The Last Stone Read online

  “Why do you think he said that?’

  “I don’t know. They [Dick and Teddy] were having a little whispered conversation back and forth to where I couldn’t really hear them too much.”

  “I said, ‘Hey, can you drop me off at the store there. I’m gonna get some ice cream.’”

  “Let’s break that down,” said Dave. “Something had to happen where it pissed Dick off. Why else would he have said that? Were they throwing a ruckus? What happened?”

  “No! They weren’t raising their voice or anything like that.”

  Dave asked, “How do you go from ‘I’m gonna have sex with these girls’ to now suddenly thinking about killing them?”

  “I believe that the little girl in the back is the one who was getting him upset because of her little sniffle.”

  Lloyd stuck with his story that he had exited the car, bought ice cream, and walked back to his father’s house in Hyattsville. He retold the story of returning to his uncle’s house the next day, when he saw one of the girls being raped. Four days later he had gone back to the mall to tell his misleading story, and then he had panicked, he said. He and Helen left to hitchhike to Virginia the following morning. He repeated his story about seeing Dick show up early in the morning on Taylor’s Mountain and watching from a window as his uncle and Henry lugged a heavy bag out to the fire.

  He decided now to admit that Lee had called ahead to alert Lizzie (Lee’s sister)—the call Henry said he’d overheard. Lloyd continued to deny the rest of what his cousins remembered. When they reached the end of this version, Dave again asked him to speculate about the girls’ fate. Lloyd said that he believed it was Kate Lyon’s body in the bag that went on the fire.

  “When you looked out the window and they put the bag on that fire, you knew exactly what was in that bag,” said Dave. “I mean, there was no doubt in your mind.”

  Lloyd nodded.

  “You don’t drive five hours to throw trash on a fire in Virginia at one thirty in the morning.”

  “No, you don’t. I agree with you about that.”

  Sheila Lyon was still alive in the car, Lloyd speculated, and was passed on to Henry, who abused her for a time and then killed her—Henry had told a story about him, so Lloyd now told a story about Henry. But he said he was just guessing.

  Each time Lloyd made a change to his narrative, it triggered a cascade of ill-considered implications. Dave had learned to spot these and pounce. Dave now pointed out how improbable it was for both Lloyd and Helen to have arrived at Taylor’s Mountain coincidentally on the same day his uncle Dick showed up with a body in a bag. If Lloyd now admitted that his father had called in advance, that showed something else.

  “That’s the preplanning that they put together to bring the girls, live, dead, one dead, one alive, down there,” said Dave. “That’s what we’re talking about. It’s been a week, eight days from the day they went missing until they ended up in Virginia. There’s no feasible way that Dick kept them in his house without your aunt Pat knowing. Think about it.”

  “Yeah, I agree with you, but where he kept them I don’t know.”

  “If Dick has these two girls—whether they are alive or dead—in his house, there had to have been a lot of chatter about what are we gonna do as a family? How are we gonna resolve this? Can’t just open the door and say, ‘Get out.’”

  “Right.”

  “I’m thinking, normal folks, made a mistake, now we’re left with this mess. That’s all that was talked about. There has to be a moment of panic.”

  This made too much sense for Lloyd to deny.

  “Yep. I was suckered into going up there, but nobody told me what was going to happen. Nobody said anything to me. Like I said, I was the black sheep of the family.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Dave said. “Did you get suckered into going to Virginia to let them know they need to start a fire? Not knowing what you were really doing? And when you got down there they show up with this car and a bag? Did you go down to lay the groundwork?”

  “Nope.”

  “So they just literally followed you down there?”

  “I don’t know if they followed me down there or not. All I can say is, he showed up knowing I was going to be down there.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have given you a ride?”

  “Me and Dickie didn’t see eye to eye like that. We weren’t that close. I mean, he got me to do that there, you know, to talk the girls into partying and stuff, but as far as me and him sittin’ and havin’ a conversation? Nah. Never happen.”

  “But he trusted you enough to go out and do something like this.”

  “I guess he figured that me being high all the time, me leaving all the time—”

  “But look at the ace in your pocket. I mean, let’s say in the nineties when you get hit with this [child-molestation charge], you could have looked at them and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got something on my uncle.’”

  Lloyd nodded.

  “So he trusted you enough that you wouldn’t say something. Why?”

  “I’m … that’s a good question,” said Lloyd, folding his arms and leaning back. He had clearly never considered this. And Dave was right. The abduction of the Lyon sisters, the most notorious unsolved crime in the region’s modern memory, would have been an ace indeed. It might have given Lloyd real leverage. He had complained bitterly about the unfairness of his prison sentence. Here was something he might have traded to reduce his time. And by Lloyd’s own account, there was no love lost between him and his uncle. He had no good answer.

  “After so many years I did forget about it,” he said, weakly. “I honestly did.”

  Who forgets kidnapping two little girls? If this was going to be his play before the grand jury, Dave suggested, he might as well give it up and confess to the whole thing. It wouldn’t fly. In Henry they had an eyewitness to—a participant in—throwing the bag on the fire. Connie corroborated it. Henry said he’d done it with Lloyd; Lloyd said Henry had done it with Dick.

