Sheila Mary Lyon was 12 when she and her 10-year-old sister, Katherine Mary Lyon, left their Kensington, Maryland, home on March 25, 1975, and walked to Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center. Sheila was described as a White girl with blond hair and blue eyes, about 5 feet 2 inches and 100 pounds, wearing farsighted gold wire-rimmed glasses. The sisters were seen at the Orange Bowl restaurant about 2:00 p.m., and a friend later reported seeing them walking west on Drumm Avenue between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m., a last confirmed sighting before they failed to return home.

Police searched and pursued tips, including inquiries about a late-1960s or 1970s station wagon. The family endured extortion-style calls demanding money; under police supervision money was left but never collected and no proof of the girls being alive was given. Investigators eventually focused on possible links to Bedford County, Virginia, and in 2015 Lloyd Lee Welch was indicted. In 2017 Welch pleaded guilty to the murders; authorities say the sisters’ bodies have never been found and prosecutors alleged remains were placed on property connected to Welch’s family on Taylor’s Mountain.

The case began as a missing-children search at Wheaton Plaza and, after decades as a cold case, produced a guilty plea without recovery of the sisters’ remains. Did anyone who lived in Wheaton in 1975 see the girls that afternoon or recall vehicles near the plaza?