The Last Stone Read online

  None of them had ever worked on a case like it, and none believed they ever would again. The effort exhausted them.

  The path to the truth, or as close as they were likely to get to it, was down a long trail of lies. It was the only way. Lloyd Welch may never have been linked to the Lyon case, or even noticed, much less caught, if he had not gone to the police himself. Nor would he have been convicted if he’d kept his mouth shut when the squad approached him in 2013. Many times in their interview sessions the detectives had suggested that guilt was gnawing at him, haunting him, burdening him, and that down deep he was longing to confess. He wasn’t. It is doubtful that Lloyd’s conscience has troubled him for a minute of his life. If anything was eating at him, it was fear. Fear of getting caught had sent him back to the mall in 1975, and years later that’s what kept him talking. If he had stopped at any point up until admitting that he’d lured the girls from the mall, the case would have been over. For Dave’s part, every time he had entered the interview room with Lloyd, he expected it to be the last. Lloyd’s clumsy mendacity kept the thing alive.

  None of the thousands of man-hours, millions of dollars, hundreds of interviews, grand jury proceedings, search warrants, wiretaps, excavations, lab tests, or perjury indictments had produced a single conclusive piece of evidence. In the fall of 2017, investigators still digging on Taylor’s Mountain found a tooth, which was judged on the site to be human and to have belonged to a child roughly twelve years old. The tooth was bagged and sent to the Bedford sheriff’s office. When the squad went to retrieve it the next day, to ship it to a lab for more detailed analysis, it was gone. The sheriff’s office had no explanation.

  “It could have been anything,” said Mark Janney, “from incompetence to corruption. We just don’t know, and it was never investigated.” It crystallized a larger sense of failure.

  No physical trace of Sheila and Kate has been found—indeed, Sheila’s precise fate is still unknown. The fragment of human bone found in the bonfire site on Taylor’s Mountain had insufficient DNA to sequence. The other fragments of fabric and beads and metal discovered—of which Mark Janney had made much with Lloyd—were merely suggestive. The traces of hemoglobin in the basement of 4714 Baltimore Avenue, found by Dave’s remarkable creative deduction, were too degraded to provide even a blood type, much less a DNA match. They’d tried hard. Prosecutor Pete Feeney, who had inspected the basement rooms on the day Dave found them, wanted to take out the entire back wall for analysis. When that proved impractical he had portions of the cement block pulverized and sent to the lab. Nothing. What other evidence they had, such as the testimonies of Connie Akers and Henry Parker, made sense only in the context of Lloyd’s own words. The sheer expenditure of futile effort in this case was breathtaking, and even after Lloyd’s indictment it continued. In December 2016, Dave had met with a historic preservation specialist to review old satellite imagery of Taylor’s Mountain, hoping for some sign of where the ’66 Chrysler New Yorker was stashed or buried. He found none.

  Reconstructing the past from memory is always hard; when the only witnesses are hostile, it’s nearly impossible. Soon after I started working on this book, when Dave told me how liars lie about the big things but flesh out their fiction with the truth, I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. This story illustrates his point. To discern the truth, an investigator (or a writer) must interpret testimony. You begin by asking basic questions: Who? What? Where? When? How? Why? The answers are then assembled into a narrative, an orderly progression of time, cause, and effect. And yet, anyone who investigates crimes, or who writes true stories, knows how untidy the process is and how readily such stories can break down. Often there are too many causes and too many effects to completely sort out. Human motivation is too hard to pin down, pieces refuse to fit, and memories notoriously differ. Add the passage of decades and the problem gets harder. Evidence gets lost or degrades. Recollections fade. Eyewitnesses die. And even with strong answers to the first five questions, the last—Why?—is always elusive. The best of modern crime stories—In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, to name two—are not whodunits but whydunits. In both cases we already know who is guilty. Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, the respective authors, were primarily interested in why, and at best they provided only artful speculation, answers that reflected as much about themselves as about their subjects. This is what you get with a “true story,” artful, informed, honest speculation. At bottom, this is what we call history.

  Lloyd could not care less. For him, truth is entirely fungible. Facts exist only as tools to craft his next argument, to be employed or discarded as the situation demands. And from his perspective, this makes sense. Anyone who could steal two little girls, abuse them horribly, kill them, and then toss their bodies onto a burning pile, is someone for whom nothing matters beyond himself. Beyond the sheer barbarity, such acts are completely, horribly selfish. Caught in a lie, Lloyd was never embarrassed or even mildly annoyed. Knocking down one story just required conjuring another, a game he clearly enjoyed. He’s still at it, as I found when I visited him myself.

  But for me, the deep questions about the Lyon case—Who would commit such a crime? And why?—were largely answered. Lloyd Welch was the answer to the first, even though it’s not clear whether he acted alone. The answer to the second, while inherently less certain, was lust and rage. It’s too easy to simply write Lloyd off as a sociopath. Cast out of a family that abused him from early childhood, he was a victim before he became a monster. He emerged from a peculiar American subculture that in many ways was locked out of the American dream, even as its members walked the country’s streets and sought work in its malls. Much has changed in forty years; many people from Appalachian families have prospered, and clans like the Welches are hardly the most persecuted minority in American history, but traces of that exclusion remain and still generate anger and resentment. Eighteen-year-old Lloyd Welch was a particularly vicious specimen, someone who distilled the absolute worst elements of his upbringing and who lashed out with unspeakable cruelty. The blame is rightly his own, but the crime reflects the world that made him.

  Much of the Lyon mystery remains. It most likely always will remain.

  “We started this investigation with the idea of finding the bodies, even if we couldn’t come up with a criminal prosecution, and sort of the opposite happened,” said Pete. “We had a criminal prosecution and never found the bodies.”

  Despite strong suspicions about Dick Welch and the possibility that other members of the family were involved, as either direct participants or coconspirators, all must be considered innocent. The detectives are pleased and proud of their effort, but they are also disappointed. They have moved on. Unless there is some surprising new find, they are disinclined to look back.

  “I don’t know what happened in this case,” said Pete, finally and simply.

  None of them fully believe Lloyd’s story. Why would they?

  THEORIES

  The four detectives have each formed a different theory of what really happened, in ways that reflect, in part, who they are. All agree that Lloyd was the one who led the girls from the mall, that rape and possibly child porn were the motives, and that both girls were subsequently murdered. They believe that Kate was killed in the basement of 4714 Baltimore Avenue and her body thrown onto the fire in Virginia, and they believe or strongly suspect that Sheila was taken to Taylor’s Mountain alive, further abused sexually, and then killed and buried there. But each has a distinct narrative to explain what happened in between, why it happened that way, and who was responsible.

  Sunny Dave Davis leans toward Lloyd as lone wolf. The detective is likable because he genuinely likes people, so he leans toward the belief that anyone who could commit a crime like this is fundamentally abnormal or, as he put it at one point, “an animal.” There was no shortage of reasons Lloyd Welch turned out that way. Dave believes Lloyd had spent time living in the woods near Wheaton Plaza, where it appeared that he in effec
t shopped for little girls. This accounted for the stories told by other women—girls at the time—who remembered being approached by a man in the mall who fit Lloyd’s description; who presented himself as a security guard, showing a badge; and who tried with varying degrees of success to take them away. He’d perfected his pitch by the time he met Sheila and Kate.

  Once he’d lured the sisters out to the woods, they were likely drugged and raped right there. He would have had Helen to help—this explained why her name was the first that occurred to Lloyd when he was informed the police were looking for him. Both were druggies and heavy drinkers, even as Helen experienced one pregnancy after another. She may have clung to Lloyd out of some misguided youthful ardor, but there were other reasons. He was a source for the drugs she craved, and she feared him—her family said she would intermittently resurface black-and-blue, sometimes with broken bones. Lloyd colored their relationship in gauzy hues, but their years together had been squalid, violent, and troubled. As some of Helen’s relatives told it, she had been more his slave than his lover or his wife. Teddy said that he always pictured Helen attached to Lloyd by a leash. In viewing her this way, it is not hard to imagine her helping him constrain two little girls. This also explained why, years later, Lloyd immediately perceived her as a threat.

  Lloyd was not the sort to plan ahead. After abduction and rape, what then? He couldn’t just turn the girls loose. Killing them and disposing of them out in the open would have been problematic. At that point he’d decided to take the problem home, to his father’s dungeon-like basement, his hangout for pot-smoking. How much help he got from his family at that point depended on just how depraved you believed the clan was. Lee, Lloyd’s father, a drunk and a pedophile, might well have welcomed him showing up with two drugged little girls. It would not be out of character. But getting them to Hyattsville required a vehicle.

  This is where the red station wagon fits in. Detectives abhor coincidences, and one that had nagged the Lyon case investigators all the way back to 1975 was the theft of that red Pinto station wagon from a dealership adjacent to Wheaton Plaza on the same day the girls disappeared. The car was found days later, parked in, of all places, Hyattsville. Lloyd had a history in those days of stealing—or, rather, borrowing—cars. Sports cars were jumped for joyrides, but who boosts a Pinto station wagon? Perhaps someone transporting two little girls and his girlfriend. And, as noted, a red car was one of those stubborn particulars that kept surfacing in Lloyd’s stories—Dave had learned to pay attention to those. If Lloyd took the girls to his father’s house, he’d have needed a story to explain why he and Helen had them—they were “runaways,” or he and Helen were “babysitting” them. Again, these were concepts that recurred.

  If the crime had become a family effort, it’s doubtful that Lloyd or the other Welches would have envisioned the firestorm of publicity that erupted. Media reports about the missing girls, the plea for clues, the ongoing searches, meant that nearly every eye in the Washington area was alert for two little blond girls. Pressure to get rid of Sheila and Kate would have been strong. Dave imagined members of the Welch family thinking, “They are in our house, it’s all over TV. What do we do with them?” Lloyd made his trip back to the mall to mislead investigators. It was at this precarious point, Dave thought, that Kate’s increasing anguish and defiance might have provoked Lloyd to kill her. She was chopped up in the basement, possibly with his father’s help. Lee then phoned relatives in Bedford, alerting them that Lloyd was coming down with the girls, one of whom was now in pieces in his old army duffel bag. This is where, in Dave’s theory, Lloyd’s aunt Pat came in. Lee didn’t have a car, but he was working part-time for Pat’s father. Dave guessed that she arranged for the loan of his big white 1966 Chrysler, which was used, by Lloyd and Helen, perhaps with Lee, to drive the girls to Virginia. The bloody bag was thrown onto the Parkers’ bonfire. Sheila, he believes, arrived in the same car, alive, and was given to Lloyd’s cousin Henry Parker, perhaps in return for his help with disposing of the bloody bag. Dave speculated that Henry then further abused Sheila, killed her, and buried her somewhere on the mountain. Given the stories about his own sexual predation, Henry had to be considered a suspect, but after his death in 2017, there was little hope of ever proving Dave’s conjecture. There had been so much testimony about the terrible odor that spread over the mountain from the bonfire consuming Kate’s body—neighbors and relatives recalled it four decades later—that Henry was unlikely to have burned another. By then, Lloyd and Helen had gone back to Maryland and hit the road. They did not return for years. In Dave’s theory, only Helen, Lloyd’s father, Lloyd’s aunt Pat, and Henry were accomplices. Like Pete, Dave suspected that Dick Welch, the prime villain in Lloyd’s stories, had not been involved at all.

  Katie Leggett’s theory is completely different. She has a more jaundiced view of human nature than Dave and sees the kidnapping as part of something bigger. She believed almost from the start that Lloyd was a patsy, duped into his role. Her background in sexual crimes led her to see Sheila and Kate as victims of a murderous child-porn ring, one that stole children to abuse them before cameras and then peddled the film—and possibly the children—to others in their illicit circles. The intense publicity and search for the girls had made them too hot to handle, so they were killed. The squad believed that several members of the Welch family were involved in rings of this kind. “We did uncover a lot of weird stuff that lends credibility to this,” she said. “We found two sisters in the same area who were involved in the same kind of thing, and they believed that their father sold them into that situation. We uncovered a lot of stuff that led us to potentially high-powered people being involved.” A former CIA contractor, whom Katie described as “shady and guilty of something,” had been part of that ring.

  To Katie, Lloyd was an ignorant eighteen-year-old druggie, easily manipulated, and incapable of pulling off a crime like this on his own. Nor had he shown, at that age, any of the sexual urge for children that got him into such trouble later. He had grown, she thought, into a sociopath and child molester, but as a teenager he was not there yet. From what she knew about child molesters, abducting children and sexually abusing them were often separate things. Few abusers were abductors; abusers tended to groom victims in their family or social circle, and seldom murdered them. This was Lloyd’s later pattern. Those who abduct children, on the other hand, are much rarer. They take strangers and usually kill them. Lloyd had definitely been at the mall and had helped lure Sheila and Kate away. She did not believe that Sheila would have been tempted by an offer to smoke dope. Among the girls’ effects, Katie had read school notes passed between Sheila and a friend who was trying to tempt her into smoking cigarettes. Sheila had refused and cut off the friendship. So Katie tended to believe that Dick Welch, in his security guard uniform, had probably been the prime actor. “‘Come with me, your parents are looking for you,’ or something like that,” she said. The girls were then taken to the Baltimore Avenue basement, where they were held and abused and filmed over the next week by Dick, Lee, Lloyd, and possibly others. At some point they were taken to Dick and Pat’s house, perhaps because it made a better backdrop for filming. Some of the couple’s children vaguely recalled girls being kept upstairs in a closet off the poolroom, and Teddy Welch had eventually told a similar story. Back in the dungeon basement, with the media storm raging, Katie said, “The oh-shit factor kicked in.” Kate was killed there, and her body was taken to Taylor’s Mountain and thrown onto the fire. Henry Parker then took Sheila, raped her, and killed her, possibly accidentally. She was buried somewhere on that property. In Katie’s theory, Lloyd’s conviction meant that they had caught only a bit player in a much larger drama.

  Mark Janney is less inclined to theorize than either Dave or Katie. He spent years doing drug work undercover, trusting his gut about people, and tends to size them up quickly and sternly. He is also well acquainted with criminal networks and sees one behind this. Mark believes someone was
waiting in a vehicle outside Wheaton Plaza when Lloyd lured the girls out, but he, like Katie, doesn’t believe Lloyd was capable of planning and carrying out the crime by himself. “He was not sophisticated enough,” Mark said. More likely, Lloyd had been put up to the kidnapping by his father and uncle, who knew an eighteen-year-old would have a better chance of fast-talking two little girls than they would. He agrees with Katie that the motive was both to satisfy their own sexual urges and to make a porn film. They then might have sold the girls into sexual slavery. This was their intent. He notes that Pat Welch, interviewed after her arrest on perjury charges, had conjectured that the girls “probably were sold; a lot of that was going on back then.” As far as Mark is concerned, this seemed too creepy and specific to be mere speculation. He believes Sheila and Kate were driven initially to the Baltimore Avenue basement, where they were drugged and raped by Lloyd, Lee, Dick, and perhaps others in their family, who filmed themselves in the act. They were taken to Dick and Patty’s house at some point, most likely on Easter Sunday, when the Welch family gathered for a meal at Lee’s house. Keeping the girls in Lee’s basement for that event would have been too risky. Later they were returned. Kate became more difficult to handle, so she was killed there. Mark believes, like the others, that Sheila was killed later in Virginia and buried there.

  Chris Homrock also believes that Lloyd could not have done this by himself. After his long investigation of Ray Mileski, it is still hard for him to let go of that connection completely. He believes, like Mark and Katie, that Lee Welch and his brothers were involved in a pedophile ring and that both sex and movies were the motive in stealing Sheila and Kate. He still suspects that Mileski’s group was involved, if only on the periphery. The link, in his opinion, was most likely Dick Welch. Chris returns again and again to Dick showing a porn movie on his sister Lizzie’s front porch on Taylor’s Mountain. The basement room on Baltimore Avenue, where the girls clearly had been kept, seemed less an opportunity Lloyd had seized than something planned. It had a mattress and a sofa and had, in Lloyd’s words, “been set up to party.” Like the others, Chris suspects that Sheila arrived in Virginia alive and that, as her younger sister’s body was consumed by the fire, which burned for days, she was raped and then killed by Henry Parker. There is no proof of this, or of Lloyd’s father’s and uncle’s direct involvement, much less Mileski’s, but after all those years of work, that’s where Chris’s suspicions land.