The Last Stone Read online

  “I am so sorry you think I do,” he said, “but I don’t.”

  “Our evidence says you do, Dick. That’s the problem. Dick, you’ve done things.”

  “I have not. I don’t know what evidence you got, but it’s not on me. Am I under arrest?”

  “No, you are not under arrest.”

  “Can I call my wife?”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “If I’m not under arrest, why can’t I call my wife?’

  “Because I said you can’t.”

  Dick laughed with astonishment. “So you’re the Man, and I’m the dummy, right?”

  “You’re not dumb. We’re serving a search warrant at your house, and we don’t want you calling your wife right now. We’ll let you call her in due time.”

  Dick kept repeating over and over that he had never been to Wheaton Plaza. “I have not been there. I have not been there.”

  Mark said that their evidence indicated otherwise. “The bottom line is this isn’t going to go away.”

  “The bottom line is I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do it, sir.”

  Dick demanded to talk to a lawyer. He broke down.

  “Everybody has made mistakes in their life,” said Mark.

  “I didn’t make no mistakes.”

  When Pat came they wouldn’t let her near her husband. She threw a fit, screaming for all the neighborhood to hear, “Somebody call an ambulance! Everybody, remember this! They’re denying help to a dying man!”

  In the middle of it, Pat phoned Dollie.

  “They’re tearing my house up,” she said.

  “Where’s Dick?”

  “He’s been on the ground a couple of times.”

  “He’s gonna have a heart attack,” Dollie said.

  “I don’t think it’s fair that nobody knows what’s going on,” said Pat. “They say people in Bedford are giving them information. There must be twenty-five or thirty of them. They lie so fucking much. I want the people in Bedford to know.”

  A day later, sounding drunk and crying, she called Dollie again.

  “I’m not a bad person. I told that detective I’m gonna call down to Bedford and tell them what’s going on. I have caught them in lies several times. I told them I’m gonna talk to everyone down there who is feeding them information.”

  “I believe Lloyd implicated Dick,” Dollie said.

  “Junior too. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about.”

  “I guess they think I’m hiding secrets for your family,” said Dollie.

  “They implicated you as one of the people talking about Dick, saying he did something like that,” said Pat.

  “They ask me a hundred million questions a day. They ask me if I’m loyal to my family, and ‘Do you have family secrets?’”

  “They tell me you implicated Dick.”

  “How could I implicate anybody? I was twelve years old!”

  “They said Junior implicated Dick. There are other people down there saying things.” Pat said the police kept hammering at Dick, telling him that they knew he was the driver. “Over and over and over,” she said. “They did take him a bottle of water.”

  The search found nothing incriminating. And despite Dick’s assertions of complete innocence, the Montgomery County police went ahead with the press conference that named him another person of interest. Called before a grand jury in Virginia months later, under oath, Pat denied having urged others to be uncooperative. Recordings of her doing just that were then played. She was indicted for perjury, and cameras caught a glimpse of her with her hands over her face as a sheriff drove her away.

  TEDDY

  Teddy felt the heat, too. The darkly handsome cousin with the curious past was summoned repeatedly for interviews and a polygraph, and he cooperated doggedly, appearing, as always, candid to a fault. He detailed his long relationship with Leonard Kraisel, an association the detectives found hard to comprehend; he acknowledged youthful sex play with siblings; and he continued to insist that he had nothing to do with the Lyon kidnapping. Lloyd, he said, he hardly knew.

  Teddy was under tremendous stress at the time. His third wife, Stacy—his first had died of cancer, and the second had left him—had been diagnosed with a fatal malignancy. He and their two boys were still dealing with emotional, financial, and legal fallout from Kraisel’s conviction; the fuel equipment and services company, largely owned by Uncle Lenny, was going under; and Teddy was shepherding a civil lawsuit on behalf of his sons against the old man (which they would eventually win). Now, for reasons he could not comprehend, his cousin had named him as a kidnapper, rapist, and killer.

