by Mark Bowden
Lloyd’s indictment had not been announced when Dave drove down on July 14th to meet him next in Dover. It had been twenty-one months since their first session, and their long dialogue had led where neither had expected. Lloyd had fashioned a noose for himself, beginning with the trip he had made to Wheaton Plaza in 1975. Dave wanted to deliver the news of the indictment personally for two reasons: the cop in him relished the moment of triumph, and the shock might be useful. Lloyd’s reaction—anger, despair, fear—might provoke something new. He always had more to say. They still had not found the girls’ bodies. They had learned of Kate’s end but not Sheila’s. From the start, a primary goal had been to find out what had happened to the sisters.
As he had learned to do, the detective plotted his approach carefully. He would remain Lloyd’s best buddy and advocate. He would pretend to be incensed by the indictment, to see Lloyd as the victim, as appalling as that was, the abused, abandoned, frightened boy, drug-addled, craving the approval of his despicable family, and now, decades later, done in by it. It was all so unfair! Dave didn’t need a script. He could improvise.
They met again like old friends. At this point Lloyd had spent more time with Dave than with any other person outside prison walls for nearly two decades.
“Hey, what’s up, bud?” he asked the detective when they met in the upstairs hallway.
“What’s goin’ on?” said Dave.
They entered the familiar gray interview room with big cups of coffee. Each had a doughnut.
“Who’s here?” Lloyd asked.
“Who’s here? Me.”
“Just you?”
“Unless you ask for somebody to come in here today.” Dave was thinking that Lloyd might finally insist on a lawyer.
Lloyd just nodded.
“I just want this to be me and you,” Dave said. “I asked for this day out of respect just for you, and you’re probably gonna get mad at me for the next five or ten minutes.”
Lloyd looked at him quizzically.
“I said you’re probably going to get upset.”
“Why? You charging me?”
“I’m not charging you.”
“They’re charging me.”
“Virginia has indicted you, but we’re gonna talk about that.”
“Then I need a lawyer.”
“Now, listen to me—”
“And I’m taking the Fifth.”
“Now, listen to me. I get it, okay? But you owe it to yourself to hear me out. There’s nothing that we say in here that can make anything worse. I know you’re gonna get mad, okay?”
“Oh no.”
“I got mad,” said Dave.
“I’m not gonna get mad at you.”
“No, I got mad, and then I thought about it and said, ‘You know what? I can either get mad or do nothing, or I can get mad and give you the respect to come back down here and explain it to you.’”
Lloyd nodded.
“Try to make something positive out of it, because I was mad and I’m still mad, and there are a lot of things still going on that, I took it upon myself to say, ‘Let’s do the right thing.’ I’m here for the two-year-old boy that was in the car [when Lloyd’s mother was killed], and I’m here for the eighteen-year-old kid that went to that mall. You got me? And then I started to think about it, and I started to think about the case, and I started—”
“Hey, Dave,” Lloyd interrupted. He seemed neither shocked nor angry. He had finished his doughnut. He said, “That was good.”
“I should have gotten two,” said Dave. And just like that, Lloyd was talking again. He complained about how cold the room was, and Dave reached up to adjust the air-conditioning unit, which also hid the room’s camera and mike.
“Okay, where’s the camera at in here?” Lloyd asked, grinning and laughing.
“I don’t know,” said Dave, and then he pointed to something on the ceiling. “What’s that thing up there?”
“That’s the fire alarm.” Lloyd took a sip of coffee. “I’m just fucking with you,” he said.
“It’s all good.”
“You see it on the TV all the time, doing interviews and shit like that, on the camera, and you don’t even know it’s in there.”
“I totally understand.”
“No, I’m just messing with you. I don’t care if y’all got me on camera or not. What the hell.”
“No. If anything, it protects everybody.”
“Yeah.”
“Like I say, I definitely want to go over quite a few things with you,” said Dave. “I don’t think we need to relive the thing like we always do. I don’t think that that’s important. I think there are important aspects that the people in Bedford [haven’t heard]—and when I say ‘people in Bedford,’ I’m not talking about law enforcement but the grand jury members, just common people, just people sitting there listening to this stuff. They only get to hear somebody else’s interpretation. They’ve never heard Lloyd Welch. They’ve never talked to you. They only get to see what I tell the attorney down there, and the attorney presents it to them.”
Lloyd said he did not want to talk to them without being advised by a lawyer, but he was willing to keep talking to Dave.
“What worse can you get?” asked Dave.
“[They might] give me more time,” said Lloyd, matter-of-factly.
“No, no no, no, no.”
Lloyd just laughed.
“No. This is just the beginning of a process,” said Dave. “And, realistically, it doesn’t—yeah, I mean, it’s gonna change a few things, but it’s gonna change them for the better, because we’ve come over that hump, and now we just need to figure out a way to turn it into a positive is the way that I look at it. It hit me this morning after I got out of the shower. I said, ‘You know what? The two-year-old that was in that car, the nineteen-year-old’—”
“Eighteen.”
