Lloyd Welch and Helen Craver
A bloody duffel bag, a bonfire, family phone calls from Maryland to Virginia linking Lloyd to the Lyon sisters—the mystery now had a terrible ending. This was not what the squad had been looking for when they zeroed in on the Welch clan, but it was huge. Amid all the man-hours and expertise and effort over the latter half of 2014, the Bedford sheriff’s office, off on a tangent, had found powerful new evidence.
Lloyd had admitted being present when the girls were abducted, and now others had placed him squarely at the story’s end, the disposal of bodies, or of at least one. The squad had always been coy with Lloyd about what they knew, mostly because they knew so little. Now, encountering him again early in 2015, they at last had something solid he had not told them.
Little had reached Lloyd about the extensive effort that had taken place over the previous half year. Teams of expert consultants had surveyed the wooded landscape of Taylor’s Mountain on foot and from the air. Parts of it had been dug up and the soil sifted, work that continued. A persistent search had been made for a car that fit the description of the one used to deliver the duffel bags. If it had carried a bag as bloody as the one described, there might still be traces of the girls’ DNA inside. It was not found. The location of the bonfire had been fixed, and the dirt there scooped out and sifted through screens. A fragment of charred human bone was found, along with scraps of singed fabric that might have been worn by the girls or come from the bags described by Connie and Henry. Melted fragments of beads were found that might have matched a necklace Kate had worn, and a piece of wire recovered might have matched the frame of Sheila’s glasses. None of these items tested out convincingly. No DNA could be recovered from the bone. As with so many other leads in this case, these bits were suggestive but inconclusive. There was nothing distinctive enough to be considered evidence. In the end, they just confirmed that when you looked hard enough you found things that resembled what you were looking for.
This was true of everything except Connie and Henry. Here were two eyewitnesses to what appeared to be the story’s bloody end, whose testimonies jibed, and who had offered them independently. Oddly, their reluctance to tell the full story augmented their credibility. Real evidence.
By January, Lloyd was back in the general prison population. Dressed again in white denim, he looked fitter and better groomed. The gray hair on the sides of his head had been trimmed so short he looked bald, and his white goatee was clipped close to his chin. He was again taken to the upstairs interview room at Dover police headquarters early in the morning. Dave came just before ten, carrying a manila folder and wearing a neatly pressed blue sweatshirt. They had not seen each other in six months.
“What’s happening, stranger?” he greeted Lloyd.
“Well, look who it is!”
Dave set a cup of coffee on the table before Lloyd and then walked back out to ask a guard to remove the handcuffs and chains. When they shook hands, Dave grasped Lloyd’s arm like an old friend. He promised that this time the coffee was hot, “black and all,” just the way Lloyd liked it.
“What have you been up to?” Dave asked. “I see you’re not in the orange.”
“No, I’m surviving.”
“Is it bad in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“I mean, I’ve got my status back and everything, but I hate all this mouth from these guys. Shit comes on TV. They see it in the papers and shit like that. ‘Oh yeah, that’s that motherfucker; he’s the one who did it,’ you know? So I keep my door shut and stay to myself.”
He said he’d had a few “little threats” but no attacks. There had been grumblings when stories appeared about the grand jury and the dig on Taylor’s Mountain. He knew that his uncle Dick had been named as a person of interest in October and that in December his aunt Pat had been indicted. That had all been reported on TV.
Dave told him that he looked good.
“I’m tryin’ to stay positive,” said Lloyd.
“I think we’re at a good spot,” said the detective. “I really do. And that’s why we came back. It has been six or seven months. We wanted to talk. We wanted to share with you all of the things—that day we left here, every day since then, I kid you not, including weekends and nights, we’ve been working on this thing. And I brought a lot of stuff to share with you. I’ve got a lot of questions for you. There are no charges. I know that’s always a concern when we meet.”
“Right.”
Dave repeated this a few more times. He wanted to make sure Lloyd didn’t spook. He called the legal problems encountered by Dick and Pat “unfortunate,” and reinforced the idea that all of Lloyd’s relatives were out to get him. Pat had been caught lying, although about what Lloyd was unclear.
“Okay. I’m here as a sex offender. I understand that. So, yeah, they’re going to say, ‘He did it.’”
“There’s some things that we need to work out between us,” said Dave, “and I think this can be a good outcome, a real positive outcome.”
Lloyd suddenly made a point of saying that he had been only seventeen in March 1975. The age of majority in Maryland was eighteen. As a seventeen-year-old, he might be able to avoid being charged as an adult, but math was not one of Lloyd’s strengths. “I’m fifty-eight now,” he said. “I just turned fifty-eight in December, okay?” That much was true, but if he had turned fifty-eight in 2014, it meant he had turned eighteen in 1974.
Dave didn’t argue with him. He was focused on very specific things—Teddy, the duffel bags, and Uncle Dick. Teddy’s broken arms and the bloody duffel bags undermined two critical parts of Lloyd’s story. Teddy had almost certainly not been involved in the abduction, and Lloyd, who always said he had fled at the first sight of the girls being abused and had never returned, had in fact helped dispose of their remains. Rather than confront him outright, the detective was going to lead him to these contradictions step by step, without showing his hand. He started with Teddy.
