The Last Stone Read online

  Some in the clan had been cautious ever since Lloyd had been named at the press conference—the police saw Teddy’s long drive that day to visit Dick in person as evidence of this. The squad had anticipated monitoring calls for a month, but they ended up listening for three months. It was costly. Supervised by veteran Montgomery County detective Rich Armagost, the bugs had to be monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, occupying four or five officers at a time. Many of the things overheard were redolent of deeper knowledge. For instance, after seeing news reports about the digging on Taylor’s Mountain, Pat Welch told one caller, knowingly, “They are going to find something on that mountain.” When told where the police were digging, she remarked, categorically, “Those aren’t their graves” and “They are on the wrong side of the mountain,” even though she had insisted to the squad that she knew nothing whatsoever about the Lyon girls. Occasionally the conversations were amusing, as callers wrestled with the fine points of jurisprudence, logic, and the English language. One described making “chicken salad” from turkey scraps. An affidavit was “an afro-davis”; asserting the right to avoid self-incrimination was “taking the Fourth”; a pedophile was a “pedifier”; and someone with proverbial skeletons in the closet had “a lot of shelves in his closet.” Mostly the cops heard the clan comparing notes, complaining about the police, and warning and encouraging one another to shut up. There were no breakthroughs.

  Working with their new Bedford partners, the squad began knocking on family doors. One of the first belonged to Artie Overstreet, Lloyd’s oldest aunt. She was a friendly, white-haired, churchgoing widow, stooped now in her eighties, who still lived with other family members in Thaxton. On a target list of family names, one of the detectives had scrawled in the margin—referring to the old TV series The Beverly Hillbillies—“Looked like the Clampetts to me; quiet weird people.”

  Artie told them that Dick and Pat, whom she heard from rarely, had called her in August—at the same time the police effort was gearing up—to ask if they might visit. She had refused them. Having just returned from a vacation, Artie did not want guests, even her younger brother and his wife. But they had come anyway. They wanted to know if she had been contacted by the police. The couple stopped in on other Virginia relatives with the same question, circling the family wagons. They spread the word, in person, that phones were tapped and that the police were out to get Dick.

  It was fascinating to overhear the family’s take on the squad’s efforts. Dave, Mark, and Katie became its chief tormenters. Dave was “the little one,” Mark “the big one with glasses,” Katie “the girl” or “the psychic,” because, as Dick Welch put it, “she can read people’s body language and setch.” Each new visit by the detectives stirred up more urgent intrafamily chatter, which in turn fed the squad’s suspicions. Family members had begun scouring the Internet for reports and speculation about the probe (in addition to mainstream media coverage, there had long been online sleuths obsessed with the mystery). Pat and her daughter went to the local library to use the computers there. On phones, by text, and in posts on social media, they commiserated and conjectured about who knew what, who was talking, what the police knew, and what the detectives were being told. If there had been no family conspiracy in 1975, there was one now. Each new interview poked the beehive, and afterward the wires buzzed, beginning with Artie, who called Pat immediately after being questioned. Through that summer and into fall the investigators consciously “tickled the wire,” sometimes planting false information just to stir things up, always pretending to know more than they did, sowing discord and division, hoping that in the anger and confusion somebody would slip up.

  They even enlisted Lloyd to draft a letter to his uncle Dick, urging Dick to visit him at the prison: “We need to talk about what happened forty years ago,” Lloyd wrote, at their behest. “You remember, don’t you? I don’t think you want me to talk about those two little girls, the ones you and Ted got at the Wheaton Plaza. You know I have been taking this shit long enough.”

  Dick didn’t respond. Unlike his nephew, he was smart enough to say nothing. Once he apprehended that he had become a target—the department would hold a press conference in October to name him as another person of interest in the case—he stopped speaking on the phone altogether. Pat fielded all the calls to their house. She became, with mounting indignation, a hub for much of the chatter. Well after she had stopped talking to the police, she was chatting cautiously on the phone with relatives. She asked many questions. Pat was keeping tabs on the squad just as they were keeping tabs on her.