  Looking for ways to lean on him, the squad enlisted a male relative who said that as a boy he had been sexually assaulted by Teddy. Teddy had deduced early on that his cell phone was tapped. His landline at home was not—the squad had been unable to show a pattern of calls to the landline to warrant a tap—but on the theory that Teddy might trust that line more, they had this relative call him on it.

  “The police asked me some questions about what happened to me as a child,” he told Teddy. “What you and Michael did to me as a child. With the butter. Sexual.”

  “I didn’t do anything to you,” said Teddy.

  “You don’t remember what you did to me? Dad and Mom confronting you on the street?” He said Teddy had driven up to his house in a red car. “You came in drunk? Got butter out of the refrigerator?”

  “I never had a red car,” said Teddy. “I had a burgundy car.”

  They quibbled, and then Teddy said, “If you’re sitting there with the police right now recording this phone call [he was], you can tell them to kiss my ass. Tell them to leave you alone. Lloyd is fucking dragging me into it!”

  His cousin Dollie, who had her own grievance, was also enlisted.

  “One time at Dick’s house,” she said, “they [Dick and his brothers] were all drunk on the front porch. Your dad [Tommy Senior] told me to get on his lap. I tried to get up, and Tommy pulled me back down.” She said that Teddy had intervened on her behalf, yelling at his father and pulling her off him. “Me and you went around the side of the house, and you pulled your winky out.” She said Teddy, having rescued her, had then pushed her to her knees and tried to put his penis in her mouth.

  Teddy said he didn’t remember it, but if it had happened, he was sorry.

  Dollie said, “Patty Ann [their cousin, Dick and Pat’s daughter] called me last night drunk off her butt. She called me and cussed me out. She called me drunk, drunk, drunk. Next thing I know, she’s hysterical crying. Said you told the police that her daddy was the driver [in the Lyon kidnapping]. Lloyd is cooperating with the police. Said you were on the scene, raped those girls.”

  “Come on, Dollie,” said Teddy. “I was eleven years old!”

  “Not by yourself. Were you and Daddy and Lloyd involved?”

  “I can’t imagine anything like that.”

  “When people get drunk things happen that don’t ordinarily happen,” Dollie said.

  “There’s so much stuff going around,” said Teddy. “They took me to the sheriff’s office yesterday, put me on a recorder. I’m not going to worry about it.”

  The same tactic was tried with Teddy’s younger half brother, Michael. He phoned Teddy (calling him “Tommy”) in mid-October—two of the detectives were with him.

  “Two detectives were here, Tommy. Going through everything, talking about everything. Things that happened in our family, those two little girls—”

  “Do you know anything about those two girls?” Teddy snapped at him, cutting him off. He practically hissed the question through the phone, a warning as much as a question. Then he added, “I don’t know anything.”

  “They were talking all kinds of crazy shit that went on in your family. Sexual things. They’re just investigating, trying to figure out who killed those Lyon girls. I have a strange feeling that they still think you know something. Let me explain it to you, they can put you in jail for
conspiracy. I haven’t a—”

  “Are you an idiot?” Teddy asked sharply, cutting him off. His tone suggested that his brother was stupid for even talking about such a thing. “I’m telling you I had nothing to do with it.”

  “They come at me with all this other bullshit,” said Michael. “Our family is totally fucked up. Goddammit, I don’t like these two strange motherfucking assholes coming in my house and talking to me about this shit! Cover your fucking ass!”

  “I don’t need to cover my ass. I didn’t do anything.”

  But Teddy was worried. After the police searched his house late that summer, he set out to prove his innocence. As a boy he had climbed to the icy roof of a local school to retrieve a ball, slipped, and fallen off, shattering both arms. He believed this had happened when he was eleven. After a stay at Washington Adventist Hospital, he had come home with casts on both arms, which were elevated by straps. “I couldn’t even wipe my own ass!” he told the detectives. It had taken many months and repeated surgeries to fully repair his bones. He wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, but he was sure it was in 1975. After his interview at police headquarters that summer, he went looking for his old medical records—and succeeded in finding them. The tap on his phone recorded him battling hard with hospital bureaucracy.

