Crime Junkie - CAPTURED: Lloyd Lee Welch

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

During spring break of 1975, Sheila & Kate Lyon went missing from a shopping center near their home and for almost 40 years no one knew what happened to them. Over the years horrible men would come into focus as suspects. Men who took the lives of 10-year-old Amanda Ray, 5-year-old Neely Smith, and 15-year-old Kathy Beatty. But it wasn't until a cold case investigator came across a single old report from 1975 (a report that had been there all along) that the case would finally be solved and Mr. & Mrs. Lyon would finally have answers about what happened to their daughters. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/captured-lloyd-lee-welch/   

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And today's story is a crazy one about an unsolved case that took over 40 years to bring closure to. And it takes you really inside the investigation to show you how a couple of tenacious investigators found the truth amongst years of lies and how they ended up

capturing Lloyd Lee Welch for the murder of Kate and Sheila Lyon. But listen close, because this story opens the door to other cases, cases that have very specific things we can do to help with. MUSIC In March of 1975, Kate Lyon was 10 years old, and her sister Sheila was 12.

They lived with their parents and older brother Jay in a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, DC, where their father worked as a well-known radio host. March 25th was a Tuesday, but the girls were on spring break. And like any young kid on spring break, the last thing you want to do is just stay home. So that afternoon, the girls planned a trip to Wheaton Plaza, which was a shopping mall just about a half a mile from their

house. They could walk there on their own, and they took a couple of bucks with them, they were going to eat lunch at this restaurant there, and they left the house sometime around 11 or 12 o'clock, and they promised their mom they'd be home by 4. Now they were going for lunch, but Wheaton Plaza was like the hub of the town.

It was likely that they would see friends, likely they would hang out, just do it, you know, the young girls too. 4 o'clock rolled around, then 4.30, 5 o'clock, and the girls still weren't back home. By 7, their parents are calling the police to report them missing. No one wanted to believe the worst. Perhaps maybe they just like ran off with friends.

Even their parents couldn't bring themselves to say the worst out loud. The next morning, their dad used his wildly popular radio show as a platform asking for someone to bring the girls home. And he honestly tries to be kind of lighthearted about it, saying, you know, this is probably all a huge misunderstanding, we're all going to feel so silly, I'm sure the girls told us that they were going to go to a friend's house, but we've forgotten, so if they're at your house,

or you know where they are, please send them home to us. But the girls don't come home. As more time passes, and their hearts sink, suspicion is placed on the girl's dad, not for any real reason other than statistics. Most of the time something happens to children, it's done by someone close, but it doesn't take long to rule him out.

When they start to look outside of the home, police go to the mall where the girls had been to gather information and to get witness statements. Now they find a young boy there, a kid who actually lived in the neighborhood and who knew the girls, who said that he saw them that day, they were at the mall, right outside of the restaurant that they said they were going to go to for lunch,

and they were talking to an older man. He told police that the man was white, maybe like 50 or 60, and I don't know how accurate that is, like when you're super young, people can tend to... Everybody's super old. Yeah, people can tend to seem a lot older, but he said this guy was like 50 or 60,

maybe six feet tall, and he's wearing a brown suit and carrying a briefcase. Now the interesting part is that inside that briefcase, he said was a tape recorder, and when he saw the girls, they were talking into a microphone that the man was holding. The boy said that there were other kids around, too,

all talking into that microphone, but he didn't go up to them or engage with the older man himself. Now, police feel that this is a really hot lead. Again, because this boy knew the girls, he said he saw them, they have to find out who this man is and why he was talking to them.

So they asked the boy to sit down with a detective who's a sketch artist and make a composite sketch. Finding this man who was last seen talking with them would be the police's best chance at finding the girls. So, Britt, I'm going to send you the sketch that ended up coming out of this. Okay, so this guy looks pretty normal. He looks well-groomed, clean-shaven,

kind of probably takes care of himself, not like creepy or sketchy looking at all. Right, and something interesting happens when they release this sketch to the media. Other people came forward and said that they had seen the same man talking to other kids at other malls all over the area. Now, the story gets a little more detailed, though.

