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Murder of Two Sisters Solved After 40 Years

The Lyon sisters vanished without a trace from a suburban mall

Liz Jin
7 min readJul 12, 2021
Kate and Sheila disappeared without a trace from a suburban mall in 1975; photo source.

The 1975 disappearance of Kate and Sheila Lyon devastated a small Maryland community and led to one of the most extensive police investigations in Washington area history.

In their relentless pursuit to find the girls, police conducted countless interviews and followed up on hundreds of tips. Scuba divers searched nearby ponds, volunteers walked through vacant lots, and the National Guard was even called in to search a nearby forest.

Despite the massive search efforts, the girls were never found, and their fate would elude law enforcement for the next three decades.

In 2013, a cold case team made a break in the case when one of the investigators came across a 1975 interview transcript with a teenage male who claimed to have witnessed the kidnapping. The teenager had been released after admitting to lying about his account. Little did the police know, they had released the individual who had kidnapped, raped, and murdered Kate and Sheila.

Background

Kate, aged 10, and Sheila, aged 12, were the daughters of John and Mary Lyon. The family lived in Maryland, where John was a popular radio personality at a local Washington radio station.

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Liz Jin
Liz Jin

Written by Liz Jin

“I wake up in the morning with a desire to both save the world and savor the world. That makes it hard to plan my day.”

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