“Do you remember when you guys were in the mall or the ride over or the ride back, however you remember it, do you remember if there’s anything wrong with him [Teddy], like, physically wrong with him?”
“Besides being gay?”
Lloyd got a good laugh over this.
“No. Well, other than that. Like, was he injured or anything like that, that might have prevented him from doing something? Was there physically something wrong with him that you could actually see?”
Lloyd, ever agile, offered, “I mean, he did have a limp. He kind of hunched over a little bit, but I didn’t see no injuries on him.”
“He claimed—and it was kind of hard to prove it—that he had two broken arms during that time period. So, we’re like, how can you prove it? We were able to go back and get hospital records, and then we were fortunate enough to get a picture of him.” Actually, Teddy had done these things himself.
“Humph!” Lloyd snorted emphatically. “Yeah, I heard about him being pushed off a building, but I didn’t see no cast on his hands or arms or anything like that, ’cause, I mean, he had a jacket on, so I didn’t really.”
“Right, but you would think you would have known. And I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt in any way.” Dave said that Teddy believed Lloyd had thrown him into the story for reasons of his own.
“Nah,” said Lloyd. “I didn’t throw him in. He was there that day. I’ll take a Bible and put it right there in front of me—like I said, I’m a Christian now—and he was there that day because he’s the one that offered me a ride home. He’s the one who said, ‘How you getting home?’ I said I was going to hitchhike home, and he said, ‘Well, we’ll give you a ride home.’”
Dave reminded Lloyd that this—along with his most recent account, from the July session—overlooked his earlier and oft-repeated insistence that Helen had been with him at the mall.
Lloyd didn’t miss a beat. “She was there for a while that day. But she left because she was going to her mom’s house, and I was gonna meet her back at the house, and she asked me to get some ice cream for her because she was pregnant. You know, she wanted to see her mom.”
This, once more, elided significant parts of Lloyd’s original story that could now be regarded only as completely false—getting on the bus with Helen, his remarking to her about the car he’d seen leaving with the girls, and so on. Lloyd made such edits to his story without hesitation or concern and with no apparent sense of how false it made him appear. Dave moved on. He asked Lloyd to talk about the couple’s carnival travels. Struck by how worried Lloyd apparently had been about Helen’s memory, Katie had come up with the idea of telling him that his old girlfriend had kept a journal. It wasn’t true, but Lloyd wouldn’t know that. They would confront Lloyd with some of the things they had gleaned from the wiretaps, presenting them as entries in Helen’s journal, which would give them more impact. Lloyd rarely pushed back for long against demonstrable truth. His slippery stories were built around the known facts.
Dave said, “And y’all did some things—and I’m not pointing fingers—it’s just that we went and talked to her current husband and she jotted a few things down that you all had done together. She made mention of a green station wagon and about how you broke into a house and stole a gun and a badge. It’s just things that we have read through her journal.”
Police records showed that Lloyd, during one of his youthful robberies, had stolen a police badge and in another had taken a green station wagon. Since the press conference, the squad had been contacted by other women who, as children, had been approached by a man at Wheaton Plaza in the months before the Lyon sisters disappeared. They said the man had flashed an official-looking badge. And the station wagon appeared in Lloyd’s stories, in the IBM man’s tip, and in the testimonies of Connie and Henry.
Lloyd looked mystified.
“Stole a gun and a badge? Stole a green station wagon?”
“No, she didn’t say you stole it, just that y’all were driving around in a green station wagon.”
Lloyd fell silent. Finally, he nodded and smiled broadly.
“That wasn’t a green station wagon, that was a SUV,” he said. It was green, but it had been a Jeep.
The detective asked again about the vehicle his uncle Dick had been driving when they left the mall. “It was definitely a station wagon? It couldn’t have been any other type of car that Dick had?”
“He had a couple of cars, but he was always driving a station wagon every time I saw him.”
Dave asked what kind of work his uncle Dick did. The squad had learned that he worked as a security guard but not at Wheaton Plaza. This might also explain the stories about a man with a badge.
“You are probably thinking to yourself, these are kind of weird questions because we have the whole background,” Dave explained. “We’ve got the beginning. I think we’ve got the end. We’re missing the middle.” Dave said Lloyd’s family, those who were still living, had “taken and built the circle around you, and they basically put you in the middle of it, and they’re pointing their fingers at you. You actually said that when we left here—’You’re gonna go back and talk to him [Dick], and he’s gonna say, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with this.’ And that’s what happened. And what they’ve done is, either through computers or phones, they’ve tried to develop the story, and we’re trying to discredit some of this.” In other words, We’re on your side. “Your entire family has made up this story and it all falls on you. And I said, ‘Well, wait a minute’—because there are people out there that have said, ‘Well, shit, let’s just let it all fall where it may’—and I said, ‘No, no, that’s not right. That’s not the right thing to do.’” Dave was suggesting that others—his colleagues or superiors—wanted to charge Lloyd based on what they had learned. As Lloyd’s champion, he was battling his hostile family and impatient prosecutors. “We’re not here because we want to lock the world up. We’re here for answers, and we’re not gonna get the answers if we shut the door.”
