Lyon sisters

Katherine Mary Lyon (aged 10), and Sheila Mary Lyon (aged 12) were two sisters who disappeared without a trace during a trip to a local mall in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in 1975. Known colloquially as The Lyon Sisters, their case resulted in one of the largest police investigations in the Washington, D.C., metro area’s history. The case remains unsolved.

The immense media attention given to this case at the time, its significance in the Washington area’s criminal history, and the fact that the mystery of their disappearance has never been explained, has led to the story being revisited on a regular basis, with the result that it has started to pass into the area’s folklore.

Background to the sisters' disappearance

The two sisters were born to John and Mary Lyon in Kensington, Maryland. They had an older brother, Jay, who later became a policeman. Their father was a well-known radio personality at WMAL, a local radio station then held by the owner of the ABC Television affiliate in Washington and the now-defunct Washington Star; he later worked as a victims counselor. Coincidentally, immediately following the girls' disappearance, the U.S. was pulling out of Vietnam. Regardless, they continued to be featured in high-profile stories on the media for some months.

Located a half mile away from their home was Wheaton Plaza shopping mall (now Westfield Wheaton). On March 25, 1975, Katherine and Sheila Lyon were going to see the Easter exhibts. It was their spring vacation and they planned to have lunch at the Orange Bowl Restaurant. They left home between 11:00 AM to noon. Their mother had instructed her daughters to return home by 4:00 PM; when they had not arrived by 7:00 PM, the police were called and an extensive search was conducted. Police felt comfortable enough with accuracy of this timeline to release it to the public.

• 11:00 AM to noon: The girls leave home.
• 1:00 PM: A neighborhood child tells investigators that he saw both of the girls together outside the Orange Bowl Restaurant. He also told the investigators that the sisters were speaking to an unidentified man.
• 2:00 PM: The girls' older brother saw them inside the Orange Bowl Restaurant eating pizza together.
• 2:30 to 3:00 PM: A friend sees the girls walking westward down a street near the Mall which would have been one of the most direct routes from the Mall to their home. This is the final sighting of the sisters that is absolutely confirmed by the police.
• 4:00 PM: This curfew set by their mother passes. The girls are expected home and do not arrive.
• 7:00 PM: Police are called. The investigation and an active search by professionals begins.

Police investigation

At approximately 1 PM, police were told that the sisters were in the Wheaton Plaza mall. A neighborhood boy, who knew the sisters, reported that he saw them together outside the Orange Bowl Restaurant speaking with an unidentified man, about 6 feet tall, 50 to 60 years old, and wearing a brown suit. The man was carrying a briefcase with a tape recorder inside; there were also other children around who were speaking into a microphone he was holding. The witness's description of the man led authorities to view the unknown person as a prime suspect in the Lyon sisters' case and two composite sketches of the man were created.

Police investigating the case followed up on reports from several people who said they recognized the sketch of the unknown man with the briefcase. Press reports indicated that a man matching the sketch was seen a few weeks earlier at the Marlow Heights Shopping Center and the Iverson Mall, both in neighboring Prince George's County, Maryland. These people reported that he had approached several young girls and asked them to read an answering machine message typed on an index card into his hand-held microphone. The police never publicly acknowledged a direct link between these reports and the Lyon sisters' disappearance.

As the weeks after the disappearance wore on, numerous volunteer groups combed vacant lots and stream beds for the sisters. The search continued and press interest reached such a fever pitch that on May 23, 1975, Maryland Lt. Gov. Blair Lee summoned 122 National Guardsmen to participate in a search of a Montgomery County forest for the two missing Lyon sisters.

No trace of the girls was ever found from these searches.

False leads

On April 7, 1975, about two weeks after their disappearance, a witness in Manassas, Virginia, reported seeing two girls resembling Sheila and Katherine in the rear of a beige 1968 Ford station wagon. The witness stated that the girls were bound and gagged in the vehicle. The driver of the station wagon resembled the man in the publicly available sketch of the prime suspect (who had been seen questioning children at the Orange Bowl Restaurant the day the sisters vanished). The witness further claimed that when the driver spotted the witness tailing him, he ran a red light and sped west on Route 234 towards Interstate 66 in Virginia. The station wagon had Maryland license plates with the possible combination "DMT-6**." The last two numbers are unknown due to the bending of the car's plate. The known combination was issued in Cumberland, Hagerstown, and Baltimore, Maryland at the time. A search for matching plate numbers failed to produce any information. Although this witness's report was at first treated as credible, and a media firestorm erupted because of it, it was later deemed "questionable" by police. Despite this later finding, media and otherwise well-researched Internet reports continue to mention this report, more often than not treating it as an all but verified sighting of the girls.

