by Mark Bowden
“Who set this up from the beginning?” Katie asked.
“Dick, I believe.”
“So you guys were at Dick’s house when this went down?”
“Yeah, he said he had some pot.”
“Okay, let me ask you this before I forget. Was he dressed in a certain way?”
“He had his security uniform on.”
“Dick did?”
“Yeah.”
This was plausible, both the uniform and the pitch about smoking pot. In 1975, marijuana was a craze. It had moved aggressively from black America and the fringe hippie subculture to white suburbia. Many youngsters, especially teenagers, were eager to try it. This new version of the story was believable in another way. Grabbing two girls had been carefully premeditated. In Lloyd’s earlier version, Teddy had just happened on the Lyon sisters. Dick sending Lloyd into the mall (Teddy’s involvement, despite what Lloyd said, was highly doubtful) to lure the girls made more sense, especially with what the team had learned about Welch men. Dick’s uniform also made sense.
“He said it would be easier,” explained Lloyd. “The girls would probably not be as scared.”
The uniform also would have made it less likely for a bystander to intervene if the girls had objected or tried to pull away.
“So, did you guys formulate this plan?” Katie asked. “How is this set up?”
“It took two days for them to talk me into going into this plan,” said Lloyd. “He [Dick] said, let’s go party with some young girls.”
“Okay.”
“You know?”
“And ‘party’ to you means he was gonna have sex with them probably.”
“Get high and shit like that. To me, back then, partying was gettin’ high, drinkin’, you know.”
“So that’s a way to buy you in, because you were part of that scene?”
“He just said, ‘Look, I’ll drive you up to the mall. I’ve got some pot. Just find a couple of girls that look like they might want to party or something like that, bring them on out, [we’ll] bring them back to my place, we’ll get high, we’ll have a little sex.’”
There were shopping centers closer to Dick’s house, but Lloyd said they chose Wheaton Plaza because it was farther away. It was less likely that they would be seen by anyone who knew them. Lloyd still insisted that Teddy was part of this plan and that he must have been wearing a coat or a jacket that covered his arms.
“He drops you guys off,” said Katie. “How long did it take you to find the girls? Convince the girls?”
“About an hour, hour and a half at the most. We went walking around. Like I said, we saw those two go in, and we said, ‘Hey, how about them two? They look like they might get high,’ or something like that. And then I guess you can say we followed them around, starin’ at them or whatever to see who they were hooking up with.”
“So the whole story about Helen is not true?” said Katie.
“Yeah. Helen wasn’t there.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, and the job thing. I was gonna go up there and put in applications, but I didn’t that day.”
“What do you say to the girls to get them to come out?”
“We asked them if they wanted to get high. If they liked to party. They didn’t say no. They didn’t say yeah. They didn’t say anything. They said, ‘I don’t know, let’s see.’”
“And they just follow you guys?”
“Well, they walked out with us.”
“And at some point, you’ve been very clear from day one that the little one starts crying. What makes her start crying?”
“I guess she got scared when she saw an older person in the car.”
“Does he say anything to them?”
“Alls he said was, ‘Don’t worry, you’re in good hands.’”
At that point Lloyd reverted to his old version of the story. He got in the back with Kate. Teddy and Dick sat in the front on either side of Sheila. They drove around, he said, for about two hours, which seemed inordinately long, but Katie let it pass. When he told Dick he wanted out, his uncle turned around and gave him a dirty look, “like, Don’t say anything.”
“So you know in your gut that shit ain’t right,” said Mark.
“Right.”
“Because this is a planned situation. Of course, they have no idea that they are going to be killed and burned.”
Lloyd said that when they were all still in the car, Dick made a comment about the girls, “Going to meet their Maker.”
“That’s one of the main reasons why I got scared and got out of the car.”
Lloyd said that when Dick showed up on Taylor’s Mountain more than a week later, he was driving the same station wagon—it was yellow according to Lloyd. After Dick and Henry threw the heavy bag onto the fire, his uncle drove away.