“Yeah,” Lloyd agreed.
“We’ve got to keep that door open. We’ve got to keep the communication going between us, because it’s obvious to me that your whole family knows. The whole family knows. Now, what they know and what their involvement is, it’s gonna be hard, but it’s got to come from you.”
“Well, see, the one thing is I can’t tell you who all’s involved and who all’s not involved because I really don’t know. All I know is, Dickie was driving the car, Teddy was there talkin’ to them girls.” Lloyd was not about to drop Teddy from his account. He said, “If you look at it, he wasn’t a bad-lookin’ kid back then.”
“Right. And neither were you.”
This startled Lloyd.
“I mean, you were a good-looking man. I’ve heard that from several people.”
Lloyd shrugged and laughed.
“We’ve got pictures of you in your younger years.”
Lloyd said that he didn’t flirt with other girls. He admitted eyeing little girls in the mall and talking to the Lyon sisters but said he had always been loyal to Helen. This was disturbing and revealing, and Lloyd seemed unaware of what it implied. It had come up several times. Helen was a twenty-two-year-old woman, pregnant with his child. He was eighteen. The girls in the mall he admitted ogling had been prepubescent, and yet, in Lloyd’s view—today as well as then—they were already sexual objects in the same way Helen was, potential rivals. He equated chatting with a grade-schooler with flirting or potentially cheating on Helen. But he was just warming up for his newest argument.
“One, how could I have gotten them out of the mall?” he asked. “How could I have gotten ’em away from the mall without those two girls screamin’ and kickin’? Now, what that boy [Teddy] said to them girls to get them to go outside, I have no idea.”
“You have to have wondered what happened,” said Dave. “Like, were they in Dick’s house for two days, a week, two weeks? Where did they end up? What did those clowns do with them? Was there more than Dick and Teddy having sex with them? ’Cause that’s pretty prevalent in your family. I mean, there’s no other way to put it.”
“Yeah.”
“It didn’t matter who you were or what you were, it just happened and it was accepted.”
“Right.”
Dave had taken the liberty of substituting Dick’s house for Leonard Kraisel’s. The logic in Lloyd’s original version of where the girls had been taken was grounded in Teddy’s relationship with the older man. The squad now knew that the relationship had not started until years later. If Dick had been driving the car, however, it was reasonable to assume that the destination basement would have been in his house, so Dave just went with it, and Lloyd didn’t dispute it.
The detective next began edging the conversation toward Taylor’s Mountain. Lloyd entered into another rambling account of his visit back to the mall to bear false witness—he said he still could not remember the actual police interview, recalling only that he had been “fucked up” and “scared.” When he’d returned from that, he decided to leave town.
“I said [to Helen], ‘We need to go, man.’ I told her what I knew and said we need to go. She said, ‘Where are we going to go?’”
“Where did y’all go?”
“Just traveling. South Carolina and Florida. I don’t remember all the other places we went. I always like warm weather.” They discussed various places Lloyd had visited or lived in over the years, and eventually Lloyd came around to mentioning Virginia.
“I went to Thaxton when I was a kid two or three times with Helen. We stayed there for a while because I really liked the area a lot.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Dave.
“It was beautiful. We’d stay for a while, and then me and Helen would leave. Last time I was there it was with Helen.”
“Do you remember about when it was?”
“Seventy-six, seventy-seven, somewhere around there. Seventy-eight.”
“How long did you stay when you were down there?”
“Couple weeks.”
“And who do you typically stay with when you go down?”
“We stayed at Artie’s. Right there at that big old house right up there on the mountain.”
“Is it possible that you and Helen showed up down in Thaxton right after this incident, just to get away from those family members and this crazy madness that was going on?” asked Dave. “Because you said you left. You had to get the hell out of there. Is it possible?”
“It could be. I mean, it’s possible we went there first. I don’t know.”
“It’s important. I want you to think about that. I ain’t saying you did anything wrong. I’m saying there may be some … the way people are trying to paint this is, ‘It was all him; he showed up, he did this; he did that.’ And I’m thinking the way this is gonna play out. It’s tough for me to gauge, so I need you to kind of interact with me a little bit about this.”
Lloyd learned here that his Virginia relatives had talked about his 1975 visit, and, true to form, he did not contradict real evidence.
“It’s a very strong possibility that we went there first,” he said. “We hitchhiked down there, stayed a week or two. Oh yeah. It’s a strong possibility.”
“You hitchhiked everywhere?”
“We hitchhiked everywhere.”
“How did you carry your shit?”
“Duffel bag.”
“Do you remember what the bag looked like?”
“Yeah, it was a green duffel bag. It was my old army duffel bag. That son of a bitch was packed, too. People go to pick that up to help throw it in the car, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God!’” This comment was telling, confirming Henry’s description of the bag as heavy, about seventy pounds.
“Who would normally pick you up?”
“Truck drivers. Christian people. Christian vans. You know, people like that. Just hippies. That’s what we were called back then, a hippie.”
