The Last Stone Read online

  “Because his momma would tell him to do it. We always did what Momma told us to do.”

  Henry had been questioned by the Bedford police on the same day they first visited Connie. He remembered Lloyd as a troublemaker, a thief, someone often in trouble with the law. Significantly, he said that when Lloyd had visited in 1975, there had been talk even then of his involvement in the Lyon sisters’ case. This was almost forty years before Lloyd’s name had been publicly linked to it. He said that before Lloyd showed up on Taylor’s Mountain with “a heavyset girl” in “a big green car,” he had heard “Mom and Dad talking about the [Lyon] kids coming up missing and stuff. And, them talking, saying they wouldn’t put it past Lloyd to do something like that, so I don’t know.”

  “Why did they link Lloyd with it?”

  “Because of the news and everything and everybody talking about it, you know?’

  “Back then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was Lloyd’s name out there then?”

  “Yeah.”

  It had not been.

  Before the October grand jury, Henry downplayed Lloyd’s surprise visit. It was of so little note, he insisted, that he had almost no memory of it. He said Lloyd and Helen had left the day after they arrived—everyone else, including Lloyd, remembered a weeklong stay. He also recalled a phone call to his mother from Lloyd’s father just after his arrival, specifically inquiring about the Lyon girls.

  “He asked my mom did he have two kids with him. She said no. So that’s all I heard about it.”

  This was startling and unexpected. When Mark and Katie paid Henry a visit the next day to question him further, he was annoyed. Coughing and wheezing, he protested, “I told y’all everything I knew. Ain’t no more I can tell you. It’s like y’all are harassing me now. I’m fed up with it.”

  But Henry knew a lot more. For his second grand jury testimony that December, he arrived with a black bag containing a portable oxygen pump connected to his nose by a plastic tube. He was stooped and looked beleaguered. Told there were discrepancies in his statements, he was warned that unless he sorted them out he would be in serious jeopardy. In a small interview room at the Bedford courthouse, Dave and Mark worked him over hard prior to his formal testimony. It was the only time in this case when Dave remembered losing his temper. He knew Henry was hiding something—Connie’s testimony told them that—and he’d had enough. He accused Henry of being directly involved in the crime.

  “Do you know what happened to those kids’ bodies?” asked Dave.

  “No, I do not know. I wish I knew; I would tell you!”

  “Did Lloyd come down here to get rid of those two kids’ bodies?” asked Mark.

  Henry was shocked and frightened.

  “I don’t know what he did, honest to God! I don’t know. He coulda had ’em in the trunk of his car. I don’t know. I mean, he was gone for a while and then he came back.” Henry speculated that Lloyd might have killed one of the girls with a tire iron on the drive down to Virginia, but emphasized that this was just conjecture.

  “When he first got there, what did he have with him?” asked Dave.

  “He had his girlfriend with him; that’s all I know.”

  “What else did he have?”

  “I don’t know. He had some clothes with him as far as I know.”

  “This is where we’re going with this,” said Dave, alluding to the grand jury questioning that would shortly take place. “This is the stuff that we need you to tell.”

  “That’s the only thing I seen is the old girl with him and his clothes.”

  “What were the clothes in?”

  “A suitcase.”

  “A suitcase?”

  “A suitcase or a bag or something. I don’t remember.”

  “What color was the bag?”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Was it a big bag? A small bag?”

  “I don’t know. Honest to God. It’s been so long ago.”

  “This is important. This is really important,” said Dave. “This is for you. This isn’t for us, because we already know what the answers are, but we are looking for you to tell us. Because you need to clean this up for yourself. The commonwealth attorney is not liking what he’s hearing from these other folks. I’m just being straight with you. So, if you can help us undo this, you’ll be helping yourself.”

  “I think he had a brown suitcase with clothes in it or a duffel bag, like an army duffel bag?”

  “Like an army duffel bag,” said Dave. “So now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “It was like a brown or, from what I remember, or green, a light green.”

  “What was in this bag? This is important.”

  “Clothes was the only thing he said he had in it. Clothes.”

  “He needed to wash some clothes? Or he needed to do what with what was in that bag?”

  Henry protested that he knew no more. Dave now exploded with impatience.

  “It was full of bloody sheets and bodies!” he shouted. “It stunk! Connie fucking looked in it! And you were standing right there! And she said you walked away and helped Lloyd. For God’s sake, Henry, we’re trying to help you!”

  “Hell no. Connie’s wrong!” he said. “She’s telling a fuckin’ lie right there.”

  “Oh, no,” said Dave. “She’s going to testify to it.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Right! She’s gonna testify to it.”

  “Oh my Lord.”

  “She’s probably testifying right now.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “The same bag that you burned!”

  “Oh God.”

  Henry now gave them a very detailed story, one that he had not spelled out in his interviews or during his first grand jury appearance. He repeated it later that day in formal testimony.

  “It was a green duffel bag tied on the top [of the car],” he said. He described it as a big bag that placed on end reached up to his waist. It was cinched on top with drawstrings.

  “Were you asked to do something with that duffel bag?”

