WHEATON — (WMAL) – Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manger said this 40-year-old case “has haunted this community and this police department.” But now that Lloyd Lee Welch has been indicted in Sheila and Katherine Lyon’s murders, officials say their case is still far from over, and a difficult fight is still ahead.
“We will have to go through what is sometimes referred to as an extradition process,” Bedford County Commonwealth’s Attorney Randy Krantz said. “We want to make him, as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible, a Bedford, Virginia inmate.” Welch is currently in prison in Delaware on an unrelated child sex abuse conviction.
The case could’ve also been tried in Montgomery County, but State’s Attorney John McCarthy said trying it in Bedford is “what’s best for the case.”
McCarthy also detailed the challenges that remain in prosecuting a homicide that has no body. Despite years of searching dense woods in rural Virginia, the bodies of the two sisters still have yet to be found.
“In a homicide, you have an autopsy and you have a body and you can prove what the cause and mechanism of death is. In a no-body murder case, you have to prove that they are, in fact, dead, and you have to prove the agent in which they died.”
The girls’ parents, former WMAL personality John Lyon and wife Mary, watched the news conference from a distance and left holding hands without speaking to the media. McCarthy wants to keep them in mind.
“If this helps the Lyon family, this is a happy day for me. These are wonderful, wonderful people who have suffered an immeasurable loss.”
Copyright 2015 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Montgomery County Police)
