The Last Stone Read online

  “We know you are a good guy,” said Katie. “People put you in a bad spot because they told you something.”

  “Did you hear that?” Robin said to him. “They think you’re not telling them something.”

  “No one wants to charge you, but not just one but three people have told us things they told you,” Mark said, exaggerating. “It’s hard to believe you don’t remember.” He pointed out the remarks in Wes’s grand jury testimony about the girls having been “chopped and burned.”

  “How come ‘chopped and burned’?” Mark asked. “It actually happened.”

  “Nobody told me that,” said Wes. “Nobody never.”

  “Of all the ways, the exact way.”

  “Dick never said that to me. I just blurted it out on the stand.”

  “We don’t want to get you hemmed up,” said Mark. “We are trying to lead the horse to water.”

  After much more of this, Wes fairly shouted out his uncle’s name.

  “It came from Dick! He wanted to go up and smash the car. He was all nervous and upset from him and Teddy, and he started blurting stuff out. He wanted to go to the mountain, find the car, smash it, and get rid of it.”

  Mark reminded Wes that he had been given immunity before his testimony in November, and that the agreement was still in effect.

  “You need to try harder,” urged Robin.

  “This has got to come out today,” said Mark. “We’re out on a limb here with the prosecutor.”

  “Dick has no remorse,” said Wes. “He don’t care.”

  “Your wife wants you to come clean,” pleaded Katie. “We don’t understand why you’re holding back, unless you had something to do with it on the back end.”

  “Even if you went down and did something with that car, you aren’t in trouble,” said Mark.

  “He [Dick] said he wanted to find the car—Jimmy Welch’s—and destroy it.”

  “Why would he blurt all this stuff to you?” Katie asked.

  “I guess because Tommy Junior [Teddy] scared the shit out of him.” (There had been, in fact, nothing whatever threatening in Teddy’s recorded conversation with his uncle.)

  Mark wondered whether Dick had brought up the car because he wanted Wes’s help.

  “He didn’t say anything, Mark. I didn’t say anything. He wanted to smash it all up, flatten it, I guess.”

  “Don’t guess,” said Robin. “You’re making it worse.”

  “I’m not making it worse! I just don’t want to fucking deal with this!”

  “You are involved in it!” said Robin.

  Wes blew up and marched outside again, and again Mark followed, talking to him in the yard.

  “It’s not going to go away,” the detective said.

  “I know it’s not going to go away.”

  Mark asked him if his reluctance to get involved was more important than resolving the case for the Lyon family.

  “I don’t know anything else!” Wes insisted.

  “You know, and I know you do. I’m here as your friend. I’ve gone to bat with the prosecutor. He has a list of all who are going to be prosecuted. I’m here to get you off that list. The only way is for the person with the goodness, you, to step up. Not just the bullet points, the details. The details of your conversation with Dick.”

  “I told you everything I know.”

  “There’s more. You are covered as long as you tell the truth.”

  Wes broke down. He sobbed. He repeated his disbelief that a member of his family could be involved in such a thing. Mark told him it wasn’t just Dick and Lloyd and Lee, it was also his aunt Pat and his cousins who helped them cover it up. He painted a dark picture of Dick, especially, suggesting to Wes that the Lyon girls had not been his only victims. Women in his family had been victimized, other strangers. He suggested that Dick had kidnapped, raped, and killed others.

  “You hold the key for all these people,” Mark said.

  And Wes finally told a fuller story, the one he would repeat in May before the grand jury about his uncles and Lloyd, about the girls being raped repeatedly on a pool table, about his uncle Dick asking for help disposing of the car that had carried the girls to Virginia. When Wes was done, Mark asked, “What is it about this family?”

  “What’s gonna happen to Dick?” Wes asked.

  “Should he be allowed to live another day free?” Mark asked.

  “Hell no.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us back then?”

  “I was scared. I was really scared, Mark. Two young kids being raped by freaking old men. I just can’t believe it. I need to take stuff more seriously. Wow. I feel sick now.”

