by Mark Bowden
Lloyd insisted that the man had given him a ride once or twice to Helen’s house. That was it.
“Okay,” said Dave. “He is the focal point of why we’re here. In talking to people that surrounded him—you would have no idea who these folks are—we came up with you, and then we said, ‘Well, look, you know, he [Lloyd] comes from that background of abuse, and what he [Mileski] did to his kids and other folks, he manipulated. He picked up young boys on the street, offered them sex for drugs and alcohol, that sort of thing.’”
Lloyd nodded.
“And that’s why we came here to you, saying, hey, this may be a good day for you. It may be a great day for us.”
“Right.”
“And it may explain things that happened way back when, right? That may never ever get explained without your help.”
“But he never offered me anything like that,” Lloyd said. “I mean, he gave me the ride. It was just something hairy about him I didn’t like. That’s why I didn’t get in the car with him anymore. I got in twice and that was it.”
“You never recall seeing him in, like, a uniform or anything of that nature where he looked like he might have been maintenance for the church? Because it’s weird that this guy, knowing who he is and knowing his background and what he was involved in—and he was involved in some pretty horrific things. Anything else that you can think of?”
Lloyd had no more to offer. He said the man who drove him listened to country music on the radio. He said he found the man “eerie” and didn’t talk to him much. Eventually he decided to stop taking rides with him. He kept looking at the picture and shaking his head with amazement.
“Definitely looks like him.”
“With all that being said, and him being the focus of this investigation, we said we have to go talk to you. I think at the time you wanted to help out,” said Dave, referring to the statement Lloyd had given the police thirty-eight years ago. Lloyd warmed to this memory.
“I did!” he said. He said he had called the police to tell them he’d seen a man putting two girls into a car, “and the cops looked at me like I was some young little punk-ass drunk or whatever.”
“Tell me what happened with that conversation and why they treated you the way they did and didn’t pay attention to you,” Dave said. “Tell me what you remember, what actually happened.”
“I told him what I saw. I told him about where I saw it, and I guess because I looked like a young, dumb person or whatever, I didn’t have, I guess, the smarts or whatever, dressed nice or whatever, they basically looked at me, like, Yeah, okay, right. I don’t remember the officer’s name. He wrote a little information down and said he’d get back and [I] never heard anything, never heard from him since.”
Dave asked Lloyd to repeat what he had seen that day. Lloyd now launched into a story completely at odds with his old statement. He said he had been standing on a sidewalk near Helen’s house in Takoma Park—this was miles from Wheaton Plaza—when he saw, “a guy putting two girls in the back of a car, and I told them [the police] that it didn’t look right. It was dark. The way the girls were acting and stuff like that. I was walking up the street when I seen it, and that’s all I saw, and that’s exactly what I told them.”
He fleshed out this story in more detail under Dave’s questioning, adding specific memories: that the man was dressed all in black and wearing a black hat; that the man put the girls in the back seat of a car, slammed the door, and drove off fast; and how he had told Helen about it when he went back to her house. When Dave asked him about Wheaton Plaza, Lloyd said he had never been there and, in answer to another question, that he had not visited a police station to give his statement. He said he had called the police from a sidewalk phone booth at Helen’s urging, and that an officer had come to him.
Dave showed him pictures of the Lyon girls. Lloyd said he couldn’t tell if they were the ones he’d seen. It was dark, he said. The girls had their backs to him. One of them, the smaller one, had been crying. He described the car in detail, but he could recall no more.
“Now, these two little girls here, they have been missing,” said Dave. “They have never been found. And their parents are damn near eighty years old and have no idea what happened to their daughters. That’s why we’re here to talk to you, and that’s why I said I think it’s gonna be a good day.”
“Right.”
“For both of us. You had some information that should have been explored back then. And I can’t make excuses. What happened back then is what happened. The only thing I can do is just offer you this and say, look, this is where we are with this thing, and you, you are what we have left. He [Mileski] is the focal point of this thing and these two little girls, whether they’re—stranger things have happened—whether they’re alive or dead.”
“Yeah, look at that guy who had those three women locked in his house,” Lloyd said, referring to an abduction and rape case that had recently been in the news.
“Right. And before these people pass away—”
“They want to know where their children are,” said Lloyd.
“Right.”
“And I don’t blame them. I wish I could honestly say that that was them. I wish. But, like I said, I did not get to see their faces. I couldn’t tell you if one girl had glasses on or not.” After giving his statement to the police, he said, “that was honestly the last time I ever thought about it.”
Dave shifted gears. He asked how Lloyd had known today that they wanted to talk to him about the Lyons. Lloyd said his sister Darlene and his niece had told him about having been contacted by Maryland cops, and that his stepmom in Tennessee also had been contacted.
Dave explained the squad’s hope that he could help them link Mileski to the crime.
“We were hoping, one, that you were still alive; and, two, that we would be able to sit down in a restaurant and have dinner. We didn’t know that you were here.”
“Take me to Maryland,” Lloyd said, abruptly.
Dave laughed, startled.
“I’ll help y’all out, man. Get me transferred to Maryland. I’ll help you out on anything you want. Or I’m gonna clam up.”
