by Mark Bowden
“I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison for something I didn’t do.”
“Understandably.”
“You know?”
“And there’s only one way we can help you.”
Then came the question that always prefaced a revelation.
“I feel like I need some kind of immunity from Virginia and Maryland, a new immunity to where I’m not going to be charged with anything ever.”
The facts were closing in on him. Dave just nodded.
“And I’m going to be a witness against them. That’s what I was, a witness. That’s why I stopped asking for a lawyer. I feel like I’m being fucked, I feel that I’m the one—”
Dave bore in: “Who killed the young one?”
After a year and a half of these long interview sessions—they were an hour and a half into this one—they had finally brought Lloyd to the worst of it.
MY ONLY ACE
“The more I say, the more I fuck myself,” he lamented. “How many are against me? The whole family.”
“Five, six, seven, ten people who don’t have any criminal records,” said Dave, agreeing.
Lloyd said his family had money and powerful lawyers. “What do I have? Nothing.”
Dave wasn’t about to console him. This was precisely how they wanted him to feel. He said, “You’re starting to get the train of thought now.” Dave stressed that there was other evidence—Wes Justice’s testimony—to link Dick to the crime.
“Right. Yes. Dickie’s the one that killed the young girl.”
“How?”
“He killed her with an ax.”
“Can you describe the ax to me?”
“It was a wooden-handle ax.”
“Long ax? Hatchet?”
“I mean, it was a long handle. He killed her with the ax and put her in that bag.”
“In that basement?”
Lloyd pulled back again.
“Yeah, see, I don’t even know. I don’t know if she was killed there or not and how she was killed. Because I just now realized by me saying she was chopped up and burned that I have implicated myself big-time.” He then said he knew of this only because Teddy had told him during a conversation they’d had years later in a bar.
“Did he say what happened to the older one?”
“No. I left before the conversation got any more involved because it sickened me to my stomach that he killed one of them, so I could just imagine the older one was dead too. And I felt shitty for the simple reason because I’m the one who went to the mall that day, and I’m the one who did not help those girls after we partied. I should have took them back to the mall myself, but as a seventeen-year-old drug addict, I was scared shitless, and to this day I’m scared shitless.”
Dave noted the phrase “sick to my stomach.” It wasn’t likely that being told this story in a bar years later, as awful as it was, would have nauseated him. But if he had been present when it happened? That made sense. Whenever Lloyd started breaking new ground, Dave would take him back again to the beginning, to see what else in the story was going to change. Lloyd’s version of going to the mall with Lee and Dick stayed the same.
“When we first got the girls, they went to Dick’s house.”
“Okay.”
“Like I told you.”
“Where was Pat?”
“At the time, Pat wasn’t there. I think she was at work.”
“Well, yeah, because you’ve got your husband and your brother-in-law bringing a ten- and twelve-year-old girl,” said Dave.
“Yeah.”
Lloyd suggested that for filming, the girls were then shuttled between Lee’s basement and Dick’s house, where the decor was better. This lasted for about a week. Dave asked what prompted Dick and Lee to kill Kate: was it that she created problems, or were they simply disposing of the girls after Dick had made his films?
“Teddy just told me that the young girl gave problems, and Dick got frustrated and he broke her neck. Now, did he do it on purpose? Did he mean to do it? I don’t know. Teddy didn’t tell me that.”
Then the conversation took an odd turn. Lloyd, again picking up on something Dave had mentioned, said he’d thought about writing a book.
“But who would publish it?” he asked.
Dave encouraged him. “How many letters have you gotten since they put you on the media, from newspapers, TV? Everybody has an interest. This particular case, forty years later it hits the news and it’s viral. People are all over it.”
Lloyd said he thought his story would be interesting. He had never touched the girls, he said, but he’d led an interesting life. “I had a lot of ass when I was growing up,” he said. “I didn’t have to force myself or anything like that. I mean, when I lived in Washington, DC, in that runaway house, I had different girls every night, because we just partied together. Nothing forceful or anything like that. We’d all just get together—”
“It was the seventies.”
“—and it was free love. Sex, rock ’n’ roll.”
“Exactly.”
He said he was surprised he’d never contracted a venereal disease. “I never used a rubber. Maybe that’s why I got so many children!”
Leaving Lloyd with these happy thoughts, Dave took a lunch break. Lloyd ate his usual fast food. Dave returned after consultation with his team with a clarifying statement. He wanted it on the record that Lloyd had been offered no inducements and had not been threatened.
“Basically, you ain’t offered me shit,” said Lloyd, laughing. “Nothing.” He gestured toward his unfinished meal and added, “A sandwich.” Then he complained that it was dry.
“I just want to make sure you feel comfortable,” said Dave.
“The only person I feel uncomfortable around is Mark.”
“Okay, then, we’ll keep Mark out of here.”
“I understand that he’s trying to do his job and stuff like that, but he gets me feeling, like, when you leave, you’re the good cop, and he comes in and he’s the bad cop. You know what I’m saying?”
“No. That’s not what we’re doing.” This was, of course, exactly what they were doing.
“We get into a yelling match, and I’m ready for them to charge me. Get me the fuck out of here, I want a lawyer, you know?”
“But I want to make sure you understand.”
“Nah, you ain’t twisting my arm yet.”
“I just want to make sure.”
“Look, I can stay in here and take the blame for going into the mall and bringing those girls out. I can’t take the blame for anything after that, except I should have intervened and gotten them away from there. Okay? That I should have done. But as far as sexually assaulting them or killing them or carrying them down to Virginia, I had nothing to do with that. Not one bit. My hands were not in that at all. You know? As far as I know, that was not no plan whatsoever, you know? I just want to make that clear. And I’m going to keep on making that clear so everybody understands it.”
“Right.”
Dave asked why Sheila was taken to Virginia after her sister was killed.
“I think he, Dick, was not through making porn with her. I think there was more people involved than just him.”
“Who do you think those people were?”
“I think it was Henry, because me and Henry are about the same age.”
Lloyd said that Sheila had been more compliant. “I mean, she was game to go get high for the very first time. I mean Mommy and Daddy can say, ‘Oh, they were just Christian girls,’ and ‘They color,’ and stuff like that, but let me tell you, I know back in my day there was a lot of twelve-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds and eleven-year-olds who wanted to get high. It was back in the seventies and stuff like that.” It was of course an appalling stretch to suggest that a thirteen-year-old willing to experiment with pot would therefore be game to have sex on camera with a series of grown men. Lloyd continued, “I’m not saying they were bad girls, and I’m not saying they were
good girls, I’m just saying that people were curious back then. In my opinion, she went down there, and they were going to do more porn with her.”
Dave then launched into a long, impassioned plea for Lloyd to simply come clean. He said the adults in his family had drawn him into it and that he had carried the emotional scars all of his life. Dave believed none of this; he was edging Lloyd farther out on the limb. He sensed that Lloyd was about to confess to being present for the murder.
“Now you know that you are screwed, in a way, but you have to figure, ‘Okay, I’m screwed but if I just let it go and just tell them what the hell happened, then maybe they can do their goddamn job and get out of here and prove what I told them, because it’s the right thing.’ Let’s be done with the games.”
“I’m not playing no games.”
“No. I know. I feel like a damn psychologist. Let me pull it out of you. Just what the hell did you see?”
Lloyd sighed. He was listening.
“Either it is what it is because you saw it, or you are totally making stuff up.”
“Nope. I’m not making it up. Not making anything up.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
Lloyd was silent, uncharacteristically so. He was thinking hard about this.
“It’s time, man,” Dave urged. “It’s written all over your face.”
“Yeah, but …,” and Lloyd fell silent again. His head was turned away and he was looking down; his left arm gripped his right arm as if he were physically trying to restrain himself. Finally, he nodded and said, quietly, “Okay. I did see Dickie and my dad.”
“What did you see?”
“Down in the basement I saw Lee break her neck, and I saw Dickie start chopping her up, and he had Lee’s green bag there. And as they were doing it, Dickie started stuffing body parts into the bag, and Lee started cleaning up the blood.”
“Where did it happen in the basement?”
“As you’re coming into that back room, the very far back room, back towards there.”
Dave asked a few more questions to establish that this had taken place exactly where the blood test had pointed.
“I was actually going down there to get high. I was actually going down to get my pipe when I walked in on it, and I stepped off to the far side to where you couldn’t see me, and they weren’t paying attention when the door opened, and I saw what I saw, and after it was all done and said, or all done, I booked it out of there, yeah.”
“Was that before or after you went to the mall?”
“That was after I went to the mall. The argument between Lee and them was for real, and I was basically threatened to get the fuck out of there. I don’t think they saw me seeing them … what they did. Me and Helen left, and I never told anybody about what I saw until just now. Yeah, it’s been eating me. I put it all away, and this last couple of months I’ve been thinking about it.”
Lloyd gave even more gruesome details: how Kate was flat on her back on the basement floor when Lee straddled her and leaned down and snapped her neck; how Dick started chopping and could not reach all the way up with the ax because the ceiling was too low; how he started hacking at one knee and ultimately chopped her into “four or five pieces.”
“I was pale when I went out of there,” he said. “Thought I was going to be sick.”
He said they’d used old rugs and blankets to soak up the blood and stuffed them into the bag with the pieces of her body.
Lloyd said he was still scared. He talked about what a changed man he was and how he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in jail. He talked about how “scary” his uncle Dick was. He protested that he didn’t realize the girls were being abused because “they didn’t ask for help.” Dave wanted still more details. He asked if Dick and Lee had been covered with blood.
“Yeah.”
Lloyd said that both men had cleaned up when he next saw them in Virginia. He said the car they were driving did not belong to them; he believed it belonged to his aunt Pat’s father. He speculated that they got rid of the car because it likely had blood in the trunk from Kate’s dismembered body.
It had taken seventeen months of repeated interviews and extensive investigation, but Dave and his partners had finally coaxed from Lloyd nearly the whole crime, at least as far as Kate Lyon was concerned—kidnap, rape, murder. He was still evading personal responsibility, but the pose had become hollow. Telling it had affected him physically. The detectives had often urged him to “unburden” himself, but the result of this admission was the opposite. It was more like taking a burden on, not casting one off. He sat hunched in his chair as if under a crushing weight.
And he spoke softly, like a man defeated. He again said he sympathized with the Lyon family’s desire to know the truth, but, “I’ve also got to think of me.” He speculated about the consequences of what he had just admitted. “Am I going to spend time in Virginia for the next ten years after I get out of this part and five years in Maryland or ten years in Maryland?”
“You’re right,” said Dave, meaning this was a legitimate concern.
“Am I going to get to be ninety-nine years old when I get out of prison?”
“No,” said Dave. “And I get it, and if you—”
Lloyd still clung unrealistically—pathetically—to his desire for an early release.
“I mean, right now, I’ve got at most eight years left in this prison at the most,” he said. “My max-out date the last time I checked was twenty twenty-four [the year 2024], but with my good time working and everything like that, I can bring it all the way down to twenty-one, twenty-two [2021, 2022]. But if this keeps hanging over me, and I end up getting time, what am I going to be, eighty, ninety years old? Oh!”
“I have no control over what happens above me,” said Dave.
“That’s why I keep saying, I need a lawyer here. I want a lawyer. I think I should have some kind of immunity, you know, from Virginia and Maryland, showing that … I mean, even though I’ve got the one [the agreement he’d signed over a year before], it ain’t no good no more probably.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s passed. Those things are like a one-shot deal,” Dave said.
“Yeah, but, see, I would want one that says forever, you know? Nothing will ever happen to me. I’ve thought about how to word it. I got law library on Monday. I’ve written it up. I’m typing it up, and I think I can bring court papers and stuff like that. I’m thinking about bringing that and presenting it if I ever see you again, which I’m sure I’ll probably end up seeing you again.”
Dave said that was true.
“I’m just saying, I got to worry about me. That’s why I’ve been leery about saying things. I try to hold back, I guess you could say, aces. Hopefully it will do something for me.”
Dave nodded.
“You know? I don’t play blackjack, but I’m sure them aces are good in blackjack. I try to hold things to where—”
“It will benefit,” Dave assured him, falsely. If this was Lloyd’s goal, he was the worst blackjack player in the world.
“Give me something,” Lloyd pleaded.
“Right,” said Dave. “It will benefit you in the end,” he promised.
“Yeah.”
Dave said, “I’m not gonna say, ‘Lloyd, tell me something, then I’m going to go to bat for you,’ because that’s not what I’m about. I’m trying my damnedest to make this thing work. Whether it puts you in the middle of it or it puts you way out here”—reaching one hand out—“it’s got to be right.”
“Yeah.”
“The truth is the truth.”
“That was my ace,” said Lloyd. “My only ace. Really.”
“It’s not a bad thing. It’s really not,” Dave reassured him. It was, for Lloyd, a bad thing.
“It’s out. It’s off my chest. I feel ninety percent better right now. It’s a weight off my shoulders.”
This was perhaps the biggest lie of all. And, j
ust as at all the other times he’d told Dave that he’d given up everything, there was still more.
13
The Truth Is the Truth
Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger and States Attorney John McCarthy announce the murder indictment of Lloyd Welch.
CHARGED
Just as he’d surmised, Lloyd’s fate was sealed. Despite his most recent claim that the real rapists and killers were his father and his uncle, he, and only he, was indicted, on July 14, 2015, for capital murder by the state of Virginia. If convicted, he might be sentenced to death or, at the very least, a prison term that would ensure he’d never again be a free man.
Whatever illusions Lloyd may have had about winning his game with the squad were dashed. His long effort to deflect blame had steered it all to himself. There was only slightly more reason to believe his last story than his first. Lloyd’s father, Lee, with his history of child abuse and rape, made a plausible suspect, but he was dead, and his widow, the exasperating Edna, was hostile and unhelpful. Whether or not Lee had broken Kate Lyon’s neck and taken part in any of the other outrages was moot. His destiny, one could hope, had been sorted by his Maker—although the ordeals of Sheila and Kate Lyon mocked the very notion of a just God.
Dick Welch was not charged. The prosecutors could not make a case against him. Indeed, state’s attorney Pete Feeney, who had supervised the investigation from the start, was inclined to believe that Dick had, as he consistently said, nothing at all to do with the crime. After all, Lloyd had also blamed Teddy, only to drop the accusation completely when it became too implausible. And he had traduced his uncle at Dave’s urging. A close study of the interview transcripts showed how, in effect, the detective had led him into naming Dick as the driver who took him and the girls from Wheaton Plaza. “If you tell me who did it—which I already know,” the detective had said, and, “We’ve already talked to that person.… He’s an asshole.” After Lloyd named Dick as the driver, he had continued to embellish his uncle’s role, which conveniently shifted blame away from himself. The strongest evidence against Dick was the story told by his nephew Wes Justice, and it was adjudged unbelievable. How likely was it that Dick, so resolute in his denials despite all the effort to pressure him or catch him off guard, would spontaneously unburden himself in a chat with his nephew? More likely, Wes had been caught in a web of his own making after boasting on the phone with his cousin Norma Jean about inside knowledge of “a green station wagon” used to transport the girls. Under mounting pressure Wes had finally just told detectives a story he believed they wanted to hear. They had threatened to prosecute him if he didn’t tell it. There was also the possibility that Wes had some deep, unvoiced grudge against his uncle—a not uncommon thing in the family—and had concocted the story as payback. As with just about everything else to do with the Welches, it was hard to know what was true and what was not.
