break they need to finally pin the abduction on Moleski. Even posthumously, it would be a victory. But first, they need to track down Lloyd Lee Welch and get some answers. What really happened at the mall that day? The good news is, finding Lloyd doesn't prove difficult. At 56 years old, he's created quite the paper trail. His rap sheet is filled with charges, including drunk driving, burglary, assaulted battery, and public drunkenness. He's now serving time at a Delaware prison for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old.

After all these years, it finally feels like they're on to something. Detectives pay Lloyd a visit in prison, and immediately they're reassured they're in the right place. The first words out of his mouth are, I know why you're here. You're here about those two missing kids. The bad news comes later. With microphones on, investigators ask Lloyd a series of questions. Now, before we get into detectives' interviews with Lloyd,

and there are many, I have to say, the way he responds reminds me a lot of Ted Bundy's interviews with journalist Stephen Misho, for those familiar, They're long-winded and evasive. Detectives are hoping to get answers about Moleski, but they don't want to tip their hand right away, so they take things slow. They let Lloyd talk about his relationships, his kids,

his abusive childhood, how he perpetuated that cycle of abuse. At some point, he talks about a man who used to give him rides to his girlfriend's house. Detectives ask for the man's name, thinking maybe it was molestine. but Lloyd says he doesn't remember. After a break, detectives decide to place a photo of Ray Moleski in front of Lloyd, and he immediately

reacts. That's the freaking guy, he says, referring to the man who used to give him rides from time to time. Even after detectives provide more information about why they're interested in Moleski, his history of sexual assault, and his possible link to the lion's sisters, Lloyd insists that Moleski was a little eerie, but that's it. To him, he was nothing more than a stranger with a car. Eventually, detectives ask if Lloyd remembers giving a statement to police in 1975. Lloyd tells them he does. He remembers how authorities didn't take him seriously. Then, when asked to repeat

what he saw that day, Lloyd tells the following story. He was miles away from the Wheaton Plaza Mall near his girlfriend's house. It was already done. dark outside, and he watched a man, dressed in all black and a black hat, shove two young girls into the backseat of a black car, then drive away. Lloyd said, at his girlfriend's insistence, he called police almost immediately and gave his statement. He placed the call from a phone booth and an officer came to meet him. It completely contradicts his original statement. The location's different, the car's different, the timing's different, not to mention investigation, know Lloyd didn't file a report with police until a week after the Lion's Sisters went missing.

Later, when detectives finally present Lloyd with his original statement, he says he legitimately doesn't remember being at the mall or giving that statement. He blames all the drugs he did back then. LSD, speed, they fried his brain. Detectives stressed that they're focused on Moleski, not Lloyd, and they provide a little more background on Moleski, how he used to give teenage boys drugs in exchange for helping him lure kids back to his house. They imply that if that were true for Lloyd,

he was a victim in their eyes, not an accomplice. Still, Lloyd insists he wouldn't do anything like that. The interrogation ultimately lasts into the evening. Lloyd contradicts himself countless more times, but around hour eight he tells detectives what they want to hear, that yes, Moleski was the man he saw take those girls at the mall in 1975, but he maintains that Moleski never abused him. They barely knew each other, and Lloyd was certainly not involved in any crimes.

Before wrapping up their first interview, detectives asked Lloyd for his opinion. What do you think Ray Moleski did to those girls? they ask. Lloyd tells them he thinks Moleski raped, killed, and probably burned them. The answer immediately raises red flags. It's an unusually specific hypothetical. Detectives return for another interview in February 2014 and hook Lloyd up to a polygraph. They ask the obvious questions. Have you ever lied to someone you loved or who trusted you? Did you have anything to do with the lion's sister's disappearance? Did you do anything to cause the girl's disappearance in 1975?

