The Last Stone Page 17

  Dave asked why.

  “I would think that it would be because he was afraid we were going to say something.”

  “That’s exactly why,” said Dave.

  “You know?”

  “Or maybe because you weren’t in for it, that’s why he hates you. Had you gone back and participated in whatever happened, you’d have been one of the boys.”

  “Yeah. Believe it or not, I was not into hurting people. At the time I had no sexual thoughts in my mind. Don’t ask me what happened in the nineties [when he did molest children], because I don’t know. I don’t know if shit finally caught up with me, all the drugs and alcohol.”

  “Was your uncle Dick into things like that?”

  “As the years went on I heard that he was, that he was into younger girls and guys, younger kids and stuff like that. I can’t say that he was and I can’t say that he wasn’t, because I wasn’t around that much.”

  Lloyd now said that the story he had told about seeing the girls with Teddy and the other man in a basement was “bogus.” He reverted again to his account of being dropped off at the convenience store; he said it was to buy ice cream for Helen. He walked home with it.

  “I think Teddy was thinking something different than what actually happened,” said Dave. “I think Uncle Dick joined in, and then I think Uncle Dick finished it.”

  Lloyd nodded.

  “And then that’s the demon that’s been in this family for thirty-nine years, and that’s the reason you and Teddy were punished like this, because y’all didn’t agree with it. It’s not what you sat in for.”

  But when Dave suggested that Dick had planned the whole thing with him and Teddy, Lloyd shook his head no.

  “I went to that mall to look for work,” he said.

  COMING CLEAN

  Having placed himself with the girls as they left the mall, in the car with those he now identified as his uncle and cousin, Lloyd was now officially a co-kidnapper. To keep him talking, Dave told him the opposite.

  “Your involvement in this thing went from solo to high priority to very low priority to, hey, maybe you’re just a witness,” he said. “You’re providing information. And with that being said, you are in a whole lot better spot than you were. But I don’t know that you totally get it. And do I think you are still holding back on me? Yeah, and I understand why.”

  “I can’t be holding back any more than what I’ve already said!” Lloyd protested. “I mean, what Teddy and Dick did that day, I can’t say.”

  He had found what he considered safe new ground. He had been at the mall looking for work. He had innocently ridden away in the car with Teddy, Dick, and the girls, taking a ride to pick up ice cream. He’d gotten out of the car and left. He was in love with Helen. She was having a baby. He wanted nothing to do with “partying” with these girls. Now that he had admitted knowing something of what happened to Sheila and Kate, he claimed to be haunted by it—a thing he’d denied for months. Lloyd made these shifts with no apparent sense of how false they sounded. He had no ear for it.

  “It’s gonna bug the shit out of me until the day I die,” he said, a comment so hollow it echoed. “You know? Why didn’t I do anything? I mean, there’s always going to be that question there. Why didn’t I step in and do something?”

  Lloyd had completely dropped his tale of going back the next day and witnessing rape. Dave was not going to let him drop it.

  He said, “My thoughts on this were, when you separated yourself, at some point you went back over, not necessarily to know anything about the girls, just went back over. It’s your family. You went back to the house, and you saw something and you left. That’s been consistent in every time we talk”—Dave was exaggerating here—“whether it has been at that house or, whatever that guy’s name was … and it was probably around that time frame that you said, ‘I’m going to do something about this, but I don’t know how to do it,’ so you went back to the mall, you got cold feet when security picked you up, because what were you going to do, tell on your uncle? What the hell did you see”—Dave banged on the desk—“that drove you to that?”

  “Saw ’em in the basement fucking.”

  “Who was fucking them?”

  “Dickie.”

  “Was Teddy?”

  “Teddy was there. I don’t know if he was fucking them or what.”

  Dave asked if he knew which girl Dick was assaulting.

  “No. She was underneath. I don’t know which one it was. I don’t know if it was the younger one or the older one. I saw one. That was all. I don’t know if Teddy had already done something to them or not. I saw that. I didn’t want nothing to do with it, and I just left. I didn’t even tell Teddy that I was there. I don’t know if he saw me or not. That was when Helen and I had left there again. We went back to South Carolina. We liked it down there. A couple of years later I came back.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “I didn’t say nothing to them. They didn’t say nothing to me. Then I got myself in trouble and ended up in jail.”

  “So, who would have killed them?”

  “That I can’t say, but if it was me in the house that day, I would say Dickie would do it because he has that much anger in him.”

  Dave pushed for more. Did Dick have guns? He had. What else had Lloyd seen?

  “Nobody was screaming,” he said. “You know what I’m saying? I don’t know if they were drugged or not.”

  “Who would have drugged them? Was Dick into drugs back then? Teddy? Was he into drugs at that age?”

  “I can’t say if he was or wasn’t. I knew he was drinking. I know he was a drinker. That was Lee’s [Lloyd’s father’s] best buddy on drinking.”

  “A twelve-year-old?”

  “Could he have gotten drugs?” said Lloyd. “Most definitely. There was drugs all over that area, you know?”

  Lloyd speculated that Dick had kept the girls locked for a week in his basement room, a finished room with a worn old carpet, a built-in bar, couch, chair, a mattress, black-and-white TV on a stand. His “sanctuary” he called it. It could be entered only from the backyard. His wife and children lived upstairs, but no one was allowed into his space. Whenever he left, he locked it.

  “If they stayed down there for a week, probably nobody would know, because that door was always locked,” Lloyd said. “Two weeks. No.”

  “Is he that sick?”

  “He was when I was a kid.”

  Dave asked him to describe his uncle Dick. Lloyd recalled an angry, violent, drunken man.

  “I’ve wondered where he’d taken them,” Lloyd said. “I’ve wondered what he did to them, you know, how he got rid of them.”

  “Do you think they are in Maryland or Virginia?”

  “Good question. I never thought of that. I mean, Virginia ain’t that far away. We got relatives that live in Virginia.”

  “I gotta ask you, just out of curiosity. I mean, I get the first couple of times that we talked it was difficult to get you to come full circle. How come you waited until this long?”

  “Scared shitless.”

  “But—”

  “Scared shitless. Plain, simple admission.”

  “You’ve given us subtle hints, but it has taken damn near a year to get this far.”

  Lloyd laughed.

  “Well, you’re comforting,” he said, and threw his hands up in the air. “It got me out of my cell.” He said he thought his stepmom, Edna, was the only one in his family who believed he did not kidnap and kill the girls. She still wrote to him.

  “Who all in the family other than you, Teddy, and Dick?” Dave asked. “Who all definitely knows?”

  “I can’t say. I don’t know who they talk—”

  “Do you think your aunt knows?”

  “Which aunt?”

  “Pat.”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t.”

  BULLSHITTING

  They took a long break for lunch. Katie came in with pasta and a
sandwich for Lloyd. After he ate, she and Mark entered and sat down to talk with him further.

  “Dave says you guys have come a long way today,” Mark said. He said Dave would be back in a while.

  Katie tried to patch up her relationship with Lloyd. She offered a benign explanation for why he had failed the lie detector test and said she no longer blamed him for it. It was hot. He was tired. He reached over and shook her hand.

  “So, let’s just forget it,” he said.

  “We were both tired,” she said. “We were both hot. It had been a long day.”

  “I thought you were gonna come over and body slam me there,” said Lloyd, laughing.

  “I’m actually a nice person that makes pasta salad and sandwiches, see?”

  “I’m a nice person,” said Lloyd.

  She asked him what he thought Sheila and Kate had been thinking when they left with him and Teddy.

  “I believe they thought they were going to hang out, listen to music. I believe they came with that in mind. Thought they were going to hang out with this cute boy. I remember the girl in the front seat asked Teddy where we were going, and he said we were going to go party. I do remember that.”

  “Do you think that those girls at that point meant, like, hanging out, listening to music?” She told him that a twelve-year-old’s idea of “partying” was likely to have been different from his at age eighteen.

  “I really believe they thought they were going to hang out and listen to music.”

  “Just hanging out, being kids?”

  “Right.”

  Lloyd said the girls had not been distressed in the car at all.

  Katie asked him why, after years in prison, after working to be a model prisoner, after finding the Lord, had he never thought to write a letter to anyone explaining what he knew about what had happened to the Lyon girls.

  “For the simple reason that I had totally forgot about it completely,” he said. “I mean, totally forgot it.”

  “How do you forget something like that?

  Mark made a pitch for Lloyd to tell more, to do “one good thing.”

  “I’ve done everything I can possibly think of,” he said. “I’ve come clean today, telling who was involved.”

  Mark explained that they would be going to Teddy and Dick to hear their versions of all this. “Now it is going to be three people’s versions, and we’ve got to set your version apart. Because you have credibility now, you know? They’re going to come in and tell us various lies that have some truth mixed in. What parts of the truth are they likely to tell us that you’re afraid to tell us?”

  “Exactly what I told him [Dave]. That’s just as far as it went with me. I was not involved with them two girls. I didn’t have sex with them two girls.”

  Mark reminded Lloyd of an earlier detail from his stories that he had now changed: that the younger of the two girls had been crying. “Where did that come from?” he asked.

  “Don’t know where that come from, in all honestly,” said Lloyd. “I don’t.”

  “But you see what I’m saying? Like, that’s sort of an odd detail to put in consistently.”

  “I guess I kind of bullshitted my way through a lot of stuff.”

  “Well, you did; you absolutely do bullshit a lot,” Mark laughed. “But that’s something that there’s no reason to bullshit, you know? That’s something that would stick out. If it were me, and I was in your shoes back then, if I see one of those girls crying, the human side of me, that’s going to make an impression in my mind and stay there.”

  “Like I said, she was sitting over in the corner there. I mean, she didn’t say nothing to me.” He shrugged. “Maybe I thought she was crying. I don’t know, you know?”

  “You’d know if she was crying or not.”

  “She wasn’t saying nothing to me, and I wasn’t saying nothing to her. I mean, her face was turned.”

  “It stands to reason, if she’s the younger one, that she’s not as emotionally or socially advanced as her older sister, who is probably the one that’s leading this train. The little one is more out of her element and might be, like, ‘Well, where are we going? I thought we were going home.’”

  Lloyd was not offering further insight. Mark returned to the idea that his family was trying to pin it all on him.

  “We’ve kind of opened this door now, and we’re going through it with you,” he said. “You can’t go through it halfway. You’ve got one foot through. You’ve got to get all the way through it, and, honestly, I don’t know where this ball is gonna go when we leave here today.” He said the more details Lloyd provided, the more leverage they would have with Teddy and Dick.

  “I’ve known all along that you were bullshitting us, that you knew the answer to this, and it’s frustrating. Dave and I have different personalities. Dave is the kind of guy … he’s much more patient than I am.”

  But Lloyd had nothing more to add, for now.

  8

  The Duffel Bag

  Investigators survey the Welch property on Taylor’s Mountain

  POKING THE BEEHIVE

  Within weeks of the July visit, the Lyon investigation exploded. Over the next six months it would engage scores of police in Maryland and Virginia, prosecutors from both states, contractors, and FBI specialists. There would be wiretaps, search warrants, and surveillance, audio and video. The old case would be worked on harder through the remainder of 2014 and into 2015 than it had been since those frantic spring days four decades ago. There would be extensive searching by air and on foot, excavations, soil analyses, lab tests, all seeking some scrap of physical evidence. There would be monthly grand jury proceedings and subpoenas from the Commonwealth of Virginia to compel testimony under oath. There would be intensive and repeated interviews, formal and informal, with nearly every living member of the Welch family. After nine months of parsing Lloyd’s subterfuge, the squad now turned on the clan with a vengeance. The detectives imagined the Lyon sisters as the guarded clan’s most deeply buried secret, running through its shared memory like a subterranean third rail, known to all but too hot to touch.

  It was a siege. Bedford, a sleepy rural town of six thousand in the Appalachian foothills, was overrun by police and press. Spurred by Lloyd’s naming of his uncle and cousin in July, the squad hustled to secure authorization for surveillance. Much to his wife’s chagrin, Dave left a Labor Day picnic with several beers under his belt to visit the judge and county prosecutor to secure a court order. The wiretaps went up on September 2, and in the first week they revealed that the case was already a hot topic of conversation on the clan’s phones and social media accounts. The active interest of the Virginia branch was, in particular, enticing. If others in the family had been involved in the crime itself, as Lloyd claimed, or had helped cover it up, there was a chance there were answers on Taylor’s Mountain.

  Dave, Mark, and Katie had driven down to Bedford on Friday, August 29, stopping first at the mountain. They had a time of it on the backcountry roads. At one point Katie, who was driving with the boldness and sense of privilege of a onetime patrolwoman, bounced so violently over a railroad crossing that she upset a cooler filled with ice water (and cans of beer) in the back seat. It sloshed over Mark. His partners’ mirth didn’t improve his temper. Katie relinquished the wheel.

  Taylor’s Mountain felt like a place stuck in time. They found the house and property owned by the late Lizzie Parker, Lloyd’s aunt, sister to his father and Dick, where they stopped to talk with a friendly man, Paul Amos, who was sitting on his front porch across the road. On a later visit they caught Amos eating his dinner straight out of a skillet and two saucepans, leading the detectives to dub him “Paulie Pots-and-Pans.” He knew the family well, and when he asked what the detectives were looking for, they told him about the Lyon sisters. He pointed up the road.

  “Well, there’s a graveyard up that hill,” he said.

  What they found did, indeed, look like an old graveyard, with plain stone markers space
d regularly around a weedy field. It was the kind of place where you might bury someone without attracting notice. There were local rumors that it had been a Native American burial site, but it was more likely just an old family cemetery. Like many in these hills, the clan had a long history of private interment.

  Next they drove into Bedford itself, a spacious redbrick small town bisected by an Amtrak rail line, with expansive vistas in all directions. To the west were the blue-green foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. On Main Street the largest structure was a colonial-style courthouse with an impressive gray-columned portico, its roof topped by a cupola with a copper dome. Dave and Katie walked into the town’s police headquarters a few blocks away, while Mark, still drying out after his dousing, stayed in the car with his laptop, putting the finishing touches on a PowerPoint presentation that laid out the case from its beginning to the newly discovered Virginia connections. The squad wanted to interview them all, for starters.

  Dave and Katie learned they had come to the wrong place. Taylor’s Mountain was in Thaxton, just to the west. The right constabulary was the nearby Bedford County Sheriff’s Office, a larger operation. It was late afternoon on the cusp of a long Labor Day weekend when the squad showed up there with Mark’s laptop. Folks were heading home. There was some grumbling, and the office brass were less than enthusiastic at first, but the PowerPoint got a hearing, and help was promised. There would be some friction over the coming months, but from that day forward the investigation was an interstate project.

  The wiretaps in Maryland targeted the cell phones of Dick, Pat, and Teddy. A small camera was placed high on a telephone pole outside Dick and Pat’s house, a conventional 1960s-era suburban ranch house with a white-shingled second story over a redbrick base. On the front lawn was a two-person swinging chair. Comings and goings were observed and charted. Up until then the elderly couple had been cordial, if not particularly helpful. The full-court press would soon turn them sharply adversarial.