The Last Stone

by Mark Bowden

  A quick scan of state criminal records disclosed Welch’s repeated run-ins with Montgomery County. There was a photo attached to a 1977 arrest, showing Welch staring sullenly into the camera. He looked older than his years, kicked around, hardened, a man with scars on his broad face and wide, crooked nose. His thick brown hair was parted in the middle, held down by a dirty, rainbow-colored headband.

  Dave confirmed that Welch was still living by calling family members, some of whom were named in the police records. He called an old number in Tennessee, and Welch’s elderly stepmother, Edna, answered. Dave identified himself. “We’re doing an investigation,” he said. “It’s from a very long time ago.” Edna sounded confused and said she could not hear him well—he suspected that she was trying to get rid of him. She told him to call her son Roy, Lloyd’s younger half brother.

  “I know he’s incarcerated,” said Roy, with what sounded like a chuckle—wouldn’t a cop know this already? “He’s in Delaware for something to do with little kids.”

  Those words rang loud. Roy didn’t offer any more, but Dave now cast a wider digital net. Using a national police database, he found all of Welch’s arrests and his disturbing history of sex crimes against children. He had worked for a traveling carnival, which explained the wide-ranging geography of his criminal past. The most recent photo, a prison shot, showed the same face grown older and thicker, sneering down at the lens. Lloyd had lost his hair, his youth, and his freedom. He had a gray mustache and goatee.

  When Chris didn’t pick up his phone, Dave texted him: “We’ve located him. Issues with sexual stuff with kids. Currently incarcerated.”

  That brought Chris out of the meeting. When Dave showed him the old arrest photo, Chris’s face paled. He took Dave upstairs and found the old police sketch based on the description given by Danette Shea, the thirteen-year-old girl who had seen a man staring at girls in Wheaton Plaza that day. They were a virtual match. How could this have been missed?

  They had seen Welch as a possible witness. Now they were even more intrigued. Chris knew Mileski had groomed young victims to help attract other children. Could he and Welch have worked together? Two little girls would be far more likely to follow a teenage boy than a middle-aged man. Both Welch and Mileski had come forward years earlier to volunteer information about the Lyon sisters—how could that be a coincidence?

  The find rejuvenated the case. Over the following months, Dave began working it with Chris. They waded back into the piles of paper looking for links between Mileski and Welch. Welch did not fit the profile of a child kidnapper in every way or as neatly as Mileski. There were three instances of child sexual abuse in Welch’s record, all with young girls, but all involved children he knew—daughters of girlfriends—in their homes. While bad enough, these incidents were a far cry from kidnapping two unknown girls from a public place and likely killing them. Still, here was a man sexually attracted to little girls. If he had been working with Mileski, it might explain why he’d gotten involved in something more extreme.

  There was more. The FBI helped the squad build a Lloyd Welch time line, cross-checking his travels against unsolved missing children cases around the country. There were a number of curious hits. One was spookily reminiscent of the Lyon sisters’ case. Welch’s carnival made an annual trip through Texas in the winter months, and in December of 1974, in Fort Worth, Texas, three teenage girls had disappeared from a mall, never to be seen again.

  Could they have stumbled on a serial killer? The FBI thought it was possible. Chris and Dave then spent months fleshing out their understanding of Welch. They interviewed other members of his family, a collection of odd characters in Maryland and Virginia who had preserved their rural accent and outlaw attitude over generations.

  All this provided insight for their sit-down. Despite the other intriguing clues, Welch remained important to them, first, as a witness, someone who might be able to identify Mileski as the man “with a little limp.” Whether or not the 1975 statement was true, and whatever his motivation had been in giving it, Welch had clearly been present. Shea’s testimony and the drawing confirmed that. Beyond this potential, however, was a richer possibility. Had the two men known each other? After all, if teenage Welch knew Mileski, how likely was it that both men had just happened to have been in the mall at the same time the girls were taken?

  The only way to find out was to ask Lloyd Welch. Because the detectives felt he would be more likely to confirm his connection to Mileski if he did not know they were investigating the Lyon case, Dave would start by trying to establish a connection between the two men. Only then would he ask about his old witness statement and try to nail down the vital Mileski ID.

  That, at least, was the plan.

  3

  In All “Honestly”

  Lloyd Lee Welch, 2013

  OCTOBER 16, 2013

  The plan did not survive the first thirty seconds. Dave met Lloyd Welch in an upstairs hallway of the Dover police headquarters. Before him stood a pale, bald old man with a potbelly in baggy white prison denim, shackled hand and foot. He had big features and a ponderous brow over clever, liquid blue eyes and a wide nose that had been broken and healed bent. He had an unsettling forwardness. This was unmistakably the man in the old arrest photo, bulked out over three decades, especially in the middle. The word that came to Dave was hard, a shell baked by years of lockup. He immediately threw the detective off balance.

  “I know why you’re here,” he said with a sly grin. “You’re here about those two missing kids.”

