The Last Stone Read online

  Also by Mark Bowden

  Doctor Dealer

  Bringing the Heat

  Black Hawk Down

  Killing Pablo

  Finders Keepers

  Road Work

  Guests of the Ayatollah

  The Best Game Ever

  Worm

  The Finish

  The Three Battles of Wanat

  Hue 1968

  THE

  LAST

  STONE

  MARK

  BOWDEN

  Copyright © 2019 by Mark Bowden

  Maps copyright © 2019 by Matt Ericson

  Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

  Cover photograph © Neal Augenstein/WTOP

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Photo credits are as follows: p. 1: Montgomery County Police; p. 8: the Washington Post; p. 29: Montgomery County Police; p. 65: Photo by James K. Atherton / the Washington Post via Getty Images; p. 91: Photo by Ricky Carioti / the Washington Post via Getty Images; p. 115 Montgomery County Police; p. 134: (Left) Montgomery County Police (Right) WDBJ News; p. 155: © Jay Westcott / The News & Advance; p. 192: Montgomery County Police; p. 217 © Neal Augenstein / WTOP; p. 243 Montgomery County Police; p. 280 Montgomery County Police; p. 305: Photo by Sarah L. Voisin / the Washington Post via Getty Images; p. 341: Family photo via the Washington Post.

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: April 2019

  This title was set in 12-point Arno Pro by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4730-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4731-8

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Mark Bowden

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  1: The First Lie

  2: Finding Lloyd

  3: In All “Honestly”

  4: The Test

  5: Teddy

  6: One Hundred and One Percent the God’s Honest Truth

  7: The Clan

  8: The Duffel Bag

  9: Wanna Get High?

  10: The Whole Thing from Beginning to End

  11: A Trick or the Truth?

  12: My Only Ace

  13: The Truth Is the Truth

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  To Gail

  It’s a good deal like chess or boxing. Some people you have to crowd and keep off balance. Some you just box and they will end up beating themselves.

  —Raymond Chandler

  Most of the of the dialogue in this book was recorded.

  I have edited it for concision and clarity.

  1

  The First Lie

  Lloyd Lee Welch, 1977

  APRIL 1, 1975

  Lloyd Welch got himself good and high before he went back to Wheaton Plaza on April Fools’ Day. He was stoned enough not to listen when his stepmom, Edna, warned him, “Don’t get mixed up in this.”

  But Lloyd was already mixed up in it, enough to scare him. He needed to do something, even if it meant running a big risk. The marijuana buzz, he figured, would soothe him and help him think straight. Such was his teenage logic.

  Screwing up came naturally. He was a seventh-grade dropout with, at age eighteen, a pathetic whisper of a mustache. His long, thick dark brown hair was parted in the middle, strapped down with a headband. He was scrawny and acned and mean; life had treated him harshly, and it showed. And, man, could he talk. Lloyd was a con artist. Words tumbled from him pell-mell, as if their sheer number and urgency could persuade. Whatever was true in what he said came wrapped in slippery layers of guile.

  The story Lloyd planned to tell that day concerned two little girls who had gone missing from Wheaton Plaza a week earlier—Sheila and Kate Lyon. Their disappearance had created a media storm. Every newspaper and TV and radio station between Richmond and Baltimore was reporting on the hunt. Children were on lockdown. The Lyon girls’ father, John, was a local radio personality, and this gave the crisis even more notoriety. After a week, past the point where odds favored ever finding the girls alive, the police in Montgomery County, Maryland, were desperate. The public had flooded them with tips, none of which had helped. The girls had vanished. In the days since their disappearance, both had had birthdays; Sheila had turned thirteen, and Kate, on Easter Sunday, eleven. The heart of every parent ached.

  The plaza was a Main Street of sorts for the suburban sprawl northwest of Washington, DC. An enormous cross-shaped structure that had opened eight years earlier, it had stores on both sides of two partly sheltered promenades. The longer of the two was anchored at its ends by the department stores Montgomery Ward and Woodward & Lothrop; it had a roof open to the sky along the center and was ornamented at intervals with bush-filled brick planters, the sides of which doubled as seating areas. Where the two promenades intersected was a square with a fountain and a modernist sculpture, then decorated for Easter. The mall’s style was futuristic, with the long horizontal lines, sharp angles, and neon hues that artists and filmmakers associated with the space age. It was more than a place to shop; it was a social center, a place to see and be seen. Unlike traditional small towns, few of the residential communities that sprouted outside big cities in the 1950s had anything like a nucleus. So the mall filled a need beyond commerce, and like those being built in suburbs all over America, Wheaton Plaza was an immediate and enduring sensation. A towering sign above its vast parking lot spelled out its name, each huge black letter set in a giant orange ball that glowed at night. There were specialty shops, a three-screen cinema, a Peoples drugstore, and plenty of food outlets, including a Roy Rogers, an ice cream shop, and a popular pizza joint called the Orange Bowl. With schools out for spring break, unseasonably warm weather, and sunshine, the plaza was a magnet, especially for children.

