There were other, even less sophisticated extortion attempts. One caller told John and Mary to drop $6,000 in an air vent outside the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department, and another instructed them to stand with exactly $1,050 outside the Orange Bowl at Wheaton Plaza. Two months after the girls disappeared, a tip from a Dutch psychic who claimed to have helped solve the Boston Strangler case sent 150 police and National Guardsmen on a daylong search of nearby Rock Creek Park. They found nothing. John and Mary gradually closed themselves off from such contacts, stopped giving interviews, and worked to avoid being consumed with bitterness. The loss of a child is a shattering experience for any family. For the Lyons—John, Mary, Jay, and Joe—it would be a hard task to salvage what was left.
To me, the story was sad and beyond understanding. Like everyone else, I waited for the police to find something and explain the mystery. In time, the story moved off the front page and then out of the news completely, overtaken by fresh outrages. As the decades passed I wrote thousands more stories, big ones and small ones. I raised five children of my own. I experienced tragedy and loss in my own life. I became a grandfather—of two little blond-haired girls, as a matter of fact. Few stories haunted me as this one did.
When he was nearing retirement, Ed Golian, who had joined the search effort as a cadet thirty years earlier, was assigned to the department’s cold case team in 2011, typically a last stop before hanging up the badge. As had other detectives before him, he reopened the Lyon files, ending his career with the same case that started it.
Today police have new tools for old crimes. DNA testing offers seemingly magic solutions to decades-old mysteries as long as physical evidence has been preserved. With no bodies and no crime scene, there would be no such magic for this one. Computers held promise. No longer a novelty, they cast a far wider net than even the massive application of manpower applied in those first weeks to finding Sheila and Kate. The machines made it inestimably easier for Ed to complete the old sex-offender lists, to compile time lines, and to cross-check names and incidents for intersections with Wheaton Plaza in 1975. The old list of car registrations that met the IBM man’s description was broadened and rechecked. More than three decades later Ed found, of course, that most of these cars had vanished to junkyards. Many owners were no longer alive. Still, all the leads were tracked down, yielding nothing.
This is what cold case teams do. They embrace the tedium. They are the turners of last stones, laboring in a landscape beyond hope. The task is Sisyphean. By its nature, investigation continually churns up new leads, prolonging both the work and the frustration. The Lyon file filled thirty boxes. Golian worked with four other detectives: Chris Homrock, who at forty-one had twenty years of experience in the department; and three who, like Ed, were nearing retirement, Joe Mudano, Bobby Nichols, and Kenny Penrod.
Instead of adding more to the files, the squad decided to weed them. The detectives set out to identify every plausible suspect and reinvestigate enough to either eliminate him or keep him. That work took two years. All the detectives were working on other cases at the same time—Chris was running the department’s robbery section, and Kenny led the homicide section—but the puzzle was such a noteworthy challenge that it was always on their minds. The suspects included a fellow named Fred Coffey in South Carolina, whom Kenny favored; another suspicious predator, Arthur Goode; and the infamous sexual sadist and serial killer James Mitchell “Mike” DeBardeleben, all of whom had stories with potential links to the Lyon girls. None could be completely eliminated.
But one jumped out—Ray Mileski, who had died in prison in 2005.
MILESKI
By 2013, Chris Homrock was the only one left in the Lyon squad. One by one, Ed Golian, Joe Mudano, Bobby Nichols, and Kenny Penrod had retired. Chris had become obsessed with the case. He talked about it constantly with his wife, Amy, also a police officer, and she encouraged him. If anyone could crack the mystery, she thought, Chris could. He was a natural. He always seemed to know what question to ask next; he could think on his feet better than anyone else she had ever met. No matter how long and hard he worked, no matter how elusive the answers, Amy would have been the last to tell him to stop. Just a few years younger than Sheila and Kate, and having grown up in nearby Potomac, Maryland, she remembered their disappearance well. Her parents referred to the case as a “permanent loss of innocence.” Now she and Chris had two daughters who were roughly the same ages Sheila and Kate had been. They could only imagine John and Mary’s suffering. So Amy was all in, even if for Chris it meant working long hours, losing sleep, and not eating right. Not that she didn’t try to tamp down his intensity now and then, reminding him that the girls were not tied to a tree somewhere awaiting his rescue. His job was to figure out what had happened, to find who had taken them, perhaps to bring the story of their terrible last days—and maybe their remains—home at last to the Lyon family.
But by the early summer of that year, Chris was ready to give up. He felt weighed down with both responsibility and futility. Despite his years of effort, the trail, if anything, had grown colder. Mileski was the one thing that had kept him going.
A petty criminal, killer, and audacious pedophile, Mileski had inserted himself into the investigation. In 1975, he had called the Montgomery County police twice: first with a suggestion—they should offer immunity to the person who kidnapped the girls if he returned them—and then, two weeks after the girls vanished, with a tip. He said he had seen the widely publicized suspect, the gray-haired man with a tape recorder, weeks before the Lyon sisters disappeared, trying to lure children into his car at another mall. He gave the police a detailed account. Then, two years later, the same Ray Mileski shot and killed his wife and one of his sons. In prison for those crimes, he had talked a lot about the Lyon sisters, telling other inmates that he knew where the girls were buried. Police investigated these claims in 1982, partially excavating Mileski’s old backyard and basement. They found nothing.
That had stalled active work on Mileski, but when the squad took another hard look at him in 2011, interest in him deepened. Reviewing old witness interviews from after he was arrested for murder, the detectives learned that one possible motive for the killings had been to prevent his wife and son from revealing his connection to the Lyon case. On his bedside table, the night of the murders, police had found a slip of paper with John Lyon’s phone number on it.
And the more Chris looked, the more he found. Witness after witness said Mileski was known to pick up young boys and girls for sex. One said he had done this once at Wheaton Plaza. Another said he had seen two little blond girls in Mileski’s basement. One woman said that Mileski had raped her on two different occasions when she was a teenager and that he had held sex parties at his suburban home. Men admitted, under hard questioning, that as boys they had been intimidated by Mileski into engaging in sex acts. Chris learned that Mileski had been part of a group of men who engaged in such activities, sometimes gathering at parties to share young victims.
It all fit. Mileski had been a pedophile associated with other pedophiles who swapped child pornography and groomed and shared victims. In time, Chris came to believe in his bones that this was his man, but the case was all circumstantial. He had talked the young couple who owned Mileski’s old house into letting him rip out the carpeting in their basement to inspect the concrete floor. He found nothing (and paid to recarpet the floor). At one point Chris learned that Mileski had purchased undeveloped land in Lancaster County, Virginia. Chris then spent weeks there, living in a motel, supervising a dig on the property in a futile search for remains. He would come home and tell Amy how close he felt, almost as if he could hear the Lyon girls calling to him from their graves. He found nothing. Now he wanted to go back to the old Mileski basement and tear through the concrete, but no judge was going to okay that without a strong justification. The gut feelings of a veteran detective didn’t count.