This was a startling shift. In the next room, Chris thought, “Why ‘clam up’ if he knew nothing more?” It was odd enough for Lloyd to lie about his 1975 statement. Anyone could misremember—it had been a long time—but he had just offered a spate of new details, clearly invented, to flesh out this false account. Why do that? What else might he be lying about or holding back?
Dave appealed to Lloyd’s pity for the girls’ parents. “They have no idea what happened to their daughters,” he said. “It would be something if we can knock on their door and say, ‘Look, we haven’t found them, but we know that they passed,’ you know? And we have some answers. This guy here,” pointing to the photo of Mileski, “without a doubt, there’s some involvement.”
“Have y’all talked to him?”
“We have not.”
“Okay.”
“We started here.”
“Okay.”
“You know, we start with the best and go to the worst.”
Lloyd again insisted, “in all honestly”—he continually mispronounced the word honesty—that he could not say who the man or the girls were that he had seen that night. “I don’t want to say something just because [you] want to hear it.”
“That doesn’t do me any good,” agreed Dave.
“And it ain’t gonna do me no good. I mean, okay, I’m a criminal, but I’m not going to sit here and say, Let’s make a deal,” although that was what, in so many words, he had just done.
“Right. No.”
“I’m not into all that. I can’t honestly say that’s the two girls or not.”
IN ALL “HONESTLY,” PART II
It was Dave’s turn to surprise Lloyd. He pulled his old statement from a folder and placed it before him.
“I want to bring this to your attention,” he said, “and this is not in any way
to jam you up, it’s just what we have to go with, and maybe it will help bring back some memories. What we have here is your actual statement that you gave to the police about this particular case. And it’s back from the mall—”
“From a mall?”
“From a mall, and it’s actually a polygraph that you took in the police station where you were brought back, and they asked you some pretty specific questions.”
Lloyd leaned back, startled. He had just been caught in a detailed lie.
“I don’t remember this,” he said, shaking his head and bending over to scrutinize the document.
“And you admit, after you take the polygraph, that, ‘Hey, maybe some of the things I told you weren’t exactly accurate.’”
“Right.”
“Maybe you tried to embellish because you’re trying to make it look good, or you were trying to tell them something without getting involved. When I look at where you came from and your upbringing and where you’re at now, and trying to understand how all that took place, we got to a point where we said we just need to go talk to him. We need to see if he’ll help us in this thing, help answer some questions for these people. We’re not here to jam you up. You’re already in trouble, you know, unfortunately, and there’s nothing we can do about that. But this is the situation you’re in. I’ll let you read this thing.”
Taken aback, Lloyd seemed momentarily at a loss. He leveled a serious look at Dave.
“I just don’t remember going to a police station and giving a statement and taking a polygraph test. I mean, I honestly don’t believe that. I mean, well, not believe, I just don’t remember it. It was at a mall? What mall?”
“Wheaton Plaza.”
“We never went to Wheaton Plaza that much.”
The last two words were a concession. Moments earlier he’d said he had never been there. Dave reviewed the contents of the old document, in which Lloyd described going to the mall with Helen to look for jobs, and then added some more of what they knew. He told him about the girls who had said he had been staring at them. He showed Lloyd the old drawing based on Danette Shea’s description.
Lloyd seemed unfazed. He joked: “Well, that’s funny. You know why it’s funny? ’Cause I didn’t have a mustache. I didn’t start growing a mustache until I was forty years old.”
In fact, he had a mustache in the 1977 arrest photo, taken when he was just twenty. Dave didn’t contradict him or show him the old photo. He just waited.
“And that’s supposed to be me?” Lloyd asked, and then laughed dismissively, as if he had convincingly debunked it. Listening in the next room, Chris found everything about Lloyd’s behavior strange—the lying, the laughter, the way he would protest how damaged his memory was and then come up with highly specific details from almost four decades past. If he was playing games, he didn’t seem to be very good at it. There was much that seemed off about this guy.
Concerned that the sketch would make Lloyd believe he was a suspect, Dave reassured him. The drawing was just “informational.” It wasn’t, “an attempt to charge anybody. It was just an attempt to say, Hey, we need this guy. He has information.”
Lloyd continued to insist he had no memory of giving the old statement. He stuck with the Takoma Park story. He protested again that he had done “a lot of drugs” and had been “an acidhead back then” and that there were holes in his memory.
“Well, it’s all in here,” said Dave, tapping the statement. There was no mistaking it. The address he had given was where his father and stepmother were living in 1975, and he had talked about Helen.
He read from Lloyd’s old description of the man with a tape recorder who had been talking to the girls.
“Man, I honestly can’t remember.”
“This was one hundred percent you,” said Dave. “You’re talking about Helen, looking for jobs. You’re pretty detailed in this statement, about hearing what he said to the girls. You were sitting on a bench watching this take place.”
Lloyd looked away. Thinking. He appeared unsure how to proceed.
“Phew,” he said. “I’m trying to jog my memory. I honestly am. Because I really do wanna help. I really do.”
“This could be the most important thing,” said Dave. “Some of the answers to these questions only you hold.”
“Got a hypnotist? On a stack of Bibles, I don’t remember that,” Lloyd said, and stayed with his Takoma Park story.
Dave tried to loosen him up. “Would it help if I told you—some of this stuff I hold back because I don’t want to just give it to you to hear you give it back to me—that this guy that I showed you a picture of that picked you up in the car is actually dead? If you were to tell me that, ‘Hey, I was there with him, I saw what he did, I know what he did,’ we’re not going to be calling you as a witness. This guy is dead. He died in prison in 2005. So we’ve come up with these theories.”
He said he believed Lloyd knew more. Lloyd insisted he didn’t.
“I can’t remember,” he said. “And I’m serious.”
Dave upped the ante. While Lloyd was not yet considered a suspect, if he continued to deny what was demonstrably true, he might become one. He didn’t want to go down that road. For now, they were, “Just two dudes sittin’ down and talkin’,” he said. “Don’t you find it weird that this guy’s picking you up from a church and dropping you off at Helen’s in a black car, and all of a sudden these two girls go missing, and he’s the focal point of the investigation, and you guys are—if he truly is the person we believe he is, which we’re damn sure, ninety-five percent—that you’re in the mall together that same day that these girls go missing? What are the chances of that?”
Lloyd laughed nervously.
Dave said, “I mean, think about it that way.”
Lloyd saw that the stakes had gone up. His memory began to improve.
“Am I involved in it? No. The first thing that would go through somebody’s mind, Is he involved in it? No. I’m not involved in it. I have never killed anybody. I have never hurt anybody in my life as far as that’s concerned. I have never kidnapped anybody, and I never would. You know? I’m an asshole for what I did to be incarcerated right now, and I feel bad about that every day, but as far as killing and kidnapping—”
“Let me stop you there,” said Dave. “We’re not putting you as killing these girls.” He explained Mileski’s methods, picking up hitchhikers, using them to help lure young girls, “because he liked to have sex with the younger crowd. And he would use these guys and give them drugs and give them alcohol to lure these girls, and then he would do what he did with them after the fact.” He was trying to make it clear to Lloyd that if he admitted he’d been involved with Mileski at age eighteen, he may have been just another of the man’s victims, not a killer or kidnapper. He was offering Lloyd a way out.
But Lloyd didn’t bite. Mileski was just someone who had given him a ride now and then. Nothing more.
He said: “And very first thing I’d do if somebody said, ‘Hey, go get those two girls for me?’—I would find that very strange to begin with—I wouldn’t be involved in something like that. I’m not into that, and I would never be involved in something like that.” Curiously, as he explained further, he would have refused not because taking two little girls from the mall would be wrong but because it would have been ill-advised. “The first thing I would do is, ‘Well, why can’t you go get ’em?’ You know? ‘Why you want me to go get ’em?’ ’Cause I’m a very questionable person. I’ll ask questions. I just won’t go out and do something.”
IN ALL “HONESTLY,” PART III
They took another break, and Dave left Lloyd alone in the room with the copy of his original statement. He leaned down and read it very carefully, lingering a long time over each page. A guard came in and set a large cup of coffee on the table and removed the chain that ran from Lloyd’s hands to his waist. He stayed absorbed in his reading. He could now reach up with both hands for the cup and more easily turn the pages.
“Phew,” he said at one point, very quietly, and then remarked, “Oh my God.”
When he finished he sighed heavily, took a gulp of coffee, and sat for a long time with his head down, sighing at intervals. His old statement placed him in the mall at the scene of the kidnapping. They had caught him lying. What could he say?
When Dave returned, he stuck to his bad-memory defense.
“I mean, that’s me,” he said, gesturing to the document. “No ifs, ands, and buts about it. But, honestly, I can’t remember anything. I can’t even remember making that statement to be honest with you.” He asked Dave, “Did you talk to Helen about this at all?”
Dave was silent for a moment. He was torn. Helen, it had turned out, was dead, and Lloyd might not know that. Should Dave build trust with him by telling him the truth, or would it be more useful for them if Lloyd didn’t know? Later, it would become clear why Lloyd was concerned about what Helen might say, but for now, they had not anticipated the question. Dave had to decide. He opted for honesty.
“Helen has passed away,” he said.
Lloyd was shocked.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m dead serious,” he said. Dave explained that she had remarried. When they’d gone looking for her they’d found her husband, who told them she had died.
“I didn’t know that,” said Lloyd. “That’s why nobody in the family could find her. She’s dead. Wow.” Apart from whatever else he felt about the death of his old partner, the mother of three of his children, Lloyd had to have been feeling relieved.
They talked more about the disparity between his stories. Lloyd continued to insist that his memory of seeing two girls being put into a car in Takoma Park was correct. Dave ignored this. Without question, the 1975 statement was the one that mattered, so he proceeded on that basis.
“You look back from a neutral standpoint, how is this possible? How are two people [Lloyd and Mileski] from different backgrounds, and y’all are in the same place at the same time and calling in information after the fact” (both men had contacted the police with a story about the kidnapping).