by Mark Bowden
He had worked on the case longer than the others, and for him the end felt particularly disappointing and anticlimactic. There were still too many unanswered questions. Finding the girls’ bodies had always been his primary goal, and in that he had failed. There was no more time to try. Fifteen minutes after Lloyd’s plea, Chris and the others were rolled up into another murder case and were up for two days doing interviews and executing search warrants. With Lloyd convicted, the chances were small that they would ever dive back into the Lyon mystery again. One thing consoled Chris. He was convinced that if Lloyd had ever gotten out of jail, he would have taken more victims.
THE PERFECT CRIME
I wanted to meet Lloyd. Mostly I wanted to size him up for myself, but I also wanted to close the book on the mystery that had been with me through my entire professional life. For years after the Lyon story dropped off the front page of my old Baltimore newspaper, its editors would summon me whenever there was a new twist or potential break. I wrote a story when the IBM man reported what he had seen and another when John Lyon was lured to the Annapolis courthouse by the extortionist.
Four years after the Lyon girls disappeared, my city editor, the late Lou Linley, took a call from a psychic who told him their remains were in a field off Route 50, near Baltimore-Washington International Airport. One of Lou’s many eccentricities—one that I did not share—was a fascination with the paranormal. He took the tip seriously enough to dispatch me, along with my colleague Bob Douglas (who in later years would become a lawyer and serve as a chief of staff to the governor of Maryland), to check it out. I wonder now, looking back on it, why Bob and I hadn’t found a cool bar in nearby Glen Burnie and spent that humid summer afternoon drinking beer. But we were earnest young men, and afraid of Lou—and of missing a story—so we obligingly stomped and sweated through every inch of those prickly fields. We found nothing.
Through the years I continued to wonder about those girls and what had happened to them. In general, the answers were as easy to surmise as they were hard to contemplate. The words one conjured to describe the crime all fell short: callous, brutal, savage, unfeeling, cruel … One could, perhaps, see how someone like Lloyd might be tempted to do what he did, but indulging that temptation, ultimately, was a choice. It is hard to imagine making a worse one. The only right word for it is evil.
To tell this story I had to meet Lloyd, and did so on January 8, 2018, at the Smyrna prison. I had written to him a month earlier, telling him about this book and requesting an interview. I told him the book would center on the interrogation sessions.
“I am eager to hear your own view of [them],” I wrote, “the tactics involved, and your account of how and why your account so dramatically changed. You are, of course, front and center throughout those conversations, so you will be very much present in the story. I would like to make sure I understand it through your eyes.”
I knew he had consistently turned down requests from journalists, so I was surprised when he wrote back promptly. He had conditions.
It will not be a interview intell we talk and come to an understanding. I know you will make a lot of money off this and most likely you have something in the works with a documentary and a book. Just so you know you are not the first person to write me and ask to do a book. I will tell you the something I told them. I can have up to $5,000 in my inmate account.
He then explained how to wire him money.
If yu don’t want to do this and we cannot come to an understanding then I don’t want my name on anything or talk about me through someone else’s name, for then I would have to talk to my lawyers. I have not heard from the other two yet. All of you have intell 1-8-18 to decide. I hope to hear from you soon on this.
I would not be making any deals with Lloyd, and I knew that I did not need his permission to write about him, but decided to meet his deadline anyway. I wrote him to say I would come to the prison on January 8 to discuss his terms. Hearing him out would give me what I wanted most, a chance to form my own impression of him and to ask a few questions of my own.
The visiting room was large and sunny; a barrier about waist high formed a big U that ran parallel to the room’s outer walls. There were benches inside and outside the barrier. I took a seat on one of the outer benches. Inmates were led into the center and then found their way to benches opposite their visitors. Sitting directly across from Lloyd felt familiar; I had watched him on video sitting across the table in the interview room for more than seventy hours. Screens don’t convey a proper sense of size or mass, and I found Lloyd to be a somewhat smaller person than I had imagined. He looked thinner than he had appeared in the videos, with a pale pink complexion, and his slate-blue, watery eyes were magnified behind his glasses. His white beard and mustache were neatly trimmed. With me he was cordial but all business. If I was expecting to look evil in the eye, or to find someone exceptional, I was disappointed. What I found was an unimpressive, scheming man, capable of charm but only to the extent that it served his own interest, someone natively bright but deeply ignorant and cocky beyond all reason.
He displayed his usual poor sense of situation, believing he had a lot more leverage over me than he did. The terms he repeated, the same ones he had outlined in his letter, were ridiculous, but I heard him out. Then I asked the questions I most wanted him to answer. The prison would not allow me to bring a notepad or recorder to the meeting, but I wrote out what I remembered immediately after our hour was up.
“Why did you keep talking to the detectives?”
Lloyd said had no choice. He was taken from the prison the first time believing he was going to an interview regarding his parole petition, and instead met Dave and eventually Dave’s colleagues. He said his repeated requests for a lawyer were ignored. Prison authorities told him, he said, that he had no choice but to continue meeting with the detectives. None of this was borne out by the videos I had watched. While he had, periodically, asked for a lawyer, and once or twice made a move to leave, he had always quickly dropped the request or, in the one case when he actually did stand up to leave, promptly returned to his chair. He had been transparently bluffing. Even apart from the formal consent forms he had signed, his participation throughout appeared completely voluntary.
The detectives, as part of his plea agreement, were no longer allowed to talk to him, so Dave had asked me to convey a message. Since Lloyd wanted money, I was to assure him that his prison account would never be empty if he revealed where the girls’ bodies were buried. It wasn’t an official offer, but the Montgomery County police had spent millions on the investigation and still didn’t have that answer. The relatively small amounts Lloyd sought, Dave had assured me, would find their way to his ledger.
Lloyd said he didn’t know where the bodies were.
“I have told them all I know,” he said. “Just because a person pleads guilty to something doesn’t mean they are guilty of it. I did not murder or kidnap them girls.”
Who did?
His uncle Dick was responsible.
“How do you think I would take two little girls out of the mall, kicking and screaming?” he asked. “Who would be able to do something like that? A man with a uniform.” He didn’t understand why Dick had not been charged. He said he was afraid of his uncle. He had been in 1975. “When he told me and Helen to leave, we left Maryland and didn’t come back for seven years,” Lloyd told me. He said he was still afraid Dick would target his children.
While insisting on his innocence, Lloyd nevertheless seemed a little proud of whatever role he had played in the crime. I told him of my early coverage of the story, and of all the years I had wondered about it. He noted that it had taken the Montgomery County police almost forty years to link him to the case, and boasted, “I’ll bet it seemed like the perfect crime, didn’t it?”
He complained about being treated in the prison as a rapist and murderer of children. Someone, he said, might still “put a shank” in his back. Over eighteen years he had earned a meas
ure of respect from the inmates and staff. After he was linked to the Lyon story, he was treated scornfully. All of his things had been taken from him when he was moved to a prison in Virginia for his court hearing, and when he got back, nothing was returned. He said he had nothing. No TV. No clothes. No job.
He said he had enjoyed the interview sessions. They got him out of the prison, and he got to eat something better than the fare in the prison mess.
“That’s one of the reasons I kept talking to them,” he said, contradicting what he’d said minutes earlier, that he had been forced to do it. He insisted that he had told the detectives the truth throughout, only sparingly. “I was also trying to protect myself.”
By the end of our appointed hour I saw no strong reason to talk with him further. I had asked him my biggest questions. I had seen him invent and reinvent his version of the story so often in the videos that I saw no point in inviting him to do the same with me. It would be starting down the same path trod by the Lyon squad in 2013 and would lead me no closer to the truth. But when I wrote back to him a few days later to reject his deal, I added that if he changed his mind about the payment and wanted to talk with me more, I’d come back and listen.
I got another letter from him promptly.
I received your letter and I am very disappointed in this. So let me say this to you so you can understand what I am saying to you. First the documentary you are doing, you may not use any pictures of me or Helen and you may not use my name in anyway at all. “You don’t have my permission to use me at all.” Now, as for your book, I do not give you any permission to use my or any pictures of me or Helen in any way. You do not have my approval or authorization to use anything about the Welch’s name. You may not use any of the interview sessions that you have of me you do not have my permission. I will not tolerate or permit someone to use my name or make any money off of me. Sorry we did not come to some kind of a understanding. Now you have my input. If you want to come see me then you will have to put $300 on my commissary’s books before you can talk to me again. My time is money now.
I noticed that, despite his tone, the price had dropped considerably.
HOME
Lloyd’s plea had been arranged by his court-appointed lawyers, Aaron Houchens and Anthony Anderson, who chose not to talk to me. No doubt they had been horrified to learn that their client had spent more than seventy hours over almost two years gradually confessing his role in the crime to the police.
Any hope of saving Lloyd from himself vanished when the judge refused to throw those interviews out, as his lawyers had requested. The judge found their arguments largely unpersuasive. The “immunity offer” from the first meeting clearly didn’t protect him, because it relied, in part, on his being entirely truthful and had stipulated that it would not hold if he admitted a crime. Lloyd had not met either requirement.
Lloyd had from time to time asked for a lawyer. Dave spent more than an hour on the stand explaining how the squad had handled each of these requests, working through a mountain of paper transcripts. Lloyd was repeatedly told he could stop talking and have a lawyer if he wished—and he kept talking. He had never been held in the interview room against his will. In the end, the judge disallowed only the last interview: immediately after Dave informed him that he was going to be indicted, Lloyd had asked for a lawyer. Dave had smoothly changed the subject, offering to talk to Lloyd not as cop to suspect, but as “human being to human being.” Lloyd had gone on to talk to Dave at length, even after repeating his desire to consult with a lawyer, making very damaging admissions. The judge ruled that in this instance the interview was compromised. The commonwealth prosecutor did not challenge the ruling, because Lloyd had repeated all the salient parts of that conversation in the van on the ride to Virginia, voluntarily. He had furnished more than enough rope for his own hanging. He was, in short, the worst client a defense lawyer could have.
His case was over at that point, and Lloyd knew it. His shoulders slumped. It had been his last chance.
The day before his plea was formally entered on September 12, 2017, Lloyd met once more with Dave Davis and the Virginia detectives in the Bedford County courthouse. The idea was to allow him one more chance to explain exactly what had happened. Lloyd was the last stone, and, to some extent, he remained unturned. After he signed the papers for his guilty pleas, which he did at the outset of the meeting, both Maryland and Virginia agreed to forgo any additional charges. Lloyd could do himself no further harm. Dave attended because he thought—he hoped—that at long last, with no reason to lie, Lloyd might tell the truth.
No. With his defense lawyers alongside, Lloyd made an effort to appear contrite—to the detective it looked as if he was trying, without success, to summon tears—only to revert to cheerful laughter in the next moment. He offered nothing new. Instead he offered something old, a story about going to Wheaton Plaza to pick up girls that was essentially the same one he’d told three years earlier, as if he had said nothing different in the interim. Large parts of this “new” version had been discredited—he insisted once more, for instance, that his cousin Teddy had been there. Much of it he himself had long since disavowed, yet … here it was again. To Dave, it didn’t make sense.
And then, as the meeting broke up, after his lawyers had left the room, Lloyd abruptly asked for them to come back. Dave thought, Uh-oh, now he’s going to try to take back the plea! The detective wondered, since Lloyd had just signed the papers, whether he could. What sort of confusion would this now cause? But Lloyd wasn’t having second thoughts. When his attorneys returned, he asked if the immunity proffered him in this meeting would remain in effect if, at some point in the future, he decided to contact the detectives and tell them something new. He was assured it would, but, Dave wondered, to what end? He left even more confused about Lloyd than when he’d started. Why would he ask that if he had nothing more to say? If he did have more to say, why not do it here and now? Did he think he could use information to gain advantages in prison? Was he just reluctant for the game to end?
John and Mary Lyon attended his sentencing, their hair now white, both grown thicker and stooped with age. While the crime was a distant, disturbing memory for those of us who had been around forty-one years earlier, the Lyons had lived with it every day and would live with it for the rest of their lives. Sheila and Kate had become distant memories, smiling faces in faded Kodachrome.
John still had his stentorian voice. He spoke briefly and with calm authority. He had only kind things to say. He thanked Chris and Dave and Katie and Mark.
“The last two or three years or so, they have treated Sheila and Kate as if they were their own sisters or daughters,” he said.
He ignored Lloyd, who was seated before him. He ended with weary words that the killer would never comprehend, because they spoke to a shared humanity. What John knew and Lloyd could not know was that such deliberate savagery was a thing beyond setting right, beyond the reach of justice, vengeance, forgiveness, or healing. The only right response was despair. One could only embrace the sadness and turn away.
“It’s been a long time,” said John. “We’re tired, and we just want to go home.”
Sheila and Kate Lyon
The author and the publisher are donating part of the proceeds from this book to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. You can learn more about that organization at http://www.missingkids.com/home.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the four detectives, Dave Davis, Chris Homrock, Mark Janney, and Katie Leggett, for their patient and generous cooperation in telling this story; and to Darren Franke, who invited me to meet them at Montgomery County, Maryland police headquarters in 2015. Pete Feeney and John McCarthy helped me understand the decisions they made in bringing Lloyd Welch to justice, and I am grateful to Catherine M. Recker of Welsh & Recker PC for her careful early reading and clear legal reasoning. Thanks once more to Matt Ericson for his lucid maps. As always, warm thanks to Morgan Entrekin and t
he rest of my friends at Grove Atlantic, for twenty years my professional home, who once more smoothly guided my manuscript into a finished book.