by Mark Bowden
The women worked him every which way. They told him how smart he was. What a good guy he was. They said they understood his fears, and his need to protect himself. But both told him that they now knew he had been involved. As they went on, Lloyd grew increasingly irate, so Katie zeroed in on that.
“Prior to Karen coming in, you and I had a very pleasant exchange. Your whole demeanor and body language and eye contact has changed.”
“Because I’m tired! I’ve been working all night long. I’ve had two hours of sleep.”
“You’re getting a little pissed off, which I get,” said Katie. “I mean, I don’t feel like this is the same person I’ve been in here talking to. So it’s easy for you to change demeanor. I mean, am I an asshole for thinking you are a good guy?”
“No, I’m still a good guy,” said Lloyd, calming down. “I’m just getting tired. I’ve been sitting here in the same spot for, what? Four hours?”
It went on. At one point Lloyd said “My mind’s dropped down, whatever. You know? I’d be happy to tell you something I knew, but I don’t. Maybe I ought to start seeing a psychiatrist here.”
Then Lloyd accused Katie of fudging the test results. She got angry, or feigned anger. There was no separating the fake from the real; Katie was playing a role, and as with anyone good at it, the role had begun to play her.
“I believe you saw him take those girls away, and I know that you know him,” she said, referring to Mileski. She told him she believed he panicked when he realized that what Mileski was doing was “fucked up” and left. “Maybe that’s where the guilt comes from. Maybe that’s where the test [result] comes from. If there’s something locked in there—and you’re not saying unequivocally no—something could be locked in. Is it possible you have seen them again since then?”
“I can’t say yes or no on that,” said Lloyd—a curious answer. “You can interpret it any way you want.”
“I’m not interpreting,” protested Katie.
“No, I’m saying you can interpret it any way you want with your college education, your background. All I can say is, I know nothing about it.”
“No! What you just said is, you can’t say yes or no.”
“Yeah, but I can’t!” Lloyd complained, loudly.
“Again, that’s like being KIND OF PREGNANT!” Katie matched Lloyd’s raised volume. “It’s not an answer! It has nothing to do with my college education. You’re probably smarter than me, to be honest with you, because you’ve lived a lot of life, okay? The bottom line is, it can’t be both ways. I’m asking you is there a possibility that you have seen those girls?”
“Why are you raising your voice?” he asked.
“Because you’re raising your voice at me, and you know why? Because I went out and I stuck up for you, and I look like a stupid fuck right now because I believed in you and I thought you were being honest!”
“I thought I was being honest, too! I think you all did something to that test, took it out and did something to it!”
“That’s absurd,” she said. “That’s absurd!”
Lloyd said she could have falsified the results if she wanted to. “That’s what you do. You can change anything on it.”
“I don’t even know how to sign on the damned thing. How am I going to switch something?”
“Well, that’s my opinion,” said Lloyd. “I thought we were having a good conversation and stuff like that, but when you started getting mad I started getting mad.”
“No,” said Katie. “You got mad first. I’m just defending myself.” Katie stepped out of the room to cool off.
Karen tried to calm Lloyd and then offered him a way out of the standoff. He listened intently.
“I actually think you are still the nice person we thought you were,” she said. “I don’t think you are the person who would hurt those girls. I don’t think that’s what happened. I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t think that you kidnapped those girls to do something bad. I think those girls went with you guys, whoever was involved, and I think something went wrong, and you got scared. And that’s completely understandable, because you were a kid back then. The people that you were with should have done better by you and not gotten you involved with something like this to begin with. But here we are now. We know that you are involved. I just want to know how involved you were. That’s it, Lloyd. You are not going to convince me that you were not involved. And it’s not just a matter of the test. We can disregard that test.”
He knew more than he was saying.
“You want to say,” Karen continued, “but you’re afraid [of] what is going to happen if you do. Were you just on the sidelines or did somebody make you do something you didn’t want to do? It’s not your fault that something happened that day.”
“I can’t tell you something that—”
“It’s the person who orchestrated this whole thing. Right? Do you agree? They’re the ones who should take the responsibility, right?”
“Whoever did something to them, yeah. But I didn’t do anything.”
“Let’s say there were a couple of people involved. Do you think everybody is equally responsible?”
“I can’t say.”
But Lloyd seemed drawn to this line of reasoning. Karen was offering him a way to admit the crime without taking responsibility. Katie returned as Karen said, “My question is, you had the person who made the plan, and that person says, ‘Hey, come on over.’ Then this other person [Lloyd] shows up, and it’s like, holy shit! They did something bad with those girls. Do you think that other person [Lloyd] is responsible?”
“Yeah! But I don’t think it’s his fault. And it wasn’t me!”
“It’s just that you know something that you’re not telling us, and that’s why we’re having a conflict,” she said. “I know Katie’s pissed off and she’s disappointed because she felt like she gave you the benefit of the doubt, and she feels like it’s making her look bad, and I’m still here telling you that I’m still giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
“And I’m sorry it’s making you … that you’re fighting with that, because I have been honest with you. I don’t know why I didn’t pass that test. I was relaxed, comfortable, and everything like that.”
“Well, it’s offensive for you to think that we are tricking you,” said Katie.
“Well, you can change anything on a computer.”
“Do you really, honestly—”
“I do! You’re a cop!”
“Does that make me a bad person?”
“No! No! But I’m just saying.”
“You’ve never had a good experience with a cop?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve never had an officer offer to help me on anything. Even when I asked.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s not y’all’s fault.”
“Have I been obnoxious or rude or tried to trick you in any way?”
“No.”
“This test wasn’t a trick.”
“It’s my opinion, that’s all,” he said. “I apologize and all that, but that’s just my opinion.”
Karen said the state’s attorney would be disbarred if he lied to him. She defended Dave’s trustworthiness—they could all see that Lloyd liked Dave and trusted him. Katie defended herself.
“You don’t trust police,” she said. “I get it. I don’t care. I mean, I don’t take it personally. Honestly, Lloyd, if I were in your same situation, I’d be doing the same thing. If I had a life of shit with cops—and Karen and I have seen enough shit cops in our career, and they exist—so I can completely believe you. Cops that make me disgraced to be a part of the same fraternal order as them because they suck. I get it. I’m not a sucky person. Karen is not a sucky person.”
“And I don’t think you are,” said Lloyd.
“And I wouldn’t be a part of anything that would make me lose sleep. Tricking somebody. This is a cat-and-mouse game. Let’s be honest. Bu
t you’ve got to play clean, and you’ve got to play fair, and telling somebody that they are bullshit is not in my DNA.”
Katie made a plea. She said she had formed a high opinion of Lloyd, and that it would be dashed if he didn’t help them. “As a mom, and I would certainly hope you would feel the same, as a father, those girls, they deserve to be commemorated and properly buried. Their parents deserve to have some peace, and for their girls to finally rest in peace. The bottom line is, that’s what we want. That’s what I want. I don’t care, even if you did it, you’ve done your time in here. You’ve been in hell. I don’t care about that stuff. I care for me, as a mom, as a cop near the end of my career, that those girls get what they deserve. What happened happened, and we can’t go back. We can only move forward and change how we’re gonna handle the situation. I don’t know how I would feel if I find out that later, once this thing erupts and the information’s out there, if you don’t take advantage of this opportunity.”
“If I could give it to them, I would!” said Lloyd, exasperated. “I’m sorry!
But then, after all these hours of denial, after all the back-and-forth without an inch given, abruptly there came a break. Lloyd suggested that if he were given some further assurance of immunity, his answers might be different.
Katie asked, “If they got a public defender for you that sat at this table with our state’s attorney, and one of these guys made you a deal that was happy to you, do you think you would remember something? Tell me the truth.”
“Honestly, I can’t say yes or not to that,” said Lloyd.
If they set all that up and came back tomorrow, Katie asked, would he have something helpful?
“I can’t say yes and I can’t say no.”
“But it’s possible?”
“Anything is possible.”
I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU SOMETHING
And that appeared to be that. After hours of grilling, the pretest chatter, the test itself, the hammering at Lloyd after he’d failed, all of it had brought them back around to the beginning. The detectives felt played.
Katie apologized for losing her temper. She said it was the Irish in her. Karen reassured Lloyd, “We’re still cool.”
Dave entered and said he had been listening outside the door. He endorsed the idea of arranging a meeting for Lloyd with a lawyer. He thought they could hold off releasing Lloyd’s name to the press.
“I’m going to have to dig really deep down and ask for some favors,” he said. He would find Lloyd a Delaware public defender, who could meet with him privately before they spoke again. It might take time. “But the flip side of that is, I don’t want to go through all that hassle and make this work if we’re not going to gain anything additional.”
Lloyd suddenly turned to Katie and Karen. “Could you two step out for a minute?”
“Absolutely,” said Katie. She and Karen left and closed the door behind them.
“I’m going to give you something, Dave, and you think about this,” he said. “Okay? I wasn’t involved.”
“Okay.”
“With the grabbing of the girls. The picture you showed me was the guy that did, that took the girls, and, yes, I used to get high with them and stuff like that. We took them to his house. I went over to the house. When I was getting ready to pull in I heard screams, a kid. I got scared, and I looked in and everything like that. I seen men there. I ran. That’s why I went back to the mall.”
“Right,” said Dave. He didn’t show it, but he was startled. He didn’t know what to make of this. Lloyd had just changed his story in a very significant way. He was now admitting that he was involved with Mileski and with the kidnapping. Mileski was no longer just a man who had given him a few rides; they had hung out, smoked dope together. Then there was this: “We took them to his house.” This may have been a slip, but it was a revealing one. He had placed himself with the kidnappers. Then he had backtracked—“I went over to the house,” retreating quickly to his position as witness. Had he helped take the girls to the house, or had he gone back later, heard screams, and run? Which was it? Dave held off asking.