One report said that the man would approach kids and ask them to record an answering machine message, which makes no sense to me. And investigators felt like this could have maybe been a ruse, like the perfect ruse for an older man and a doctor to engage with young kids and get them to let their guard down. Now, at the same time police are running down who they're calling tape recorder man,

another young girl comes forward who said that she was in the mall that day and she noticed a weird creepy guy. Is it tape recorder guy? No, so this guy was much younger, still white, but she said that he was in his late teens, maybe early 20s, and she said that he had long brown hair

with a mustache and his face was scarred from acne. Now, another detective was put with this girl as well to make a sketch, and here's what she came up with. This guy looks completely different. Like you said, long hair, he's got a mustache, he's definitely younger. Was she saying that this was the same guy

or is this just some completely new dude? No, this is a completely new dude. She didn't have a story about seeing the girls with this guy. Her story was completely different and actually didn't include the girls at all. She just came forward and said that she and her friends were walking around the mall the same day, and this guy that she had made a sketch of,

who again, long brown hair, mustache totally different, had kind of been like following them around and staring at them nonstop. I mean, so bad to the point where it was so obvious one of the girls was like, hey, if you take a picture, it'll last longer. She actually confronted him.

Now, the girl did say something interesting though. She said that the man seemed to be overly focused on girls with blonde hair, and that's why she wasn't super worried herself because she had brown hair, and this is interesting because both lion sisters were blonde. However, there wasn't anyone else who had come forward to say that they saw this man

or that the girls had an interaction with this man, and it didn't really fit in with all of the other reports about this tape recorder man. So the police decide that this is probably just a fluke, and it would cause more confusion than anything if the sketch was released to the public, so they decided to file it away in their reports. Efforts continued to try and find tape recorder man,

and more importantly, to try and find the girls. Over the coming weeks, massive searches were conducted in the surrounding area, like abandoned houses, sewers. They got like 122 National Guardsmen involved in a search of the wooded area near the mall, and not a single shred of evidence connected to the girls surfaced over that time.

It wasn't until the girls had been missing for almost two weeks that someone thought they spotted them. This person was driving in Virginia, and when they came to a stoplight, they noticed the car next to them. Inside, they said they saw two young girls that looked like Sheila and Kate, and they were bound and gagged.

When the driver, who actually resembled tape recorder man, saw the person in the vehicle had seen him and the girls, the driver says that this dude just sped off like right through a red light. Now, the driver was only able to get a partial license plate. DMT-6. But there were like two spaces that were missing, and they couldn't see because the license plate had been bent.

Now, this sighting was reported to the public, and there was an army of CB radio users who spent the entire night looking for a beige-colored station wagon, like the driver had said, with those beginning plate numbers. But nothing ended up coming of it, other than like a media frenzy, and eventually police themselves would even question whether or not this was a credible sighting.

Like we've seen in so many other cases, there were people who tried to take advantage of the Lyon family in their dark time. People calling and claiming to have the girls, saying that they were looking for ransom money, and there was even once where a drop was arranged, but the man never ended up showing up when the family said, you know, like, we want to actually talk to our girls

and prove that you have them and that they're okay, like this guy ceased all communication and just disappeared. This case, as time went on, baffled police, the family, the public, no one could figure out how two little girls could go missing in the middle of a busy mall without anyone seeing a thing. Leads dried up, and the media reported on the case less and less and less,

eventually only receiving a slight mention on the anniversary, and anniversary after anniversary would pass, and it seemed like the case was doomed to go cold, until 12 years after the girl's disappearance, when police would be confronted with an interesting suspect. In 1987, a man named Fred Coffey was arrested in North Carolina. He had been connected to the abduction and murder of a 10-year-old girl named Amanda Ray.

Amanda went missing in 1979 while playing outside of her home, just a block from where Fred lived, but Fred wasn't on anyone's radar at the time. Police weren't able to link him to the murder until 1986. He was convicted and sentenced to the death penalty, but the sentence was overturned twice, actually, and eventually he just got life, which in North Carolina meant that he would also have the option for parole.