  Wes was, the squad couldn’t help noticing, a lot like his cousin Lloyd. It was just as hard to wring a full story from him, and, after they finally did, they were left wondering how much of it was true.

  FERAL

  It had taken effort, but the squad could now more clearly picture Lloyd at age eighteen. They could look past the sad, pasty, wily, shackled old man who met them in the interview room and see teenage Lloyd, lean, dirty, mean, and high—stoned, speeding, tripping, or drunk. He had been feral. In ordinary times, this might have made him stand out, but in the late 1960s, during and after the Summer of Love, at about the time he was cast off by his family, many teenage boys were growing their hair long, dressing shabbily, infrequently bathing, and freely experimenting with drugs. Lloyd ran smack into the hippie movement in its heyday. For most, this period was a fling, youthful defiance of middle-class suburban norms. But for Lloyd it was no pose. He really was poor, desperate, dirty, and up for anything. And for the first and only time in his life he actually fit in. By 1975 the hippie movement had faded, but Lloyd hadn’t changed. He was then part of a class of shaggy vagabonds thumbing their way around the country on back roads, camping in the woods outside suburbia. Like Lloyd and Helen, many were heavy drug users. Flower power had gone to seed. They still proclaimed, as Lloyd would proclaim, the fading mantras of the hippie moment—free love, mind-expanding drugs, and the all-encompassing “If it feels good, do it,” but few had considered what such a credo might mean to man like Lloyd Welch.

  The hillbilly subculture that produced him has been described in more recent years by author J. D. Vance as “a permanent American underclass.” The Welches had never blended into white-collar suburbia. In Hyattsville during the 1960s and ’70s, they had lived clustered in the same run-down apartment complexes and eventually in houses on the same run-down blocks, reproducing rapidly. They were marked by their distinctive hill-country manners and dialect, trapped in low-paying jobs with few prospects, cantankerous, prone to violence, colliding frequently with the police, and, sealed in the intimacy of their crowded homes, carrying on vicious old habits.

  Lloyd had been an outcast even from this. Abused and abandoned by his father, reclaimed only to be cast out again, at age eighteen he was already an outlaw, stranded on the fringes of a prosperous world beyond his grasp. Although still haunting his family, he was homeless, often camping with Helen in the region’s shrinking wooded patches. After he had been publicly linked to the Lyon case, three other women had surfaced with stories of a man who had either assaulted or attempted to lure them as children—all in the mid-1970s, all before the Lyon girls were taken. Each described a man who resembled Lloyd. There was the unsolved case of a fourteen-year-old girl who had been raped by a man who emerged from a patch of woods adjacent to her school. Others said the man had approached them in the mall flashing an official-looking badge, claiming he was an undercover security officer. One girl had refused to leave with him. Two others, in a separate incident, had gone with him, getting into a car before thinking better of it. One had jumped out while it was moving. This caused him to stop, at which point the second girl bolted. If the man in any of these encounters had been Lloyd, the incidents suggested he had been perfecting his approach.

  In a twisted way, it made sense for Lloyd to prey on children at the mall, for several reasons. For
one thing, he could do so anonymously. Unlike the old small-town Main Streets, where everyone knew everyone else, centers like Wheaton Plaza drew from a wide and densely populated region. Strolling in the mall was more like walking down a city sidewalk; occasionally you would run into someone you knew, but mostly you did not. A sea of strangers was the perfect hunting ground for a predator. And Wheaton Plaza made sense for a deeper reason. Malls were suburbia’s gleaming showcases, lined with high-end stores stocked with goods Lloyd could not afford, displaying colorful, oversize ads for a lifestyle beyond his reach. They drew clean and prosperous families with credit cards and shopping lists. Living in the woods with his girlfriend, Lloyd would not have known how to take the first step into that world. And while he was not the sort to reflect on such things, much less articulate them, he must have resented the plenitude, all the comforts of money, family, and community that he lacked. As Lloyd himself had put it, “I was an angry person when I was young.” And if he felt scorn, or rage, how better to strike back than to stalk the very thing the mall’s privileged customers most prized? The pretty little girls he saw there, to whom he was perversely attracted, represented everything he was denied. Might such a man, driven by lust and rage, steal them … drug them … ravish them … kill them … dismember them … burn them?

