“We’ve had hundreds of phone calls from well-wishers,” John told me, two days after the girls had disappeared. “Most are from perfect strangers. They want to know what they can do to help. I wish I knew what to tell them.”
Every stand of woods or weeds was searched. Storm sewers were explored, as was every vacant house for miles. The residents of a nearby nursing home were interviewed, one by one. Scuba divers groped through mud at the bottoms of ponds. John stood by one chilly afternoon, shivering, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his white Levi’s, as divers disappeared into a small lake on the grounds of the nearby Kensington Nursing Home. He waited awkwardly … for what? How did one both want and desperately not want to find something? Nothing was found. Nothing came of anything the police did, despite occasional moments of excitement. Thirteen days after the girls vanished, on April 7—long after hopes of finding them alive had faded—there was a call from an IBM employee who, on his way to work in Manassas, Virginia, had stopped at a red light behind a Ford station wagon. He had been startled to see in its rear the head of a blond child, bound and gagged. He jotted down the license-plate number, all but the last digit, which he couldn’t see because the plate was bent. The driver of the station wagon, apparently noticing the other driver eyeing him from behind, had suddenly accelerated through the red light and sped off through the intersection. In that pre-cell-phone era, the IBM man phoned in the tip when he got to his office and later that day was questioned and polygraphed. He wasn’t sure whether the plate had been from Maryland or North Carolina—the new bicentennial plates of these states were similar—but his story was sound. Lists were compiled of all cars with plates that matched the description, from both states, and efforts were made to find them. Nothing came of it.
This nightmare unfolded in the context of larger national unease. Ground was shifting under enduring institutions of American life, and the promise that had propelled the country so dynamically through the 1950s and ’60s had soured. Jobs were scarce, and paychecks didn’t go as far—a phenomenon dubbed “stagflation.” Americans had stopped buying stocks—they were no longer betting on the future. The Vietnam War was spiraling to humiliating defeat after dominating headlines for more than a decade. President Nixon had resigned in a scandal, and each week another top member of his administration went to jail. There were revelations of domestic spying and of troubling American involvement in foreign coups and assassination plots, both ludicrous and disturbing. Government suddenly appeared not just untrustworthy but inept. Violent crime in nearby Washington had nearly doubled in the previous five years. The Summer of Love had degenerated into drug abuse and violent radicalism. Strange groups were setting off bombs and abducting people—tracking dogs used in the hunt for the Lyon sisters had been used a year earlier to look for kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. On TV, the most popular character was Archie Bunker, a blue-collar American male railing hilariously against the collapse of his preferred social order.
The day Sheila and Kate went missing was an early taste of spring. There had been two snowfalls that March, but the weather before Easter week had turned warm and muggy. That Tuesday morning John worked the midnight-to-six shift, after which he drove home and went to bed. He woke up at one in the afternoon to an empty house. Off school for spring break, Sheila and Kate had gone to the mall. They had left with about two dollars between them, complaining that the cost of a pizza slice at the Orange Bowl had recently gone up five cents. There had been a time when Sheila did not want her younger sister with her, but in recent months Mary felt they had begun to play happily together again. Mary had gone bowling, and the Lyon boys were off with friends in the neighborhood. Mary and Joe were home soon after John got up, and when he went back to bed for a mid-afternoon nap, she took a rake to the matted leaves in the backyard that had been buried in snow just weeks before. At dusk she began missing the girls. She assumed they were with friends and having fun. They were usually prompt at dinnertime, and ordinarily Sheila would call if they were delayed. But she had not called. John and Mary ate dinner with their boys, two empty chairs at the table, Mary now annoyed. With still no word after they’d finished, they started calling all the girls’ friends. Nothing. They drove around the neighborhood with a mounting sense of alarm. Then they called the police.
Many teenagers and even children go absent from their homes—there had been eighteen hundred reported cases in Montgomery County alone in the previous year, but most involved slightly older children, and in nearly every case they were quickly found. That this report was different was rapidly becoming apparent, and when the girls remained missing through that night it became a crisis. According to John and Mary, this was utterly out of character. Both girls were obedient. They were honor roll students. Kate was the outgoing, athletic, silly one. She was a fifth grader at Oakland Terrace Elementary School and had a poster of pop singers Loggins and Messina in her bedroom. Her mother had just given her permission to get her ears pierced. Sheila was the dreamy one, quieter and more of a homebody. The poster in her room was of the romantic folk balladeer John Denver. She had started to help her mother cook, had begun wearing eye shadow, and had recently taken her first babysitting jobs. A seventh grader at Newport Junior High, she was hoping to make the school’s cheerleading squad. Neither girl had taken money from her piggy bank or extra clothing, telltale signs of a runaway.
“No,” John told me, with crisp certainty. “They did not run away. I really wish there was a reason for believing they did.”
As a green, twenty-three-year-old reporter, I tried to see the Lyon case as a story, my first chance to write front-page news. The people I wrote about were subjects, and tragedy was a thing that happened to others. But the Lyons were people I liked, even admired. I could not witness their pain dispassionately.
Of the thousands of missing children cases reported each year, those involving children taken by a stranger number only one one-hundredth of one percent—on average about one hundred cases a year in the United States, a number that has changed little for as long as such statistics have been kept. Nearly all missing children are found quickly. For two to be taken at once and to disappear completely is a thing so rare that it’s almost true to say it never happens—the numbers are so low they cannot be meaningfully framed as a percentage of overall kidnappings. Needless to say, very few people are ever touched personally by such crimes, but today’s omnipresent tabloid-style journalism and social media so magnify every occurrence that people are unduly afraid. American children in the twenty-first century lead far more sheltered, supervised lives than children of earlier times. Only thirteen percent still walk to school. Parents who leave a child untended for even a short time may find themselves reported to the police. While today we can all too readily imagine the disappearance of a child, in 1975 it was shocking—and all the more so in this case because it was two children. Imagining how or why was difficult. The problem of controlling two alarmed children at those ages suggested more than one kidnapper, which raised the question, why? What would motivate two people or a group? A sex-trafficking ring? A circle of pedophiles? Just speculating about it conjured scenarios that made you ashamed to be human.
A few weeks after the girls vanished, as if to underscore the potential for cruelty, opportunists began to surface. There were psychics who claimed to have “seen” where the girls were. There were extortionists. One man called the Lyon home and said he would return Sheila and Kate for a payment of $10,000. John drove to the appointed location, a bus station in Annapolis, with a briefcase—in it was just $101, enough to make the crime a felony. He was told to wait there for a pay phone to ring. It did. The caller, a man, instructed him to walk across the street to the county courthouse and put the briefcase in a trash can inside the first-floor men’s room. The man said he would then drop the girls off in front of the building. With police watching from a distance, John did as instructed. He then stood expectantly for hours before the courthouse, hopefully eyeing every car that passed. He and his police escort only gave up when the courthouse shut down for the day. They retrieved the briefcase and drove home. John was desperately disappointed and furious. The same man phoned the next morning and said that he hadn’t followed through because there were too many cops around. John pointed out the stupidity of selecting a courthouse if he was trying to avoid cops. He told the man not to call back unless he could put one of the girls on the phone. They did not hear from him again.