Once he was on police's radar for Amanda's murder, police started linking him to more and more cases, some in North Carolina, but also in other states as well. Sometime in the 1980s, a police task force was brought together, and they were asked to look at unsolved cases involving children like along the East Coast, and they get together and start comparing notes and this Fred Coffey guy-like comes up.

Along with the Lyon Sisters case, one of the unsolved cases they had was from July of 1975, just a few months after the Lyon Sisters disappeared, but just about three and a half miles up the road. A 15-year-old girl named Kathy Beatty had gone missing. She left a note for her mother the night of Thursday, July 24th. She said that she was going to be at a friend's house, but she would be home by 10 p.m.

Now, her mom found this note when she came home at 11, so Kathy was already late, but it was like pouring down rain that night, and her mom thought maybe she was just like waiting for a ride home rather than walking home like she normally would, so her mom decided to go to that friend's house to pick her up. But when she arrived, Kathy wasn't there. She wouldn't find out until later that Kathy had never been there,

but her friends were trying to cover for her. All of them end up driving around looking for her, but no one was able to find her that night. It wasn't until the next morning when Kathy's older sister went to the local Kmart to look for her that she saw a horrible sight. Her younger sister was laying in a ditch behind the store. She was almost unrecognizable because of the depression in her skull

where she had been severely beaten. Though she was found alive by her sister, she eventually passed away after 11 days in the hospital due to her injuries. In addition to being beaten, it was found that Kathy had been sexually assaulted as well, and for many years her case, like the lion case, went unsolved. Hundreds of people were interviewed, and there were suspects, but no one was ever arrested.

Then in the 80s, all of a sudden there's this man, Fred Coffey, who they're comparing cases to, and there were some odd details that stood out about Fred. Now he'd left the Navy in 1975 and moved to Montgomery County in March of 1975. So that was only like four months before Kathy's murder, right? Yep, and it was the same month that the lion girls went missing. Fred, who looked dangerously like tape recorder man,

had just started a new job at a place called Vitrol Labs, and Vitrol Labs was just across the street from where Kathy was found, and the parking lot for Vitrol Labs bordered the apartment complex where Kathy lived. And that's not even the most incriminating part. When Kathy was found back in July of 1975, the newspapers had reported on the case, and when they reported on it accurately, they said that she had been found alive.

Now, without explanation, the very same day this is published, Fred Coffey left his brand new job, a job that he'd only been at for months, without like saying a word, without giving notice, nothing. Oh, so he fled? I mean, that's what it seems like. So this put him on the radar in Kathy's case,

and in the same breath, like put him on the radar for the lion sister case. But there must have been a problem, and I don't know what that problem was exactly, but they were never able to link him definitively to either case. And according to the Justice for Amanda site, her mom claims that coffee is suspected in 12 murders in five other states. Oh my God. I mean, I know this guy is like prolific,

but as far as I can tell, no additional charges have been filed. Now, there was one particular case I could find his name linked to in the news. It was a five-year-old named Neely Smith, who went missing after playing outside of her apartment complex, just like Amanda. And this girl lived in the very same complex as Fred Coffey. But there was like a news article from July of 2015, saying that police were going to compare his DNA to the crime scene evidence. And nothing else.

Yes, how many times have we seen this? So we don't know if it's a match. I don't know if it wasn't a match. Well, if it was ever even tested. Exactly, like I don't know if they're even still waiting. I mean, we know how long sometimes these backlogs are. Could they be? I mean, I know you said that he was going to be up for parole eventually.

Do you think they might be waiting to charge him till then? Maybe, but that seems really risky, don't you think? Like, just charge him now. I mean, this guy's 70. By the time he'd be up for parole for a fresh case, I mean, he could very likely be dead. I mean, yeah, I guess, I don't know North Carolina law very well, but maybe it's like a time-serve type of thing there.

That could be. Like if they have that, that law where they charged him now, they would count time-serve, maybe that's why they're not doing it. But I honestly don't know. I'm not familiar with North Carolina law. It just seems strange to me that they would do this article and that there'd be zero follow-up. Yeah.

