The Last Stone

by Mark Bowden

  Lloyd, ever agile, offered, “I mean, he did have a limp. He kind of hunched over a little bit, but I didn’t see no injuries on him.”

  “He claimed—and it was kind of hard to prove it—that he had two broken arms during that time period. So, we’re like, how can you prove it? We were able to go back and get hospital records, and then we were fortunate enough to get a picture of him.” Actually, Teddy had done these things himself.

  “Humph!” Lloyd snorted emphatically. “Yeah, I heard about him being pushed off a building, but I didn’t see no cast on his hands or arms or anything like that, ’cause, I mean, he had a jacket on, so I didn’t really.”

  “Right, but you would think you would have known. And I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt in any way.” Dave said that Teddy believed Lloyd had thrown him into the story for reasons of his own.

  “Nah,” said Lloyd. “I didn’t throw him in. He was there that day. I’ll take a Bible and put it right there in front of me—like I said, I’m a Christian now—and he was there that day because he’s the one that offered me a ride home. He’s the one who said, ‘How you getting home?’ I said I was going to hitchhike home, and he said, ‘Well, we’ll give you a ride home.’”

  Dave reminded Lloyd that this—along with his most recent account, from the July session—overlooked his earlier and oft-repeated insistence that Helen had been with him at the mall.

  Lloyd didn’t miss a beat. “She was there for a while that day. But she left because she was going to her mom’s house, and I was gonna meet her back at the house, and she asked me to get some ice cream for her because she was pregnant. You know, she wanted to see her mom.”

  This, once more, elided significant parts of Lloyd’s original story that could now be regarded only as completely false—getting on the bus with Helen, his remarking to her about the car he’d seen leaving with the girls, and so on. Lloyd made such edits to his story without hesitation or concern and with no apparent sense of how false it made him appear. Dave moved on. He asked Lloyd to talk about the couple’s carnival travels. Struck by how worried Lloyd apparently had been about Helen’s memory, Katie had come up with the idea of telling him that his old girlfriend had kept a journal. It wasn’t true, but Lloyd wouldn’t know that. They would confront Lloyd with some of the things they had gleaned from the wiretaps, presenting them as entries in Helen’s journal, which would give them more impact. Lloyd rarely pushed back for long against demonstrable truth. His slippery stories were built around the known facts.

  Dave said, “And y’all did some things—and I’m not pointing fingers—it’s just that we went and talked to her current husband and she jotted a few things down that you all had done together. She made mention of a green station wagon and about how you broke into a house and stole a gun and a badge. It’s just things that we have read through her journal.”

  Police records showed that Lloyd, during one of his youthful robberies, had stolen a police badge and in another had taken a green station wagon. Since the press conference, the squad had been contacted by other women who, as children, had been approached by a man at Wheaton Plaza in the months before the Lyon sisters disappeared. They said the man had flashed an official-looking badge. And the station wagon appeared in Lloyd’s stories, in the IBM man’s tip, and in the testimonies of Connie and Henry.

  Lloyd looked mystified.

  “Stole a gun and a badge? Stole a green station wagon?”

  “No, she didn’t say you stole it, just that y’all were driving around in a green station wagon.”

  Lloyd fell silent. Finally, he nodded and smiled broadly.

  “That wasn’t a green station wagon, that was a SUV,” he said. It was green, but it had been a Jeep.

  The detective asked again about the vehicle his uncle Dick had been driving when they left the mall. “It was definitely a station wagon? It couldn’t have been any other type of car that Dick had?”

  “He had a couple of cars, but he was always driving a station wagon every time I saw him.”

  Dave asked what kind of work his uncle Dick did. The squad had learned that he worked as a security guard but not at Wheaton Plaza. This might also explain the stories about a man with a badge.

  “You are probably thinking to yourself, these are kind of weird questions because we have the whole background,” Dave explained. “We’ve got the beginning. I think we’ve got the end. We’re missing the middle.” Dave said Lloyd’s family, those who were still living, had “taken and built the circle around you, and they basically put you in the middle of it, and they’re pointing their fingers at you. You actually said that when we left here—’You’re gonna go back and talk to him [Dick], and he’s gonna say, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with this.’ And that’s what happened. And what they’ve done is, either through computers or phones, they’ve tried to develop the story, and we’re trying to discredit some of this.” In other words, We’re on your side. “Your entire family has made up this story and it all falls on you. And I said, ‘Well, wait a minute’—because there are people out there that have said, ‘Well, shit, let’s just let it all fall where it may’—and I said, ‘No, no, that’s not right. That’s not the right thing to do.’” Dave was suggesting that others—his colleagues or superiors—wanted to charge Lloyd based on what they had learned. As Lloyd’s champion, he was battling his hostile family and impatient prosecutors. “We’re not here because we want to lock the world up. We’re here for answers, and we’re not gonna get the answers if we shut the door.”

  “Yeah,” Lloyd agreed.

  “We’ve got to keep that door open. We’ve got to keep the communication going between us, because it’s obvious to me that your whole family knows. The whole family knows. Now, what they know and what their involvement is, it’s gonna be hard, but it’s got to come from you.”

  “Well, see, the one thing is I can’t tell you who all’s involved and who all’s not involved because I really don’t know. All I know is, Dickie was driving the car, Teddy was there talkin’ to them girls.” Lloyd was not about to drop Teddy from his account. He said, “If you look at it, he wasn’t a bad-lookin’ kid back then.”

  “Right. And neither were you.”

  This startled Lloyd.

  “I mean, you were a good-looking man. I’ve heard that from several people.”

  Lloyd shrugged and laughed.

  “We’ve got pictures of you in your younger years.”

  Lloyd said that he didn’t flirt with other girls. He admitted eyeing little girls in the mall and talking to the Lyon sisters but said he had always been loyal to Helen. This was disturbing and revealing, and Lloyd seemed unaware of what it implied. It had come up several times. Helen was a twenty-two-year-old woman, pregnant with his child. He was eighteen. The girls in the mall he admitted ogling had been prepubescent, and yet, in Lloyd’s view—today as well as then—they were already sexual objects in the same way Helen was, potential rivals. He equated chatting with a grade-schooler with flirting or potentially cheating on Helen. But he was just warming up for his newest argument.

  “One, how could I have gotten them out of the mall?” he asked. “How could I have gotten ’em away from the mall without those two girls screamin’ and kickin’? Now, what that boy [Teddy] said to them girls to get them to go outside, I have no idea.”

  “You have to have wondered what happened,” said Dave. “Like, were they in Dick’s house for two days, a week, two weeks? Where did they end up? What did those clowns do with them? Was there more than Dick and Teddy having sex with them? ’Cause that’s pretty prevalent in your family. I mean, there’s no other way to put it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It didn’t matter who you were or what you were, it just happened and it was accepted.”

  “Right.”

  Dave had taken the liberty of substituting Dick’s house for Leonard Kraisel’s. The logic in Lloyd’s original version of where the girls had been taken was grounded in Teddy’s relationship
with the older man. The squad now knew that the relationship had not started until years later. If Dick had been driving the car, however, it was reasonable to assume that the destination basement would have been in his house, so Dave just went with it, and Lloyd didn’t dispute it.

  The detective next began edging the conversation toward Taylor’s Mountain. Lloyd entered into another rambling account of his visit back to the mall to bear false witness—he said he still could not remember the actual police interview, recalling only that he had been “fucked up” and “scared.” When he’d returned from that, he decided to leave town.

  “I said [to Helen], ‘We need to go, man.’ I told her what I knew and said we need to go. She said, ‘Where are we going to go?’”

  “Where did y’all go?”

  “Just traveling. South Carolina and Florida. I don’t remember all the other places we went. I always like warm weather.” They discussed various places Lloyd had visited or lived in over the years, and eventually Lloyd came around to mentioning Virginia.

  “I went to Thaxton when I was a kid two or three times with Helen. We stayed there for a while because I really liked the area a lot.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Dave.

  “It was beautiful. We’d stay for a while, and then me and Helen would leave. Last time I was there it was with Helen.”

  “Do you remember about when it was?”

  “Seventy-six, seventy-seven, somewhere around there. Seventy-eight.”

  “How long did you stay when you were down there?”

  “Couple weeks.”

  “And who do you typically stay with when you go down?”

  “We stayed at Artie’s. Right there at that big old house right up there on the mountain.”

  “Is it possible that you and Helen showed up down in Thaxton right after this incident, just to get away from those family members and this crazy madness that was going on?” asked Dave. “Because you said you left. You had to get the hell out of there. Is it possible?”

  “It could be. I mean, it’s possible we went there first. I don’t know.”

  “It’s important. I want you to think about that. I ain’t saying you did anything wrong. I’m saying there may be some … the way people are trying to paint this is, ‘It was all him; he showed up, he did this; he did that.’ And I’m thinking the way this is gonna play out. It’s tough for me to gauge, so I need you to kind of interact with me a little bit about this.”

  Lloyd learned here that his Virginia relatives had talked about his 1975 visit, and, true to form, he did not contradict real evidence.

  “It’s a very strong possibility that we went there first,” he said. “We hitchhiked down there, stayed a week or two. Oh yeah. It’s a strong possibility.”

  “You hitchhiked everywhere?”

  “We hitchhiked everywhere.”

  “How did you carry your shit?”

  “Duffel bag.”

  “Do you remember what the bag looked like?”

  “Yeah, it was a green duffel bag. It was my old army duffel bag. That son of a bitch was packed, too. People go to pick that up to help throw it in the car, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God!’” This comment was telling, confirming Henry’s description of the bag as heavy, about seventy pounds.

  “Who would normally pick you up?”

  “Truck drivers. Christian people. Christian vans. You know, people like that. Just hippies. That’s what we were called back then, a hippie.”

  “Where did y’all eat or lay your head down in between?”

  Curiously, Lloyd said they slept “in the car.”

  “How would you typically eat, use the bathroom, shower?”

  “Restaurants. We’d eat at some of the restaurants. Some of the Christians, they would give us money to eat. We’d wash up in the bathrooms, pull into a gas station.”

  “You didn’t have any pets or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “No cats, no dogs, nothing?”

  “No.”

  So much for the two explanations Lloyd had given Henry and Connie for the blood on his bag—they did not carry or prepare food (the “ground beef” in Connie’s story) and did not travel with a dog.

  “What some of the folks down there have said is that you and Helen show up with a big green duffel bag, the army bag, and there’s something in it.”

  “Yeah, it was my clothes.”

  “Was there something wrong with your clothes when you showed up down there?”

  “Got rained on a couple of times, so they’d be soaking wet.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “They weren’t dirty, like mud-stained? Have any transmission fluid or antifreeze on it or anything of that nature?”

  Lloyd said no. He said the clothes would start to smell after a while, need laundering.

  “So there would be no reason that the bag would have been tossed in a fire?”

  “No.”

  “None at all?”

  “No. I kept that bag for a long time. Shit, me and Helen had that bag, damn, we had it when we went all the way down to Florida and my last daughter was born.”

  “So Henry never destroyed that bag?”

  “Hell no. Ain’t nobody ever destroyed it.”

  “This is the type of stuff that has been put out there,” said Dave. “They’re pointing fingers. I think you know where I’m going with this.”

  “I had bodies in there,” said Lloyd, grinning and laughing. “Come on!”

  “That’s where they’re going with that.”

  Lloyd leaned back and laughed heartily. “Oh, that’s a good one.”

  “We can’t make this stuff up,” said Dave, humoring Lloyd. “I mean, this is the stuff that they’re testifying to.”

  “Wow. So they’re saying that I killed those two girls.”

  “I didn’t say you killed them.”

  “Well, they’re saying that.”

  “That you showed up down there.”

  “With a duffel bag with Helen that had two bodies in it and threw ’em on the fire?”

  Dave nodded.

  “Come on. If he threw them in the fire and there was bodies in there, they’d stink like bodies.”

  Dave said that Lloyd’s cousins had in fact described the smell: “Like burning rats.”

  Lloyd shook his head. “Boy, that’s the best one I heard yet.”

  THE GOD’S HONEST TRUTH

  Lloyd showed no alarm, but he must have felt cornered here. Dave told him the full story related by Connie and Henry, under oath. Lloyd saw how damaging this was.

  “Wow,” he said.

  This was going to require some major tinkering with his story, and Dave was there to help.

  “I try to come in here with the best judgment,” the detective said. “I look at it as, okay, seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old boy at the time. You’re in the mall. You get back to Hyattsville. You see what you see. You’re part of the family. They did what they did. Now all of the sudden they put it on you, and who’s to say you knew what was in the bag? Who’s to say they didn’t put the bag in the trunk of the car, and Dick drove you and Helen down there and told you to take it and put it on the fire, with Henry and you not having any knowledge of what was in the bag? You see what I’m saying?”

  He was showing Lloyd how to endorse the evidence without admitting he had willingly burned a body.

  “They could have completely used you, as a nineteen-year-old kid, and it’s stuff that we need to clean up. I’m not sure what your involvement and role was, or was it just that you were played as you’re being played now, and that’s what we’re left with.”

  Lloyd just nodded and grunted affirmatively as he listened. He wasn’t buying it.

  “Well, when me and Helen went down there, nobody took us down there,” he said. “There was no bloody bag or bodies or anything like that. That bag did not weigh no seventy or eighty pounds. That bag probably wasn’t any more
than twenty-five, thirty pounds. It had her clothes and my clothes in there, and that’s all. Oh, it had my razor and, you know, her little makeup [kit]. I’m telling you—and I’ve never been straight before with you until recently—I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. There was no bag with blood, bodies on the fire, and it was not our bag. If there was, that’s them, not me.”

  If the subject matter had not been so grave, it would have been laughable. Lloyd was invoking past lies to sell his current probity: You can trust me now because I admit I was lying then.

  “Do you remember Dick coming down during that period of time?” he asked. “How can we explain this bag?”

  “I do remember me and Helen being woked up at night, hearing a car pull up, but I didn’t get out of bed or anything like that. I don’t know who it was.”

  “Do you remember if there was a fire going, like, for a couple of days during that time you were ‘woke up’?”

  “Could have been. I mean it was dark out. It was like one or two in the morning.” Lloyd told him where on the property the fire would have been. He said he thought they were probably just burning brush.

  Dave told him about Henry’s memory of a phone call to his mother from Lloyd’s father, and of Lee’s asking whether the two girls were there.

  “My dad called?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a crock of shit.”

  “I’m just telling you what they—”

  “Yeah.” Lloyd shook his head.

  “I mean, I can’t make this shit up,” said Dave.

  “Boy, I tell you, they’re really trying to bury me, ain’t they?”

  “Oh yeah. And that’s what I mean, why when I came in here I said these are gonna be some hard questions and hard answers. Because this is what people have come up with. And there’s gotta be a way we can undo this, because not only have they testified, but about two weeks ago in a certain area on this property, we found the fire and we found what we believe were human remains that were burned.”

  “You found the fire? Wow.” Lloyd began laughing quietly to himself.