![]() ![]() I became a grandfather - of two little blond-haired girls, as a matter of fact. In my newspaper the story was still on the front page at the end of the week: “Hope Fades in Search for Girls.” But in time, as nothing happened, the story moved off the front page and then out of the news completely, overtaken by fresh outrages.Īs the decades passed I wrote thousands more stories, big ones and small ones. As days passed with no good news, the tale turned grimmer. ![]() My first story ran two days after the girls vanished, under the headline “100 Searching Woods for 2 Missing Girls.” It had photos of 12-year-old Sheila, in blond pigtails and glasses, and 10-year-old Kate, with her blond hair cut in a cute bob. and phone every police barracks in the state, asking whether anything interesting had happened overnight. My job was to show up in the newsroom at 4 a.m. I was a green 23-year-old reporter with the Baltimore News-American when the story broke. Scuba divers groped through mud at the bottoms of ponds. The residents of a nearby nursing home were interviewed, one by one. Storm sewers were explored, as was every vacant house for miles. Every stand of woods or weeds was searched. Police interviewed countless witnesses and followed hundreds of tips. They were never seen again, though the hunt for them was relentless and extensive. On a March day in 1975, the sisters - daughters of a well-known Washington radio personality - had gone to Wheaton Plaza, a suburban Maryland shopping mall, on an innocent outing, and then vanished. For decades, the disappearance of Sheila and Kate Lyon wasn’t just an enduring mystery it was an unhealed regional trauma. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |