Lyon sisters suspect told police girls likely were abducted, raped, burned
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Version 0 of 1. Lloyd Lee Welch, the 58-year-old former carnival worker charged with murder in the 1975 disappearance of two young Maryland sisters, told investigators that he believed the girls were “abducted, raped and burned up,” according to a police affidavit filed in Virginia Circuit Court. The affidavit, which was submitted to get a judge’s permission to search the Salem, Va., home of a cousin of Welch’s in January, offers new details about how detectives closed in on Welch, starting in 2013, in the decades-old disappearance of Sheila Lyon, 12, and her sister, Katherine, 10. According to the affidavit, another cousin of Welch’s, Henry Parker, told detectives late last year that it had been known among family members in 1975 that Lloyd Welch had something to do with the girls’ disappearance in Maryland and was trying to get them to central Virginia before police caught up with him. “Parker stated he had heard through family conversations that Lloyd Welch was running from law enforcement in the Maryland area and was supposed to have two girls with him whose parents were searching for them from Maryland,” the affidavit states. Last week, officials announced that Welch was indicted in Bedford County, Va., on two counts of first-degree murder. In an attempt to find evidence and the girls’ remains, authorities have conducted numerous searches in Maryland and Virginia — including in a rugged area of Virginia known as Taylors Mountain, where the Welch family has owned land. [Convicted sex offender charged with murder of missing sisters] Richard Welch, one of Lloyd Welch’s uncles, has been named by police as a “person of interest” in the case. He has not been charged. The information about Parker bolsters what officials in Maryland and Virginia have said for months. Others have long known of Lloyd Welch’s possible connection to the case but for years never came forward. The affidavit also underscores what could be a challenge for prosecutors: Lloyd Welch, who is incarcerated in Delaware after a 1998 conviction of the sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl, has recently told investigators different versions of what happened to the Lyon sisters. At one point, detectives wrote in the court papers, Welch stated that he “had lied about most of the information he had provided in the past interviews and wanted to start over.” Still, the sum total of his statements, at least according to available court records, has Welch admitting that he was at the Wheaton Plaza mall March 25, 1975, the day Sheila and Katherine Lyon went missing. Lloyd Welch has told detectives that he saw the Lyon sisters at the mall or was with them when they left. He has also said that he, Richard Welch and another family member left the mall in a car with the Lyon sisters with them. In the Salem court papers, detectives added more details to what Lloyd Welch has told them he saw at Richard Welch’s home in Hyattsville, Md., the day after the Lyon sisters were at the mall. Lloyd Welch specifically told detectives that he “witnessed Richard Welch engaging in sexual activity with one of the Lyon sisters in a room in the basement,” the affidavit states. “He further explained the room in the basement was kept secure with a lock, and could only be accessed by Dick Welch.” Richard Welch has declined to comment, but his daughter, Patricia Ann Welch, has said repeatedly that her father is innocent. Reached Tuesday, she said detectives have relied far too much on what Lloyd Welch has told them. “He’s a pathological liar,” she said. “Lloyd started down this road, and he’s just running with it.” She said that Lloyd Welch’s specific allegations about her father, as spelled out in the affidavit, couldn’t be true because there were no individual rooms in their family basement in 1975. “We had no locked room downstairs,” she said. Richard Welch’s attorney also has cast doubt on the claim, noting that his client has yet to be charged with anything. In a letter to The Washington Post, Lloyd Welch has said that investigators have twisted his words and that he had nothing to do with what happened to the girls. The property that was searched in Salem is the residence of Connie Akers, a cousin of Lloyd Welch’s. In other affidavits, she was identified as a witness to Lloyd Welch’s arrival in Bedford County in the spring of 1975. She has told investigators that Welch had a duffel bag containing bloody clothing and that he asked her to wash the items and she refused, according to affidavits. Welch told Akers that he had been carrying ground beef that had gone bad, according to court papers. In the affidavit in Salem, detectives wrote that Akers has tried to communicate with Welch in prison. Detectives searched Akers’s home Jan. 14. They seized compact discs, a Dell computer tablet, a laptop computer, letters and other items, according to court records. It was not immediately clear whether any evidence of value was recovered. In an interview last week, Parker said that Welch showed up on property in Bedford County in 1975 with duffel bags and that he helped throw them on a fire. He said he did not know what was in the bags. |