Police search for the Lyon sisters around Wheaton Plaza on April 1, 1975
As far as Chris Homrock was concerned, they were closer than ever to proving Ray Mileski was the kidnapper and killer. There was still no concrete proof—there probably would never be any—but Lloyd Welch’s testimony felt like real evidence.
Hadn’t Lloyd recognized Mileski’s photo instantly? He said he couldn’t remember the man’s name but admitted that he knew him. He’d said he was certain—although it was already apparent that “certainty” from Lloyd was anything but. To nail it down they needed to firm up a connection between the two.
After all, how likely was it, as Dave had said, that these two men who shared a sordid sexual appetite for children—and who knew each other!—would just happen to be in Wheaton Plaza on the same afternoon Sheila and Kate disappeared? As Chris had told Lloyd, he knew men whom Mileski had picked up hitchhiking as teenagers, and who had been victimized and then groomed to attract still younger victims. Lloyd had plainly been one of the former. Even his vehement denial fit the pattern. Men denied such things. Chris wrote to his supervisors that Lloyd, although unreliable and less than fully cooperative, had handed them a breakthrough. As far as the lead detective was concerned, the Lyon case had gone from whodunit to what exactly did he do?
Dave was less sold. He did not have as much invested in the Mileski hypothesis, and his hours one-on-one with Lloyd had heightened his misgivings about him. But Chris was in charge, and his priority made sense. Together they set out to reinterview all of Mileski’s relatives and his seedy old circle.
They got help. It was a sign of how nettling the unsolved crime remained for the department that its assistant chief, Russ Hamill, told Chris he could have as many detectives as he needed. For a case nearly four decades old, this was unprecedented. The first to join them, in November, was Mark Janney, a no-nonsense cop’s cop, tall and athletic (a basketball player in college), the son of a Maryland state trooper—he carried his late father’s badge with him. Mark was forty-six. His father had risen to the top ranks of the state police, but Mark had no passion for promotion. What he loved was the work itself. He had spent most of his twenty-two years with the department working undercover, making drug buys on the street in his mid-twenties, graduating to federal task force work against drug dealers. In more recent years he’d worked on homicides. He found the job thrilling. Off duty he consumed true crime books; the Lyon case was just the sort of stumper to grab him. At the time he joined the squad, his two daughters were about the same ages Sheila and Kate had been in 1975, which brought the outrage and tragedy of it home. He would return from work feeling guilty about his own good fortune and acutely aware of John and Mary’s loss. Mark’s size and stern mien made him the most physically intimidating member of the squad, and he would play that role comfortably. When it came time to lean on someone, it was generally Mark who did the leaning. He was briefed on Mileski and Welch, and in December rode out to Dover with Dave to meet Lloyd for himself. It was an informal visit—they did not even tell Pete Feeney about it, much to the prosecutor’s later chagrin. Chris and Dave wanted Mark to size up Lloyd Welch for himself. To Mark, it was simple. He had watched some of the video of the first interview and was appalled foremost by the way Lloyd described (and excused) his crime. Mark reckoned him a sociopath, a man self-interested to the exclusion of feelings for others, not just without remorse but incapable of it.
All through the holidays at the end of 2013, the squad sought out and questioned face-to-face, one by one, Mileski’s contacts. To each they described Lloyd and Helen and showed pictures, but no one recognized them. Mileski’s surviving son, who was familiar with his father’s illicit circle, said Lloyd looked familiar but could not be sure. The conversations, meanwhile, led them deeper into Mileski’s furtive underworld, one that Chris believed had enlisted young Lloyd Welch and into which they feared Sheila and Kate had fallen.
Unable to confirm the link between Welch and Mileski independently, they were stuck with getting Lloyd to admit it. He had been adamant in that first session that there was no link, but the detectives had observed that his defenses weakened when he grew rattled and tired. It was after he’d been caught in a lie in his most recent witness statement that he’d admitted, eight hours into the session, that the man he had seen taking the girls from the mall was Mileski. So making him rattled and weary became a strategy. Mark took a step in this direction during the unofficial visit. He told Lloyd that the department was considering linking him publicly to the case, naming him a “person of interest.” This would not identify him as a suspect, at least not formally, but would amount to the same thing. A press conference would broadcast his image and recap his criminal past. It would be a public shaming. Like most sex offenders, Lloyd had labored to keep the nature of his offense quiet. As the squad well knew, it would disturb his life on many levels, not least within the prison itself, where pedophiles were held in vicious contempt.
This was no idle threat. The department was eager. Lloyd’s connection to the case seemed certain, and the FBI was curious enough about other children’s disappearances to believe that shaking the tree—spreading word of his involvement—might scare up new leads not just in the Lyon case but in others. For their part, however, the squad members didn’t like the timing. If they named Lloyd publicly, it would be hard to sustain the pretense that they wanted him as a witness—which remained Chris’s primary goal. It would almost certainly shut Lloyd up for good. Chris was holding his superiors off. He wanted one more crack at him.
