The Last Stone Page 35

  “So, who else in the family knows this story?” Dave asked.

  “Lee, but he’s dead. I guess Henry knows it. I mean, I don’t know if Connie knew. I know my mom [Edna], she can say she doesn’t know some of the things, but I’m sure she knows that me and Dickie went to the mall, because she told me right there with Helen, ‘You don’t know nothin’. You’re not involved. Don’t get yourself caught up. Don’t go to that mall.’ You know? And I’m ninety-nine point nine [percent] sure Patty knows, Dick’s wife.”

  Dave asked why Lloyd, a year earlier, had brought his cousin Teddy into the story. His cousin had endured months of suspicion and distress and had been forced to lay bare the most intimate details of his life to clear himself.

  Lloyd said, simply, “Scapegoat.”

  SUCKERED BIG-TIME

  One big question had always been: what would make the Lyon girls leave the mall with a stranger? If they had resisted, there were enough people in Wheaton Plaza that day to have noticed. Lloyd’s explanation might make sense. The lure of pot might just have been enough to make Sheila abandon caution, walk out of the mall, and perhaps even get into a car with strangers, much as her parents disbelieved it. Judging by the stories the detectives had gathered from prior similar instances, other girls had gone that far. Sheila was about to turn thirteen, an age when children are prone to do daring, foolhardy things, and in 1975, smoking dope was among the most common forms of youthful rebellion, akin to drinking beer or sneaking a slug from a bottle in a parent’s liquor cabinet. It was cool. It was easy to imagine a girl just days away from her thirteenth birthday, even a sheltered, innocent girl—perhaps especially a sheltered, innocent girl—saying yes, even to a stranger. Ten-year-old Kate would have been stuck. Told to stay with her big sister, she was now being led someplace she should not go. The detail of her crying softly in the back seat of the car, asking when they were going to go back, was heartrending.

  Another big question was: how could one abductor handle two girls? Even if there had been some willingness to go with Lloyd at first, at some point that afternoon Sheila’s mistake would have been clear. This boy was not their friend. At that point it was unlikely, though not impossible, that Lloyd could have handled both girls by himself, but he had Helen, who was so self-destructively entangled with him. She had participated in other crimes with him. Lloyd might also have had the help of his father or his uncle, as he’d said. There was plenty to suggest, if not prove, that both had a sexual interest in children.

  Pornography was another possible motive. Before the digital age, films and photographs of children being used for sex were rare. They were difficult to make and hard to come by. The film itself was evidence of a crime, so it had to be developed and printed privately. Purchasing or even borrowing such material was expensive. Making and distributing child porn was dangerous but potentially lucrative.

  “They had money,” Lloyd said, of Dick and Pat. “I don’t know if they made a bunch of movies with her [Sheila] and sold her off or what. I’ve always been curious to know where the fuck they get all their money at.”

  Dick and Pat Welch were not well-to-do, as Lloyd suggested, although their pleasant, middle-class suburban home and their cars might have made them appear so to him. There was no proof that Dick made child porn. In his grand jury testimony he had admitted once buying a porn film and showing it on the porch of his sister Lizzie’s house, but that was all. The home movies the squad had seized from his house were all conventional family fare.

  No matter what Lloyd said, the most likely place for the girls to have been held captive and raped would have been in the dungeon-like basement of Lee’s house. Dave was haunted by the possibility that detectives had knocked on the front door, as Edna had testified, while Sheila was still drugged and hidden below.

  The rest of this story fit with what they’d learned in Virginia. The detectives didn’t believe for a minute Lloyd’s claims of innocence—or that, as he’d put it, “I was suckered big-time.” Not likely.

  If other family members had been involved, then Lloyd’s decision to return to the mall and give a statement might well have triggered the girls’ killing. And if the detectives had knocked on Lee’s door while one or both girls were still alive, it would have made the need to get rid of them all the more urgent. There was the flood of human blood in the basement to prove that. Kate’s unhappiness from the beginning, and her age, made it more likely that she had given more trouble. She would have been too young to fully appreciate the danger. Two years older, Sheila might have chosen not to provoke.

  This was as far as evidence and reasonable speculation would go. Lloyd was not offering more.

  “What happens now?” he asked Dave.

  “Like I was telling you, it’s gonna be a process. It could be two weeks. It could be three weeks. They’re gonna have a hearing of some sort in Delaware to get you moved to Virginia, and then the process starts down there. I’m sure at some point you’re going to get legal [retain a lawyer], and we’ll have to go through the attorney to talk to you.”

  “Well, I can tell you right now, if I end up getting charged, I’m going to take the Fifth. Because I originally thought I’d be testifying against them and not being charged for anything. That was my whole thinking.”

  He was worried he would be attacked in the prison when his indictment was reported.

  “I’m just going to have to live with it tomorrow and see what happens. Next time you see me, if I’m in a body cast, you’ll know what happened.”

  “Anything you want to take away or add?” Dave asked.

  “Nope. There’s nothing more. I’m going to get a lawyer.”

  THE RIDE

  There would be one more long talk with Lloyd in September. He’d had more than two months to contemplate the hole he’d dug himself. The fallout in the prison had not been not as bad as he’d feared. He’d stayed in the general population and weathered it fine.

  He was picked up at the prison by a van that had been wired for sound and driven to Bedford for his arraignment. Dave rode along with two of the Virginia detectives, Mayhew and Wilks, grasping one more opportunity to get Lloyd talking.

  Lloyd had been indicted in July, but the law in Virginia required a waiting period before he could be questioned again. So the drive south had been delayed. Prosecutors anticipated that Lloyd’s defense would entail suppressing the interview sessions. His lawyers would be likely to claim that he had been duped into believing he had immunity and that he had not been provided counsel after numerous requests. These were not surefire arguments, but just in case, the detectives wanted to capture Lloyd in the van making a completely voluntary confession. So they were instructed not to question him directly about the case unless he brought it up himself.

  The squad believed that Dave, Mark, and Katie should be the ones to take this ride with Lloyd. It was their last chance, and by now the three had learned to play him like a violin. But the van was being furnished by Virginia authorities, and Bedford insisted that its own detectives should have the honors. They agreed to bring Dave along—he was unquestionably the one Lloyd saw as his friend. Katie was offended. After all the work she and Mark had put into the case! She was so upset about being exluded that when she complained to her lieutenant she broke down. Acutely conscious of being female in a world that was predominantly male, she had never dared shed a tear on the job. Afterward, embarrassed by her emotions, she made a mental note that it was time to begin distancing herself from this case.

  The drive from the prison took them through fog to the Eastern Shore and the Bay Bridge, then past Annapolis and toward Washington. They passed the Hyattsville exit off the congested Capital Beltway and headed south on Interstate 95 toward Richmond. Lloyd bantered away with the detectives. He was alternately cheerful, happy to be spending the day outside the prison walls, and distressed. Little time passed before Lloyd cleared the first hurdle for the detectives; he started talking about his case unprompted.

  It bega
n as complaint. Why had he been charged? He was the innocent one, the wronged one. He’d been misled into thinking he was just going to be a witness, and now his very willingness to help was being used to screw him. None of that capability for remorse and sympathy noted years earlier by his prison psychologist was evident. He still showed no sign of apprehending the horror inflicted on the Lyon girls. His concern was all for himself.

  He had seen a story in the Wilmington News Journal about his cousin Wes Justice’s testimony that his uncle Dick had confessed the whole thing.

  “He admitted it a year ago to him [Wes],” Lloyd said. “I’ve got the article. I’m trying to understand how they’re charging me with murder when I didn’t kill nobody.”

