The Last Stone Read online

  “I mean we can’t undo the fact that you were at the mall, you saw the girls.”

  “Yeah, I admitted to that.”

  “But we haven’t made it to the point where they’re in Virginia and they’re being burned. So, somewhere in between, someone in this family took those girls down to Bedford and burned them.”

  “What car did I drive?” Lloyd asked.

  “That’s—”

  “I was seventeen years old.” Lloyd explained that he didn’t own a car at the time and that whenever he had stolen a car he’d been caught immediately. “And my dad called down there and said me and Helen’s coming down there?”

  Dave said these were things they had been told.

  Lloyd again denied it, but the detective defended the story.

  “These two [Connie and Henry] came up with this story independent of each other. They hate each other. They haven’t talked in years. There’s a hatred to the point where they had to be separated in the courtroom. That’s how bad they hated. This all has to do with money. Property, wills … it’s a dispute. Someone had to have showed up down there for them both to say the same thing, and I’m not saying it was you.” Connie and Henry, of course, had said it was Lloyd. “So, who else would have had access to a green duffel bag? Help me out here. Who in your opinion would have taken this thing? Because I think it’s unrealistic to think, it’s almost impossible to think, and I’m just saying this hypothetically, that you killed one or two of those girls, put them in a bag to where they started to decompose with blood leaching out of them—because that’s what they described—that you can do this on the side of the road and get into somebody’s car with that smell. There’s no way.”

  “There’s no way possible,” Lloyd agreed. “No.”

  So long as he adhered to his hitchhiking story, it kept him well removed from a bag stuffed with decomposing body parts. He now suggested that perhaps Teddy had concocted this story and fed it to Connie and Henry. Dave showed him pictures of cars, and Lloyd picked out a station wagon that his uncle Dickie drove. “That was, like, his baby,” he said. He was always washing it, keeping it clean. He said the car was more of a yellow color than green.

  They took a lunch break, and when Dave returned he got Lloyd to walk through the events of that day at the mall once more. Lloyd repeated his most recent version of the story: leaving the mall with Dick, Teddy, and the girls, the younger girl crying softly in the back seat; getting out at the convenience store to get ice cream for Helen; going back to Dick’s house (he had smoothly incorporated Dave’s version of where the girls had been taken); seeing his uncle raping one of the girls; going to the mall to give his false statement; and then leaving for Virginia. Once he and Helen were there, after hitchhiking down, someone arrived in a car, waking him up. He didn’t know who it was. He said he heard a man and a woman outside in conversation.

  Lloyd said the bonfire had been burning when they got there and was still burning when they went to bed. He also said he had been “scared shitless” when he left for Virginia.

  “I mean, I’ve seen Dick mad before. You know? I’ve seen him mad. And I didn’t want to be nowhere around in case he knew that I actually did see him on top of this girl. You know?”

  “Do you think there’s any way that Dick or somebody could have brought down one or two? One was burned and maybe the other one was still left alive and somebody else down there did something to them?”

  “I can’t say. I don’t know. I mean, well, possible. I last saw them at his house and that was the last time I saw him. I really didn’t know what was going on. I mean, I put two and two together a little bit here, but I didn’t think anyone was gonna be hurt, that they were gonna be hurt or anything like that.”

  “Well, tell me what you put together. It’s important to try to figure out how this thing kind of—”

  “I just kind of figured, why would my uncle, when he’s got a nice-lookin’ wife, be with a young girl? I don’t know. Maybe he’s just trying to live his youth or whatever. You know? I guess I didn’t hear right in my mind because at that time, I wasn’t thinking about molesting any girls or anything like that. That didn’t happen until years later, and I don’t know why that happened. I guess whatever snapped. I just thought it was kind of strange that he was with one of them, and she wasn’t screaming or anything like that, so I couldn’t say if it was mutual at the time or if he was forcing himself and just wore her out or what.”

  “What if he choked her out?”

  “That could have been. I mean, her eyes were closed. She wasn’t looking at me or anything like that. Her eyes were closed, so I don’t know if he had her drugged up, you know, or what. I didn’t see the other girl, so I didn’t know where she was at.”

  “Probably beat her with something,” said Dave.

  “Could have. I don’t know.”

  “And she was the one in the bag, unfortunately,” said Dave, speculating.

  “Like I said, I got scared shitless and I left. Didn’t want no part of it, and to this day I still don’t want no part of it. I mean, if I actually had to get up on the stand and testify what I saw to prove my innocence, I would do it. Right in front of him.”

  “Yeah, I mean, look what they’ve done to you.”

  Lloyd continued to assert his innocence. “Even if you offered me freedom and charges dropped, I still couldn’t tell you what happened to those girls and where they’re at. Because I had no part in it. I didn’t touch them. I didn’t walk them out of the mall. I didn’t do none of that.”

  Dave now returned to Helen’s journal, Katie’s fiction.

  “There was some stuff in there, Lloyd, but she’s not here to explain it. There was stuff in there about the station wagon with the seats laid back. There was stuff in there about you hurting kids and she felt bad about it. So, you read it for what it is. It could have been out of frustration.”

  “I believe it was,” said Lloyd.

  “Or there is truth to it. If someone would just stand up and say, ‘Look, this is what the fuck happened!’” Dave banged his hand on the desk. “Then we could go back and figure it out, but that’s not what’s going on. They’re giving these little pieces because they want to remove themselves,” which was, of course, exactly what Lloyd was doing. Dave asked him to explain what he thought had happened.

  “I think Uncle Dick killed them. I honestly do. Out of frustration, anger, or whatever, you know? Maybe they didn’t do what he wanted them to do, and he killed them.”

  “How long do you think that they were alive?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t say if he got rid of them that day that I saw them, the next day. I know my dad used to go over there a lot.”

  “And, see, that’s the stuff that we need to know, because they’re testifying that he’s the one that called Lizzie.”

  “He probably did,” said Lloyd, accepting what, minutes earlier, he had dismissed as “a crock of shit.”

  Lloyd was distinctly uncomfortable. He no doubt could feel the probe closing in, and he was still evading, but for once he seemed unsure of his next move.

  THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER WITH

  After four hours, Dave left and Katie stepped in. She buttered Lloyd up at length, going on about how much better a person he was than the rest of his family, how much more cooperative he was. Then she pleaded with him to help himself by helping them. They were on his side!

  Lloyd listened politely and held fast.

  Mark joined them. He sat in a chair alongside Lloyd, facing him, and for a while he just listened to Katie’s efforts. Then he started showing Lloyd photos of the materials found at the burn site. The evidence, he said, corroborated the stories his cousins had told.

  “We just want the truth,” said Katie. “None of us want to keep doing this.”

  That much was true. The investigation had taken over her life to such an extent that it was causing problems at home. She had left off working on child-abuse cases because they were emot
ionally exhausting, only to be drawn into the worst case of her career. It was consuming her, stealing part of her soul. She had begun working with a therapist to deal with it. She hadn’t told the department about that; she was paying for the therapy herself. Her physical health had suffered. She blamed it on the long hours and the stress. As a mother, she looked at Mary Lyon and could not imagine being in her place. But she took pains not to let any of this show, especially to her colleagues. Before Lloyd, everything she did and said was a performance.

  “Look, this is a race,” she told him. “We’ve got all these people that have something to lose at this point. Whoever gets over the finish line first, meaning whoever’s gonna come and just break and tell us the truth first, is the one that is in the best position. Everybody is starting to crumble.”

  Lloyd said he knew nothing more.

  Then Mark used a different approach, something they had not tried. He had catalogued Lloyd’s lies. The list was nothing short of astonishing.

