Mark Bowden’s The Last Stone: that way madness, lies
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
On March 25, 1975, sisters Sheila and Kate Lyon, ages 12 and 10, vanished from a mall in suburban Maryland.
[SDB’s full review here. Want these in your inbox in their entirety? Up that sub!]
A massive manhunt (or, I guess, "girlhunt") ensued – including the use of police dogs who had also helped out in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst the year before – but no certain trace of the Lyons was found, and no one was charged in connection with their disappearance.
Then, in 2013, a Maryland cold-case squad thought they had a promising lead in the form of a possible witness, and reopened the investigation.
The story
Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down; Killing Pablo) covered the Lyons' disappearance as a "cub reporter" at a Baltimore paper in the mid-seventies; he returns to the case file with The Last Stone. The book follows a cold-case team's multi-year interrogation of a compulsive liar and victim/victimizer, Lloyd Lee Welch, in an attempt to piece together the last days of the Lyons, and get some answers for the sisters' aging parents. I'll try not to reveal too much about how successful law enforcement is in that endeavor, but the book itself is quite successful, and I recommend it.
This isn't to say that it's an easy read; it isn't, at all. Welch, already incarcerated for sexually assaulting an ex-girlfriend's daughter (a girl about the Lyons' age), doesn't take long to repel the reader, protesting with nauseating specifics that he shouldn't have gotten 33 years for rape. He's also a compulsive liar, as his interrogators and Bowden note repeatedly, but his lies in the particular context of this investigation take the form of numerous evolving versions of the same dispiritingly grimy story – each one slightly more revolting than the last.
The reader is therefore obliged to relive the girls' degradation and terror in a dozen variations, and while this is effective, and centers the experience of the victims even though the authorial POV is functionally positioned at the shoulder of the cops, said experience is horrific. Similar experiences across the larger Welch clan run through the narrative and create an almost claustrophobic reading atmosphere.
But despite 1) the repetition of the details of a kidnapping and rape-murder of children, 2) which never quite resolve to a clear picture of what happened to the Lyons, 3) in a forthrightly pro-cop narrative, the book's saving grace is prose that moves along smartly. Bowden occasionally steps into the story with an aside – he notes at one point that, although child-abduction cases like the Lyons' are rare, "today's omnipresent tabloid-style journalism and social media so magnify every occurrence that people are unduly afraid." Later, when Welch accuses his interlocutors of running the good-cop-bad-cop, the detectives deny it:
"No. That's not what we're doing." This was, of course, exactly what they were doing.
There's the occasional deft description, too, like the characterization of Welch's salty stepmother, Edna, as "sharp as the cut rim of a tin can." (Bowden's sugar-free but not unsympathetic description of the "hillbilly subculture" that produced Welch, "sealed in the intimacy of their crowded homes, carrying on vicious old habits," is marred by a citation of "the author J.D. Vance," but I got past it.) Bowden knows when to skim over months of becalm in the investigation; more to the point, he knows he has to, lest the reader get overwhelmed in sordidry and bail.
But mostly, Bowden furnishes transcripts of the months and years of conversations cops and DA investigators had with Welch, trying to nudge him closer to a truthful account of what happened at the Wheaton Mall that day – or truthful enough that they could pan it for a couple of nuggets of verifiable information – and lets them speak for themselves. It's very process-y, and the painstaking worrying free of names or slices of timeline is remarkably readable given how long it takes, and how much squid-inking Welch is doing to divert attention away from himself as much more than a mere witness.
It manages not to read like copaganda, either, although I suppose it is that, technically. I wouldn't say Bowden is neutral on whether Dave Davis and the others assigned to manipulate some truth out of Welch "should" use the tactics they do, but nor would I say he's blithely comfortable with the ethical compromises law enforcement makes to catch a monster. He makes the reader aware that they exist. (The great Robert Kolker's NYT review of The Last Stone, gift-linked here, has more on that idea.)
But my primary takeaway from The Last Stone isn't the alchemy of a simultaneously readable and repugnant story, although that's impressive. Rather, it's that Bowden gets at something about the fundamental tension at the heart of true crime's allure of true crime: we want to know what really happened, and why, but at the same time, because human nature and mutable memory are what they are, so often we never will – never can. Kolker notes in his write-up that, "like all great true crime," the book "finds its power not by leaning into cliché but by resisting it – pushing for something more realistic, more evocative of a deeper truth." I agree, and I think that truth in The Last Stone (or one of them) is that, in a true-crime story, the seeking of order in chaos is the only order we can reasonably expect.
Late in 2020, Investigation Discovery ran a doc, Who Killed the Lyon Sisters?, featuring Mark Bowden and directed by Bowden's son. I haven't watched it, and it may be a more efficient use of your true-crime time than The Last Stone – but the book is worth your time too.