On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, age 10 and 12, disappeared during a trip to a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. Three days later, eighteen-year-old Lloyd Welch visited the Montgomery County Police with a tip: he had seen the Lyons girls at the mall that day and had watched them climb into a strange man’s car. Welch’s tip led nowhere, and the police dismissed him as a troublemaking teen wasting their time. As the weeks passed and the police’s massive search for the girls came up empty, grief, shock, and horror spread out from the Lyons family to overtake the entire region. The trail went cold, the investigation was shelved, and hope for justice waned.
Then, in 2013, a detective on the department’s cold case squad reopened the Lyons files and soon discovered that the officers had missed something big about Lloyd Welch in 1975. That same week, a young girl who had seen the Lyons sisters at the mall described a man who had been following her throughout the day. An artist had even produced a sketch: It looked remarkably like Lloyd.
The acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and Hue 1968 had been a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper at the time of the original disappearance, and covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind.
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