For forty years the mystery of what happened to the Lyon sisters, aged 10 and 12, who disappeared in 1975 from the Wheaton Plaza shopping mall in suburban Washington, DC, haunted an entire community, including journalist Mark Bowden, who covered the story as a cub reporter. With THE LAST STONE (Atlantic Monthly Press; Publication date: April 2, 2019; ISBN: 978-0-8021-4730-1, $27.00 hardcover), he now returns to the crime to cover the extraordinary effort by authorities to bring their kidnapper to justice and to try to answer the question he could never shake, “Who would commit such a crime? And why?”

When the girls vanished on March 25, 1975, shock, then grief, spread through the community, as a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and the mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware.
Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch, as well as his sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, four skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies.