The Last Stone Page 31

  “You’re getting charged for something you did do,” said another.

  “Thank you,” said Lloyd as the men left. He called after them, “Have a good day.”

  Lloyd stewed for a few minutes alone in the room, his arms crossed, a scowl across his heavy features.

  This performance by the Virginia team was all, of course, pure theater. When Dave reentered, having given Lloyd some time to decompress and ponder his plight, he asked, feigning bewilderment, “What in the world is going on?”

  “You tell me,” said Lloyd.

  “Well, my friend, there’s a whole lot of arguing going on out there. They’re trying to pack their shit up, talking about charging your ass.”

  “Yep.”

  “What went sideways in this room when they were in here?”

  Like an affronted child, Lloyd told on the Virginia delegation. He replayed the conversation for Dave, what they said, what he said, how unfair they had been. “And I told them,” he said, raising both hands plaintively, “I can’t tell you no more than what I already know! I had three people coming at me at the same time. I mean, the one guy I was trying to be polite to, the other two wanted to have their little hard nose and threaten me and shit like that. So finally I just said, ‘Well, let a lawyer handle it.’”

  Despite the elaborate charade, and the fact that Lloyd had clearly fallen for it, he still wasn’t going to give Dave anything more.

  “You don’t have a trump card somewhere you’re going to pull out?” the detective asked.

  “If I did I’d say it right now, just because they’re going back to Virginia to file charges against me.”

  Dave told him this probably wouldn’t happen for a month or so.

  “I mean, there’s nothing I can tell you, Dave. I’m sorry. There’s no trump card. There’s nothing. Katie asked, ‘What do you want for us to do to get the rest of the information out of you?’ There’s no more information, you know? I’m screwed. I’m … the rest of my life in prison probably, you know? I’ll probably finish up my time here and go to Maryland for time y’all give me and then go down to Virginia to do whatever time they give me down there. I’ll die in prison for something I didn’t do. It doesn’t make no sense. Going to put an innocent man in jail who did not touch them girls and did not kill them. My trump card was that I believe that Dickie killed them girls down there at that bridge, you know, or did something down there.”

  “Right, because that’s in his backyard.”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s where he did it at.”

  Lloyd ended by asking for a few more days. It was a Friday. He asked them to wait until Tuesday.

  “Give me the weekend to rack my brain. And believe me, every time I do rack my brain, I let you know something new.”

  The Virginia detectives came back in before the session ended to reassure him that he had a few more days. Lloyd told them how bad he felt for having done nothing to help the girls back in 1975, about how his life had changed. He’d become a Christian; he was determined to turn things around.

  “I’m not a bad person,” he said.

  12

  My Only Ace

  4714 Baltimore Avenue

  THE DUNGEON

  You had to forget the narrative. The way to read Lloyd was to look past the story to its details.

  The stories were false. All of them. He had sworn on enough imaginary Bibles to fill a garage. He had been standing on a sidewalk in Takoma Park when he saw someone take the girls; he had been in the mall when he saw a man he recognized—Mileski—walk off with them; his cousin Teddy had walked off with them as he watched; he had been with Teddy and Uncle Dick as they drove off with the girls, but he wasn’t involved and had gotten out of the car to get ice cream; he had seen the girls being raped but had not been in the room; he had an idea where they were killed and who killed them, but he had not been present; he had seen a bloody bag being thrown onto the fire but had been watching from a window, from a distance. All these efforts to deflect blame only focused more suspicion on him. He was like the Wizard of Oz imploring Dorothy, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

  You had to look past the misdirection. Running through many of his versions were certain particulars that recurred—stalking girls in the mall; an offer to get high; a station wagon; a crying girl in the back seat; a basement hangout accessed from the backyard; rape; drugged girls; a poolroom; an ax; the girls “chopped up” and “burned”; a green army duffel bag; a bonfire. As if in an ever-churning blender, these stubborn nubs kept surfacing. The more they surfaced, the more they began to look true.