  DICK AND PAT

  In truth, Artie’s call to Pat was instigated by the police.

  “Were they at your house long?” Pat asked, and then lamented: “It’s out of control, Artie. Did they say anything about me and Dick? I’ve heard so much stuff in the last month. It’s made Dick sick. It’s made me sick. So much gossip going on. If I could talk to everybody in Bedford, I’ll tell them not to talk to them. They have connived, twisted things around, said things that can’t be true, just to make the person they are talking to confused. Oh my goodness! It’s horrible!”

  “They are nice people,” said Artie.

  “They have to be nice! But how many times do you have to tell them no? It’s gossip. People blowing things out of proportion. It’s horrible! If they say it [the Lyon case] has anything to do with any of us, it ain’t true!”

  Pat was surprisingly savvy about surveillance. The sixty-five-year-old grandmother was more prudent than some professional drug dealers the detectives had monitored. She was vigilant and fierce. She viewed protecting her husband as an essential wifely duty. Her daughter, Kim Pettas, told police that no matter how badly she had been treated by her father while she was growing up—and the treatment had been, she said, horrific—her mother always took his side. Dick had once beaten Kim so badly when she was a child that she lost control of her bladder and was left too swollen and bruised to attend school for three days. When she was a teenager her father routinely called her “whore” and “slut.” She remembered one warm conversation with her mother in the family kitchen ruined when Dick entered the room and began insulting her, calling her “cunt” and “whore.” When Kim looked to her mother for help, Pat’s maternal mood turned on a dime. She snapped at Kim, “He is my husband, and I will protect him until the day that I die, do you understand me?” She was still at it.

  To shake something loose, the detectives encouraged old resentments. There were plenty of them. Joann Green, Pat’s middle-aged younger sister, said she had been sexually molested by Dick when she was nine. She often spent time at her sister’s apartment, where she had nieces close to her own age. She was terrified of her uncle Dick. She said she once watched in horror as he savagely beat the family dog for peeing indoors, repeatedly slamming its head into the floor. In later years, when he worked as a security guard, he had a dog that would snarl and attack on command. He would get it to growl and bare its teeth at Joann until she screamed in fear, and then he would laugh. She said Dick had molested her in his and Pat’s house on Emerson Street in central Hyattsville. She said Dick, who was then in his twenties, had pulled off her pants and underwear, draped her leg over the back of a couch, and performed oral sex. “I’ll make you so hot you’ll piss your pants,” she said he told her. “I didn’t know what that meant,” she told me. “I didn’t know what he had did. I kind of knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was called. I didn’t know why he did it, so I just tried to block it out.” Joann said she had been too ashamed and frightened to tell anyone.

  This sexual aggression lasted for years, Joann said, until she was old enough to understand and to complain. When she was a teenager, playing pool with her cousins in his house, she said Dick kept suggestively thrusting his pool cue between her legs until she fled downstairs and complained to Pat. “Just stay away from him,” Pat advised. When Joann gave birth to her first child at Prince George’s Hospital in May 1975, she came home
to her sister’s house in Hyattsville and then had to wait until Pat sobered up for a ride home to Virginia. Dick, now thirty, also drunk, kept coming into her room that night and touching her. She would squirm away from him. He left her room in anger, bellowing through the house, “I want a piece of pussy!” Joann said this continued until she complained to her sister.

  This picture of a young, wolfish Dick Welch made it easier to imagine him in Lloyd’s latest scenario. Joann was recruited to confront Dick directly, something she had never dared to do. She was crying when Pat picked up the phone.

  “I just wanted to talk to him,” Joann said. “Ask him why he did what he did to me. He never apologized! I thought I was the only one he did it to, but I’m learning otherwise. Pat, I’m putting two and two together. He was a security guard at the Wheaton Plaza when those Lyon girls went missing.”

