by Mark Bowden
Lloyd then offered a little more detail about luring the girls. He watched them for a while, and when they were alone he approached them. He said he asked, “Have either one of you ever gotten high before? Ever thought about getting high?”
He replayed how the conversation went:
“I’ve thought about it,” said Sheila, “but I’ve never done it.”
“Well, I’ve got a little pot, and I’m just hanging around here. Would you like to get high?”
Sheila said yes, but Kate balked. “We can’t do that,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” Sheila urged her. “It isn’t going to hurt us. Everyone is doing it.”
Katie immediately cast doubt on that dialogue.
“These girls didn’t smoke. I mean, they were ten and twelve.”
Lloyd said that was how it happened.
“Their parents say there’s absolutely no way that they would have gotten in the car with strangers,” said Katie.
“Well, their parents lied.”
“It’s not that they’re lying. You know, parents want to think the best of their kids.”
Mark asked why, if Dick had decided to drive all the way to Wheaton, because he did not want to be seen picking up girls close to his house, did he bring the girls back to his house?
“That’s a question I’ve asked myself so many times, and I can’t answer that because I don’t know. All I know is he got high down in that basement down there, and that’s where he did all of his partying then. I guess he felt safe in that area.”
Again Lloyd said that he got out of the car at the convenience store. Here is where he had decided to take his stand. He had innocently participated in taking ten- and twelve-year-old girls to “party” with his pedophiliac uncle. The rest had come as a shock to him—although not enough of a shock to impel him to take a single step to aid the girls. Mark scoffed. He leaned toward Lloyd and fixed him with a steady, troubled gaze. He spoke very calmly, asking again why Dick would have taken the girls back to his own house, where his wife and children lived.
And then Lloyd tripped up. He said that Pat wasn’t home “when we got there.”
Mark did not draw attention to it immediately; he just ran with it.
“So, you guys pull in the driveway, do you all go back around to the basement?”
“I shouldn’t say we pulled in,” Lloyd said, backtracking fast. “I’m saying they pulled in. Pat was at work. I can see the house when I’m walking by the tracks.”
“See, and that’s the kind of thing the jurors are going to get tripped up on, because when you said just a minute ago—”
“I said they.”
“—when we pulled into the driveway.”
“When we pulled in, yeah.”
“All right? And if you pulled in, if you didn’t get out at the store, that’s fine.”
“No, I got out at the store and got ice cream.”
“You established a lot of credibility with us now, and we completely understand that back then you didn’t know where this thing was going,” Mark lied. “And you were scared and all that stuff. If you went to Dick’s house from the mall, that doesn’t change things as far as the way we’re looking at all this.”
“No, I did get out at the store.”
“Lloyd, did you get back in the car?” Katie asked. “Because, honestly, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah. I walked down the railroad tracks You can see their house from the railroad tracks.”
“But hear me out,” said Katie. “You’re saying that they dropped you off, and you went about your business, and you didn’t know anything until the next day, and now you’re putting yourself looking at them pulling up to the house with the girls. So it doesn’t matter if you were in the car, it doesn’t change anything other than the fact that we can believe in you. Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“I understand,” said Lloyd. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Because it doesn’t make you any less guilty or more guilty. If you’re in the car when they pulled up to the house—already you said somewhere in your mind you knew there was probably going to be sex, not necessarily that you were gonna participate—what curious nineteen-year-old boy isn’t gonna go and see what’s gonna happen? They [the girls] weren’t that much different in age than you. There were totally different things goin’ on back then.”
Katie was smoothing the path for Lloyd. She was allowing, for purposes of easing Lloyd’s concerns, that having sex with prepubescent girls was somehow a normal thing, especially in the anything-goes 1970s.
“I can understand important parts where you want to take yourself out,” she said. “This isn’t one of them. I know it’s in our nature to protect ourselves, and I get it. But it just doesn’t make sense. I’ve got a pretty good Lloyd bullshit meter. Mark has a good Lloyd bullshit meter, as you know.”
Lloyd chuckled to himself. This was true.
“You know, because you always end up giving it up to us anyways,” Katie said.
Lloyd laughed, leaned back, and threw up both arms in an attitude of surrender.
“Okay, goddamnit! Damn. I did get out at the store there and get some ice cream. We drove to the house. I got out. I left the house. There was nobody at the house. I said I was leaving and I left.”
