by Mark Bowden
If he were set free that day, Lloyd said, he’d have exactly eighty-two cents of his own. Delaware would give him fifty dollars and some clean clothes.
“You can’t even get a motel for fifty dollars!” said Dave.
“So, what happens to me is, I get violated, and I’m right back in the system.”
Dave commiserated: “It’s a huge problem that nobody wants to seem to think about.”
In time they got around to business. The detective had, he said, new information, “because, like I said, this is more about you today. I’ve spent a lot of time with you, and we’ve built up a pretty decent relationship.”
“I think we have. And I don’t like cops. But I’ll be honest with you—this is from the heart—I actually do like you and the rest of the team. You know, I talk to you more than I talk to them, but I’ve actually come to respect you three. I’ve actually come to respect you three more than anything else in the world, because—y’all are officers, don’t get me wrong on that—it’s because you’re human beings. I don’t think you’re gonna throw me under the bus.”
“No. And that’s why I want to explain everything to you, because we’ve always tried to be up front with you.” This, of course, was not true. He had been duplicitous from the start, and so had Lloyd. It was the game.
“Let me tell you something,” said Dave. “It wasn’t easy to get here. There was a lot of people that said, ‘No, we’re done communicating with him.’ There was a lot of shenanigans that went on. Part of what got shut down was the grand jury.”
“So, they wanted to charge me, put it all on me?”
“It’s looking like that. And that’s why it’s an important day for both of us.”
“I’ve already come to the conclusion they’re going to pin it on me.”
“Well, let’s see what we can get here today. Our county in Maryland, Montgomery, has always been about answers. When we came down here we wanted answers. So, what? We hit you with a charge? You’re already in jail. So what difference does it make if we charge you? You’re not going anywhere. So, it was all about answers. But then you get other agencies involved, and things start to change. It was like fighting tooth and nail, with some folks saying we’ve invested two years of our careers in you. We believe in you. Give us one more shot. I said, ‘Give me an opportunity.’”
“Yeah. I’ve implicated myself so much. I realized it when I left [the last session] that I was fucked.”
“And that’s what I said,” Dave explained. Today was a chance to back away from the ledge. Dave said he’d brought his lunch and that they would eat together and “kick back,” but first he wanted to run through the whole thing once more. Lloyd retold the story of his uncle Dick’s efforts to recruit him, how he and Dick and Teddy drove to the mall. When he got to the part about talking the girls into leaving with them, Dave interrupted.
“All right. Let’s stop right there. You’ve got three or four people that see Lloyd Welch in the mall. No one has ever said anything about Teddy.”
“Right.”
“No one has ever said anything about Dick, because he was outside in the car. So you’ve got Lloyd Welch.”
But Lloyd refused to take Teddy out of the picture. He walked Dave through the same story he had told last time, but in this version, he now claimed, preposterously, that he did not know when he went back to the mall to give his statement that the girls he had seen at his uncle’s house were the Lyon sisters. He now said he thought the girls were just runaways. This ignored much of what he had told them in the previous months, about seeking the reward money, about trying to deflect police interest in himself. It was as if he had never said those things. This appeared to be something he had worked out in his cell during the previous months, a new strategy. It showed a staggering lack of awareness. He seemed to completely buy that Dave was here to help him craft a self-defense narrative, untethered to facts, into which he could plug new, more favorable particulars for old problematic ones—and that no would notice or care!
“So I was going to use them two girls who I thought was actually running away.” His choice of the word use here was revealing. “You know what I’m saying? Because at the time, I really didn’t know their names or really know their faces or anything like that. Like I said, they never said, ‘Help’ or anything like that when we looked after them. So I thought they were running away.”
Otherwise he stuck to the version of the story he had told three weeks earlier, seeing Dick drive up at night, the bag, the fire, the horrible odor. Dave sat through it all, pointing out once or twice how jurors might see through it—Lloyd transparently removing himself from the picture at every stage. But it wasn’t good enough. Virginia’s prosecutors weren’t buying it, Dave explained, because they were more intent on nailing him than on learning the truth. In short, Lloyd was about to be charged with murder.
“Does the DNA from the bones show that it was the girls?” Lloyd asked.
“Got one fragment that shows,” said Dave, falsely.
“Now, the question is, how did Lloyd get dead bodies from point A to point B?” Lloyd said, speaking of himself in the third person.
“That’s why we’re here, because there’s lots of stuff in between that we’ve got answers to. And that’s why I’m back. I begged,” said Dave. He said he wanted to see whether Lloyd could give him answers that matched up with what they already knew. This was a timeworn interrogation tactic and a stretch. They knew little more than what Lloyd had told them.
“It’s hard for me to believe that you don’t have some of the answers that you left out,” Dave said. “And I get it.”
Lloyd altered his story a little. Earlier he had said that he and Helen had gone to Virginia because Dick had told him to get lost. Now he said he had been asked by his uncle and his father to go. He said Dick visited him at his father’s house and recommended that he and Helen leave earlier than they had planned. “It would be best if you got out of here,” he said Dick told him.
“And was that because he knows you were seen at the mall and he knows it’s going to hit the media?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now he’s worried that you’re going to get caught, which is going to implicate him, or you’re simply going to turn on him?”
“Yeah. And Lee did make a phone call that we were coming.”
“Let’s stop right there. Let’s not leave anything out. And what I mean by that is, I’m not saying you’re holding back. I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m thinking from a person outside, taking my feelings out—I mean, I really do care for you—but if you’re supposed to be going down there, and Dick has come up with this plan that he eventually is going to come down there with these girls, whether they’re alive or dead, why wouldn’t he give you a car to drive? Or you and Helen ride with him? Why would you try to hitchhike to Bedford? Explain that, because that logically doesn’t make sense.”
Lloyd clung to his hitchhiking story. This was crucial. It freed him from having been involved with transporting the Lyon girls to Virginia. He knew that any such involvement would mean more trouble. So he argued again that he and his uncle didn’t get along well enough for Dick to offer him a ride. Besides, he said, he and Helen would not have wanted to spend five hours in the car with Dick.
“So, they were dead or alive when you left?”
“They were alive when we left. What happened after that, I don’t know.”
“Who had sex with them?”
Lloyd said he didn’t know.
A TRICK OR THE TRUTH?
The most important thing, Dave said, was to know who killed Sheila and Kate and where.
“I can give you my suspicion,” said Lloyd.
“Give it to me.”
“I honestly think it was Dick and Lee. I would think that the girls had had enough; they wanted to go home,” Lloyd said, as if Sheila and Kate had initially been keen on their abduction and rape. “Dickie didn’t want to send them home. He would be charged with r
ape and kidnapping and all that. And he decided to get rid of them. And knowing him and Lee were as close as they were …”
This was a breakthrough. Lloyd was now coming to the actual murder scene. Dave just let him continue.
Lloyd said the girls wouldn’t have been killed in Dick’s house. Dick and Lee would have taken them somewhere else. “Where, I don’t know.” Both men were married and had children living at home. Too many people. He suggested that the girls might have been drugged, knocked unconscious, or even strangled, and then carried up to the railroad tracks that ran near Dick’s house or over to the Anacostia River basin, a small tributary that winds down from the northeast toward the Potomac. There they would have been chopped into pieces and put into the duffel bag or bags. Either that, Lloyd said, or Dick and Lee had set off to take the girls to Virginia, and one girl “had gotten out of hand” and was killed on the way.
This was more than Lloyd had ever told them about the girls’ ultimate fate. Dave deliberately did not remark on it.
“We’ve got theories,” he told Lloyd. He explained how stories gained credence because of provable details. “I’ll give you one because it sticks in my mind. There was a red Ford Pinto station wagon stolen from a Ford dealership right next to the mall the day the girls were abducted. That car was recovered by PG [Prince Georges] County an eighth of a mile away from Dick’s house [about a half-hour drive from Wheaton Plaza without traffic].”
Lloyd lifted an eyebrow and smiled.
“And because I stole a couple of cars, the theory is that Lloyd took the car,” he said.
“And in your original statement you said that the car was red.”
“Oh Lord,” Lloyd lamented. “Oh Lord.”
“You see?”
“When I first started talking to y’all, back then I was bullshit,” said Lloyd. “But everything I’ve told you in the last year, when I started telling you about Dickie and stuff like that, it started weighing on my conscience. I’m fifty-eight years old. I’ve held this shit in too long. It’s … I can’t tell you who killed them.”
Dave thought he could. He said, “If I told you that I know that Dick killed them, damn near can prove it—I can’t prove whether you helped, didn’t help. And I can tell you how he killed them, and obviously we know where they ended up. Now, in my mind, the only thing that you’re holding out on is some knowledge, just because of the family and the tightness. And because I already know, and you can tell me some of those details, then I could go back and say, ‘Look, he told me what we already can prove.’ That helps you.”
“But then that implicates me.”
“How does that implicate you?”
“Okay, let’s just say I know how they were killed; I know where they were killed; I know who killed them. Then that implicates me being there when they were killed.”
“But that’s the trust that you and I have to develop. I’m not here tricking you.”
Dave said that a family member had come forward who was “very little at the time,” but whom Dick trusted—he was talking about Wes Justice. “It was like pulling teeth to get this guy to testify before the grand jury, and finally he broke, and he broke bad. He laid it all out for what Dick told him. And if you were able to back that up—”
“See, that’s the problem—”
“If not, then it stands as Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd.” Then Dave extended his hand. “Out here is Dick and Teddy. And we can’t prove any of this shit.”
He told Lloyd in effect, I think there’s more you could tell, but you’re worried that you’re being played.
Lloyd concurred. “Is it a trick, or is that the truth, or … you see what I am going through?” he asked.
“I can’t give it to you, because if I do, then they’re just going to say, ‘Nah, you spoon-fed him that, and he gave it back to you.’ You’ve already hinted around at it before.”
“I have?”
“Yes. I want to say that it was in the last interview that you hinted around it. And that’s what really drew our attention to what this guy [Wes] is saying.”
“Can you refresh my memory of me hinting around?”
“Had to do with the bag. One of the things you corroborated was that your dad, that Lee, had a bag just like yours.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s part of it, but think about what you said when you were being blamed for them being put in the bag, about how they wound up in the bag.”
“Oh, chopped up?”
Dave made a gesture with his hands, as if to say, Voilà!
Lloyd continued, “Because he said it was bloody, and I said, Well, the only way that I could think about it is if they were chopped up.”
“No, what you actually said—you got pissed because you were being accused of killing them. And what you did is, you threw your hands up and said, ‘What? Am I supposed to have chopped them up and put them in a bag?’ What was told to this person by Dick is that he chopped them up.”
“Now, see, I will say that he did,” said Lloyd. “I mean, I know for a fact, because he had a little section outside where he chopped wood and stuff like that, because he used to sell wood. Now, he did have an ax, and he did have a hatchet. And he kept them very sharp. And he kept them down in the basement with his other tools. But for me to say that I actually saw him do that, I can’t.”
“So, you’re told by your family to get the hell out of Dodge,” said Dave.
“Basically, that’s exactly the way it was.”
Lloyd had come a long way. He had suggested that his uncle and father had killed the girls and dismembered them. Then he said the station wagon his uncle Dick had driven to Virginia afterward, to deliver the bloody duffel bags, belonged to his aunt Pat or possibly to her father.
“There’s two problems that we have to unfuck here,” said Dave. These were the stories told by Connie Akers and Henry Parker about Lloyd’s bloody duffel bag. Both witnesses gave very specific accounts of Lloyd delivering the bags, and both were believable. Their stories jibed. Lloyd had contradicted both—two against one. Here, again, was plausible evidence that Lloyd would have to explain away.
“Wow,” he said, staring the obstacle in the face.
“Yeah. So, we have to undo that and somehow figure out Dick’s role in this mess.”
“Yeah,” said Lloyd, intently collaborating. “So, Henry and Connie are saying, ‘Lloyd did it.’ Lloyd and Helen didn’t show up in no car.” He bragged about how powerful his legs were from all the walking he did when he was young. He said he had no memory of encountering Connie with a bag of dirty clothes. He grew angry just talking about the story told by Connie and Henry, and announced that he was done trying to protect anyone in his family. “I tried covering them. I tried to leave it alone, walking away. And I did it for forty years.”
“I’ve got my own opinion,” said Dave. “But there’s got to be something that you can give me that I can back up, because I have my opinion. And it’s good—it’s a good opinion of you, and it’s a very bad opinion of Dick. And it’s easy for Connie to do kind of what you did in the beginning. You’d give us some truth. You just interchanged people.”
“Uh-huh,” Lloyd agreed, and then came up with a motive for Connie to lie. “I honestly think that Connie had a crush on me. I honestly do. And she was pissed off whenever I’d show up with Helen.”
“So explain to me why—”
“Why she would lie on me?”
“Yeah.”
“To save Dick’s ass, is what I think.”
“Right,” said Dave. “Because how easy would it be if the true story is that you simply just showed up down there? Dick comes down because that’s the plan they came up with when you left. They said, ‘We got to do something, the shit’s on, Lloyd’s been back at the mall, he’s been seen, and now he’s lied to the police, it’s eventually going to come home, we got to do something.’ They panic. I don’t know where they were killed. More than likely, they used an ax and chopped them up because that’s
what he [Dick] told this other family member. And I was trying not to lead you.”
“Right,” said Lloyd. He liked how this was going. Dave had caught the spirit of the thing.
“If there’s one person in your corner, it’s me,” said Dave.
“Right.”
“Because I don’t want to see you get charged with capital murder in Virginia if you didn’t kill them.”
I’M FUCKED NOW. I’M DEAD.
After a lunch break, Dave returned beleaguered.
“Holy smokes!” he said.
“What?”
“I was going to come in here and eat with you, man, but they beat me up something awful out there.”
“They beat you up?” In Lloyd’s world the expression wasn’t metaphorical.
Dave explained that the prosecutors and police from Virginia, who were waiting eagerly in the next room, were going press charges against Lloyd unless the squad could extract something new from him, some verifiable fact that corroborated his version of events.
This was, of course, a ploy. The commonwealth attorney’s office was being very cooperative, not clamoring at that moment to press charges.
“It’s a mess,” said Dave. “The first thing I said to them when I walked in there is, ‘I believe him one hundred percent. I believe him.’ I said, ‘There are some things that may differ a little bit than what we’ve been able to prove, but it’s explainable.’ But what they said is, ‘Look, it’s a whole lot different than what he said the last time.’ And the way they’re looking at it is, you’re going in reverse instead of forward. And I said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ So I figured we’d come back in here.”
Dave told him how absurd “babysitting” the girls sounded.
“If you were told, simply sit your ass in that poolroom and watch these girls, and the girls were tied up or gagged, and that’s what you saw, and that’s why you went and watched TV, because you didn’t want to be a part of it, I can understand that. It’s a little more explainable than you were ‘babysitting,’ and they didn’t say anything. That’s bullshit. It was Easter Sunday. It was her [Sheila’s] birthday. I’m, like, wait a minute.”