“Where did y’all eat or lay your head down in between?”
Curiously, Lloyd said they slept “in the car.”
“How would you typically eat, use the bathroom, shower?”
“Restaurants. We’d eat at some of the restaurants. Some of the Christians, they would give us money to eat. We’d wash up in the bathrooms, pull into a gas station.”
“You didn’t have any pets or anything like that?”
“No.”
“No cats, no dogs, nothing?”
“No.”
So much for the two explanations Lloyd had given Henry and Connie for the blood on his bag—they did not carry or prepare food (the “ground beef” in Connie’s story) and did not travel with a dog.
“What some of the folks down there have said is that you and Helen show up with a big green duffel bag, the army bag, and there’s something in it.”
“Yeah, it was my clothes.”
“Was there something wrong with your clothes when you showed up down there?”
“Got rained on a couple of times, so they’d be soaking wet.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“They weren’t dirty, like mud-stained? Have any transmission fluid or antifreeze on it or anything of that nature?”
Lloyd said no. He said the clothes would start to smell after a while, need laundering.
“So there would be no reason that the bag would have been tossed in a fire?”
“None at all?”
“No. I kept that bag for a long time. Shit, me and Helen had that bag, damn, we had it when we went all the way down to Florida and my last daughter was born.”
“So Henry never destroyed that bag?”
“Hell no. Ain’t nobody ever destroyed it.”
“This is the type of stuff that has been put out there,” said Dave. “They’re pointing fingers. I think you know where I’m going with this.”
“I had bodies in there,” said Lloyd, grinning and laughing. “Come on!”
“That’s where they’re going with that.”
Lloyd leaned back and laughed heartily. “Oh, that’s a good one.”
“We can’t make this stuff up,” said Dave, humoring Lloyd. “I mean, this is the stuff that they’re testifying to.”
“Wow. So they’re saying that I killed those two girls.”
“I didn’t say you killed them.”
“Well, they’re saying that.”
“That you showed up down there.”
“With a duffel bag with Helen that had two bodies in it and threw ’em on the fire?”
Dave nodded.
“Come on. If he threw them in the fire and there was bodies in there, they’d stink like bodies.”
Dave said that Lloyd’s cousins had in fact described the smell: “Like burning rats.”
Lloyd shook his head. “Boy, that’s the best one I heard yet.”
Lloyd showed no alarm, but he must have felt cornered here. Dave told him the full story related by Connie and Henry, under oath. Lloyd saw how damaging this was.
“Wow,” he said.
This was going to require some major tinkering with his story, and Dave was there to help.
“I try to come in here with the best judgment,” the detective said. “I look at it as, okay, seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old boy at the time. You’re in the mall. You get back to Hyattsville. You see what you see. You’re part of the family. They did what they did. Now all of the sudden they put it on you, and who’s to say you knew what was in the bag? Who’s to say they didn’t put the bag in the trunk of the car, and Dick drove you and Helen down there and told you to take it and put it on the fire, with Henry and you not having any knowledge of what was in the bag? You see what I’m saying?”
He was showing Lloyd how to endorse the evidence without admitting he had willingly burned a body.
“They could have completely used you, as a nineteen-year-old kid, and it’s stuff that we need to clean up. I’m not sure what your involvement and role was, or was it just that you were played as you’re being played now, and that’s what we’re left with.”
Lloyd just nodded and grunted affirmatively as he listened. He wasn’t buying it.
“Well, when me and Helen went down there, nobody took us down there,” he said. “There was no bloody bag or bodies or anything like that. That bag did not weigh no seventy or eighty pounds. That bag probably wasn’t any more than twenty-five, thirty pounds. It had her clothes and my clothes in there, and that’s all. Oh, it had my razor and, you know, her little makeup [kit]. I’m telling you—and I’ve never been straight before with you until recently—I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. There was no bag with blood, bodies on the fire, and it was not our bag. If there was, that’s them, not me.”
If the subject matter had not been so grave, it would have been laughable. Lloyd was invoking past lies to sell his current probity: You can trust me now because I admit I was lying then.
“Do you remember Dick coming down during that period of time?” he asked. “How can we explain this bag?”
“I do remember me and Helen being woked up at night, hearing a car pull up, but I didn’t get out of bed or anything like that. I don’t know who it was.”
“Do you remember if there was a fire going, like, for a couple of days during that time you were ‘woke up’?”
“Could have been. I mean it was dark out. It was like one or two in the morning.” Lloyd told him where on the property the fire would have been. He said he thought they were probably just burning brush.
Dave told him about Henry’s memory of a phone call to his mother from Lloyd’s father, and of Lee’s asking whether the two girls were there.
“My dad called?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a crock of shit.”
“I’m just telling you what they—”
“Yeah.” Lloyd shook his head.
“I mean, I can’t make this shit up,” said Dave.
“Boy, I tell you, they’re really trying to bury me, ain’t they?”
“Oh yeah. And that’s what I mean, why when I came in here I said these are gonna be some hard questions and hard answers. Because this is what people have come up with. And there’s gotta be a way we can undo this, because not only have they testified, but about two weeks ago in a certain area on this property, we found the fire and we found what we believe were human remains that were burned.”