Lloyd had given them a pretext. He’d asked to be polygraphed. The detectives didn’t believe the machine actually detected lies, and evidently neither did Lloyd, because he seemed confident it would get him off the hook. But the device didn’t have to be foolproof to be useful. It scared those who believed in it, and it made even those who didn’t anxious. Told they’d flunked the test, some suspects panicked and came clean. This is what the squad hoped would happen with Lloyd. But giving it could also backfire. If he passed, it would embolden his mendacity.
To conduct the test, Chris invited Katie Leggett, the department’s premier polygrapher. She was a veteran detective, age thirty-nine, with long experience in the sex crimes unit. Funny, smart, and outgoing, she had set out to become a lawyer, until she realized she hated spending all her time in a law library. Her brother was a police officer, and she had an uncle and a cousin in uniform. Their work seemed more exciting, so after sampling some college classes in criminal justice, Katie went for it. She had endured the mandatory years of patrol duty. Wearing the bulky, manly uniform bugged her, and she found the work unsatisfying. Particularly discouraging was seeing so many of those she arrested go free. The system did not punish offenders the way she believed they ought to be punished. But the job changed for her when she made detective. The work was more consistently interesting. She could dress fashionably. Her colleagues teased her about being “prissy,” but Katie felt like herself again. She had blond hair that fell to her shoulders, wore designer shoes, and carried her Glock in a Louis Vuitton handbag. There was nothing prissy beneath the gloss. Her appetite for harsh justice led her to specialize in child-abuse cases, where both the law and the societal mood were less tolerant. Those she busted went to jail. She did it for eleven years, during which time she had two children of her own. Eventually, the work began to wear on her. It says something about the awfulness of sex crimes that she sought refuge working on homicides.
This was where she was when the Lyon squad came calling. Katie did not know Chris, Dave, or Mark. She knew little about the case, even though she had grown up in the Washington area and, of course, had heard about the Lyon sisters. The squad wanted both her polygraph skills and her sex crimes experience. Accustomed as she was to the worst forms of sexual predation, she would hardly be unnerved by someone like Lloyd. Katie was a talker and was also attractive. Her conspicuously feminine style would also play well. She was perfect.
But she said no. The case seemed too difficult, and weak. The squad didn’t have much to go on. She had other reasons. Her youngest was still a baby. Katie was looking to pull back from the ugliness, not dive in over her head.
But the squad persisted, enlisting one of her friends, Karen Carvajal, to plead on their behalf and to help with the polygraph session, and Katie gave in. She eventually came to believe it was fated, finding almost spooky connections with Sheila and Kate. She had been only eleven months old when the girls disappeared, but her birthday, March 30, was the same as Sheila’s, and she shared Kate’s name. Their child photos looked a lot like hers, and she had hung out in Wheaton Plaza herself as a girl. When she first introduced herself to John and Mary, they had been struck by these things. She was moved when they suggested that her involvement “was meant to be.”
Her initial instructions concerning Lloyd were straightforward.
“We just want to know if he was involved in the actual abduction, the murder of the girls, basically,” Chris told her. “Can you find that out on the polygraph?”
Katie thought she could. She believed in the test, which monitored a subject’s blood pressure, pulse, breathing, and skin conductivity as he or she was asked carefully scripted questions. She had started off thinking it was hocus-pocus—its results were still not allowed as evidence in a criminal trial—but after years of practice she had become a believer, at least in its usefulness. People nearly always agreed to take it, even if they were guilty. Most thought they could outsmart it—she felt sure Lloyd Welch would fall into this category—but in the hands of a skilled operator, it could, she believed, expose deception.
The session was set to take place in Smyrna on the second Monday in February 2014.
The conditions were not ideal. Katie had brought an unfamiliar portable machine, and the prison had set them up in a basement room—more like a cell—that turned suffocating whenever the door was closed. They had to keep the door open, so anyone walking past could see in. Here was inmate Welch meeting with a whole battery of fuzz—Maryland cops and FBI. It made Lloyd anxious, understandably. Prisons are hothouses for rumor and suspicion. What was happening in that room looked like a big deal. Why was Welch cooperating with them? What was he saying? At one point a female guard wandered in uninvited. She was, Lloyd explained, in charge of hearing grievances filed by other inmates. “She’s just nosy,” he said.
Eventually Katie and Lloyd were left alone for the exam, but for much of the session her friend Karen Carvajal was also in the room. In contrast to the setup in Dover, there was no adjacent conference room or video link through which the others could observe. Katie had brought a small digital recorder, but there was no hidden camera or microphone. She struggled with the lie detector, which was outfitted with the necessary wires and sensors. She played it up a little. His eyes kept wandering to the open door, and she wanted his full attention, so she became the dumb buxom blonde struggling with modern technology. Men were unfailingly captivated by this.
She sighed heavily.
“All right, well, it looks like it’s gonna be … I need an Internet connection to be able to pull up my files. Is there no Internet?”
“Well, they have it, but it’s—”
“I have it, I mean, I’m afraid it’s just gonna fade in and out.”
She made ingratiating small talk with Lloyd while playing up her struggles. Her colleagues stepped in and out. Carvajal sat with Katie and Lloyd as Katie fiddled with the device.
“So we got that you had a shitty childhood,” Katie said. “Your dad was physically, mentally, and sexually abusive.”
