The Last Stone Read online

  Lloyd chuckled. “I’m laughing because ain’t nothin’ been buggin’ me. I’m being honest with you. I did not—”

  “I’m not saying you did it.”

  “No, no, no, no, I did not even think about this in all these years, until my sister and my stepmother sent me a letter stating that the cops were askin’ about two girls missin’ in Wheaton. Do I know anything about it? I didn’t know anything about it, and I told them I don’t know anything about it. I went and made a lie up to get a reward.” This was new. Lloyd had never mentioned reward money before. “I’m bein’ honest with you,” he said. “I lied, back then. I lied now. Because I wanted to feel important. I wanted to make myself look important.”

  Lloyd admitted that recently he had been “down on” himself. He blamed himself for his current predicament. He had lied in their first conversation because Chris Homrock had intimated that Lloyd had been raped by Mileski. “That really pissed me off,” he said. “So I said, ‘Well, let me fuck with them some.’ I lied. The last time I saw those girls or anybody was inside that mall. That was the last time.”

  Never mind the story he had confided to Dave at the end of the third session, and then reiterated in the fourth about seeing the girls nude, drugged, and being raped in a basement room. He was either forgetting this or discarding it. Dave chose to ignore it. Instead he pressed Lloyd about the new reason for going back to the mall.

  “How much money were they offering?” he asked.

  “At the time, I don’t even remember how much it was. I thought it was enough to get me and Helen a place and maybe for her to apply for doctor care and stuff like that. You know what I’m sayin’? And my stepmom told me not to go and say anything, and Helen said the same thing. Dumb ass me had to go. Dumb ass me had to lie, and I’ve been lying ever since. You know? And now it’s done screwed me so bad that I can’t show my face in no institution. I done screwed myself over so bad it’s pathetic. I should have never said anything. I should have never gotten myself involved, and I apologize to all of you.”

  Dave asked if they might go “off the record,” a completely hollow offer, because he had every intention of using everything Lloyd told him, not to mention that the session was being videotaped and observed by his colleagues.

  Lloyd talked about Teddy and the older man he was living with at the time the girls disappeared. Dave knew, of course, that this was a red herring.

  “Teddy introduced me to this guy. Teddy had disappeared for a while. He came back with a Camaro. He said he was a fashion model or something like that, and this guy was giving him a place to live and money and stuff like that. But we used to go to his house and party all the time. I went to the house one day—we were partying and shit like that—and he had two girls, and I left. I don’t know if it was them or not. I mean, in all honestly, I don’t know if it was the twenty-fifth, twenty-eighth, or what it was.”

  Lloyd now admitted that he had known about the Lyon sisters’ disappearance at the time. He had gone back to the mall to tell his story, over his stepmother’s and Helen’s protests, “because stubborn ass me had to say, ‘I want that money.’ I was eighteen years old. I was ignorant. I was dumb. I’m still ignorant, and I’m dumb.”

  “But you’re awfully sharp,” said, Dave, laying it on thick. “I mean, you’re as sharp as a tack.”

  “You think I am.”

  “You are!”

  Lloyd laughed.

  Dave said, “You’re an intelligent dude.”

  ONE HUNDRED AND ONE PERCENT THE GOD’S HONEST TRUTH

  It was time to puncture the story about Teddy.

  “Are we talking about the same Teddy Junior?” Dave asked.

  “Teddy Junior.”

  “He was twelve back then,” said Dave. Actually, Teddy had been eleven. He turned twelve in July of that year.

  “Nah, he was—”

  “He was twelve. I know when he was born.”

  “He was thirteen years old. Yeah, Teddy. Teddy was a scary little fucker back then.”

  “How old were you, though?”

  “I was eighteen, but I was a snotty little—”

  “You could have handed him his ass in two minutes!”

  “No, I was a scrawny little kid. I was scrawny. What’s he say? Is he alive?”

  “Oh yeah. We talked to him. He says you’re nuts.”

  Lloyd chuckled to himself and said softly, “I’m nuts.”

  They went back over the events at the mall, and Lloyd then correctly described the clothing that the Lyon sisters were wearing, which had never been made public—Sheila in a dark blue sweatshirt, jeans, brown shoes; Kate in a red jacket, flowery blue denim shirt, jeans. Lloyd seemed not to realize the significance of this. He was digging himself in deeper.

  They talked for a while about Teddy and other members of the Welch family. The squad had decided to develop further the notion that Lloyd’s entire family had turned on him. This was not true. Few of his relatives had anything nice to say about him, and they were all ready to believe he had done it, but none were actively trying to get him convicted. What was important was that Lloyd believed they were. It made him feel vulnerable, which was something the detectives could exploit.

  “I’ve got a fucked-up family,” he said. “They say they’re my family, but I don’t know what they are anymore.”

  “There’s something that you’re trying to explain to me without coming out and telling me,” said Dave.

  “I want this to end,” said Lloyd. “Let’s go with this.”

  He then launched back into his story of looking for work at the mall with Helen, seeing Teddy and another man—he was not giving up easily on his newest culprit.

  “Teddy had his arm around the girl with the glasses, and the other one had his arm around the smaller one,” he said. He had watched as the girls were led from the mall. After looking at pictures of Sheila and Kate again, he said for the first time that they were definitely the ones taken. He repeated his story that, on the following day, he had seen them in the basement of the house where Teddy was staying. As for whose house it was, he was quite plainly thinking of Kraisel, although he didn’t know the man’s name. He now said that the person who had threatened and frightened him was not Teddy but this older man—he had clearly absorbed how ridiculous it was to claim he’d been terrorized by an eleven-year-old.

  “I’m scared to this day,” he said. “My hands are sweating right now.”

  “Now, is this the truth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, this is no more fabrication?”

  “On Helen’s life, on my mother’s, on my kids’.”

  “This is finally it?”

  “This is it, and that’s all I can tell you.”

  But Lloyd, as always, had more. He described the condition of Sheila and Kate one day after their kidnapping in shockingly casual terms.

  “I wouldn’t say they looked like they were in stress. I’d say more like they were getting high for the first time, you know? You’re like, ‘Wow, man.’ They were kind of like rocking back and forth on the couch there, and the guy was sitting on one side, and Teddy was sitting on the other side with the other girl. I seen ’em lean over to kiss or whatever, and turned around and walked away. They looked like they were high. Looked like they were having a good time. They weren’t screaming or hollerin’ or anything like that.”

  It was chilling, not the least because nothing about the scene he described seemed exceptionable to him.

  “I have no idea what they did to them. I left. I’m still scared.”

  “But he [Kraisel] is, like, eighty-some years old,” said Dave.

  “Yeah, but money talks. I’m still scared it’s gonna come back and bite me in the ass, you know.”

  “Yeah, but you had to come clean, because it wasn’t right.”

  “Well, like I said, I’ve been back in the SHU [Special Housing Unit] there and locked down by myself and not being able to work and shit. I’ve had a lot to
think about, and it’s been on my mind a lot. It’s been eating me up. I haven’t been sleeping as good as I used to.”

  “Right. You look like a totally different person from the first time we met.”

  “I look like a bum.”

  “Things may change.”

  “I’m not going to be able to go on the compound no more, so that means I’m gonna be sitting in that cell. I got thirteen years left, you know.”

  “Things may change, my friend.”

  “Everything I told you today is the God’s honest truth,” said Lloyd. “I’m tired of this shit … getting’ tired of it.… I brought it on my own self. On the day I met you, I brought it all on my own self. I did because y’all warned me that if I didn’t, you know, come clean with everything, it was gonna have to go out into the media. Like I’ve always said, I’ve always hurt the people that I know and that I love, you know? I either know you and I hurt you or love you and I hurt you. I mean, it’s always … don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because [of] the way that I was hurt so much when I was growin’ up.”

  “By people that loved you.”

  “You know? Yeah. Or I thought they loved me.… I mean my niece comes. My niece and my sister came to see me when I ended up in the back. Three weeks later, detectives are coming up to me again and telling me word for word what I said to them. To my nieces, you know? Now they’ve turned. Everything that I told you in this room today is one hundred and one percent the God’s honest truth.” He held his right hand high, as if pledging. “On my children’s life, on Helen’s life—even though she’s passed—and my stepmom’s life, you know? Everything that I told you. The rest of it was all bull. You know? It was me trying to be important, me trying to make a name for myself, and I found out that didn’t work. I backfired on me. I was a bullshitter. And it backfired on me one hundred and one percent.”

  After four hours, Dave was back in Lloyd’s good graces, but the goblin was still speaking in riddles. His knowledge of the girls’ clothing was real evidence. But the rest? They needed to create leverage, and for that they were going to take a long hard look at the Welches.

  7

  The Clan

  Dick Welch

  Pat Welch

  TWO BRANCHES

  Teddy Welch made little sense as the kidnapper, but his story afforded a glimpse into the curious Welch family. What the detectives found shocked them. The abuse that Lloyd had suffered in his father’s house and Teddy had suffered in his was not an aberration. It was the norm. Few family members had escaped it. Fathers beat and raped their children, brothers terrorized and raped their sisters and cousins. Alcohol, drugs, and violence colored every relationship. It was not much of a stretch to see teenage Lloyd and perhaps even Teddy as pawns enlisted by the older, more practiced predators in their family.

  The clan had two branches, one in Hyattsville, Maryland, and the other five hours south on a secluded hilltop in Thaxton, Virginia, a place the locals called Taylor’s Mountain. Here the family’s Appalachian roots were extant, even though some of its members had gradually moved into more modern communities in and around Bedford, the nearest town. The Maryland branch, while its environs were markedly different, clearly belonged to the same tree. Hyattsville sprawled on both sides of Route 1, America’s oldest highway, which between Washington and Baltimore was so cluttered with commercial excess that H. L. Mencken had once called it “a monument to America’s lust for the hideous.” It was called Baltimore Avenue within Hyattsville’s limits. Abutting the District of Columbia of which, for all practical purposes, it had become a part, the city’s border existed only on maps. Isolated remnants of the county’s bucolic past remained in blocks of older wood-frame houses stranded between acres of parking lots, strip malls, and big retail outlets. Its population was mixed in every way. The Welch family, with its country ways, lived shoulder to shoulder with city dwellers seeking affordable housing close to jobs inside the beltway. The clan had sunk its roots here wide and deep, with enough Welches, Overstreets, Dooleys, Esteps, and Parkers to fill Magruder Park when they gathered for a reunion. If they had a look, it was generally pale and blue-eyed, with small pinched features in a broad face. Their men were scrawny and their women wide. There was a marked downturn to their thin-lipped mouths, as if a frown had been imprinted in their DNA. Taylor’s Mountain and Hyattsville may have been radically different places, but the family was the same in both. Its mountain-hollow ways—suspicion of outsiders, an unruly contempt for authority of any kind, stubborn poverty, a knee-jerk resort to violence—set it perpetually at odds with mainstream suburbia. Most shocking were its sexual practices. Incest was notorious in the families of the hollers (hollows) of Appalachia, where social isolation and privation eroded social taboos. The practice came north with the family to Hyattsville. Here, where suburban families had turned child-rearing into a fetish, some adults in Lloyd’s immediate family exploited their offspring and ignored barriers to incest. It was not uncommon for Welch children to experiment sexually with siblings and cousins.

  The family hid all this. Its business was no one else’s. Criminal behavior rarely warranted family censure, much less a report to the police. Indeed, the more shocking the conduct, the stronger the impulse to hide it. Protecting the family from outsiders was more important than protecting its members, including children, from each other. And the Welch women, often victims, were its fiercest guardians. In Virginia the rule was, What happens on Taylor’s Mountain stays on Taylor’s Mountain. If the Lyon sisters had fallen into this cesspool, as Lloyd claimed and the detectives now suspected, then some of the family might have known—and even helped.

  Lloyd had emerged from this culture as both victim and predator. After years of wandering and imprisonment, he had strayed far from the family’s grip, but the peculiar values and behavior he learned (and endured) had not played well in society at large. Locked away now in Delaware, he felt isolated and shunned, his letters to kinfolk rarely answered. Still, the family had a hold on him.

  Two of the relatives he had mentioned, besides Teddy, were Uncle Dick and Aunt Pat. Just a week after the fifth session with Lloyd, the squad invited both to police headquarters in Hyattsville, where they still lived. Dick was Lloyd’s only surviving paternal uncle. Mark interviewed him while Dave and Katie sat down in a separate room with Pat.

  Dick was a pale, skinny man in wire-framed glasses who looked lost inside an oversize blue work shirt and baggy khakis. He had thin white hair combed across his head; a stern, pinched face with a wide, crooked nose; a distinct underbite; and an unusually broad, slack neck. His grown children now called him “Poppy.” Fighting a chronic heart ailment, he looked older than his sixty-nine years and frail, nothing like the rough customer with long sideburns and a sneer in old family photos. Mark found him amiable and sharp-witted. Like Pat, he had little affection for Lloyd.

  Nothing in Lloyd’s storytelling had linked either Dick or Pat to the crime, but the squad had grown suspicious of them because of Teddy’s phone records. On February 11, the day of the press conference, Teddy had phoned Dick, someone he called rarely, and talked with him for more than twenty minutes. That same day he had then driven an hour and a half in rush-hour traffic to Hyattsville to speak to Dick in person—his cell-phone use showed his location and time in transit. There was something important and urgent for them to discuss that day. Dick said that Teddy had wanted to talk about his sons.

  The detectives doubted that. The trip had prompted them to rethink Teddy’s role. The more they considered it, the more they reasoned that Lloyd’s scenario might make sense. What if Teddy had been the boy Dee Danner had seen talking to the Lyon sisters? This had long been assumed to have been their brother Jay, who confirmed that he’d seen them there, but what if it had been someone else?

  Dick said he knew nothing about the Lyon girls. He had never seen them and had long wondered, like everyone else, what had happened to them.

  Pat—Patricia Jean—was clever. She was a pale, squat wo
man, so fat that she walked with a pronounced waddle. Her hair was thin and white, although she occasionally dyed it a light brown. Farsighted, she wore oversize reading glasses that she kept propped on top of her head. For years she had worked at a Giant supermarket. Pat had nothing for the detectives. She was cordial and presented herself as slightly befuddled—which, in time they would learn, she was not. She had been born an Engleking and did not see herself as a Welch. Indeed, she held the clan in some contempt. “That’s his [Dick’s] family, not mine,” she said. She had particular disdain for Lloyd. Pat portrayed him, in so many words, as a black sheep even by Welch standards. She had a hard time even untangling his parentage; she was unsure whether the woman killed in the auto accident, Margaret, had been his mother. She said her most vivid memory of his father, Lee, was of him passed out drunk on his living room couch.

  Dave did nothing to discourage her attitude toward Lloyd. The man he now cheerily greeted as “my brother” in the interview room he described to Pat as “an animal.”

  Both Dick and Pat said they believed Lloyd was entirely capable of kidnapping, raping, and killing two little girls, but neither knew the first thing about it.

  Those first interviews produced little but did nothing to dampen the squad’s growing suspicions. After the April session in Dover, Lloyd’s prison cell had been searched and all his personal papers seized—this was when they had obtained his recent, handwritten life summary. In this and in his letters, Lloyd made it clear that he believed his relatives were conspiring against him, which both stung him and also seemed to scare him. What did his family know that he was afraid they might tell?

  In their next session, scheduled for July, Dave would play on those fears. At the same time the squad was gearing up for a full-court press on the Welches, in both Maryland and Virginia.

  JULY 14, 2014

  “What’s happening, man?” Dave said in greeting, as he sauntered into the interview room at Dover.