This retreat was telling. Katie was right; it made little difference whether Lloyd got out at the store or a few minutes later at the house. But the shift revealed Lloyd’s whole method. He told the truth up to a point, but then extricated himself when things turned bad. He removed himself from the scene. When trapped into admitting he was present, as he was here by his own slipup, he became the innocent victim, a sucker, a patsy. Just easygoing Lloyd, along for the ride, exploited.
Having loosened up a little on this, Lloyd offered some more information about those first few hours of the Lyon girls’ nightmare. He said they initially drove all over the area, smoking dope in the car. He said Teddy was blowing marijuana smoke into Sheila’s mouth in the front seat, while Kate whined in the back. “She really didn’t want to go, but her sister talked her into it,” he said. “I guess you could say she was acting up. She did ask her sister at one point, ‘Are we gonna go back to the mall anytime soon?’”
It evoked such a sad scene, Kate with her head averted in the back seat, staring out the window, wondering where they were going, who these men were, and what might happen to them. Lloyd said his uncle responded by encouraging the ten-year-old, saying, “Why don’t you get high!” This was also about the time that Dick, clearly annoyed, told Teddy, “They can always meet their Maker.” Later, Lloyd said, Sheila took her little sister’s hand as they got out of the car and led her into the basement room.
The detectives picked away further at Lloyd’s story. Why would he have gone back to Dick’s house the next day if what his uncle had said—“They can always meet their Maker”—so scared him? All of Lloyd’s reasons were feeble. He wanted to say goodbye to a cousin. His uncle had good dope.
“Lloyd, did an anonymous nine-one-one call ever go through your head?” Katie asked.
“No.”
“Just because you were saving your ass?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, fair enough.”
“I didn’t want to go to jail.”
“Fair enough.”
“It was me who was at the mall.”
“Right.”
“It was me who everybody saw, you know? I mean, y’all have got a picture of me.” He was referring to the old police sketch.
“Right.”
“Or close enough.”
“That’s the kind of honesty I’m talking about. Because that’s not an easy thing to say, but it’s the truth and it’s fair, and we don’t judge you any. In fact, we are happy that you say it.”
“Yeah. Nine-one-one just—”
“That’s a hard pill to swallow,” said Katie, finishing the thought for him.
Lloyd nodded.
“Knowing
that this little girl was getting raped and possibly drugged, dead, whatever?” she asked. “And you could have prevented it, and you didn’t because you were preserving yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the kind of stuff that we are looking for.”
Lloyd finally acknowledged unequivocally that he had gone to the police with his false story because “I didn’t want them to come lookin’ at me. Because I didn’t know if somebody had seen me talking to them.” He had been, he said, “covering my ass.”
Mark pushed him once more on what happened in Virginia.
“You were involved with this thing in the beginning. It ended. And you’re there when it ends. It’s like a coincidence that you just happen to be there?”
“Coincidences happen.”
Mark laughed.
“All through life, coincidences happen,” said Lloyd.
Then Katie launched into another of her empathetic stem-winders. She believed in her heart, she said, that Lloyd had been sucked into the crime by his uncle, that these were “shitty people,” that he was the only decent and honorable one in the family, that he was “a teenager trying to do better with Helen,” and that he had gotten into a bad situation because of drugs. She said he had fled to Virginia because his uncle had probably threatened him, and that he had kept his mouth shut about the whole thing for forty years because he was frightened. His family had set him up, essentially framed him to take the hit for the crime, and now they were all free, “living their lives,” trying to make sure that the blame came to rest solely on him. They were getting away with it! He needed to come clean so the detectives could help him protect himself. Dick was the evil one here. He had probably done this multiple times and gotten away with it! “He’s still getting away with it!” she said. Lloyd had a chance to bring him to justice, avoid being made the scapegoat, and unburden himself. “We can’t unless you do,” she said. “I wish you would just let it out. Let it go. If that means you have to cry, if that means you have to punch something …” Katie was on a roll.
And almost six hours into the session, true to form, Lloyd once more buckled—or seemed to. He started rubbing his eyes. He announced that he was tired. Then out came the question: “What’s gonna happen to me?”
And as they always did, the detectives finessed the answer. He had already confessed to having helped kidnap the girls. They did not tell him so, but this alone was enough to lock him away for the remainder of his life. They wanted more. They wanted to know exactly what happened.
“You’ve asked that question so many times,” said Mark. “What’s going to happen to me? You said something earlier today: ‘Everything I’ve said hurts me.’ And that is absolutely true, and it’s true because what you have said up until this point leaves you looking bad.” Mark was returning to Dave’s argument, that Lloyd needed to tell them more about what happened, in order to defend himself.
“Okay,” said Lloyd. “Do you want Dave in here too, so all three of you can hear the whole story?”
THE WHOLE THING FROM BEGINNING TO END
Helen’s invented journal would pay a dividend after all. It had evidently been gnawing at Lloyd. Told that Helen had written of their being with the Lyon girls some days after the girls’ disappearance, he was faced once more with tangible evidence—or what he thought was tangible evidence. Lloyd rarely resisted provable facts. Katie’s artful fiction would now force another maneuver.
When Mark left to fetch Dave, Lloyd pleaded with Katie, “I just don’t want to do no more time. I want to get out.”
Katie was not about to dash his fondest hope, not while he was still talking. She dodged it.
“Look, I’ve seen you struggle,” she said. “This is just you and me talking now. The reason you want to keep giving us more is that you want to do the right thing. It’s just time. It’s just time. You’re tired. We’re tired, and nobody is taking care of you.”
“But the only problem with this all is I tell you all everything, the whole thing from the beginning to the end, and it’s still my word against theirs, and there’s more of them than there is of me.”
Mark and Dave entered. Dave, who had removed his tie, pulled the chair Mark had been sitting in even closer to Lloyd and leaned toward him. Mark and Katie sat behind the desk.
“Okay,” said Lloyd, leaning back in his chair and clasping both hands behind his head. “March twenty-third. Dick approached me and Teddy with this plan to go up to the Wheaton mall, like I said, to pick up a couple of girls, party with them, have sex with them.” This was a new admission; Lloyd had always insisted on just the euphemism “partying.” “I told him no, I don’t want to do that. I’ll party with you, I’ll party with the girls, but I’m not having no sex with those girls. I’m with Helen. She’s with child. I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t even want to be in this. You can leave me out.’ Couple of days later, he talks me in. Says, ‘Look, I got pot, man. I got plenty of pot. Got some good drugs. We’ll all get high,’ and stuff like that. So finally he talked me into going up there. I go up there. I go into the mall. I saw the two girls come walking through. I followed them for a while. I approached them and said, ‘Hey, do y’all wanna get high?’ You know, I did say it that way. ‘You wanna get high?’ And the older one said, ‘We’ve never gotten high before. We don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ll try it. Everybody’s doing it. I mean, it’s the seventies. Peace, love, and rock ’n’ roll.’ And the older one finally said, ‘Yeah, let’s get high.’ The younger one said, ‘No, I don’t want to go.’ And her sister said, ‘Oh, come on, we’re just going to get high,’ you know? So, we go out of the mall, and Dick pulls up. I don’t know where Teddy came out of, but he came up behind me. The older girl got in the front, like I said. I got in the back. The other girl got in the back, and we drove around for a while, started getting high. Ted was giving shotgun to the girl [blowing marijuana smoke directly into her mouth], and we were just talking up front there.”
The detectives noted that Lloyd had inadvertently placed himself in the front seat, and since they had long ago stopped believing in Teddy’s role, it made sense. Nobody pointed it out, and Lloyd continued his new tale.
“The other girl, she still wasn’t saying nothing, just like I said. I don’t know if she was crying or what. I didn’t offer her anything, because she just looked like she wanted to be by herself. I finally get the ice cream, because I did tell Helen I would get some ice cream for her. We go back to the house there, and Dick, at the time, I guess, was bickering with Teddy about something. I don’t know what it was, and he said, ‘Well, they can always meet their Maker.’ You know how that goes, and I got out and I said, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’m taking this ice cream home. I don’t want to. Y’all do your thing. Have a good time.’ And I left. I did not go back to that house until the next day, and it was, like, out of curiosity, to see if the girls were okay or if they were still there or not—” Here he had taken to heart Katie’s suggestion that as a teenager, knowing there were going to be sex acts, he would have at least been curious to see. “Helen was with me, but she didn’t go downstairs. I did. I saw Dick raping the one girl, and her eyes were rolled [back]. Like I said, I don’t know if she was on a high or drugged or what, because Dick could get drugs all the time. I backed out. About that time Teddy come, I don’t know if he came around this way [around the outside of the house to the basement entrance], and I said, ‘Hey, I’ll see you later. I don’t want to be around here.’”
Now Lloyd offered his explanation of Helen’s supposed diary entry about them spending time with the girls days later.
“Me and Helen left for a while. I guess it was the next day, next morning or whatever, Dick and Teddy had come over to the house and asked me and Helen if we would watch two girls, just babysit for a while, you know, and that’s true, and I said, ‘What two girls?’ and he said, ‘You know, the girls that you got a hold of.’ I said, ‘You still got them little girls? What are you doing with them? I thought
you were gonna send them home.’ And he said, ‘Oh, they want to stay for a while. They like getting high.’ So we went there. We stayed for a while.”
It was, of course, absurd. You kidnap two little girls, who have now been missing for days and are the objects of a mass, bicounty, hugely publicized manhunt; and you have seen your uncle raping one of them, who appears drugged; and you then, with your girlfriend, agree to “babysit” them, accepting your uncle’s explanation that they are enjoying themselves? It got weirder.
“At his house or at your house?” Katie asked.
“It was his house.”
“Okay.”
“We watched them. Helen, she played with them and everything like that. Helen always loved kids. I guess, at the time, she didn’t really know what was going on. I guess we watched ’em for about four or five hours. They weren’t hurt or anything like that. Nothin’ was ever mentioned about them having sex or anything like that or getting them from the mall. Dick finally came back upstairs.”
The detectives noted that the girls had now been moved from the basement party room at Dick’s house to an upstairs room. Lloyd had added a bizarre new scene to his narrative, and like most of his fictions, it appeared to be at least partly truthful. It corroborated things they had heard in wiretaps and interviews. Family members had several times alluded to something untoward going on in Dick’s upstairs poolroom. Then there was Teddy’s new story. Lloyd, in an effort to help himself, had just placed another rock on the growing pile of damning evidence.
He continued: “Pat, I don’t know where she was at, at the time. I don’t know if she was sitting out on the front porch and just wanted some time alone or whatever. Finally, they came back in. Me and Helen left. Dickie gave Helen a little bit of money for watching ’em for a couple of hours. We went back to the house [Lloyd’s father’s house], and I guess you could say that it kind of bugged me of what was going on.… They didn’t have no marks on them like they were punched on or tortured or anything like that. They had clothes on, so I couldn’t tell what was on their body or anything like that, but none of them said anything about, ‘Hey, are you gonna get us back up to the mall?’ or anything like that. I don’t know what they said to Helen, because Helen was the one who watched them mostly. A couple of days later it just kept eating at me, eating at me, eating at me, finally I decided it was time for me to go to the mall and get my name cleared out of this, because I didn’t want no part of it. Dick came over to the house one time, talked to Lee, I don’t know what they all talked about. He saw me, and he said, ‘Look, don’t say a damn word about nothin’. You don’t know nothin’, just get out of here. You’re talkin’ about going to Virginia for a while. Go there. See everybody and disappear.’ I took that as a hint. You know? I went to the mall. I told my side of the story. When I ended up talking to the police, I got really scared then. Left. Me and Helen hitchhiked. It took us a day and a half to get down there hitchhiking. About that time, our clothes were a little mildewy, because it was a little cold outside that night. We stayed in the woods. We got the clothes washed. We ate dinner about twelve thirty, one thirty, somewhere around there. It was late. We were in bed asleep. A car pulled up, and Dick got out of the car. The reason I know it was Dick was because he was wearing his T-shirt and it was the [his] car. He went to the back. He opened it up. He pulled a bag out, and I knew right then and there that something wasn’t right. Something happened to them girls. I was too scared to say anything, just like I’ve been all of this time. Henry came. I don’t know where he was at the time. I don’t know if he was down by the fire or where he was at. He helped him [Dick] carry the bag down there. They threw it on the fire. Came back to the house. They talked a little bit. Dick looked up there toward the window like I was, like he could see me lookin’ out the window or whatever. He got in the car. There was another man in the car. I didn’t know if it was Lee or who it was. He never got out. I didn’t see him. About that time I laid my head back down, and I said, ‘Oh shit.’ Helen said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Said, ‘Dick was just down here. I don’t know what was going on, but he threw something on the fire. I don’t know what it was.’ I didn’t want to tell her what I was thinking. We got up that morning. We ate breakfast. I told everybody, ‘Look, thank you for the hospitality and the food and everything like that. We’re gonna head down south now.’ We walked outside, and it smelled real bad. That’s why I said it smelled like rats.” In fact, it had been Dave who said this. “Helen got sick to her stomach. She brought everything up. She said, ‘What the hell is that smell?’ I said, “I don’t know.’ We left. Forty years I didn’t say nothing.”
