In his letters and his talks with the detectives, Lloyd repeated that he always owned up to his crimes—by way of arguing that his denials about the Lyon girls should be believed. But his past demonstrated something else. Lloyd would admit a thing only when he had to, after he’d been caught, and only those parts that he couldn’t refute. All his admissions had been calculated to mitigate his punishment. They were grudging, limited, and laced with denial. In every instance, Lloyd portrayed himself as an innocent victim. He’d pleaded guilty after molesting one little girl in Virginia, arguing, as he put it in his life summary: “She used to get in bed with her mom before I came along. One night I guess she could not get next to her mother so she got in bed next to me. I guess I thought it was my wife cuddled next to me in my sleep. I guess in my sleep I put my arm around her. She told her mom that my hand had touch her private area. I cannot say it did or did not happen because I was asleep.” Lloyd owned up to nothing if he could help it.
Concerning the Lyon case, it was the same pattern. Each alteration in his story addressed a contradiction he could not escape. And each, in ways he did not anticipate, drew him closer to the very thing he sought to evade. It was a good bet that he would never accept any blame for the fate of the Lyon sisters. There are some things too terrible to admit, especially to yourself.
MARCH 25, 2014
On the thirty-ninth anniversary of the girls’ disappearance, Katie and Mark confronted Lloyd again in Smyrna. Confronted is the right word, because this session was not like the others.
The press conference had turned Lloyd’s life upside down. Overnight, he had become a pariah in the prison. He was depressed and irate, and the detectives met him head-on. With Lloyd thrown off balance, it made sense to hit him hard. Sympathy and flattery had gotten them only so far. The pretext for this visit was the need to collect his palm prints—the FBI wanted to compare them with evidence of another crime—but the real reason was to see whether they could get him to cave in. Katie came armed with the bitterness of all the women he’d impregnated, abused, and left.
Lloyd was clad now in bright orange, the color for inmates in lockdown or, in his case, protective custody. His days were spent in isolation. He had lost his kitchen job. He looked ill. He had noticeably lost weight. He looked mad enough to spit. He started complaining as soon as he saw Mark and Katie.
“You all put out there that two children are missing, so the first thing that goes through their minds is, ‘Let’s kill him,’” he said. “I mean, there’s judgment all the way around. I didn’t kill nobody. I wasn’t involved in anything like that!”
Katie ignored his outburst. She told him, in so many words, that she didn’t feel sorry for him, and was done giving him the benefit of the doubt.
“Let’s just cut out all the shit,” she said. “We talked to people. I just met a woman who had a kid with you. You failed that [polygraph] because there is something that you are not telling the truth about. Period. Let’s just cut all of the shit out, there is a lot of stuff you told me that’s not true. I have been all over this country, we have been all over this country. Do you know that you had a child that died, a female child? Does that ring a bell? Charlene? You knew she was pregnant when you left her and went to Baltimore with some fifteen-year-old chick. You knew she was pregnant.”
“I went to Baltimore with some fifteen-year-old chick?”
“Yeah. Pam or some chick that was living in the trailer park. She [Charlene] walked in and found you sleeping with her. I mean this woman, you left her pregnant, she had a kid and suffered her whole life with this child that was ill, and with no help from you. No nothing. The kid died.”
“I didn’t know she was pregnant! How could I have known she was pregnant?”
“I mean, you have kids all over the place.”
“I do?”
“Yeah. I probably know more of your kids than you do at this point.”
“Wow! How many I got?”
“A lot, a lot.”
“Yeah?” Lloyd looked proud.
“Do you remember Charlene? Cici? She was very visibly pregnant when you left her. She was twenty. You told her she was too old and you were looking for somebody younger.”
He denied it. Mark mentioned the name of a local pastor in South Carolina who had known him and had corroborated Charlene’s story.
“I didn’t leave with no fifteen-year-old girl; they can make [up] all the lies that they want.”
“Why would they?” asked Katie. “Everybody can’t be wrong. Everybody can’t be lying. These are people that haven’t spoken with anybody. They saw the report on the news, and they thought, ‘Oh gosh, let me tell them about my experience.’ I thought you were a decent guy. Every single female I talked to said you beat the shit out of her. And every dude I met told me that you like to beat up girls. Why would everybody lie?”
“Wow, maybe because I did something to them and they didn’t like it,” Lloyd offered, lamely.
“But there are a million things they can make up. They can say you are a dirtbag. Or they can say you are a thief. They can say you are a cheater.”
Katie asked him about a pickup line he used on a woman in Myrtle Beach in the mid-1980s: “You want to go halves on a baby?”
Lloyd loosed his favorite exclamation—“Wow!”—then, “That was a good one!”
“Charming,” said Katie.
“You were with Keelie then, weren’t you?” Mark asked.
“No.”
“Well, that’s not true,” said Mark. “This is where we get into trouble. Because you lie about everything. You got married to Keelie on January third, nineteen eighty-five. You were married to her; she was pregnant when you got married.”
Mark then walked Lloyd through a list of women and places.
“Believe whatever you want,” said Lloyd. “I don’t care.”
“It’s not a matter of believing,” said Mark. “It’s what the evidence tells me.”
“Let’s cut the bull,” said Lloyd, repeating Katie’s directive in spirit if not word for word. “Charge me, or let me go back to my cell. It’s as simple as that.”
LET THE LIES CATCH UP
But Lloyd made no move to leave. If the squad had worried that shaming him publicly might shut him up, it had the opposite effect.
With the heat turned up, he now had no choice. As he neared the home stretch of his long prison term, freedom was something he could taste. Prior to this collision with the Lyon squad, the path had seemed clear. His prison mental-health report had all but pronounced him rehabilitated. “Mr. Welch took advantage of the treatment opportunities available within the prison to come to an understanding of the problems that led to [his] offense,” it read, its author either asleep or completely taken in. “Mr. Welch seems to have developed deep insight, empathy, and remorse for his victim’s pain and suffering.” The report recommended that he be placed in a “transitional setting” in order to begin preparation “for a gradual release into society.” Any tie to this terrible old crime would scotch that plan. So Lloyd was stuck. In order to maintain his position as a witness, not a doer, he had to stay on top of this investigation, and the only way to do that was to keep meeting with the detectives. Knowledge gave him leverage. As long as he could sell the detectives a narrative they liked, one that gave them what they were looking for, he had a chance. It was a delicate balancing act. If he admitted too much—being in any way involved with the kidnapping, being around when the girls were being abused—he was done. If he admitted too little, as with his earlier claim to have never been in Wheaton Plaza, and they found something to contradict him, he was done. The sessions were perilous but vital.