The following is a word for word copy of an article which ran in the Washington Star Newspaper on 3 April 1975. Much has been said about a suspicious man seen speaking with Sheila and Katherine Lyon shortly before their disappearance on 25 March 1975.
He was reported to be speaking to the girls with a tape recorder and hand-held microphone, hence his nickname "The Tape Recorder Man" or TRM. Some old newspaper stories refered to him as "Microphone Man", but on this thread "TRM" seems to be the name of choice.
I added the below story to the origional thread rather late in its run. It can be found on the second to last page of that thread. I include my comments on it as a preface to the article.
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Eyewitness: Last Time the Lyon Girls Were Seen
Below is the text of a front page article which appeared in The Washington Star newspaper on Thursday, April 3, 1975. It is an interview with the boy who saw and described The Tape Recorder Man talking with Sheila and Katherine Lyon on the afternoon of 25 March 1975, at Wheaton Plaza shortly before they disappeared.
The headline is a bit misleading, because the girls were actually seen a short time later by their brother, Jay and possibly a little later by another boy.
Aside from "Jimmy's" detailed statement and description to the Montgomery County Police on 28 March 1975, this is as close as it comes to a first hand account of exactly what he saw and heard in regard to TRM and the Lyon sisters. To my knowledge, it is the only newspaper interview that he gave.
Also interviewed in this article is Davis Morton, the Montgomery County Police officer who drew the two composite sketches of the Tape Recorder Man (TRM). A print of the second or "updated drawing" was included with the story.
After reporting on their interview with Jimmy and his mother, and with Davis Morton, the article shifted theme to give an account of what people were saying about the case and about how they were all reconsidering safety and security issues at Wheaton Plaza.
The Washington Star newspaper went out of business in 1982, and to my knowledge, there are no "on line" archives of their articles. I obtained a copy of this interview from a microfilm file in a library.
I typed it as it appeared in the paper, with the exception that I put x's in place of a printed street address, so as not to violate any privacy protocol.
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Eyewitness: Last Time the Lyon Girls Were Seen
Thursday, April 3, 1975
By Mary Ann Kuhn and Rebecca Leet
Washington Star Staff Writers
Jimmy sat in a blue armchair in the living room of his family's Kensington home, letting his 13-year-old legs with their high-top sneakers stretch out on the turquoise rug as he talked publicly for the first time about the man he saw with the missing Lyon sisters last week at Wheaton Plaza.
Jimmy is the teen-ager who provided Montgomery County police with a description of the 50 to 60-year-old man he saw talking to the girls, Sheila, 13, and Katherine, 11, daughters of John and Mary Lyon of 3xxx Plyers Mill Road.
With his help, police drew a sketch of the man's face which has been published in newspapers and shown on television. Police have kept Jimmy's identity a secret. Jimmy (not his real name) did not seek publicity. His parents, fearful of retaliation, requested that his real name not be used.
Last night, four women who called police saying they recognized the man in the sketch went to the Wheaton Police station to offer help in drawing a new composite.
According to Pfc. Davis Morton, a robbery squad detective who does composites "to help out whenever it's needed," the 13-year-old's description of the man was accurate.
"I showed the composite to four women (separately) and it seemed to be basically the guy they had seen," he said. "They suggested a few minor changes, but I don't know if they would even be noticeable."
"Sometimes you're close and sometimes you're way off (in making a composite) but I feel better about this one because of the other witnesses."
"It was about 1 or 2 o'clock." Jimmy related. "I was out with a friend. We were down near ... um ... Peoples (Drug Store) and the Orange Bowl (pizza carryout) and we saw the two girls talking to a man with a tape recorder."
"I heard the man ask one question: ' Are any of you two involved in sports?'"
"And then ... um ... 30 seconds later I looked back. He was walking away toward Wards (Montgomery Ward) and the girls were walking the other way toward the fountain."
Jimmy stopped talking. Up to then, the words had tumbled out. He sat there and crossed his hands over his maroon lettered football jersey.
His parents didn't say anything.
His mother sat on the sofa with an untouched glass of red wine on the next table while her husband sat across the room with the newspaper opened across his folded legs. Jimmy was asked to give more details about what he had seen.
He smiled when he told how he and his friend had joked about going over to the man and asking him to interview them so they could get on television.
"I said to my friend, 'Hey, look over there. I wonder what's going on. It looks like a reporter.' We thought he was some kind of a reporter," Jimmy explained. "We were joking around that maybe we should go over there and get him to interview us."
"The man was holding a microphone in his hand between the girls, and asking questions. He had a tan briefcase on the ground. It was one of those hard ones that sat up." the boy said, adding that the tape recorder was sitting next to the man, out of the briefcase.
The man was sitting on the ledge next to an island of (illegible word - bushes?) in the middle of the plaza, Jimmy said. People sit on the ledge to rest during their shopping sprees or to eat a snack or pizza from the carryout.
Jimmy said he had never seen the man before or since. He said the man was well dressed in a brown suit.
Jimmy, who lives several blocks from the Lyons said he and his friend rode their bikes up to the plaza that day "to see friends. We just went up there to ride around. We had nothing else to do so we decided to go up there and look around."
Jimmy's mother said that right after the news came out that the Lyon girls were missing, her son told her he had seen them at the plaza. But it wasn't until Friday that he mentioned anything about the man with a tape recorder, she said.
"On Friday, he said that the girls were talking to a reporter. I said, 'How do you know he was a reporter?' He said because he had a microphone. I told him that could have been anybody and notified police."
At the police station on Friday, Jimmy said, the police "had me look through two files of mug shots."
(The beginning of the next sentence seems to have been left out of the printed article)
... in a while, a police officer would ask me if everything was all right (with the sketch). I'd tell them what was right and what was wrong." Jimmy said he thought the sketch was a good likeness. His mother said he was at the police station 2 1/2 hours that day.
Jimmy's friend who was with him the day the Lyon girls were seen with the man at the plaza verified virtually everything Jimmy said except that he said he did not hear any of the conversation between the man and the girls.
"I hope they find them." Jimmy said.
Meanwhile, fewer kids are "hanging" at Wheaton Plaza in the days since the Lyon sisters disappeared.
"Kensington, Md., isn't all that exciting a place, " 15-year-old Rachel Farr explained the mall's magnetism for teen-agers yesterday. "This (the plaza) is the best place to hang."
But now, "There's a kind of eerie feeling around the mall.... You can really see it," said 16-year-old Eric Provost, assistant manager at the Orange Bowl. "There's less talk. Less fooling around. When somegody goes up now (to the plaza) they have a reason."
Karen McGhee, 11, said that when her friend's coat fell as they were walking through the plaza yesterday and a man stopped to point it out, "I got my lungs ready to scream if he grabbed her."
A spokesman in the plaza manager's office said calls have come in from people wanting to know if it is safe to come there and shop.
If Montgomery County teen-agers are not gathering at the mall, they also are not running away from home as much since the Lyon girls disappeared, according to the county's Juvenile Bureau, which is investigating the case.
After eight tense days, the investigation of the Lyon girls' disappearance is settling into the tiring, colorless and seemingly endless routine of tracking down one fruitless lead after another - remembering, the police often note, that it may take only one good lead to resolve the mystery.
Yesterday, specially trained tracking dogs from Philadelphia spent the morning sniffing the area behind Oakland Terrace Elementary School and Newport Junior High, where the girls are students, in a re-check of an area officers already have searched twice.
Police said the dogs turned up nothing. Their two day role in the continuing drama ended as have so many apparently hopeful starts - quietly, uneventfully, sadly.
"We don't have anything," one officer said yesterday. "We're right back where we started."