“What happened after that I can’t tell you,” said Lloyd. “This is between you and me right now.”
“Yes, but I have to be able to know that’s the truth, between me and you.”
“It is.”
Dave asked what the man’s name was, the one who took the girls.
“I want to go with Manny,” said Lloyd. “Manning or something like that.”
“Okay. Do you remember where it was that he lived?”
“See, that’s the thing, I can’t.”
Dave asked him to describe what he remembered.
“It had a fence around it, one of those small little wire fences.”
“Okay.”
“It had a basement in the bottom.”
“Okay. What was in the basement?”
Lloyd said that there was a mattress. He said he and others used to party in that basement.
“Helen would go over once in a while with me, and she wasn’t involved in anything. She just sat around. She had a couple of drinks, and that’s it. We’d leave.”
“Do you remember where the house is located?”
“I want to say that it was in Wheaton,” said Lloyd. He said he would recognize the house if he was driven past it. He described a house with a basement that opened to a backyard. They had to go around the house to let themselves in. He described a small bar in the basement, a couch, some chairs, the mattress in a separate back room, a TV, and a stereo.
Dave pressed for more. Lloyd described the cars he saw at the house in general terms. “Like I said, it’s been a long time. I mean, she [Katie] kind of got me angry and shit.”
“Oh yeah,” said Dave, sympathizing.
“You know, I apologize for yelling and shit.”
“You need not apologize.”
They talked further. Lloyd tossed out several vaguely remembered first names, then he added something more. He spoke hurriedly, as if he were in a rush to get the memory out.
“When I went over there the next day, the girls were still there, and they were … it looked like they were grown up, you know? And I heard her scream, and I looked in and I got scared. I wasn’t going in there. I wasn’t getting involved. I saw the girl. I knew that was the girls that he picked up at the mall, and I took—”
“Do you remember what they looked like? What they were wearing or anything?”
“They were wearing nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. They were drugged up. You could tell they were drugged up because they were lying there like that, you know? I mean, I looked in. When I heard the scream, I did look in, and it was him and two other people in there.”
“You can’t remember who they were?”
“I didn’t see their faces. I just saw them body parts, you know. I know there was two males because they were screwing the girls, and I didn’t see her face. That’s why I got scared and ran but can’t tell you more.”
Lloyd refused to say more. He pleaded memory loss. He said he had run back to Helen’s house afterward and hadn’t even told her what he’d seen. “It just scared me,” he said. “I got high. I went back to the mall and told a security guard of what I saw in the mall, and that was it. I didn’t tell anybody. I wasn’t protecting anybody or anything. I was a scared kid.”
“Right.”
“You know? And I’m still scared. I’m fifty-seven years old and I’m still scared. I’m scared that I’m gonna get charged with something.”
Dave had not been in the room when Karen had spun her alternative scenario for Lloyd, suggesting that he had, perhaps, gotten drawn into something by older men without realizing what they intended. He was running with it now. “Something went wrong, and you got scared,” she had said. Clearly, flunking the lie detector test had shaken him. The detectives now had something on him. If he were searching for an escape route, he had seized upon exactly the one K
aren had offered—only to steer himself straight into a kidnapping charge.
Dave pushed him harder. He went over the impossible coincidence of his just happening to be in the mall when the girls were abducted and then just happening to visit the very house where the girls had been taken.
“See, that looks bad,” he said.
“Yeah. Oh, I understand, but I didn’t go to the house until the next day.” Then he said that he was afraid that the men who had taken the girls, and who had seen him at the window, were going to come after him and Helen and kill them and their baby—which had not yet been born. He repeated that he couldn’t remember who they were.
He had nothing more. The session had lasted all afternoon. Lloyd once more had held out until exhausted and then had abruptly, voluntarily, thrown out something new, something that contradicted much of what he’d said before, and something that far more directly implicated him. And the weird thing? He didn’t seem to realize it.
Those final five minutes were huge. They now had a case against Lloyd Welch, and, again, it was from his own mouth.
5
Teddy
At a February 11, 2014, press conference, the Montgomery County Police named Lloyd as a person of interest
THE GOBLIN
Hours of bullshit, then five minutes of half-truth. The pattern was as clear as it was vexing. As Chris Homrock’s wife, Amy, put it, “Lloyd was blowing smoke up their butts; he knew it, and they knew it.”
The surprise “something” that Lloyd gave Dave at the end of the polygraph session briefly threw the squad off stride. Dave, Katie, and Karen stopped at a pizza joint in Dover afterward to regroup. What Lloyd had just admitted was big. Despite his previous adamant denials, he had completely reversed himself. Several people, including him, had participated in the crime. He was a friend of the kidnapper—who, they believed, was Ray Mileski. He “used to get high” with this man. The girls had been taken to the basement of a house in Wheaton—one with which Lloyd was familiar—where they had been drugged and sexually abused by several men. He had witnessed this before getting scared and running away.