But it could also be, like I said earlier, that the testing just isn't completed. I have no idea either about the backlog in North Carolina. So now and then, Fred Coffey got connected to a lot of cases, but he hasn't been officially convicted of anything new. In February of this year, 2019, there was a news article stating that police were now re-evaluating and resubmitting key DNA evidence in Kathy's case,

but we don't know what that is and we don't know how long that will take. Again, the other articles from 2015 trying to connect Fred Coffey to something, who knows if they just started in February of 2019 for Kathy Beatty when that's going to be done. Right. So it very well could be that in the coming months or years we find out that Fred has something to do with Kathy's murder

or we find out that all of his actions were just like very weird and strange coincidences and that's very possible because for a long time people thought the lion sister's disappearance and Kathy's cases were connected. But the more we learn about the lion case, the more we can be sure Fred Coffey wasn't the man responsible because it was a man by the name of Ray Molesky that would break this case wide open decades later.

The name Ray Molesky didn't mean anything right away when police first arrested him for the murder of his wife and son in 1977. But years would pass and informants from prison started coming forward one by one saying that Ray was talking in prison, saying he knew something about those two girls in Montgomery County who went missing a couple of years before he was arrested. By his own admission to police he said he knew something and would be willing to talk in exchange for a more favorable prison sentence.

Now police tried talking to him, tried searching his place, but that never got any kind of real evidence on him. He ended up passing away in 2004 so any chance of a cold case team getting anything real out of him directly would be tough. But man, they kept coming back to him because he looked so good for the lion case. He lived in the area in 1975. He looked so much like the composite sketch of tape recorder man. And above all else, he was a notorious pedophile.

For years all police had was this suspicion about Ray Molesky. This gut feeling that they knew he was their guy, but he had slipped through their fingers. Cold case teams came and went and it wasn't until 2013 that one detective by sheer luck, maybe even divine intervention came across a report that could nail Molesky, a report that would change absolutely everything about this case. Detective Chris Hamrock had been assigned to the case all these years later.

He, like many people before him, thought Molesky was actually good for it. He was the prime suspect, but he could never find that one thing to nail him on it. But one day he came back to the files and there was this report just sitting on top. Now he'd been through all the files before, but he'd never seen this one or never paid attention to it and somehow always glossed over it because it never seemed important. But here it was laying right on top of this pile. And to this day, no one can ever explain how it got there,

why it was brought out or who did it. But it was a polygraph interview with a man, maybe even more of a boy at the time, named Lloyd Lee Welch. According to the transcript and the report summary, Lloyd had approached a security guard a couple of weeks after the girls had gone missing. And he told the guard that he had seen a man talking to the girls and he wanted to let someone know. Now this guard, of course, called the police right away

and Lloyd was taken to an interview room so his statement could be recorded. Lloyd told the officers that he was 22 at the time and he'd gone to the mall with his wife Helen to look for a job that day. He said that he saw the girls talking to an older man with gray hair about six feet tall who had a brown briefcase. Now, at the time that he had come forward, none of this was groundbreaking. All of that information had been released in newspapers and had all been connected to tape recorder man.

So Lloyd wasn't giving them anything new. Lloyd said that he watched the interaction between the girls and this man for about five to ten minutes. That seems like a really long time. I don't just sit at the mall staring at someone unless something's wrong. And if you're that concerned about it, why wait weeks to report it? Right. It feels off and police aren't dumb. They keep probing.

And Lloyd's story goes on and he says that him and his wife saw the man and the girls together again a little bit later and the man is like putting the girls into a car. This is when police asked him pretty much the same question you did. Like, if all of this stood out so much, like you're watching them for five to ten minutes because something is out of the ordinary to you. Why are you just coming forward now? And Lloyd says, well, I wasn't sure then.

And now that I've been seeing all this stuff on the news, I really wanted to help. He does offer one new detail, though. And this is the detail that sticks out in the police report all these years later to the cold case detective who found it. He says that the man talking to the girls had a limp. Now, to go back to 1975 when the detective is taking this report and interviewing him, they decide to give him a polygraph about all of this information and unsurprisingly, he failed.

