“You see something on TV?” Katie asked. “Did you have a radio?”
“See, that’s what I’m saying, I honestly don’t remember if we saw it on TV, or read it, or heard about it on the radio,” he said, stepping back slightly from his implausible insistence that he had known nothing about the missing girls. Now he was saying, indirectly, that he might have known. “I guess after a few days it just started bugging me, and I talked to Helen about it, and I said, ‘You know, it just don’t feel that it was his kids,’ or whatever, but I don’t know if I saw a newspaper and it clicked or what, because I started to get high again.”
He was working to make a good impression. He said he wanted “to do one good thing” in his life. “If I don’t do nothing else, let me at least tell somebody, ‘Hey, I saw this person.’ I’m gonna be honest with you, if I had anything to do with them or any kind of involvement like that, it would tear me up inside so much that I would end up telling somebody, and I’ve never told anybody.”
Lloyd kept returning to this. He said he had admitted all the crimes in his life. If he had been involved in this one, he would admit that, too. Katie commiserated with him. Being a criminal, she said, “doesn’t make you a liar.”
He talked about his road years with Helen, about their breaking up when he got arrested and giving up their children. He said he had never thought about the Lyon case until recently.
“What, thirty-nine years, whatever it is?” he asked. “I’m surprised that I’m even involved in it. I thought I was doing a nice citizen thing. I didn’t think they were going to try to involve me in something like this.” He added that he was not a “monster.”
“Well, let me ask you this,” said Katie. “Why do you want to take a polygraph?”
“Because I’m not guilty of taking them girls or being involved in it, and I want to prove that to them and to prove to myself, too.”
Katie screwed up her face.
“What do you mean, ‘prove to yourself’?”
“Because they’re trying to make me sound like I’m some kind of monster or something like that.”
“But if you didn’t do it, you know you didn’t do it. Are you second-guessing yourself?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
All of this was preliminary. Their conversation, which had been freeform, was intended to build rapport and put Lloyd in the right frame of mind. He confirmed that he was taking the test voluntarily, indeed, that he was the one who had asked for it.
THE TEST
“There’s no surprises,” Katie told him after connecting the sensors. “We’ll do something called a skin test. Basically, I want you to lie to me. It’s about a number. It’s a stupid thing. I’m gonna ask you to choose a number and then ask you to lie because I want to see what your lies look like. Does that make sense to you?”
“You want me to lie?” asked Lloyd, who sighed, as if insulted by the very suggestion.
Katie explained the test further. There were three charts. She would ask him the same questions and plot his responses to all three.
“They’re just going to be in different order because I want to make sure you are paying attention, yes?”
Lloyd laughed. “I mean, I ain’t gonna lie. I’m tired, but—”
“Do you still want to take it?”
“Oh, yeah! There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I mean, I’m tired, but I’m awake enough to where I can do it. I’m not on any drugs. I mean, I’m clean.”
She asked him to pick his favorite number between one and ten. He chose six. She explained that she would ask him a question about this, and wanted him to “lie about the number six.”
Katie then fussed some more with the machine, and Lloyd chortled; her act worked every time. She instructed him to keep his feet flat, his arms still, and to look straight ahead. “Don’t get fixated and start making animals in your mind.”
Lloyd laughed.
“Don’t get trippy on me.”
“No.”
“Don’t get fixated. Hold as still as possible.” She told Lloyd that he was “probably the calmest person I’ve ever done this to.” As she maneuvered him into the correct position, Lloyd made a joke about being put in an electric chair. Katie laughed.
“I don’t think the person would be this nice,” she said.
She inflated a cuff on his arm. Then she began asking him which number he had chosen.
“Is it the number four?”
“No.”
“Is it the number five?”
“No.”
“Is it the number six?”
“No.”
“Is it the number seven?”
“No.”
“Is it the number eight?”
“No.”
“Is it the number nine?”
“No.”
She spent a few more minutes reassuring him and positioning him.
“Are you comfortable like that?” she asked.
“I’m comfortable.”
“All right.”
“Did I lie on the number six?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Did it show?”
Katie said yes.
They then went through the careful regimen of the polygraph, short, direct questions and equally short, direct answers. One of the questions—emerging out of a list of ones that had nothing to do with the case—was, “Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls?”
“No,” he answered.
“Not connected with this case, have you ever lied to someone you loved or who trusted you?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls in Wheaton in 1975?”
“No.”
“Is there something else you were afraid I will ask you a question about on this test?”
“No.”
After a few more questions, Katie said, “Okay, that’s one in the record books.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. “How’d I do on it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me. How did you do?”
“I believe I did good.”
“It’s not that easy,” Katie said. “I can’t just look. See, I’m watching you. I’m watching the charts. I won’t know the results until after we add the score. It has to be scored.”
Then Katie took him through a list of similar questions, differently ordered and phrased. One was, “Regarding the disappearance of those girls, do you intend to answer truthfully each question about that?”
“Yes.”
“Not connected with this case, have you ever lied to get yourself out of trouble?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything to cause the disappearance of those girls?”
“No.”
And so on. It didn’t take long. She gave him a chance to relax and scratch his nose—“It never fails,” she said—and then she went through the list a third time. When it was over she deflated the cuff and took it off his arm. She told him to stay put and then left the room to score the test. Lloyd chatted with Dave and Karen. He worked to convince them he had been truthful.