Lloyd nodded and grunted assent.
“You never really had a mom. Your stepmom was decent to you, but you kind of at that point were already screwed up. Not good things.”
“Right.”
“I mean you didn’t have half a chance to teach yourself, you know, to become street-smart, teach yourself survival skills. You did what you needed to do to survive but not any violent crimes.”
“Right.”
“Would you consider yourself a relatively honest person, especially now?”
“Yeah.”
“You kind of get the error of your ways? You’re done with all this crap? You just want to get out of here and live your life?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you find yourself being pretty honest with people here, like the guards or inmates?”
“You can ask any guard, any of the guards that know me, and they’ll tell you that I’m one of the quietest people.”
“Okay,” said Katie. She walked him through the course of his normal day, sleeping until two in the afternoon, working through most nights in the kitchen.
“You have to be minimum status in order to work in a place like that,” he said.
“Meaning that you’re relatively well-behaved.”
“Right.”
Lloyd told her about how he made his own pizza, which he shared with his friends and sometimes with the guards. The crust was fashioned from crushed soup crackers, which he coated with pizza sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and sausage.
“They take it down to their microwave, and we heat it up,” he said. “They trust me enough because they know that I—”
“You’re not going to poison them.”
“No. I put the plastic gloves on and stuff like that. I show a lot of respect.”
“Just a low-key guy tryin’ to get by. Okay.”
Lloyd explained his hopes of getting out of prison eventually and living out the remainder of his days in a “normal” way. He relaxed. He liked talking to Katie. At one point he swore and then quickly apologized.
Katie started to respond, “There’s nothing you can say that—”
Carvajal laughed.
“Trust me,” said Katie. “I’m the worst mouth you’ll ever hear. Don’t let my innocent look fool you.”
Lloyd was warming up to her. He talked more about his life in the prison, about how inmates rarely asked one another to talk about the crimes that had gotten them locked up. Katie was still struggling with the machine, distracted, but encouraged Lloyd to keep talking.
“I think I have a pretty good idea about the kind of person you are, or that you’re presenting to me at least. You’re very laid-back. You seem very settled and calm. I mean, it is what it is, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, I guess there’s gotta be a calmness that comes over you. You’ve atoned for what you’ve done. You’ve admitted to doing it, and in the event that you get out, you would even apologize to this girl, so you’ve made peace in some fashion. Maybe that’s what makes you appear so peaceful to me, you know?”
Lloyd laughed. He was flattered. Katie assured him that she was professionally nonjudgmental—which was not true; she was the opposite and was revolted by his crimes. She said she had made mistakes in her life, and that he was really no different from her in a fundamental way. “We’ve all done things that could have really wound us up in bad situations.”
“Right.”
“Some people get caught, some people don’t,” Katie said. “I just don’t really like judging other people, which is fascinating because of my line of work, but it’s what keeps me healthy. I’ve actually had people write letters from prison thanking me for treating them the way that I do. I’m kind of like a social worker stuck in a cop’s world. As I’ve grown up I’ve realized that I’m not perfect, so who am I to judge other people? So that means I do have to, we do have to, go into a little bit of what this situation is, if you don’t mind.”
Lloyd recounted his connection to the Lyon case, the most recent version. He and Helen had gone to the mall looking for jobs. They saw a man whom Lloyd recognized talking to two girls, a man who had given him “the heebie-jeebies,” and whom he described in detail. Later, as they boarded a bus to leave (in his 1975 story, they had been in a car), they had seen the same man putting the two girls in an auto. The younger of the two looked as if she was crying. He described the car. A week later he went back to the mall to tell the police.
“You see something on TV?” Katie asked. “Did you have a radio?”
“See, that’s what I’m saying, I honestly don’t remember if we saw it on TV, or read it, or heard about it on the radio,” he said, stepping back slightly from his implausible insistence that he had known nothing about the missing girls. Now he was saying, indirectly, that he might have known. “I guess after a few days it just started bugging me, and I talked to Helen about it, and I said, ‘You know, it just don’t feel that it was his kids,’ or whatever, but I don’t know if I saw a newspaper and it clicked or what, because I started to get high again.”
He was working to make a good impression. He said he wanted “to do one good thing” in his life. “If I don’t do nothing else, let me at least tell somebody, ‘Hey, I saw this person.’ I’m gonna be honest with you, if I had anything to do with them or any kind of involvement like that, it would tear me up inside so much that I would end up telling somebody, and I’ve never told anybody.”
Lloyd kept returning to this. He said he had admitted all the crimes in his life. If he had been involved in this one, he would admit that, too. Katie commiserated with him. Being a criminal, she said, “doesn’t make you a liar.”
He talked about his road years with Helen, about their breaking up when he got arrested and giving up their children. He said he had never thought about the Lyon case until recently.
“What, thirty-nine years, whatever it is?” he asked. “I’m surprised that I’m even involved in it. I thought I was doing a nice citizen thing. I didn’t think they were going to try to involve me in something like this.” He added that he was not a “monster.”
“Well, let me ask you this,” said Katie. “Why do you want to take a polygraph?”
“Because I’m not guilty of taking them girls or being involved in it, and I want to prove that to them and to prove to myself, too.”
Katie screwed up her face.
“What do you mean, ‘prove to yourself’?”
“Because they’re trying to make me sound like I’m some kind of monster or something like that.”
“But if you didn’t do it, you know you didn’t do it. Are you second-guessing yourself?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
All of this was preliminary. Their conversation, which had been freeform, was intended to build rapport and put Lloyd in the right frame of mind. He confirmed that he was taking the test voluntarily, indeed, that he was the one who had asked for it.
“There’s no surprises,” Katie told him after connecting the sensors. “We’ll do something called a skin test. Basically, I want you to lie to me. It’s about a number. It’s a stupid thing. I’m gonna ask you to choose a number and then ask you to lie because I want to see what your lies look like. Does that make sense to you?”
“You want me to lie?” asked Lloyd, who sighed, as if insulted by the very suggestion.
Katie explained the test further. There were three charts. She would ask him the same questions and plot his responses to all three.
“They’re just going to be in different order because I want to make sure you are paying attention, yes?”
Lloyd laughed. “I mean, I ain’t gonna lie. I’m tired, but—”
“Do you still want to take it?”
“Oh, yeah! There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I mean, I’m tired, but I’m awake enough to where I can do it. I’m not on any drugs. I mean, I’m clean.”
She asked him to pick his favorite number between one and ten. He chose six. She explained that she would ask him a question about this, and wanted him to “lie about the number six.”
Katie then fussed some more with the machine, and Lloyd chortled; her act worked every time. She instructed him to keep his feet flat, his arms still, and to look straight ahead. “Don’t get fixated and start making animals in your mind.”
Lloyd laughed.
“Don’t get trippy on me.”
“No.”
“Don’t get fixated. Hold as still as possible.” She told Lloyd that he was “probably the calmest person I’ve ever done this to.” As she maneuvered him into the correct position, Lloyd made a joke about being put in an electric chair. Katie laughed.
“I don’t think the person would be this nice,” she said.
She inflated a cuff on his arm. Then she began asking him which number he had chosen.
“Is it the number four?”
“No.”
“Is it the number five?”
“No.”
“Is it the number six?”
“Is it the number seven?”
“No.”
“Is it the number eight?”
“No.”
“Is it the number nine?”
“No.”
She spent a few more minutes reassuring him and positioning him.
“Are you comfortable like that?” she asked.
“I’m comfortable.”
“All right.”
“Did I lie on the number six?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Did it show?”
Katie said yes.
They then went through the careful regimen of the polygraph, short, direct questions and equally short, direct answers. One of the questions—emerging out of a list of ones that had nothing to do with the case—was, “Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls?”
“No,” he answered.
“Not connected with this case, have you ever lied to someone you loved or who trusted you?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls in Wheaton in 1975?”
“No.”
“Is there something else you were afraid I will ask you a question about on this test?”
“No.”
After a few more questions, Katie said, “Okay, that’s one in the record books.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. “How’d I do on it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me. How did you do?”
“It’s not that easy,” Katie said. “I can’t just look. See, I’m watching you. I’m watching the charts. I won’t know the results until after we add the score. It has to be scored.”
Then Katie took him through a list of similar questions, differently ordered and phrased. One was, “Regarding the disappearance of those girls, do you intend to answer truthfully each question about that?”
“Yes.”
“Not connected with this case, have you ever lied to get yourself out of trouble?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls?”
“No.”
And so on. It didn’t take long. She gave him a chance to relax and scratch his nose—“It never fails,” she said—and then she went through the list a third time. When it was over she deflated the cuff and took it off his arm. She told him to stay put and then left the room to score the test. Lloyd chatted with Dave and Karen. He worked to convince them he had been truthful.
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said. “What I told you down in Dover is the same thing I told her in here, you know? My story is not going to change, because I know nothing about it except for what I told you. I mean, I was straightforward with her. That’s why I said I’ll take the test, you know? I told you I’d take hypnosis, truth serum, whatever you’ve got, you know?”
“This is all we’ve got to offer you,” said Dave.
“I mean, I don’t know nothin’. You know what I’m saying?”
When Katie returned, she asked again, “How do you think you did?”
“I think I did good. I’m hoping I did good, I mean.”
“Okay.”
“How did I do?”
“You didn’t do real good,” Katie said. “Which I’m a little bit disappointed about, because I thought we had, you know, something good going on here.”
She laid the charts out on the table. She seemed genuinely disappointed, as if Lloyd had let her down personally.
“I can show you. I hand scored in here, and I also had the computer score it to give you the benefit of the doubt, and both—’deception indicated.’ That’s a really high number,” she said, pointing to the computer score.
“‘Deception indicated’?” Lloyd asked. “What does that mean?”
“That means that you are lying about the whole thing, the girls.”
“Well, I’m not lying!” Lloyd said, now angry and confused. “Could it be that I’m so tired? I mean, I worked last night.”
Katie said fatigue would not affect the results.
“The thing I’m worried about,” she said, “is if you know something along the lines of trying to protect somebody else. I don’t know enough about what’s going on, because I think you’re a decent guy. I mean, I don’t want to be wrong. I feel like you’re not really this violent, bad person, and I hate being wrong. I’m not saying that that’s changed. We’re kind of at a point where the damage is done. The situation is what it is.”
“Right,” said Lloyd, deflated. He had asked for the test in the hope of eliminating suspicion. At this point the wheels in his head must have been turning. If Lloyd believed the test was capable of detecting a lie—and this appeared to be his belief—then he must have been confident he could fool it. But he had not fooled it. The pattern he had shown in the first session, when caught in a lie, was to immediately spin a new story, one in which he incorporated the facts he had just been given without incriminating himself. It was his method, a reflex. It was apparent in the way he often would pick up on words and phrases spoken to him and use them himself minutes later. But the polygraph was a machine. It didn’t contradict his story with evidence or logic, it didn’t offer conflicting facts, it just said he was lying. What new story could he spin from that?
“We just want to know where these girls are, you know what I’m saying?” said Katie. “You’re a dad. You know how that feels. You would want the same respect and peace. They deserve to be buried properly; they deserve to have their family be able to stand around and say, ‘We loved you.’ You can understand that. All of us can understand that as parents.”
“And I do understand that, honestly. I just don’t know where they are at. I had nothing to do with them. I mean, if it’s locked up in my brain somewhere with all the drugs I’ve done, I wish somebody would help get it out.”
Katie was struck by this comment. It wasn’t the first time Lloyd had hinted that he might have some knowledge of what happened to the Lyon sisters, that it might be trapped somewhere in his memory. Innocent people didn’t say things like that. She was reasonably confident of her ability to detect untruth with the machine, but not certain. If the flunked test made her strongly suspect that Lloyd was hiding something, this remark convinced her that he was.
“But you were pretty clear that you didn’t use drugs that day,” said Karen.
“That day! But that night I did.”
“But you would not have forgotten being involved in the disappearance, right? I mean, that’s not something you would have forgotten.”
“No, that’s not something I would have forgotten, but I didn’t do it so I wasn’t involved. I mean, I can’t make it any clearer than it is. I’m not involved.”
This was not going as Lloyd had hoped. Katie and Karen were no longer being friendly and cute. Karen, in particular, bore in. She told him he was in “a precarious situation.”
“I think you probably feel like maybe you have something to lose with your family,” she said, offering him an out. “I think Dave meant it when he said that they would spin this in a way that wouldn’t hurt you with your family”—she was speaking of his scattered children.
“I understand that,” said Lloyd. “I want it off my family.”
“Well, Lloyd, the bottom line is, you don’t trust the police,” said Katie. “I pride myself on not making people’s experience shittier.” He had turned his life around in prison, she said, and was now trying to live differently. “In my heart of hearts, I believe there’s some part of you that knows something more than you are giving us. I don’t think you’re a bad guy. I think you’ve made mistakes in your life.”
“Yeah.”
“I believe enough in my skills and I believe enough in this test to know there’s something bothering you,” she said.
Lloyd insisted this was not the case. Karen told him that the news of his involvement would come out, and that it would destroy any relationship he hoped to have with his children—this was the line that would later trouble Pete Feeney. It was a threat. They were offering him a chance to tell his side of the story to prevent a public shaming.
“I can’t tell you something I don’t know! Honestly!”
“There’s two things, if you are honest with yourself,” Karen said. “Like the fact that sometimes your statements have differed from one interview to the next, which is hard for us to reconcile, because it raises questions and it raises doubts in our minds.”
“I’ve given you the same statement every time.”
“Well, no. No, you haven’t. I don’t think you’re being entirely truthful with us. And the other thing is—and maybe you can answer this—you were considering the immunity documents. You know, a person who wasn’t involved in this wouldn’t have considered it. Do you agree?”
“They offered it to me down there. I mean—”
“But you considered it. And you told Dave that you actually did have something significant to say, but then when they wouldn’t give you the immunity you wanted, you didn’t say it. So there’s something you’re not—”
“The only thing, the significant thing I said was, I saw two girls being put in a car.”
“But you said that before the immunity documents,” said Katie.
She was right. He had. He retreated again to blanket denial. He knew nothing. He was holding back nothing.
Katie tried a different tack. Maybe the girls had not been kidnapped, she suggested. Maybe they had gone off willingly.
Karen mused, “It’s possible you were with the person who did it and maybe—”
“No,” Lloyd said, abruptly.
But Karen continued with the thought: “—you didn’t know that’s what they were going to do?”
“No. I wasn’t with nobody.” He said he wanted a new immunity agreement, which had the effect of undermining what he’d just said—if he had been by himself and had nothing more to offer, then why seek broader immunity?
Katie shifted gears again. She commiserated with Lloyd, suggesting that Mark Janney’s veiled threat to release Lloyd’s name to the press had been heavy-handed.
“I thought he was a little strong,” she said. “I didn’t think that was fair.” (This comment, too, would later haunt Pete Feeney, who had to guard against anyone overstepping the state’s strict interrogation guidelines. Katie was admitting that Mark had threatened Lloyd.) Then she effectively repeated the same threat, only phrasing it as a show of sympathy: “If they do put that information out there to get leads, that might be detrimental to you. That’s why I’m concerned. I don’t want people to paint you as a monster.”
