Fruitless suspicion had fallen at first on the girls’ father, John Lyon, for no reason other than statistics—most crimes against children were committed by family members—and sheer desperation. But the Lyon family was a happy one. Their photos—four sunny children posing on the beach or dressed in their Sunday best in the front yard or peering out happily from the back window of the family station wagon—depicted a contemporary suburban ideal. Sheila stood out in all the pictures, with her glasses and bright blond pigtails, from early childhood to the picture taken of her dressed all in white, her legs grown long and lean, posing before a shrub on the day of her First Communion. Kate looked like more of a tomboy, with even brighter blond hair, cut shorter than her sister’s, and a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. The drawings and cards and notes the girls left behind in their bedrooms were heartbreakingly innocent and joyful. John and Mary were loving parents, guilty of nothing more than letting their girls walk unsupervised down the street to the mall to buy slices of pizza. They were bereft.
That much was plain to anyone who saw them those first days, as I did, working the story as a new reporter for the Baltimore News-American. Knowing that any attention might help, the couple opened up their small white stucco house on the corner to everyone, family, friends, and even reporters. They passed out cans of beer and cups of coffee. Mary was unusually composed—she was on a diet of tranquilizers—but her face was red and drawn. John was a study in well-contained panic, a man with a wry sense of humor about himself, someone cool, trapped in a circumstance for which there was no cool way to behave. I remember sitting with him in the enclosed side porch of his house as he vacantly strummed a guitar and tried patiently to answer my useless questions.
They were a handsome pair, John rugged and hip, Mary pretty, small, and slender, with short dark hair. Both were in their thirties. They had met at Xavier University in Cincinnati, when John had been a full-time student and Mary a part-time one. He was from Chicago, and she was from nearby Erlanger, Kentucky. They married in Erlanger and had their first child, Jay, shortly before moving to Chicago, where they lived with John’s parents while he completed his degree by taking night classes at Columbia College. He worked days at Sears in the Loop. After graduation he’d gotten a job at a radio station in Ohio, where Sheila was born, and then one in Streator, Illinois, where Kate was born, and then a bigger job, in Peoria—“The big city!” Mary joked—where John worked in both radio and TV. He appeared on a daytime kids’ show, introducing movies with his guitar and banjo. He and Mary sometimes performed with a folk band in those years, during which she gave birth to their youngest, Joe. The job at WMAL was a big step up. It was the most popular radio station in Washington, DC, and by now John was a seasoned on-air personality. He had long, dark hair beginning to show strands of gray and a droopy mustache and spoke with the deep, melodious tones of a radio pro. He worked as a fill-in disc jockey and sometimes read the news and still performed with a band, called Gross National Product, that played gigs in the area. John and Mary were charming and witty and fun, accustomed to the spotlight, which helped explain their remarkable poise at the center of this awful one. Tragedy felt like a complete stranger in their home, a reminder of the most banal of truths: you can do absolutely everything right and still be rewarded with unconscionable cruelty.
In those first days there was disbelief and hope. Maybe it was all a snafu and the girls would turn up. John went on the air at WMAL the day after they vanished, speaking calmly and modestly.
“I’m sure we’re going to feel stupid about this,” he said. “They probably told us they were going to a sleepover and we forgot. If anybody knows where they are, please send them home.”
Kensington, where the Lyons lived, was north of Washington, well outside the Capital Beltway, adjacent to the booming edge city of Silver Spring. It had been farmland until the end of the nineteenth century, when an Anglophile DC developer bought lots and replicated a Victorian village, which would lend a quaint character to the suburban homes that sprang up around it. First popular as an escape from the swampy district summers, it was overtaken by the suburban explosion that followed World War II. By the 1970s Kensington was a bedroom community for Washington commuters, most of them government workers, nearly all of them white, and still something of an escape, not so much from DC’s climate as from its crowded, increasingly black, restive, and troubled core. Together, Kensington and the larger, adjacent suburb of Wheaton were home to fifty thousand people and distinctly middle to upper class. They were like thousands of other suburbs ringing American cities, havens for whites fleeing the black urban migration, seeking comfort in racial and demographic homogeneity. Largely new, green, clean, and prosperous, Kensington was considered an idyllic place to raise a family.
Before the age of continuous cable TV news and the Internet, children’s disappearances were primarily local tragedies and did not automatically attract strong news coverage. In big cities like Washington and Baltimore, newspapers were the primary medium, and they had come a long way from their sensationalist roots. Journalism was now a white-collar profession. Reporters for the big papers saw their work as public service—the Washington Post was fresh off the triumph of Watergate. In Baltimore, the most respected paper was the Baltimore Sun, a dignified modern daily that headlined those stories its editors deemed important—an amendment to a piece of tax legislation in Annapolis would get better play than a lurid local crime. With its news bureaus all over the country and the world, the Sun was in the business of educating and informing readers. My paper, the Baltimore News-American, on the other hand, was a throwback. It was part of the Hearst chain. It had nothing like its competitor’s resources (or talent), took itself less seriously, and, for better or worse, still showed its yellow roots. Its priority was still whatever sells. In keeping with that approach, my job was to show up in the newsroom at four in the morning and phone every police barracks in the state, asking whether anything interesting had happened overnight. This was a mind-numbing task and usually produced nothing, but when, on the morning of March 26, 1975, the desk officer in Wheaton told me about the missing children, I drove directly to the scene. Ours was an afternoon paper, so if the story was interesting enough—which this clearly was—and I moved fast enough, it was possible to slap a story on the front page later that day. It was sure to attract attention. Millions of families in the region lived in neighborhoods just like Kensington, shooing their kids out the door in the morning and catching up with them at mealtimes, unconcerned about where they went, because every house on every block was inhabited by families just like their own. A story like this struck at suburbia’s idea of itself.
My first story ran on a Thursday, two days after the girls vanished, under the headline, “100 Searching Woods for 2 Missing Girls.” It had photos of Sheila, in pigtails and glasses, and Kate, with her hair cut in a cute bob. By the next morning, Good Friday, the FBI and the Washington, DC, police department had joined the effort, and the story led the local news in the Washington Post: “Police Press Search for Missing Girls.” As days passed with no good news, the tale turned grimmer. No one wanted to imagine the girls’ fate. In my newspaper the story was still on the front page at the end of the week: “Hope Fades in Search for Girls.” Every TV and radio news broadcast led with it, sparking a huge public response. More than three hundred people phoned the police in the first three days alone to say they had seen the girls, and all these tips had to be checked out. The family heard from everyone they’d ever known.