Deputy State’s Attorney Pete Feeney and Detective Dave Davis with Lloyd Welch
Wiry, flinty, and truculent as ever, Dick Welch emerged from months of innuendo and intense surveillance a battered man. He was about to turn seventy but seemed older. In addition to his heart trouble he faced a frightening array of accusations. Various family members had accused him of ugly and violent behavior toward them in the past, even of abusing the family dog. Lloyd had named him as the man who had planned the kidnapping of Sheila and Kate Lyon and who then presided over their gang rape, murder, and dismemberment.
Dick denied it all, and if he was lying, he was a lot better at it than his nephew. He said little, and what he did say was simple and consistent. Indeed, he behaved like someone wrongly accused, bewildered and frustrated by wounding falsehoods and at times appropriately indignant. It helped that he seemed so harmless. The man with the menacing look in old snapshots—lean, with combed-back dark hair, long sideburns, a tight T-shirt, and a smirk—was now “Poppy.” His voice would rise to a pleading whine when he was upset, and the squad had gone to great lengths to upset him. Apart from publicly shaming him, Mark Janney had told him, in so many words, that no matter what he said, he was “going down.” Virginia’s death penalty or at least a life sentence loomed behind the threat. But by February 2015, almost a year after the squad had turned to him, nothing connected Dick Welch to the Lyons beyond Lloyd’s word, which was, of course, worthless.
A big part of the story about Dick wasn’t credible: that the girls had been imprisoned in his house for a week or more before being killed. It had not been a big house, and living in it with him were his wife and four children. It had been across the street from the county courthouse and just a stone’s throw from the Hyattsville police headquarters. Someone surely would have noticed the two little blond girls the entire region was looking for. It was, frankly, far more likely that Lloyd had invented Dick’s role, just as he had Teddy’s, to deflect attention from his own guilt. Dick was not an educated man. He said he could neither read nor write. But he wasn’t stupid. He was about the only one in the family who had nothing to say. He had stayed off the phones during those months of surveillance, and when Teddy had paid him that surprise visit wearing a wire, Dick had been entirely consistent. He knew nothing about the case. When he was summoned to appear before the Bedford grand jury on February 6, he came without his lawyer. He had recovered his composure since the browbeating session at his house the previous September. Entering the grand jury chamber, he noticed his now familiar antagonists in the room.
He remarked, “Oh, I see my buddies are here!”
And they went at him for hours, prosecutors and detectives. It was like a nightmare version of the old TV program This Is Your Life. All the terrible things said about him were dumped in his lap. Randy Krantz, the Bedford prosecutor, listed all the family members—female and male—who said Dick had sexually abused them as children.
Speaking of Joann Green, Dick’s sister-in-law, Krantz asked, “Do you have any explanation why she would tell the police that you sexually assaulted her?”
“I thought we were talking about the Lyon girls,” said Dick.
“Well, I’m asking: Did you sexually assault your sister-in-law?”
“No.”
“Do you have any explanation why she would say you did?”
“I don’t know.”
“So it’s your testimony under oath that you did not sexually assault her?”
“No.”
“Ever.”
“Not as I know of.”
“Well, what do you mean, ‘not as you know of’?”
“I didn’t do it. I mean, I don’t know where it came from. Okay?”
“Have you ever sexually assaulted any of your family members?”
“Hell no.”
“Do you have any reason why other family members would say that you did?”
“Well, they’re all a bunch of liars. I know that. You can’t believe half of what any of them says. That’s why me and my wife stay to ourselves.”
Later, Krantz came back at him in the same vein.
“Do you think it is unusual,” he asked, “for one person, one person such as yourself, to be accused by multiple people of sexually molesting children?”
“Uh-huh,” Dick agreed.
“Your sister-in-law, Joann Green, has accused you of sexually molesting her. Okay? Your nephew—did you ever take your nephew hunting up in Upper Marlboro?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What were you hunting?”
“Squirrel.”
“Okay, so if he says you took him hunting, that would be the truth.”
“Take him hunting? Yeah.”
“But if he says you sexually molested him—”
“That would be a lie.”
“—that would be a lie. So he’s lying, and Joann Green is lying?”
“Your own daughter says—”
“That’s a whole lot—”
“—you sexually molested her.”
“You believe that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not true.”
“My point to you, Mr. Welch, is simply this: Would you agree with me that the type of person that would abduct and molest and murder two girls is the same type of person these other people would accuse of sexually molesting them, [someone] that would have sexual interest in children?”
“I’m not that type of guy. I did not. I don’t like little girls.”
“What do you like?”
“I like … I like my wife.”
When they came around to asking him whether he had any involvement in the Lyon case, Dick was succinct and firm.
“God as my witness, no.”
“Did you transport one or both of these girls—Sheila and Kate Lyon—from Wheaton Plaza to your residence?”
“No, I didn’t. I’ve never been there.”
“Did you have sexual contact with either Sheila or Kate Lyon?”
“God as my witness, no.”
He gave similar crisp answers to the whole litany of accusations.
“Do you have knowledge of any of these things that I’ve talked about?”
“No, but I wish I did.” He had earlier said that he wished he could help the detectives solve the mystery. “But I didn’t.”
“Do you have any explanation why people would say that you did?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is your chance to explain.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why I’m getting accused, them saying I did this, I done that. I haven’t.”
“All right. So your answer is, then, you don’t have any explanation?”
“No, because I didn’t do anything.”
That is where the case against Uncle Dick stood until May, when the squad found someone who confirmed Lloyd’s accusation. Yet another Welch cousin, Wes Justice, a man Lloyd hardly knew, ten years his junior, would tell the grand jury that his uncle Dick had spontaneously confessed to him his role in the crime and had also named Lloyd and Lloyd’s father, Lee. Better yet, unlike Lloyd, Wes had no obvious animus toward his uncle. It had taken months to fully pry the story out of him.
Wes’s mother, Ruth, was a younger sister to Dick and Lee. Wes was a plumber and looked like one, a disheveled, portly man, unshaven, with a mop of salt-and-pepper hair that was usually crushed under a baseball cap. His family nickname was “Tud.” He was a simple man. One of the things he liked to do was fart into Mason jars, which he sealed and kept in the freezer—at one point he showed off this collection to Mark. He would uncork his preserved flatulence around unsuspecting visitors and collapse with giggles at their disgust. Emotional and blunt, Wes had an ambivalent connection to his extended family; he seemed at once loyal and afraid—so afraid that the detectives wondered whether he, too, might have been abused as a child.
On a summer afternoon in 2014, at about the time the full-court press on the Welch family began, Wes stopped by his uncle’s house in Hyattsville. He said he was driving past, taking a break from a job in Washington, and saw his uncle mowing the lawn, so he pulled into the driveway. In the conversation that ensued, Wes said, his uncle told him about the Lyon case investigation and “came out and said that he raped those girls.”
This was the version Wes told the grand jury in May 2015.
“When Dickie was telling you that the girls were raped, who did he say was involved in their rape?” the prosecutor asked him.
“Lee.”
“Lee Welch?”
“Lee Welch and Lloyd.”
“Lloyd Welch. And who else?”
“That’s the only thing he told [me] was them two and him,” said Wes.
He said Dick told him how the girls had been lured by Lloyd from Wheaton Plaza, and then raped repeatedly on a pool table in Dick’s house before being killed. They had been taken to Taylor’s Mountain—Wes was uncertain whether they were alive or dead at that point—in a green station wagon owned by his cousin Jimmy Welch. The car had then been hidden in a dilapidated barn on the property.
