“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.”