  Teddy was able to show that his fall had happened on February 15, 1975, and he had spent a week in the hospital. He even found an old photo of him taken there, his cast-encased arms in traction. This was more than a month before the Lyon girls had disappeared, but he’d worn the casts for months. Two broken arms made him an even less likely kidnapper, even if you believed he was somehow involved at age eleven. It certainly would have been hard to miss him in Wheaton Plaza that day. None of the witnesses remembered a boy with two broken arms. Dee Danner, the woman who remembered seeing the Lyon girls talking to a boy, was asked specifically if he “had anything wrong with him.” She said no. Teddy had even kept the casts, which were taken when his house was searched. They were tested for signs of blood—on the theory that Teddy might have been present at the girls’ murder—and none were found.

  He went further still to prove himself to the squad. He agreed to wear a wire for a surprise visit to his uncle Dick. The detectives instructed him to get Dick talking about the crime. Teddy drove over to his uncle’s house on the afternoon of September 16. He sat with him on the swing chair in the front yard and for nearly an hour commiserated with him and Pat about the ongoing investigation. Dick kept reminding Teddy that his lawyer had advised him not to talk about it, but to the extent that he did, he repeated the same denials he had made to the police.

  Even after this effort, the squad’s doubts about Teddy lingered. His disappointing conversation with Dick and Pat didn’t convince them that any of the three were innocent; instead they wondered whether Teddy had tipped Dick and Pat off to the wire.

  Lloyd had known exactly what he was doing when he named his cousin. Chris, Dave, Mark, and Katie were, at heart, conventional cops. To them, Teddy lay so far outside their concept of normal that they were willing to believe almost anything about him. The sexual bargain Teddy had struck as a boy, the way his story had played out in recent years with Uncle Lenny, and his odd sexual history with cousins and siblings—it all made Teddy smell complicit.

  Ultimately, the wiretaps produced more questions than answers. They were useful in fleshing out the tawdry context of Lloyd’s family, and some of what was learned, as we shall see, would help move the case forward, but the keen anticipation at their launching went unfulfilled. By the end of 2014, the bistate siege of the Welches was looking like a great dollar- and time-consuming dead end.

  EDNA

  If there was a moment that captured the exasperation of these months, it was the appearance of Edna Ayline Welch, Lloyd’s ailing and obese stepmother, before the Bedford grand jury on November 7. Edna was a deceptively simple, mean country woman in her eighties, sharp as the cut rim of a tin can and prone to didactic and random biblical quotations. Her letters to Lloyd in prison were full of them—like textual glossolalia. These missives were written in her hand, although she said she was illiterate. Edna lived in Tennessee in a filthy, cluttered house littered with dog droppings. Her soft, full, lined face had sprouted gray whiskers, which were a source of family amusement. Her daughter had posted to Facebook a video of herself plucking hairs from her mother’s chin to the sound of banjo music.

  Edna was of particular interest for several reasons. She had been living with Lee Welch in the Hyattsville house at 4714 Baltimore Avenue, where Lloyd and Helen had sometimes stayed during March and April 1975. Edna had told of cops knocking on her door there looking for Lloyd in the weeks after the girls disappeared, something which the detectives had not known and for which there was no record. She said Lloyd and Helen had gone off by then; she did not know where. Even if she knew nothing about the Lyon girls, as she claimed, she at least might be able to corroborate or debunk bits of information Lloyd had dropped about those days. And there was reason to believe she knew much more than she let on. Soon after Dave had first phoned her in the summer of 2013, searching for Lloyd without mentioning why, hard-of-hearing Edna had apparently written to Lloyd to tell him that the Maryland police wanted to talk to him about the Lyon girls. She had made the connection immediately. Her letter to Lloyd was never recovered, but a search of her Tennessee home revealed one he had written to her in response, five months before the first police interview.

