Robert Keller - Cold Cases: Solved Volume 1: 18 Fascinating True Crime Cases

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18 Baffling Cold Cases Solved!

: Two little girls go missing from the mall. What happens to them is beyond your most terrifying nightmares.

: Angie was always willing to help a stranger in need. But not everyone has good intentions. Sometimes charity comes at a terrible cost.

: The discovery of a human skull panics a killer into a confession. Perhaps he should have waited for the coroners report.

: Karen was the former wife of an American icon. But celebrity is no shield against a determined psychopath.

: Three little boys take a moonlight bicycle ride and encounter a predator. For one of them, the night will end in terror.

: When a preteen girl goes missing from a school, suspicion falls on the one person all of the female students are wary of the creepy janitor.

: A serial rapist prowling for a victim; a courageous young woman determined to resist him; a fight to the death with only one winner.

: The case had gone unsolved for 40 years. Now, finally, the killer had been unmasked. But is he still around to face justice?

: Rayna had overcome so much difficulty in her life. She deserved a shot at happiness. Fate, tragically, had other plans.

: It was a simple errand, a quick run to the store in a safe neighborhood. It should not have cost a little girl her life.

: The savage slaying of an elderly woman; a detective who refuses to accept defeat; a killer who might not have escaped justice after all.

: A young woman goes on a late night store run and ends up dead. Justice is a long time in coming. It gets there in the end.

: Roy Joe had been dealt many tribulations in his life. None of them, though, was as bad as Carolyn.

: For years, Joan was thought to be a victim of Britains most notorious slayer. Her killer turned out to be a different psychopath entirely.

: A low-life prowling a suburban neighborhood; a sweet little girl walking home from a playdate; a tragedy about to unfold.

: A chance encounter in a college parking lot puts a young mother in proximity to a very dangerous man.

: Two teenagers meet up for a moonlight tryst in an abandoned building. One of them wont make it out alive.

: A death ruled a suicide; a killer on the lam; a detective determined to bring him to justice; the unlikely assistance of a TV crew.

The cops dubbed him Tape Recorder Man. He was six-foot tall and probably in his mid-50s. He walked with a limp. Tape Recorder Man was conservatively dressed in a brown suit, and he carried a brown leather briefcase. Inside the case was the latest model cassette recorder. On Tuesday, March 25, 1975, this individual spent hours strolling the Wheaton Plaza shopping mall in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. He was seen demonstrating his recorder to groups of interested youngsters hanging out during their spring break. No one quite understood Tape Recorder Mans purpose in doing this. He had no product to sell, no business to promote. His only interest seemed to be in spending time in the proximity of children. In those more innocent times, no one appears to have been particularly alarmed by this. That opinion would change when two little girls went missing.

If you lived anywhere in the D.C. area during the 70s, you knew the voice of John Lyon. John was a popular host on WMAL, serving the metro area. He was also the husband of Mary and the father of Jay, Sheila, and Katherine. The family lived in Kensington, Maryland, a short half-mile from the Wheaton Plaza mall. On the morning of Tuesday, March 25, 1975, Mary Lyon gave her daughters Sheila, aged 12, and Katherine, 10, permission to walk to the mall. The girls left sometime between 11 oclock and noon and were under strict instructions to be home by 4:00 p.m. Their mother would never see them again.

The disappearance of Sheila and Katherine would be reported to the police at 7 oclock that evening. It would spark a massive search and dominate the news for weeks to come. As detectives began reconstructing the girls last moments, they learned that a friend had seen them talking to an unidentified man outside the Orange Bowl restaurant at around 1:00 p.m. About an hour later, their brother Jay had seen them inside the restaurant, eating pizza together. Sometime between 2:30 and 3:00, another friend had spotted them leaving the mall, walking westward in the direction of their home. After that, they vanished.

What particularly interested the police about this timeline was the conversation with the unidentified adult male. This was the man in the brown suit, the man with the briefcase, the individual they would soon dub Tape Recorder Man. This person was immediately elevated to the top of the suspect list. Investigators were convinced that he knew something about the missing girls and might be responsible for their disappearance. A considerable amount of effort was expended to find him. In fact, the police devoted so much attention to Tape Recorder Man that they completely overlooked another suspect.

In the aftermath of their disappearance, a friend of the Lyon sisters reported to detectives that a scruffy, long-haired man had been eyeing the sisters up. In fact, hed been so fixated on the girls that their friend, barely 12 years old herself, had decided to confront him. The man had shuffled off after she berated him for staring at Sheila and Kate. The description that the girl provided was of a white male, late teens to early 20s, shabbily dressed, scars on his left cheek, and a bad case of acne. The police attached very little importance to this report. They were fixated on their main suspect. Despite their considerable efforts, they would never find Tape Recorder Man.

The search for the Lyon sisters was protracted and intense, involving police from multiple jurisdictions, hundreds of volunteers, and even the Maryland National Guard. Vacant lots, stream beds, abandoned buildings, tracts of forest, all were combed without result. There was a reported sighting of the girls, trussed up and gagged in the back of a beige station wagon in Manassas, Virginia; there were calls from psychics and scam artists; there was a callous attempt by some sick individual to extort $10,000 from the distraught parents. And then there was a claim by a man named Lloyd Welch that he had witnessed the actual abduction.

Welch first reported his sighting to a security guard at the Wheaton Mall one week after the girls vanished. The guard then called the police and Welch was transferred to an interrogation room and asked to repeat his story. He claimed to have seen an older man, dressed in a brown suit, bundling the girls into a car and driving away with them. The man, he said, walked with a limp. Since the person he was describing was almost an exact match for their main suspect, the police were naturally interested. However, there were inconsistencies in Welchs statement, and so he was asked to take a polygraph. He agreed and failed.