  “Is Lloyd the one telling the truth?” Dave asked. “Is Henry telling the truth? Now, Henry is in a bad situation because emotionally he doesn’t know how to deal with it. I think as he’s gotten older, he’s gotten soft.”

  Lloyd nodded and grinned.

  “That’s weird, because Henry used to be a nasty little ass.”

  “His health’s bad. He knows he probably has only a couple more years, if that, to live. What would bother Henry the most? Do you think there’s direct involvement?”

  “I would,” said Lloyd. “I would say that it’s tearing him up so much because he got involved with one of the girls. Like I said earlier, something went wrong. It’s already went so far, and he killed ’em, and it’s tearing him up. See, it’s eating me up inside but in a different way. I didn’t kill them. I didn’t rape them. I just walked ’em out of the mall and got them in the car. I’m guilty of that. That’s as far as I’m guilty of. Them doin’ what they did is tearing them up more. It’s not tearing me up that they’re dead. It’s tearing me up that I even got involved. There’s times I could kick myself in the ass for even getting involved into going and getting them, but as far as them dying and me having a hand in it, I can’t say it’s tearing me up.”

  He repeated his belief that Dick gave Henry the older girl.

  “He had sex. They told him to get rid of ’em, and this thing about the tire iron?” Henry had earlier speculated that Lloyd might have killed one of the girls with a tire iron on the drive down from Maryland. “He’s probably saying the tire iron because that’s probably what he used.” Lloyd laughed. “I mean, that’s the only thing I can think. Why would he say a tire iron?”

  “That’s what I said. It’s an odd thing to say. What do you think Henry would have done with the second girl?”

  “He probably put her in the fire.”

  “Do you think both of them went in that fire?”

  “Yep. If Henry killed her.”

  Lloyd said the fire reeke
d so badly in the morning that it made Helen nauseated.

  WHEN WE GOT THERE

  Wearing Lloyd down worked. On interview days he was awakened early and kept waiting in Dover police headquarters. He would sit alone and shackled for hours in the interview room before the squad arrived. Then they tag-teamed him. Chris stayed back, watching on a monitor. Dave would engage Lloyd for hours on end, taking him back over the same ground again and again, alternately wooing and threatening him, offering him what looked like avenues of escape. His story wasn’t good enough, Dave kept telling him. If they were going to make charges stick against his uncle or his cousin, they needed something more. They needed verifiable details. Through it all Lloyd kept lying, and Dave mostly just absorbed his whoppers and excuses without contradiction. He repeatedly assured Lloyd that somehow all of this was working to his benefit, urging him to fight back against his family. After a lunch break, Mark and Katie would work Lloyd over for hours more. Katie played stubbornly on his conscience, stressing how certain she was that he had one, what a truly decent fellow he was at heart, how in her eyes he was always trying to do the right thing, tenaciously egging him on to display this inherent decency. Mark continued to bang away at all the obvious holes in his story.

  And every time, Lloyd broke. For all his vaunted street smarts, he never seemed to catch on to how he was being played.

  On this day Lloyd got his lunch break after four hours with Dave. He was given his choice of take-out food, and the detectives always brought back additional orders from the same place for his guards. Lloyd consistently disappointed them by selecting Arby’s. When he’d finished eating, it was Mark and Katie’s turn.

  “We’re back,” said Mark.

  “Are you surprised?” asked Katie.

  Katie had prepared an elaborate backstory about Helen’s invented journal. It was, she said, “My big thing that I’ve been working on.” Showing a flair for fiction, she explained that the journal had gotten waterlogged, and that Helen’s handwriting was so small it was hard to decipher, so it had taken her some time to make sense of it.

  “It had some emotional stuff, but I didn’t want to come in here and give you bullshit, so what we did was send it to the FBI lab, because they have ways of re-creating, you know, gluing stuff and putting them in air containers and getting stuff back together.”

  “I never knew she kept a journal,” said Lloyd, skeptically.

  “She didn’t, I don’t think, when she was with you. It was very clear that you were kind of the love of her life, you know.” Katie was laying it on thick here. “And I’m not saying that to blow smoke up your ass. I mean, her husband was—what’s the right word?—alienated by that, which I think you can understand.” Katie went on and on about the diary that did not exist.

  Katie sat behind the desk, and Mark took a chair alongside Lloyd, who was silently chewing gum. She began by presenting an entry that described a room with a pool table at Uncle Dick’s house: a room that had a bed on the floor in a closet. This was a tidbit they had gleaned from the wiretaps and from a new tip offered by Teddy Welch. Still struggling to free himself from suspicion, Teddy had called with a recovered memory. He said that on a visit to Dick and Pat’s house, he’d heard the click of pool balls and had followed the sound upstairs, where he opened the door to an attic-like room that had a pool table—this is where the couple said their pool table had been. Teddy said he saw Lloyd at one end of the table, and Helen sitting on a mattress tucked into a small closet, watching. Sitting on the other side of the table were two blond girls. Teddy said he had then been called back downstairs. The detectives wondered why he hadn’t mentioned it earlier—this was after multiple police interviews, a polygraph session, and several grand jury appearances. Since they were always accusing him of holding something back, Teddy explained, he had been working hard to recover whatever memories he could.

