by Mark Bowden
This was the third significant departure for Lloyd and a striking one. Discounting his 1975 statement, he had gone from seeing a strange man with two girls miles away from Wheaton Plaza, to just happening to see a man he recognized leading them from the mall and putting them in a car, to now placing himself with the kidnappers. All three versions were dubious, but were parts of them correct? Were the detectives zeroing in on the truth, or was Lloyd just desperately inventing? Was there any reason to continue viewing him mostly as a link to Mileski? Given how freely he altered his story, even his recognition of Mileski—the thing that had most excited Chris—was suspect. The sheer industry of Lloyd’s mendacity raised his own profile. When someone lies that persistently, you stop listening to what he says and start wondering what he’s up to. If Lloyd was trying to point the squad somewhere else, he was achieving the opposite.
Dave assumed that this startling admission had not been recorded. Katie had brought a tape recorder, which she had used for the test, but she had left the room when Lloyd asked to speak to Dave alone.
They phoned Pete Feeney, and he urged them to turn around, return to the prison, no matter what the hour, and get Lloyd to repeat, on the record, what he had just said. Pete didn’t want Lloyd to sleep on it or talk to his fellow inmates or have any time to reconsider. But turning around was the last thing the detectives felt like doing at the end of a long day. Besides, who knew what Lloyd would say now? The comment, “We took them to his house,” appeared less than fully considered. If they drew attention to it, how likely was he to repeat it?
“Wait,” said Katie.
She had left her recorder in the room. In wrestling with the polygraph machine, she said, she might have forgotten to turn the recorder off. She retrieved it, fast-forwarded it to the end, and, much to their relief, Lloyd’s final comments were there.
When they got back to Gaithersburg, they were so excited they felt like popping champagne. They believed there was now sufficient evidence to charge Lloyd. For thirty-nine years the department had been stymied by this case, and now, at last, they had broken it. No matter Lloyd’s steadfast denials, they could prove he had been at Wheaton Plaza that day—he admitted it, he had given a statement to the police to that effect in 1975, and the drawing on file was a clear match for him. He now said he had known the kidnappers and in an unguarded moment had admitted being with them. He had witnessed at least one of the girls being sexually abused. It wouldn’t hurt that he was a convicted child molester. Even if he hadn’t taken the girls himself, he had stayed silent through those critical days in 1975 and had even tried to mislead investigators. At the very least he had obstructed justice. He looked guilty as hell. In fact, he seemed, suddenly, a lot more likely a suspect than Mileski.
But Pete demurred. He had a team poring over every transcribed line of the interviews and saw problems. He was still concerned about the immunity agreement they had signed in October, which he considered compromised by Dave’s reassurances to Lloyd. It had hinged on Lloyd telling the whole truth, which he admitted he had not done, so that would make a strong argument in favor of using his words against him, but the whole thing seemed more vulnerable to challenge than Pete would have liked. He had been dumbfounded to learn that Mark and Dave had visited Lloyd without informing him, had not recorded the session, and had—according to Katie’s apology in the polygraph interview—effectively threatened Lloyd. A defense lawyer could make much of these things. And in Lloyd’s newest gift to Dave, while he had initially said, “We took them to his house,” he had immediately backtracked. It might be considered a slip of the tongue. Conviction would be no slam dunk. Lloyd could claim that he’d been coerced and had, on that one occasion, simply misspoken, using the wrong pronoun. Pete advised the detectives that unless Lloyd admitted that he had been present when the girls were taken from the mall, they did not have enough to charge him. The champagne mood fizzled.
For its part, the Montgomery County Police Department had heard enough. Tired of being led in circles by a convicted child molester, the chiefs wanted to go public. Here was a potential solution to the most stubborn mystery on the department’s books, not to mention, possibly, the rarest of criminal justice finds: a serial killer of children. They scheduled a press conference for Tuesday, February 11, to name Lloyd as a person of interest. Posters were prepared showing enlarged images of Sheila and Kate and of Lloyd as a young man, the old police sketch, and an old photograph of him with Helen.