  “I would ask you to think, as I say this, put yourself in a position of a reasonable person. You’re a reasonable guy. But if you are a reasonable person listening to this case, what would you think when I get to the end?”

  He then reviewed the list, item by item. Lloyd kept trying to interrupt, but Mark wouldn’t let him. It was extensive. It started with the original 1975 story, which Lloyd had admitted at the time was mostly a lie. Then there was one he’d made up in his first conversation with Dave. “You say, ‘I was never at Wheaton Plaza. I never talked to any police. I don’t remember any of that.’”

  “No, I said I was there that day.”

  “No, you initially said that you weren’t.”

  Then there was the failed polygraph administered by Katie. Then it was telling Dave that the kidnappers were Teddy and the older man he lived with. When it was pointed out that Teddy had been just eleven, Mark continued, “you finally come around and say, ‘Okay, it was Dick that was with us. Dick was driving the car.’”

  Then Mark reminded Lloyd that he had said he thought the girls had been raped, killed, and burned.

  “Do you remember saying that?”

  “I didn’t say raped and burned.”

  “You did.”

  “I said raped and killed.”

  “You said they were probably raped and burned.”

  “No, I didn’t. No.”

  “Lloyd, I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not going to.”

  “Okay. So, when are you all going to charge me?”

  “Just hear me out.” Mark then explained how their investigation in Virginia confirmed, in fact, that at least one body had been burned.

  “Now, again, reasonable person, Lloyd. Two people who haven’t talked to each other in two years who get hit up cold by the police and come up with those kind of details on the same story?”

  “I’ll say it again, when are you charging me?” asked Lloyd, who was growing increasingly agitated. He sat with his arms folded, coiled.

  Mark went on, “And now all of the sudden we find human bones in that same location? In addition to those bones, we find material consistent with a green army duffel bag. We find this piece of wire”—he pointed to a photo on a sheaf of paper on the desk—“which is consistent with the wire that was in that girl’s wire-framed glasses. We find these beads that are melted together, and we know that one of the girls was wearing a beaded necklace. We find this button from a pair of pants that are the same kind of pants that one of the girls was wearing.” In fact, Mark was deliberately stretching the truth here. None of these scraps could be linked to a duffel bag or to what Sheila or Kate had worn, but Lloyd didn’t need to know that. “So we’ve got a problem here, Lloyd.”

  “Your problem is that I didn’t do nothing to those girls.”

  “Lloyd, you can explain away each little piece, but when you have to explain away everything, what’s the reasonable person [going to] think?”

  “Well, you all think I did it. I mean, let’s be for real.”

  Mark said he knew that Lloyd left the mall with the girls, and also that he had been on the mountain at the same time they had been tossed into the fire.

  “Now, what happened in between is what I’m hoping you can help us figure out, because those two things are fact.”

  Lloyd now offered, at last, something new. He said his trip to Bedford with Helen was prompted by his fear of his uncle Dick.

  “He knew that I knew that he had them,” said Lloyd.

  “If you are so scared and so upset, why did you go back to the mall and risk being put right in the middle of it?” asked Katie.

  “I had a little bit of conscience, a little concern.”

  “But then you misled them.”

  Lloyd nodded. She was right; this made no sense. If he were concerned about the girls, why lie to the police?

  “Every time we jump a little hurdle with you, your face slams in the mud,” she said.

  “I felt that if I gave a lie that maybe it would eventually come out,” Lloyd explained, unconvincingly.

  “But how does that ease your conscience?” asked Mark. “By putting the police on the wrong trail? It makes it worse!”

  “I don’t know. I was a druggie back then. I was an alcoholic. And I’ve told you all that I can tell you. I’m gonna say it for the last time, charge me. I’ll get a lawyer, go from there. If not, I did not do nothin’ to those girls. I don’t want to be charged for something I didn’t do.”

  “Then help us sort it out and help us figure out who did what.”

  Lloyd was fed up.

