The Last Stone

by Mark Bowden

  “Personally?”

  “Yeah, I’m asking you for an opinion.”

  “Well, my opinion is that he killed ’em and raped ’em; he killed ’em and he probably burned ’em. I don’t know.”

  In the adjacent room, Chris and Pete looked at each other.

  “Who says ‘burned them’?” asked Pete.

  “If for any reason we wanted to come back and talk to you, would you be all right with that?” Dave asked.

  “I have no problem talking to y’all and stuff like that,” Lloyd said. “As long as I’m not implicated in, you know, doing something to them.” He said he planned to contact a lawyer, “just to be on the safe side.”

  “No, I don’t think we’re even anywhere close to that,” said Dave.

  He left Lloyd with a copy of the immunity agreement.

  “I don’t know anything else,” Lloyd assured him. “If I knew, believe me, I’d tell it.”

  As the detectives and the deputy state’s attorney left for the long drive back to Gaithersburg, they talked over their impressions. Chris was convinced that Lloyd was holding out on them, particularly about his relationship with Mileski. The fact that they had both been in Wheaton Plaza that day was a coincidence too big to swallow.

  All three of them were now more suspicious of Lloyd than they had been. This long dance had convinced them of three things:

  First, Lloyd was a compulsive liar. His stories were all over the place. There was no way he could have forgotten completely about giving the 1975 statement to the police and being given a polygraph exam. When he chose to remember a thing, he could, to a remarkable level of detail. His memory was clearly fine, and these were things a person didn’t forget. There was no way, living in the neighborhood in March of that year, that he would not have heard anything about the missing Lyon sisters. His explanation that “something wasn’t right,” seven days later, was ridiculous. Besides, anyone who asserts so often that he is telling the truth probably isn’t. Again and again Lloyd protested, “Believe me,” “Trust me,” “I’m telling you the truth.” He had invoked the words “honest” or “honestly” sixty-eight times, sworn to God and on imaginary stacks of Bibles, and once had tossed in his unknown “children’s lives.” Only liars work that hard to appear sincere.

  Second, Lloyd knew more than he said he did. If the story he had told was all he knew—he had witnessed the girls leaving the mall with someone—then why was he so concerned about immunity? Why was he inventing stories? Chris was struck by how Lloyd, alone in the room reading over the agreement, had lamented to himself, “They got me.” Albeit, Lloyd was distrustful of police, but what pure witness would be so worried that telling what he’d seen would get him charged with the crime?

  Third, contrary to his oft-repeated and vehement denials, he had been directly involved. It was the best explanation for his continual lies, his implausible memory lapses, and his evident fright.

  His comment at the end about the girls’ likely fate was especially curious. Anyone asked to conjecture what had happened to the Lyon girls might have said rape and murder. But “burned them”?

  Who says “burned them”?

  4

  The Test

  Police search for the Lyon sisters around Wheaton Plaza on April 1, 1975

  WHAT EXACTLY DID HE DO?

  As far as Chris Homrock was concerned, they were closer than ever to proving Ray Mileski was the kidnapper and killer. There was still no concrete proof—there probably would never be any—but Lloyd Welch’s testimony felt like real evidence.

  Hadn’t Lloyd recognized Mileski’s photo instantly? He said he couldn’t remember the man’s name but admitted that he knew him. He’d said he was certain—although it was already apparent that “certainty” from Lloyd was anything but. To nail it down they needed to firm up a connection between the two.

  After all, how likely was it, as Dave had said, that these two men who shared a sordid sexual appetite for children—and who knew each other!—would just happen to be in Wheaton Plaza on the same afternoon Sheila and Kate disappeared? As Chris had told Lloyd, he knew men whom Mileski had picked up hitchhiking as teenagers, and who had been victimized and then groomed to attract still younger victims. Lloyd had plainly been one of the former. Even his vehement denial fit the pattern. Men denied such things. Chris wrote to his supervisors that Lloyd, although unreliable and less than fully cooperative, had handed them a breakthrough. As far as the lead detective was concerned, the Lyon case had gone from whodunit to what exactly did he do?

  Dave was less sold. He did not have as much invested in the Mileski hypothesis, and his hours one-on-one with Lloyd had heightened his misgivings about him. But Chris was in charge, and his priority made sense. Together they set out to reinterview all of Mileski’s relatives and his seedy old circle.

  They got help. It was a sign of how nettling the unsolved crime remained for the department that its assistant chief, Russ Hamill, told Chris he could have as many detectives as he needed. For a case nearly four decades old, this was unprecedented. The first to join them, in November, was Mark Janney, a no-nonsense cop’s cop, tall and athletic (a basketball player in college), the son of a Maryland state trooper—he carried his late father’s badge with him. Mark was forty-six. His father had risen to the top ranks of the state police, but Mark had no passion for promotion. What he loved was the work itself. He had spent most of his twenty-two years with the department working undercover, making drug buys on the street in his mid-twenties, graduating to federal task force work against drug dealers. In more recent years he’d worked on homicides. He found the job thrilling. Off duty he consumed true crime books; the Lyon case was just the sort of stumper to grab him. At the time he joined the squad, his two daughters were about the same ages Sheila and Kate had been in 1975, which brought the outrage and tragedy of it home. He would return from work feeling guilty about his own good fortune and acutely aware of John and Mary’s loss. Mark’s size and stern mien made him the most physically intimidating member of the squad, and he would play that role comfortably. When it came time to lean on someone, it was generally Mark who did the leaning. He was briefed on Mileski and Welch, and in December rode out to Dover with Dave to meet Lloyd for himself. It was an informal visit—they did not even tell Pete Feeney about it, much to the prosecutor’s later chagrin. Chris and Dave wanted Mark to size up Lloyd Welch for himself. To Mark, it was simple. He had watched some of the video of the first interview and was appalled foremost by the way Lloyd described (and excused) his crime. Mark reckoned him a sociopath, a man self-interested to the exclusion of feelings for others, not just without remorse but incapable of it.

  All through the holidays at the end of 2013, the squad sought out and questioned face-to-face, one by one, Mileski’s contacts. To each they described Lloyd and Helen and showed pictures, but no one recognized them. Mileski’s surviving son, who was familiar with his father’s illicit circle, said Lloyd looked familiar but could not be sure. The conversations, meanwhile, led them deeper into Mileski’s furtive underworld, one that Chris believed had enlisted young Lloyd Welch and into which they feared Sheila and Kate had fallen.

  Unable to confirm the link between Welch and Mileski independently, they were stuck with getting Lloyd to admit it. He had been adamant in that first session that there was no link, but the detectives had observed that his defenses weakened when he grew rattled and tired. It was after he’d been caught in a lie in his most recent witness statement that he’d admitted, eight hours into the session, that the man he had seen taking the girls from the mall was Mileski. So making him rattled and weary became a strategy. Mark took a step in this direction during the unofficial visit. He told Lloyd that the department was considering linking him publicly to the case, naming him a “person of interest.” This would not identify him as a suspect, at least not formally, but would amount to the same thing. A press conference would broadcast his image and recap his criminal past. It would be a public shaming.
Like most sex offenders, Lloyd had labored to keep the nature of his offense quiet. As the squad well knew, it would disturb his life on many levels, not least within the prison itself, where pedophiles were held in vicious contempt.

  This was no idle threat. The department was eager. Lloyd’s connection to the case seemed certain, and the FBI was curious enough about other children’s disappearances to believe that shaking the tree—spreading word of his involvement—might scare up new leads not just in the Lyon case but in others. For their part, however, the squad members didn’t like the timing. If they named Lloyd publicly, it would be hard to sustain the pretense that they wanted him as a witness—which remained Chris’s primary goal. It would almost certainly shut Lloyd up for good. Chris was holding his superiors off. He wanted one more crack at him.

  Lloyd had given them a pretext. He’d asked to be polygraphed. The detectives didn’t believe the machine actually detected lies, and evidently neither did Lloyd, because he seemed confident it would get him off the hook. But the device didn’t have to be foolproof to be useful. It scared those who believed in it, and it made even those who didn’t anxious. Told they’d flunked the test, some suspects panicked and came clean. This is what the squad hoped would happen with Lloyd. But giving it could also backfire. If he passed, it would embolden his mendacity.

  To conduct the test, Chris invited Katie Leggett, the department’s premier polygrapher. She was a veteran detective, age thirty-nine, with long experience in the sex crimes unit. Funny, smart, and outgoing, she had set out to become a lawyer, until she realized she hated spending all her time in a law library. Her brother was a police officer, and she had an uncle and a cousin in uniform. Their work seemed more exciting, so after sampling some college classes in criminal justice, Katie went for it. She had endured the mandatory years of patrol duty. Wearing the bulky, manly uniform bugged her, and she found the work unsatisfying. Particularly discouraging was seeing so many of those she arrested go free. The system did not punish offenders the way she believed they ought to be punished. But the job changed for her when she made detective. The work was more consistently interesting. She could dress fashionably. Her colleagues teased her about being “prissy,” but Katie felt like herself again. She had blond hair that fell to her shoulders, wore designer shoes, and carried her Glock in a Louis Vuitton handbag. There was nothing prissy beneath the gloss. Her appetite for harsh justice led her to specialize in child-abuse cases, where both the law and the societal mood were less tolerant. Those she busted went to jail. She did it for eleven years, during which time she had two children of her own. Eventually, the work began to wear on her. It says something about the awfulness of sex crimes that she sought refuge working on homicides.

  This was where she was when the Lyon squad came calling. Katie did not know Chris, Dave, or Mark. She knew little about the case, even though she had grown up in the Washington area and, of course, had heard about the Lyon sisters. The squad wanted both her polygraph skills and her sex crimes experience. Accustomed as she was to the worst forms of sexual predation, she would hardly be unnerved by someone like Lloyd. Katie was a talker and was also attractive. Her conspicuously feminine style would also play well. She was perfect.

  But she said no. The case seemed too difficult, and weak. The squad didn’t have much to go on. She had other reasons. Her youngest was still a baby. Katie was looking to pull back from the ugliness, not dive in over her head.

  But the squad persisted, enlisting one of her friends, Karen Carvajal, to plead on their behalf and to help with the polygraph session, and Katie gave in. She eventually came to believe it was fated, finding almost spooky connections with Sheila and Kate. She had been only eleven months old when the girls disappeared, but her birthday, March 30, was the same as Sheila’s, and she shared Kate’s name. Their child photos looked a lot like hers, and she had hung out in Wheaton Plaza herself as a girl. When she first introduced herself to John and Mary, they had been struck by these things. She was moved when they suggested that her involvement “was meant to be.”

  Her initial instructions concerning Lloyd were straightforward.

  “We just want to know if he was involved in the actual abduction, the murder of the girls, basically,” Chris told her. “Can you find that out on the polygraph?”

  Katie thought she could. She believed in the test, which monitored a subject’s blood pressure, pulse, breathing, and skin conductivity as he or she was asked carefully scripted questions. She had started off thinking it was hocus-pocus—its results were still not allowed as evidence in a criminal trial—but after years of practice she had become a believer, at least in its usefulness. People nearly always agreed to take it, even if they were guilty. Most thought they could outsmart it—she felt sure Lloyd Welch would fall into this category—but in the hands of a skilled operator, it could, she believed, expose deception.

  The session was set to take place in Smyrna on the second Monday in February 2014.