  On the Monday after that May 1 session, Dave went looking for the place where Lloyd said the killing and dismembering occurred. It was at a secluded spot under a bridge, the place he had described as Dickie’s outdoor haven. He said it was near his uncle’s old home on Emerson Street in Hyattsville. Dick went there to fish and drink and smoke. It was his “comfort area.” Lloyd was “ninety percent” sure about it.

  Dave didn’t know Hyattsville well. It was about a half-hour drive from Gaithersburg, just a few exits south off the Capital Beltway. Dick’s old house was no longer there; it had been razed to make room for a new and larger district court building.

  But Dave knew where it had been, and he went there first. Right away, Lloyd’s story didn’t add up. For one thing, the location was the last place you would choose to bring two little girls who were the object of a bicounty manhunt. Even back in the 1970s, before the new courthouse had been built, the address had been a stone’s throw from the city’s police headquarters. There were cops coming and going all the time, lots of squad cars just a few hundred yards away. Lloyd had said there were railroad tracks behind the house and that the bridge over the Anacostia River, where Dick liked to hang out, drink, and fish, was a short distance from the front door. But the tracks were in front, not behind, and across Rhode Island Avenue. The river, which was more like a creek at the bottom of a wide basin, was not even close. The map showed it was four blocks east, across Rhode Island Avenue, across the tracks, through a thicket of auto dealerships and repair shops, down Baltimore Avenue, and then past a long block of old homes on Buchanan Street. It was not a place Dick could walk to quickly or easily. The layout was nothing like the one Lloyd had described.

  Dave next sought out Buchanan Street, which Lloyd had also mentioned. Members of the Welch family had once lived there. It was not far away, running southeast from Baltimore Avenue down to the river basin. Dave drove along that route to where it stopped. The dead end looked down to the water. To the left was a rail bridge that angled across it.

  Dave climbed the low fence and walked down. The riverbed was much wider than the waterway itself, which was like a creek, much too shallow for anyone to fish. The red-brown bank sloped gradually to the water and then up again on the other side to dense blocks of homes. You could jump the trickle of water, even though the locals called the area “River Park.” This was clearly the place Lloyd had described, but it was no secluded haven; the angle of the bridge exposed it to views from neighborhoods all around. With all the dealerships and parking lots in the vicinity, it would have been well lit at night. Dave strolled down to the water’s edge, which was littered with the remnants of late-night beer parties and the leavings of homeless campers. He grabbed a few items from under the bridge that looked as though they had been there a long time. Killing and chopping up a human being, even a small one, would spill a great deal of blood, which could leave long-lasting traces, but it was doubtful anything he saw had been there forty years. As Dave looked around from beneath the bridge he was even more convinced no one would choose this spot for murder. It was like being onstage in a theater-in-the-round. Another Lloyd Welch curveball. He walked back up to his car and tossed the items he’d picked up into his trunk.

  Dave had begun to lose hope of ever sorting out what had happened to the girls. This was a feeling that at one point or another had come over each member of t
he squad. For Chris Homrock, who had been involved longest and still headed the team, the lack of tangible evidence had been a constant frustration. His wife, Amy, also a cop, had cautioned him often to at least allow for the possibility of failure, and he had stared it in the face more than once. But these brushes with despair took turns with them all. And then one or the other would turn up something new or think of a different question to ask or an untried approach, and they would all get back to work. Dave was the one taking his turn at despair that morning. Lloyd’s story about the bridge was just another in his endless stream of lies. The only things they could be certain of were those confirmed by other witnesses—Lloyd’s presence in the mall, for instance, and his showing up on Taylor’s Mountain with Helen and a bloody duffel bag. Everything in between was caught in the tangle of Lloyd’s telling, a puzzle with changeable parts, one impossible to solve.

  Dave was all too aware of Lloyd’s methods, how he would take what he gleaned from their conversations and use it to reweave his story. You could see it in the way he picked up on a word or phrase used by one of his questioners and then began using it himself—as when Dave used the word babysit when reaching for a reason that eleven-year-old Teddy might have been spending time with his thirty-year-old uncle, and then Lloyd offered the same word to explain why he and Helen had spent time with the Lyon sisters. Such parroting mirrored a deeper strategy; Lloyd assumed not just their words but also their ideas. When the squad had approached him as a witness, he had embraced that. When Dave had shown him a picture of Mileski, he’d immediately spun a story around him. When Mileski was discounted, he’d smoothly shifted gears again, adopting the suggestion—made first by Karen Carvajal—that “an older man” had steered him into the crime. That was when he’d come up with Teddy and Teddy’s “friend” Leonard Kraisel. When Dave had suggested that he and Teddy needed a driver, he’d offered up his uncle Dick. And so it went with every new twist. There was reason to believe that his whole tale had been built this way. Without one piece of physical evidence, a good defense attorney would pick it apart. There were certain things in the narrative that seemed certain—Lloyd’s presence at the mall and the bloody bag in Thaxton. But what if the rest was all bullshit? Good detectives do more than just assemble their case, they continually test it against contrary scenarios. If Dave gave his misgivings free rein, it was still possible to wonder whether Lloyd had been involved at all, whether the whole case had been built on lies. It had begun, after all, with the lie Lloyd told back in 1975. Having made that mistake, what if he had spun the rest, step by step, in a bungling effort to extricate himself? Or worse, out of some perverse desire for attention? It was hard to imagine anyone doing such a thing, implicating not just himself but virtually his entire family, but Lloyd was nothing if not strange. How had Edna described him? A child lacking something? One with a deep need for attention? What if that was all this was? Were revulsion and public condemnation and the risk of more years in prison better than being locked away and ignored? It might do as an explanation for why Lloyd kept coming back, digging himself in deeper and deeper. The protracted conversation with Lloyd had created nothing as much as confusion. Dave had never met anyone so mendacious. And what else did they have? The descriptions of those who had seen a man who looked like eighteen-year-old Lloyd at Wheaton Plaza. What if that’s all they were? A man who looked like Lloyd? The stories told by Connie Akers and Henry Parker were forty years old. All Connie had seen was a bag with bloody clothes in it. Henry kept changing the details. Wes Justice was hardly a pillar of probity. The detectives were told that he often made things up. None of it was rock solid. Despair made everything about the case seem unreal. Every surface of the narrative was slippery. Dave felt lost.

  But as he turned his car around and headed back up Buchanan, staring him right in the face across busy Baltimore Avenue was a house he recognized. He had seen it in snapshots in the file. It was the house where Lee and Edna had lived, 4714 Baltimore Avenue, a two-story, white-clapboard wood-frame duplex with pale blue trim and an uneven front porch. This was the address Lloyd had given when he’d made his original false statement, the house where he and Helen had been staying, the one from which they left for Virginia. Lloyd had described seeing his uncle pull out of a driveway with the Lyon sisters in his car, heading toward the river—this now made more sense. The driveway was directly opposite Buchanan Street, which led straight down to the river and bridge. There was no way the girls had been killed down under that bridge, but this house, right in front of him, was one of those stubborn nubs in Lloyd’s stories. The location fit Lloyd’s description perfectly, once you saw that it was not his uncle’s house but his father’s.

  It struck Dave with the force of revelation. Just as Lloyd always moved himself off center in his stories, so he had moved this house. The detective pulled over, crossed Baltimore Avenue, and knocked on the front door,

  A friendly Hispanic woman who spoke almost no English answered. Dave managed to make himself understood enough to say that he wanted to look at the basement. She showed him that there was no way to enter it through the house. You had to go outside, down the porch, and walk along the driveway to the backyard. Steps led down from the yard to a padlocked door. In every scenario Lloyd had spun there was a basement hangout, a place where the girls had been kept. He had placed it first in Teddy’s older friend’s home, then in his uncle Dick’s, but in both it was a room that could be entered only by walking around the house to a door in the rear. This was the room to which the girls had been taken to be drugged and raped. Once Dave understood how Lloyd’s mind worked, he knew, without question, this had to be the place.