  “I don’t know about 2 girls missing from Wheaton, MD,” he had written. “Tell me who called and what they say I did or think I did because I’ve never done anything to 2 girls to make them come up missing. So write me back and let me know what is going on on this.”

  So Lloyd, whom Chris and Dave and Pete had hoped to surprise, had been prepping mentally for the encounter for months. In the same letter, he had asked Edna a surprising question: “Mom, have you ever heard from Helen or from any of the girls? I don’t know where Helen is.”

  Why, out of the blue, a question about Helen? Lloyd had neither seen nor heard from her in more than thirty years. He didn’t even know that she had died of cancer some years earlier. But it was Helen who sprang to mind. The detectives could imagine a good reason for this. Helen had been with him when the kidnapping occurred. If she were still alive, her memories of those days might be very damaging to him. When Dave saw this letter, and realized that Edna had never written Lloyd an answer, he kicked himself for having told Lloyd that Helen was dead. If Lloyd were worried about what she might say, this would have given the squad useful leverage.

  Edna was in the last year of her life. She was not happy about the summons to Virginia. She arrived weary and in a snit, a backwoods matriarch beset by the powers that be. Leaning heavily on a cane, she worked her way to the witness chair, disheveled, her curly gray hair cut short and jutting out untidily. She had, as the detectives had already learned, a hearing problem that fluctuated with her mood—a disorder common in the ornery elderly. She heard what she cared to hear. There was much to be learned from her if she chose to be helpful, which she did not.

  “Ms. Welch, can you hear me?” asked Virginia prosecutor Randy Krantz. When there was no response he asked again, “Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you right—I might miss some words,” said Edna.

  “All right. If I—if anybody—asks you a question that you can’t hear—”

  “Would you come closer?”

  “I’d be happy to,” said Krantz.

  She started out fine, answering questions expansively. When Lloyd was still a boy, she had agreed to take him in briefly, because her husband “kept whining about wanting his kids.” Lee, as she put it, “drinked a lot.” She obliged him, hoping it might mellow and sober him, “which it did not,” she said, emphatically. He showed no affection for Lloyd. Instead, the boy seemed to make him angry and abusive, so Edna’s kindly gesture only heaped new hardship on her already strained home life. She had not ha
d it easy, as she put it, “with a drunk husband fussing and carrying on.” She said she had to intercept Lee’s pay every week, “or else he would go drink it up.”

  Edna had trouble remembering the names of all her children and stepchildren. She described as “difficult” those early days with Lloyd, then a boy, in her house. After being retrieved from foster care, “he didn’t listen to me, for one thing. And I don’t even remember what kind of trouble he got into or what. We had to go to court with him, or I did. My husband wouldn’t have a thing to do with him, with nothing, PTA, children. ‘No,’[he’d say], ‘that’s you,’ you know? I had my hands full. And so, I told the judge I just couldn’t handle it. And he put Lloyd in some kind of house or something. And that’s the last I seen of him there, for years.”

  Edna’s hearing began to falter as the detectives, Mark, Dave, and Katie, took their turns.

  “Do you remember when you learned that Lloyd was being investigated about the disappearance of these two girls?” asked Mark.

  “When you called me.”

  In that first phone call, since Dave had been careful not to mention it, they wondered how she had so quickly surmised they were working on the Lyon case.

  “Did you relay that information to Lloyd?” Mark asked.

  “What? Now, wait. Run that by me again.”

  “Do you remember when those two girls disappeared, the Lyon sisters?”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t until you-ins brought it up.”

  “And what did you remember about it when we brought it up?”

  Edna asked for a drink of water.

  “I told them I hadn’t even got my coffee this morning.”

  “Oh, I can relate,” said Mark.

  “We drove all night. We drove. We just got here.”