  “Yeah. We had a big fire outside, burning where we’d cleaned off some brush and stuff out in the garden we was going to have for next summer. We had a bunch of wood and stuff we had put up there to burn. And we was out there burning it. And he [Lloyd] said, ‘I got some old clothes and stuff in this old duffel bag here.’ He said that the old dog that had belonged to the girl that was with him, he said they had the car jacked up and the dog got underneath the car. Said the car rolled off and killed the dog. He told her that he’d bring it down there and bury the dog on the property there. And he said, ‘Well, why don’t we just throw it over in the fire and give it, like, an Indian burial?’”

  Henry said the bag had red stains.

  “He said it was transmission fluid, spilled in the trunk of his car.”

  “Mr. Parker, I want to caution you,” the prosecutor said. “I want you to take your time, make sure you tell the grand jury exactly what you told the investigators, because they’ve got that on a recording.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Did you think that what was on the duffel bag was blood?”

  “Could have been from the dog. I don’t know.”

  “That’s not what I asked you. At the time did you think it was blood?”

  “Well, it could have been.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not saying that it was or it wasn’t.”

  “How heavy was the duffel bag?”

  “It was probably about seventy, eighty pounds, because he said the dog was a big dog.”

  “How many duffel bags did he have?”

  “Well, we went out to the fire and throwed one in there. That one he throwed out I never did see that.”

  “Did your momma tell you to burn the duffel bag?”

  “Well, she told me to take it out and burn it in the fire.”

  “The big, heavy one?”

  “Yeah.”

&nbs
p; “Was anything in that bag when you burned it?”

  “He said it was a dog. I never looked into the bag.”

  “Did he have the bag with him when you first saw him or did he have to go to the car and get the bag out of the car?”

  “He had it sitting outside the car.”

  “Did you throw the duffel bag into the fire?”

  “Well, I told him to get it where we could pitch it up in the fire, because it was awful hot, getting close to it.”

  “Did it take both of you to do that?”

  “We swung it like this,” moving his arms to demonstrate. “I said, ‘Swing it and throw it up in the fire,’ so it would be up in there.”

  Henry said Lloyd threw a second bag into the fire himself.

  He was asked about the phone call between his mother and his uncle Lee. Henry told the grand jury that when his mother was on the phone, she exclaimed, “Oh my God!”

  “I’m like, ‘What is it, Momma?’ She said ‘You don’t need to know. It’s on a need-to-know basis.’”

  He said later his mother explained to him what was going on.

  “What exactly did your mother say?”

  “She said it was two kids missing up there in Maryland and they were thinking he had the kids. It was about six months later after she told me, because she wouldn’t discuss it with me.”

  Later in the same testimony, Henry elaborated: “She had said he had two kids, babysitting them that day, and then it was later that she said the two kids had been killed.”

  “Did your mother ever tell you what was in that bag?”

  “No, she never did.”

  “Exactly what did your momma say?”

  “Said it was two kids missing in Maryland and they were thinking that he had the kids.”

  “Okay.”

  “And they didn’t know where they were at, and they were still looking for them.”

  “And that was when, how long after he left, that she told you that?”

  “It was about six months later after she told me she wouldn’t discuss it with me.”

  “Lloyd was still there though when you and him—obviously—threw the duffel bag into the fire.”

  “Yeah. Later that night—see, my dad stayed out there to keep the fire from getting away, you know. And Lloyd stayed out there with him the rest of the night tending to the fire.”

  “How long did the fire burn?”

  “It burned for a day and a half.”

  Henry now said that Lloyd and Helen had stayed with them for about a week, sleeping on the living room floor. On further examination he said the duffel bag had smelled, “like something dead in it. It was a dog. And it was red on the outside of it. I didn’t know how long he had had the dog in the car with him.” He said the red substance on the bag was “sticky.” Lloyd had dragged the bag over near the fire himself, and then Henry had helped him toss it up into the flames.

  The detectives had reason to suspect that Henry had been more than just a helper. His sister had told them about his sexual interest in her as a child, including one preplanned assault from which she had escaped. And when they forced him to revisit the episode Henry seemed deeply troubled, to a degree they found surprising. Pressed by Katie about the bags and the fire, and told that Lloyd had implicated him, Henry had broken down.

  “Just knowin’ those babies wasn’t taken care of like they should have been. I couldn’t deal with it. If I had heard some babies like that I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t! Myself!” he said pointing to himself. “Oh God, no. I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. I’d go kill myself. I’d jump off a damn bridge or somethin’ somewhere.”

  9

  Wanna Get High?

  Lloyd Welch and Helen Craver

  JANUARY 28, 2015

  A bloody duffel bag, a bonfire, family phone calls from Maryland to Virginia linking Lloyd to the Lyon sisters—the mystery now had a terrible ending. This was not what the squad had been looking for when they zeroed in on the Welch clan, but it was huge. Amid all the man-hours and expertise and effort over the latter half of 2014, the Bedford sheriff’s office, off on a tangent, had found powerful new evidence.

  Lloyd had admitted being present when the girls were abducted, and now others had placed him squarely at the story’s end, the disposal of bodies, or of at least one. The squad had always been coy with Lloyd about what they knew, mostly because they knew so little. Now, encountering him again early in 2015, they at last had something solid he had not told them.

  Little had reached Lloyd about the extensive effort that had taken place over the previous half year. Teams of expert consultants had surveyed the wooded landscape of Taylor’s Mountain on foot and from the air. Parts of it had been dug up and the soil sifted, work that continued. A persistent search had been made for a car that fit the description of the one used to deliver the duffel bags. If it had carried a bag as bloody as the one described, there might still be traces of the girls’ DNA inside. It was not found. The location of the bonfire had been fixed, and the dirt there scooped out and sifted through screens. A fragment of charred human bone was found, along with scraps of singed fabric that might have been worn by the girls or come from the bags described by Connie and Henry. Melted fragments of beads were found that might have matched a necklace Kate had worn, and a piece of wire recovered might have matched the frame of Sheila’s glasses. None of these items tested out convincingly. No DNA could be recovered from the bone. As with so many other leads in this case, these bits were suggestive but inconclusive. There was nothing distinctive enough to be considered evidence. In the end, they just confirmed that when you looked hard enough you found things that resembled what you were looking for.

  This was true of everything except Connie and Henry. Here were two eyewitnesses to what appeared to be the story’s bloody end, whose testimonies jibed, and who had offered them independently. Oddly, their reluctance to tell the full story augmented their credibility. Real evidence.

  By January, Lloyd was back in the general prison population. Dressed again in white denim, he looked fitter and better groomed. The gray hair on the sides of his head had been trimmed so short he looked bald, and his white goatee was clipped close to his chin. He was again taken to the upstairs interview room at Dover police headquarters early in the morning. Dave came just before ten, carrying a manila folder and wearing a neatly pressed blue sweatshirt. They had not seen each other in six months.

  “What’s happening, stranger?” he greeted Lloyd.

  “Well, look who it is!”

  Dave set a cup of coffee on the table before Lloyd and then walked back out to ask a guard to remove the handcuffs and chains. When they shook hands, Dave grasped Lloyd’s arm like an old friend. He promised that this time the coffee was hot, “black and all,” just the way Lloyd liked it.

  “What have you been up to?” Dave asked. “I see you’re not in the orange.”

  “No, I’m surviving.”

  “Is it bad in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I mean, I’ve got my status back and everything, but I hate all this mouth from these guys. Shit comes on TV. They see it in the papers and shit like that. ‘Oh yeah, that’s that motherfucker; he’s the one who did it,’ you know? So I keep my door shut and stay to myself.”

  He said he’d had a few “little threats” but no attacks. There had been grumblings when stories appeared about the grand jury and the dig on Taylor’s Mountain. He knew that his uncle Dick had been named as a person of interest in October and that in December his aunt Pat had been indicted. That had all been reported on TV.

  Dave told him that he looked good.

  “I’m tryin’ to stay positive,” said Lloyd.

  “I think we’re at a good spot,” said the detective. “I really do. And that’s why we came back. It has been six or seven months. We wanted to talk. We wanted to share with you all of the things—that day we left here, every day since
then, I kid you not, including weekends and nights, we’ve been working on this thing. And I brought a lot of stuff to share with you. I’ve got a lot of questions for you. There are no charges. I know that’s always a concern when we meet.”

  “Right.”

  Dave repeated this a few more times. He wanted to make sure Lloyd didn’t spook. He called the legal problems encountered by Dick and Pat “unfortunate,” and reinforced the idea that all of Lloyd’s relatives were out to get him. Pat had been caught lying, although about what Lloyd was unclear.

  “Okay. I’m here as a sex offender. I understand that. So, yeah, they’re going to say, ‘He did it.’”

  “There’s some things that we need to work out between us,” said Dave, “and I think this can be a good outcome, a real positive outcome.”

  Lloyd suddenly made a point of saying that he had been only seventeen in March 1975. The age of majority in Maryland was eighteen. As a seventeen-year-old, he might be able to avoid being charged as an adult, but math was not one of Lloyd’s strengths. “I’m fifty-eight now,” he said. “I just turned fifty-eight in December, okay?” That much was true, but if he had turned fifty-eight in 2014, it meant he had turned eighteen in 1974.

  Dave didn’t argue with him. He was focused on very specific things—Teddy, the duffel bags, and Uncle Dick. Teddy’s broken arms and the bloody duffel bags undermined two critical parts of Lloyd’s story. Teddy had almost certainly not been involved in the abduction, and Lloyd, who always said he had fled at the first sight of the girls being abused and had never returned, had in fact helped dispose of their remains. Rather than confront him outright, the detective was going to lead him to these contradictions step by step, without showing his hand. He started with Teddy.

  “Do you remember when you guys were in the mall or the ride over or the ride back, however you remember it, do you remember if there’s anything wrong with him [Teddy], like, physically wrong with him?”

  “Besides being gay?”

  Lloyd got a good laugh over this.

  “No. Well, other than that. Like, was he injured or anything like that, that might have prevented him from doing something? Was there physically something wrong with him that you could actually see?”