  “He was not,” said Pat.

  “My God, did he have something to do with that?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “How? If you didn’t know he was messing with your own kids?”

  “Because I know that.”

  “Is he ever going to apologize for having sex with me?”

  “I’ll talk to you later,” said Pat, and hung up.

  Joann dialed her back. She said the detective, Katie Leggett, had asked her about the sexual assault. She said she couldn’t fathom how the police knew about it.

  “Let me tell you something,” said Pat. “They make lies up. Let me tell you. They are trying to catch anything or anybody, and they will make things up. They will lie that they heard it from somebody else or whatever.”

  “But it’s the truth,” Joann said. She reminded Pat that she had confronted her repeatedly in those years about her husband’s behavior.

  Pat said she had no memory of it. She said, “If you told them that’s what happened then they’d arrest him.”

  “But I denied it.” She said she was now worried about what might happen to her because she had lied to the police.

  “You don’t have to talk to them,” said Pat. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “But if I don’t talk to them maybe I’ll get in trouble. I don’t know.”

  “No. You don’t have to talk to them.”

  “You want me to keep lying to them, or do you want me to tell the truth?” she asked. This was a key question. If Pat counseled her to keep lying, she would be obstructing justice. She was much too canny for that.

  “Just don’t talk to them,” she said. “These people are very persuading. They tell lies.”

  Nothing rattled Pat. Late in September, Dollie Estep, her niece, who lived in Bedford, called with an urgent message. Lloyd, she said, had confessed to kidnapping, raping, and killing the Lyon girls, and had named Dick and Teddy as accomplices. She said Teddy had also named Dick. This, of course, was not true. Mark and Katie were sitting with Dollie as she made the call. They had misled her in an effort to stir things up, and suggested the warning call to Pat. Dollie urged her aunt to make a deal with the detectives to save herself and Dick.

  “Don’t say anything to me,” Dollie told Pat immediately. “I’m going to do the talking; you’re not. They took me to the police station today. They took my picture. The death penalty is on the line. Teddy is putting Lloyd there. Rapings, beatings. He’s gonna make a plea deal. You need to start talking. Patricia Ann [another of Pat’s daughters] is in danger. Teddy wants to silence her. They’re saying they have evidence. The death sentence is on the line. If you and Dick don’t talk first, Dick is going to get the death penalty. You need to talk because Tommy Junior [Teddy] is throwing you under the bus. You need to talk to them. Do it now! Don’t let Tommy Junior do this to you.”

  “We don’t know anything,” said Pat, calmly.

  “Junior is throwing you under the bus big-time. Call your lawyer and take him with you to see them. I’m worried to death about Dick.”

  Pat was unmoved.

  In poking around on Taylor’s Mountain, the detectives found much to interest them. There was that old cemetery with unmarked gravestones and the remains of a large fire pit used to dispose of brush and trash by the Parker family (Lizzie Welch had married Allen Parker). “They burned everything,” their daughter had said. It was not an uncommon practice in rural areas. Sometimes the bonfire burned for days at a time. Suspecting it might have been used to incinerate the Lyon girls’ bodies, investigators had begun marking off places to excavate. Part of the land was still owned by Dick and Pat. Dollie called them again at the end of September.

  “They have marked your property up here as a crime scene,” Dollie said.

  “As what?”

  “As a crime scene. They’re gonna dig it up.”

  “Okay, that’s cool.”

  Dollie said, “I told them, ‘The person that killed those girls is dead.’”

  “I’ll call you back,” said Pat, and hung up.

  Despite Pat’s seeming calm, she was worried, and even though she was cagey on the phone, there were plenty of hints that she knew more than she let on. Her daughter Kim Pettas called her as more reports were aired of the digging on Taylor’s Mountain, prompting another of the exchanges that the squad found so suggestive.

  “You better look at the news,” Kim told her.

  “I’ve been looking at the news. We’re going to jail,” Pat said.

