by Mark Bowden
Lloyd laughed. He was flattered. Katie assured him that she was professionally nonjudgmental—which was not true; she was the opposite and was revolted by his crimes. She said she had made mistakes in her life, and that he was really no different from her in a fundamental way. “We’ve all done things that could have really wound us up in bad situations.”
“Right.”
“Some people get caught, some people don’t,” Katie said. “I just don’t really like judging other people, which is fascinating because of my line of work, but it’s what keeps me healthy. I’ve actually had people write letters from prison thanking me for treating them the way that I do. I’m kind of like a social worker stuck in a cop’s world. As I’ve grown up I’ve realized that I’m not perfect, so who am I to judge other people? So that means I do have to, we do have to, go into a little bit of what this situation is, if you don’t mind.”
Lloyd recounted his connection to the Lyon case, the most recent version. He and Helen had gone to the mall looking for jobs. They saw a man whom Lloyd recognized talking to two girls, a man who had given him “the heebie-jeebies,” and whom he described in detail. Later, as they boarded a bus to leave (in his 1975 story, they had been in a car), they had seen the same man putting the two girls in an auto. The younger of the two looked as if she was crying. He described the car. A week later he went back to the mall to tell the police.
“You see something on TV?” Katie asked. “Did you have a radio?”
“See, that’s what I’m saying, I honestly don’t remember if we saw it on TV, or read it, or heard about it on the radio,” he said, stepping back slightly from his implausible insistence that he had known nothing about the missing girls. Now he was saying, indirectly, that he might have known. “I guess after a few days it just started bugging me, and I talked to Helen about it, and I said, ‘You know, it just don’t feel that it was his kids,’ or whatever, but I don’t know if I saw a newspaper and it clicked or what, because I started to get high again.”
He was working to make a good impression. He said he wanted “to do one good thing” in his life. “If I don’t do nothing else, let me at least tell somebody, ‘Hey, I saw this person.’ I’m gonna be honest with you, if I had anything to do with them or any kind of involvement like that, it would tear me up inside so much that I would end up telling somebody, and I’ve never told anybody.”
Lloyd kept returning to this. He said he had admitted all the crimes in his life. If he had been involved in this one, he would admit that, too. Katie commiserated with him. Being a criminal, she said, “doesn’t make you a liar.”
He talked about his road years with Helen, about their breaking up when he got arrested and giving up their children. He said he had never thought about the Lyon case until recently.
“What, thirty-nine years, whatever it is?” he asked. “I’m surprised that I’m even involved in it. I thought I was doing a nice citizen thing. I didn’t think they were going to try to involve me in something like this.” He added that he was not a “monster.”
“Well, let me ask you this,” said Katie. “Why do you want to take a polygraph?”
“Because I’m not guilty of taking them girls or being involved in it, and I want to prove that to them and to prove to myself, too.”
Katie screwed up her face.
“What do you mean, ‘prove to yourself’?”
“Because they’re trying to make me sound like I’m some kind of monster or something like that.”
“But if you didn’t do it, you know you didn’t do it. Are you second-guessing yourself?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
All of this was preliminary. Their conversation, which had been freeform, was intended to build rapport and put Lloyd in the right frame of mind. He confirmed that he was taking the test voluntarily, indeed, that he was the one who had asked for it.
THE TEST
“There’s no surprises,” Katie told him after connecting the sensors. “We’ll do something called a skin test. Basically, I want you to lie to me. It’s about a number. It’s a stupid thing. I’m gonna ask you to choose a number and then ask you to lie because I want to see what your lies look like. Does that make sense to you?”
“You want me to lie?” asked Lloyd, who sighed, as if insulted by the very suggestion.
Katie explained the test further. There were three charts. She would ask him the same questions and plot his responses to all three.
“They’re just going to be in different order because I want to make sure you are paying attention, yes?”
Lloyd laughed. “I mean, I ain’t gonna lie. I’m tired, but—”
“Do you still want to take it?”
“Oh, yeah! There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I mean, I’m tired, but I’m awake enough to where I can do it. I’m not on any drugs. I mean, I’m clean.”
She asked him to pick his favorite number between one and ten. He chose six. She explained that she would ask him a question about this, and wanted him to “lie about the number six.”
Katie then fussed some more with the machine, and Lloyd chortled; her act worked every time. She instructed him to keep his feet flat, his arms still, and to look straight ahead. “Don’t get fixated and start making animals in your mind.”
Lloyd laughed.
“Don’t get trippy on me.”
“No.”
“Don’t get fixated. Hold as still as possible.” She told Lloyd that he was “probably the calmest person I’ve ever done this to.” As she maneuvered him into the correct position, Lloyd made a joke about being put in an electric chair. Katie laughed.
“I don’t think the person would be this nice,” she said.
She inflated a cuff on his arm. Then she began asking him which number he had chosen.
“Is it the number four?”
“No.”
“Is it the number five?”
“No.”
“Is it the number six?”
“No.”
“Is it the number seven?”
“No.”
“Is it the number eight?”
“No.”
“Is it the number nine?”
“No.”
She spent a few more minutes reassuring him and positioning him.
“Are you comfortable like that?” she asked.
“I’m comfortable.”
“All right.”
“Did I lie on the number six?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Did it show?”
Katie said yes.
They then went through the careful regimen of the polygraph, short, direct questions and equally short, direct answers. One of the questions—emerging out of a list of ones that had nothing to do with the case—was, “Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls?”
“No,” he answered.
“Not connected with this case, have you ever lied to someone you loved or who trusted you?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls in Wheaton in 1975?”
“No.”
“Is there something else you were afraid I will ask you a question about on this test?”
“No.”
After a few more questions, Katie said, “Okay, that’s one in the record books.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. “How’d I do on it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me. How did you do?”
“I believe I did good.”
“It’s not that easy,” Katie said. “I can’t just look. See, I’m watching you. I’m watching the charts. I won’t know the results until after we add the score. It has to be scored.”
Then Katie took him through a list of similar questions, differently ordered and phrased. One was, “Regarding the disappearance of those girls, do you intend to answer truthfully each question about that?”
“Yes.”
“Not connected with thi
s case, have you ever lied to get yourself out of trouble?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls?”
“No.”
And so on. It didn’t take long. She gave him a chance to relax and scratch his nose—“It never fails,” she said—and then she went through the list a third time. When it was over she deflated the cuff and took it off his arm. She told him to stay put and then left the room to score the test. Lloyd chatted with Dave and Karen. He worked to convince them he had been truthful.
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said. “What I told you down in Dover is the same thing I told her in here, you know? My story is not going to change, because I know nothing about it except for what I told you. I mean, I was straightforward with her. That’s why I said I’ll take the test, you know? I told you I’d take hypnosis, truth serum, whatever you’ve got, you know?”
“This is all we’ve got to offer you,” said Dave.
“I mean, I don’t know nothin’. You know what I’m saying?”
When Katie returned, she asked again, “How do you think you did?”
“I think I did good. I’m hoping I did good, I mean.”
“Okay.”
“How did I do?”
“You didn’t do real good,” Katie said. “Which I’m a little bit disappointed about, because I thought we had, you know, something good going on here.”
She laid the charts out on the table. She seemed genuinely disappointed, as if Lloyd had let her down personally.
“I can show you. I hand scored in here, and I also had the computer score it to give you the benefit of the doubt, and both—’deception indicated.’ That’s a really high number,” she said, pointing to the computer score.
“‘Deception indicated’?” Lloyd asked. “What does that mean?”
“That means that you are lying about the whole thing, the girls.”
“Well, I’m not lying!” Lloyd said, now angry and confused. “Could it be that I’m so tired? I mean, I worked last night.”
Katie said fatigue would not affect the results.
“The thing I’m worried about,” she said, “is if you know something along the lines of trying to protect somebody else. I don’t know enough about what’s going on, because I think you’re a decent guy. I mean, I don’t want to be wrong. I feel like you’re not really this violent, bad person, and I hate being wrong. I’m not saying that that’s changed. We’re kind of at a point where the damage is done. The situation is what it is.”
“Right,” said Lloyd, deflated. He had asked for the test in the hope of eliminating suspicion. At this point the wheels in his head must have been turning. If Lloyd believed the test was capable of detecting a lie—and this appeared to be his belief—then he must have been confident he could fool it. But he had not fooled it. The pattern he had shown in the first session, when caught in a lie, was to immediately spin a new story, one in which he incorporated the facts he had just been given without incriminating himself. It was his method, a reflex. It was apparent in the way he often would pick up on words and phrases spoken to him and use them himself minutes later. But the polygraph was a machine. It didn’t contradict his story with evidence or logic, it didn’t offer conflicting facts, it just said he was lying. What new story could he spin from that?
“We just want to know where these girls are, you know what I’m saying?” said Katie. “You’re a dad. You know how that feels. You would want the same respect and peace. They deserve to be buried properly; they deserve to have their family be able to stand around and say, ‘We loved you.’ You can understand that. All of us can understand that as parents.”
“And I do understand that, honestly. I just don’t know where they are at. I had nothing to do with them. I mean, if it’s locked up in my brain somewhere with all the drugs I’ve done, I wish somebody would help get it out.”
Katie was struck by this comment. It wasn’t the first time Lloyd had hinted that he might have some knowledge of what happened to the Lyon sisters, that it might be trapped somewhere in his memory. Innocent people didn’t say things like that. She was reasonably confident of her ability to detect untruth with the machine, but not certain. If the flunked test made her strongly suspect that Lloyd was hiding something, this remark convinced her that he was.
“But you were pretty clear that you didn’t use drugs that day,” said Karen.