“Well, eighteen.”
“Yeah,” said Lloyd, laughing again.
“I always fuck up the math. I’m not the smartest one.”
“I was eighteen.”
“You’re right.”
Lloyd then lamented his plight at length. He was being charged for something he had not done. He had come to regret what he’d told Dave in their last session, because, when he reflected on it later, he thought, speaking of himself partly in the third person, “I’m really fucked because now Lloyd knows everything that’s going on, and he’s gonna be charged with everything, because I can’t prove nothin’.” Again he said he needed to talk to a lawyer. “I’ll vote the Fifth.”
“Look,” said Dave, misleadingly, “I’m talking to you as a man to a man. Not a cop to an inmate.”
“Right.”
“Okay? Human being to human being, and I know you gotta do your job and that’s protect Lloyd Lee Welch.”
“Right,” said Lloyd. “You know? I’ve done that all my life. I’m a little frustrated because I thought I was going to be a witness and end up testifying and not being charged with anything, and now I’m getting fucked. I already know that I am.” He said he was an admitted child molester, not a killer. He couldn’t even kill an animal.
Dave kept on. He was on Lloyd’s side. He was working tirelessly on his behalf. He believed him, but it was still important to clear a few things up. It wouldn’t hurt Lloyd at this point to finally tell him all that he knew. “If you break it down logically, it makes sense to me now. You’re eighteen, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Well, my father was doing a good thing for everybody and was gonna party, now this thing has gotten sideways, but I’m the only one that anybody saw at the mall.’ Now you’re sweating it, thinking, ‘What the fuck? Now what? I can’t go back and say anything to a thirty-, forty-year-old man who might beat my ass.’ So at some point you go back to the mall because you’re sweating it. Your mom, your dad, they don’t know you went back to the mall, they still have these two girls. They’re doing these bad things to them. How am I gonna unfuck this thing? Now all of the s
udden Montgomery County police,” he knocked on the table to simulate a knock on the Welches’ front door. “Because they kicked you out of the station, and now they’re looking to talk to you again, but you’re not there, and your mom answers the door, and now your dad knows you’ve been back to the mall.”
A guard, hearing the knocking, opened the door to the interview room and poked his head in.
“No, no, that was me banging on the table,” said Dave.
“Okay.”
“We’re good.”
Lloyd laughed, and the guard closed the door again.
“Now your family’s mad at you. Now you’re even more worried that you went to the mall, and the police are banging on the door wanting to talk to you.”
“I didn’t even know the police went to the house,” said Lloyd.
“I didn’t either, because it wasn’t documented. That’s what your mom testified to twice.”
“I didn’t know anything about that.”
“So, they’re aggravated. Now your uncle Dick gets drug in, because that’s your dad’s brother. He needs help. You know, ‘The dumb ass went back to the mall. We got these kids. What are we gonna do?’” And that, Dave suggested, was when the decision was made to kill the girls and when Lloyd found Dick and Lee in the basement in the act. “Matter of fact, they probably made you come over and watch it or help clean it up, and that’s how they suckered you into carrying that bag down there.”
Getting Lloyd to admit taking the bloody duffel bag to Taylor’s Mountain would shore up the case against him. It would substantiate the testimonies of Connie and Henry, two of the only pieces of independent evidence, and would definitely place him at both the beginning and the end of the crime. How could he persuade Lloyd to make such a damaging admission? Dave had come up with an explanation that appeared, if not innocent, at least less damning.
Speaking of Lloyd in the third person, he said, “It’s because he was told he was gonna do it and he had no option. What other option did you have? Think about it. You had no fuckin’ option.”
Lloyd just took this in, arms crossed, nodding occasionally, and laughing softly to himself.
Dave said, “So you owe it to yourself to explain some of this stuff, because how does it get any worse?”
“How’s it get worse? Me spending the rest of my life in jail for something I didn’t do.”
“Well, then, we have to clean it up.”
“Did Dickie get indicted?”
“Not yet.”
“Is he getting indicted?”
Dave said he was fighting “tooth and nail” to make that happen. “We’ve got to figure out a way to explain some of this stuff that logically doesn’t make sense. See how I’m trying to change everything into a positive with you? Giving you the benefit of the doubt?”
Lloyd sat pondering this, leaning back in his chair, nodding, arms still crossed.
“I’m sniffing all around it, aren’t I?” suggested Dave.
Lloyd muttered, nodding, saying something to himself that sounded like, “Shut up.” Dave wasn’t sure, but Lloyd was definitely thinking about saying more.
Dave reminded him that his family had all turned on him.
“Oh, I already know how they are,” Lloyd said. “So if I give my side, I’m fucked anyway.”
“Who is standing up for you?”
“No one. Well, you are.”
Dave told him about “missing evidence” up on the mountain—he was referring to the car, but didn’t say what it was—and his cousin Wes Justice, who “flat out lied” to the grand jury and was now facing the possibility of perjury charges.
“The car,” said Lloyd.
“The car. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is. To come forward, or is it right to keep lying and see where it ends up? And where we are with him right now is we think he should come forward, because we’re damn close to finding it.”
“Well, see, the thing is, I didn’t drive up to no mall. I’m telling you. Dickie did take me to the mall.”
He went back over the kidnapping and the taking of the girls to Dick’s house and his decision to leave. “And what I saw in the basement is true.”
Then he stopped. He scratched his head. The truth of his predicament was sinking in.
“See, I know once I start, I’m … I’m just fucked. I am just really fucked. I’m going to jail for the rest of my life for something I didn’t do, man. Just ’cause I know it.”
Dave said a lot of people had theories. For instance, he said, a number of people had at first disbelieved his own about the killing in the basement at 4714 Baltimore Avenue because it didn’t jibe with their own.
“They found her blood down there, didn’t they?”
“Yes.” This was not precisely true.
Lloyd sighed heavily.
“Okay. All right. I’m fucked anyway. You know that whole story about the mall thing and shit like that and about the babysitting and shit like that? Yep, I was in the basement. I seen what happened, and I was threatened. Multiple threats. That I could be cut up, too, if I didn’t help do what they wanted me to do. The white car is the one I took to Virginia. You know, I did help Henry throw a bag on the fire, and I knew it was a body in there. I didn’t know if it was both of them or not. Lee knew. Lee and Dick did the cutting, and I helped clean up a little bit. Not a lot because it made me sick to my stomach. They took the bag and put it in the car and told me to take it down to Virginia, and Henry would be down there with a fire and to throw the bag on the fire, and to come back. I came back. I don’t know what Dickie did with the car after that. I know as soon as I came back, they cleaned it up, and Dickie drove off with the car.”
Here was the story whole—well, almost whole. It was worth remembering that this was the same man who, a year and a half earlier, had said—“in all honestly”—that he had never been to Wheaton Plaza. Now he had helped with the kidnapping, dismemberment, and disposal. The distance his story had traveled was dizzying. But, still, none of this had been his idea; he had never touched the girls; he had been forced to clean up the blood after the murder and deliver the remains to Virginia. But here it was; they had teased out the whole abomination.
“When they put the bag in the car, they told me to go straight down to Virginia,” he said. “Dickie gave me some money to make sure that the car had gas in it and enough gas to get down there and enough gas to get back.”
He said the bag they used was Lee’s, not his. The younger girl, Kate, “was givin’ a little trouble. She was crying a lot and stuff. I think they got scared. I can’t say for sure if Dickie had smacked them around or she hit her head or anything like that, because I didn’t see all that. All I know is when I went down to the basement what I saw, them chopping her up. I saw Lee put a small piece of leg into the bag, and that’s when I got pulled in, sick to my stomach, and I really don’t like blood.”
He said Dick had used a hatchet, not the ax.
“I don’t know how they killed her, but she was already dead. Lee had a bunch of rags around. They had a piece of plywood on the floor. Eventually they got a part of the leg off, and Lee takes a rag and grabs it and puts it in the bag, and I kind of threw up a little bit, ’cause I was sick, and they told me, ‘Don’t go nowhere.’ Dick grabbed ahold of me and said, ‘You’re gonna do what we say or you’ll be next,’ and I was scared. They cut both legs off. I think they eventually got part of her arms off, and then they both picked her up and put her in the bag. I think they had everything else in there. They had a bunch of rags to pick her up and put her in. The bag had one of these clip things. You could hear the bag being clipped. Dick wiped his hands as best he could, and he handed me the keys.”
He repeated that he had driven a big white car, the 1966 Chrysler New Yorker belonging to his aunt Pat’s father. Dick gave him forty dollars.
“I drove all night. Drove down there and drove back, you know. I wasn’t down there long. That’s what I was told to do, go down there and come st
raight back. Don’t bullshit around. Don’t stop nowhere unless you’re getting gas. Drunk a lot of coffee because I was tired. That was a tiring trip. Five down, five back. I had no driver’s license. I had just learned how to drive that big-ass car. I was taking it very slow, not speeding or anything like that.”
He worried when he stopped to get gas that blood might be leaking out of the trunk.
“By the time I got down there, the bag was pretty wet. I got sick a little more, but I didn’t throw up. I just got nauseated, and, like I said, Henry was there. He said, ‘Let’s go,’ and I popped the trunk.” They hefted the bag onto the bonfire, and Henry threw more branches on top. Lloyd had blood on his hands and tried to wipe them clean. On the way home, he said, he felt sick, so he pulled the car off the road, rolled the window down, and just collected himself. He slept for a time and then resumed driving.
He arrived back at 4714 Baltimore Avenue at daybreak, he said. He showered and slept. A few days later he and Helen hitchhiked back down to Virginia. Lloyd said he didn’t know what happened to Sheila. He believed she’d been killed but didn’t know whether it was in Maryland or Virginia. He said he was “eighty-eight percent” certain that Sheila was brought down to Taylor’s Mountain and that Henry had done something with her.
