The Last Stone Page 27

  Katie pointed out that Henry and Connie directly contradicted him.

  “I understand that,” said Lloyd, confident now that he had fully stated his new version of the story, one that incorporated all that he had absorbed from the detectives. He had once more removed himself as far as possible from culpability. This was his new story, and he was going to stick with it.

  “Everything I just told you is the way it went down. Everything.”

  They worked on him for another hour, but Lloyd was done. They finished by talking up the proposed ride in the RV down to Bedford for his grand jury testimony.

  “Is there anything we can do for you at the jail?” asked Dave.

  “Get me the hell out,” Lloyd said.

  They laughed. Dave said the grand jury appearance would happen in a week.

  “It’s all of them against me. I already know that.”

  “Well, you get your day, and that’s what we want to do.”

  Lloyd would never appear before a grand jury.

  11

  A Trick or the Truth?

  Deputy State’s Attorney Pete Feeney and Detective Dave Davis with Lloyd Welch

  GOD AS MY WITNESS, NO

  Wiry, flinty, and truculent as ever, Dick Welch emerged from months of innuendo and intense surveillance a battered man. He was about to turn seventy but seemed older. In addition to his heart trouble he faced a frightening array of accusations. Various family members had accused him of ugly and violent behavior toward them in the past, even of abusing the family dog. Lloyd had named him as the man who had planned the kidnapping of Sheila and Kate Lyon and who then presided over their gang rape, murder, and dismemberment.

  Dick denied it all, and if he was lying, he was a lot better at it than his nephew. He said little, and what he did say was simple and consistent. Indeed, he behaved like someone wrongly accused, bewildered and frustrated by wounding falsehoods and at times appropriately indignant. It helped that he seemed so harmless. The man with the menacing look in old snapshots—lean, with combed-back dark hair, long sideburns, a tight T-shirt, and a smirk—was now “Poppy.” His voice would rise to a pleading whine when he was upset, and the squad had gone to great lengths to upset him. Apart from publicly shaming him, Mark Janney had told him, in so many words, that no matter what he said, he was “going down.” Virginia’s death penalty or at least a life sentence loomed behind the threat. But by February 2015, almost a year after the squad had turned to him, nothing connected Dick Welch to the Lyons beyond Lloyd’s word, which was, of course, worthless.

  A big part of the story about Dick wasn’t credible: that the girls had been imprisoned in his house for a week or more before being killed. It had not been a big house, and living in it with him were his wife and four children. It had been across the street from the county courthouse and just a stone’s throw from the Hyattsville police headquarters. Someone surely would have noticed the two little blond girls the entire region was looking for. It was, frankly, far more likely that Lloyd had invented Dick’s role, just as he had Teddy’s, to deflect attention from his own guilt. Dick was not an educated man. He said he could neither read nor write. But he wasn’t stupid. He was about the only one in the family who had nothing to say. He had stayed off the phones during those months of surveillance, and when Teddy had paid him that surprise visit wearing a wire, Dick had been entirely consistent. He knew nothing about the case. When he was summoned to appear before the Bedford grand jury on February 6, he came without his lawyer. He had recovered his composure since the browbeating session at his house the previous September. Entering the grand jury chamber, he noticed his now familiar antagonists in the room.

  He remarked, “Oh, I see my buddies are here!”

  And they went at him for hours, prosecutors and detectives. It was like a nightmare version of the old TV program This Is Your Life. All the terrible things said about him were dumped in his lap. Randy Krantz, the Bedford prosecutor, listed all the family members—female and male—who said Dick had sexually abused them as children.

  Speaking of Joann Green, Dick’s sister-in-law, Krantz asked, “Do you have any explanation why she would tell the police that you sexually assaulted her?”

  “I thought we were talking about the Lyon girls,” said Dick.

  “Well, I’m asking: Did you sexually assault your sister-in-law?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any explanation why she would say you did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So it’s your testimony under oath that you did not sexually assault her?”

  “No.”

  “Ever.”

  “Not as I know of.”

  “Well, what do you mean, ‘not as you know of’?”

  “I didn’t do it. I mean, I don’t know where it came from. Okay?”

  “Have you ever sexually assaulted any of your family members?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Do you have any reason why other family members would say that you did?”

  “Well, they’re all a bunch of liars. I know that. You can’t believe half of what any of them says. That’s why me and my wife stay to ourselves.”