  Lloyd walked in by himself, looking for a security guard. His plan was to tell his story to a mall cop and leave, but he had a poor sense of situation. Any scrap of new intelligence about the Lyon sisters at that point was a very big deal. The mall cop immediately called the police. “Now I’m screwed,” Lloyd thought. “My stepmom was right.” Two detectives, Steve Hargrove and Mike Thilia, came promptly. Lloyd was taken to police headquarters, and as soon as a tape recorder was turned on, he did what he did best.

  He told them he was twenty-two. He said he had finished high school. He had been at the mall with his wife, Helen. None of this was true. He had seen two little girls who fit the Lyon sisters’ description—the same ages, bl
ond hair, the elder one (Sheila) with glasses—talking in the mall to an older man with a tape recorder. All of this was unremarkable; pictures of the girls had been everywhere, on TV, in newspapers, and on telephone poles—the police had posted thousands of leaflets. The unknown “tape recorder man” had been widely reported as the prime suspect. Lloyd offered a detailed description: hair gray around the ears, black and thick on top; a dark, stubbly face—“like a heavy shaver”—about six one, six two; wearing a brown suit, white shirt, and black tie; and carrying a brown briefcase that held the portable recorder. He said he’d overheard the man explaining to the girls that he recorded people’s voices and then put them on the radio. This same story had been in all the news reports and was known by just about everyone breathing within a radius of two hundred miles. Lloyd said he later saw both girls leaving the mall with the man and had seen them again outside as they drove off.

  “All right, let me ask you a couple of questions before we get to the second time you saw him,” said Hargrove. “What brought your attention to the man and the little girls in the first place?”

  “Well, because an older man talking to two small girls, just walk up and talk to them, the girls wouldn’t know exactly what to say if he was asking some kind of questions,” Lloyd said, words spilling out awkwardly. “And the girls looked pretty young, [one] about twelve, the other ten, a little younger than that maybe. I’m not sure how old they were, because I didn’t see their face[s], and they just caught my attention when he said he was putting them on the air, and he looked pretty old to be talking to someone that young”—as if it were uncommon for adults to speak with children.

  “Did he appear to be alone?”

  “Yes, he was alone.”

  “Working by himself?”

  “Right, until he started talking to those two girls.”

  Lloyd said he saw the man pull the tape recorder out and show it to the girls, and that he himself watched them for five or ten minutes, which is a long time to sit and watch three strangers.

  “I was sitting down at the time because I was walking around so much I was tired, and I sat down and that’s when I saw him talking to them.” He said he had been walking around the mall applying for jobs.

  “Did you hear him ask the girls any specific questions?” Hargrove asked.

  “Not at the time I was there, no. I didn’t hear that.”

  “Did you hear the girls say anything?”

  “One of the girls laughed, you know. Giggled, like.”

  “Which one? The taller one?”

  “The taller one.”

  Lloyd was a fount of particulars about the girls’ departure.

  “I came through the Peoples drugstore, and he was standing there, and they were getting ready to cross the street. Me and my wife, we both, she came and got me, and we cut through the store and we got in the car, and he left before us and he went west on University [Avenue], and we went west toward Langley Park. And the car that he got into was a red Camaro, and it had white seats, lining, and the girls had gotten in the back, and he got in the front, and there was a dent in the right rear end, and the taillight was busted out.”

  “How did you know the taillight was busted out?”

  “Because when he started to pull off, then he stepped on the brakes easy, and his taillight didn’t go on, just one of them.”

  “Which one went on? Which side?”

  Lloyd said the left-side light came on, the right side was broken, and then went on to offer a startling spate of additional details about the car—oversize shocks, high suspension, wide tires, chrome wheel covers—“and he had pinstripes on each side, and they were about one inch apart and they were black, and he had something written like an advertisement thing in the right-hand corner.”

  “The front?”

  “The back of the windshield. And it looked like it was on the outside or inside, I couldn’t really tell, and then his mufflers sounded really loud, and I noticed they sounded like glasspack mufflers, and he had square coming out, you know the muffler which at the end was a square, and I told my wife, Helen, I said, ‘Ain’t that a nice car, a souped-up car?’ and she said, ‘uh,’ she wasn’t paying that much attention to it. She was really tired from walking around so much and looking for a job, so she didn’t pay much attention. I don’t know if she saw the car or not. And we were pulling out, and he was right in front of us, and we were at the light and we stopped, and the light turned green, and I wasn’t really looking at the car when the light turned green, when he took off, that’s what got me to look again, because I was listening to the muffler and talking to her, and then he went west. And we went toward Langley Park, and that was the last time I had seen him since.”

  “Why didn’t you come forward with this information when you first heard about it?”

  “Because I wasn’t really positive and sure if it was the same guy and the same two girls at the time, and that’s why I was up in Wheaton Plaza today, looking at the picture and listening around to see if it was the same two girls and the same guy, and then I saw a captain, he was a security guard, and he remembered me there last Tuesday in a brown fur jacket.”

  “You were wearing a brown fur jacket?”

  “Yeah, I was wearing a brown fur jacket, and he talked to me again today. I mean, he didn’t talk to me last week, but he talked to me, and I told him about what I saw. That’s when he contacted you all. That’s when you got ahold of me.”

  Lloyd said he might be able to identify the girls and the man if he saw them again. He could describe what the weather was like that earlier afternoon: “A little windy, but it was nice.” He said the Camaro had white Maryland tags.

  “Okay, Lloyd, are you telling me, the police department, all this of your own free will?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No one has asked you?”

  “No. I came forward of my own free will because I have been worried about the girls, even though I don’t know them, but I just can’t stand to see anybody hurt, two little girls, or anybody hurt.”

  Hargrove and Thilia warned him that giving a false statement to the police was a criminal offense.

  “Now, with that in mind, are you willing to say everything you told us is correct?” asked one of the officers.

  “Yes, I am. I am telling you the truth. I can’t afford to lie because I have a baby on the way and a wife to take care of, and I can’t afford to lie about anything.”

  “Are you nervous right now?”

  “I am a little nervous talking to the tape recorder, yes.”

  In a final flourish, Lloyd added that the man he saw leaving with the girls “walked with a little limp.”

  Lloyd was then given a lie detector test, which he flunked. Flustered, he admitted that he’d made up everything about the car and about seeing the tape recorder man with the girls outside the mall. He had told them nothing that anyone listening to news reports wouldn’t know, gussied up with a peculiar flurry of made-up particulars. Lloyd thought for sure he’d be arrested then, but instead the detectives dismissed him, no doubt annoyed.

  The officers missed something about Lloyd Welch that day, something big. Days earlier, Danette Shea, a girl slightly older than Sheila Lyon, who had seen Sheila at the mall that day, had described a man who had been following and staring at Danette and her friends. He had been so obnoxious that one of the girls had taunted him: “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.” Shea had described the man as eighteen or nineteen years old, five eleven to six foot, dark brown hair in a shag, medium mustache. A police artist had even produced a sketch, which was in the growing file. It looked a lot like Lloyd.

  Before leaving, Lloyd was given a lecture about lying to the police. He was enormously relieved. The Montgomery County police were swimming in useless tips just then. Given the urgency of the situation, the kid wasn’t just a nuisance, he was a serious waste of time. They had no doubt sized him up as a local knucklehead, obviously high, trying to insinuat
e himself into the story, play the hero, and collect a reward—WMAL, the radio station that employed John Lyon, had just upped its offering to $14,000, and the Wheaton Plaza Merchants’ Association had put up $5,000 more. Lloyd seemed stupid, not suspicious. How much sense would it make, after all, for someone involved with a kidnapping to draw attention to himself by claiming to be a witness and telling an elaborate lie? The six-page typed transcript of the interview went into a ring binder with all the other stray bits. A one-page report was written up. At the top, Hargrove wrote, “LIED.”

  After that, the department didn’t give Lloyd Welch a second thought.

  Not for thirty-eight years.

  2

  Finding Lloyd

  John and Mary Lyon, 1975

  ONE SHOT

  One shot was all they were likely to get with Lloyd Welch. So the Montgomery County Police Department’s Lyon squad had gamed the meeting for months, all through the summer and fall of 2013. They had even driven down to Quantico, Virginia, to consult with FBI behavioral analysts, who drew up impressive charts and summoned comparative data to pronounce Lloyd a classic hard case. The analysts predicted he would clam up as soon as he learned what the squad wanted to ask him about.

  At that point all they knew about Lloyd Lee Welch came from files. His criminal record sketched a rough time line before and after he had walked into Wheaton Plaza in 1975 with his bogus story—or so it had been considered then; now the authorities were less certain.

  Lloyd’s record traced a heroic trail of malfeasance. In Maryland: larceny (1977), burglary (1981), assault and battery (1982). In Florida: burglary in Orlando (1977), burglary in Miami (1980). In Iowa: robbery in Sioux City (1987). Then he’d moved to South Carolina: public drunkenness and then grand larceny in Myrtle Beach (1988), burglary in Horry County (1989), sexual assault on a ten-year-old girl in Lockhart (1992), drunk driving in Clover (1992). Then on to Virginia: sexual assault on a minor in Manassas (1996), simple assault in Manassas (1997). He’d finally landed hard in Delaware: sexual assault of a ten-year-old girl in New Castle (1997). After that the list ended. This was typical. Waning hormones or better judgment often overtook even the slowest learners by their mid-thirties, after which they avoided trouble. Either that or they got killed or locked up. In Welch’s case it was the latter. He was deep into a thirty-three-year sentence for the Delaware charge, housed at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna.