“Officers?”
“Yep, calling me a child killer, child rapist, all of that and then telling people on the tier that I’m on now the same thing. I tried to ask for something, and they act like they don’t know me. Officers that I have known for years don’t know me all the sudden. Oh yeah, I’m a little discouraged by a lot of things. That’s why I’m going to be taking the Fifth on a lot of things and asking for a lawyer all the time.”
Lloyd now believed that the whole Mileski angle Dave had presented in October, showing him pictures, asking him to be a witness, had been a setup. It had not been, and Dave told him so. He said the squad in fact had been focused on Mileski but had since found evidence that completely exonerated him. “That was a mistake,” he explained. “Everything you were told about that guy was accurate. But he was in jail at the time.” This was not true, but he wanted to dismiss Mileski from their conversation.
He reiterated that Lloyd had the right to stop talking and to consult with an attorney, and that he would understand if Lloyd went that way, but then tried to carve out an exception for himself.
“You’ve heard me, and I’ve never come up with anything shady,” he said. “I’ve never lied to you.”
They talked a little more, and then Lloyd, without further complaint, once more agreed to waive his rights.
“All of the times we’ve sat down and talked, there’s been a variation,” Dave said. “Different events. Different people. Kind of a variation in stories. What I mean by that is not lies—”
“No, a lot of them was lies,” Lloyd admitted.
“I’m trying to sit back and take an absolute point of view of it and not base it on opinion,” said the detective. “Because I like you. And part of this is hard, because when you gain some sort of trust after being with someone for a while, it’s hard to understand how you could have done something like this. But you have to look at it objectively. You have to do your job, and you have to take your opinion out of it. Does that make sense?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can’t come in here and judge you just based on how I feel about you. I have to look at all the facts as a whole. So that’s what I did. I broke them all apart. And there’s some factual things that I think that you’ll agree upon. That in nineteen seventy-five, March twenty-fifth, you were inside Wheaton Plaza.”
“Uh-huh.”
Dave proceeded to outline the other things they could agree were fact. Lloyd had paid enough attention to a group of girls that they had heckled him, and they had later given the police a description that produced a composite sketch.
“And that doesn’t make you a criminal,” Dave hastily added. “That makes you a man, because they were a good-looking set of girls, and anybody—no matter how old they were—would have looked at them. And that’s a fact. So much that one of the girls approached you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s things that we can’t dispute,” said Dave. “That physically happened.”
“And I agree with you on that,” said Lloyd. “I told you from day one that I was in the mall.”
In fact, he had not, but Dave was not here to quarrel. He was trying to reset their relationship. He wanted a clean slate. He continued to outline the facts upon which they could both agree: Lloyd went back to the mall to say he had witnessed something. He took a polygraph. Lloyd acknowledged these things were true.
“Remember talking about the bus?” Dave asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Hopefully you are going to enlighten me. Maybe you got into a car. Maybe they got into a car. Maybe you got on a bus, and they got on the same bus. But at some point in time, you, my friend, were the last person that saw those girls. You might have been the last person to have a conversation with them. And when you were questioned by the police in seventy-five, if you would have told them, what would the police have thought?”
“Arrest him. He did it.”
“Exactly, and that’s what’s been bugging you for the last thirty-nine years.”
Lloyd chuckled. “I’m laughing because ain’t nothin’ been buggin’ me. I’m being honest with you. I did not—”
“I’m not saying you did it.”
“No, no, no, no, I did not even think about this in all these years, until my sister and my stepmother sent me a letter stating that the cops were askin’ about two girls missin’ in Wheaton. Do I know anything about it? I didn’t know anything about it, and I told them I don’t know anything about it. I went and made a lie up to get a reward.” This was new. Lloyd had never mentioned reward money before. “I’m bein’ honest with you,” he said. “I lied, back then. I lied now. Because I wanted to feel important. I wanted to make myself look important.”
Lloyd admitted that recently he had been “down on” himself. He blamed himself for his current predicament. He had lied in their first conversation because Chris Homrock had intimated that Lloyd had been raped by Mileski. “That really pissed me off,” he said. “So I said, ‘Well, let me fuck with them some.’ I lied. The last time I saw those girls or anybody was inside that mall. That was the last time.”
Never mind the story he had confided to Dave at the end of the third session, and then reiterated in the fourth about seeing the girls nude, drugged, and being raped in a basement room. He was either forgetting this or discarding it. Dave chose to ignore it. Instead he pressed Lloyd about the new reason for going back to the mall.
“How much money were they offering?” he asked.
“At the time, I don’t even remember how much it was. I thought it was enough to get me and Helen a place and maybe for her to apply for doctor care and stuff like that. You know what I’m sayin’? And my stepmom told me not to go and say anything, and Helen said the same thing. Dumb ass me had to go. Dumb ass me had to lie, and I’ve been lying ever since. You know? And now it’s done screwed me so bad that I can’t show my face in no institution. I done screwed myself over so bad it’s pathetic. I should have never said anything. I should have never gotten myself involved, and I apologize to all of you.”
Dave asked if they might go “off the record,” a completely hollow offer, because he had every intention of using everything Lloyd told him, not to mention that the session was being videotaped and observed by his colleagues.
Lloyd talked about Teddy and the older man he was living with at the time the girls disappeared. Dave knew, of course, that this was a red herring.
“Teddy introduced me to this guy. Teddy had disappeared for a while. He came back with a Camaro. He said he was a fashion model or something like that, and this guy was giving him a place to live and money and stuff like that. But we used to go to his house and party all the time. I went to the house one day—we were partying and shit like that—and he had two girls, and I left. I don’t know if it was them or not. I mean, in all honestly, I don’t know if it was the twenty-fifth, twenty-eighth, or what it was.”
Lloyd now admitted that he had known about the Lyon sisters’ disappearance at the time. He had gone back to the mall to tell his story, over his stepmother’s and Helen’s protests, “because stubborn ass me had to say, ‘I want that money.’ I was eighteen years old. I was ignorant. I was dumb. I’m still ignorant, and I’m dumb.”