The Welch family property on Taylor’s Mountain Road
Cops beset poor Henry Parker. Increasingly frail and bent, rolling his oxygen tank to his front door, he groaned when he recognized the ones on his snowy porch on February 24, 2015. They had driven up in an unmarked pickup.
“I don’t know what’s goin’ on!” he exclaimed, before they’d said a word. “Y’all keep buggin’ me, man. I ain’t got nothin’ to say to you guys no more. I told you everything I can tell you.”
Henry’s condition had worsened in the cold months since his grand jury testimony. He was miserable and could feel his time slipping away—he would last only one more winter. He couldn’t sleep and could not take pills to help him sleep, because he feared, with his lung ailment, that in deep slumber he might stop breathing altogether.
“I’m traumatized with all this shit,” he said. “I’m thinkin’ about going to see a head doctor like my sister done. I mean, this is fuckin’ me up!”
Word had gotten back to Henry that one of the cops working on the Lyon case was a brother of the Lyon girls, which in his mind framed his ordeal—it was a family feud. The men visiting him, Virginia State Police agent Lee Willis, Sergeant Jon Wilks, and investigator Mike Mayhew, from the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office, assured him that they were local—their drawls made that much plain—and while it was true that Jay Lyon was a cop up in Montgomery County, Maryland, they assured Henry that he was nearing retirement and was not working on the case. Henry wasn’t buying it.
“I want you to leave,” he said.
“No, we’re not going to ask you any questions,” said one. “We’re gonna show you something. We want to show you what Lloyd’s been saying. Remember we told you that Lloyd was trying to throw you under the bus? Well, we’re gonna show you. We’re going to show you what he is saying so you can see it’s Lloyd, not us, making up a lot of shit. We know you think we’re lying our asses off to you, so we’re gonna show you we’re not bullshitting you.”
On a laptop, they played for Henry a piece of Lloyd’s January session, wherein he explains to Dave that it was Henry and Dick who threw the heavy bag onto the fire.
“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,” says Lloyd. “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.”
“‘To my mind’?” repeated Henry, scornfully. “He knows what was in the damn bag.”
“We know,” said Wilks. “We don’t believe a word he is saying. We believe it was him and you threw it on the fire. He’s puttin’ Dickie—he’s getting his picture plumb out of it. We know that.”
The detectives hoped that this might anger Henry enough to convince him to tell them more. They believed he knew more but understandably feared further implicating himself. If he heard Lloyd naming him, maybe he’d feel compelled to refute his cousin. But it didn’t work. Henry still said he thought the bag held a dead dog.
“I didn’t even see Dickie,” said Henry. “He [Lloyd] drove down in a car. I found out later that Dickie came down and took him back up to Maryland. Some girl was with him. He drug it [the bag] over from the car.”
The detectives explained that Lloyd had confessed to planning the abduction of the girls from the mall.
“So, he’s thrown himself into a chargeable offense,” said Willis. “Even though he has minimized his other part in it, he is saying he was part of the conspiracy to abduct these girls. He’s also saying other people helped him do it. And we have to believe somebody helped him do it. He couldn’t do two girls at the same time.”
They assured him again that they did not believe Lloyd. They were not looking to charge Henry with a crime.
“We are looking for you to give us some assistance on what’s up on that mountain,” said Wilks. “You have to know there was some girls in that bag, not a dog. You’re smarter than that.”
“But I don’t know.”
“But knowing what you know today—”
“I still don’t know no more about what was in it,” Henry said. “Anybody who sits there and opens their mouth can tell you anything.”
“Well, they can, but usually they don’t open their mouth and say they are guilty of a class-one felony that’s gonna get ’em fifteen to thirty years in the state penitentiary. You know what I mean? He’s acknowledged that part of it, which is the crazy thing.”
“We’ve the first part, and we’ve got this bullshit ending,” said Mayhew. “We’re trying to get you to help us sort out this bullshit ending.”
“I can’t tell you no more than I told you,” said Henry.
It was the same everywhere they went, in Virginia and Maryland. The Welch family had either lawyered up, shut up, or given—they said—all they could. The wiretaps were off, the grand jury proceedings at a standstill, the digs and lab tests winding down. The enormous effort had moved the case forward, but only by inches. It had provided a few awful glimpses of Sheila and Kate’s end.
There remained, again, only one fruitful avenue. The one person who always had more to say.
The day after the interview with Henry in Virginia, the Lyon squad visited Lloyd for the eighth time.
Dave burst cheerily into the gray interview room at Dover with coffee and a doughnut. In a departure, he was wearing a crisp blue dress shirt and boldly striped tie.
“I’m dressed up for you,” he said. “Look at me.”
“Yeah, what the hell’s that for?” asked Lloyd. He was still in his baggy prison whites, a black eyeglass case clipped to the front pocket. They bantered like old buddies, Lloyd reviewing once more his doomed hopes for release, and Dave, listening as if for the first time, full of his seemingly guileless bonhomie. Lloyd was in denial. He certainly grasped the seriousness of his predicament, yet carried on as if nothing had happened. Dave gave the routine recitation of rights and then announced that there would be another Virginia grand jury in March. He asked if Lloyd would consider appearing.
“We’re trying to develop a case against your uncle, so the strategy was to bring you to grand jury to testify, obviously with your permission.” He said it would entail a drive of several hours, “so our department actually went above and beyond, and they were looking at getting an RV and allowing myself and Mark and Katie to sit with you in the RV and drive you down there.”
“I’d love it,” said Lloyd. “I’d love a nice ride.”
Dave said that they would try to coordinate it so that Edna would testify again on the same day.
“Why not give Lloyd a bone?” he said he’d told the others. “His mom’s there. Why not let them come into a room like this and talk? You haven’t seen her for how long?” It had been decades.
In anticipation of this jaunt, Dave explained that he wanted to spend this session “clearing up” Lloyd’s story. He said the other principals, Dick, Pat, Teddy, Henry, Connie, and others, would also be recalled.
“So they’re still blaming it all on me, ain’t they?”
“Shit, yeah. They’re blaming it on you.”
“‘Lloyd did it. Lloyd’s in jail.’”
“That’s the easiest thing to do.”
Reflecting back on the long, damning chain of falsehoods Mark had recited in their last session, Lloyd allowed that he looked guilty, and if he was hoping for reassurance from Dave, he was disappointed.
“You got it,” is what the detective said.
“I agree with you one hundred percent on that,” said Lloyd. “Looking at it on paper, the way he said it, it’s like, damn, Lloyd did do it, you know, or he was there.”
The task today, Dave told Lloyd, was to shift that blame to Dick. This was not, in fact, his primary objective. The squad did believe Dick had been involved, so anything more about him was welcome, but the primary goal was to coax still more about what had happened from Lloyd. He was going to try to get himself off the hook by damning Dick, but no matter what else he said at this point, he would share culpability.
Dave asked for more details about how the kidnapping was conceived.
“The original plan was me and Teddy would go into the mall, find a couple of girls that looked like they might want to party or something like that, ask ’em if they’d like to get high, bring them out, we’d all get in the car, and we’d go up and get high, you know, and party. That was the original plan. Not one thing was mentioned about sex. Just to party. Nobody said anything to me. Nobody said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna bring ’em up and have sex with them.’ You know?”
This was, of course, beyond belief. Dick had been a thirty-year-old man. The idea that he would plot to lure two little girls to his house in order to get them high or drunk and have a few laughs was ridiculous, as was Lloyd’s contention that he had been only an innocent ride-along. But Dave played along.
Lloyd said he went to Dick’s house that morning. His uncle was wearing his security guard uniform. They rode with Teddy in Dick’s yellow station wagon.
“We went to the mall and saw the two girls. There was a bunch of them walking into the mall. I heard Dickie say, ‘Well, what about them?’ I didn’t know who he was talking about at first.” Dick pointed them out, and they watched the girls enter the mall.
Dick stayed in the car, Lloyd said, while he and Teddy went after them. They offered the girls a chance to smoke dope.
Lloyd recalled Sheila answering, “Yeah, I’d like to try.”
“That was all, you know?” he said. “‘Oh, it sounds like fun,’ you know? Kids.”
Dick pulled up to the curb as they exited with the girls.
“Okay, you said one got in the front and one got in the back,” said Dave.
“Right.”
“The young one was in the back.”
“Yeah, I think that was …” Here Lloyd encountered a new problem. If the girls had left with them cheerfully, looking forward to smoking dope and hanging out, why had the younger one been crying in the back seat? “Like I said, I don’t know if she was really cryin’ or not. I don’t know. It sounded like she was.” He whimpered softly to illustrate. “But that could just have been a sniffle, because she had her head turned the whole time. She didn’t say nothin’. The girl in the front didn’t say nothin’. They didn’t ask where we were going to party or anything like that, you know.”
In the previous session, Lloyd had told Mark that they’d driven around for two hours. Dave pointed out that this didn’t sound right. Hyattsville was only about fifteen minutes away. Lloyd insisted that he’d never said two hours—he didn’t seem to realize that all these interviews were recorded. Several times he joked about it, once telling Dave he had checked the desk drawers looking for a recorder when he’d been left alone in the room. “Because how in the hell does he remember everything I said?” Lloyd asked. But he never got serious about the question. Dave would swiftly change the subject.
Lloyd continued recalling the ride away from the mall.
“I know there was some joints already rolled up. I know Dick smoked pot. I was smoking one in the back. The girl [Kate] was sitting over there, she didn’t smoke at that time. I should have asked, ‘Are you okay?’ or something like that, but I wasn’t thinkin’. I was gettin’ high.”
“Ah, see, to me, I don’t think that that’s odd,” said Dave, who in fact found the whole situation horrifyingly odd. “Look at it this way. If you’re loading two girls to go party, in your mind you’re partying, you’re hanging out. In Dick and Ted’s mind—you don’t know what they talked about but—more than likely they’re talking about having sex with these two girls after they get them high and drunk, right? I mean, I’m just sayin’.”
“Right. But I guess what scared me the most is when we got up there by the university [University of Maryland], Dick didn’t turn all the way around. I guess he was talking to Teddy or somebody, and he said, ‘Well, you know, they can always meet their Maker.’ You know? I guess that is what scared me the most, because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”
“Why do you think he said that?’
“I don’t know. They [Dick and Teddy] were having a little whispered conversation back and forth to where I couldn’t really hear them too much.”
“I said, ‘Hey, can you drop me off at the store there. I’m gonna get some ice cream.’”
“Let’s break that down,” said Dave. “Something had to happen where it pissed Dick off. Why else would he have said that? Were they throwing a ruckus? What happened?”
“No! They weren’t raising their voice or anything like that.”
Dave asked, “How do you go from ‘I’m gonna have sex with these girls’ to now suddenly thinking about killing them?”
“I believe that the little girl in the back is the one who was getting him upset because of her little sniffle.”
Lloyd stuck with his story that he had exited the car, bought ice cream, and walked back to his father’s house in Hyattsville. He retold the story of returning to his uncle’s house the next day, when he saw one of the girls being raped. Four days later he had gone back to the mall to tell his misleading story, and then he had panicked, he said. He and Helen left to hitchhike to Virginia the following morning. He repeated his story about seeing Dick show up early in the morning on Taylor’s Mountain and watching from a window as his uncle and Henry lugged a heavy bag out to the fire.
He decided now to admit that Lee had called ahead to alert Lizzie (Lee’s sister)—the call Henry said he’d overheard. Lloyd continued to deny the rest of what his cousins remembered. When they reached the end of this version, Dave again asked him to speculate about the girls’ fate. Lloyd said that he believed it was Kate Lyon’s body in the bag that went on the fire.
“When you looked out the window and they put the bag on that fire, you knew exactly what was in that bag,” said Dave. “I mean, there was no doubt in your mind.”
Lloyd nodded.
“You don’t drive five hours to throw trash on a fire in Virginia at one thirty in the morning.”
“No, you don’t. I agree with you about that.”
Sheila Lyon was still alive in the car, Lloyd speculated, and was passed on to Henry, who abused her for a time and then killed her—Henry had told a story about him, so Lloyd now told a story about Henry. But he said he was just guessing.
Each time Lloyd made a change to his narrative, it triggered a cascade of ill-considered implications. Dave had learned to spot these and pounce. Dave now pointed out how improbable it was for both Lloyd and Helen to have arrived at Taylor’s Mountain coincidentally on the same day his uncle Dick showed up with a body in a bag. If Lloyd now admitted that his father had called in advance, that showed something else.
“That’s the preplanning that they put together to bring the girls, live, dead, one dead, one alive, down there,” said Dave. “That’s what we’re talking about. It’s been a week, eight days from the day they went missing until they ended up in Virginia. There’s no feasible way that Dick kept them in his house without your aunt Pat knowing. Think about it.”
“Yeah, I agree with you, but where he kept them I don’t know.”
“If Dick has these two girls—whether they are alive or dead—in his house, there had to have been a lot of chatter about what are we gonna do as a family? How are we gonna resolve this? Can’t just open the door and say, ‘Get out.’”
“Right.”
“I’m thinking, normal folks, made a mistake, now we’re left with this mess. That’s all that was talked about. There has to be a moment of panic.”
This made too much sense for Lloyd to deny.
“Yep. I was suckered into going up there, but nobody told me what was going to happen. Nobody said anything to me. Like I said, I was the black sheep of the family.”
“Let me put it this way,” Dave said. “Did you get suckered into going to Virginia to let them know they need to start a fire? Not knowing what you were really doing? And when you got down there they show up with this car and a bag? Did you go down to lay the groundwork?”
“Nope.”
“So they just literally followed you down there?”
“I don’t know if they followed me down there or not. All I can say is, he showed up knowing I was going to be down there.”
“Why wouldn’t he have given you a ride?”
“Me and Dickie didn’t see eye to eye like that. We weren’t that close. I mean, he got me to do that there, you know, to talk the girls into partying and stuff, but as far as me and him sittin’ and havin’ a conversation? Nah. Never happen.”
“But he trusted you enough to go out and do something like this.”
“I guess he figured that me being high all the time, me leaving all the time—”
“But look at the ace in your pocket. I mean, let’s say in the nineties when you get hit with this [child-molestation charge], you could have looked at them and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got something on my uncle.’”
Lloyd nodded.
“So he trusted you enough that you wouldn’t say something. Why?”
“I’m … that’s a good question,” said Lloyd, folding his arms and leaning back. He had clearly never considered this. And Dave was right. The abduction of the Lyon sisters, the most notorious unsolved crime in the region’s modern memory, would have been an ace indeed. It might have given Lloyd real leverage. He had complained bitterly about the unfairness of his prison sentence. Here was something he might have traded to reduce his time. And by Lloyd’s own account, there was no love lost between him and his uncle. He had no good answer.
“After so many years I did forget about it,” he said, weakly. “I honestly did.”
Who forgets kidnapping two little girls? If this was going to be his play before the grand jury, Dave suggested, he might as well give it up and confess to the whole thing. It wouldn’t fly. In Henry they had an eyewitness to—a participant in—throwing the bag on the fire. Connie corroborated it. Henry said he’d done it with Lloyd; Lloyd said Henry had done it with Dick.
“Is Lloyd the one telling the truth?” Dave asked. “Is Henry telling the truth? Now, Henry is in a bad situation because emotionally he doesn’t know how to deal with it. I think as he’s gotten older, he’s gotten soft.”
Lloyd nodded and grinned.
“That’s weird, because Henry used to be a nasty little ass.”
“His health’s bad. He knows he probably has only a couple more years, if that, to live. What would bother Henry the most? Do you think there’s direct involvement?”
“I would,” said Lloyd. “I would say that it’s tearing him up so much because he got involved with one of the girls. Like I said earlier, something went wrong. It’s already went so far, and he killed ’em, and it’s tearing him up. See, it’s eating me up inside but in a different way. I didn’t kill them. I didn’t rape them. I just walked ’em out of the mall and got them in the car. I’m guilty of that. That’s as far as I’m guilty of. Them doin’ what they did is tearing them up more. It’s not tearing me up that they’re dead. It’s tearing me up that I even got involved. There’s times I could kick myself in the ass for even getting involved into going and getting them, but as far as them dying and me having a hand in it, I can’t say it’s tearing me up.”
He repeated his belief that Dick gave Henry the older girl.
“He had sex. They told him to get rid of ’em, and this thing about the tire iron?” Henry had earlier speculated that Lloyd might have killed one of the girls with a tire iron on the drive down from Maryland. “He’s probably saying the tire iron because that’s probably what he used.” Lloyd laughed. “I mean, that’s the only thing I can think. Why would he say a tire iron?”
“That’s what I said. It’s an odd thing to say. What do you think Henry would have done with the second girl?”
“He probably put her in the fire.”
“Do you think both of them went in that fire?”
“Yep. If Henry killed her.”
Lloyd said the fire reeked so badly in the morning that it made Helen nauseated.
Wearing Lloyd down worked. On interview days he was awakened early and kept waiting in Dover police headquarters. He would sit alone and shackled for hours in the interview room before the squad arrived. Then they tag-teamed him. Chris stayed back, watching on a monitor. Dave would engage Lloyd for hours on end, taking him back over the same ground again and again, alternately wooing and threatening him, offering him what looked like avenues of escape. His story wasn’t good enough, Dave kept telling him. If they were going to make charges stick against his uncle or his cousin, they needed something more. They needed verifiable details. Through it all Lloyd kept lying, and Dave mostly just absorbed his whoppers and excuses without contradiction. He repeatedly assured Lloyd that somehow all of this was working to his benefit, urging him to fight back against his family. After a lunch break, Mark and Katie would work Lloyd over for hours more. Katie played stubbornly on his conscience, stressing how certain she was that he had one, what a truly decent fellow he was at heart, how in her eyes he was always trying to do the right thing, tenaciously egging him on to display this inherent decency. Mark continued to bang away at all the obvious holes in his story.
And every time, Lloyd broke. For all his vaunted street smarts, he never seemed to catch on to how he was being played.
On this day Lloyd got his lunch break after four hours with Dave. He was given his choice of take-out food, and the detectives always brought back additional orders from the same place for his guards. Lloyd consistently disappointed them by selecting Arby’s. When he’d finished eating, it was Mark and Katie’s turn.
“We’re back,” said Mark.
“Are you surprised?” asked Katie.
Katie had prepared an elaborate backstory about Helen’s invented journal. It was, she said, “My big thing that I’ve been working on.” Showing a flair for fiction, she explained that the journal had gotten waterlogged, and that Helen’s handwriting was so small it was hard to decipher, so it had taken her some time to make sense of it.
“It had some emotional stuff, but I didn’t want to come in here and give you bullshit, so what we did was send it to the FBI lab, because they have ways of re-creating, you know, gluing stuff and putting them in air containers and getting stuff back together.”
“I never knew she kept a journal,” said Lloyd, skeptically.
“She didn’t, I don’t think, when she was with you. It was very clear that you were kind of the love of her life, you know.” Katie was laying it on thick here. “And I’m not saying that to blow smoke up your ass. I mean, her husband was—what’s the right word?—alienated by that, which I think you can understand.” Katie went on and on about the diary that did not exist.
Katie sat behind the desk, and Mark took a chair alongside Lloyd, who was silently chewing gum. She began by presenting an entry that described a room with a pool table at Uncle Dick’s house: a room that had a bed on the floor in a closet. This was a tidbit they had gleaned from the wiretaps and from a new tip offered by Teddy Welch. Still struggling to free himself from suspicion, Teddy had called with a recovered memory. He said that on a visit to Dick and Pat’s house, he’d heard the click of pool balls and had followed the sound upstairs, where he opened the door to an attic-like room that had a pool table—this is where the couple said their pool table had been. Teddy said he saw Lloyd at one end of the table, and Helen sitting on a mattress tucked into a small closet, watching. Sitting on the other side of the table were two blond girls. Teddy said he had then been called back downstairs. The detectives wondered why he hadn’t mentioned it earlier—this was after multiple police interviews, a polygraph session, and several grand jury appearances. Since they were always accusing him of holding something back, Teddy explained, he had been working hard to recover whatever memories he could.
He was convinced that this brief encounter explained why Lloyd had chosen to name him as the kidnapper. Lloyd would have recalled being seen with the girls, so he had acted to head that off by blaming Teddy. To the detectives, it was hard not to view Teddy’s recovered memory as tit for tat.
But to test out the scenario, Katie said Helen had written of the upstairs poolroom in her diary.
“Yeah, that was in the back room where the pool table was, yeah,” said Lloyd. “Right off the living room.”
“It sounds like she [Helen] is describing something like an attic almost,” said Katie. “Like a finished attic.”
“Oh, we really never went up there.… We stayed at Dick and Pat’s maybe two or three different times.” Lloyd said the room upstairs was kept locked.
“She talks about this time there was a mattress in the closet, a pool table, and she speaks about two girls being in this area with you guys.”
“Yeah. Could have been the kids. I don’t know. Not the girls from the mall. It could have been Pat’s kids. I don’t remember that. That’s got me confused.”
“I’ll bring the copies next time so you can see them,” said Katie. “But it sounds like you and her and these two girls, and so I was wondering if somehow you guys ended up staying there because you needed a place in the interim and didn’t know that the Lyons girls were there and [they] ended up being in that room with you guys.”
Katie was really pushing it here.
“Nah. We didn’t stay at Dick’s house. We were at my mom’s house. When those girls came up missing we were at my mom’s house.”
“Well, they didn’t come up missing. You guys took them from the mall.”
“Well—”
“Right? Okay?”
“I’m saying when they were announced missing,” said Lloyd.
Katie forged on. “Okay. The only thing that she said was, something I wanted to share with you, was that she hopes someday that you would do the right thing and make peace with this situation.”
Lloyd said nothing. He shook his head and then flipped his right hand dismissively, as if to say, I have no idea.
“Obviously, I’m telling you that she was able to piece this—I don’t know if you guys had a conversation—but she was definitely able to piece some of this stuff—”
“I never told her about them girls. Could she have pieced it together? Knowing Helen? Yeah.”
“Oh, she did. I mean, I’m reading that she pieced it together.”
Lloyd seemed unaffected by this. The diary ploy didn’t appear to have troubled him at all—though it had—so Katie dropped it. She went back over Lloyd’s most recent version, and let him know that, as it now stood, he had still failed to produce enough verifiable information to nail Dickie.
“You’ve told us the beginning part. We’re piecing together the end part based on the stuff you’ve already told us and stuff that other people have told us. The middle part is what we really need to hammer him on, because you’re saying, basically, that he had these girls and he’s the one who brought them there [to Virginia]. What we’re looking for are unique facts that we can hammer him on where he can’t refute, you know. Somebody killed them. Somebody kept them alive. He [Dick] has got his damn hands full. He doesn’t care if Lloyd and Helen are going to Bedford. You know what I mean? We can’t go and present to a grand jury in trying try to put something together against Dick that [says] you are there and then consequently these bodies just end up there. You know what I’m saying? Like, it doesn’t make sense?”
“I know it looks like Lloyd’s the one who did it.”
“Well, sure. And that’s what everyone is painting. And if you had a part of it, tell us! Clearly you were a teenager that got pulled into all this bullshit. You know I’m a little bit more sensitive than the average guy. You and I have had some heart-to-heart conversations. It sucks to be the outcast of the family. It sucks to be the one who nobody wants around and feel unloved, so I get that. ‘And these people finally want to have something to do with me. I’ll go smoke some dope and party with these girls if that makes me fit in.’ But there are holes that don’t make sense. I’m not saying that you did more, but you knew more about what happened on the back end of this, and you just don’t wanna say anything, because you don’t want to be involved. But the truth is, you’re already involved.”
Lloyd didn’t budge. He reiterated his story about hitchhiking, about seeing Dick pull up in the middle of the night with the bag. He was sure Dick and Teddy had sex on their minds when they went for the girls, but not him. He was loyal to Helen.
Now Mark leaned into the conversation.
“When we talked the last time, you told Katie and I that it took Dick about two days for him to talk you into it because you were scared.”
Lloyd nodded in agreement. He had said that.
“What were you scared about?”
“I didn’t want to get involved in going and picking up girls, you know? That was really not my scene.”
“Was it that there was going to be some trickery involved to get these girls? That’s what it seems like, that he’s wearing a security uniform to make them feel safe.”
“I don’t know if at that time you could say there was trickery or anything like that. Like I was saying, I really didn’t want to cheat on Helen.”
“Let me ask you this. If Dick hated you so much, why would he involve you in his plan?”
“I think I was being used.”
“Well, I get that sense, too.”
“Because I was the one who walked around that mall the most.”
“And approached them?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re the sacrificial lamb,” offered Katie.
“I was the one with the headband. I was the one with the long hair. I’m the one who looked like a total hippie, you know? Yeah, like you said. I was the lamb. The sucker.”
Lloyd then offered a little more detail about luring the girls. He watched them for a while, and when they were alone he approached them. He said he asked, “Have either one of you ever gotten high before? Ever thought about getting high?”
He replayed how the conversation went:
“I’ve thought about it,” said Sheila, “but I’ve never done it.”
“Well, I’ve got a little pot, and I’m just hanging around here. Would you like to get high?”
Sheila said yes, but Kate balked. “We can’t do that,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” Sheila urged her. “It isn’t going to hurt us. Everyone is doing it.”
Katie immediately cast doubt on that dialogue.
“These girls didn’t smoke. I mean, they were ten and twelve.”
Lloyd said that was how it happened.
“Their parents say there’s absolutely no way that they would have gotten in the car with strangers,” said Katie.
“Well, their parents lied.”
“It’s not that they’re lying. You know, parents want to think the best of their kids.”
Mark asked why, if Dick had decided to drive all the way to Wheaton, because he did not want to be seen picking up girls close to his house, did he bring the girls back to his house?
“That’s a question I’ve asked myself so many times, and I can’t answer that because I don’t know. All I know is he got high down in that basement down there, and that’s where he did all of his partying then. I guess he felt safe in that area.”
Again Lloyd said that he got out of the car at the convenience store. Here is where he had decided to take his stand. He had innocently participated in taking ten- and twelve-year-old girls to “party” with his pedophiliac uncle. The rest had come as a shock to him—although not enough of a shock to impel him to take a single step to aid the girls. Mark scoffed. He leaned toward Lloyd and fixed him with a steady, troubled gaze. He spoke very calmly, asking again why Dick would have taken the girls back to his own house, where his wife and children lived.
And then Lloyd tripped up. He said that Pat wasn’t home “when we got there.”
Mark did not draw attention to it immediately; he just ran with it.
“So, you guys pull in the driveway, do you all go back around to the basement?”
“I shouldn’t say we pulled in,” Lloyd said, backtracking fast. “I’m saying they pulled in. Pat was at work. I can see the house when I’m walking by the tracks.”
“See, and that’s the kind of thing the jurors are going to get tripped up on, because when you said just a minute ago—”
“I said they.”
“—when we pulled into the driveway.”
“When we pulled in, yeah.”
“All right? And if you pulled in, if you didn’t get out at the store, that’s fine.”
“No, I got out at the store and got ice cream.”
“You established a lot of credibility with us now, and we completely understand that back then you didn’t know where this thing was going,” Mark lied. “And you were scared and all that stuff. If you went to Dick’s house from the mall, that doesn’t change things as far as the way we’re looking at all this.”
“No, I did get out at the store.”
“Lloyd, did you get back in the car?” Katie asked. “Because, honestly, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah. I walked down the railroad tracks You can see their house from the railroad tracks.”
“But hear me out,” said Katie. “You’re saying that they dropped you off, and you went about your business, and you didn’t know anything until the next day, and now you’re putting yourself looking at them pulling up to the house with the girls. So it doesn’t matter if you were in the car, it doesn’t change anything other than the fact that we can believe in you. Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“I understand,” said Lloyd. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Because it doesn’t make you any less guilty or more guilty. If you’re in the car when they pulled up to the house—already you said somewhere in your mind you knew there was probably going to be sex, not necessarily that you were gonna participate—what curious nineteen-year-old boy isn’t gonna go and see what’s gonna happen? They [the girls] weren’t that much different in age than you. There were totally different things goin’ on back then.”
Katie was smoothing the path for Lloyd. She was allowing, for purposes of easing Lloyd’s concerns, that having sex with prepubescent girls was somehow a normal thing, especially in the anything-goes 1970s.
“I can understand important parts where you want to take yourself out,” she said. “This isn’t one of them. I know it’s in our nature to protect ourselves, and I get it. But it just doesn’t make sense. I’ve got a pretty good Lloyd bullshit meter. Mark has a good Lloyd bullshit meter, as you know.”
Lloyd chuckled to himself. This was true.
“You know, because you always end up giving it up to us anyways,” Katie said.
Lloyd laughed, leaned back, and threw up both arms in an attitude of surrender.
“Okay, goddamnit! Damn. I did get out at the store there and get some ice cream. We drove to the house. I got out. I left the house. There was nobody at the house. I said I was leaving and I left.”
This retreat was telling. Katie was right; it made little difference whether Lloyd got out at the store or a few minutes later at the house. But the shift revealed Lloyd’s whole method. He told the truth up to a point, but then extricated himself when things turned bad. He removed himself from the scene. When trapped into admitting he was present, as he was here by his own slipup, he became the innocent victim, a sucker, a patsy. Just easygoing Lloyd, along for the ride, exploited.
Having loosened up a little on this, Lloyd offered some more information about those first few hours of the Lyon girls’ nightmare. He said they initially drove all over the area, smoking dope in the car. He said Teddy was blowing marijuana smoke into Sheila’s mouth in the front seat, while Kate whined in the back. “She really didn’t want to go, but her sister talked her into it,” he said. “I guess you could say she was acting up. She did ask her sister at one point, ‘Are we gonna go back to the mall anytime soon?’”
It evoked such a sad scene, Kate with her head averted in the back seat, staring out the window, wondering where they were going, who these men were, and what might happen to them. Lloyd said his uncle responded by encouraging the ten-year-old, saying, “Why don’t you get high!” This was also about the time that Dick, clearly annoyed, told Teddy, “They can always meet their Maker.” Later, Lloyd said, Sheila took her little sister’s hand as they got out of the car and led her into the basement room.
The detectives picked away further at Lloyd’s story. Why would he have gone back to Dick’s house the next day if what his uncle had said—“They can always meet their Maker”—so scared him? All of Lloyd’s reasons were feeble. He wanted to say goodbye to a cousin. His uncle had good dope.
“Lloyd, did an anonymous nine-one-one call ever go through your head?” Katie asked.
“No.”
“Just because you were saving your ass?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, fair enough.”
“I didn’t want to go to jail.”
“Fair enough.”
“It was me who was at the mall.”
“Right.”
“It was me who everybody saw, you know? I mean, y’all have got a picture of me.” He was referring to the old police sketch.
“Right.”
“Or close enough.”
“That’s the kind of honesty I’m talking about. Because that’s not an easy thing to say, but it’s the truth and it’s fair, and we don’t judge you any. In fact, we are happy that you say it.”
“Yeah. Nine-one-one just—”
“That’s a hard pill to swallow,” said Katie, finishing the thought for him.
Lloyd nodded.
“Knowing that this little girl was getting raped and possibly drugged, dead, whatever?” she asked. “And you could have prevented it, and you didn’t because you were preserving yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the kind of stuff that we are looking for.”
Lloyd finally acknowledged unequivocally that he had gone to the police with his false story because “I didn’t want them to come lookin’ at me. Because I didn’t know if somebody had seen me talking to them.” He had been, he said, “covering my ass.”
Mark pushed him once more on what happened in Virginia.
“You were involved with this thing in the beginning. It ended. And you’re there when it ends. It’s like a coincidence that you just happen to be there?”
“Coincidences happen.”
Mark laughed.
“All through life, coincidences happen,” said Lloyd.
Then Katie launched into another of her empathetic stem-winders. She believed in her heart, she said, that Lloyd had been sucked into the crime by his uncle, that these were “shitty people,” that he was the only decent and honorable one in the family, that he was “a teenager trying to do better with Helen,” and that he had gotten into a bad situation because of drugs. She said he had fled to Virginia because his uncle had probably threatened him, and that he had kept his mouth shut about the whole thing for forty years because he was frightened. His family had set him up, essentially framed him to take the hit for the crime, and now they were all free, “living their lives,” trying to make sure that the blame came to rest solely on him. They were getting away with it! He needed to come clean so the detectives could help him protect himself. Dick was the evil one here. He had probably done this multiple times and gotten away with it! “He’s still getting away with it!” she said. Lloyd had a chance to bring him to justice, avoid being made the scapegoat, and unburden himself. “We can’t unless you do,” she said. “I wish you would just let it out. Let it go. If that means you have to cry, if that means you have to punch something …” Katie was on a roll.
And almost six hours into the session, true to form, Lloyd once more buckled—or seemed to. He started rubbing his eyes. He announced that he was tired. Then out came the question: “What’s gonna happen to me?”
And as they always did, the detectives finessed the answer. He had already confessed to having helped kidnap the girls. They did not tell him so, but this alone was enough to lock him away for the remainder of his life. They wanted more. They wanted to know exactly what happened.
“You’ve asked that question so many times,” said Mark. “What’s going to happen to me? You said something earlier today: ‘Everything I’ve said hurts me.’ And that is absolutely true, and it’s true because what you have said up until this point leaves you looking bad.” Mark was returning to Dave’s argument, that Lloyd needed to tell them more about what happened, in order to defend himself.
“Okay,” said Lloyd. “Do you want Dave in here too, so all three of you can hear the whole story?”
Helen’s invented journal would pay a dividend after all. It had evidently been gnawing at Lloyd. Told that Helen had written of their being with the Lyon girls some days after the girls’ disappearance, he was faced once more with tangible evidence—or what he thought was tangible evidence. Lloyd rarely resisted provable facts. Katie’s artful fiction would now force another maneuver.
When Mark left to fetch Dave, Lloyd pleaded with Katie, “I just don’t want to do no more time. I want to get out.”
Katie was not about to dash his fondest hope, not while he was still talking. She dodged it.
“Look, I’ve seen you struggle,” she said. “This is just you and me talking now. The reason you want to keep giving us more is that you want to do the right thing. It’s just time. It’s just time. You’re tired. We’re tired, and nobody is taking care of you.”
“But the only problem with this all is I tell you all everything, the whole thing from the beginning to the end, and it’s still my word against theirs, and there’s more of them than there is of me.”
Mark and Dave entered. Dave, who had removed his tie, pulled the chair Mark had been sitting in even closer to Lloyd and leaned toward him. Mark and Katie sat behind the desk.
“Okay,” said Lloyd, leaning back in his chair and clasping both hands behind his head. “March twenty-third. Dick approached me and Teddy with this plan to go up to the Wheaton mall, like I said, to pick up a couple of girls, party with them, have sex with them.” This was a new admission; Lloyd had always insisted on just the euphemism “partying.” “I told him no, I don’t want to do that. I’ll party with you, I’ll party with the girls, but I’m not having no sex with those girls. I’m with Helen. She’s with child. I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t even want to be in this. You can leave me out.’ Couple of days later, he talks me in. Says, ‘Look, I got pot, man. I got plenty of pot. Got some good drugs. We’ll all get high,’ and stuff like that. So finally he talked me into going up there. I go up there. I go into the mall. I saw the two girls come walking through. I followed them for a while. I approached them and said, ‘Hey, do y’all wanna get high?’ You know, I did say it that way. ‘You wanna get high?’ And the older one said, ‘We’ve never gotten high before. We don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ll try it. Everybody’s doing it. I mean, it’s the seventies. Peace, love, and rock ’n’ roll.’ And the older one finally said, ‘Yeah, let’s get high.’ The younger one said, ‘No, I don’t want to go.’ And her sister said, ‘Oh, come on, we’re just going to get high,’ you know? So, we go out of the mall, and Dick pulls up. I don’t know where Teddy came out of, but he came up behind me. The older girl got in the front, like I said. I got in the back. The other girl got in the back, and we drove around for a while, started getting high. Ted was giving shotgun to the girl [blowing marijuana smoke directly into her mouth], and we were just talking up front there.”
The detectives noted that Lloyd had inadvertently placed himself in the front seat, and since they had long ago stopped believing in Teddy’s role, it made sense. Nobody pointed it out, and Lloyd continued his new tale.
“The other girl, she still wasn’t saying nothing, just like I said. I don’t know if she was crying or what. I didn’t offer her anything, because she just looked like she wanted to be by herself. I finally get the ice cream, because I did tell Helen I would get some ice cream for her. We go back to the house there, and Dick, at the time, I guess, was bickering with Teddy about something. I don’t know what it was, and he said, ‘Well, they can always meet their Maker.’ You know how that goes, and I got out and I said, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’m taking this ice cream home. I don’t want to. Y’all do your thing. Have a good time.’ And I left. I did not go back to that house until the next day, and it was, like, out of curiosity, to see if the girls were okay or if they were still there or not—” Here he had taken to heart Katie’s suggestion that as a teenager, knowing there were going to be sex acts, he would have at least been curious to see. “Helen was with me, but she didn’t go downstairs. I did. I saw Dick raping the one girl, and her eyes were rolled [back]. Like I said, I don’t know if she was on a high or drugged or what, because Dick could get drugs all the time. I backed out. About that time Teddy come, I don’t know if he came around this way [around the outside of the house to the basement entrance], and I said, ‘Hey, I’ll see you later. I don’t want to be around here.’”
Now Lloyd offered his explanation of Helen’s supposed diary entry about them spending time with the girls days later.
“Me and Helen left for a while. I guess it was the next day, next morning or whatever, Dick and Teddy had come over to the house and asked me and Helen if we would watch two girls, just babysit for a while, you know, and that’s true, and I said, ‘What two girls?’ and he said, ‘You know, the girls that you got a hold of.’ I said, ‘You still got them little girls? What are you doing with them? I thought you were gonna send them home.’ And he said, ‘Oh, they want to stay for a while. They like getting high.’ So we went there. We stayed for a while.”
It was, of course, absurd. You kidnap two little girls, who have now been missing for days and are the objects of a mass, bicounty, hugely publicized manhunt; and you have seen your uncle raping one of them, who appears drugged; and you then, with your girlfriend, agree to “babysit” them, accepting your uncle’s explanation that they are enjoying themselves? It got weirder.
“At his house or at your house?” Katie asked.
“It was his house.”
“Okay.”
“We watched them. Helen, she played with them and everything like that. Helen always loved kids. I guess, at the time, she didn’t really know what was going on. I guess we watched ’em for about four or five hours. They weren’t hurt or anything like that. Nothin’ was ever mentioned about them having sex or anything like that or getting them from the mall. Dick finally came back upstairs.”
The detectives noted that the girls had now been moved from the basement party room at Dick’s house to an upstairs room. Lloyd had added a bizarre new scene to his narrative, and like most of his fictions, it appeared to be at least partly truthful. It corroborated things they had heard in wiretaps and interviews. Family members had several times alluded to something untoward going on in Dick’s upstairs poolroom. Then there was Teddy’s new story. Lloyd, in an effort to help himself, had just placed another rock on the growing pile of damning evidence.
He continued: “Pat, I don’t know where she was at, at the time. I don’t know if she was sitting out on the front porch and just wanted some time alone or whatever. Finally, they came back in. Me and Helen left. Dickie gave Helen a little bit of money for watching ’em for a couple of hours. We went back to the house [Lloyd’s father’s house], and I guess you could say that it kind of bugged me of what was going on.… They didn’t have no marks on them like they were punched on or tortured or anything like that. They had clothes on, so I couldn’t tell what was on their body or anything like that, but none of them said anything about, ‘Hey, are you gonna get us back up to the mall?’ or anything like that. I don’t know what they said to Helen, because Helen was the one who watched them mostly. A couple of days later it just kept eating at me, eating at me, eating at me, finally I decided it was time for me to go to the mall and get my name cleared out of this, because I didn’t want no part of it. Dick came over to the house one time, talked to Lee, I don’t know what they all talked about. He saw me, and he said, ‘Look, don’t say a damn word about nothin’. You don’t know nothin’, just get out of here. You’re talkin’ about going to Virginia for a while. Go there. See everybody and disappear.’ I took that as a hint. You know? I went to the mall. I told my side of the story. When I ended up talking to the police, I got really scared then. Left. Me and Helen hitchhiked. It took us a day and a half to get down there hitchhiking. About that time, our clothes were a little mildewy, because it was a little cold outside that night. We stayed in the woods. We got the clothes washed. We ate dinner about twelve thirty, one thirty, somewhere around there. It was late. We were in bed asleep. A car pulled up, and Dick got out of the car. The reason I know it was Dick was because he was wearing his T-shirt and it was the [his] car. He went to the back. He opened it up. He pulled a bag out, and I knew right then and there that something wasn’t right. Something happened to them girls. I was too scared to say anything, just like I’ve been all of this time. Henry came. I don’t know where he was at the time. I don’t know if he was down by the fire or where he was at. He helped him [Dick] carry the bag down there. They threw it on the fire. Came back to the house. They talked a little bit. Dick looked up there toward the window like I was, like he could see me lookin’ out the window or whatever. He got in the car. There was another man in the car. I didn’t know if it was Lee or who it was. He never got out. I didn’t see him. About that time I laid my head back down, and I said, ‘Oh shit.’ Helen said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Said, ‘Dick was just down here. I don’t know what was going on, but he threw something on the fire. I don’t know what it was.’ I didn’t want to tell her what I was thinking. We got up that morning. We ate breakfast. I told everybody, ‘Look, thank you for the hospitality and the food and everything like that. We’re gonna head down south now.’ We walked outside, and it smelled real bad. That’s why I said it smelled like rats.” In fact, it had been Dave who said this. “Helen got sick to her stomach. She brought everything up. She said, ‘What the hell is that smell?’ I said, “I don’t know.’ We left. Forty years I didn’t say nothing.”
Katie pointed out that Henry and Connie directly contradicted him.
“I understand that,” said Lloyd, confident now that he had fully stated his new version of the story, one that incorporated all that he had absorbed from the detectives. He had once more removed himself as far as possible from culpability. This was his new story, and he was going to stick with it.
“Everything I just told you is the way it went down. Everything.”
They worked on him for another hour, but Lloyd was done. They finished by talking up the proposed ride in the RV down to Bedford for his grand jury testimony.
“Is there anything we can do for you at the jail?” asked Dave.
“Get me the hell out,” Lloyd said.
They laughed. Dave said the grand jury appearance would happen in a week.
“It’s all of them against me. I already know that.”
“Well, you get your day, and that’s what we want to do.”
Lloyd would never appear before a grand jury.