  The detectives humored him, chatting about a variety of things, noting scenes by the side of the road, discussing traffic patterns, pointing out a rainbow, but Lloyd kept coming back to the crime. He could not have been more helpful if he had tried. He eventually reviewed the kidnapping scene at the mall, placing himself with his father and uncle in the car as they drove off with the girls. He talked about driving the bloody duffel bag with Kate’s remains down to Virginia, although at first he said—even with Dave sitting beside him—that he hadn’t known what was in it. He admitted hauling the bag to the fire with his cousin Henry and tossing it in. Then he described the scene in the basement where Kate had been chopped into pieces—contradicting his claim, just minutes earlier, that he had not known what was in the bag. Lloyd could not help himself. Just as the detectives had hoped, he seemed not to realize that the conversation counted, that by telling his story to the police he was, once more, officially confessing his crimes.

  “I can’t believe that you’re doing this to me,” he said. “How can you prove it was done in Virginia and not Maryland, or how can you prove it was in Maryland and not Virginia? You see what I’m saying?”

  “It will all work out in the end,” Dave assured him, “as your aunt [Artie] said more than once. The truth is the truth.”

  “They all know he [Dick] did it,” said Lloyd.

  Lloyd now threw another relative into the mix, Luke Welch, his late, mentally disabled uncle.

  “Lukie and Dick and Dad, I’m sure that’s the three. I was just somebody that, whattaya call it, popped up, and they suckered me into something, and I guess with all the abuse and shit like that, and I wanted the attention and shit, as fucked up as I was.”

  He had gone back to the mall to give a statement because, “I had a guilty conscience, even though I got scared and lied and shit like that.”

  Well over an hour into the ride, with the van now pushing through rain and heavy traffic, it occurred to him that he was being worked.

  “I don’t mind talking to y’all, just so long as it ain’t being thrown up that I did this and I did that. I don’t know if y’all have a recorder in here or not. I used to ask you all the time, where’s the recorder at?”

  The detectives laughed.

  “I’ll ask you,” said Lloyd. “Do you have a recorder?”

  “Yep,” said Mayhew.

  “You recording me?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay.”

  “We ain’t hiding it.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s to protect us, too.”

  “Right. I know how to ask for a lawyer.”

  After that, Lloyd finally shut up about the case. He had at long last told everything he was going to tell. For the remainder of the drive that day, he conversed but said nothing substantive. The detectives kept trying.

  “Is there anything you thought of since the last time you talked to Dave that you think you need to tell us?” asked Mayhew. “Anything at all that pops in your head?”

  “Nah.”

  “You think you maybe haven’t talked to us about?”

  “That’s it,” said Lloyd.

  Hours into the drive, Wilks asked Lloyd, “What’s the favorite state you’ve been to? What ones do you like most?”

  “South Carolina.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Myrtle Beach.”

  “Trying to get back to it?” asked Dave.

  “Yeah, I would like to. It’s just something about it. I like the ocean. Good people,” Lloyd said wistfully. “Oh, lots of things.”

  THE PLEA

  On September 12, 2017, in a Bedford courtroom, Lloyd Welch pleaded guilty to two counts of felony murder.

  He said he had participated in the kidnapping of Sheila and Kate Lyon more than forty years earlier, and while he continued to deny he had raped or killed them, his admission—which stood in sharp contrast to his bizarre notion of “partying”—fell well within the confines of a Virginia legal doctrine defining as murder a killing “in the commission of abduction with intent to defile.”

  The plea spared him the death penalty, but it meant, as he feared, that he would never leave prison. His sentence was forty-eight years. He would serve his full sentence for child molestation in Delaware and then travel to a Virginia penitentiary for the remainder of his days. He was sixty years old, and he had, from first to last, talked himself into this outcome.

  The case against Lloyd was so tangled that the Virginia charge, and his plea, resulted from a desire by Montgomery County, Maryland, to simplify it. The girls had been kidnapped from a mall in Wheaton, which meant that this specific crime fell under the jurisdiction of the Montgomery County state’s attorney, John McCarthy. His staff had been supervising the probe for years—indeed, the county office had overseen it since the day the girls disappeared. It was one of the most significant crimes in county history, and one that had touched McCarthy personally. He remembered the day of the abduction well. A law student at night, he had been teaching a high school class at a local Catholic school, not far from Wheaton Plaza, on that day. Like most people in the region he had followed the story closely and felt the general sadness and frustration when no answers came. After becoming an attorney and then a prosecutor, he had become friends with John Lyon, who upon retiring from broadcasting volunteered as a witness/victim advocate at the courthouse. McCarthy had often benefited from John’s help during criminal trials. John also worked Friday nights as a bartender at the local Knights of Columbus hall, where McCarthy sometimes retreated at the end of his workweek. So the decision to hand Lloyd Welch off to Bedford, Virginia, was a painful one for him, not least because, as McCarthy reminded me, he is an elected official (since 2006), and winning a conviction in such a landmark case would surely have meant votes.

  The decision made sense nonetheless. What real evidence there was strongly suggested that Kate Lyon, at least, had been murdered in Hyattsville, in neighboring Prince Georges County. No one was sure what had happened to Sheila, or where it had happened, but the statements of Lloyd and others suggested that she had been taken to Virginia and killed there. Technically, the case belonged to all three jurisdictions, and Lloyd, through his own statements, had incriminated himself in all three, but his ever-changing story made it hard to mount a coherent prosecutorial narrative. Basing the whole case on the prison interviews was fraught with legal peril. The various inducements, immunity agreements (written and oral), threats, and vague promises during those hours and hours of interviews by Dave, Mark, Katie, and Chris might give a good defense lawyer plenty of weaknesses to exploit, and laws governing police interrogation were especially restrictive in Maryland. The case against Lloyd was stronger in Virginia, primarily because Lloyd’s final story of driving human remains to Taylor’s Mountain was corroborated by his cousins. Virginia also made sense because Lloyd had several times voiced his fear of being executed, and since Maryland was not a death-penalty state, he was considered more likely to accept a guilty plea in Virginia to avoid death row—a calculation that proved correct. The plea also avoided the hazards of trial, as did the decision not to seek kidnapping and rape charges in Maryland. Bringing him to trial would invite challenges and appeals that could delay, if not upend, his conviction. The principal
factor guiding all this tactical legal reasoning, McCarthy told me, was the desire of John and Mary Lyon to bring the case to a close. It was painful for them.

  Little of this rationale was explained to the Maryland detectives, who were more than disappointed. They were angry and felt betrayed. They had poured years of effort into the case, endured sleepless nights, extensive travel, tedious legwork, and immeasurable emotional stress. It had consumed them. And after all their efforts to build a case against Dick and other family members who might have been involved, only Lloyd had faced justice. They still had not found the girls’ bodies. Their painstakingly built case against Lloyd would never be fully aired in court. It was a bitter pill.

  They were justly proud of their work. In the end, the exhaustive effort against the Welch clan in Maryland and Virginia amounted to little on its own, but it had contributed mightily to what was, without question, a sustained masterpiece of criminal interrogation. How do you get a compulsive liar, one with every reason to lie, to tell the truth? Dave Davis brought recognized skills to the interview room, but neither he nor the others were experienced homicide detectives. They made mistakes, some potentially ruinous—Pete recalled his astonishment after Lloyd had signed the carefully crafted limited immunity agreement, and Dave had proceeded, orally, to liberally broaden its terms. Unsure of what they had in Lloyd at the beginning, they had overpromised, saying that he would not be charged. Dave kicked himself for revealing that Helen Craver was dead, and he and Mark erred by holding an unrecorded, off-the-record chat with Lloyd early on—and apparently threatening him. Katie then made the mistake of admitting this! None of the long interview sessions had gone exactly as the squad would have liked. They had felt their way forward, trying one ploy after another, wheedling, lying, flattering, badgering, and coercing.

  “We knew we were dealing with a monster, but we had to entertain him in a fashion,” said Katie. “That was the best approach with him. We had to keep him talking, had to keep him on our ‘team.’ We had to endure the ‘friendship’ and go through the crap to get as many of the answers as we could.”