The first time the squad had heard this story, or part of it, was the previous October, after Wes and his cousin Norma Jean Welch were subpoenaed to appear before the Bedford grand jury. Conferring beforehand by phone, Wes told Norma Jean that he was worried he would be asked about “a green station wagon” that he believed had been used to carry the Lyon girls south. Norma Jean, who was trying to be helpful, passed this along to the squad—this is what ultimately prompted the exhaustive and futile air and ground search of Taylor’s Mountain. On the same day Norma Jean called, Mark and Katie had driven to Wes’s house in Prince Frederick, in southern Maryland.
They knocked on Wes’s door on Halloween, a few hours before trick-or-treaters would be out. Wes was startled to see the detectives, and rattled. He couldn’t imagine why they had come all that way. And he was not ready to tell the same story he would later tell the grand jury. As his grandchildren played in the next room, he sat with his wife, Robin, a large blond woman who was considerably more poised than her husband, and swore he knew nothing about the case apart from what he had seen online. But he confirmed his remarks to Norma Jean about a green station wagon, which was something that had not been part of any public discussion. Mark and Katie wanted to know where he had heard it. At this, Wes melted down. Sobbing, he stormed from the room and the house. Robin called after him, telling him to calm down and tell the truth. Mark followed him out to the yard.
“I’m trying to think of who I heard it from!” Wes shouted in frustration.
“I know your heart is in the right place,” said Mark. “We know you don’t want to get involved.”
Pointing to Wes’s grandchildren, Mark invoked John and Mary Lyon. “Can you imagine those two beautiful kids you’ve got in there? They know their kids got raped, got murdered.”
Wes expressed his revulsion and disbelief that anyone, much less someone in his own family, could do such a thing.
“That station wagon might be the key to the whole thing,” said Mark.
Wes calmed down. He then told Mark that his uncle Dick had mentioned the car to him in their August conversation. He repeated this when he appeared before the grand jury for the first time, in November.
“He [Dick] just popped up out of the blue about a station wagon up in the mountains in a barn,” he told the jurors. “He said it’s covered up. And I think he said there’s blankets in the back of it.”
“Why did that pop up?” a prosecutor asked.
“I don’t know.”
Wes said the car had belonged to his cousin Jimmy Welch. At the close of his testimony, he had added something intriguing. Summing up, the Virginia prosecutor had stated, “Here’s the thing. Obviously, something very terrible happened to those girls. Okay? Age ten. Age twelve. Okay?” And Wes had responded, “I understand. Something—you’re right. Something terrible happened, cut them up, burned them up, or something.”
Here was an echo of Lloyd’s own original speculation, which Wes could not have heard. It prompted the squad to invite him in for another chat in Gaithersburg on April 26. When he didn’t show up, Mark and Katie went looking for him. They found him at home in Prince Frederick that evening. Wes said his phone was broken, so he hadn’t been able to call and cancel, but this, the detectives told him, was not the kind of invitation to be ignored. A number of people were about to be charged with perjury, Mark said, and Wes was on the list.
The plumber was horrified. How could they connect him with such a terrible thing!
“A lot of people have tried to obstruct our investigation,” Mark explained. “The prosecutors are pretty fed up.”
The detective had brought a transcript of Dick Welch’s grand jury testimony and, bluffing, told Wes that his uncle had talked in detail about their August conversation. Mark said Dick’s account had contradicted Wes’s about a number of things (this was not true).
“It’s hard to think that a seventy-year-old man would remember more than you,” said Mark.
Wes panicked. He pleaded that he’d told them everything. All he knew was that his cousin Jimmy’s car had been involved. For this they were dragging him into it! He had been ten years old when it happened! What could he possibly have known?
“I’m actually here for your benefit,” said Mark. “The grand jury doesn’t believe you don’t know more.”
Wes repeated, almost spitting the words, “Dick did not mention about no girls. Nothing like that.”
Mark asked again how the subject of the station wagon had come up.
“It’s been so long,” said Wes. “I have totally blocked it out!”
Katie tried to soothe him. She told him he was the one person they had interviewed who actually showed some feelings about the matter. “The only one who shows any semblance of caring,” she said, using the same approach she often employed with Lloyd. “We know you have a conscience,” she said, and then added, “but there’s no way in hell you can forget this stuff.”
Wes complained that they were “jumping down my throat!”
“It’s about doing the right thing,” said Katie.
They talked about closure, and Wes agreed that the Lyon family deserved some. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s unreal how anybody could do something like this.”
“We know you are a good guy,” said Katie. “People put you in a bad spot because they told you something.”
“Did you hear that?” Robin said to him. “They think you’re not telling them something.”
“No one wants to charge you, but not just one but three people have told us things they told you,” Mark said, exaggerating. “It’s hard to believe you don’t remember.” He pointed out the remarks in Wes’s grand jury testimony about the girls having been “chopped and burned.”
“How come ‘chopped and burned’?” Mark asked. “It actually happened.”
“Nobody told me that,” said Wes. “Nobody never.”
“Of all the ways, the exact way.”
“Dick never said that to me. I just blurted it out on the stand.”
“We don’t want to get you hemmed up,” said Mark. “We are trying to lead the horse to water.”
After much more of this, Wes fairly shouted out his uncle’s name.
“It came from Dick! He wanted to go up and smash the car. He was all nervous and upset from him and Teddy, and he started blurting stuff out. He wanted to go to the mountain, find the car, smash it, and get rid of it.”
Mark reminded Wes that he had been given immunity before his testimony in November, and that the agreement was still in effect.
“You need to try harder,” urged Robin.
“This has got to come out today,” said Mark. “We’re out on a limb here with the prosecutor.”
“Dick has no remorse,” said Wes. “He don’t care.”
“Your wife wants you to come clean,” pleaded Katie. “We don’t understand why you’re holding back, unless you had something to do with it on the back end.”
“Even if you went down and did something with that car, you aren’t in trouble,” said Mark.
“He [Dick] said he wanted to find the car—Jimmy Welch’s—and destroy it.”
“Why would he blurt all this stuff to you?” Katie asked.
“I guess because Tommy Junior [Teddy] scared the shit out of him.” (There had been, in fact, nothing whatever threatening in Teddy’s recorded conversation with his uncle.)
Mark wondered whether Dick had brought up the car because he wanted Wes’s help.
“He didn’t say anything, Mark. I didn’t say anything. He wanted to smash it all up, flatten it, I guess.”
“Don’t guess,” said Robin. “You’re making it worse.”
“I’m not making it worse! I just don’t want to fucking deal with this!”
“You are involved in it!” said Robin.
Wes blew up and marched outside again, and again Mark followed, talking to him in the yard.
“It’s not going to go away,” the detective said.
“I know it’s not going to go away.”
Mark asked him if his reluctance to get involved was more important than resolving the case for the Lyon family.
“I don’t know anything else!” Wes insisted.
“You know, and I know you do. I’m here as your friend. I’ve gone to bat with the prosecutor. He has a list of all who are going to be prosecuted. I’m here to get you off that list. The only way is for the person with the goodness, you, to step up. Not just the bullet points, the details. The details of your conversation with Dick.”
“I told you everything I know.”
“There’s more. You are covered as long as you tell the truth.”
