man who had appeared in the Lyon investigation in 1975 did not simply vanish from the world.
Welch moved extensively during the following decades and accumulated a criminal record involving offenses in multiple states.
In 1997, he was imprisoned in Delaware following the sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl.
By then, the connection between Welch and the Lyon sisters still had not been established.
That meant an extraordinary situation existed.
A person who had appeared in the original investigation was serving a long prison sentence elsewhere, while the Lyon sisters’ cold case file remained unresolved in Maryland.
The pieces existed.
They simply had not been assembled.
The breakthrough came when detectives stopped looking only for new clues
In 2013, Montgomery County Police reopened the Lyon sisters investigation as a cold case.
This time, investigators approached the case differently.
Instead of assuming the answer had to come from a completely new