  He was convinced that this brief encounter explained why Lloyd had chosen to name him as the kidnapper. Lloyd would have recalled being seen with the girls, so he had acted to head that off by blaming Teddy. To the detectives, it was hard not to view Teddy’s recovered memory as tit for tat.

  But to test out the scenario, Katie said Helen had written of the upstairs poolroom in her diary.

  “Yeah, that was in the back room where the pool table was, yeah,” said Lloyd. “Right off the living room.”

  “It sounds like she [Helen] is describing something like an attic almost,” said Katie. “Like a finished attic.”

  “Oh, we really never went up there.… We stayed at Dick and Pat’s maybe two or three different times.” Lloyd said the room upstairs was kept locked.

  “She talks about this time there was a mattress in the closet, a pool table, and she speaks about two girls being in this area with you guys.”

  “Yeah. Could have been the kids. I don’t know. Not the girls from the mall. It could have been Pat’s kids. I don’t remember that. That’s got me confused.”

  “I’ll bring the copies next time so you can see them,” said Katie. “But it sounds like you and her and these two girls, and so I was wondering if somehow you guys ended up staying there because you needed a place in the interim and didn’t know that the Lyons girls were there and [they] ended up being in that room with you guys.”

  Katie was really pushing it here.

  “Nah. We didn’t stay at Dick’s house. We were at my mom’s house. When those girls came up missing we were at my mom’s house.”

  “Well, they didn’t come up missing. You guys took them from the mall.”

  “Well—”

  “Right? Okay?”

  “I’m saying when they were announced missing,” said Lloyd.

  Katie forged on. “Okay. The only thing that she said was, something I wanted to share with you, was that she hopes someday that you would do the right thing and make peace with this situation.”

  Lloyd said nothing. He shook his head and then flipped his right hand dismissively, as if to say, I have no idea.

  “Obviously, I’m telling you that she was able to piece this—I don’t know if you guys had a conversation—but she was definitely able to piece some of this stuff—”

  “I never told her about them girls. Could she have pieced it together? Knowing Helen? Yeah.”

  “Oh, she did. I mean, I’m reading that she pieced it together.”

  Lloyd seemed unaffected by this. The diary ploy didn’t appear to have troubled him at all—though it had—so Katie dropped it. She went back over Lloyd’s most recent version, and let him know that, as it now stood, he had still failed to produce enough verifiable information to nail Dickie.

  “You’ve told us the beginning part. We’re piecing together the end part based on the stuff you’ve already told us and stuff that other people have told us. The middle part is what we really need to hammer him on, because you’re saying, basically, that he had these girls and he’s the one who brought them there [to Virginia]. What we’re looking for are unique facts that we can hammer him on where he can’t refute, you know. Somebody killed them. Somebody kept them alive. He [Dick] has got his damn hands full. He doesn’t care if Lloyd and Helen are going to Bedford. You know what I mean? We can’t go and present to a grand jury in trying try to put something together against Dick that [says] you are there and then consequently these bodies just end up there. You know what I’m saying? Like, it doesn’t make sense?”

  “I know it looks like Lloyd’s the one who did it.”

  “Well, sure. And that’s what everyone is painting. And if you had a part of it, tell us! Clearly you were a teenager that got pulled into all this bullshit. You know I’m a little bit more sensitive than the average guy. You and I have had some heart-to-heart conversations. It sucks to be the outcast of the family. It sucks to be the one who nobody wants around and feel unloved, so I get that. ‘And these people finally want to have something to do with me. I’ll go smoke some dope and party with these girls if that makes me fit in.’ But there ar
e holes that don’t make sense. I’m not saying that you did more, but you knew more about what happened on the back end of this, and you just don’t wanna say anything, because you don’t want to be involved. But the truth is, you’re already involved.”

  Lloyd didn’t budge. He reiterated his story about hitchhiking, about seeing Dick pull up in the middle of the night with the bag. He was sure Dick and Teddy had sex on their minds when they went for the girls, but not him. He was loyal to Helen.

  Now Mark leaned into the conversation.

  “When we talked the last time, you told Katie and I that it took Dick about two days for him to talk you into it because you were scared.”

  Lloyd nodded in agreement. He had said that.

  “What were you scared about?”

  “I didn’t want to get involved in going and picking up girls, you know? That was really not my scene.”

  “Was it that there was going to be some trickery involved to get these girls? That’s what it seems like, that he’s wearing a security uniform to make them feel safe.”

  “I don’t know if at that time you could say there was trickery or anything like that. Like I was saying, I really didn’t want to cheat on Helen.”

  “Let me ask you this. If Dick hated you so much, why would he involve you in his plan?”

  “I think I was being used.”

  “Well, I get that sense, too.”

  “Because I was the one who walked around that mall the most.”

  “And approached them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re the sacrificial lamb,” offered Katie.

  “I was the one with the headband. I was the one with the long hair. I’m the one who looked like a total hippie, you know? Yeah, like you said. I was the lamb. The sucker.”