“You found the fire? Wow.” Lloyd began laughing quietly to himself.
“I mean we can’t undo the fact that you were at the mall, you saw the girls.”
“Yeah, I admitted to that.”
“But we haven’t made it to the point where they’re in Virginia and they’re being burned. So, somewhere in between, someone in this family took those girls down to Bedford and burned them.”
“What car did I drive?” Lloyd asked.
“That’s—”
“I was seventeen years old.” Lloyd explained that he didn’t own a car at the time and that whenever he had stolen a car he’d been caught immediately. “And my dad called down there and said me and Helen’s coming down there?”
Dave said these were things they had been told.
Lloyd again denied it, but the detective defended the story.
“These two [Connie and Henry] came up with this story independent of each other. They hate each other. They haven’t talked in years. There’s a hatred to the point where they had to be separated in the courtroom. That’s how bad they hated. This all has to do with money. Property, wills … it’s a dispute. Someone had to have showed up down there for them both to say the same thing, and I’m not saying it was you.” Connie and Henry, of course, had said it was Lloyd. “So, who else would have had access to a green duffel bag? Help me out here. Who in your opinion would have taken this thing? Because I think it’s unrealistic to think, it’s almost impossible to think, and I’m just saying this hypothetically, that you killed one or two of those girls, put them in a bag to where they started to decompose with blood leaching out of them—because that’s what they described—that you can do this on the side of the road and get into somebody’s car with that smell. There’s no way.”
“There’s no way possible,” Lloyd agreed. “No.”
So long as he adhered to his hitchhiking story, it kept him well removed from a bag stuffed with decomposing body parts. He now suggested that perhaps Teddy had concocted this story and fed it to Connie and Henry. Dave showed him pictures of cars, and Lloyd picked out a station wagon that his uncle Dickie drove. “That was, like, his baby,” he said. He was always washing it, keeping it clean. He said the car was more of a yellow color than green.
They took a lunch break, and when Dave returned he got Lloyd to walk through the events of that day at the mall once more. Lloyd repeated his most recent version of the story: leaving the mall with Dick, Teddy, and the girls, the younger girl crying softly in the back seat; getting out at the convenience store to get ice cream for Helen; going back to Dick’s house (he had smoothly incorporated Dave’s version of where the girls had been taken); seeing his uncle raping one of the girls; going to the mall to give his false statement; and then leaving for Virginia. Once he and Helen were there, after hitchhiking down, someone arrived in a car, waking him up. He didn’t know who it was. He said he heard a man and a woman outside in conversation.
Lloyd said the bonfire had been burning when they got there and was still burning when they went to bed. He also said he had been “scared shitless” when he left for Virginia.
“I mean, I’ve seen Dick mad before. You know? I’ve seen him mad. And I didn’t want to be nowhere around in case he knew that I actually did see him on top of this girl. You know?”
“Do you think there’s any way that Dick or somebody could have brought down one or two? One was burned and maybe the other one was still left alive and somebody else down there did something to them?”
“I can’t say. I don’t know. I mean, well, possible. I last saw them at his house and that was the last time I saw him. I really didn’t know what was going on. I mean, I put two and two together a little bit here, but I didn’t think anyone was gonna be hurt, that they were gonna be hurt or anything like that.”
“Well, tell me what you put together. It’s important to try to figure out how this thing kind of—”
“I just kind of figured, why would my uncle, when he’s got a nice-lookin’ wife, be with a young girl? I don’t know. Maybe he’s just trying to live his youth or whatever. You know? I guess I didn’t hear right in my mind because at that time, I wasn’t thinking about molesting any girls or anything like that. That didn’t happen until years later, and I don’t know why that happened. I guess whatever snapped. I just thought it was kind of strange that he was with one of them, and she wasn’t screaming or anything like that, so I couldn’t say if it was mutual at the time or if he was forcing himself and just wore her out or what.”
“What if he choked her out?”
“That could have been. I mean, her eyes were closed. She wasn’t looking at me or anything like that. Her eyes were closed, so I don’t know if he had her drugged up, you know, or what. I didn’t see the other girl, so I didn’t know where she was at.”
“Probably beat her with something,” said Dave.
“And she was the one in the bag, unfortunately,” said Dave, speculating.
“Like I said, I got scared shitless and I left. Didn’t want no part of it, and to this day I still don’t want no part of it. I mean, if I actually had to get up on the stand and testify what I saw to prove my innocence, I would do it. Right in front of him.”
“Yeah, I mean, look what they’ve done to you.”
Lloyd continued to assert his innocence. “Even if you offered me freedom and charges dropped, I still couldn’t tell you what happened to those girls and where they’re at. Because I had no part in it. I didn’t touch them. I didn’t walk them out of the mall. I didn’t do none of that.”
Dave now returned to Helen’s journal, Katie’s fiction.
“There was some stuff in there, Lloyd, but she’s not here to explain it. There was stuff in there about the station wagon with the seats laid back. There was stuff in there about you hurting kids and she felt bad about it. So, you read it for what it is. It could have been out of frustration.”