Chris pushed for more time. Maddening as Lloyd was—he was like a fairy-tale goblin guarding a treasure, speaking in riddles—they needed to keep him engaged. There was still so much they didn’t know. They wanted to find the girls’ remains and to be able to explain exactly what had happened to them and who had been involved. With Lloyd in the room, those answers had seemed close. Pete, reviewing the most recent session with Lloyd, noted that he had offered to point out the house where the girls had been taken if he were driven around Wheaton. Shouldn’t they try that before permanently alienating him? In-house, the debate abruptly ended when Dan Morse, a Washington Post reporter, called with a scoop. He had gotten wind of Welch’s connection to the case and had confirmed with members of the Welch family that the detectives had been asking about Lloyd. His story would run the next day. So, late that morning, the show went on. The squad made sure that the nightly news programs would be shown on cellblock monitors in Smyrna. If they were going to hit Lloyd, they might as well hit him where it hurt.
That morning, at the department’s headquarters in Gaithersburg, the dais decorated with the poster-size images and surrounded by the flags of the United States, Maryland, and Montgomery County, the press conference opened with a prepared statement from John and Mary Lyon, who were present but who did not wish to face the cameras and reporters. They stood nearby behind a screen. Their comments were read by a department spokesperson: “Throughout these years our hopes for a resolution to the mystery have been sustained by the support and efforts of countless members of law enforcement, the news media, and the community. The fact that so many people still care means a great deal to us.”
Chief J. Thomas Manger, a man with a stern white crew cut, dressed in the department’s black uniform and black tie, announced the tentative breakthrough to a packed room of journalists—the Lyon case was still a big draw.
“Our cold case team has been able to identify a man, currently incarcerated, and we have been able to establish that this man was at the Wheaton Plaza mall that day [and] might have had contact with the Lyon girls,” he said. “The person of interest is Lloyd Lee Welch.” He gestured toward the photo of Lloyd and summarized his carnival travels from 1974 through 1977. He pointed to the picture of Lloyd with Helen, noting that she had been with him during those years. “We are looking for the public’s help. Anyone who has any information [from] during that time … we ask for them to contact law enforcement. Mr. Welch was at the scene, and looking at his criminal history has made him an important person of interest in this case.”
Then he took questions.
One reporter asked, “What led you to him?”
Manger praised the hard work of his special squad, noting the value of fresh eyes on old files, and this was partly true. The right answer—which perhaps the chief didn’t fully realize—was that the discovery had been fortuitous. Hard work was behind it, for certain, but it had started with Lloyd’s old description of a man with a limp. Convinced he had seen Ray Mileski, they’d gone looking for Lloyd. Now Mileski seemed a peripheral figure at best. His name didn’t even come up in the press conference.
As anticipated, the announcement generated a flood of coverage in Washington, DC; Baltimore; northern Virginia; and well beyond. It prompted a detailed, two-minute national report on CNN, complete with pictures of the girls from 1975 and of plain memorial stones over two empty graves, and an old interview with John and Mary, from after the twentieth anniversary of the girls’ disappearance. Both had white hair but still looked hale. Beyond the
tragedy of losing their daughters, Mary tried to itemize the enduring nature of their sadness: “The brides that he didn’t walk down the aisle,” her voice breaking as she nodded toward John, seated next to her on a couch. “The grandchildren we didn’t have. The sons-in-law we didn’t have.”
As hoped, the reports prompted many new tips. Lloyd, it seemed, had left a string of abandoned, abused, angry women and discarded children. Katie and Mark set out to talk to each, one by one, which sent them on a tour of the squalid reaches of rural tenancy. Outside a trailer home in the hills of western North Carolina, dressed in her best wool coat and expensive shoes, Katie balked when confronted with a muddy yard replete with grazing donkeys.
“I am not going to step in donkey shit with these shoes,” she said. Mark refused to give her a piggyback ride, so she had to give in, muddying her heels on the walk to the front door. Inside, as she started to sit down on a sofa, her host shouted, “Not there! The dog just peed there!” She slid over to a dry spot. She would never wear the coat or shoes again. They collected horror stories from Lloyd’s domestic past. One man who had known Lloyd years earlier said flatly that he “hated women.” All described his overriding attraction to the very young. He had once taken up with a girl of fifteen, telling his furious twenty-two-year-old companion, “You’re too old for me.”
None of these angry personal stories shed light on the Lyon mystery, but they did bring Lloyd into better focus. His own accounts of his past were uniformly unreliable, even about how old he was. Over the years he had given various birthdates to authorities, all of them in December but in the years 1952, 1955, 1956, and 1957. The rest of his story was equally slippery. The memories of these old girlfriends and acquaintances helped color in the tale told by his criminal record, and in some instances corroborated what Lloyd had said about himself. Also helpful was a handwritten life summary that would be found in his prison cell. From all these things, in the weeks after the press conference, a fuller picture of Lloyd Welch emerged.
A FAILURE AND AN EMBARRASSMENT
Lloyd’s true birthdate was December 30, 1956. His childhood went wrong early. As Lloyd told it, “My father killed my mother when I was two.” His father, Lee Welch, driving drunk, had crashed their car, killing Lloyd’s mother, Margaret Ann, who at the time was pregnant with twins. Lee was convicted of manslaughter and went to prison. Young Lloyd had some broken bones and lacerations that sent him to the hospital—including that broken nose. From there he was cycled through a series of foster homes until he was seven, when Lee and his new wife showed up.
“They came and got me,” he had told Dave in their first session. “They introduced themselves, ‘I’m your father; I’m your stepmother.’ That was Edna. That’s the woman. I love her like a mom. She treated me with respect. She loved me. We went to Maryland and there was a house … Buchanan Street.”
But whatever hopes he had at that tender age of recouping his family were short-lived.
“Me and my father just kept bickering with each other. He pulled a shotgun on me. Put it up to my head. Said I looked like my mother a lot. He sexually raped, sexually assaulted me a few times when he was drinking. Slapped me around whenever he’d come back from work and shit like that, and I would always run away from home. The cops would bring me back.”
Lloyd said he began drinking at a very early age, and when he was a young teenager he started using drugs—marijuana, cocaine, uppers, downers, acid, whatever he could find. Street drugs were plentiful in those years, a big part of the teenage scene. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, cities like Washington had teenagers squatting in abandoned buildings and hanging out on the street, living the dream. Lloyd was savvier than most about fending for himself, and he preferred being on his own. Whenever he was placed in a home or shelter, he ran away. By sixteen he was already a confirmed grifter, living from score to score. He was nothing like the hippies around him; there was no flower power ethos behind Lloyd’s lifestyle. He was so out of step with the youthful antiwar fervor of the period that he enlisted in the army at the height of the Vietnam War, only to be thrown out for lying about his age, education, and criminal past.
Lloyd had written the summary of his life for one of his correspondents. Like many prisoners serving long sentences, Lloyd carried on epistolary friendships, sometimes convincing people to wire money to his prison account. He had not told any of these correspondents why he was locked up. After the press conference, he had a lot of explaining to do, so he’d set about the task.
“My life was already screwed up,” he wrote of his teenage years. “I was a failure in life and an embarrassment. My dad had told this to me many times.”
He would often hitchhike out to Hyattsville, another edge city northeast of Washington, in the district’s other Maryland suburban county, Prince Georges. His father, Lee, and stepmother, Edna, and many other members of Lloyd’s large extended family lived there, clustered around his grandmother’s house. They were part of what has become known as the Hillbilly Highway, the migration of largely Scotch Irish Appalachian families to northern cities after World War II. Many of these families retained the insularity, habits, and dialect of their native region. Lloyd’s large extended family was typically close-knit, but he had always existed only on its margins. By his late teens, he was only half-heartedly welcomed when he showed up at Lee and Edna’s home. By that point they had a houseful of their own children. He tried to avoid his father, who was perpetually drunk.
Lloyd met Helen in 1973. He approached her on a street corner in Takoma Park and started talking. They walked together to her house.
“I stayed that night … in the backyard. They actually put up a tent for me. I ate dinner with them. I got to liking her a lot, and every day I would come back to see her and stuff like that.”
Rootless, impulsive, and up for a good time, Helen fell in with Lloyd, leaving home to stay with him at a boys’ shelter in DC. When she was discovered and asked to leave, Lloyd went with her. After that they fended for themselves on the streets, together everywhere. As Edna would later put it, “You seen Lloyd, you seen Helen.” They spent almost four years this way, hitchhiking, working for the carnival, doing odd jobs, drinking, and taking drugs. Helen and Lloyd even shared a few run-ins with the law.
“We were all wild, I guess you could say,” he had told Dave in the October interview. “Drugs and everything like that. I lived that life. I always wandered. I just couldn’t stand to be locked down, and she went with me. I wanted to travel. She wanted to travel with me, so I would do an odd job for six or seven months and make enough money, and we’d travel, we’d go to Texas, we’d go to Florida. We finally decided to go back to Maryland and live. First we lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, for a while, close to her mom, her brothers and sisters.”
Helen lost one child before term and was carrying another child when they returned to Maryland sometime in 1974 or early ’75. They camped out some of the time or stayed with Helen’s mother or with Edna and Lee, whose address was then 4714 Baltimore Avenue, Hyattsville, across busy Route 1 (Baltimore Avenue) from the head of Buchanan Street. This was the address Lloyd gave when he made his original statement about the Lyon kidnapping. Soon after that sit-down with Montgomery County police the couple departed again and were gone for years.
“I was not a hard criminal,” Lloyd wrote. “I just did stupid shit to people I knew.”
When released from the prison stretch that split him from Helen and their children, Lloyd went back to wandering, drugs, drinking, and petty crimes. He was in and out of jail. In 1985, during one of his periods of freedom, he got married, in South Carolina—he was then using the name Mike. He started his own landscaping business in Myrtle Beach in 1989, by then living with a different woman from the one he had married. Then came his three child-molestation arrests, the last of which had earned him his current lengthy term.
In his letters and his talks with the detectives, Lloyd repeated that he always owned up to his crimes—by way of argu
ing that his denials about the Lyon girls should be believed. But his past demonstrated something else. Lloyd would admit a thing only when he had to, after he’d been caught, and only those parts that he couldn’t refute. All his admissions had been calculated to mitigate his punishment. They were grudging, limited, and laced with denial. In every instance, Lloyd portrayed himself as an innocent victim. He’d pleaded guilty after molesting one little girl in Virginia, arguing, as he put it in his life summary: “She used to get in bed with her mom before I came along. One night I guess she could not get next to her mother so she got in bed next to me. I guess I thought it was my wife cuddled next to me in my sleep. I guess in my sleep I put my arm around her. She told her mom that my hand had touch her private area. I cannot say it did or did not happen because I was asleep.” Lloyd owned up to nothing if he could help it.
Concerning the Lyon case, it was the same pattern. Each alteration in his story addressed a contradiction he could not escape. And each, in ways he did not anticipate, drew him closer to the very thing he sought to evade. It was a good bet that he would never accept any blame for the fate of the Lyon sisters. There are some things too terrible to admit, especially to yourself.
MARCH 25, 2014
On the thirty-ninth anniversary of the girls’ disappearance, Katie and Mark confronted Lloyd again in Smyrna. Confronted is the right word, because this session was not like the others.
The press conference had turned Lloyd’s life upside down. Overnight, he had become a pariah in the prison. He was depressed and irate, and the detectives met him head-on. With Lloyd thrown off balance, it made sense to hit him hard. Sympathy and flattery had gotten them only so far. The pretext for this visit was the need to collect his palm prints—the FBI wanted to compare them with evidence of another crime—but the real reason was to see whether they could get him to cave in. Katie came armed with the bitterness of all the women he’d impregnated, abused, and left.