Several phone calls from people claiming to have the girls and offering to exchange them for ransom money were made to the Lyon family in the immediate aftermath of the sisters' disappearances. The one that went the furthest and that had seemed most credible at first started when an anonymous male voice called the family on April 4, 1975, and demanded that John Lyon leave a briefcase with $10,000 inside an Annapolis, Maryland, courthouse restroom. The money was left just as the instructions from the caller required, but the money was never claimed. This same anonymous person called John Lyon later and maintained that police had surrounded the courthouse and he could not retrieve the ransom. The man was told that he would have to show some evidence of having the Lyon sisters in his custody before another attempt would be made to leave him a ransom. Although the caller then said he would be in touch with the family, he never contacted them again.

Suspects

James Mitchell DeBardeleben II was likely the culprit. He likely stole Maryland State Police uniforms and kidnapped the Lyon sisters using a police ruse that lured them into his vehicle. He likely took them to a safe house in Virginia. A Washington Post article dated in September of 1975 reported that three Maryland State Police uniforms went missing from a Baltimore dry cleaning business in a robbery. The uniforms were stolen in February of 1975, coinciding perfectly with the appearance of "Tape Recorder Man" at suburban Maryland area shopping centers. DeBardeleben was eventually arrested tried and convicted for several acts of police impersonations that resulted in kidnappings and serial raping of women in Frederick, Baltimore, Ocean City Maryland, Manassass, Virginia and Beach areas in Delaware near Ocean City. He was known to have murdered at least 8 people but was believed to be an extremely prolific serial killer who may have murdered far more. He has been categorized as a sexual sadist, and an organized serial killer, the most lethal and dangerous kind of rapist. He was known to have planned, rehearsed, and organized his crimes to make him nearly unstoppable for a period of at least 17 years (1966 to 1983). The Secret Service caught him for the second time in 1983 because he was a counterfeiter. He used his counterfeit money to fund much darker and more sinister crimes, like kidnapping, raping and murdering. He was nicknamed the "Mall Passer" because he had a passion for doing crimes in malls, especially crowded malls during holiday seasons. He committed many serious crimes in Wheaton, including a bank robbery of a bank that was located in the parking lot of Wheaton Plaza. He kidnapped the manager's wife at gunpoint and called the bank stating he would murder the wife if he did not receive a certain sum of money. DeBardeleben likely committed a nearly identical crime on December 23, 1974 when he likely kidnapped "the Missing Trio" from an outdoor mall in Fort Worth, Texas.

Coffey was convicted in 1987 for the 1979 beating, strangulation murder, and child molestation of a 10-year-old girl in North Carolina and (as of 2007) is serving a life sentence (after an earlier death sentence was overturned) in a North Carolina prison. Authorities learned that he interviewed for a job (and was subsequently employed) in Silver Spring, Maryland, six days after the Lyon sisters vanished. Silver Spring is a short distance from Wheaton Plaza. Investigators have been unable to determine if Coffey is connected to the case, and he has never been charged in their disappearances.

Raymond Rudolph Mileski Sr. was another possible suspect in the girls' disappearances named in press reports. Mileski resided in Suitland-Silver Hill, Maryland, in 1975, not far from the malls in Prince George's County that had reported a man with a microphone approaching young girls. In a family disagreement, Mileski murdered his wife and teenage son and wounded another son inside their home in November 1977. He was convicted of the homicides and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Based on both prison informants tips and Mileski’s own claims to know something about the Lyon sisters case, which he offered to share more fully in exchange for more favorable prison conditions, authorities searched the yard of his former residence in April 1982, including extensive digging, but no evidence was discovered. Mileski died in prison in 2004.

See also

• Crime
• Cold case
• List of people who disappeared mysteriously
• John Brennan Crutchley, a deceased rapist and possible serial killer suspected of linkages to as many as 20 or so disappearances of teenaged girls and young women in and around the Washington, DC area.

External links

• WUSA (Washington, DC, TV station) permanent page devoted to the disappearance
• Websleuth forum on Lyon Sisters (opinion forums but many newspaper articles and links are reprinted partially or in their entirety)
• Montgomery County Gazette Newspaper Article on the 30th Anniversary on impact on the community
• Missing person's profile of Sheila Lyon
• Missing person's profile of Katherine Lyon