  So much for surprise and for gauging Lloyd’s first reaction. If he intended to rattle Dave, it had worked. The detective’s mind raced. How could he know? It had to have come from his family, yet the detectives had taken care to avoid saying exactly why they were looking for Lloyd. They’d said, at most, that he might have witnessed a very old crime. Of course, the police do not actively investigate old minor crimes, and the Lyon case was notorious, but it was still a highly specific assumption. What did it mean that Lloyd had been given a heads-up?

  Then Dave realized that part of the responsibility was his. That morning, without thinking, he had pulled on a dark blue polo shirt with a gold crest that read, “Montgomery County Police / Major Crimes Division.”

  They were shown to a bare interview room, a small windowless space with gray walls and black trim, olive carpeting, a table, and two chairs. Lloyd was visibly disappointed. When he had been awakened early that morning, he had hoped the interview would be about a pardon petition he had filed recently. The emblem on Dave’s shirt had dashed that hope.

  The detective asked about prison life.

  “It sucks,” said Lloyd. “It sucks.”

  “How much longer do you have?”

  “I’m waiting to go for a pardon recommendation, and if I get that, right now I’ve got nine, about nine and a half years.” He was requesting that the final five years of his sentence be dropped as a reward for good behavior, which, according to the intricate algebra of detention, meant he might be eligible for work release in just two. Dave ran with it.

  “Do you think prison has been that rehab that they talk about, or do you think you’re gonna fall right back into whatever it was that you were doing back then?”

  Once freed, Lloyd said, he hoped to go to Tennessee, “out in the country,” near where his stepmother, Edna, lived.

  Lloyd was nothing at all like the man the FBI analysts had led them to expect. He appeared to enjoy talking for its own sake, and even though he knew Dave was working on the old Lyon case, he seemed indifferent to the risk. He talked like a man addicted to talk, free-associating, and Dave, who had worried for so long about how to get him going, just sat back and listened. Riffing at length about prison life, Lloyd got around to contrasting Delaware to Maryland, where he’d served an earlier stretch. Dave’s state, he said, was “ten times better.”

  “I mean, the staff is a lot better, the food is a lot better, the pay’s a lot better [he was bei
ng paid eighteen cents an hour for his work detail in the Delaware prison kitchen]. They’re more concerned about rehabilitating people. This place isn’t.”

  He then launched into the sort of lament cops hear often from inmates, so routine it was rote, about how awful his life had been, how events had forced him into crime, about how he had learned his lesson, turned his life around, found the Lord, and become a productive citizen who didn’t belong behind bars. Dave nodded agreeably.

  “I’m fifty-six years old,” Lloyd said. “I’ve lost a lot in life because I had a screwed-up life. You know, I had a screwed-up father. I never knew my real mother. So at fifty-six, if I can get out, I could probably give a lot to the community. I’d prefer to help law enforcement in finding these sons of bitches and drug dealers.”

  Lloyd was like a burst dam. Words cascaded. Unprompted, he came to the offense that had gotten him locked up for so long. Such injustice! He was, he wanted Dave to know, a good guy. He had been grossly over-punished. His “crime” had been a simple misunderstanding. He was not a child molester. His victim was the daughter of his girlfriend, a child he cared about and would never harm. His crime had been, at worst, a momentary lapse.

  “I got drunk. I got high. You know, the girl had me in her trust and everything like that. I was stupid for doing what I did. I admit it. I had all the remorse in the world for what I did to that child, you know? She was gonna be my stepdaughter, you know? I thank God that I didn’t go all the way with what happened and shit like that. Even though they say I penetrated, in the state of Delaware, if you put your little pinkie in there [a vagina] or your tongue, you’re considered to have penetrated.”

  Dave swallowed his bile. He had children of his own. His daughter was just nine. Here was a man arguing that the sex acts he had performed on a ten-year-old were trivial. Dave pretended to be surprised.

  “It’s considered penetration?”

  “Right. My penis never went in her. She was still a virgin because I stopped myself, you know? And I feel bad about what I did to her.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “I was forty.”

  Dave shook his head.

  “Yeah,” said Lloyd. “Stupid. Very stupid.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know what I’m sayin’?” Lloyd said.

  Dave nodded and then got to work: “Along those same lines, minus the sex part of it, when you were talking about your upbringing and your family, believe it or not, that’s why we’re here to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  Dave told Lloyd that he could take a break whenever he wished, and that if he wanted to order food—a special treat for an inmate—“We can make that happen. I mean, this is very informal.” But before they got down to business, even though they were just friends talking here, Dave was a cop and Lloyd was an inmate, so there were formalities. Lloyd had to give written consent. Despite the fears this might arouse, Deputy State’s Attorney Pete Feeney had insisted on it. Dave had the statement before him on the table.

  “I’m going to read it to you, we’ll sign it, we’ll put it away, and then we’ll start to talk a little bit,” he said. “Like I said, we have all day.”

  He read: “You have the right now to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you. You have the right to a lawyer before or during any questioning. You can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you.”

  Dave reassured Lloyd that this was just red tape; he was only a witness. There would be no charges. Lloyd listened, nodding, and squinted skeptically. Dave—and his colleagues in the next room, watching on-screen—waited nervously.

  “As long as I’m not being charged with nothin’,” Lloyd said finally, and then, to the relief of all, signed.