Wes broke down. He sobbed. He repeated his disbelief that a member of his family could be involved in such a thing. Mark told him it wasn’t just Dick and Lloyd and Lee, it was also his aunt Pat and his cousins who helped them cover it up. He painted a dark picture of Dick, especially, suggesting to Wes that the Lyon girls had not been his only victims. Women in his family had been victimized, other strangers. He suggested that Dick had kidnapped, raped, and killed others.
“You hold the key for all these people,” Mark said.
And Wes finally told a fuller story, the one he would repeat in May before the grand jury about his uncles and Lloyd, about the girls being raped repeatedly on a pool table, about his uncle Dick asking for help disposing of the car that had carried the girls to Virginia. When Wes was done, Mark asked, “What is it about this family?”
“What’s gonna happen to Dick?” Wes asked.
“Should he be allowed to live another day free?” Mark asked.
“Hell no.”
“Why didn’t you tell us back then?”
“I was scared. I was really scared, Mark. Two young kids being raped by freaking old men. I just can’t believe it. I need to take stuff more seriously. Wow. I feel sick now.”
Wes was, the squad couldn’t help noticing, a lot like his cousin Lloyd. It was just as hard to wring a full story from him, and, after they finally did, they were left wondering how much of it was true.
It had taken effort, but the squad could now more clearly picture Lloyd at age eighteen. They could look past the sad, pasty, wily, shackled old man who met them in the interview room and see teenage Lloyd, lean, dirty, mean, and high—stoned, speeding, tripping, or drunk. He had been feral. In ordinary times, this might have made him stand out, but in the late 1960s, during and after the Summer of Love, at about the time he was cast off by his family, many teenage boys were growing their hair long, dressing shabbily, infrequently bathing, and freely experimenting with drugs. Lloyd ran smack into the hippie movement in its heyday. For most, this period was a fling, youthful defiance of middle-class suburban norms. But for Lloyd it was no pose. He really was poor, desperate, dirty, and up for anything. And for the first and only time in his life he actually fit in. By 1975 the hippie movement had faded, but Lloyd hadn’t changed. He was then part of a class of shaggy vagabonds thumbing their way around the country on back roads, camping in the woods outside suburbia. Like Lloyd and Helen, many were heavy drug users. Flower power had gone to seed. They still proclaimed, as Lloyd would proclaim, the fading mantras of the hippie moment—free love, mind-expanding drugs, and the all-encompassing “If it feels good, do it,” but few had considered what such a credo might mean to man like Lloyd Welch.
The hillbilly subculture that produced him has been described in more recent years by author J. D. Vance as “a permanent American underclass.” The Welches had never blended into white-collar suburbia. In Hyattsville during the 1960s and ’70s, they had lived clustered in the same run-down apartment complexes and eventually in houses on the same run-down blocks, reproducing rapidly. They were marked by their distinctive hill-country manners and dialect, trapped in low-paying jobs with few prospects, cantankerous, prone to violence, colliding frequently with the police, and, sealed in the intimacy of their crowded homes, carrying on vicious old habits.
Lloyd had been an outcast even from this. Abused and abandoned by his father, reclaimed only to be cast out again, at age eighteen he was already an outlaw, stranded on the fringes of a prosperous world beyond his grasp. Although still haunting his family, he was homeless, often camping with Helen in the region’s shrinking wooded patches. After he had been publicly linked to the Lyon case, three other women had surfaced with stories of a man who had either assaulted or attempted to lure them as children—all in the mid-1970s, all before the Lyon girls were taken. Each described a man who resembled Lloyd. There was the unsolved case of a fourteen-year-old girl who had been raped by a man who emerged from a patch of woods adjacent to her school. Others said the man had approached them in the mall flashing an official-looking badge, claiming he was an undercover security officer. One girl had refused to leave with him. Two others, in a separate incident, had gone with him, getting into a car before thinking better of it. One had jumped out while it was moving. This caused him to stop, at which point the second girl bolted. If the man in any of these encounters had been Lloyd, the incidents suggested he had been perfecting his approach.
In a twisted way, it made sense for Lloyd to prey on children at the mall, for several reasons. For one thing, he could do so anonymously. Unlike the old small-town Main Streets, where everyone knew everyone else, centers like Wheaton Plaza drew from a wide and densely populated region. Strolling in the mall was more like walking down a city sidewalk; occasionally you would run into someone you knew, but mostly you did not. A sea of strangers was the perfect hunting ground for a predator. And Wheaton Plaza made sense for a deeper reason. Malls were suburbia’s gleaming showcases, lined with high-end stores stocked with goods Lloyd could not afford, displaying colorful, oversize ads for a lifestyle beyond his reach. They drew clean and prosperous families with credit cards and shopping lists. Living in the woods with his girlfriend, Lloyd would not have known how to take the first step into that world. And while he was not the sort to reflect on such things, much less articulate them, he must have resented the plenitude, all the comforts of money, family, and community that he lacked. As Lloyd himself had put it, “I was an angry person when I was young.” And if he felt scorn, or rage, how better to strike back than to stalk the very thing the mall’s privileged customers most prized? The pretty little girls he saw there, to whom he was perversely attracted, represented everything he was denied. Might such a man, driven by lust and rage, steal them … drug them … ravish them … kill them … dismember them … burn them?
It was a theory. In it, perhaps, was the outline of an answer to the old crime’s deepest mystery, the one that had bothered me through the years. Who would do such a thing? And why?
None of these ideas were conveyed to Lloyd, of course. The detectives continued to pretend he was, at heart, a really good guy, eager to do the right thing, whom they were ever-ready to take at his ever-changing word. They did so because for them to learn what had happened to the Lyon sisters, Lloyd would have to tell them, even though he had every reason in the world not to. He wasn’t going to stop talking. In addition to his other motivations—to find out what they knew, to break the monotony of his days—they now realized how much he was enjoying himself. This extended dialogue was a game he believed he could win. And often the detectives wondered whether he was right. At times it felt as if he was leading them in circles.
At each visit, the squad tried to bring him evidence, real or invented, strong enough to make him recast his story. From the first it had worked this way. Confronting him with his 1975 statement—a thing he could not deny—had compelled him to admit he’d been in the mall, which had compelled him, in self-defense, to name someone else as the kidnapper. He’d seized on Mileski because that’s who the squad put in front of him. After they removed Mileski as a possibility, he had offered up Teddy, not knowing that his age and broken arms would virtually rule him out. He had correctly surmised that Teddy and “an older man”—Kraisel—would appeal to them. When that scenario was disproved by the time line, and it was pointed out that he and Teddy would have needed an older accomplice with a car, he’d named Dick, another shrewd choice, as it turned out, given the family’s stories about his uncle. When real witnesses placed Lloyd squarely in Virginia with a bloody duffel bag, something he could not safely deny, he’d edged his cousin Henry into the picture—after all, Henry was one of those who had named him.
The one constant in all these shifts was Lloyd’s effort to move himself off center. Present but not involved. The logical contortions this required were both repellent and laughable, such as “partying” with two scared little girls and then “babysitting” them during days when they were being drugged and raped. But with each new twist, Lloyd revealed more.
Three months passed. Lloyd’s promised day before the grand jury, and his visit with Edna, did not come.
Dave had meant it when he’d made the offer. The Lyon squad had got the RV authorized and intended to wire it up. The detectives had planned to use the trip as a pretext for another long interview. Dave would ride with Lloyd, and the rest of the squad would follow in another car, listening. They could then switch up, do their usual tag-team routine. They would take Lloyd up to Taylor’s Mountain first to see whether anything there stirred more memories, and then on to the copper-domed courthouse. Before the grand jury, he would be under oath. Because Lloyd so feared additional charges, it might help pin him down.
