Her initial instructions concerning Lloyd were straightforward.
“We just want to know if he was involved in the actual abduction, the murder of the girls, basically,” Chris told her. “Can you find that out on the polygraph?”
Katie thought she could. She believed in the test, which monitored a subject’s blood pressure, pulse, breathing, and skin conductivity as he or she was asked carefully scripted questions. She had started off thinking it was hocus-pocus—its results were still not allowed as evidence in a criminal trial—but after years of practice she had become a believer, at least in its usefulness. People nearly always agreed to take it, even if they were guilty. Most thought they could outsmart it—she felt sure Lloyd Welch would fall into this category—but in the hands of a skilled operator, it could, she believed, expose deception.
The session was set to take place in Smyrna on the second Monday in February 2014.
FEBRUARY 10, 2014
The conditions were not ideal. Katie had brought an unfamiliar portable machine, and the prison had set them up in a basement room—more like a cell—that turned suffocating whenever the door was closed. They had to keep the door open, so anyone walking past could see in. Here was inmate Welch meeting with a whole battery of fuzz—Maryland cops and FBI. It made Lloyd anxious, understandably. Prisons are hothouses for rumor and suspicion. What was happening in that room looked like a big deal. Why was Welch cooperating with them? What was he saying? At one point a female guard wandered in uninvited. She was, Lloyd explained, in charge of hearing grievances filed by other inmates. “She’s just nosy,” he said.
Eventually Katie and Lloyd were left alone for the exam, but for much of the session her friend Karen Carvajal was also in the room. In contrast to the setup in Dover, there was no adjacent conference room or video link through which the others could observe. Katie had brought a small digital recorder, but there was no hidden camera or microphone. She struggled with the lie detector, which was outfitted with the necessary wires and sensors. She played it up a little. His eyes kept wandering to the open door, and she wanted his full attention, so she became the dumb buxom blonde struggling with modern technology. Men were unfailingly captivated by this.
She sighed heavily.
“All right, well, it looks like it’s gonna be … I need an Internet connection to be able to pull up my files. Is there no Internet?”
“Well, they have it, but it’s—”
“I have it, I mean, I’m afraid it’s just gonna fade in and out.”
She made ingratiating small talk with Lloyd while playing up her struggles. Her colleagues stepped in and out. Carvajal sat with Katie and Lloyd as Katie fiddled with the device.
“So we got that you had a shitty childhood,” Katie said. “Your dad was physically, mentally, and sexually abusive.”
Lloyd nodded and grunted assent.
“You never really had a mom. Your stepmom was decent to you, but you kind of at that point were already screwed up. Not good things.”
“Right.”
“I mean you didn’t have half a chance to teach yourself, you know, to become street-smart, teach yourself survival skills. You did what you needed to do to survive but not any violent crimes.”
“Right.”
“Would you consider yourself a relatively honest person, especially now?”
“Yeah.”
“You kind of get the error of your ways? You’re done with all this crap? You just want to get out of here and live your life?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you find yourself being pretty honest with people here, like the guards or inmates?”
“You can ask any guard, any of the guards that know me, and they’ll tell you that I’m one of the quietest people.”
“Okay,” said Katie. She walked him through the course of his normal day, sleeping until two in the afternoon, working through most nights in the kitchen.
“You have to be minimum status in order to work in a place like that,” he said.
“Meaning that you’re relatively well-behaved.”
“Right.”
Lloyd told her about how he made his own pizza, which he shared with his friends and sometimes with the guards. The crust was fashioned from crushed soup crackers, which he coated with pizza sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and sausage.
“They take it down to their microwave, and we heat it up,” he said. “They trust me enough because they know that I—”
“You’re not going to poison them.”
“No. I put the plastic gloves on and stuff like that. I show a lot of respect.”
“Just a low-key guy tryin’ to get by. Okay.”
Lloyd explained his hopes of getting out of prison eventually and living out the remainder of his days in a “normal” way. He relaxed. He liked talking to Katie. At one point he swore and then quickly apologized.
Katie started to respond, “There’s nothing you can say that—”
Carvajal laughed.
“Trust me,” said Katie. “I’m the worst mouth you’ll ever hear. Don’t let my innocent look fool you.”
Lloyd was warming up to her. He talked more about his life in the prison, about how inmates rarely asked one another to talk about the crimes that had gotten them locked up. Katie was still struggling with the machine, distracted, but encouraged Lloyd to keep talking.
“I think I have a pretty good idea about the kind of person you are, or that you’re presenting to me at least. You’re very laid-back. You seem very settled and calm. I mean, it is what it is, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, I guess there’s gotta be a calmness that comes over you. You’ve atoned for what you’ve done. You’ve admitted to doing it, and in the event that you get out, you would even apologize to this girl, so you’ve made peace in some fashion. Maybe that’s what makes you appear so peaceful to me, you know?”
Lloyd laughed. He was flattered. Katie assured him that she was professionally nonjudgmental—which was not true; she was the opposite and was revolted by his crimes. She said she had made mistakes in her life, and that he was really no different from her in a fundamental way. “We’ve all done things that could have really wound us up in bad situations.”
“Right.”
“Some people get caught, some people don’t,” Katie said. “I just don’t really like judging other people, which is fascinating because of my line of work, but it’s what keeps me healthy. I’ve actually had people write letters from prison thanking me for treating them the way that I do. I’m kind of like a social worker stuck in a cop’s world. As I’ve grown up I’ve realized that I’m not perfect, so who am I to judge other people? So that means I do have to, we do have to, go into a little bit of what this situation is, if you don’t mind.”
Lloyd recounted his connection to the Lyon case, the most recent version. He and Helen had gone to the mall looking for jobs. They saw a man whom Lloyd recognized talking to two girls, a man who had given him “the heebie-jeebies,” and whom he described in detail. Later, as they boarded a bus to leave (in his 1975 story, they had been in a car), they had seen the same man putting the two girls in an auto. The younger of the two looked as if she was crying. He described the car. A week later he went back to the mall to tell the police.