  “You ain’t goin’ to jail.”

  “Oh yeah? I ain’t got time to look at the news ’cause I’ve got to get ready to go away.”

  “Mother, they [the Lyon girls’ remains] was found up on Lizzie’s property.”

  “What was found?”

  “The grave site.”

  “That’s not their grave site. They’re still looking.”

  Pat’s worry that she and Dick were about to be arrested suggested that there was incriminating evidence to be found.

  In order to avoid polluting these conversations, the detectives had told no one the details of Lloyd’s ever-changing account. So they were especially interested when comments by family members seemed to corroborate it. In his most recent version, he and Teddy had left Wheaton Plaza with the girls and got into a car waiting in the parking lot. The detectives were startled to hear Pat, discussing the case with Dollie, present virtually the same scenario.

  “Didn’t you say that the detectives said they know it was Lloyd and Junior [Teddy]?” Pat asked.

  “No. He said Lloyd admitted to it and that Tommy [Teddy] was involved. Lloyd admitted to the girls, and Tommy Junior was involved with him. It was him and Tommy.”

  “Well, who was the other guy?”

  “They didn’t mention the other guy.”

  “The way I understood it was, there was two men out in the parking lot with Lloyd,” said Pat.

  “I don’t think they are pressed about Dick; I think they know it’s Thomas Junior,” Dollie said.

  “I heard there was somebody else there, you know? They have to know who it was.”

  The day after this call, Pat and Dick lost whatever self-possession they had, when the squad and the FBI searched their house. This was September 19. Pat was not home when the teams swarmed in with the warrant. Mark Janney cornered Dick in the front yard, sharply questioning and accusing him.

  “Here’s the thing, Dick,” said Mark. “I think you have kind of been expecting this day, you know what I mean. You’ve probably been carrying around a lot of weight on your shoulders the last few months, wondering what’s going on with us. We’ve been investigating this thing very thoroughly. It’s over. It’s time to put this thing to rest.”

  “What did I do?” Dick asked.

  “You know what your role was.”

  “I don’t know. What did I do? I didn’t do anything.”

  “Our objective is to mainly find those girls.”

  “I don’t know where they are at! I had nothing to do with it!”

  “It’s time for
you to tell us the truth.”

  “I had nothing to do with it. On my mother’s grave, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, Dick, we’ve got a lot of evidence. We’ve talked to a lot of people. Put people’s stories together, including Ted and including Lloyd, and the main thing I want is to hear your version of things.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t there. I didn’t do anything. I was accused of doing it, but I did not do it. I didn’t even know the boy [Lloyd]; he was off from the family. I did not do it.”

  “There’s no point in going down this road right now.”

  “It’s the honest road. It’s the honest road. It’s all I can say; it’s the honest road. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s time. It’s time, Dick.”

  Mark said that not everyone involved shared the full weight of the blame, and they needed to hear from him what his role was.

  “I didn’t have no role,” said Dick. “I didn’t do anything. I did not do nothing.”

  “It could very well be a case where people were drunk, their judgment was screwed up, they got into something that they didn’t expect to get into, and it just went the wrong way. And if that’s the case, and if something accidental happened to those girls, and people got scared and freaked out, then that’s what we’re here to clear up.”

  “I don’t even know the girls you’re talking about. I never seen ’em. Of course, I know the girls you’re talking about. I seen their picture. I didn’t know ’em. I have not done nothin’.”

  “It’s time,” said Mark. “You’ve been carrying this a long time.”

  “I ain’t been carrying nothing!”

  “It’s time to tell the truth.”

  “I AM telling the truth!”

  “It’s time to clear this up.”

  “This is clearing it up! Right here! I have done nothin’!”

  Mark kept at him hard, but Dick didn’t budge. He had not been running from this case. He had not been hiding anything. He didn’t know anything. His distress made him unsteady, and at one point he keeled over. They placed him on a bench and brought him water. Dick kept insisting he had nothing to do with the crime.