  FEBRUARY 10, 2014

  The conditions were not ideal. Katie had brought an unfamiliar portable machine, and the prison had set them up in a basement room—more like a cell—that turned suffocating whenever the door was closed. They had to keep the door open, so anyone walking past could see in. Here was inmate Welch meeting with a whole battery of fuzz—Maryland cops and FBI. It made Lloyd anxious, understandably. Prisons are hothouses for rumor and suspicion. What was happening in that room looked like a big deal. Why was Welch cooperating with them? What was he saying? At one point a female guard wandered in uninvited. She was, Lloyd explained, in charge of hearing grievances filed by other inmates. “She’s just nosy,” he said.

  Eventually Katie and Lloyd were left alone for the exam, but for much of the session her friend Karen Carvajal was also in the room. In contrast to the setup in Dover, there was no adjacent conference room or video link through which the others could observe. Katie had brought a small digital recorder, but there was no hidden camera or microphone. She struggled with the lie detector, which was outfitted with the necessary wires and sensors. She played it up a little. His eyes kept wandering to the open door, and she wanted his full attention, so she became the dumb buxom blonde struggling with modern technology. Men were unfailingly captivated by this.

  She sighed heavily.

  “All right, well, it looks like it’s gonna be … I need an Internet connection to be able to pull up my files. Is there no Internet?”

  “Well, they have it, but it’s—”

  “I have it, I mean, I’m afraid it’s just gonna fade in and out.”

  She made ingratiating small talk with Lloyd while playing up her struggles. Her colleagues stepped in and out. Carvajal sat with Katie and Lloyd as Katie fiddled with the device.

  “So we got that you had a shitty childhood,” Katie said. “Your dad was physically, mentally, and sexually abusive.”

  Lloyd nodded and grunted assent.

  “You never really had a mom. Your stepmom was decent to you, but you kind of at that point were already screwed up. Not good things.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean you didn’t have half a chance to teach yourself, you know, to become street-smart, teach yourself survival skills. You did what you needed to do to survive but not any violent crimes.”

  “Right.”

  “Would you consider yourself a relatively honest person, especially now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You kind of get the error of your ways? You’re done with all this crap? You just want to get out of here and live your life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you find yourself being pretty honest with people here, like the guards or inmates?”

  “You can ask any guard, any of the guards that know me, and they’ll tell you that I’m one of the quietest people.”

  “Okay,” said Katie. She walked him through the course of his normal day, sleeping until two in the afternoon, working through most nights in the kitchen.

  “You
have to be minimum status in order to work in a place like that,” he said.

  “Meaning that you’re relatively well-behaved.”

  “Right.”

  Lloyd told her about how he made his own pizza, which he shared with his friends and sometimes with the guards. The crust was fashioned from crushed soup crackers, which he coated with pizza sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and sausage.

  “They take it down to their microwave, and we heat it up,” he said. “They trust me enough because they know that I—”

  “You’re not going to poison them.”

  “No. I put the plastic gloves on and stuff like that. I show a lot of respect.”

  “Just a low-key guy tryin’ to get by. Okay.”

  Lloyd explained his hopes of getting out of prison eventually and living out the remainder of his days in a “normal” way. He relaxed. He liked talking to Katie. At one point he swore and then quickly apologized.

  Katie started to respond, “There’s nothing you can say that—”

  Carvajal laughed.

  “Trust me,” said Katie. “I’m the worst mouth you’ll ever hear. Don’t let my innocent look fool you.”

  Lloyd was warming up to her. He talked more about his life in the prison, about how inmates rarely asked one another to talk about the crimes that had gotten them locked up. Katie was still struggling with the machine, distracted, but encouraged Lloyd to keep talking.

  “I think I have a pretty good idea about the kind of person you are, or that you’re presenting to me at least. You’re very laid-back. You seem very settled and calm. I mean, it is what it is, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, I guess there’s gotta be a calmness that comes over you. You’ve atoned for what you’ve done. You’ve admitted to doing it, and in the event that you get out, you would even apologize to this girl, so you’ve made peace in some fashion. Maybe that’s what makes you appear so peaceful to me, you know?”