The only question he didn't fail was on the point that he had been in the mall that day. Everything else was a lie. So back in 75, they just kind of file this away. There was just a fluke and the summary report had one big written word, like at the top, that just said, lied. The officer at the time was kind of annoyed like this guy's wasting their time. He's some knucklehead who's just trying to inject himself into the investigation. Maybe he wants to play the hero.

Or maybe he's even trying to collect the reward money that was out there because at the time there was a big chunk of money, but he wasn't offering them anything new. For almost 40 years, that report just sat in the file and every cold case detective who worked on this never gave it a second look. But again, there it was, sitting on top, begging to be looked at, and Detective Hamrock saw something that pops out at him, that limp. Lloyd had said the man walked with a limp.

And sure, it would have meant nothing to the detectives at the time, but with his specific suspect in mind, with Ray Molesky in focus, that did mean something because Ray had a limp and that was new information that wasn't put out to the public back then because again, they weren't looking at Ray. This detective thinks, holy crap, like did I just somehow stumble across the one guy who can put my suspect in the mall? Like this is it, we're, you know, 30 plus years later

and I actually might have a key witness. A team is assembled to go talk to Lloyd. It's like a team of Dave, Mark, Katie and Karen. They have like a great mix of detectives. And from 2013 to 2017, they would be the ones to see this through, but they had no idea what they were in for. When they look up Lloyd, he was easy to find. And when they find him, they get that little like crinkle between their eyebrows like,

huh, this is interesting. He was in prison serving a 33 year sentence for sexual assault on a minor. So another pedophile? Yeah, and so they start to wonder, maybe he knew Molesky more than just seeing him at the mall that day, but they'd have to talk to him to find out. He was in prison in Delaware, so they couldn't make him any kind of deal like they couldn't lighten his prison sentence or get him moved if he wanted it.

So they decided to go in with a strategy that he had to flip on Molesky because if he didn't, maybe he'd go down for the crimes. And they weren't 100% bluffing because along with the old statement, something else was found. Remember that sketch that was made based off the girl's statement in the mall who said that that guy with the long hair was staring at her and her friends? Yeah, the young guy with the mustache. Right.

So now that police are like looking Lloyd up before they go to talk to him, check out Lloyd's picture next to that sketch. Whoa, it's the same guy. Very, very close. So when they go to meet him, they're almost surprised at how much Lloyd liked to talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. And they tried to hide, like originally their plan, they wanted to hide why they were there, but one of the detectives like wore a shirt from Montgomery County.

And so right away though, they walk in and Lloyd knew why they were there. He's like, oh, you guys are here about those little girls. And to the investigators, they're like, oh my God, is this an admission? And he says, no, like I lived in Montgomery County. That was the biggest case. If you come rolling in here with Montgomery County shirt, like that's what I'm going to think. Now Dave ends up kind of being the lead investigator on this and becomes buddy buddy with Lloyd. Dave says, listen, I'm on your side.

I want to make sure that you don't get mixed up in this the wrong way. So let's start from the beginning. Why did you come forward weeks after this happened all those years ago? And Lloyd says, I was just trying to help. And so Dave's like, good, well, if you still want to help, I would like you to. I think you can. And this is where their multi-year saga begins. At first, Lloyd denies all of it kind of he denies being in the mall.

He denies like going into the police station. He says he just called them from a pay phone. But I mean, I don't know if he like doesn't realize that things are written down or recorded or whatever. But Dave like confronts him with his written statement and the polygraph test and the transcript. So Lloyd's story has to change. They show him a picture of Ray Molesky and he says, yeah, I think that could be the guy that I saw that day. Now this is huge. Lloyd goes on to tell them that he knew Molesky.