  “Okay. I’m on state property,” he said. He stood abruptly, walked to the door, opened it, and spoke to the guard in the hallway. “I’m ready to go, sir. This conversation is over with.” Mark leaned back in his chair and grimaced. Then he and Katie stood and started gathering their papers.

  “Oh, that’s unfortunate, Lloyd,” said Katie.

  But Lloyd abruptly closed the door and returned to his seat. He was in too deep to walk out. Katie worked to salvage the situation.

  “We’re sitting here trying to give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “The last thing we want to do is pin this on somebody who didn’t do it.”

  Katie sometimes tried to simply overwhelm Lloyd. She would start talking, throwing out ideas, her words flowing in great improvisational gusts, easing from one concept to the next, alternately flattering, reasoning, bargaining, confronting, empathizing. Mark called it her superpower; he joked that sometimes suspects would confess just to shut her up. Katie turned it on full bore now. She invoked Lloyd’s children, who, she said, wanted this all to be over. She talked about mistakes she had made in her own life. She was somebody who knew mistakes. Life, she said, was about learning and moving on …

  She was still at it when the session passed the six-hour mark. It was a magnificent torrent of cajolery, all of it delivered earnestly and with a straight face.

  And finally, Lloyd, as he did at all these sessions, caved in. He sighed heavily, and, interrupting Katie’s monologue, which showed no signs of slowing down, he asked the question he always asked before offering something new.

  “Okay. Let me ask you this question before—I didn’t mean to cut you off. If I sit here and tell you from day one what went down to day two, what’s gonna happen to me?”

  DON’T WORRY, YOU’RE IN GOOD HANDS

  Lloyd didn’t give the detectives time to respond. Apparently, as he listened to Katie, he had worked out how to modify his story.

  “First of all, I didn’t kill ’em,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Katie.

  “I didn’t burn ’em.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was not my green bag. It was Lee’s bag out of his trunk.”

  This was new. He had now brought his late father into the mix.

  “Okay,” Lloyd said, “I did not do that. I can tell you who did.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s gonna happen to me?” />
  “Well, why would anything happen to you?” Katie asked. “If you didn’t do the crime?”

  “Because I was involved. I was at the mall.”

  “You asked Dave the same question last time right before you told us about Dick, and I’m gonna give you the same answer that Dave gave you. We can’t answer that question for you until we know what your role was and if you were involved in killing them.”

  “I wasn’t involved in killing them, and I wasn’t involved in raping them.”

  “Okay.”

  Lloyd still insisted that Teddy had lured the girls from the mall. The rest of his story was the same, too, but he revised his account of the car that arrived on Taylor’s Mountain early in the morning. He now said that he knew who was in it.

  “Dickie came down,” he said. “It was about one, one thirty [in the morning]. There was somebody else in the car. I don’t know who else was in the car. There was a big ol’ fire going, and I seen Dickie and Henry grab a bag and walk over to the fire and throw it in. Me and Helen, after that, said it was time for us to book out, and we left. What was in that bag, to my mind, was the girls.”

  “Both of them?”

  “I don’t know if it was both of them or one of them. I honestly don’t know. All I know is, yes, me and Ted did pick them up [at Wheaton Plaza].”

  “Tell us how that went down,” said Mark.

  “Just asked them if they wanted to get high, and they said yeah.”

  “Now, how did that happen?” Mark asked. “Did you approach them inside the mall first? Outside?”

  “We saw ’em go in. We tried to catch them and ask ’em if they wanted to get high before they got all the way into the mall, but we didn’t get a chance to get to them, so I guess that’s why they saw me watching, because I was trying to see who they were hooking up with and where they were going. So I guess that’s why everybody said they saw me watching them. We were gonna party, that’s all, but I guess you could say in the long run, I got scared and I didn’t want any. I told Ted and them, I said I didn’t want anything to do with it. Dick did take us all back to his house. I did get out at the store, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I was scared.”