“I’ve already been painted as a monster with my family.”
“I don’t think you’re a monster,” offered Karen.
“I mean with my mom and my niece and my sisters. I’m considered the monster of the family now.”
Lloyd complained that his sister and niece had stopped visiting him.
“That’s something that can be rectified,” said Karen.
“I think there was a good person at the mall that day who saw something that he didn’t like. Would you have stepped in?” Katie asked. “Because I’m wondering if maybe you tried to step in and that’s how you got hemmed up in all this? Because I think you’re a good guy.”
“What did I tell you?” said Lloyd.
Katie ran with this. What if Lloyd saw something bad happening and tried to step in and save the girls?
“If that’s the case,” she said, “you need to tell us so we can fix the situation with your family. We’re the two girls who can advocate for that.” She rephrased this idea as Lloyd listened intently. “You’re not shaking your head, so I know I’m onto something,” she said.
Lloyd laughed.
“I’m listening to you,” he said.
So Katie continued this line of reasoning. After all, Lloyd was just “a kid” back then. He lacked the confidence he would have today. Karen suggested that Lloyd might have found himself caught up in something bad and panicked.
“I want to believe the rapport you and I established,” said Katie. “I want to believe that I am not a fool, that I should go back to Police 101 because I’ve just been had. I believe there’s a reason and that it’s in there somewhere. I believe wholeheartedly in that.”
The women worked him every which way. They told him how smart he was. What a good guy he was. They said they understood his fears, and his need to protect himself. But both told him that they now knew he had been involved. As they went on, Lloyd grew increasingly irate, so Katie zeroed in on that.
“Prior to Karen coming in, you and I had a very pleasant exchange. Your whole demeanor and body language and eye contact has changed.”
“Because I’m tired! I’ve been working all night long. I’ve had two hours of sleep.”
“You’re getting a little pissed off, which I get,” said Katie. “I mean, I don’t feel like this is the same person I’ve been in here talking to. So it’s easy for you to change demeanor. I mean, am I an asshole for thinking you are a good guy?”
“No, I’m still a good guy,” said Lloyd, calming down. “I’m just getting tired. I’ve been sitting here in the same spot for, what? Four hours?”
It went on. At one point Lloyd said “My mind’s dropped down, whatever. You know? I’d be happy to tell you something I knew, but I don’t. Maybe I ought to start seeing a psychiatrist here.”
Then Lloyd accused Katie of fudging the test results. She got angry, or feigned anger. There was no separating the fake from the real; Katie was playing a role, and as with anyone good at it, the role had begun to play her.
“I believe you saw him take those girls away, and I know that you know him,” she said, referring to Mileski. She told him she believed he panicked when he realized that what Mileski was doing was “fucked up” and left. “Maybe that’s where the guilt comes from. Maybe that’s where the test [result] comes from. If there’s something locked in there—and you’re not saying unequivocally no—something could be locked in. Is it possible you have seen them again since then?”
“I can’t say yes or no on that,” said Lloyd—a curious answer. “You can interpret it any way you want.”
“I’m not interpreting,” protested Katie.
“No, I’m saying you can interpret it any way you want with your college education, your background. All I can say is, I know nothing about it.”
“No! What you just said is, you can’t say yes or no.”
“Yeah, but I can’t!” Lloyd complained, loudly.
“Again, that’s like being KIND OF PREGNANT!” Katie matched Lloyd’s raised volume. “It’s not an answer! It has nothing to do with my college education. You’re probably smarter than me, to be honest with you, because you’ve lived a lot of life, okay? The bottom line is, it can’t be both ways. I’m asking you is there a possibility that you have seen those girls?”
“Why are you raising your voice?” he asked.
“Because you’re raising your voice at me, and you know why? Because I went out and I stuck up for you, and I look like a stupid fuck right now because I believed in you and I thought you were being honest!”
“I thought I was being honest, too! I think you all did something to that test, took it out and did something to it!”
“That’s absurd,” she said. “That’s absurd!”
Lloyd said she could have falsified the results if she wanted to. “That’s what you do. You can change anything on it.”
“I don’t even know how to sign on the damned thing. How am I going to switch something?”
“Well, that’s my opinion,” said Lloyd. “I thought we were having a good conversation and stuff like that, but when you started getting mad I started getting mad.”
“No,” said Katie. “You got mad first. I’m just defending myself.” Katie stepped out of the room to cool off.
Karen tried to calm Lloyd and then offered him a way out of the standoff. He listened intently.
“I actually think you are still the nice person we thought you were,” she said. “I don’t think you are the person who would hurt those girls. I don’t think that’s what happened. I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t think that you kidnapped those girls to do something bad. I think those girls went with you guys, whoever was involved, and I think something went wrong, and you got scared. And that’s completely understandable, because you were a kid back then. The people that you were with should have done better by you and not gotten you involved with something like this to begin with. But here we are now. We know that you are involved. I just want to know how involved you were. That’s it, Lloyd. You are not going to convince me that you were not involved. And it’s not just a matter of the test. We can disregard that test.”
He knew more than he was saying.
“You want to say,” Karen continued, “but you’re afraid [of] what is going to happen if you do. Were you just on the sidelines or did somebody make you do something you didn’t want to do? It’s not your fault that something happened that day.”
“I can’t tell you something that—”
“It’s the person who orchestrated this whole thing. Right? Do you agree? They’re the ones who should take the responsibility, right?”
“Whoever did something to them, yeah. But I didn’t do anything.”
“Let’s say there were a couple of people involved. Do you think everybody is equally responsible?”
“I can’t say.”
But Lloyd seemed drawn to this line of reasoning. Karen was offering him a way to admit the crime without taking responsibility. Katie returned as Karen said, “My question is, you had the person who made the plan, and that person says, ‘Hey, come on over.’ Then this other person [Lloyd] shows up, and it’s like, holy shit! They did something bad with those girls. Do you think that other person [Lloyd] is responsible?”
“Yeah! But I don’t think it’s his fault. And it wasn’t me!”
“It’s just that you know something that you’re not telling us, and that’s why we’re having a conflict,” she said. “I know Katie’s pissed off and she’s disappointed because she felt like she gave you the benefit of the doubt, and she feels like it’s making her look bad, and I’m still here telling you that I’m still giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
“And I’m sorry it’s making you … that you’re fighting with that, because I have been honest with you. I don’t know why I didn’t pass that test. I was relaxed, comfortable, and everything like that.”
“Well, it’s offensive for you to think that we are tricking you,” said Katie.
“Well, you can change anything on a computer.”
“Do you really, honestly—”
“I do! You’re a cop!”
“Does that make me a bad person?”
“No! No! But I’m just saying.”
“You’ve never had a good experience with a cop?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve never had an officer offer to help me on anything. Even when I asked.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s not y’all’s fault.”
“Have I been obnoxious or rude or tried to trick you in any way?”
“No.”
“This test wasn’t a trick.”
“It’s my opinion, that’s all,” he said. “I apologize and all that, but that’s just my opinion.”
Karen said the state’s attorney would be disbarred if he lied to him. She defended Dave’s trustworthiness—they could all see that Lloyd liked Dave and trusted him. Katie defended herself.
“You don’t trust police,” she said. “I get it. I don’t care. I mean, I don’t take it personally. Honestly, Lloyd, if I were in your same situation, I’d be doing the same thing. If I had a life of shit with cops—and Karen and I have seen enough shit cops in our career, and they exist—so I can completely believe you. Cops that make me disgraced to be a part of the same fraternal order as them because they suck. I get it. I’m not a sucky person. Karen is not a sucky person.”
“And I don’t think you are,” said Lloyd.
“And I wouldn’t be a part of anything that would make me lose sleep. Tricking somebody. This is a cat-and-mouse game. Let’s be honest. But you’ve got to play clean, and you’ve got to play fair, and telling somebody that they are bullshit is not in my DNA.”
Katie made a plea. She said she had formed a high opinion of Lloyd, and that it would be dashed if he didn’t help them. “As a mom, and I would certainly hope you would feel the same, as a father, those girls, they deserve to be commemorated and properly buried. Their parents deserve to have some peace, and for their girls to finally rest in peace. The bottom line is, that’s what we want. That’s what I want. I don’t care, even if you did it, you’ve done your time in here. You’ve been in hell. I don’t care about that stuff. I care for me, as a mom, as a cop near the end of my career, that those girls get what they deserve. What happened happened, and we can’t go back. We can only move forward and change how we’re gonna handle the situation. I don’t know how I would feel if I find out that later, once this thing erupts and the information’s out there, if you don’t take advantage of this opportunity.”
“If I could give it to them, I would!” said Lloyd, exasperated. “I’m sorry!
But then, after all these hours of denial, after all the back-and-forth without an inch given, abruptly there came a break. Lloyd suggested that if he were given some further assurance of immunity, his answers might be different.
Katie asked, “If they got a public defender for you that sat at this table with our state’s attorney, and one of these guys made you a deal that was happy to you, do you think you would remember something? Tell me the truth.”
“Honestly, I can’t say yes or not to that,” said Lloyd.
If they set all that up and came back tomorrow, Katie asked, would he have something helpful?
“I can’t say yes and I can’t say no.”
“But it’s possible?”
“Anything is possible.”
And that appeared to be that. After hours of grilling, the pretest chatter, the test itself, the hammering at Lloyd after he’d failed, all of it had brought them back around to the beginning. The detectives felt played.
Katie apologized for losing her temper. She said it was the Irish in her. Karen reassured Lloyd, “We’re still cool.”
Dave entered and said he had been listening outside the door. He endorsed the idea of arranging a meeting for Lloyd with a lawyer. He thought they could hold off releasing Lloyd’s name to the press.
“I’m going to have to dig really deep down and ask for some favors,” he said. He would find Lloyd a Delaware public defender, who could meet with him privately before they spoke again. It might take time. “But the flip side of that is, I don’t want to go through all that hassle and make this work if we’re not going to gain anything additional.”
Lloyd suddenly turned to Katie and Karen. “Could you two step out for a minute?”
“Absolutely,” said Katie. She and Karen left and closed the door behind them.
“I’m going to give you something, Dave, and you think about this,” he said. “Okay? I wasn’t involved.”
“Okay.”
“With the grabbing of the girls. The picture you showed me was the guy that did, that took the girls, and, yes, I used to get high with them and stuff like that. We took them to his house. I went over to the house. When I was getting ready to pull in I heard screams, a kid. I got scared, and I looked in and everything like that. I seen men there. I ran. That’s why I went back to the mall.”
“Right,” said Dave. He didn’t show it, but he was startled. He didn’t know what to make of this. Lloyd had just changed his story in a very significant way. He was now admitting that he was involved with Mileski and with the kidnapping. Mileski was no longer just a man who had given him a few rides; they had hung out, smoked dope together. Then there was this: “We took them to his house.” This may have been a slip, but it was a revealing one. He had placed himself with the kidnappers. Then he had backtracked—“I went over to the house,” retreating quickly to his position as witness. Had he helped take the girls to the house, or had he gone back later, heard screams, and run? Which was it? Dave held off asking.
“What happened after that I can’t tell you,” said Lloyd. “This is between you and me right now.”
“Yes, but I have to be able to know that’s the truth, between me and you.”
“It is.”
Dave asked what the man’s name was, the one who took the girls.
“I want to go with Manny,” said Lloyd. “Manning or something like that.”
“Okay. Do you remember where it was that he lived?”
“See, that’s the thing, I can’t.”
Dave asked him to describe what he remembered.
“It had a fence around it, one of those small little wire fences.”
“Okay.”
“It had a basement in the bottom.”
“Okay. What was in the basement?”
Lloyd said that there was a mattress. He said he and others used to party in that basement.
“Helen would go over once in a while with me, and she wasn’t involved in anything. She just sat around. She had a couple of drinks, and that’s it. We’d leave.”
“Do you remember where the house is located?”
“I want to say that it was in Wheaton,” said Lloyd. He said he would recognize the house if he was driven past it. He described a house with a basement that opened to a backyard. They had to go around the house to let themselves in. He described a small bar in the basement, a couch, some chairs, the mattress in a separate back room, a TV, and a stereo.
Dave pressed for more. Lloyd described the cars he saw at the house in general terms. “Like I said, it’s been a long time. I mean, she [Katie] kind of got me angry and shit.”
“Oh yeah,” said Dave, sympathizing.
“You know, I apologize for yelling and shit.”
“You need not apologize.”
They talked further. Lloyd tossed out several vaguely remembered first names, then he added something more. He spoke hurriedly, as if he were in a rush to get the memory out.
“When I went over there the next day, the girls were still there, and they were … it looked like they were grown up, you know? And I heard her scream, and I looked in and I got scared. I wasn’t going in there. I wasn’t getting involved. I saw the girl. I knew that was the girls that he picked up at the mall, and I took—”
“Do you remember what they looked like? What they were wearing or anything?”
“They were wearing nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. They were drugged up. You could tell they were drugged up because they were lying there like that, you know? I mean, I looked in. When I heard the scream, I did look in, and it was him and two other people in there.”
“You can’t remember who they were?”
“I didn’t see their faces. I just saw them body parts, you know. I know there was two males because they were screwing the girls, and I didn’t see her face. That’s why I got scared and ran but can’t tell you more.”
Lloyd refused to say more. He pleaded memory loss. He said he had run back to Helen’s house afterward and hadn’t even told her what he’d seen. “It just scared me,” he said. “I got high. I went back to the mall and told a security guard of what I saw in the mall, and that was it. I didn’t tell anybody. I wasn’t protecting anybody or anything. I was a scared kid.”
“Right.”
“You know? And I’m still scared. I’m fifty-seven years old and I’m still scared. I’m scared that I’m gonna get charged with something.”
Dave had not been in the room when Karen had spun her alternative scenario for Lloyd, suggesting that he had, perhaps, gotten drawn into something by older men without realizing what they intended. He was running with it now. “Something went wrong, and you got scared,” she had said. Clearly, flunking the lie detector test had shaken him. The detectives now had something on him. If he were searching for an escape route, he had seized upon exactly the one Karen had offered—only to steer himself straight into a kidnapping charge.
Dave pushed him harder. He went over the impossible coincidence of his just happening to be in the mall when the girls were abducted and then just happening to visit the very house where the girls had been taken.
“See, that looks bad,” he said.
“Yeah. Oh, I understand, but I didn’t go to the house until the next day.” Then he said that he was afraid that the men who had taken the girls, and who had seen him at the window, were going to come after him and Helen and kill them and their baby—which had not yet been born. He repeated that he couldn’t remember who they were.
He had nothing more. The session had lasted all afternoon. Lloyd once more had held out until exhausted and then had abruptly, voluntarily, thrown out something new, something that contradicted much of what he’d said before, and something that far more directly implicated him. And the weird thing? He didn’t seem to realize it.
Those final five minutes were huge. They now had a case against Lloyd Welch, and, again, it was from his own mouth.