They would party together, ran in the same crowd together and the investigators keep thinking like, what are the odds that two men who knew each other and shared the same perversions were in the same mall at the same time, but they weren't there for the same reason. They kind of imply this to Lloyd. Like, you know, maybe you knew him, did you go with him? But Lloyd's story, at least in that first interview, was just that he saw Molesky and he wasn't there with him. But over time, the story keeps changing just a little bit at first. But eventually, they realize that they're talking to a killer.

The first lie was where Lloyd and his girlfriend were. Now, first they were in a car when they saw the girls get into the car with that guy. Then they were getting onto a bus. And eventually, like, I mean, these small details changed constantly in Lloyd's retelling of the story and it's hard to track all of his lies. Now, I don't know how, like, it didn't feel like total BS to the investigators. I probably would have like totally written him off. He's wasting my time. But something told these investigators that there was something there, something worth fighting for,

because a pattern would start to emerge when they talk to Lloyd. Not over a single day, but over weeks and months. Lloyd would feed them hours of lies and BS. Then, at the very end of their interview, every single time, there would be a kernel of truth. And not even the whole truth. The story would change just enough. And there would be something that felt genuine that Lloyd was saying. Not 100% truth.

Again, like, it was covered in lies. But it was the closest thing that they had always come to the truth. And each time, they would step closer and closer to reality. Over time, he admitted that he was there with Molesky and he helped him get the girls, but swears he didn't do anything. Then, Molesky disappears from the story altogether. And now, it's Lloyd's uncle that actually took the girls. And his uncle was a security guard somewhere else and he said that he used this ruse to get them to go. Eventually, Lloyd added his cousin Teddy to the mix.

Now, he says it was his uncle and his cousin and he just happened to be with them. Okay, maybe he helped get the girls into the car, but then they dropped Lloyd off at an ice cream store and he had no idea what happened to them after that. So you can see he's getting, like, more and more involved in the story. The thing about Lloyd pointing fingers at his family is that they all seem to be really capable of something like this. The family had two big groups that lived in one in this area and then another out in Virginia about five hours away. The entire family were pedophiles. They participated in incest.

The younger kids had been molested by the older generations and then eventually the younger kids were taught that it's okay to experiment sexually with their siblings or their cousins. So, I mean, this family is looking more and more like they could be guilty of something. Now, Lloyd's uncle Dick, who's the one that he pointed to as being at the mall that day and being responsible for all of this, was a pedophile. And Teddy, who he said was at the mall, was abused by his family and then later by a wealthy man who he lived with. Honestly, that's actually like a totally crazy story, too, because even though Teddy confronted this older man after eventually having counseling years and years later, the abuse with him stopped, but Teddy kept this man in his life like part of the family.

And after Teddy got married and had kids, this guy starts molesting his kids. It is a very twisted, perverse saga that you read about. And again, the police are looking at this thinking like, oh my God, we've gotten into something really deep, and I think we're getting closer and closer to the truth. So, the fact that these two, Dick and Teddy, could have been involved seemed plausible, but there were still problems with Lloyd's story. For example, Teddy was just 11 at the time that the girls went missing, and he had two broken arms.

Yeah, I don't think an 11-year-old can kidnap a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, especially if he has two broken arms. Right, and what I kept thinking is maybe if he was involved, maybe he helped lure them. Yeah, he was the trap. He was there to make them feel comfortable or whatever. Yeah, they could go with a kid their own age, but don't you think people would remember seeing a kid with two arms in cast at the mall? 100%. Right, so of course, this is a lie too, but buried in this lie is part of the truth. In his original story about his cousin and his uncle, when Lloyd was finally admitting that he might have had something to do with helping them get the girls,

he said that he helped them by like asking the girls if they wanted to go party to like get them out to the car. I'm sorry, these girls were 10 and 12. I don't think they were really into the party scene, but... Yeah, yeah, listen, no one is saying that they buy this load of crap, but it's his story that he gets them to his uncle's car, and he's in the back with one girl, his uncle and Teddy are up in the front with another girl, and then he gets dropped off. But the more and more the detectives keep pushing, again, over months, over the years, he slips and he talks about himself being in the front seat. He says stuff like we got them to the house, and the same pattern emerges. At the end of every interview, there's a little bit more, just a little bit that leads to the truth.