But their partners in Virginia had balked. The Marylanders were wearing out their welcome. Bedford had thrown open its doors at first, but when the work produced so little, the relationship grew strained. The sheriff’s office had fought to conduct the digs on Taylor’s Mountain itself—a point of local pride—spurning the FBI’s evidence-recovery experts, recruited by Montgomery County, a move that had delayed the work for months and disappointed the squad members, who had been pleased by the FBI’s willingness to help. When the digging yielded little, there remained the suspicion in Maryland that the wrong people had done it. Then there was the matter of indicting Pat Welch for obstruction. The point, as the Marylanders saw it, was to pressure her to testify more candidly, but after being charged, Pat was not reinterviewed. Months later she pleaded guilty and was released on probation. Instead of turning up the heat, the Bedford team had let Pat get off effectively scot-free. There were other instances when the squad felt a lack of eagerness below the border. Bedford was a small community and a close one. Some of those targeted by the probe were, in the eyes of local officers, good ol’ boys they knew well, whose protests found a welcome hearing. The Virginians, for their part, were increasingly disinclined to let these obsessed cold case detectives order them around.
These tensions may or may not have contributed to Bedford’s refusal to bring Lloyd down. Inviting Lloyd into its jurisdiction for any reason other than to try him for murder was a step too far. Guarding him, figuring out where to confine him overnight, would have been costly and risky. Compared with the thousand-man Montgomery County Police Department, the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office was a storefront operation. A security detail to keep watch on Lloyd for several days would have put a strain on its routine patrol duties. The RV ride fell through.
But Virginia was still helping. After the trip was nixed, Chris, Dave, Mark, and Katie contrived to use the refusal to shape their strategy for the next encounter with Lloyd, which was set for Friday, May 1. They were met in Dover by a team of Virginia detectives.
This time they hoped to scare the truth out of him.
Dave reentered the familiar interview room carrying the usual two cups of coffee.
“My brother! What’s happening?” he said, and then, anticipating Lloyd’s usual lament about having been roused early and kept waiting, said, “I know. Don’t yell at me.”
“Man, I’ve been up since two o’clock this morning,” said Lloyd. He had been dozing in the chair.
“If it means anything, you look good,” said Dave. “You do. You look like you’ve lost a little weight. You look like you’re in better shape. You do.”
The praise perked Lloyd up. He did look healthier. He said he had been working out.
“This [session] is really for you,” said Dave. “And I’m going to explain everything to you. Where we are at. Where it’s going. And this may be the last time that we meet.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, no, no, no, no. Not in a bad way.”
Dave said the promised RV drive had fallen through because of a conflict with Virginia. That much was true, but Dave put his own spin on it: Bedford wanted to charge Lloyd immediately, and the Lyon squad, in his corner, was frantically trying to fend it off. He showed Lloyd the standard forms outlining his rights—“this nonsense,” he called it.
“Nothing has changed on the form,” he said. “There are no charges.”
One of Lloyd’s more curious failings was a grandiosely erroneous estimation of how much control he had over his circumstances. He now told Dave that he had been drafting his own blanket immunity agreement—one that would guarantee he would never be charged with anything in the Lyon case. It was a guilty man’s dream. No prosecutor would ever agree to such a thing, but Lloyd had visited the prison’s law library and drafted one. He had originally planned to insist that it be endorsed before he set foot in the grand jury room, but, he said, he had decided against it. Seeing how eager the squad was for him to testify, and being the magnanimous fellow he was, he had planned to shelve it, telling himself, as he related now to Dave, “I’m not going to put them through that hassle, because I’m trying to get out of here. I’m trying to start what little life I got left, trying to do good.” Since they had never come for him, he’d missed the chance to make the grand gesture, but he wanted Dave to know about it. The detective changed the subject.
“You look real good,” he repeated.
“Huh?”
“Not bad for a fifty-eight-year-old man?” he said, holding up his right arm and flexing his biceps.
“When can you get out?” Dave asked, as if they had not discussed this before, and as if that were still an option. It was a topic that always cheered Lloyd up. “How many years you got left?”
“Well, see, that’s the thing. On paper it says twenty twenty-four [the year 2024], but with the good time and stuff like that building up, if I don’t get charged for none of this right here, then I could be out of here by twenty-one [2021], at the earliest.” He had not been granted the five-year dispensation he’d sought in 2013.
“So you’ll be—six years—you’ll be, like, say, sixty-five.”
“I’ve done a lot of rotten things in my life. And in the nineteen years I’ve been incarcerated here, this has taught me a lesson that I never want to learn again. And, like I said, I found the Lord, and I really want to start helping people and stuff like that.”
They talked about how much the world had changed, especially the advances in technology. Dave marveled at what he had read of the new Apple Watch, which had been released the previous month. “It does everything your phone and computer does, and it’s a watch!”
If he were set free that day, Lloyd said, he’d have exactly eighty-two cents of his own. Delaware would give him fifty dollars and some clean clothes.
“You can’t even get a motel for fifty dollars!” said Dave.
“So, what happens to me is, I get violated, and I’m right back in the system.”
Dave commiserated: “It’s a huge problem that nobody wants to seem to think about.”
In time they got around to business. The detective had, he said, new information, “because, like I said, this is more about you today. I’ve spent a lot of time with you, and we’ve built up a pretty decent relationship.”
“I think we have. And I don’t like cops. But I’ll be honest with you—this is from the heart—I actually do like you and the rest of the team. You know, I talk to you more than I talk to them, but I’ve actually come to respect you three. I’ve actually come to respect you three more than anything else in the world, because—y’all are officers, don’t get me wrong on that—it’s because you’re human beings. I don’t think you’re gonna throw me under the bus.”
“No. And that’s why I want to explain everything to you, because we’ve always tried to be up front with you.” This, of course, was not true. He had been duplicitous from the start, and so had Lloyd. It was the game.
“Let me tell you something,” said Dave. “It wasn’t easy to get here. There was a lot of people that said, ‘No, we’re done communicating with him.’ There was a lot of shenanigans that went on. Part of what got shut down was the grand jury.”
“So, they wanted to charge me, put it all on me?”
“It’s looking like that. And that’s why it’s an important day for both of us.”
“I’ve already come to the conclusion they’re going to pin it on me.”
“Well, let’s see what we can get here today. Our county in Maryland, Montgomery, has always been about answers. When we came down here we wanted answers. So, what? We hit you with a charge? You’re already in jail. So what difference does it make if we charge you? You’re not going anywhere. So, it was all about answers. But then you get other agencies involved, and things start to change. It was like fighting tooth and nail, with some folks saying we’ve invested two years of our careers in you. We believe in you. Give us one more shot. I said, ‘Give me an opportunity.’”
“Yeah. I’ve implicated myself so much. I realized it when I left [the last session] that I was fucked.”
“And that’s what I said,” Dave explained. Today was a chance to back away from the ledge. Dave said he’d brought his lunch and that they would eat together and “kick back,” but first he wanted to run through the whole thing once more. Lloyd retold the story of his uncle Dick’s efforts to recruit him, how he and Dick and Teddy drove to the mall. When he got to the part about talking the girls into leaving with them, Dave interrupted.
“All right. Let’s stop right there. You’ve got three or four people that see Lloyd Welch in the mall. No one has ever said anything about Teddy.”
“Right.”
“No one has ever said anything about Dick, because he was outside in the car. So you’ve got Lloyd Welch.”
But Lloyd refused to take Teddy out of the picture. He walked Dave through the same story he had told last time, but in this version, he now claimed, preposterously, that he did not know when he went back to the mall to give his statement that the girls he had seen at his uncle’s house were the Lyon sisters. He now said he thought the girls were just runaways. This ignored much of what he had told them in the previous months, about seeking the reward money, about trying to deflect police interest in himself. It was as if he had never said those things. This appeared to be something he had worked out in his cell during the previous months, a new strategy. It showed a staggering lack of awareness. He seemed to completely buy that Dave was here to help him craft a self-defense narrative, untethered to facts, into which he could plug new, more favorable particulars for old problematic ones—and that no would notice or care!
“So I was going to use them two girls who I thought was actually running away.” His choice of the word use here was revealing. “You know what I’m saying? Because at the time, I really didn’t know their names or really know their faces or anything like that. Like I said, they never said, ‘Help’ or anything like that when we looked after them. So I thought they were running away.”
Otherwise he stuck to the version of the story he had told three weeks earlier, seeing Dick drive up at night, the bag, the fire, the horrible odor. Dave sat through it all, pointing out once or twice how jurors might see through it—Lloyd transparently removing himself from the picture at every stage. But it wasn’t good enough. Virginia’s prosecutors weren’t buying it, Dave explained, because they were more intent on nailing him than on learning the truth. In short, Lloyd was about to be charged with murder.
“Does the DNA from the bones show that it was the girls?” Lloyd asked.
“Got one fragment that shows,” said Dave, falsely.
“Now, the question is, how did Lloyd get dead bodies from point A to point B?” Lloyd said, speaking of himself in the third person.
“That’s why we’re here, because there’s lots of stuff in between that we’ve got answers to. And that’s why I’m back. I begged,” said Dave. He said he wanted to see whether Lloyd could give him answers that matched up with what they already knew. This was a timeworn interrogation tactic and a stretch. They knew little more than what Lloyd had told them.
“It’s hard for me to believe that you don’t have some of the answers that you left out,” Dave said. “And I get it.”
Lloyd altered his story a little. Earlier he had said that he and Helen had gone to Virginia because Dick had told him to get lost. Now he said he had been asked by his uncle and his father to go. He said Dick visited him at his father’s house and recommended that he and Helen leave earlier than they had planned. “It would be best if you got out of here,” he said Dick told him.
“And was that because he knows you were seen at the mall and he knows it’s going to hit the media?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now he’s worried that you’re going to get caught, which is going to implicate him, or you’re simply going to turn on him?”
“Yeah. And Lee did make a phone call that we were coming.”
“Let’s stop right there. Let’s not leave anything out. And what I mean by that is, I’m not saying you’re holding back. I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m thinking from a person outside, taking my feelings out—I mean, I really do care for you—but if you’re supposed to be going down there, and Dick has come up with this plan that he eventually is going to come down there with these girls, whether they’re alive or dead, why wouldn’t he give you a car to drive? Or you and Helen ride with him? Why would you try to hitchhike to Bedford? Explain that, because that logically doesn’t make sense.”
Lloyd clung to his hitchhiking story. This was crucial. It freed him from having been involved with transporting the Lyon girls to Virginia. He knew that any such involvement would mean more trouble. So he argued again that he and his uncle didn’t get along well enough for Dick to offer him a ride. Besides, he said, he and Helen would not have wanted to spend five hours in the car with Dick.
“So, they were dead or alive when you left?”
“They were alive when we left. What happened after that, I don’t know.”
“Who had sex with them?”
Lloyd said he didn’t know.
The most important thing, Dave said, was to know who killed Sheila and Kate and where.
“I can give you my suspicion,” said Lloyd.
“Give it to me.”
“I honestly think it was Dick and Lee. I would think that the girls had had enough; they wanted to go home,” Lloyd said, as if Sheila and Kate had initially been keen on their abduction and rape. “Dickie didn’t want to send them home. He would be charged with rape and kidnapping and all that. And he decided to get rid of them. And knowing him and Lee were as close as they were …”
This was a breakthrough. Lloyd was now coming to the actual murder scene. Dave just let him continue.
Lloyd said the girls wouldn’t have been killed in Dick’s house. Dick and Lee would have taken them somewhere else. “Where, I don’t know.” Both men were married and had children living at home. Too many people. He suggested that the girls might have been drugged, knocked unconscious, or even strangled, and then carried up to the railroad tracks that ran near Dick’s house or over to the Anacostia River basin, a small tributary that winds down from the northeast toward the Potomac. There they would have been chopped into pieces and put into the duffel bag or bags. Either that, Lloyd said, or Dick and Lee had set off to take the girls to Virginia, and one girl “had gotten out of hand” and was killed on the way.
This was more than Lloyd had ever told them about the girls’ ultimate fate. Dave deliberately did not remark on it.
“We’ve got theories,” he told Lloyd. He explained how stories gained credence because of provable details. “I’ll give you one because it sticks in my mind. There was a red Ford Pinto station wagon stolen from a Ford dealership right next to the mall the day the girls were abducted. That car was recovered by PG [Prince Georges] County an eighth of a mile away from Dick’s house [about a half-hour drive from Wheaton Plaza without traffic].”
Lloyd lifted an eyebrow and smiled.
“And because I stole a couple of cars, the theory is that Lloyd took the car,” he said.
“And in your original statement you said that the car was red.”
“Oh Lord,” Lloyd lamented. “Oh Lord.”
“You see?”
“When I first started talking to y’all, back then I was bullshit,” said Lloyd. “But everything I’ve told you in the last year, when I started telling you about Dickie and stuff like that, it started weighing on my conscience. I’m fifty-eight years old. I’ve held this shit in too long. It’s … I can’t tell you who killed them.”
Dave thought he could. He said, “If I told you that I know that Dick killed them, damn near can prove it—I can’t prove whether you helped, didn’t help. And I can tell you how he killed them, and obviously we know where they ended up. Now, in my mind, the only thing that you’re holding out on is some knowledge, just because of the family and the tightness. And because I already know, and you can tell me some of those details, then I could go back and say, ‘Look, he told me what we already can prove.’ That helps you.”
“But then that implicates me.”
“How does that implicate you?”
“Okay, let’s just say I know how they were killed; I know where they were killed; I know who killed them. Then that implicates me being there when they were killed.”
“But that’s the trust that you and I have to develop. I’m not here tricking you.”
Dave said that a family member had come forward who was “very little at the time,” but whom Dick trusted—he was talking about Wes Justice. “It was like pulling teeth to get this guy to testify before the grand jury, and finally he broke, and he broke bad. He laid it all out for what Dick told him. And if you were able to back that up—”
“See, that’s the problem—”
“If not, then it stands as Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd.” Then Dave extended his hand. “Out here is Dick and Teddy. And we can’t prove any of this shit.”
He told Lloyd in effect, I think there’s more you could tell, but you’re worried that you’re being played.
Lloyd concurred. “Is it a trick, or is that the truth, or … you see what I am going through?” he asked.
“I can’t give it to you, because if I do, then they’re just going to say, ‘Nah, you spoon-fed him that, and he gave it back to you.’ You’ve already hinted around at it before.”
“I have?”
“Yes. I want to say that it was in the last interview that you hinted around it. And that’s what really drew our attention to what this guy [Wes] is saying.”
“Can you refresh my memory of me hinting around?”