His replies are all the same. No, no, of course not. But after the results of the polygraph indicate deception, Lloyd panics and tells investigators there is something he's been keeping from them. Back in 1975, Ray Moleski wasn't just someone who gave him. him rides from time to time. He knew Moleski. Well, they used to get high together pretty regularly, and on one occasion, he saw something he maybe shouldn't have. This was after Kate and Sheila disappeared. Lloyd went to Molesky's house. Molesky and a bunch of other men were there. Lloyd didn't know most

of their names. At some point, Lloyd took a set of stairs from the backyard to the basement, and that's where he saw them. Kate and Sheila Lyon were inside. They were naked, drugged, and not alone. There were also two men there, sexually assaulting them. Lloyd didn't recognize either one. He ran from the house scared. That's why he eventually went to the police and invented his original statement.

He was hoping it would help lead them there. Now, if you're frustrated, listening to Lloyd's ever-changing stories, imagine being the detectives interviewing him. At a certain point, they don't really know what to think. Clearly, Lloyd's a liar. But what if some of it is true? What if he's finally being honest? If he is, that means there were other guilty parties involved, more than Lloyd, more than Moleski. So detectives decide to keep pressing on. They even go public with some of the information they have. Two months after his polygraph, in March 2014,

Lloyd finally provides detectives with an explanation for his evasive behavior. He basically says he's lied so many times because he's afraid of one of the men involved in the Lion's Sisters' disappearance, and he's not talking about Ray Moleski. In fact, Lloyd does a 180 on Moleski. He now says he wasn't involved at all. It was his cousin, Teddy Welsh, who kidnapped. the girls, and Teddy was working with someone else, someone whose name conveniently escapes Lloyd.

Detectives, of course, are as skeptical of this story as the others. They ultimately learn Teddy Welch was 11 years old in 1975. He had not one, but two broken arms at the time, not someone who could have orchestrated the kidnapping of two girls. But even though detectives don't trust Lloyd, they decide to trust the price. He clearly knows more than he's letting on, and somewhere in all the lies he's weaving, they're hopeful to find a real, legitimate thread they can pull on. Then, in July 2014, Lloyd miraculously remembers the name of his cousin Teddy's supposed accomplice. It was his Uncle Dickie, he says, a man who in 1975 worked as a security guard

near the Wheaton Plaza Mall. Dickie was Teddy's uncle, too. And Lloyd implicates himself even further. He says that on the day Kate and Sheila disappeared, he got in the car with his uncle Dickie, Teddy, and the Lion Sisters. After leaving the mall, Lloyd got out of the car to get ice cream, and Uncle Dickie went to lock the girls in his basement, which mirrors the description Lloyd previously gave as Ray

Moleskies. Then, Lloyd supposes that after the kidnapping, his Uncle Dickie might have driven Kate and Sheila down to Virginia, where some relatives live near Taylor's Mountain, presumably in his car, a beige Ford station wagon. Transport your senses with Sol de Janado's limited edition perfume mist collection at Sephora. Sprits on lush notes of rainforest orchid and crisp sea. with Hefresco Paraiso. Embrace of floral and fruity scent inspired by Rio's nude beach

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A few weeks after the Lion Sisters disappeared in 1975, a witness in Virginia saw two girls bound and gagged in the backseat of a beige Ford station wagon. 39 years later, Lloyd Lee Welsh tells detectives his uncle Dickie kidnapped Kate and Sheila, locked them in his basement, then later may have driven them to Virginia in a beige Ford station wagon. Detectives make the connection between the two statements right away. After so many months spent waiting through lies, they feel like Lloyd finally gave them something real, and he included a destination. They had relatives up on Taylor's Mountain.

It's where Lloyd Lee Welsh spent his childhood and where many members of the Welsh family still live, on a hilltop in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia, intentionally isolated from mainstream society. Officials traveled to the area in the summer of 2014, only to quickly learn that finding the information they're looking for will be difficult. For starters, it's a sprawling, wooded landscape. If there are any clues buried in the mountains, detectives note that it will be like finding a needle in a haystack. Plus, there's a culture

of privacy on the mountain. Suspicion of outsiders is part of the area's history. People tend to keep to themselves, and even among the locals, the Welsh family are considered social pariahs, quick to violence, comfortable living below the poverty line, and skeptical of authorities. In fact, long-standing tensions between the family and local police have led to an unorthodox, unspoken agreement. The police don't patrol the mountain anymore. They leave the Welshes to their own devices. Throughout the investigation, detectives learn the cost of that isolation.

Incest had become commonplace. According to reports, many children in the Welsh family would go on to become survivors of physical abuse and sexual assault. Lloyd and his cousin Teddy were not outliers. And even still, many family members remain tight-lipped when investigators show up on their doorstep with questions. Months into their investigation, in October 2014, detectives catch a break. One of Lloyd's many cousins, still living in the area, decides to come forward. Her name is Connie, and she tells detectives the following story. Back in 1975, Connie remembers Lloyd visiting her family in Taylor's Mountain.

He showed up carrying a large green army duffel bag that appeared to be stuffed to the brim, and he was wearing blood-stained clothes. Connie asked Lloyd about the bag. He told her it was filled with beef that he had planned to cook but had since gone bad. Later, Connie suggested Lloyd might have recruited her brother Henry to help him build a bonfire that could destroy the bag and its contents. And they succeeded. Henry reluctantly corroborates the story.

The fire ended up being so big that when investigators speak to some locals, they remember it vividly. It raged for days, maybe even a full week, and according to them, it filled the area with an odor reminiscent of burning hair and flesh. Some described the smell as like burning rats. Why that information didn't cause more concern at the time or make its way to police, we can't say. It probably had something to do with the culture of privacy on Taylor's Mountain. But for investigators working the Lion's sisters case now, Connie's story calls to mind a statement Lloyd Welsh made during his first interview, that he believed Ray Moleski killed, raped, and burned the Lion Sisters.

Maybe their intuition was right. Maybe Lloyd had been feeding them partial truths this whole time. Detectives searched the plot of land where the bonfire allegedly took place, and they find their first ever clues. It's not a lot of material, but it's something. A piece of wire that investigators believe could have come from Sheila's glasses, a string, possibly from the necklace Kate wore, and a singular human bone fragment. It feels important at first, but tests come back inconclusive. There's not enough DNA to link any of the items to Kate or Sheila, not even the bones.

So in January 2015, detectives pay Lloyd Welsh another visit in prison. When they last spoke, Lloyd said his uncle Dickie drove the girls down to Virginia. He never mentioned a duffel bag or being there himself. He certainly didn't mention blood or a bonfire. Hoping to link Lloyd to Connie's testimony, detectives ask him if he ever went to Virginia after the girls were taken. And he's surprisingly forthcoming. He tells them,

it's a very strong possibility. And when they ask what he would have used for luggage at that time, he tells them he had a green army duffel bag, and his description matched the one Connie and her brother Henry gave police. When Lloyd learns about the story, Connie and Henry told investigators, he denies everything. He claims Teddy must have been.

fed Connie and Henry the lie. But eventually, Lloyd realizes the situation he's in. He changes his story again, without straying too far from his latest version, the one where he, Teddy, and their uncle Dickie got into Dickie's car with the lion's sisters. He insists that by the time he got to Virginia, the bonfire was already raging. But before investigators are done talking to Lloyd, he adds another accomplice to the story, Lloyd's father, Lee, who died back in 1998. And that's not all. Lloyd tells police he knows where the girl's bodies are. They're not in Virginia. They're back in Maryland. According to Lloyd, he and his Uncle Dickie used to go fishing at this one particular spot sometimes.

It was down the street from Uncle Dickie's house in Hyattsville, Maryland, a town near. Kensington, right where a small bridge crossed the Anacostia River. Lloyd said it was well hidden, especially at night, and he's sure his uncle and father took Kate and Sheila's bodies there after murdering them. It could easily be another lie, but investigators don't want to take any chances. One detective, Detective Dave Davis, drives down to Hyattsville, Maryland, and finds the location Lloyd pointed them to. Except it's nothing. like Lloyd described. No intelligent person would dump a body there. It's out in the open, highly visible, and the water doesn't even look deep enough to fish. It's feeling like Lloyd sent them

on another wild goose chase until, while driving away, Dave looks up and notices an address of one of the nearby houses, 4714 Baltimore Avenue. He's seen the address many times before in the Lion's case files. Lloyd listed it on his 1975 police statement. It's the home his father, Lee Welsh, owned. On a hunch, Dave knocks on the front door of the house. He shows the new occupants his badge and asks if he could possibly take a look at their basement. They say yes. He heads around to the back of the house and finds a small set of stairs leading to a padlocked door, which opened into a basement. The basement itself is dark, musty, and split into two rooms.

Neither are connected to the rest of the house. The space can only be accessed from the outside padlocked door. The ceiling's low and old furniture is piled high. It feels immediately familiar to Dave. He's walking into the place Lloyd Welsh first described as Ray Moleski's basement, and then as his uncle Dickies. Turns out, it was Lee Welsh's house all along. He assumes that's where the lion sisters spent their final days.

The next day, investigators send a forensics team to the house. They scan the back room with a blue light, and the whole room lights up. A staggering amount of blood had been spilled in the space. As author Mike Bowden put it, it had been bathed in blood. After 40 years of searching, investigators found their crime scene. Testing reveals the blood's conclusively human. There's not enough DNA to link any of it to Sheila or Kate, but it doesn't matter.

In May 2015, detectives confront Lloyd with what they found, and he cracks at the edges. He breaks down and confesses to a new part of the story. He was there, in the house, when one of the lion's sisters tried to escape. He's pretty sure it was the younger one. His father, Lee, broke her neck. Then his uncle placed her body in a duffel bag. Lloyd's not sure what happened to Sheila, but he believes she was taken to Virginia and killed.

That year, Dick Welch is brought in front of a grand jury, jury and questioned. He's 70 years old, and multiple family members have come forward to speak out about his history of violent abuse. But under oath, he denies all allegations of abuse, as well as any involvement in the Lion's Sister's abduction and murders. Without evidence and without a confession, he's never charged. Two years later, in September 2017, Lloyd Lee Welch, Jr. is put on trial in Virginia. Even though Lloyd technically only confessed to assisting in Kate and Sheila's abduction, a judge can convict him on felony murder charges in the state. Plus, capital punishment is legal in Virginia, and prosecutors hope Lloyd will plead guilty to avoid the

death penalty, which is what ends up happening. He pleads guilty to two counts of felony murder. And at 60 years old, he's sentenced to 48 additional years. He will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison. Forty years in the making, and it's not necessarily a satisfying ending, but it's something, even if there are still a lot of open-ended questions, like what happened to Kate and Sheila's bodies? What really happened in Virginia? Who, if anyone else, was involved? There are so many names. that have come up over the years, Dick and Lee Welsh, Ray Maleski. At various points over the years, detectives considered a known child predator named Arthur Good, and a sexual sadist and serial killer named James Mitchell de Bartolabin, sometimes known as the Mall Passer. They couldn't

eliminate any of them. Could one or more of them have been associates? When you examine all of Lloyd's stories together, you can draw conclusions. You can try and piece together what actually happened on March 25, 1975, and in the weeks that followed. But with so many persons of interest aging or dead, we may never know the whole truth. But there's always hope. After all, if nothing else, the Lion's Sisters case proves that years of dedication and persistence can pay off. Thanks for listening to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast, and we'd love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

We found the book The Last Stone by Mark Bowden, as well as as the documentary Who Killed the Lion Sisters extremely helpful to our research. Stay safe out there. Serial Killers is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Lori Marinelli and Connor Samson, edited by Mickey Taylor, Chelsea Wood, Maggie and Meyer, and Ali Wicker. Researched by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Haley Milliken and Lori Segal, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming, is Julian Borrow. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production

supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson. Want to hear something spooky. Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot. Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal. One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession. Stories straight from the witnesses' mouths themselves. Something very snake-like lifted its head out of the water. Hosted by me. guide. Derek Hayes. Somehow I lost eight whole hours. Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast.

A beloved 75-year-old man washing up getting ready for bed is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcast this year, but they're not crime Beat. Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts.