Mark, in particular, seemed to get this. He showed no sympathy for Lloyd whatsoever. He badgered him with the falsehoods and inconsistencies in his stories. He also liberally exaggerated the evidence against him.
“We found a lot of cases that are all across Maryland, South Carolina, Florida. All these cases around Wheaton, Takoma Park, that look like they’ve got your name on them. Rapes. Girls have disappeared. Girls that have been found murdered.”
“Hold. Hold. Hold,” Lloyd protested, raising his hand.
“No, this is the truth, Lloyd. We have all the old evidence. All the old fingerprints, DNA samples, stuff that was never analyzed. Because back in the seventies they didn’t have DNA analysis. But we kept all that evidence. Now it is all getting compared. And it’s not just going to be us saying that you did it. That’s evidence, Lloyd.”
Mark was bluffing. None of this was true. The detectives had taken a stab at locating old physical evidence of crimes committed in Montgomery County in the 1970s. They had found nothing more than heaps of moldy boxes the police department had stored in an old garage. None of it had been catalogued or kept in order—no one at the time foresaw much use for doing so. A further effort would be made to find, sort, and mine this material, but it hadn’t even gotten under way, and the chances of its yielding anything useful were small.
“Okay, show me the evidence,” said Lloyd. “I am tired. I only got two sex charges.”
“It’s not a matter of what you got charged with, Lloyd. That’s not how you keep track. It’s what you actually did. You got away with a lot, but it is catching up to you now.”
Katie reminded him that when Dave and Chris had come to him in October, they had not been trying to build a case against him. They had just been looking for information.
“If I knew I would have told you.”
“Lloyd, you know,” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“You may not have been the one that did it, but you know, and you know we know,” she said. “That polygraph shows you know. The truth is, I don’t even think you can keep up with your lies anymore. It’s got to be exhausting; it has to be. And at some point, you have to break down and give yourself a chance to show some humanity. To these old people who have never been able to bury their kids, who’d like to die in peace knowing that these kids got proper burying. And that’s all I asked you that day, ‘Tell me where they are, and let’s get this done.’ And this shit storm has started because of that. That’s all we wanted to know when we came in here. They were willing to give you a deal; they were willing to cut you out and say, ‘Okay, he is a changed man. He came forward he did the right thing.’ Thirty-nine years today. And instead you tied our hands. Now the shit storm has started. And the bottom line is, you still have a chance to do the right thing and tell us where these girls are. Or where you think they are, because there is nothing in this world that’s going to convince anybody that you don’t know.”
She said she had no interest in trying to charge him with past crimes against women.
“I don’t want to be their victims’ rights advocate. I want to know where those girls are buried. That’s what I want out of this whole situation. And instead, because you want to play games, because you know, Lloyd, you know, you know. The polygraph says you know, your body language says you know. Your lies are catching up with you.”
“Let the lies catch up,” he said. “I don’t know where they are. I am going to keep on telling you that. And I would love for them [the Lyon family] to know. I would, I really honestly would.”
Katie said, “Let me ask you, when I sat here and said to you, ‘What’s it going to take? What is it going to take for you to just tell us?’ And I gave you some options in terms of the deals they were giving you. And you were into that. You wanted to hear more about it, you said, ‘Okay, if this is what we do, then I might go back to my cell and have a memory.’ What was that?”
Lloyd pleaded again that long years of drinking and drugs had eroded his memory. Katie scoffed. Why, if he couldn’t remember anything, did he keep angling for a deal? How was he able to come up with such detailed recollections of the things he did admit? Why had he confided something new to Dave at the end of their last session?
“Just be real with us for five minutes,” she said.
“I am being real! I don’t know where. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Katie tried flattery again. She told Lloyd she considered him an extremely intelligent man: “People who have PhDs probably aren’t as street-smart as you are. This is a game of chess to you, and you are just waiting to see our move.”
She walked him through some of his past, the women who said he had abused them, his history of arrests. Mark reiterated how assiduously the FBI and his own department were now gathering evidence against him.
“Because that’s the choice you made,” he said. “Now, I can put the skids on that. I have the power to do that. But it has to start with you. And it doesn’t start with you continuing to lie to us. It’s time for the truth, Lloyd. Beyond any doubt, we know you were there that day. And you had something to do with the girls’ disappearance. There is no doubt about that with any of us.”
Lloyd asked, why, if he had been involved in kidnapping two little girls, would he have brought Helen with him?
“There is nothing to say that you did, other than your word,” said Mark. “And you have lied about everything. Why would we believe that? And the witnesses at the mall never saw Helen. They saw only you.”
“I ain’t sayin’ nothing else. I am done saying things. You all are not believing anything I am saying.”
But, again, he stayed put.
Mark reminded him of the option Karen Carvajal had presented him a month earlier. Maybe he wasn’t fully culpable. Perhaps he had been used to help lure the girls without knowing what was in store.
“If there was somebody else who was there, you need to tell us who it was,” he said. He said he was amazed that Lloyd had carried this secret for so long. “There’s some reason this is weighing very heavily on you. I can try and move you to a facility where no one knows you and doesn’t know [i.e., and no one knows] all of this shit. I am willing to go forward. But you have to give me something, man, this has to be a two-way street.”
Lloyd wouldn’t budge—yet.
HE IS A MOTHERFUCKER
“Can we clarify the last time when Dave talked to you, and you said you saw them the following day at that house naked in the basement?” asked Mark.
“Yeah, I did say that.”
“Is that the truth?”
Lloyd paused for a moment, then said, “Yeah.”
“You had to think about that.”
“It’s the truth. I seen two girls. I don’t know if it was them two girls or not. I told him that.”
“And whose house was that?”
“I don’t remember the guy’s name.”
“But how did you know that guy?”
“We used to party all the time. I used to party with a lot of people up in Maryland. I had a cousin named Billy. I don’t know if you all know him or not. He is probably dead. He introduced me to a lot of people. He lived near, in Prince Georges County. He lived near Uncle Dickie and them. Did you meet Uncle Dickie?”