“Had to do with the bag. One of the things you corroborated was that your dad, that Lee, had a bag just like yours.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s part of it, but think about what you said when you were being blamed for them being put in the bag, about how they wound up in the bag.”
“Oh, chopped up?”
Dave made a gesture with his hands, as if to say, Voilà!
Lloyd continued, “Because he said it was bloody, and I said, Well, the only way that I could think about it is if they were chopped up.”
“No, what you actually said—you got pissed because you were being accused of killing them. And what you did is, you threw your hands up and said, ‘What? Am I supposed to have chopped them up and put them in a bag?’ What was told to this person by Dick is that he chopped them up.”
“Now, see, I will say that he did,” said Lloyd. “I mean, I know for a fact, because he had a little section outside where he chopped wood and stuff like that, because he used to sell wood. Now, he did have an ax, and he did have a hatchet. And he kept them very sharp. And he kept them down in the basement with his other tools. But for me to say that I actually saw him do that, I can’t.”
“So, you’re told by your family to get the hell out of Dodge,” said Dave.
“Basically, that’s exactly the way it was.”
Lloyd had come a long way. He had suggested that his uncle and father had killed the girls and dismembered them. Then he said the station wagon his uncle Dick had driven to Virginia afterward, to deliver the bloody duffel bags, belonged to his aunt Pat or possibly to her father.
“There’s two problems that we have to unfuck here,” said Dave. These were the stories told by Connie Akers and Henry Parker about Lloyd’s bloody duffel bag. Both witnesses gave very specific accounts of Lloyd delivering the bags, and both were believable. Their stories jibed. Lloyd had contradicted both—two against one. Here, again, was plausible evidence that Lloyd would have to explain away.
“Wow,” he said, staring the obstacle in the face.
“Yeah. So, we have to undo that and somehow figure out Dick’s role in this mess.”
“Yeah,” said Lloyd, intently collaborating. “So, Henry and Connie are saying, ‘Lloyd did it.’ Lloyd and Helen didn’t show up in no car.” He bragged about how powerful his legs were from all the walking he did when he was young. He said he had no memory of encountering Connie with a bag of dirty clothes. He grew angry just talking about the story told by Connie and Henry, and announced that he was done trying to protect anyone in his family. “I tried covering them. I tried to leave it alone, walking away. And I did it for forty years.”
“I’ve got my own opinion,” said Dave. “But there’s got to be something that you can give me that I can back up, because I have my opinion. And it’s good—it’s a good opinion of you, and it’s a very bad opinion of Dick. And it’s easy for Connie to do kind of what you did in the beginning. You’d give us some truth. You just interchanged people.”
“Uh-huh,” Lloyd agreed, and then came up with a motive for Connie to lie. “I honestly think that Connie had a crush on me. I honestly do. And she was pissed off whenever I’d show up with Helen.”
“So explain to me why—”
“Why she would lie on me?”
“Yeah.”
“To save Dick’s ass, is what I think.”
“Right,” said Dave. “Because how easy would it be if the true story is that you simply just showed up down there? Dick comes down because that’s the plan they came up with when you left. They said, ‘We got to do something, the shit’s on, Lloyd’s been back at the mall, he’s been seen, and now he’s lied to the police, it’s eventually going to come home, we got to do something.’ They panic. I don’t know where they were killed. More than likely, they used an ax and chopped them up because that’s what he [Dick] told this other family member. And I was trying not to lead you.”
“Right,” said Lloyd. He liked how this was going. Dave had caught the spirit of the thing.
“If there’s one person in your corner, it’s me,” said Dave.
“Right.”
“Because I don’t want to see you get charged with capital murder in Virginia if you didn’t kill them.”
After a lunch break, Dave returned beleaguered.
“Holy smokes!” he said.
“What?”
“I was going to come in here and eat with you, man, but they beat me up something awful out there.”
“They beat you up?” In Lloyd’s world the expression wasn’t metaphorical.
Dave explained that the prosecutors and police from Virginia, who were waiting eagerly in the next room, were going press charges against Lloyd unless the squad could extract something new from him, some verifiable fact that corroborated his version of events.
This was, of course, a ploy. The commonwealth attorney’s office was being very cooperative, not clamoring at that moment to press charges.
“It’s a mess,” said Dave. “The first thing I said to them when I walked in there is, ‘I believe him one hundred percent. I believe him.’ I said, ‘There are some things that may differ a little bit than what we’ve been able to prove, but it’s explainable.’ But what they said is, ‘Look, it’s a whole lot different than what he said the last time.’ And the way they’re looking at it is, you’re going in reverse instead of forward. And I said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ So I figured we’d come back in here.”
Dave told him how absurd “babysitting” the girls sounded.
“If you were told, simply sit your ass in that poolroom and watch these girls, and the girls were tied up or gagged, and that’s what you saw, and that’s why you went and watched TV, because you didn’t want to be a part of it, I can understand that. It’s a little more explainable than you were ‘babysitting,’ and they didn’t say anything. That’s bullshit. It was Easter Sunday. It was her [Sheila’s] birthday. I’m, like, wait a minute.”
“But that’s the whole thing,” Lloyd protested. “They didn’t say anything to me.”
“Did they look scared? We’re talking about a ten- and twelve-year-old girl.”
But Lloyd stuck with it. “I mean, back then, who was scared? It was all free love and partying and shit like that. Those girls were never tied up. I didn’t see them tied up, so I can’t say if they were tied up. And not one of them said, ‘Hey, I want to go home,’ ‘Hey, this is Easter weekend, you going to let us go? Help us?’ Anything. They didn’t say nothing. They didn’t talk to me at all, you know. He showed me where those girls were at and just said ‘babysit them.’” He said Helen would have done something if she thought the girls were being abused.
This, Dave reiterated, was inconceivable. Kate had been crying when she left the mall, days earlier. She would have been frantic. He talked about the childlike drawings and writings found in the girls’ rooms and schoolwork.
“They were kids, man. They were coloring! This wasn’t two girls who were going to smoke and drink. And now you’re talking about being in a stranger’s house for five days? And who knows how many people have run through [raped] them? And it’s Easter Sunday and one of their birthdays?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How can—”
“I didn’t know it was her birthday.”
“It doesn’t add up.”
“I understand that. You asked me earlier if one of the girls looked like they were drugged. And I told you the older one looked like she was drugged. I believe both of them was drugged.” He offered a theory. He said he thought Pat was a nurse—she wasn’t—and that would have given her access to needles and drugs. Lloyd was flailing now. He floated the idea that the girls may have been running away from home because their father was abusing them. Dave said these explanations were not going to help him.
“You understand completely now that we need to try to make something work,” the detective said. “And if we don’t, then we’re left with a pile of shit. Both of us are.”
Lloyd would not alter his story.
“Why would you guys hitchhike and then have them follow you down in a car?” Dave asked.
“Why? I didn’t even know they were coming down. I didn’t have a car.”
“Did you ride with them?”
“We actually hitchhiked. Me and Helen hitchhiked out of there.”
“How are we going to explain what Connie says and what Henry says?”
“They’re lying. They are totally lying. We did not come down there in a car.”
Lloyd looked beaten. He said he was resigned to taking all the blame, unfairly.
“How can we undo it?” asked Dave. “How can we switch it back?”
“I mean, I could sit here and say, ‘Hey, I saw Dick chop them up.’ I’d be lying. I could say, ‘Hey, I knew they were taking them down to Virginia.’ I’d be lying. You see what I’m saying?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can only admit to what I know. I can’t fabricate that I saw him chop them up. I can’t fabricate that I knew they were in a car and that he was just going to take them down. I can’t. I didn’t drive down in no car. And I’ll put a stack of Bibles, anything you want. I did not drive down in any car with any bags in it and throw anything on a fire. That was—no.”
The more adamant Lloyd grew protesting his truthfulness, the closer he was to admitting a lie. It was as if he built a wall around a falsehood, and when facts started pressing in, he pushed back harder and harder until he could resist no longer. Then the wall completely collapsed. They were getting close to that point again.
Dave continued pretending that he was Lloyd’s ally. He believed Lloyd. He pleaded for some detail, one demonstrable fact, that would prove Lloyd’s story.
“I have a very strong idea where those girls were killed at, very strong idea,” said Lloyd. He described a bridge near Dick’s house, a span over the Anacostia River. “You know where the house used to be at?”
“What house?”
“Dickie’s house.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know where the bridge is? On Buchanan Street, the bridge that goes across? You know the little river than runs down there?”
“Right.”
He said Dick had a spot beneath that bridge where he liked to hang out.
“I’m pretty sure that’s where they were killed,” he said. “That would probably be the logical place for him to take them, because it’s under a bridge and it’s right there by the water. There should be some family members to tell you that he used to go down and do a bit of fishing there. I mean, he was down there quite a bit. Nine times out of ten that’s where I’d say he took them. I’d say he drugged them and took them there, and that’s where he did what he had to do.”
The bridge, Lloyd said, would have provided him with cover. “Nobody would even know you were there. And if you did it at nighttime, nobody would see you.”
“Why would you struggle with telling me that?” Dave asked.
“Because even though I know they’re turning against me, I still have some kind of love for parts of my family. I don’t like turning against people. I don’t like being considered a snitch.” This despite the fact that he had months ago introduced his cousin and his uncle as the girls’ kidnappers and killers.
“Let me put it to you this way,” said Dave. “Do you know that’s what happened? Because if you’re saying it hypothetically, that’s not a snitch. That’s just your opinion on it.”
“Yeah. I mean—”
“I mean, let’s just be fucking real.”
“Do I know for real that it happened there?”
“Yeah. I mean, you just said, ‘Fuck it.’ You were holding that as a trump card. I mean, to me, you know for sure.”
Lloyd stammered. “Come on, man. We’ve been—this is too much.”
“It’s time,” Dave demanded.
“Yeah. I do know that that’s where they were killed at,” said Lloyd. “Did I drive them down there? No.”
Lloyd said that the bridge and river were his uncle’s “comfort area,” but then he backtracked again. He said he could be only “ninety percent” sure. He was now worried he had said too much.
“I don’t think you got the death penalty in Maryland. I don’t know.”
“Or in Virginia. I don’t know.”
“They do in Virginia.”
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I’m fucked now. I’m dead.”
Lloyd now said that he saw Dick leave with the girls in a car heading toward the river and the bridge. He and Helen were clearing out, as Dick had suggested, and that was what he saw. Something bad happened under that bridge. “I don’t know what, because we kept walking. I didn’t turn around and look.”
Three and a half hours into the session, Mark and Katie took over, pressing home to Lloyd how hard Dave was working on his behalf.
True to form, Mark zeroed in on the absurdities in Lloyd’s story. While there were parts of it they all believed, the rest would fall with one blow. No one would believe—he didn’t believe—that the girls were trippy and calm days after being kidnapped.
“I didn’t say I kidnapped them.”
“You said that.”
“Yeah, you did,” said Katie.
“No, I did not. I said I walked out of the mall with them. I never kidnapped them. I never forced them. I never said ‘kidnapped.’”
“Well, whether you used the word or not, it’s po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, it doesn’t make any difference,” said Katie.
“I said I walked out of the mall with them. I didn’t force them out of the mall. I asked them if they wanted to party and get high.”
“But the fact of the matter is, whatever the circumstances of their leaving with you, they never came home.”
“Right,” said Lloyd.
“So you are responsible for whatever happened to them, in the eyes of the law.”
“‘In the eyes of the law?’ Yeah, I guess so.”
“See what I’m saying?” asked Mark.
Lloyd said he understood. Mark walked him through the rest. He had seen one of the girls being raped. He knew that was wrong. He did nothing. And then he turned up at the mountain at the same time as the girls, both dead, or one dead and one alive. “So at no point did you do anything to help them or try to help them, you know what I mean?”
“That’s true.”
“These are the things that a reasonable body of people are going to be thinking. That is what it is. There’s no changing that. But that leaves so much unanswered.”
Lloyd allowed that he should have done something.
“At that point in time I didn’t really think anything was going to happen to those girls,” he said, as if abducting, raping, and feeding drugs to a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old wasn’t, in itself, anything. “Like I told Dave, I think Dick panicked when I ended up going back to the mall, and things went sour. I think in reality he wanted to party and he found a couple of girls that he partied with, you know?”
Katie said that if he didn’t drop his pose of complete innocence, his family was going to bury him.
“I can tell you that there’s a list of people in your family that I hate, and you’re very low on that list. We like you. I can tell you who I hate, that I hope burn in hell I hate them so much.”
“Pat,” Lloyd interjected, grinning.
“They’re evil, awful people. Did you say Pat? She’s number one. That’s funny that you say that, because she’s number one. She’s a sickening person.” Lloyd leaned forward with mirth, his arms folded across his chest. “But the reason we keep coming back to you is because, number one, you know stuff, but also because we think you have redeeming qualities, and we think you are going to eventually tell us the truth. You’re a smart guy. You’re one of the smartest people I’ve met.” Lloyd smiled and ducked his head shyly; he was eating this up. “You are! You are always ten steps ahead of us. And it may be because you have a lot of time on your hands to be ten steps ahead.”
“I watch a lot of Criminal Minds,” he said, referring to the popular TV series about a team of FBI criminal profilers, then quickly added, “I’m just joking.”
“Maybe if I watched it I could figure out how to crack you,” Katie said, “but let’s call a spade a spade. You’ve got more, and we’re playing a little game trying to figure out what we need to do to get more from you. It’s part of the game that we play with you. You know it. You’ve admitted it before. For whatever reason you are still holding stuff back. And it’s self-preservation. And I would probably do the same thing.”
Katie went on to describe how she saw the game. Dave, she said, “who really believes in you,” would report what Lloyd had said to the rest of the squad. “And my bullshit meter goes off. We don’t have the same relationship with you that Dave has.” She told Lloyd that after their last meeting, she suspected that he had gone back to his cell and worried about how much he had revealed. “And now you’re trying to draw back,” she said, “but the problem is that there’s things that have happened that you can’t take back. And it makes Dave look like a complete asshole if he’s sticking up for you.”
“I told Dave earlier—didn’t he tell y’all?—that Dickie’s the one who killed them. He didn’t tell you that?”
“No,” Katie lied. “I never even saw Dave.”
Lloyd retold his story about Dick taking the girls down toward the bridge as he and Helen left to hitchhike to Virginia. “They [Sheila and Kate] looked like they were still drugged up pretty good, because you could look at them. They were just, like, sitting there, you know?”
“Did they look alive?” Katie asked.
“I mean, the girl’s head moved, so I figured he was taking them home at the time.”
Sometimes the things Lloyd said were so incredible they took Katie’s breath away.