  It was a theory. In it, perhaps, was the outline of an answer to the old crime’s deepest mystery, the one that had bothered me through the years. Who would do such a thing? And why?

  None of these ideas were conveyed to Lloyd, of course. The detectives continued to pretend he was, at heart, a really good guy, eager to do the right thing, whom they were ever-ready to take at his ever-changing word. They did so because for them to learn what had happened to the Lyon sisters, Lloyd would have to tell them, even though he had every reason in the world not to. He wasn’t going to stop talking. In addition to his other motivations—to find out what they knew, to break the monotony of his days—they now realized how much he was enjoying himself. This extended dialogue was a game he believed he could win. And often the detectives wondered whether he was right. At times it felt as if he was leading them in circles.

  At each visit, the squad tried to bring him evidence, real or invented, strong enough to make him recast his story. From the first it had worked this way. Confronting him with his 1975 statement—a thing he could not deny—had compelled him to admit he’d been in the mall, which had compelled him, in self-defense, to name someone else as the kidnapper. He’d seized on Mileski because that’s who the squad put in front of him. After they removed Mileski as a possibility, he had offered up Teddy, not knowing that his age and broken arms would virtually rule him out. He had correctly surmised that Teddy and “an older man”—Kraisel—would appeal to them. When that scenario was disproved by the time line, and it was pointed out that he and Teddy would have needed an older accomplice with a car, he’d named Dick, another shrewd choice, as it turned out, given the family’s stories about his uncle. When real witnesses placed Lloyd squarely in Virginia with a bloody duffel bag, something he could not safely deny, he’d edged his cousin Henry into the picture—after all, Henry was one of those who had named him.

  The one constant in all these shifts was Lloyd’s effort to move himself off center. Present but not involved. The logical contortions this required were both repellent and laughable, such as “partying” with two scared little girls and then “babysitting” them during days when they were being drugged and raped. But with each new twist, Lloyd revealed more.

  FRICTION

  Three months passed. Lloyd’s promised day before the grand jury, and his visit with Edna, did not come.

  Dave had meant it when he’d made the offer. The Lyon squad had got the RV authorized and intended to wire it up. The detectives had planned to use the trip as a pretext for another long interview. Dave would ride with Lloyd, and the rest of the squad would follow in another car, listening. They could then switch up, do their usual tag-team routine. They would take Lloyd up to Taylor’s Mountain first to see whether anything there stirred more memories, and then on to the copper-domed courthouse. Before the grand jury, he would be under oath. Because Lloyd so feared additional charges, it might help pin him down.

  But their partners in Virginia had balked. The Marylanders were wearing out their welcome. Bedford had thrown open its doors at first, but when the work produced so little, the relationship grew strained. The sheriff’s office had fought to conduct the digs on Taylor’s Mountain itself—a point of local pride—spurning the FBI’s evidence-recovery experts, recruited by Montgomery County, a move that had delayed the work for months and disappointed the squad members, who had been pleased by the FBI’s willingness to help. When the digging yielded little, there remained the suspicion in Maryland that the wrong people had done it. Then there was the matter of indicting Pat Welch for obstruction. The point, as the Marylanders saw it, was to pressure her to testify more candidly, but after being charged, Pat was not reinterviewed. Months later she pleaded guilty and was released on probation. Instead of turning up the heat, the Bedford team had let Pat get off effectively scot-free. There were other instances when the squad felt a lack of eagerness below the border. Bedford was a small community and a close one. Some of those targeted by the probe were, in the eyes of local officers, good ol’ boys they knew well, whose protests found a welcome hearing. The Virginians, for their part, were increasingly disinclined to let these obsessed cold case detectives order them around.

