and Katherine disappeared, Lloyd Lee Welch Jr. stood before a judge in Bedford County Circuit Court.
He pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree felony murder.
He was 60 years old.
The girls had been gone for more than four decades.
Their remains were still missing.
But the investigation had finally produced a criminal conviction.
The sentence answered one question — but not all of them
Welch received two concurrent 48-year prison sentences as part of the plea agreement.
The agreement spared prosecutors and the Lyon family the uncertainty of a lengthy murder trial and eliminated the possibility of a death sentence that could have accompanied the charges.
Yet the guilty plea did not answer every question.
Welch admitted participating in the abduction.
He did not acknowledge personally carrying out every act prosecutors believed had occurred.
And the whereabouts of the sisters’ remains remained unknown.
That distinction is important when describing