“So this man has abducted them from the mall, had sex, drugged them up, and now he’s, like, ‘Oh, Happy Easter, I’m going to take them home’?” she said. “That’s absurd.”
“I thought he was going to drop them off somewhere. I mean, I’m a stupid kid back then.”
“You’re far from stupid now. There’s no way you were that stupid then.”
Lloyd was not changing his story.
“I try to tell you when you are not making sense,” said Mark. “You’ve got to help us! That leaves our efforts today to try to better your situation floundering.”
“We feel like you know more; you are not helping yourself,” said Katie. She told him that his use of the word babysit was turning her stomach. The girls had ended up raped, murdered, butchered, burned. “They sure as hell weren’t being babysat. They were being held against their will.”
“Okay.”
Again, Lloyd insisted the girls seemed happy. He thought he was helping them run away from home.
“So you thought that after you saw a drugged girl being raped. You can’t possibly convince me that you thought that.”
“I did.”
During the time he babysat the girls, Katie asked, uttering the word with scorn, “What were the instructions you were given?”
Lloyd nodded and waved his hand and shouted, “NOW you ask the question you’ve been waiting to ask! Right?”
“That actually just popped into my head,” said Katie, truthfully.
“It’s the question that I’ve been waiting for,” said Lloyd.
This was nonsense. Katie had suggested to him that he was playing games with them, and Lloyd liked that idea. It made him seem smart. So now he pretended, poorly, to be engaging in gamesmanship. The whole thing was just … off. It made you wonder how self-aware Lloyd really was. His answer to Katie’s question was that he and Helen were told to keep an eye on the girls. This answer told them nothing of consequence.
“So, you’re not going to offer anything that we don’t ask,” said Katie. “If you look up welch in the dictionary, it says ‘people who will not offer up anything unless you ask.’”
“Yes,” said Katie. She was joking, but Lloyd didn’t get it. “I actually wrote Mr. Webster a letter and asked him to put it in the dictionary. So, unless we ask you the right question, you are not going to give it to us?”
Lloyd shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay, that’s fair. That’s cool,” said Katie.
“Well, some answers I’ll give you, but some I won’t, because I’m not really trying to get charged with anything. I’m not trying to stay in jail for the rest of my life for something I didn’t do.”
The back-and-forth continued for another hour. Then came the day’s final act, the one they had been setting up. Three Virginia detectives came in—Mayhew, Wilks, and Willis—all business.
Mayhew introduced himself.
“I’m going to be straight with you, buddy. We just went over this stuff with Dave and Mark and Katie. I know you’ve been talking to them all day. I know you’re tired. But we’re here for one thing. We’re investigating the deaths of the two Lyon sisters. And that’s two sisters, not just one. That’s two cases. And to be straight up and forward with you, buddy, everyone we’ve talked to in your family, and we’ve talked to everyone, believe me. We know a lot, and we know you still know a lot. Now, where we’re going to start this at is, we know we’ve got you the day they were abducted, in between babysitting them, and at the end where the bodies are at. Do you understand that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you also understand that in the state of Virginia, you do not have to touch those girls to be charged with homicide?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Absolutely,” said Mayhew.
Lloyd looked stunned.
Unless he could offer something to prove his version of the story, he would be charged with murder.
“You’re the one who abducted these girls, you raped these girls, and you killed them. Do you understand where we’re coming from?” said Willis.
“We’re here to give you your chance to tell us what you know,” said Mayhew. “You’ve got a lot of people saying, ‘Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd.’ Do we believe all that bullshit? No. We know other people are involved. We know they are all involved. But right now everybody is saying, ‘Lloyd.’ You’re the one who abducted these girls, you raped these girls, and you killed these girls. Do you understand where we’re coming from? You already know what we know. What we’re here for today is your side. Tell us what happened.”
“Here’s the situation,” said Wilks. “Listen to me. Here’s the situation. We sit here and listen to all this bullshit, all we’re going to listen to. We have our case. We got it. If you want to take it all, that’s on you, buddy.”
“I don’t want to take nothing,” said Lloyd.
“Then tell us the truth.”
“I told the truth.”
“You conspired to commit an abduction that turned into a homicide. And I can tell you, the commonwealth attorney in Bedford County in Virginia, he’s a fair man, but he’s going to seek justice where justice is deserved. And those two little girls deserve justice. And he’s gonna get it.”
“And I agree with you,” said Lloyd.
“And he’s going to get it. Okay?”
“I can’t tell you no more than I’ve already told them.”
“That’s where it lies,” said Willis. “You can either get in contact with one of the Maryland people if some miraculous memory comes forward tonight, but you are going to be charged in Virginia.”
Lloyd seemed cowed. Voices were raised. Lloyd said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s get a lawyer, and we’ll go from there!” All three detectives stood up to leave.
“Absolutely,” said one.
“Because I don’t need to say no more.”
“Absolutely, Lloyd,” said another.
“I mean, I’m sorry to waste y’all’s time.”
“Not a waste of our time,” said Willis. “Not at all.”
“You’re getting charged for something you did do,” said another.
“Thank you,” said Lloyd as the men left. He called after them, “Have a good day.”
Lloyd stewed for a few minutes alone in the room, his arms crossed, a scowl across his heavy features.
This performance by the Virginia team was all, of course, pure theater. When Dave reentered, having given Lloyd some time to decompress and ponder his plight, he asked, feigning bewilderment, “What in the world is going on?”
“You tell me,” said Lloyd.
“Well, my friend, there’s a whole lot of arguing going on out there. They’re trying to pack their shit up, talking about charging your ass.”
“Yep.”
“What went sideways in this room when they were in here?”
Like an affronted child, Lloyd told on the Virginia delegation. He replayed the conversation for Dave, what they said, what he said, how unfair they had been. “And I told them,” he said, raising both hands plaintively, “I can’t tell you no more than what I already know! I had three people coming at me at the same time. I mean, the one guy I was trying to be polite to, the other two wanted to have their little hard nose and threaten me and shit like that. So finally I just said, ‘Well, let a lawyer handle it.’”
Despite the elaborate charade, and the fact that Lloyd had clearly fallen for it, he still wasn’t going to give Dave anything more.
“You don’t have a trump card somewhere you’re going to pull out?” the detective asked.
“If I did I’d say it right now, just because they’re going back to Virginia to file charges against me.”
Dave told him this probably wouldn’t happen for a month or so.
“I mean, there’s nothing I can tell you, Dave. I’m sorry. There’s no trump card. There’s nothing. Katie asked, ‘What do you want for us to do to get the rest of the information out of you?’ There’s no more information, you know? I’m screwed. I’m … the rest of my life in prison probably, you know? I’ll probably finish up my time here and go to Maryland for time y’all give me and then go down to Virginia to do whatever time they give me down there. I’ll die in prison for something I didn’t do. It doesn’t make no sense. Going to put an innocent man in jail who did not touch them girls and did not kill them. My trump card was that I believe that Dickie killed them girls down there at that bridge, you know, or did something down there.”
“Right, because that’s in his backyard.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s where he did it at.”
Lloyd ended by asking for a few more days. It was a Friday. He asked them to wait until Tuesday.
“Give me the weekend to rack my brain. And believe me, every time I do rack my brain, I let you know something new.”
The Virginia detectives came back in before the session ended to reassure him that he had a few more days. Lloyd told them how bad he felt for having done nothing to help the girls back in 1975, about how his life had changed. He’d become a Christian; he was determined to turn things around.
“I’m not a bad person,” he said.