He says, well, I came back to the house and saw a couple of girls in the basement once. I forgot about it, but I remember that they were naked and drugged up and they were having sex with them. Couldn't be sure it was like those girls, but it was around the same time. I'm sorry, who else would it be? Right, but again, even this doesn't feel like the whole truth. Now, in their very, very first interview, when Dave asked him what he thought happened to the girls, if he had nothing to do with it, he said, well, my opinion is that he killed them, raped them, and he probably burned them. And this was something that always stuck out to the investigators.

How specific burned them? Like, who just guesses that? But it was no guess. In between all of their interviews with Lloyd, they were also going out and doing some digging, investigating into his family, trying to corroborate all of his stories, and they made it out to his family's house in Virginia, the one that was five hours away from the mall. Now, this is a house where his uncle, Dick, had lived. When they start interviewing the family who lived there, people in town, there was something that everyone remembered from 1975.

Even all these years later, around the time those girls went missing, there was a big fire on the family property. A fire that burnt for days and days and smelt God awful. One family member said that Lloyd had a large duffel bag that weighed about 60 to 70 pounds that was stained with something dark. Now, Lloyd said it was transmission oil because it looked kind of red, and he threw it on the fire. A CSI team was brought in to examine the fire pit. This is over 30 years later. Were they actually expecting to find something? I mean, they're looking for anything, and this effort isn't totally fruitless. They do find something. They find a couple of bone fragments, pieces of clothing, or maybe cloth from that duffel bag,

and wire that they said was the same kind that could have been from a pair of glasses that Sheila wore. But unfortunately, because you mentioned it's 33, 34 years later, time and the elements had degraded all of these things too much. Nothing could conclusively be linked back to the girls. But this was still enough to keep the investigators going, to prove to them that they were on the right track. If they kept listening to Lloyd and kept pulling the story out of him, they'd get closer and closer to the truth. Now, in the book that I read about this case, it was called The Last Stone by Mark Bowden, the author said, what the police realized is that you couldn't listen to the stories that Lloyd would tell. The web he spun was messy. It made zero sense.

Every time he opened his mouth, it was a completely different story that completely contradicted the one he just told you. But if you paid attention to the details, those details stayed the same because those were the things that were ingrained in his brain. I think I've heard this in a lot of other interviews with investigators or behavioral analysis people. It's hard to remember a lie, but the things that you saw, the things that you experienced, those stay the same. And in Lloyd's pattern, he had these details that stayed the same, but he would always distance himself from those details. It was someone else who he saw do this. It was someone else who was driving. It was someone else sitting next to the girl. Like, he's replacing himself in the story with someone else. Now, the part about the fire was the same.

Lloyd kept coming back to, there was a fire. There was a fire. Someone put a girl in the fire. At least that's what I heard. I don't know. I wasn't there. Again, it always changed, changed, changed, but there always was a fire. And now they felt like they could back that up. There was also another part that existed in every story. A basement where Lloyd said he saw those girls. Now, again, his details about this basement were chilling. He described the two rooms in vivid detail. He said, you can only enter the basement from the backside of the house. It was old and dingy. There was like a couch and a radio in one room and a mattress in the back room. And as his stories go on and on over the years, it's his story that he had come in and seen the girls naked and drugged up there.

He had come in and seen somebody assaulting the girls there. Eventually, as he elaborated on these stories, he told police that his uncle Dick had killed Kate in that basement. He described a bloody scene where Dick dismembered her body. And it was in such detail that he even talked about how his uncle couldn't fully swing the axe because the ceiling was too low. Now, where this basement was changed all the time, Dick's house, Teddy's friend's house, but like the bonfire, the investigators were determined to find it. Dave went from place to place that Lloyd mentioned, but struck out every time. He was just about to give up until he remembered one more place, Lloyd's dad's house, exactly where Lloyd had been living at the time of the disappearances. Thirty-something years later, the house had new occupants, but Dave knocked on the door, asked the nice lady if he could see the basement, and she said, sure, but you can only get to the basement from the outside.

