As hoped, the reports prompted many new tips. Lloyd, it seemed, had left a string of abandoned, abused, angry women and discarded children. Katie and Mark set out to talk to each, one by one, which sent them on a tour of the squalid reaches of rural tenancy. Outside a trailer home in the hills of western North Carolina, dressed in her best wool coat and expensive shoes, Katie balked when confronted with a muddy yard replete with grazing donkeys.
“I am not going to step in donkey shit with these shoes,” she said. Mark refused to give her a piggyback ride, so she had to give in, muddying her heels on the walk to the front door. Inside, as she started to sit down on a sofa, her host shouted, “Not there! The dog just peed there!” She slid over to a dry spot. She would never wear the coat or shoes again. They collected horror stories from Lloyd’s domestic past. One man who had known Lloyd years earlier said flatly that he “hated women.” All described his overriding attraction to the very young. He had once taken up with a girl of fifteen, telling his furious twenty-two-year-old companion, “You’re too old for me.”
None of these angry personal stories shed light on the Lyon mystery, but they did bring Lloyd into better focus. His own accounts of his past were uniformly unreliable, even about how old he was. Over the years he had given various birthdates to authorities, all of them in December but in the years 1952, 1955, 1956, and 1957. The rest of his story was equally slippery. The memories of these old girlfriends and acquaintances helped color in the tale told by his criminal record, and in some instances corroborated what Lloyd had said about himself. Also helpful was a handwritten life summary that would be found in his prison cell. From all these things, in the weeks after the press conference, a fuller picture of Lloyd Welch emerged.
A FAILURE AND AN EMBARRASSMENT
Lloyd’s true birthdate was December 30, 1956. His childhood went wrong early. As Lloyd told it, “My father killed my mother when I was two.” His father, Lee Welch, driving drunk, had crashed their car, killing Lloyd’s mother, Margaret Ann, who at the time was pregnant with twins. Lee was convicted of manslaughter and went to prison. Young Lloyd had some broken bones and lacerations that sent him to the hospital—including that broken nose. From there he was cycled through a series of foster homes until he was seven, when Lee and his new wife showed up.
“They came and got me,” he had told Dave in their first session. “They introduced themselves, ‘I’m your father; I’m your stepmother.’ That was Edna. That’s the woman. I love her like a mom. She treated me with respect. She loved me. We went to Maryland and there was a house … Buchanan Street.”
But whatever hopes he had at that tender age of recouping his family were short-lived.
“Me and my father just kept bickering with each other. He pulled a shotgun on me. Put it up to my head. Said I looked like my mother a lot. He sexually raped, sexually assaulted me a few times when he was drinking. Slapped me around whenever he’d come back from work and shit like that, and I would always run away from home. The cops would bring me back.”
Lloyd said he began drinking at a very early age, and when he was a young teenager he started using drugs—marijuana, cocaine, uppers, downers, acid, whatever he could find. Street drugs were plentiful in those years, a big part of the teenage scene. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, cities like Washington had teenagers squatting in abandoned buildings and hanging out on the street, living the dream. Lloyd was savvier than most about fending for himself, and he preferred being on his own. Whenever he was placed in a home or shelter, he ran away. By sixteen he was already a confirmed grifter, living from score to score. He was nothing like the hippies around him; there was no flower power ethos behind Lloyd’s lifestyle. He was so out of step with the youthful antiwar fervor of the period that he enlisted in the army at the height of the Vietnam War, only to be thrown out for lying about his age, education, and criminal past.
Lloyd had written the summary of his life for one of his correspondents. Like many prisoners serving long sentences, Lloyd carried on epistolary friendships, sometimes convincing people to wire money to his prison account. He had not told any of these correspondents why he was locked up. After the press conference, he had a lot of explaining to do, so he’d set about the task.
“My life was already screwed up,” he wrote of his teenage years. “I was a failure in life and an embarrassment. My dad had told this to me many times.”
He would often hitchhike out to Hyattsville, another edge city northeast of Washington, in the district’s other Maryland suburban county, Prince Georges. His father, Lee, and stepmother, Edna, and many other members of Lloyd’s large extended family lived there, clustered around his grandmother’s house. They were part of what has become known as the Hillbilly Highway, the migration of largely Scotch Irish Appalachian families to northern cities after World War II. Many of these families retained the insularity, habits, and dialect of their native region. Lloyd’s large extended family was typically close-knit, but he had always existed only on its margins. By his late teens, he was only half-heartedly welcomed when he showed up at Lee and Edna’s home. By that point they had a houseful of their own children. He tried to avoid his father, who was perpetually drunk.
Lloyd met Helen in 1973. He approached her on a street corner in Takoma Park and started talking. They walked together to her house.
“I stayed that night … in the backyard. They actually put up a tent for me. I ate dinner with them. I got to liking her a lot, and every day I would come back to see her and stuff like that.”
Rootless, impulsive, and up for a good time, Helen fell in with Lloyd, leaving home to stay with him at a boys’ shelter in DC. When she was discovered and asked to leave, Lloyd went with her. After that they fended for themselves on the streets, together everywhere. As Edna would later put it, “You seen Lloyd, you seen Helen.” They spent almost four years this way, hitchhiking, working for the carnival, doing odd jobs, drinking, and taking drugs. Helen and Lloyd even shared a few run-ins with the law.
“We were all wild, I guess you could say,” he had told Dave in the October interview. “Drugs and everything like that. I lived that life. I always wandered. I just couldn’t stand to be locked down, and she went with me. I wanted to travel. She wanted to travel with me, so I would do an odd job for six or seven months and make enough money, and we’d travel, we’d go to Texas, we’d go to Florida. We finally decided to go back to Maryland and live. First we lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, for a while, close to her mom, her brothers and sisters.”
Helen lost one child before term and was carrying another child when they returned to Maryland sometime in 1974 or early ’75. They camped out some of the time or stayed with Helen’s mother or with Edna and Lee, whose address was then 4714 Baltimore Avenue, Hyattsville, across busy Route 1 (Baltimore Avenue) from the head of Buchanan Street. This was the address Lloyd gave when he made his original statement about the Lyon kidnapping. Soon after that sit-down with Montgomery County police the couple departed again and were gone for years.
“I was not a hard criminal,” Lloyd wrote. “I just did stupid shit to people I knew.”
When released from the prison stretch that split him from Helen and their children, Lloyd went back to wandering, drugs, drinking, and petty crimes. He was in and out of jail. In 1985, during one of his periods of freedom, he got married, in South Carolina—he was then using the name Mike. He started his own landscaping business in Myrtle Beach in 1989, by then living with a different woman from the one he had married. Then came his three child-molestation arrests, the last of which had earned him his current lengthy term.