The Last Stone Page 20

  She got her drink and then, with Mark’s prompting, recalled Lloyd and Helen discussing the missing girls on a couch in her living room after seeing a report on TV.

  “I don’t remember what they said or anything, but Lloyd is kind of—I always thought he wanted to be noticed. A little wanting, wanting something. I don’t know how to explain what I’m trying to say.”

  “Attention?” Mark suggested. “He wanted attention?”

  “Yeah. I understood there was going to be a reward or something, maybe, you know? I don’t know. But, anyway, Lloyd was after money, I guess. I guess that’s the way you’d put it. But he called and said he knew something. But he was just an eighteen-year-old boy, never had a car.”

  When detectives came to her door a few weeks later, she said, she told them that Lloyd had gone and she didn’t know where.

  “He was a foolish kid,” she said. “Well, I shouldn’t say that, should I?”

  “You can say whatever is the truth,” said Mark.

  “I don’t mean to mean-mouth him, but kids do awful stupid things.”

  This, it turned out, was about all Edna had to offer. Her memory began failing her.

  Krantz stepped back in, warning that lying to a grand jury was a criminal offense. “What happens to someone in a courtroom when they don’t tell the truth, what do you think?” he asked.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Krantz repeated the question, louder.

  “What happens?” Edna asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, they lied.”

  “Uh-huh, and what does the court do to people who have lied?”

  “I don’t know. I guess put them in jail.”

  “And you know why you’re here.”

  “Couldn’t help but know it.”

  “So, I’m going to ask you a question. Would you lie for Lloyd?”

  “No. No. I haven’t lied yet and won’t start.”

  Her memory and hearing faded fast from that point on. She had been threatened and did not take it kindly. No, she didn’t remember Teddy Welch, her nephew, and no, she knew nothing of Lloyd’s life outside his brief stays in her house. Despite Lloyd’s rosy-hued memories of her—he still called her “Mom” and “the only one who ever loved me,” and so forth—Edna had no affectionate memories of him at all. She said she hardly knew him. Neither she nor Lee had wanted him around. He returned for only a brief period when he was eighteen. Her occasional letters to him in prison were less maternal affection than Christian charity, which accounted for their didactic scriptural content. So why were they bugging her about him?

  But continue bugging her they did, at which point the old woman gave the assembled legal talent a master seminar in nonresponse.

  “Did Lloyd ever tell you he had been at Wheaton Plaza?” Krantz asked.

  “What period of time?”

  “Any time.”

  “In his letters.”

  “Okay. And what did Lloyd say in his letters?”

  “What did he say?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, all right. I can’t really recall. If you want to know, I don’t read.”

  “No. And I’m not trying to embarrass you.”

  “Well …”

  “I understand.”

  “Generally somebody who writes, reads,” he said. “Who reads Lloyd’s letters to you?”

  “Well. Part of them never was even read,” said Edna.

  “I’m talking about the one where he talked about Wheaton Plaza.”

  “Well, he said he didn’t do it.”

  Krantz reminded Edna that the detectives had spoken at length to Lloyd. “So I want you to think real carefully before you answer. What did Lloyd say in his letters about Wheaton Plaza?”

  “I can’t tell. I don’t remember. Now, he might not have said nothing. I don’t know. But he said he didn’t or something like that.”

  “What if I told you Lloyd has admitted doing it?”

  “I’d say he’s a liar.”

  “Uh-huh, and why is that? Is that because you don’t want to believe that he did it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean, do you know whether he did it or not?”

  “You want the honest truth?”

  “I want you to answer my question. Do you know whether Lloyd did it or not? Yes or no?”

  “No, I don’t know in my heart. No.”

  “So you don’t know whether he’s lying?”

  “But I know what I think.”

  And on it went. Edna said she felt sure Lloyd had done no such thing.

  “Who writes the letters that you send to Lloyd?”

  “What? Who writes them?”

  Krantz repeated the question.

  “I do.”

  “You know what you write, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Or I think I do.”

  “And you can read what you write?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My spelling ain’t too good. I have to look up every word I spell.”

  “You wrote and told Lloyd that the police had been to your house asking about him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Well, that’s probably what I told him.”

  “Why? Why did you do that?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “You already said that you did.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “And my question to you is, why did you do that?’

  “Well, what do you write to somebody that you don’t even hardly know?”

  “Well, that’s my question. Why would you write to somebody you hardly know?”

  “Just to have something to write, I guess.”

  “And he wrote back to you, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And in the letter he wrote you back, he talked about Wheaton Plaza, didn’t he?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Edna slipped and slid out of her questioners’ grasp. Sometimes she didn’t hear; at other times she started off on her own tangent.

  “Listen, you’ve got to help me here, because I’m slow,” said Krantz, finally.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t tell me that. Your face is red,” said Edna.

  “That’s blood pressure.”

  “Oh yeah. You’re getting mine up here, too.”

  Krantz tried a different tack. He asked Mark Janney, “Did she ever make any statements to you, Detective Janney, about this conversation with Lloyd Welch?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did Mrs. Welch tell you?”

  “At first she said he told her that he was going for a reward, and then later she changed and said he did not say that.”

  “Did you hear him?” he asked Edna.

  “No. I didn’t hear him.”

  When Dave tried, her hearing further deteriorated. He asked where she had been when she first learned that the Montgomery County police wanted to talk to Lloyd about the Lyon sisters.

  “Wait a minute,” said Edna. “You talk awful soft. You almost have to holler.”

  Dave approached her.

  “I can bend down here,” he said, leaning toward her. “When you found out about this case.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When you found out about this investigation from the Maryland police.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you find out? Did they come to your house and talk to you?”

  “First they called me on the phone.”

  “What did they tell you over the phone?”

  “What did they tell me? That they were investigating, you know? I can’t tell you what they told me.”

  “Because that was me that called you.”

  “Oh, it was?”

  “It was.”

  “Well, you booger.”

  “And didn’t we talk? You remember what you told me?”

  “I
don’t know.”

  “You told me I had to talk to your son Roy.”

  “Oh. You know why? Because I don’t hear too good.”

  “Exactly. So we never had a conversation about this case. I simply told you that we were the police department and I needed to talk to you, and you said, ‘You need to talk to my son.’ And you went as far as to give me Roy’s cell number.”

  “Oh now, well, maybe I did. I don’t know.”

  “I know, because I had that conversation with you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right.”

  “And we never, ever talked about this case.”

  “Now, somebody did.”

  Katie took her turn. She challenged Edna’s assertion that Lloyd could not have committed the crime. Amid Lloyd’s correspondence they had found a recent letter from Edna that began, “Hate to say this but if you did anything like they say you don’t need to be out.… I need to whip your ass when you was a boy. So make it [prison] your home. You don’t need to be out. A man do this to children need to be cut up like a pig and P out of a straw.”

  She admitted writing it.

  “Yeah, but I was mad,” she said.

  “Okay? Mad about what?”

  “Mad about all the accusations and stuff you-uns make, which we didn’t know nothing.”

  “So the accusations we made, made you write a letter to Lloyd saying—”

  “Well, maybe not you.”

  “Oh, it was me. I’m the one that’s been at your house a couple of times.”

  Katie then said, “Okay. So you think he would do bad things so he should stay in prison, but you don’t think he’s capable of doing this bad thing.”

  “No,” said Edna, simply, either rejecting Katie’s characterization or embracing the distinction—it wasn’t clear which.

  “You can see why that would be confusing to us,” said Katie.

  “Well, you know, sometimes I’m confused about what I even write.”

  “Have you ever described this investigation as ridiculous?”

  “Yes. Insane.”

  “Okay. What about it is ridiculous?”

  “Because we had nothing to do with it.”

  “Has anybody ever said that you had something to do with it, or are they asking questions about—”

  “Well, if you think—you, wait. Wait now. You’re getting my goat here.”

  “All right,” Katie said. “Bring it. Let’s see it. Bring your goats. Tell me. I want to know, and the grand jury. What about this is ridiculous?”

  “You want to know how I feel about the investigation?” Edna asked.

  “I do.”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  CONNIE AND HENRY

  In a way, Edna was right. Cold cases were more or less defined by wasted effort. When you weren’t walking down well-trodden paths, you were pursuing leads so unpromising that others had long ago abandoned them. Yet evidence could emerge from anywhere, even from missteps. They had found Lloyd only because Chris was looking so hard at Ray Mileski. In their efforts to “tickle the wire,” the detectives began to range more widely, visiting just about every Welch relative they could find in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere—Kim Pettas was living in South Dakota. The Bedford sheriff’s office was plugging away at local clan members who appeared to be well outside the inner circle but who might have useful background knowledge. And it was here, on the least consequential edges of the probe—as these things happen—that the investigation at last found something important.

  On September 17, two Bedford detectives knocked on the door of Connie Akers in nearby Salem. Connie was the only daughter of Lizzie Parker. She had grown up on Taylor’s Mountain, and the detectives hoped she might give them a better picture of that homestead in 1975, and she did. Connie had seemingly distanced herself from the rest of the clan. After her parents died, she and her only remaining sibling, Henry, had had a falling-out over their inheritance and hadn’t spoken in years. An articulate, fifty-five-year-old woman living with her husband in a nice suburban home, Connie was well dressed and well coiffed, with short gray hair that swept across her forehead, and wore fashionable glasses. And yet, as far removed from her hillbilly roots as Connie appeared, it turned out she was still surprisingly plugged in.

  When she answered the door, she told the detectives forthrightly, “I know why you’re here. Lloyd Welch.”

  The detectives told her that they were just trying to flesh out her family tree to get a better idea of who had been living on Taylor’s Mountain in the 1970s. She said she had lived there then with her parents and her three brothers.

  “Lloyd is a drifter,” she said. “He would come and go. Mother always told me to stay away from him. So I did.”

  They chatted some more. Connie sketched the layout of the property, helping to pinpoint the location of the family’s frequent bonfires. Then she announced that she had something they might want to know.

  “Okay, I can tell y’all my story,” she said. “I do remember Lloyd in 1975 coming to the house with his wife, or whatever she was. She was pregnant. It was warm weather. I remember getting clothes off the clothesline. He had a duffel bag with dirty clothes in it.” Connie said the dirty clothes were caked with freshly dried blood. “He said they were bloody because he had ground beef in it. The only reason I remember it is he told me to wash his clothes, and I told him he could wash his own clothes.”

  That Connie remembered warm weather and Helen visibly pregnant pinned the encounter to the spring of the Lyon girls’ disappearance. Given her distant relation to Lloyd, this was something she was not likely to have known without actually having encountered the couple, so it lent veracity to her account. But the real breakthrough was “freshly dried blood.”

  Otherwise, Connie seemed uninterested. She offered this single memory and that was it. She repeated that she had little or nothing to do with Lloyd or any of the other members of his immediate family. But the squad found something different on her Facebook account. Connie was conferring frequently with her Maryland cousins about the case. Soon after she was questioned, she wrote to Teddy’s wife, Stacy, about what she had been asked and what she had said. She also phoned Pat and Dick’s daughter Patricia Ann. She later wrote on Facebook to another cousin, Patricia Ann’s daughter, Amy Johnson, and explained that her story was, in part, meant to absolve her uncle Dick. “I called Pat last night to let her know I talked to police,” she wrote. “I know Dick did not bring him [Lloyd] down. He walked down with his pregnant girlfriend. That’s for having our back.”

  What did she mean by that last line?

  Connie provided her own explanation in another posting to Amy: “I’m really trying to help. I remember some things. I told them today that Dick didn’t even go around Uncle Tommy [Teddy’s father]. They didn’t like each other. There is no way Dick helped anybody do anything bad.”

  The police also learned that Connie had reached out to her estranged brother, Henry, who was four years older and lived in nearby Roanoke. It was their first conversation in more than a year. She encouraged him to watch the TV news. There was detailed coverage of the police search on Taylor’s Mountain. She told another cousin, but not the police, that Henry had been with her when Lloyd and Helen had arrived with the bloody duffel bag and that they had come not on foot but in a white car. The car was significant. A number of the Welch cousins recalled a vehicle that was variously described as a big white sedan or a green or yellow station wagon. Some said it belonged to Dick. Its automatic windows were memorably newfangled. The description of a station wagon, in particular, jibed with the old report phoned in by the IBM employee who had seen a blond child bound and gagged in one on his way to work.

  Lloyd’s bloody duffel bag, the car (or station wagon), and a raging fire suggested that the girls had been murdered and cut into pieces, stuffed into a bag or bags, and taken to Virginia to be incinerated. Connie and other neighbors remembered one bo
nfire that had lasted for days and had enveloped the mountain with a dreadful odor. This dovetailed with an odd statement Lloyd had made in the first interview, when asked to speculate on the girls’ ultimate fate. He had said they had probably been killed and burned.

  After learning that Connie had not been completely forthcoming, the squad sought to compel her full cooperation. She was subpoenaed by the Bedford grand jury in October, when, now under oath, she again told only part of what she knew. Recalled two months later, after having been warned of penalties for withholding information, she at last told the full story.

  “He placed the duffel bag between the four of us,” she said, referring to herself, Lloyd, Helen, and Henry. “It was packed enough to sit up on its own.”

  “Was the duffel bag ever opened in your presence while you were outside?”

  “Yes, because I seen the bloody clothes on top.” She described the blood as “like present blood bleeding, but it wasn’t dried brown blood to be dried for weeks. So it was, like, a maroon color.” She said it wasn’t just a spot of blood, that there was “a lot.” She said, “It smelled bad. I can remember it smelled bad.”

  “Smelled bad like anything in particular?”

  “Rotten meat.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I must have asked him, how did that happen? And he said that him and Helen were going to camp on the side of the road and that was from ground beef, ground beef that went bad.”

  The team encountered yet more reluctance from Henry, a frail, prematurely doddering man of fifty-nine with an advanced breathing disorder. He was tethered at all times to an oxygen tank. His ailment caused him to habitually retch up gobs of phlegm, which he expelled vigorously, either into a soiled handkerchief or, outdoors, freely and without much warning—every time he turned his head, Katie would ease away. Connie’s other two brothers had died. In one of her Facebook exchanges with her cousin Amy, Connie confided, “My biggest fear is that my last family member Henry was part of it on the mountain.” She had told the grand jury that her brother often hung out with Lloyd when the latter visited. When asked how Henry might have been involved, she said, “Henry wouldn’t murder the child. He wasn’t in Maryland. I meant help bury it. If he helped bury the bodies on the mountain.”

  “Why do you think Henry would bury the bodies on the mountain?”