What all this meant was that Lloyd had chosen with great care whom to name next as the Lyon girls’ kidnapper. Locked in isolation, with little to do but stew over his predicament, he had come up with the most notoriously aberrant member of his family—which was saying something. He had talked to the detectives about “the older man” with whom Teddy had been living, certainly Leonard Kraisel. This unseemly pairing was well known to the Welch family. His relatives knew all about Teddy’s work as a teenage model, and his “adoption” by Kraisel. They called Teddy “gay,” disparagingly, as if it were a catchall term for sexual depravity. Lloyd had heard all the stories and had sized Kraisel up as a perfect new suspect for the Lyon squad. Teddy fit perfectly into the scenario they’d suggested about himself and Mileski, an older pederast seducing a boy and then using him to lure additional victims. And Teddy, handsome enough to find work as a model, was well suited for the role. Lloyd correctly surmised that Teddy and Uncle Lenny, with their creepy sexual arrangement, would be like red meat to these hungry detectives.
The problem was that both Lloyd’s math and his family history were off. Teddy had not met Kraisel until he was fifteen, four years after the Lyon kidnapping. This completely blew the premise of Lloyd’s story, but, just as he’d likely imagined, the detectives found Teddy’s past irresistibly suggestive. And interest in Teddy had an unintended and ultimately more significant consequence. It drew the squad’s attention to the entire Welch clan.
All families had secrets, but few had ones like these.
BECALMED
After the Montgomery County Police Department’s press conference about Lloyd Welch, the most important evidence to surface was a two-year-old report that the squad had not seen. A woman named Dee Danner, after sitting on a memory for many years, had phoned the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2012 to report that she had observed a suspicious man in Wheaton Plaza on the day the Lyon sisters had disappeared. When Danner saw Lloyd’s photo on TV in 2014, she recognized him. She phoned the Montgomery County police to repeat her story, which was all the more credible because she had initially reported it long before Lloyd was publicly linked to the mystery.
“This has been bothering me for years,” she had told the man who took her call in 2012. She described seeing that day a young white man with long brown hair and a mustache who had scared her. He looked to be in his twenties, she said. The man was staring so intently at her and at other girls that she and her companion had been frightened. They noticed that he seemed particularly fixated on girls with blond hair, which reassured them—both Dee and her friend had dark hair. She said the man was “creepy.” When he saw them watching him he had stared back menacingly, spooking them enough that they went to look for a security guard. They found one but shrank from talking to him. “What would we say,” she asked later—that someone was staring at girls and had made a face at them? So they said nothing but kept watching the creepy man.
“We were scared of this guy, really scared of him,” she said. When Mark interviewed her, Dee said he had definitely been alone, which jibed with the story told years ago by Danette Shea, who had provided the description for the police artist. Dee also remembered seeing Sheila and Kate—she knew Sheila from school—and the notorious tape recorder man, who had been such a focus of the investigation years ago. She said this man had been a big center of attention, with a crowd around him, children and parents. In such circumstances it was hard to imagine him walking off with Sheila and Kate without being noticed. When the girls were missing, Dee and her friend immediately thought of the creepy man, but neither had contacted the police. They were children, she explained. All the news reports were focused on the tape recorder man. They felt what they had seen wasn’t important. But it had bothered her enough that she never forgot it.
Dee’s memory was detailed and in parts verifiable. She had definitely been in Wheaton Plaza that day. Her identification of Lloyd was solid. She also remembered seeing the Lyon girls talking with a boy who was about their age, maybe slightly older. The previous investigation had confirmed that Jay, their older brother, had briefly been with them in the mall. But what if, the detectives wondered, the boy she had seen was Teddy?
The effect of Dee’s memory was to intensify the focus on Lloyd, but the squad had little else to go on. Despite what Mark and Katie had told him, that the press conference had generated significant new leads, it had not directly advanced the case. In the first months of 2014, the probe was becalmed.
But the conference had had a huge impact on Lloyd. He was miserable. It had not only affected his prison relationships; the publicity had outed him to his regular correspondents, who were horrified to have befriended a child molester. Lloyd’s carefully cultivated epistolary support system crumbled.
He wrote a peevish lament to Edna in April: “I am an embarrassment to my family. I will send family pictures back to you that you sent me. I cannot believe that my brothers and sisters would turn on me like they have.” In another letter written in the same period, he apologized at length to a former cell mate’s mother-in-law, with whom he had corresponded regularly—she had encouraged him to become religious—and whom he had misled about his offense.
I know you are upset, and hurt by me. I can understand this. As I said, I am a shame of my life. I wish I was never born, that way people would never have been hurt by me. I told you I always hurt people I know and love. Yes, I did lie to you and that hurt me more than you will ever know, but everything I told you about me in here [in prison], what I was doing and how I was trying to change my life around was true. I have had people all my life do judgment on me and walk away. It hurts like hell but you get use to it. I am not a monster. I might be stupid and a screwed up life. But I could never hurt anyone like that. I lie to you because, yes, I was very a shame of my life.… I wanted to tell you face to face about my life and show you that I was a good person in life. I am not going to lie to you anymore. I ask for your forgiveness in this matter. Only you can decide this. I thank you for all you have done for me. If you feel in some way that I have use you in any way to get money from you then I am sorry for that. It was not why I wrote.
He told her he would understand if she stopped writing. He denied any connection to the Lyon sisters and noted that he had not been charged.
I am being question about this, yes, because I made a stupid mistake 39 years ago and said I saw something when I did not see anything. I am not guilty of this. There is know [no] evidence on me, just that, yes, I was there that day and I made a false statements back then. I could never in my life kidnap anyone or hurt them. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life but not this.… I made mistakes in my life but I am still a decent person. I should not be treated like some kind of a animal, people will always judge me. May God be with you and your family.
He signed off with “God bless.”
Despite this seemingly heartfelt plea, Lloyd had eclipsed Ray Mileski as the squad’s prime suspect. Mark and Katie had done what they could to batter him into admitting his role, only to elicit more misdirection.
It was painful to admit, but Lloyd was all they had—and they had now surely alienated him. When Dave went to see him again a month later, it was all about damage repair.