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).
“Oh Lord, this is goin’—I can see myself gettin’ charged now.”
“Nah, no. No. Listen, look, we’re not here to build a case against you.”
“Right.”
Dave talked about what an “animal” Mileski had been, how he had killed his own wife and child. He soothed Lloyd by telling him how impressed he was, that before they’d met he had imagined Lloyd as very “harsh” and “disturbed.”
“But I come into this room. I sit down with you. You’re drinking coffee, we’re getting ready to have lunch, and I’ve got to be honest with you. I like you. But I have to stay neutral and take my personal feeling away from you. And when you can remember all this stuff but you can’t remember this,” pointing to the statement, “like I said, you sit on this side of the table and you start to say—”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t look good. I mean, you know, it makes it look like maybe you did have something to do with it.”
“Right.”
“And I don’t want to go down that route.”
Again, Lloyd pleaded that his brain had been addled by drugs. His memory had holes. But when he recognized the futility of denying his old police statement, it abruptly recovered.
“Me and him were not together,” he said. “Let’s get that straight, right? Me and him were not together. Me and Helen went to the mall and was looking for work. I don’t remember the day or anything like that. I honestly … but me and him were not together. Oh Lord, please don’t put us together.” He laughed nervously. “Please! I did a lot of bad shit in my life, but I’ve never hurt anybody.” He admitted what he had done to the little girl, the crime that had landed him in jail, “but as far as literally kidnapping somebody or allegedly getting involved with something like that and literally seeing somebody get hurt, I couldn’t do it.”
Dave offered, “There’s no doubt in my mind that not only were you there that day and saw them in the mall, but I think your interpretation of what you remember with the black car and the two girls is one and the same.” He was giving Lloyd permission here to simply merge the two stories. “You can put this asshole in the middle of what we already know because you were there. That’s the best way I can explain it. You are fighting it right now because I think you are trying to determine what is the right thing and what’s the wrong thing because you have to protect yourself.”
Lloyd squirmed in his chair. They had been talking for three hours. He was floundering. He kept talking affably but with mounting incoherence.
“I mean, I’m not saying he wasn’t at the mall that day, and I’m not saying I didn’t see him that day, it’s just that I can’t honestly remember seeing that asshole or something like that, that happened.” Lloyd had picked up Dave’s use of the word asshole to refer to Mileski and immediately offered it back, something that would become a pattern. He continued, “Now as time goes on, and I start—because now this is bringing fresh to my memory of remembering stuff—I might be able to, but you gotta figure I got almost forty years of time behind me.”
They took a break for food. The session was wearing on Lloyd. Left alone again, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and put his head into his hands. He sighed heavily, “Oh man!” Then again, head bent to his cuffed hands, “Oh man!” His head was down for long minutes until Chris brought him a meal from McDonald’s.
When Dave resumed, after conferring with his colleagues, he said they all believed Lloyd was withholding information. They believed not only that he knew Mileski, but that he had worked with Mileski to kidnap Sheila and Kate Lyon.
“It’s weird that there’s an association,” Dave said. “And that’s the best way I can put it. I know you told me a couple of times that you guys weren’t together, but there was an association. I mean, maybe, who the hell knows? Maybe you decided to look for a job, and this clown was there and doing his thing. We’re here—guy’s dead—and that’s gonna be the focus of this investigation from here on out.”
Lloyd continued to insist that he had nothing to do with Mileski and had no memory of seeing him at the mall. They went around and around.
“Even if you could just give me that little bit, well, yeah, I was in the mall,” Dave said, almost pleading. “We know you were in the mall because you gave a statement. And you’re thinking, man, even if I associate myself with that, I can be looking at additional time, and that’s not—we’re not here to jam Lloyd Welch up.”