the vehicle. The driver of the station wagon resembled the man in the publicly available sketch of the prime suspect. The witness further claimed that when the driver spotted the witness tailing him, he ran a red light and sped west on Route 234 towards Interstate 66 in Virginia. The station wagon had Maryland license plates with the possible combination "DMT-6**." The last two numbers are unknown due to the bending of the car's plate. The known combination was issued in Cumberland, Hagerstown, and Baltimore, Maryland at the time. This supposed sighting inspired a small army of mobile citizen band (CB) radio users to scour the area throughout the evening and into the night with a running commentary and chatter but without any tangible results. A search for matching plate numbers failed to produce any information. Although this witness's report was at first treated as credible, and a media firestorm erupted because of it, it was later deemed "questionable" by police. The disappearance generated calls from psychics, extortionists and attention seekers. Several phone calls from people claiming to have the girls and offering to exchange them for ransom money were made to the Lyon family in the immediate aftermath of the sisters' disappearance. One began with an anonymous male voice on April 4, 1975, and demanded that John Lyon leave a briefcase with $10,000 inside an Annapolis, Maryland, courthouse restroom. He left just $101 in the briefcase as directed by law enforcement officials, just enough to make the crime a felony, but the briefcase was never claimed. This same anonymous person called John Lyon later and said that there were too many police around the courthouse and he could not retrieve the ransom. John Lyon said he would have to hear the girls' voices before he would do anything else. He never contacted them again. Lloyd Welch reported seeing the girls and a man to a mall guard one week after the disappearance. The police took down his elaborate statement. However, when given a lie detector test, he failed on most of his answers, and he and his report were disregarded. Suspects Fred Howard Coffey was convicted in 1987 for the 1979 beating, strangulation murder, and molestation of a 10-year-old girl in North Carolina and () is serving a life sentence (after an earlier death sentence was overturned) in a North Carolina prison. Authorities learned that he interviewed for a