  Later, Krantz came back at him in the same vein.

  “Do you think it is unusual,” he asked, “for one person, one person such as yourself, to be accused by multiple people of sexually molesting children?”

  “Uh-huh,” Dick agreed.

  “Your sister-in-law, Joann Green, has accused you of sexually molesting her. Okay? Your nephew—did you ever take your nephew hunting up in Upper Marlboro?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What were you hunting?”

  “Squirrel.”

  “Okay, so if he says you took him hunting, that would be the truth.”

  “Take him hunting? Yeah.”

  “But if he says you sexually molested him—”

  “That would be a lie.”

  “—that would be a lie. So he’s lying, and Joann Green is lying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your own daughter says—”

  “That’s a whole lot—”

  “—you sexually molested her.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not true.”

  “My point to you, Mr. Welch, is simply this: Would you agree with me that the type of person that would abduct and molest and murder two girls is the same type of person these other people would accuse of sexually molesting them, [someone] that would have sexual interest in children?”

  “I’m not that type of guy. I did not. I don’t like little girls.”

  “What do you like?”

  “I like … I like my wife.”

  When they came around to asking him whether he had any involvement in the Lyon case, Dick was succinct and firm.

  “God as my witness, no.”

  “Did you transport one or both of these girls—Sheila and Kate Lyon—from Wheaton Plaza to your residence?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’ve never been there.”

  “Did you have sexual contact with either Sheila or Kate Lyon?”

  “God as my witness, no.”

  He gave similar crisp answers to the whole litany of accusations.

  “Do you have knowledge of any of these things that I’ve talked about?”

  “No, but I wish I did.” He had earlier said that he wished he could help the detectives solve the mystery. “But I didn’t.”

  “Do you have any explanation why people would say that you did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is your chance to explain.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why I’m getting accused, them saying I did this, I done that. I haven’t.”

  “All right. So your answer is, then, you don’t have any explanation?”

  “No, because I didn’t do anything.”

  TUD

  That is where the case against Uncle Dick stood until May, when the squad f
ound someone who confirmed Lloyd’s accusation. Yet another Welch cousin, Wes Justice, a man Lloyd hardly knew, ten years his junior, would tell the grand jury that his uncle Dick had spontaneously confessed to him his role in the crime and had also named Lloyd and Lloyd’s father, Lee. Better yet, unlike Lloyd, Wes had no obvious animus toward his uncle. It had taken months to fully pry the story out of him.

  Wes’s mother, Ruth, was a younger sister to Dick and Lee. Wes was a plumber and looked like one, a disheveled, portly man, unshaven, with a mop of salt-and-pepper hair that was usually crushed under a baseball cap. His family nickname was “Tud.” He was a simple man. One of the things he liked to do was fart into Mason jars, which he sealed and kept in the freezer—at one point he showed off this collection to Mark. He would uncork his preserved flatulence around unsuspecting visitors and collapse with giggles at their disgust. Emotional and blunt, Wes had an ambivalent connection to his extended family; he seemed at once loyal and afraid—so afraid that the detectives wondered whether he, too, might have been abused as a child.

  On a summer afternoon in 2014, at about the time the full-court press on the Welch family began, Wes stopped by his uncle’s house in Hyattsville. He said he was driving past, taking a break from a job in Washington, and saw his uncle mowing the lawn, so he pulled into the driveway. In the conversation that ensued, Wes said, his uncle told him about the Lyon case investigation and “came out and said that he raped those girls.”

  This was the version Wes told the grand jury in May 2015.

  “When Dickie was telling you that the girls were raped, who did he say was involved in their rape?” the prosecutor asked him.

  “Lee.”

  “Lee Welch?”

  “Lee Welch and Lloyd.”

  “Lloyd Welch. And who else?”

  “That’s the only thing he told [me] was them two and him,” said Wes.

  He said Dick told him how the girls had been lured by Lloyd from Wheaton Plaza, and then raped repeatedly on a pool table in Dick’s house before being killed. They had been taken to Taylor’s Mountain—Wes was uncertain whether they were alive or dead at that point—in a green station wagon owned by his cousin Jimmy Welch. The car had then been hidden in a dilapidated barn on the property.

