Dave assumed that this startling admission had not been recorded. Katie had brought a tape recorder, which she had used for the test, but she had left the room when Lloyd asked to speak to Dave alone.
They phoned Pete Feeney, and he urged them to turn around, return to the prison, no matter what the hour, and get Lloyd to repeat, on the record, what he had just said. Pete didn’t want Lloyd to sleep on it or talk to his fellow inmates or have any time to reconsider. But turning around was the last thing the detectives felt like doing at the end of a long day. Besides, who knew what Lloyd would say now? The comment, “We took them to his house,” appeared less than fully considered. If they drew attention to it, how likely was he to repeat it?
“Wait,” said Katie.
She had left her recorder in the room. In wrestling with the polygraph machine, she said, she might have forgotten to turn the recorder off. She retrieved it, fast-forwarded it to the end, and, much to their relief, Lloyd’s final comments were there.
When they got back to Gaithersburg, they were so excited they felt like popping champagne. They believed there was now sufficient evidence to charge Lloyd. For thirty-nine years the department had been stymied by this case, and now, at last, they had broken it. No matter Lloyd’s steadfast denials, they could prove he had been at Wheaton Plaza that day—he admitted it, he had given a statement to the police to that effect in 1975, and the drawing on file was a clear match for him. He now said he had known the kidnappers and in an unguarded moment had admitted being with them. He had witnessed at least one of the girls being sexually abused. It wouldn’t hurt that he was a convicted child molester. Even if he hadn’t taken the girls himself, he had stayed silent through those critical days in 1975 and had even tried to mislead investigators. At the very least he had obstructed justice. He looked guilty as hell. In fact, he seemed, suddenly, a lot more likely a suspect than Mileski.
But Pete demurred. He had a team poring over every transcribed line of the interviews and saw problems. He was still concerned about the immunity agreement they had signed in October, which he considered compromised by Dave’s reassurances to Lloyd. It had hinged on Lloyd telling the whole truth, which he admitted he had not done, so that would make a strong argument in favor of using his words against him, but the whole thing seemed more vulnerable to challenge than Pete would have liked. He had been dumbfounded to learn that Mark and Dave had visited Lloyd without informing him, had not recorded the session, and had—according to Katie’s apology in the polygraph interview—effectively threatened Lloyd. A defense lawyer could make much of these things. And in Lloyd’s newest gift to Dave, while he had initially said, “We took them to his house,” he had immediately backtracked. It might be considered a slip of the tongue. Conviction would be no slam dunk. Lloyd could claim that he’d been coerced and had, on that one occasion, simply misspoken, using the wrong pronoun. Pete advised the detectives that unless Lloyd admitted that he had been present when the girls were taken from the mall, they did not have enough to charge him. The champagne mood fizzled.
For its part, the Montgomery County Police Department had heard enough. Tired of being led in circles by a convicted child molester, the chiefs wanted to go public. Here was a potential solution to the most stubborn mystery on the department’s books, not to mention, possibly, the rarest of criminal justice finds: a serial killer of children. They scheduled a press conference for Tuesday, February 11, to name Lloyd as a person of interest. Posters were prepared showing enlarged images of Sheila and Kate and of Lloyd as a young man, the old police sketch, and an old photograph of him with Helen.
Chris pushed for more time. Maddening as Lloyd was—he was like a fairy-tale goblin guarding a treasure, speaking in riddles—they needed to keep him engaged. There was still so much they didn’t know. They wanted to find the girls’ remains and to be able to explain exactly what had happened to them and who had been involved. With Lloyd in the room, those answers had seemed close. Pete, reviewing the most recent session with Lloyd, noted that he had offered to point out the house where the girls had been taken if he were driven around Wheaton. Shouldn’t they try that before permanently alienating him? In-house, the debate abruptly ended when Dan Morse, a Washington Post reporter, called with a scoop. He had gotten wind of Welch’s connection to the case and had confirmed with members of the Welch family that the detectives had been asking about Lloyd. His story would run the next day. So, late that morning, the show went on. The squad made sure that the nightly news programs would be shown on cellblock monitors in Smyrna. If they were going to hit Lloyd, they might as well hit him where it hurt.
That morning, at the department’s headquarters in Gaithersburg, the dais decorated with the poster-size images and surrounded by the flags of the United States, Maryland, and Montgomery County, the press conference opened with a prepared statement from John and Mary Lyon, who were present but who did not wish to face the cameras and reporters. They stood nearby behind a screen. Their comments were read by a department spokesperson: “Throughout these years our hopes for a resolution to the mystery have been sustained by the support and efforts of countless members of law enforcement, the news media, and the community. The fact that so many people still care means a great deal to us.”
Chief J. Thomas Manger, a man with a stern white crew cut, dressed in the department’s black uniform and black tie, announced the tentative breakthrough to a packed room of journalists—the Lyon case was still a big draw.
“Our cold case team has been able to identify a man, currently incarcerated, and we have been able to establish that this man was at the Wheaton Plaza mall that day [and] might have had contact with the Lyon girls,” he said. “The person of interest is Lloyd Lee Welch.” He gestured toward the photo of Lloyd and summarized his carnival travels from 1974 through 1977. He pointed to the picture of Lloyd with Helen, noting that she had been with him during those years. “We are looking for the public’s help. Anyone who has any information [from] during that time … we ask for them to contact law enforcement. Mr. Welch was at the scene, and looking at his criminal history has made him an important person of interest in this case.”
Then he took questions.
One reporter asked, “What led you to him?”
Manger praised the hard work of his special squad, noting the value of fresh eyes on old files, and this was partly true. The right answer—which perhaps the chief didn’t fully realize—was that the discovery had been fortuitous. Hard work was behind it, for certain, but it had started with Lloyd’s old description of a man with a limp. Convinced he had seen Ray Mileski, they’d gone looking for Lloyd. Now Mileski seemed a peripheral figure at best. His name didn’t even come up in the press conference.
As anticipated, the announcement generated a flood of coverage in Washington, DC; Baltimore; northern Virginia; and well beyond. It prompted a detailed, two-minute national report on CNN, complete with pictures of the girls from 1975 and of plain memorial stones over two empty graves, and an old interview with John and Mary, from after the twentieth anniversary of the girls’ disappearance. Both had white hair but still looked hale. Beyond the tragedy of losing their daughters, Mary tried to itemize the enduring nature of their sadness: “The brides that he didn’t walk down the aisle,” her voice breaking as she nodded toward John, seated next to her on a couch. “The grandchildren we didn’t have. The sons-in-law we didn’t have.”