  These tensions may or may not have contributed to Bedford’s refusal to bring Lloyd down. Inviting Lloyd into its jurisdiction for any reason other than to try him for murder was a step too far. Guarding him, figuring out where to confine him overnight, would have been costly and risky. Compared with the thousand-man Montgomery County Police Department, the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office was a storefront operation. A security detail to keep watch on Lloyd for several days would have put a strain on its routine patrol duties. The RV ride fell through.

  But Virginia was still helping. After the trip was nixed, Chris, Dave, Mark, and Katie contrived to use the refusal to shape their strategy for the next encounter with Lloyd, which was set for Friday, May 1. They were met in Dover by a team of Virginia detectives.

  This time they hoped to scare the truth out of him.

  MAY 1, 2015

  Dave reentered the familiar interview room carrying the usual two cups of coffee.

  “My brother! What’s happening?” he said, and then, anticipating Lloyd’s usual lament about having been roused early and kept waiting, said, “I know. Don’t yell at me.”

  “Man, I’ve been up since two o’clock this morning,” said Lloyd. He had been dozing in the chair.

  “If it means anything, you look good,” said Dave. “You do. You look like you’ve lost a little weight. You look like you’re in better shape. You do.”

  The praise perked Lloyd up. He did look healthier. He said he had been working out.

  “This [session] is really for you,” said Dave. “And I’m going to explain everything to you. Where we are at. Where it’s going. And this may be the last time that we meet.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “No, no, no, no, no. Not in a bad way.”

  Dave said the promised RV drive had fallen through because of a conflict with Virginia. That much was true, but Dave put his own spin on it: Bedford wanted to charge Lloyd immediately, and the Lyon squad, in his corner, was frantically trying to fend it off. He showed Lloyd the standard forms outlining his rights—“this nonsense,” he called it.

  “Nothing has changed on the form,” he said. “There are no charges.”

  One of Lloyd’s more curious failings was a grandiosely erroneous estimation of how much control he had over his circumstances. He now told Dave that he had been drafting his own blanket immunity agreement—one that would guarantee he would never be charged with anything in the Lyon case. It was a guilty man’s dream. No prosecutor would ever agree to such a thing
, but Lloyd had visited the prison’s law library and drafted one. He had originally planned to insist that it be endorsed before he set foot in the grand jury room, but, he said, he had decided against it. Seeing how eager the squad was for him to testify, and being the magnanimous fellow he was, he had planned to shelve it, telling himself, as he related now to Dave, “I’m not going to put them through that hassle, because I’m trying to get out of here. I’m trying to start what little life I got left, trying to do good.” Since they had never come for him, he’d missed the chance to make the grand gesture, but he wanted Dave to know about it. The detective changed the subject.

  “You look real good,” he repeated.

  “Huh?”

  “I said you look real good.”

  “Not bad for a fifty-eight-year-old man?” he said, holding up his right arm and flexing his biceps.

  “When can you get out?” Dave asked, as if they had not discussed this before, and as if that were still an option. It was a topic that always cheered Lloyd up. “How many years you got left?”

  “Well, see, that’s the thing. On paper it says twenty twenty-four [the year 2024], but with the good time and stuff like that building up, if I don’t get charged for none of this right here, then I could be out of here by twenty-one [2021], at the earliest.” He had not been granted the five-year dispensation he’d sought in 2013.

  “So you’ll be—six years—you’ll be, like, say, sixty-five.”

  “I’ve done a lot of rotten things in my life. And in the nineteen years I’ve been incarcerated here, this has taught me a lesson that I never want to learn again. And, like I said, I found the Lord, and I really want to start helping people and stuff like that.”

  They talked about how much the world had changed, especially the advances in technology. Dave marveled at what he had read of the new Apple Watch, which had been released the previous month. “It does everything your phone and computer does, and it’s a watch!”