  Dave walked around to the backyard and then down the back steps. The old padlock on the door was not secure. He jiggled the latch, and it opened easily. He stepped into a dark, low-ceilinged stone dungeon, gloomy, dirty, and stale-smelling, heaped with old furniture. It was so hauntingly familiar it raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck. This was the place. He knew it. It was exactly where one would stash two stolen, frightened, drugged little girls—two rooms completely cut off from the house above. Even with big commercial properties on either side and a loud and busy road out front, it might as well have been a remote mountain cave. You could do whatever you wished in this space without being seen or heard. More furniture had been crammed into it over the ensuing years, but there were still traces of the old stuff. There were even a few items he recognized from old Welch family photos the squad had seized. If you imagined it emptier, it looked exactly as Lloyd had described it: a couch, an old TV, stereo components, a mattress, and even a back room with a door.

  Dave returned the next day with a forensics team. They cleared away some of the old furniture and started testing for traces of blood, squirting Bluestar spray, a blood-detection agent that bonds with even the slightest trace of hemoglobin and glows brightly under a blue light. The floors and walls of the outer room revealed nothing much, a few blood spots here and there, what you might find in a room used as a work space. Then they cleared debris from the back room and sprayed some more. It lit up from floor to ceiling. It lit up like a murder scene. Someone or something had been slaughtered in this room. It had been bathed in blood.

  And then Dave knew. All uncertainty vanished. He was even more certain because he had not been led there by Lloyd; he had found it himself. He had extracted it from Lloyd’s stories, bit by bit—Buchanan Street, the house with a basement that could be entered only from the rear, and all the rest. Here, at last, was something real. Blood. Aglow in blue light, the room announced itself as the place where Sheila and Kate Lyon, lured from Wheaton Plaza, had been drugged, raped, and imprisoned, and where at least one of them had been killed and dismembered. Before he had switched the location to a bridge, Lloyd had talked a lot about a basement hangout. It had been, he claimed, his uncle Dickie’s sanctuary, a place with a locked door, where Dick went to smoke and drink. But it wasn’t Dickie’s basement. It was the basement of Lee’s house
, the one where Lloyd had been living, the space where Lloyd hung out, smoked dope, drank, and “partied.” It wasn’t Mileski’s murder scene or Kraisel’s or Dick’s.

  It was his.

  MAY 12, 2015

  They went back to Lloyd just over a week later, at Dover.

  Dave’s discovery had recharged them all. It finally nailed Lloyd’s vaporous tales to earth. It was real evidence. Not by a long shot was it the finish line. There were still many questions about what had happened and who exactly had been involved, but it confirmed that they were looking in the right place. Eventually blood technicians would determine that, while there wasn’t enough to extract DNA, the traces of blood in the basement were human.

  More immediately, the find gave them something new to bring Lloyd. This session would lead them, finally, to the dark heart of the matter.

  It began with Dave’s usual cheery greeting and Lloyd’s usual complaint about having been awakened early and kept waiting.

  “You don’t look happy,” said Dave.

  “I’m not.”

  “Did you get anything to eat? Anything to drink?”

  “Nah.”

  “Well, we can make that happen.”

  Lloyd had left the last session expecting to be indicted in days, but nothing had happened. He was confused and depressed. Dave brought him up to date. There had been no charges, he said, because he was still holding out heroically on Lloyd’s behalf.

  “We have to be able to come to an agreement,” Dave said. “Lay out everything as far as where we are, because I have to be able to explain—a lot of it is theory-driven—the real story, the whole story, good, bad, or indifferent. That’s what we gotta come up to.”

  Lloyd said, “I’m at the point where if I’m gonna be charged, charge me, because I’ve done implicated myself so much.”