When Dave opened up the door, all of the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention. It was exactly what Lloyd had been describing for months. There was more junk in this basement 30 years later, but there was the couch, there was the radio, and there was the back room where he said the girls had been drugged and naked. Dave was more sure than ever that Lloyd saw all of this because he had done it all himself. A CSI team came to sweep this place, and disappointment swept over the team when nothing was found in that front room. Just like tiny spots here and there that reacted with luminol, but nothing out of the normal, nothing you wouldn't expect to see in a basement workspace. Just when they maybe had their first tinge of doubt, they moved to the back room. It lit up from floor to ceiling with luminol.

And right then, Dave believed he knew what happened to those girls. Dave's theory is that Lloyd did this all on his own. He had pretended to be a security guard. There were actually other reports from young girls of a man trying to lure them away, a man who kind of looked like him. And Dave thinks that he practiced his routine till he made it perfect. He thinks that he kept the girls in the basement of his dad's home. He eventually killed Kate there and transported her body in the duffel bag. Now, when he transported Kate, Dave thinks that Sheila was still alive and that Sheila was given to his family in Virginia at that house five hours away, basically to keep them quiet.

And eventually, he thinks the family in Virginia killed Sheila. Why did he think they were killed in separate places? Well, once they realized that the girls likely were brought to the Welch property in Virginia, they dug up areas around the property, and they were able to find a single tooth that they estimated to have belonged to a 12-year-old, which is exactly Sheila's age. And in every story, again, the details stay the same. In every story, it's only Kate who was killed in the basement. It's only Kate that was put into the bonfire. So they have this tooth. Were they ever able to conclusively connect it to Sheila? Here's the problem. Oh, no.

Some time in transportation of this piece of evidence, and there's plenty of theories about corruption or whatever or incompetence, the tooth has disappeared. So they've never been conclusively able to link that tooth to Sheila. The basement, they were like ripping out concrete from it, but it was all so degraded that they couldn't even get a blood type, much less a DNA sample. So unfortunately, there's no physical evidence that the Lyon family has proving what happened. Just the ever-changing confession of a depraved man and his family, and the theories that investigators put together. And you know, the investigators don't even 100% agree with one another. One of them thinks that Lloyd was too dumb to be the mastermind. They think that it was part of a bigger child pornography and sex operation, which we all know could absolutely be possible.

Lloyd ended up pleading guilty, but still tells reporters and anyone who will listen to him that he had no choice. He got screwed over by the police. He had nothing to do with it. But that's a lie, like everything else that came out of his mouth. The truth was in the details, and his details led to his own home covered in blood and a fire pit on his family's property with bone fragments in it. Lloyd Welch is 100% responsible for whatever happened to Kate and Sheila, whatever horrible fate they met at the mall that spring break day. But I think this story is a horrible reminder that these predators aren't few and far between. Fred Coffey was an engineer masquerading as a normal man. Lloyd's uncle was a security guard in a position of power to kids.

Lloyd himself was only 18. Britt, I don't know how you parent in a world this scary. Oh, it's terrifying. Everyone needs to remember to keep your kids close. Teach them it's okay to be weird. It's okay to be rude. Trust their instincts and be alert. These monsters are all walking among us.

We talked about so many families in our story today that experienced tragedy, but there is a way you can help. Every three years, Fred Coffey is up for parole. Amanda Ray's mom asked people to write letters to the parole board asking to keep him in jail. So we have a link to her website and the Facebook page that she runs. His next parole isn't until 2021, but bookmark the page, bookmark your calendars. And in Kathy's case, her family is still looking for a killer. They have a GoFundMe to raise money for a reward, which can also be found on our website. And in the event her killer is caught without the public's help, maybe if they're able to use DNA,

all the money is going to be donated to St. Jude's Hospital for Children in Memphis, Tennessee, in Kathy's name. So please take a moment to go check that out and remind your kids to be safe. All of that information, again, you can find that on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on social media at crimejunkiepod on Twitter and at crimejunkiepodcast on Instagram. We will be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?