  He then resumed holding forth about … his life … his travels … his jobs … his girlfriends … the children he had left in his wake. His childhood was troubled and lonely. His most significant relationship had been with a woman named Helen Craver, whom he had met when he was just sixteen and she was twenty, a chubby woman who shared his appetite for drugs and drifting. They had stuck together through the 1970s, traveling and using drugs and making babies. Helen lost one child and gave birth to three during those years. After he was sentenced to a second stretch in prison in 1981, they both relinquished parental rights, and Helen went her own way. Lloyd had seen neither her nor his children since.

  “They’re all adults now,” Lloyd said. “I should have grandchildren by now. You would think. I mean my oldest daughter’s thirty-four years old. But do you have any idea where they’re at?”

  Dave shook his head.

  “No? And if they married, their names?”

  Again, Dave shook his head.

  “I would love to establish a relationship with them, let them know that I did love them and everything, but I thought it was in their best interest to put them in foster homes and get adopted out. Margaret at the time was six, and Amy was just turning five, and Tanya was a little baby.”

  “You know, you impress me,” said Dave. “I mean, to be able to—I know they’re your kids but just the amount of time that’s passed—how you’re not only able to name them, but you’re able to say how old they were. I mean, you obviously cared back then.”

  “I did. I did. It was just one of them things. It was hard but, you know, in the end it was probably the right thing to do. The only reason I did it was because at the time I was an ugly person. I was an alcoholic. I was a drugger. I was in prison. And I was thinking about how I was treated when I was a kid, all that I was put through, and I figured the best thing for me to do is to have these children go to a home that would love them and care about them and raise them right.”

  “Right.”

  “I was my father’s son.”

  “We talked to some of Helen’s sisters to try to get some insight.” Lloyd nodded and listened here with particular interest. “[They said] you were like the nicest guy one day, and then the next day, you know, they were fearful of you. They were scared to death of you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They didn’t know what was going on. They said you guys moved around a lot. All this stuff is as intriguing as hell.” Dave encouraged him to reconnect with his children. “You know, you still have time. You’re gonna get out of here.”

  “Well, I’m hoping. I mean, good Lord willing, I’m hoping to be out of here. I don’t wanna die in prison. I really don’t, you know? I really wanna get my life. Like I said, I’ve really seriously thought about going into law enforcement. This is not the life for me. I don’t want it. I really don’t. I’m tryin’ everything I can to get out of prison. This is my second time putting in a pardon package, and I’m just asking for five years. I’m not asking to be set out on the street right away.”

  Dave asked what sort of work Lloyd hoped to do when released. Lloyd said landscaping, so they talked about that. The detective then gently steered the conversation back to Helen and the 1970s, which he hoped might lead them to Ray Mileski, the priority.

  “How did you get to Helen’s house? Did anyone ever bring you over there or anything? Do you remember back then any names that you might have been hanging out with?”

  “One time. I can’t remember his name, though. He drove an old Plymouth. It was a station wagon. He brought me over a couple of times.”

  “Do you recall his name?”

  “No, but I can—I mean, he had a bald head.”

  Mileski had not been bald. Dave asked for more. Lloyd said the man was old, “but everybody looks old when you’re that age.” He had picked Lloyd up outside a church. He thought the man might have been a minister—Mileski had not been. He drove a “dark-colored” car. When Dave pressed him for more details, Lloyd quickly grew irritated. He didn’t understand why such an insignificant thing, a man who many years earlier had given him a ride, was so important. It was a lifetime ago. He had been a druggie. He had taken many acid trips and taken a lot of speed.

  “My mi
nd’s almost shot on a lot of things,” he said.

  Dave changed the subject. He asked about Lloyd’s father.

  Lloyd said he’d been abused.

  “How many times do you think he abused you?”

  “Oh, I’ll never forget it. Ten times.”

  Dave sighed.

  Lloyd said it had happened every time Edna had left him alone in the house with his father. He would be berated, then beaten. “It just got to the point where I just didn’t say nothing, you know?” When he did complain about his father to others, he said, no one believed him. He said he still had “a hatred of him.”

  Dave was sympathetic. He said. “Yeah, because, I mean, minus that in your life, who knows the potential you may have had.”

  IN ALL “HONESTLY,”PART I

  They took a break. Dave went next door to confer with Chris, Pete, and Ray Young, the FBI agent. They had expected to be paddling upriver with Lloyd; instead, Dave was navigating rapids. They decided to show him a picture of Mileski. When the interview resumed, Dave placed it on the table.

  Lloyd reacted with surprise. “That’s the freaking guy that had the damn car I was telling you about! The one who was the minister!”

  He said he was certain. In the next room Chris rose from his chair in excitement. Here was the connection he had been looking for, the primary reason for this interview. He was so pumped that he began pacing. Enormous time and effort had been invested in this session on the hunch that the two men had known each other—and bingo! A big piece of his long-stalled case against Mileski had just clicked into place. Now, what was the true nature of the connection?

  “Did he ever offer you anything?” Dave asked.

  “He never offered me anything.”

  “Never to work for him?”