The detectives pushed for more, but Lloyd was finished changing his story for that day.
Katie thanked him. “I pray and I hope that this story that you told us is really true.”
“It is the truth.”
“It makes a lot of sense to us,” Katie said.
Dave came back in for a few minutes before the session ended. It had lasted almost seven hours. Lloyd was worried.
“I just wanna know what’s going to happen to me,” he said to Dave. “I mean, my involvement was helping to get the girls in the car, and that was it. I didn’t touch ’em. I didn’t rape ’em. Didn’t have sex with ’em. Didn’t kill ’em. Didn’t carry them down to Virginia. Didn’t do none of that. I was a scared-shitless little boy, you know?”
“Well, we’ll work through it,” Dave said, noncommittally.
Lloyd had now greatly strengthened the kidnapping case against himself. It had been planned. He had lured the girls with pot and led them away. He had driven off with them. Lloyd still had his immunity letter, but that wasn’t going to help. That had been contingent on his not having committed a crime.
And Lloyd knew it. In one of his last comments to Dave that day, he remarked that the letter “ain’t worth shit now.” He was right.
10
The Whole Thing from Beginning to End
The Welch family property on Taylor’s Mountain Road
CAN’T TELL YOU NO MORE
Cops beset poor Henry Parker. Increasingly frail and bent, rolling his oxygen tank to his front door, he groaned when he recognized the ones on his snowy porch on February 24, 2015. They had driven up in an unmarked pickup.
“I don’t know what’s goin’ on!” he exclaimed, before they’d said a word. “Y’all keep buggin’ me, man. I ain’t got nothin’ to say to you guys no more. I told you everything I can tell you.”
Henry’s condition had worsened in the cold months since his grand jury testimony. He was miserable and could feel his time slipping away—he would last only one more winter. He couldn’t sleep and could not take pills to help him sleep, because he feared, with his lung ailment, that in deep slumber he might stop breathing altogether.
“I’m traumatized with all this shit,” he said. “I’m thinkin’ about going to see a head doctor like my sister done. I mean, this is fuckin’ me up!”
Word had gotten back to Henry that one of the cops working on the Lyon case was a brother of the Lyon girls, which in his mind framed his ordeal—it was a family feud. The men visiting him, Virginia State Police agent Lee Willis, Sergeant Jon Wilks, and investigator Mike Mayhew, from the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office, assured him that they were local—their drawls made that much plain—and while it was true that Jay Lyon was a cop up in Montgomery County, Maryland, they assured Henry that he was nearing retirement and was not working on the case. Henry wasn’t buying it.
“I want you to leave,” he said.
“No, we’re not going to ask you any questions,” said one. “We’re gonna show you something. We want to show you what Lloyd’s been saying. Remember we told you that Lloyd was trying to throw you under the bus? Well, we’re gonna show you. We’re going to show you w
hat he is saying so you can see it’s Lloyd, not us, making up a lot of shit. We know you think we’re lying our asses off to you, so we’re gonna show you we’re not bullshitting you.”
On a laptop, they played for Henry a piece of Lloyd’s January session, wherein he explains to Dave that it was Henry and Dick who threw the heavy bag onto the fire.
“There was a big ol’ fire going, and I seen Dickie and Henry grab a bag and walk over to the fire and throw it in,” says Lloyd. “Me and Helen, after that, said it was time for us to book out, and we left. What was in that bag, to my mind, was the girls.”
“‘To my mind’?” repeated Henry, scornfully. “He knows what was in the damn bag.”
“We know,” said Wilks. “We don’t believe a word he is saying. We believe it was him and you threw it on the fire. He’s puttin’ Dickie—he’s getting his picture plumb out of it. We know that.”
The detectives hoped that this might anger Henry enough to convince him to tell them more. They believed he knew more but understandably feared further implicating himself. If he heard Lloyd naming him, maybe he’d feel compelled to refute his cousin. But it didn’t work. Henry still said he thought the bag held a dead dog.
“I didn’t even see Dickie,” said Henry. “He [Lloyd] drove down in a car. I found out later that Dickie came down and took him back up to Maryland. Some girl was with him. He drug it [the bag] over from the car.”
The detectives explained that Lloyd had confessed to planning the abduction of the girls from the mall.
“So, he’s thrown himself into a chargeable offense,” said Willis. “Even though he has minimized his other part in it, he is saying he was part of the conspiracy to abduct these girls. He’s also saying other people helped him do it. And we have to believe somebody helped him do it. He couldn’t do two girls at the same time.”
They assured him again that they did not believe Lloyd. They were not looking to charge Henry with a crime.
“We are looking for you to give us some assistance on what’s up on that mountain,” said Wilks. “You have to know there was some girls in that bag, not a dog. You’re smarter than that.”
“But I don’t know.”
“But knowing what you know today—”
“I still don’t know no more about what was in it,” Henry said. “Anybody who sits there and opens their mouth can tell you anything.”
“Well, they can, but usually they don’t open their mouth and say they are guilty of a class-one felony that’s gonna get ’em fifteen to thirty years in the state penitentiary. You know what I mean? He’s acknowledged that part of it, which is the crazy thing.”
“We’ve the first part, and we’ve got this bullshit ending,” said Mayhew. “We’re trying to get you to help us sort out this bullshit ending.”
“I can’t tell you no more than I told you,” said Henry.
It was the same everywhere they went, in Virginia and Maryland. The Welch family had either lawyered up, shut up, or given—they said—all they could. The wiretaps were off, the grand jury proceedings at a standstill, the digs and lab tests winding down. The enormous effort had moved the case forward, but only by inches. It had provided a few awful glimpses of Sheila and Kate’s end.
There remained, again, only one fruitful avenue. The one person who always had more to say.
FEBRUARY 25, 2015
The day after the interview with Henry in Virginia, the Lyon squad visited Lloyd for the eighth time.
Dave burst cheerily into the gray interview room at Dover with coffee and a doughnut. In a departure, he was wearing a crisp blue dress shirt and boldly striped tie.
“I’m dressed up for you,” he said. “Look at me.”
“Yeah, what the hell’s that for?” asked Lloyd. He was still in his baggy prison whites, a black eyeglass case clipped to the front pocket. They bantered like old buddies, Lloyd reviewing once more his doomed hopes for release, and Dave, listening as if for the first time, full of his seemingly guileless bonhomie. Lloyd was in denial. He certainly grasped the seriousness of his predicament, yet carried on as if nothing had happened. Dave gave the routine recitation of rights and then announced that there would be another Virginia grand jury in March. He asked if Lloyd would consider appearing.
“We’re trying to develop a case against your uncle, so the strategy was to bring you to grand jury to testify, obviously with your permission.” He said it would entail a drive of several hours, “so our department actually went above and beyond, and they were looking at getting an RV and allowing myself and Mark and Katie to sit with you in the RV and drive you down there.”
“I’d love it,” said Lloyd. “I’d love a nice ride.”
Dave said that they would try to coordinate it so that Edna would testify again on the same day.
“Why not give Lloyd a bone?” he said he’d told the others. “His mom’s there. Why not let them come into a room like this and talk? You haven’t seen her for how long?” It had been decades.
In anticipation of this jaunt, Dave explained that he wanted to spend this session “clearing up” Lloyd’s story. He said the other principals, Dick, Pat, Teddy, Henry, Connie, and others, would also be recalled.
“So they’re still blaming it all on me, ain’t they?”
“Shit, yeah. They’re blaming it on you.”
“‘Lloyd did it. Lloyd’s in jail.’”
“That’s the easiest thing to do.”
Reflecting back on the long, damning chain of falsehoods Mark had recited in their last session, Lloyd allowed that he looked guilty, and if he was hoping for reassurance from Dave, he was disappointed.
“You got it,” is what the detective said.
“I agree with you one hundred percent on that,” said Lloyd. “Looking at it on paper, the way he said it, it’s like, damn, Lloyd did do it, you know, or he was there.”
The task today, Dave told Lloyd, was to shift that blame to Dick. This was not, in fact, his primary objective. The squad did believe Dick had been involved, so anything more about him was welcome, but the primary goal was to coax still more about what had happened from Lloyd. He was going to try to get himself off the hook by damning Dick, but no matter what else he said at this point, he would share culpability.
Dave asked for more details about how the kidnapping was conceived.
“The original plan was me and Teddy would go into the mall, find a couple of girls that looked like they might want to party or something like that, ask ’em if they’d like to get high, bring them out, we’d all get in the car, and we’d go up and get high, you know, and party. That was the original plan. Not one thing was mentioned about sex. Just to party. Nobody said anything to me. Nobody said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna bring ’em up and have sex with them.’ You know?”
This was, of course, beyond belief. Dick had been a thirty-year-old man. The idea that he would plot to lure two little girls to his house in order to get them high or drunk and have a few laughs was ridiculous, as was Lloyd’s contention that he had been only an innocent ride-along. But Dave played along.
Lloyd said he went to Dick’s house that morning. His uncle was wearing his security guard uniform. They rode with Teddy in Dick’s yellow station wagon.
“We went to the mall and saw the two girls. There was a bunch of them walking into the mall. I heard Dickie say, ‘Well, what about them?’ I didn’t know who he was talking about at first.” Dick pointed them out, and they watched the girls enter the mall.
Dick stayed in the car, Lloyd said, while he and Teddy went after them. They offered the girls a chance to smoke dope.
Lloyd recalled Sheila answering, “Yeah, I’d like to try.”
“That was all, you know?” he said. “‘Oh, it sounds like fun,’ you know? Kids.”
Dick pulled up to the curb as they exited with the girls.
“Okay, you said one got in the front and one got in the back,” said Dave.
“Right.”
“The young one was in
the back.”
“Yeah, I think that was …” Here Lloyd encountered a new problem. If the girls had left with them cheerfully, looking forward to smoking dope and hanging out, why had the younger one been crying in the back seat? “Like I said, I don’t know if she was really cryin’ or not. I don’t know. It sounded like she was.” He whimpered softly to illustrate. “But that could just have been a sniffle, because she had her head turned the whole time. She didn’t say nothin’. The girl in the front didn’t say nothin’. They didn’t ask where we were going to party or anything like that, you know.”
In the previous session, Lloyd had told Mark that they’d driven around for two hours. Dave pointed out that this didn’t sound right. Hyattsville was only about fifteen minutes away. Lloyd insisted that he’d never said two hours—he didn’t seem to realize that all these interviews were recorded. Several times he joked about it, once telling Dave he had checked the desk drawers looking for a recorder when he’d been left alone in the room. “Because how in the hell does he remember everything I said?” Lloyd asked. But he never got serious about the question. Dave would swiftly change the subject.
Lloyd continued recalling the ride away from the mall.
“I know there was some joints already rolled up. I know Dick smoked pot. I was smoking one in the back. The girl [Kate] was sitting over there, she didn’t smoke at that time. I should have asked, ‘Are you okay?’ or something like that, but I wasn’t thinkin’. I was gettin’ high.”
“Ah, see, to me, I don’t think that that’s odd,” said Dave, who in fact found the whole situation horrifyingly odd. “Look at it this way. If you’re loading two girls to go party, in your mind you’re partying, you’re hanging out. In Dick and Ted’s mind—you don’t know what they talked about but—more than likely they’re talking about having sex with these two girls after they get them high and drunk, right? I mean, I’m just sayin’.”
“Right. But I guess what scared me the most is when we got up there by the university [University of Maryland], Dick didn’t turn all the way around. I guess he was talking to Teddy or somebody, and he said, ‘Well, you know, they can always meet their Maker.’ You know? I guess that is what scared me the most, because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”