“That day! But that night I did.”
“But you would not have forgotten being involved in the disappearance, right? I mean, that’s not something you would have forgotten.”
“No, that’s not something I would have forgotten, but I didn’t do it so I wasn’t involved. I mean, I can’t make it any clearer than it is. I’m not involved.”
This was not going as Lloyd had hoped. Katie and Karen were no longer being friendly and cute. Karen, in particular, bore in. She told him he was in “a precarious situation.”
“I think you probably feel like maybe you have something to lose with your family,” she said, offering him an out. “I think Dave meant it when he said that they would spin this in a way that wouldn’t hurt you with your family”—she was speaking of his scattered children.
“I understand that,” said Lloyd. “I want it off my family.”
“Well, Lloyd, the bottom line is, you don’t trust the police,” said Katie. “I pride myself on not making people’s experience shittier.” He had turned his life around in prison, she said, and was now trying to live differently. “In my heart of hearts, I believe there’s some part of you that knows something more than you are giving us. I don’t think you’re a bad guy. I think you’ve made mistakes in your life.”
“Yeah.”
“I believe enough in my skills and I believe enough in this test to know there’s something bothering you,” she said.
Lloyd insisted this was not the case. Karen told him that the news of his involvement would come out, and that it would destroy any relationship he hoped to have with his children—this was the line that would later trouble Pete Feeney. It was a threat. They were offering him a chance to tell his side of the story to prevent a public shaming.
“I can’t tell you something I don’t know! Honestly!”
“There’s two things, if you are honest with yourself,” Karen said. “Like the fact that sometimes your statements have differed from one interview to the next, which is hard for us to reconcile, because it raises questions and it raises doubts in our minds.”
“I’ve given you the same statement every time.”
“Well, no. No, you haven’t. I don’t think you’re being entirely truthful with us. And the other thing is—and maybe you can answer this—you were considering the immunity documents. You know, a person who wasn’t involved in this wouldn’t have considered it. Do you agree?”
“They offered it to me down there. I mean—”
“But you considered it. And you told Dave that you actually did have something significant to say, but then when they wouldn’t give you the immunity you wanted, you didn’t say it. So there’s something you’re not—”
“The only thing, the significant thing I said was, I saw two girls being put in a car.”
“But you said that before the immunity documents,” said Katie.
She was right. He had. He retreated again to blanket denial. He knew nothing. He was holding back nothing.
Katie tried a different tack. Maybe the girls had not been kidnapped, she suggested. Maybe they had gone off willingly.
Karen mused, “It’s possible you were with the person who did it and maybe—”
“No,” Lloyd said, abruptly.
But Karen continued with the thought: “—you didn’t know that’s what they were going to do?”
“No. I wasn’t with nobody.” He said he wanted a new immunity agreement, which had the effect of undermining what he’d just said—if he had been by himself and had nothing more to offer, then why seek broade
r immunity?
Katie shifted gears again. She commiserated with Lloyd, suggesting that Mark Janney’s veiled threat to release Lloyd’s name to the press had been heavy-handed.
“I thought he was a little strong,” she said. “I didn’t think that was fair.” (This comment, too, would later haunt Pete Feeney, who had to guard against anyone overstepping the state’s strict interrogation guidelines. Katie was admitting that Mark had threatened Lloyd.) Then she effectively repeated the same threat, only phrasing it as a show of sympathy: “If they do put that information out there to get leads, that might be detrimental to you. That’s why I’m concerned. I don’t want people to paint you as a monster.”
“I’ve already been painted as a monster with my family.”
“I don’t think you’re a monster,” offered Karen.
“I mean with my mom and my niece and my sisters. I’m considered the monster of the family now.”
Lloyd complained that his sister and niece had stopped visiting him.
“That’s something that can be rectified,” said Karen.
“I think there was a good person at the mall that day who saw something that he didn’t like. Would you have stepped in?” Katie asked. “Because I’m wondering if maybe you tried to step in and that’s how you got hemmed up in all this? Because I think you’re a good guy.”
“What did I tell you?” said Lloyd.
Katie ran with this. What if Lloyd saw something bad happening and tried to step in and save the girls?
“If that’s the case,” she said, “you need to tell us so we can fix the situation with your family. We’re the two girls who can advocate for that.” She rephrased this idea as Lloyd listened intently. “You’re not shaking your head, so I know I’m onto something,” she said.
Lloyd laughed.
“I’m listening to you,” he said.
So Katie continued this line of reasoning. After all, Lloyd was just “a kid” back then. He lacked the confidence he would have today. Karen suggested that Lloyd might have found himself caught up in something bad and panicked.
“I want to believe the rapport you and I established,” said Katie. “I want to believe that I am not a fool, that I should go back to Police 101 because I’ve just been had. I believe there’s a reason and that it’s in there somewhere. I believe wholeheartedly in that.”
