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The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation
The Last Stone A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation Author:Mark Bowden On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, age 10 and 12, disap-peared during a trip to a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. Three days later, 18-year-old Lloyd Welch went to the Montgomery County Police with a tip: he had witnessed the Lyons girls climb into a strange man?s car outside the mall that day. Welch?s tip led nowh... more »ere, and the police dismissed him as a drug-addled troublemaker wasting their time. As the weeks passed, and a 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 discovered that the police had missed something big in 1975. Nearly forty years after the crime, Lloyd Welch quickly became the most likely suspect in the Lyons case.
In 1975, Mark Bowden was 23-year-old rookie reporter for a small Baltimore newspaper covering the Lyons sisters? disappearance. In The Last Stone, Bowden returns to his first major story, one that has haunted him for decades, and takes us behind the scenes of the cold case team's artful interrogation of Lloyd Welch. Over months of intense questioning, five skilled detectives would chip away at Welch?s pathological lies, uncovering a shocking and hideous web of violence and abuse. Based on extensive interviews and video footage from inside the interro-gation room, The Last Stone is an utterly captivating and revelatory reconstruction of a masterful investigation, and a chilling, intimate look inside a disturbing criminal mind.« less