The Last Stone

by Mark Bowden

  The problem was that both Lloyd’s math and his family history were off. Teddy had not met Kraisel until he was fifteen, four years after the Lyon kidnapping. This completely blew the premise of Lloyd’s story, but, just as he’d likely imagined, the detectives found Teddy’s past irresistibly suggestive. And interest in Teddy had an unintended and ultimately more significant consequence. It drew the squad’s attention to the entire Welch clan.

  All families had secrets, but few had ones like these.

  BECALMED

  After the Montgomery County Police Department’s press conference about Lloyd Welch, the most important evidence to surface was a two-year-old report that the squad had not seen. A woman named Dee Danner, after sitting on a memory for many years, had phoned the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2012 to report that she had observed a suspicious man in Wheaton Plaza on the day the Lyon sisters had disappeared. When Danner saw Lloyd’s photo on TV in 2014, she recognized him. She phoned the Montgomery County police to repeat her story, which was all the more credible because she had initially reported it long before Lloyd was publicly linked to the mystery.

  “This has been bothering me for years,” she had told the man who took her call in 2012. She described seeing that day a young white man with long brown hair and a mustache who had scared her. He looked to be in his twenties, she said. The man was staring so intently at her and at other girls that she and her companion had been frightened. They noticed that he seemed particularly fixated on girls with blond hair, which reassured them—both Dee and her friend had dark hair. She said the man was “creepy.” When he saw them watching him he had stared back menacingly, spooking them enough that they went to look for a security guard. They found one but shrank from talking to him. “What would we say,” she asked later—that someone was staring at girls and had made a face at them? So they said nothing but kept watching the creepy man.

  “We were scared of this guy, really scared of him,” she said. When Mark interviewed her, Dee said he had definitely been alone, which jibed with the story told years ago by Danette Shea, who had provided the description for the police artist. Dee also remembered seeing Sheila and Kate—she knew Sheila from school—and the notorious tape recorder man, who had been such a focus of the investigation years ago. She said this man had been a big center of attention, with a crowd around him, children and parents. In such circumstances it was hard to imagine him walking off with Sheila and Kate without being noticed. When the girls were missing, Dee and her friend immediately thought of the creepy man, but neither had contacted the police. They were children, she explained. All the news reports were focused on the tape recorder man. They felt what they had seen wasn’t important. But it had bothered her enough that she never forgot it.

  Dee’s memory was detailed and in parts verifiable. She had definitely been in Wheaton Plaza that day. Her identification of Lloyd was solid. She also remembered seeing the Lyon girls talking with a boy who was about their age, maybe slightly older. The previous investigation had confirmed that Jay, their older brother, had briefly been with them in the mall. But what if, the detectives wondered, the boy she had seen was Teddy?

  The effect of Dee’s memory was to intensify the focus on Lloyd, but the squad had little else to go on. Despite what Mark and Katie had told him, that the press conference had generated significant new leads, it had not directly advanced the case. In the first months of 2014, the probe was becalmed.

  But the conference had had a huge impact on Lloyd. He was miserable. It had not only affected his prison relationships; the publicity had outed him to his regular correspondents, who were horrified to have befriended a child molester. Lloyd’s carefully cultivated epistolary support system crumbled.

  He wrote a peevish lament to Edna in April: “I am an embarrassment to my family. I will send family pictures back to you that you sent me. I cannot believe that my brothers and sisters would turn on me like they have.” In another letter written in the same period, he apologized at length to a former cell mate’s mother-in-law, with whom he had corresponded regularly—she had encouraged him to become religious—and whom he had misled about his offense.

  I know you are upset, and hurt by me. I can understand this. As I said, I am a shame of my life. I wish I was never born, that way people would never have been hurt by me. I told you I always hurt people I know and love. Yes, I did lie to you and that hurt me more than you will ever know, but everything I told you about me in here [in prison], what I was doing and how I was trying to change my life around was true. I have had people all my life do judgment on me and walk away. It hurts like hell but you get use to it. I am not a monster. I might be stupid and a screwed up life. But I could never hurt anyone like that. I lie to you because, yes, I was very a shame of my life.… I wanted to tell you face to face about my life and show you that I was a good person in life. I am not going to lie to you anymore. I ask for your forgiveness in this matter. Only you can decide this. I thank you for all you have done for me. If you feel in some way that I have use you in any way to get money from you then I am sorry for that. It was not why I wrote.

  He told her he would understand if she stopped writing. He denied any connection to the Lyon sisters and noted that he had not been charged.

  I am being question about this, yes, because I made a stupid mistake 39 years ago and said I saw something when I did not see anything. I am not guilty of this. There is know [no] evidence on me, just that, yes, I was there that day and I made a false statements back then. I could never in my life kidnap anyone or hurt them. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life but not this.… I made mistakes in my life but I am still a decent person. I should not be treated like some kind of a animal, people will always judge me. May God be with you and your family.

  He signed off with “God bless.”

  Despite this seemingly heartfelt plea, Lloyd had eclipsed Ray Mileski as the squad’s prime suspect. Mark and Katie had done what they could to batter him into admitting his role, only to elicit more misdirection.

  It was painful to admit, but Lloyd was all they had—and they had now surely alienated him. When Dave went to see him again a month later, it was all about damage repair.

  The detective had lain awake the night before, wondering how to handle the interview. The truth was that they had never adequately prepared for these sessions with Lloyd. They needed to be smarter. For the first session they had prepped long and hard, but then they had seen Lloyd as a witness. The second meeting had been about introducing Lloyd to Mark, and in the third, which included Katie’s polygraph test, they had hoped to sort out which version of his story to believe and perhaps shake him up enough to extract the truth. The fourth had been designed to take advantage of the blow struck by the press conference, to pressure him, but had only backed him deeper into his corner and produced the dubious story about Teddy. It had one positive outcome; they no longer needed to worry about Lloyd’s refusing to see them. The press conference had hurt him badly. If he were going to shut down, it would have happened then. The FBI’s estimation that Lloyd would clam up had clearly been off base. Now the squad needed to rebuild rapport, and for that they needed a sound strategy. What had they learned about him? What could they use?

  Nobody ever tells you when you go into police work that it will require dishonesty. The objective, it would seem, is the opposite, utter honesty. But once you get into the really interesting stuff, you descend, by necessity, a moral ladder onto slippery ground where the truth is a liability. This was one of the reasons Katie had felt the need to escape the sex crimes unit. To catch the child molester or the possible child killer, she’d had to play along, to pretend—convincingly—sympathy and even amity. This sometimes made her skin crawl.

  Dave knew that was where he was headed. It was the basis of his approach to all the suspects he had interrogated, and it came naturally to him. The armored-car robber who had confessed and then led him and Chris to the buried loot had done so becaus
e Dave had won him over, had convinced him that he was on his side. He had reasoned with him, had talked him into believing that cooperation was the only thing that might help him. This was a standard tactic, one that most seasoned criminals saw through; but fewer did so with Dave, because he was able to summon something like real empathy for the accused. In his years of detective work he had seen disadvantaged defendants get creamed by the justice system for crimes that warranted leniency, and also the opposite. He remembered in particular a well-spoken, white, presentable high school teacher who had gone on an armed-robbery spree to support a drug habit, and who got off in court with a slap on the wrist. Dave felt the educated criminal with the good job was, if anything, more culpable than someone who committed a crime out of desperation or stupidity. His default posture was to try to understand the poor sucker in deep trouble. And yet, on another level, Dave knew that empathy itself was a ploy. Earning trust was nearly always a ruse. Cooperation rarely worked to a suspect’s benefit. The armored-car robber got a life sentence—so much for coming clean to his good buddy, Dave! The detective coped with this duplicity by narrowing his vision. He focused only on the relationship he developed with a suspect inside the interview room, looking neither back nor forward. The simplicity of the room helped. Small, windowless, and bare, it constricted the world to the conversation. But the work required more, he knew. It meant donning moral blinders to the terrible things his subject might have done, to the consequences that might await the subject, and to his own behavior. In that confined space, Dave became a suspect’s last best friend.

  His determination not to dwell on the crime itself was why Dave had never met John and Mary Lyon. To feel their pain and to obsess about their daughters’ fate would make it harder to act chummy with Lloyd. Unless he could summon some genuine empathy for Lloyd, his act would be all pretense—and unconvincing. It was easier to adopt this approach because Lloyd, Dave understood, was also playing false. It was a game. Each man was trying to get over on the other. It was something Dave enjoyed as much as Lloyd seemed to enjoy it—although the stakes were clearly higher for Lloyd. So far, as Dave saw it, he, Dave, was losing. But he had clearly established himself as the “good cop.” Now he would play it to the hilt. Mark and Katie soon would be calling him Lloyd’s “Wubbie.”

  APRIL 24, 2014

  They met again in the same interview room upstairs at Dover Police Headquarters. Lloyd, in his bright orange denim, with his hands shackled in his lap, looked dejected. He was seated on one side of the desk and Dave on the other. The detective slid across a large cup of coffee. Lloyd hardly stirred. He looked thinner still, his white goatee longer, the patches of hair left on his scalp straggly.

  “Does he have to be hooked up?” Dave asked the two guards at the door, pointing to the chains attached to Lloyd’s handcuffs.

  “We can take the travel gear off, but the cuffs will stay on,” said one.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  The chains were removed.

  “What’s happening, brother?” he asked Lloyd cheerfully.

  Lloyd rubbed his eyes with his cuffed hands and sighed heavily.

  “Nothin’,” he said, glumly.

  “Long morning again?”

  “I’ve been in these things since six this morning.”

  “I know there’s been a lot of undue pressure put on you,” began Dave. “It’s been a lot of pressure put on the community and on this police department to try to get this thing to come to a head. And one of the reasons I wanted to sit down with you is because I think I’ve come up with some different things.”

  He said he wanted them to start over.

  “It’s going to be very laid-back, very informal. I wanted to start off by saying I apologize for the last six or eight months, the way that this unfolded on you, as well as how it’s obviously affected you, how it’s displaced you in the prison—”

  “Yeah, look at me,” Lloyd said. He was feeling sorry for himself. In his life summary, written at about this time, he complained, “I am treated like a piece of shit now. Maybe that is what I am now. I have been the black sheep of a family that has never loved me or cared about me. I guess I will die that way.”

  Lloyd referred back to their first meeting, laughing bitterly: “That’s when my life went to hell. Seventeen years of work, trying to do good in this penitentiary and change my life around, and all in three months’ time it went downhill. I mean, I can’t even go into population now. They got me on lockdown. Pure, pure lockdown.”

  “I think a lot of that’s for your safety, just based on the media release.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it was. Then I hear the people that I’ve known for years have been telling all kinds of bull crap about me.”

  “They have,” said Dave. “I have been talking to several of them. I don’t know that I believe them, but I had to talk to them. I mean they’re all reaching out to us.”

  “Well, that’s what I don’t understand. What they’re talking to y’all about. They don’t know nothing about me, what’s put me in jail, you know? Because I didn’t share nothing with nobody. I didn’t share my life with nobody.”

  “I can tell you’re a little upset, but I think after today—”

  “I’m a little discouraged about a lot of things. I got officers treatin’ me like shit, talkin’ shit about me. I’ve had a few of them threaten me.”

  “Officers?”

  “Yep, calling me a child killer, child rapist, all of that and then telling people on the tier that I’m on now the same thing. I tried to ask for something, and they act like they don’t know me. Officers that I have known for years don’t know me all the sudden. Oh yeah, I’m a little discouraged by a lot of things. That’s why I’m going to be taking the Fifth on a lot of things and asking for a lawyer all the time.”

  Lloyd now believed that the whole Mileski angle Dave had presented in October, showing him pictures, asking him to be a witness, had been a setup. It had not been, and Dave told him so. He said the squad in fact had been focused on Mileski but had since found evidence that completely exonerated him. “That was a mistake,” he explained. “Everything you were told about that guy was accurate. But he was in jail at the time.” This was not true, but he wanted to dismiss Mileski from their conversation.

  He reiterated that Lloyd had the right to stop talking and to consult with an attorney, and that he would understand if Lloyd went that way, but then tried to carve out an exception for himself.

  “You’ve heard me, and I’ve never come up with anything shady,” he said. “I’ve never lied to you.”

  They talked a little more, and then Lloyd, without further complaint, once more agreed to waive his rights.

  “All of the times we’ve sat down and talked, there’s been a variation,” Dave said. “Different events. Different people. Kind of a variation in stories. What I mean by that is not lies—”

  “No, a lot of them was lies,” Lloyd admitted.

  “I’m trying to sit back and take an absolute point of view of it and not base it on opinion,” said the detective. “Because I like you. And part of this is hard, because when you gain some sort of trust after being with someone for a while, it’s hard to understand how you could have done something like this. But you have to look at it objectively. You have to do your job, and you have to take your opinion out of it. Does that make sense?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I can’t come in here and judge you just based on how I feel about you. I have to look at all the facts as a whole. So that’s what I did. I broke them all apart. And there’s some factual things that I think that you’ll agree upon. That in nineteen seventy-five, March twenty-fifth, you were inside Wheaton Plaza.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Dave proceeded to outline the other things they could agree were fact. Lloyd had paid enough attention to a group of girls that they had heckled him, and they had later given the police a description that produced a composite sketch.

  “And th
at doesn’t make you a criminal,” Dave hastily added. “That makes you a man, because they were a good-looking set of girls, and anybody—no matter how old they were—would have looked at them. And that’s a fact. So much that one of the girls approached you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s things that we can’t dispute,” said Dave. “That physically happened.”

  “And I agree with you on that,” said Lloyd. “I told you from day one that I was in the mall.”

  In fact, he had not, but Dave was not here to quarrel. He was trying to reset their relationship. He wanted a clean slate. He continued to outline the facts upon which they could both agree: Lloyd went back to the mall to say he had witnessed something. He took a polygraph. Lloyd acknowledged these things were true.

  “Remember talking about the bus?” Dave asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hopefully you are going to enlighten me. Maybe you got into a car. Maybe they got into a car. Maybe you got on a bus, and they got on the same bus. But at some point in time, you, my friend, were the last person that saw those girls. You might have been the last person to have a conversation with them. And when you were questioned by the police in seventy-five, if you would have told them, what would the police have thought?”

  “Arrest him. He did it.”

  “Exactly, and that’s what’s been bugging you for the last thirty-nine years.”