“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—”