“I believe it was,” said Lloyd.
“Or there is truth to it. If someone would just stand up and say, ‘Look, this is what the fuck happened!’” Dave banged his hand on the desk. “Then we could go back and figure it out, but that’s not what’s going on. They’re giving these little pieces because they want to remove themselves,” which was, of course, exactly what Lloyd was doing. Dave asked him to explain what he thought had happened.
“I think Uncle Dick killed them. I honestly do. Out of frustration, anger, or whatever, you know? Maybe they didn’t do what he wanted them to do, and he killed them.”
“How long do you think that they were alive?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t say if he got rid of them that day that I saw them, the next day. I know my dad used to go over there a lot.”
“And, see, that’s the stuff that we need to know, because they’re testifying that he’s the one that called Lizzie.”
“He probably did,” said Lloyd, accepting what, minutes earlier, he had dismissed as “a crock of shit.”
Lloyd was distinctly uncomfortable. He no doubt could feel the probe closing in, and he was still evading, but for once he seemed unsure of his next move.
After four hours, Dave left and Katie stepped in. She buttered Lloyd up at length, going on about how much better a person he was than the rest of his family, how much more cooperative he was. Then she pleaded with him to help himself by helping them. They were on his side!
Lloyd listened politely and held fast.
Mark joined them. He sat in a chair alongside Lloyd, facing him, and for a while he just listened to Katie’s efforts. Then he started showing Lloyd photos of the materials found at the burn site. The evidence, he said, corroborated the stories his cousins had told.
“We just want the truth,” said Katie. “None of us want to keep doing this.”
That much was true. The investigation had taken over her life to such an extent that it was causing problems at home. She had left off working on child-abuse cases because they were emotionally exhausting, only to be drawn into the worst case of her career. It was consuming her, stealing part of her soul. She had begun working with a therapist to deal with it. She hadn’t told the department about that; she was paying for the therapy herself. Her physical health had suffered. She blamed it on the long hours and the stress. As a mother, she looked at Mary Lyon and could not imagine being in her place. But she took pains not to let any of this show, especially to her colleagues. Before Lloyd, everything she did and said was a performance.
“Look, this is a race,” she told him. “We’ve got all these people that have something to lose at this point. Whoever gets over the finish line first, meaning whoever’s gonna come and just break and tell us the truth first, is the one that is in the best position. Everybody is starting to crumble.”
Lloyd said he knew nothing more.
Then Mark used a different approach, something they had not tried. He had catalogued Lloyd’s lies. The list was nothing short of astonishing.
“I would ask you to think, as I say this, put yourself in a position of a reasonable person. You’re a reasonable guy. But if you are a reasonable person listening to this case, what would you think when I get to the end?”
He then reviewed the list, item by item. Lloyd kept trying to interrupt, but Mark wouldn’t let him. It was extensive. It started with the original 1975 story, which Lloyd had admitted at the time was mostly a lie. Then there was one he’d made up in his first conversation with Dave. “You say, ‘I was never at Wheaton Plaza. I never talked to any police. I don’t remember any of that.’”
“No, I said I was there that day.”
“No, you initially said that you weren’t.”
Then there was the failed polygraph administered by Katie. Then it was telling Dave that the kidnappers were Teddy and the older man he lived with. When it was pointed out that Teddy had been just eleven, Mark continued, “you finally come around and say, ‘Okay, it was Dick that was with us. Dick was driving the car.’”
Then Mark reminded Lloyd that he had said he thought the girls had been raped, killed, and burned.
“Do you remember saying that?”
“I didn’t say raped and burned.”
“You did.”
“I said raped and killed.”
“You said they were probably raped and burned.”
“No, I didn’t. No.”
“Lloyd, I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not going to.”
“Okay. So, when are you all going to charge me?”
“Just hear me out.” Mark then explained how their investigation in Virginia confirmed, in fact, that at least one body had been burned.
“Now, again, reasonable person, Lloyd. Two people who haven’t talked to each other in two years who get hit up cold by the police and come up with those kind of details on the same story?”
“I’ll say it again, when are you charging me?” asked Lloyd, who was growing increasingly agitated. He sat with his arms folded, coiled.
Mark went on, “And now all of the sudden we find human bones in that same location? In addition to those bones, we find material consistent with a green army duffel bag. We find this piece of wire”—he pointed to a photo on a sheaf of paper on the desk—“which is consistent with the wire that was in that girl’s wire-framed glasses. We find these beads that are melted together, and we know that one of the girls was wearing a beaded necklace. We find this button from a pair of pants that are the same kind of pants that one of the girls was wearing.” In fact, Mark was deliberately stretching the truth here. None of these scraps could be linked to a duffel bag or to what Sheila or Kate had worn, but Lloyd didn’t need to know that. “So we’ve got a problem here, Lloyd.”
“Your problem is that I didn’t do nothing to those girls.”
“Lloyd, you can explain away each little piece, but when you have to explain away everything, what’s the reasonable person [going to] think?”
“Well, you all think I did it. I mean, let’s be for real.”
Mark said he knew that Lloyd left the mall with the girls, and also that he had been on the mountain at the same time they had been tossed into the fire.
“Now, what happened in between is what I’m hoping you can help us figure out, because those two things are fact.”
Lloyd now offered, at last, something new. He said his trip to Bedford with Helen was prompted by his fear of his uncle Dick.
“He knew that I knew that he had them,” said Lloyd.
“If you are so scared and so upset, why did you go back to the mall and risk being put right in the middle of it?” asked Katie.
“I had a little bit of conscience, a little concern.”
“But then you misled them.”
Lloyd nodded. She was right; this made no sense. If he were concerned about the girls, why lie to the police?
“Every time we jump a little hurdle with you, your face slams in the mud,” she said.
“I felt that if I gave a lie that maybe it would eventually come out,” Lloyd explained, unconvincingly.
“But how does that ease your conscience?” asked Mark. “By putting the police on the wrong trail? It makes it worse!”
“I don’t know. I was a druggie back then. I was an alcoholic. And I’ve told you all that I can tell you. I’m gonna say it for the last time, charge me. I’ll get a lawyer, go from there. If not, I did not do nothin’ to those girls. I don’t want to be charged for something I didn’t do.”
“Then help us sort it out and help us figure out who did what.”
Lloyd was fed up.
“Okay. I’m on state property,” he said. He stood abruptly, walked to the door, opened it, and spoke to the guard in the hallway. “I’m ready to go, sir. This conversation is over with.” Mark leaned back in his chair and grimaced. Then he and Katie stood and started gathering their papers.
“Oh, that’s unfortunate, Lloyd,” said Katie.
But Lloyd abruptly closed the door and returned to his seat. He was in too deep to walk out. Katie worked to salvage the situation.
“We’re sitting here trying to give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “The last thing we want to do is pin this on somebody who didn’t do it.”
Katie sometimes tried to simply overwhelm Lloyd. She would start talking, throwing out ideas, her words flowing in great improvisational gusts, easing from one concept to the next, alternately flattering, reasoning, bargaining, confronting, empathizing. Mark called it her superpower; he joked that sometimes suspects would confess just to shut her up. Katie turned it on full bore now. She invoked Lloyd’s children, who, she said, wanted this all to be over. She talked about mistakes she had made in her own life. She was somebody who knew mistakes. Life, she said, was about learning and moving on …
She was still at it when the session passed the six-hour mark. It was a magnificent torrent of cajolery, all of it delivered earnestly and with a straight face.
And finally, Lloyd, as he did at all these sessions, caved in. He sighed heavily, and, interrupting Katie’s monologue, which showed no signs of slowing down, he asked the question he always asked before offering something new.
“Okay. Let me ask you this question before—I didn’t mean to cut you off. If I sit here and tell you from day one what went down to day two, what’s gonna happen to me?”
Lloyd didn’t give the detectives time to respond. Apparently, as he listened to Katie, he had worked out how to modify his story.
“First of all, I didn’t kill ’em,” he said.
“Okay,” said Katie.
“I didn’t burn ’em.”
“Okay.”
“It was not my green bag. It was Lee’s bag out of his trunk.”
This was new. He had now brought his late father into the mix.
“Okay,” Lloyd said, “I did not do that. I can tell you who did.”
“Okay.”
“What’s gonna happen to me?”
“Well, why would anything happen to you?” Katie asked. “If you didn’t do the crime?”
“Because I was involved. I was at the mall.”
“You asked Dave the same question last time right before you told us about Dick, and I’m gonna give you the same answer that Dave gave you. We can’t answer that question for you until we know what your role was and if you were involved in killing them.”
“I wasn’t involved in killing them, and I wasn’t involved in raping them.”
“Okay.”
Lloyd still insisted that Teddy had lured the girls from the mall. The rest of his story was the same, too, but he revised his account of the car that arrived on Taylor’s Mountain early in the morning. He now said that he knew who was in it.
“Dickie came down,” he said. “It was about one, one thirty [in the morning]. There was somebody else in the car. I don’t know who else was in the car. There was a big ol’ fire going, and I seen Dickie and Henry grab a bag and walk over to the fire and throw it in. Me and Helen, after that, said it was time for us to book out, and we left. What was in that bag, to my mind, was the girls.”
“Both of them?”
“I don’t know if it was both of them or one of them. I honestly don’t know. All I know is, yes, me and Ted did pick them up [at Wheaton Plaza].”
“Tell us how that went down,” said Mark.
“Just asked them if they wanted to get high, and they said yeah.”
“Now, how did that happen?” Mark asked. “Did you approach them inside the mall first? Outside?”
“We saw ’em go in. We tried to catch them and ask ’em if they wanted to get high before they got all the way into the mall, but we didn’t get a chance to get to them, so I guess that’s why they saw me watching, because I was trying to see who they were hooking up with and where they were going. So I guess that’s why everybody said they saw me watching them. We were gonna party, that’s all, but I guess you could say in the long run, I got scared and I didn’t want any. I told Ted and them, I said I didn’t want anything to do with it. Dick did take us all back to his house. I did get out at the store, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I was scared.”
“Who set this up from the beginning?” Katie asked.
“Dick, I believe.”
“So you guys were at Dick’s house when this went down?”
“Yeah, he said he had some pot.”
“Okay, let me ask you this before I forget. Was he dressed in a certain way?”
“He had his security uniform on.”
“Dick did?”
“Yeah.”
This was plausible, both the uniform and the pitch about smoking pot. In 1975, marijuana was a craze. It had moved aggressively from black America and the fringe hippie subculture to white suburbia. Many youngsters, especially teenagers, were eager to try it. This new version of the story was believable in another way. Grabbing two girls had been carefully premeditated. In Lloyd’s earlier version, Teddy had just happened on the Lyon sisters. Dick sending Lloyd into the mall (Teddy’s involvement, despite what Lloyd said, was highly doubtful) to lure the girls made more sense, especially with what the team had learned about Welch men. Dick’s uniform also made sense.
“He said it would be easier,” explained Lloyd. “The girls would probably not be as scared.”
The uniform also would have made it less likely for a bystander to intervene if the girls had objected or tried to pull away.
“So, did you guys formulate this plan?” Katie asked. “How is this set up?”
“It took two days for them to talk me into going into this plan,” said Lloyd. “He [Dick] said, let’s go party with some young girls.”
“Okay.”
“You know?”
“And ‘party’ to you means he was gonna have sex with them probably.”
“Get high and shit like that. To me, back then, partying was gettin’ high, drinkin’, you know.”
“So that’s a way to buy you in, because you were part of that scene?”
“He just said, ‘Look, I’ll drive you up to the mall. I’ve got some pot. Just find a couple of girls that look like they might want to party or something like that, bring them on out, [we’ll] bring them back to my place, we’ll get high, we’ll have a little sex.’”
There were shopping centers closer to Dick’s house, but Lloyd said they chose Wheaton Plaza because it was farther away. It was less likely that they would be seen by anyone who knew them. Lloyd still insisted that Teddy was part of this plan and that he must have been wearing a coat or a jacket that covered his arms.
“He drops you guys off,” said Katie. “How long did it take you to find the girls? Convince the girls?”
“About an hour, hour and a half at the most. We went walking around. Like I said, we saw those two go in, and we said, ‘Hey, how about them two? They look like they might get high,’ or something like that. And then I guess you can say we followed them around, starin’ at them or whatever to see who they were hooking up with.”
“So the whole story about Helen is not true?” said Katie.
“Yeah. Helen wasn’t there.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, and the job thing. I was gonna go up there and put in applications, but I didn’t that day.”
“What do you say to the girls to get them to come out?”
“We asked them if they wanted to get high. If they liked to party. They didn’t say no. They didn’t say yeah. They didn’t say anything. They said, ‘I don’t know, let’s see.’”
“And they just follow you guys?”
“Well, they walked out with us.”
“And at some point, you’ve been very clear from day one that the little one starts crying. What makes her start crying?”
“I guess she got scared when she saw an older person in the car.”
“Does he say anything to them?”
“Alls he said was, ‘Don’t worry, you’re in good hands.’”
At that point Lloyd reverted to his old version of the story. He got in the back with Kate. Teddy and Dick sat in the front on either side of Sheila. They drove around, he said, for about two hours, which seemed inordinately long, but Katie let it pass. When he told Dick he wanted out, his uncle turned around and gave him a dirty look, “like, Don’t say anything.”
“So you know in your gut that shit ain’t right,” said Mark.
“Right.”
“Because this is a planned situation. Of course, they have no idea that they are going to be killed and burned.”
Lloyd said that when they were all still in the car, Dick made a comment about the girls, “Going to meet their Maker.”
“That’s one of the main reasons why I got scared and got out of the car.”
Lloyd said that when Dick showed up on Taylor’s Mountain more than a week later, he was driving the same station wagon—it was yellow according to Lloyd. After Dick and Henry threw the heavy bag onto the fire, his uncle drove away.
The detectives pushed for more, but Lloyd was finished changing his story for that day.
Katie thanked him. “I pray and I hope that this story that you told us is really true.”
“It is the truth.”
“It makes a lot of sense to us,” Katie said.
Dave came back in for a few minutes before the session ended. It had lasted almost seven hours. Lloyd was worried.
“I just wanna know what’s going to happen to me,” he said to Dave. “I mean, my involvement was helping to get the girls in the car, and that was it. I didn’t touch ’em. I didn’t rape ’em. Didn’t have sex with ’em. Didn’t kill ’em. Didn’t carry them down to Virginia. Didn’t do none of that. I was a scared-shitless little boy, you know?”
“Well, we’ll work through it,” Dave said, noncommittally.
Lloyd had now greatly strengthened the kidnapping case against himself. It had been planned. He had lured the girls with pot and led them away. He had driven off with them. Lloyd still had his immunity letter, but that wasn’t going to help. That had been contingent on his not having committed a crime.
And Lloyd knew it. In one of his last comments to Dave that day, he remarked that the letter “ain’t worth shit now.” He was right.