  The first time the squad had heard this story, or part of it, was the previous October, after Wes and his cousin Norma Jean Welch were subpoenaed to appear before the Bedford grand jury. Conferring beforehand by phone, Wes told Norma Jean that he was worried he would be asked about “a green station wagon” that he believed had been used to carry the Lyon girls south. Norma Jean, who was trying to be helpful, passed this along to the squad—this is what ultimately prompted the exhaustive and futile air and ground search of Taylor’s Mountain. On the same day Norma Jean called, Mark and Katie had driven to Wes’s house in Prince Frederick, in southern Maryland.

  They knocked on Wes’s door on Halloween, a few hours before trick-or-treaters would be out. Wes was startled to see the detectives, and rattled. He couldn’t imagine why they had come all that way. And he was not ready to tell the same story he would later tell the grand jury. As his grandchildren played in the next room, he sat with his wife, Robin, a large blond woman who was considerably more poised than her husband, and swore he knew nothing about the case apart from what he had seen online. But he confirmed his remarks to Norma Jean about a green station wagon, which was something that had not been part of any public discussion. Mark and Katie wanted to know where he had heard it. At this, Wes melted down. Sobbing, he stormed from the room and the house. Robin called after him, telling him to calm down and tell the truth. Mark followed him out to the yard.

  “I’m trying to think of who I heard it from!” Wes shouted in frustration.

  “I know your heart is in the right place,” said Mark. “We know you don’t want to get involved.”

  Pointing to Wes’s grandchildren, Mark invoked John and Mary Lyon. “Can you imagine those two beautiful kids you’ve got in there? They know their kids got raped, got murdered.”

  Wes expressed his revulsion and disbelief that anyone, much less someone in his own family, could do such a thing.

  “That station wagon might be the key to the whole thing,” said Mark.

  Wes calmed down. He then told Mark that his uncle Dick had mentioned the car to him in their August conversation. He repeated this when he appeared before the grand jury for the first time, in November.

  “He [Dick] just popped up out of the blue about a station wagon up in the mountains in a barn,” he told the jurors. “He said it’s covered up. And I think he said there’s blankets in the back of it.”

  “Why did that pop up?” a prosecutor asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Wes said the car had belonged to his cousin Jimmy Welch. At the close of his testimony, he had added something intriguing. Summing up, the Virginia prosecutor had stated, “Here’s the thing. Obviously, something very terrible happened to those girls. Okay? Age ten. Age twelve. Okay?” And Wes had responded, “I understand. Something—you’re right. Something terrible happened, cut them up, burned them up, or something.”

  Here was an echo of Lloyd’s own original speculation, which Wes could not have heard. It prompted the squad to invite him in for another chat in Gaithersburg on April 26. When he didn’t show up, Mark and Katie went looking for him. They found him at home in Prince Frederick that evening. Wes said his phone was broken, so he hadn’t been able to call and cancel, but this, the detectives told him, was not the kind of invitation to be ignored. A number of people were about to be charged with perjury, Mark said, and Wes was on the list.

  The plumber was horrified. How could they connect him with such a terrible thing!

  “A lot of people have tried to obstruct our investigation,” Mark explained. “The prosecutors are pretty fed up.”

  The detective had brought a transcript of Dick Welch’s grand jury testimony and, bluffing, told Wes that his uncle had talked in detail about their August conversation. Mark said Dick’s account had contradicted Wes’s about a number of things (this was not true).

  “It’s hard to think that a seventy-year-old man would remember more than you,” said Mark.

  Wes panicked. He pleaded that he’d told them everything. All he knew was that his cousin Jimmy’s car had been involved. For this they were dragging him into it! He had been ten years old when it happened! What could he possibly have known?

  “I’m actually here for your benefit,” said Mark. “The grand jury doesn’t believe you don’t know more.”

  Wes repeated, almost spitting the words, “Dick did not mention about no girls. Nothing like that.”

  Mark asked again how the subject of the station wagon had come up.

  “It’s been so long,” said Wes. “I have totally blocked it out!”

  Katie tried to soothe him. She told him he was the one person they had interviewed who actually showed some feelings about the matter. “The only one who shows any semblance of caring,” she said, using the same approach she often employed with Lloyd. “We know you have a conscience,” she said, and then added, “but there’s no way in hell you can forget this stuff.”

  Wes complained that they were “jumping down my throat!”

  “It’s about doing the right thing,” said Katie.

  They talked about closure, and Wes agreed that the Lyon family deserved some. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s unreal how anybody could do something like this.”