In their next session, scheduled for July, Dave would play on those fears. At the same time the squad was gearing up for a full-court press on the Welches, in both Maryland and Virginia.
JULY 14, 2014
“What’s happening, man?” Dave said in greeting, as he sauntered into the interview room at Dover.
Three months had elapsed since their last visit. Lloyd again sat slumped in his orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed and chained in his lap. He grunted sullenly.
The detective set a big cup of coffee on the table before him. “It was kind of a mess getting over here; I don’t know how warm that is.”
Lloyd didn’t drink it.
“It has been a couple of weeks because we had to run down all that stuff you told us.”
Lloyd squinted at him.
“And it’s good. It’s good for both of us. There’s some things we want to clear up, and I think now we’re closer with you in being together on this thing.”
It wasn’t true, and Lloyd was not buying it. As they again went through the ritual of legal consent, he was more than usually suspicious. He pointed to a paragraph, one he had seen several times now, which outlined the steps that would follow his being charged with a crime. In the past Dave had always made a point of x-ing that out to emphasize that they were not planning to charge him.
“You didn’t cross it out like you did the last time,” Lloyd said.
“Oh shit. We can cross it out.”
“I’m just sayin’.”
Lloyd was still angry. He was smarting over the seizure of his papers. To justify it, prison authorities had alleged that he had broken their rules, a charge which appeared to have been trumped up.
“What’s the deal [with the seizure]?” he asked.
“That’s a good place to start, because I’m sure in your mind—”
Lloyd laughed. How else would anyone take it? The seizure of his property and search of his cell meant that he was a target.
“I mean, I can totally see it from your perspective,” said Dave. “It looks bad. But look at it from this perspective. If we’re going to try and build anything against you … How long have we known each other? Damn near over a year, right?”
“Since October of last year.”
Lloyd knew exactly. He was not in the mood to be snowed. He complained bitterly about “the charge that was put on me,” referring to the justification on the search warrant, which claimed that he had abused his letter-writing privileges. He said it was a “fabrication,” a “lie,” and “threatening.”
“I’ll explain it to you,” said Dave. “When we left here, you said, ‘Hey, you need to talk to my cousin.’ So we went out and explored the cousin [Teddy], we explored the family. The family is not in your corner.”
“Yeah, I know they’re not.”
“The family is against you, and they’re lying to us,” said Dave. He said that Welch family members had told them that there was relevant information in Lloyd’s letters. That’s why they had been seized.
“There ain’t nothing in it,” Lloyd said.
“There’s nothing there,” Dave agreed. “Which is good. It’s good for both of us.”
Dave was trying to find his footing, to cut through Lloyd’s sourness and skepticism. He decided to be straight with him about Teddy. The accusation didn’t add up. He also pointed out that Lloyd’s claim to have traveled to and from the mall with Helen on a bus also could not be true, because there had been no such bus service in 1975.
“It’s time for you to kick back and say, ‘Look, I got a vested interest in myself,’” Dave reasoned. “You’ve got a vested interest in not getting any more time.”
He still viewed Lloyd sympathetically, he said, but it was becoming a minority view. Dave was Lloyd’s resolute defender. He had figured something out, he said. It was one thing to react with disgust to a fifty-seven-year-old man’s interest in girls aged twelve and ten, but if Lloyd had been attracted to girls that age in 1975, it was no big deal.
“You were nineteen! [He had actually been eighteen.] Any nineteen-year-old kid, there’s nothing wrong there. And that’s the thing. You gotta say, ‘Okay, wait a minute now, he wasn’t fifty-seven doing this, he was nineteen.’ Any nineteen-year-old kid that went to a mall, the whole purpose of going to a mall back then when you were a kid was to hang out, to find girls and find people to party with. That was it.”
“But I already had a lot of people to party with,” said Lloyd. “You already know that.”
“Right. But it’s always fun to have different people.”
“And I was involved with Helen.”
“All right.”
“I was.”
Dave altered course. Noting again Lloyd’s youth, he suggested that he might have been roped into the crime by his family.
“You’ve got a vested interest in protecting your family, but they’re not protecting you,” he said. “I’ve been here to see you more than your entire family, which is sad.”
Lloyd shrugged his shoulders. This was true.
Dave got him talking along these lines. He asked about Lloyd’s father, Lee. “He liked girls and boys. It didn’t matter, right?”
“Who, my dad?”
“Right.”
“Yeah.”
“And that seems to be the running theory about your uncles, too. It didn’t matter.”
Lloyd nodded emphatically. He said, “Now, me, I like women.”
He was warming to the conversation again. It was hard to overestimate the desire of a man living in isolation to talk. After his initial petulance, he began to relax. He peeled the lid off the coffee Dave had brought in and took a sip. The detective persuaded the guards to come in and remove both Lloyd’s chains and his handcuffs, a first. Then he commiserated with Lloyd about his eyes, which were puffy and red.
“They keep saying I have hay fever,” said Lloyd. “Or some kind of allergy. I keep telling them, I’m fifty-seven years old. I’ve never had an allergy in my life. I’ve never had hay fever.”
“Could it be a detergent they clean that shit with?” Dave suggested, gesturing toward his bright orange prison uniform.
Dave returned to Lloyd’s relatives. So far the detectives had talked to Dick, Pat, and Teddy.
“Every time that you sit down and talk, we learn a little bit more about your family.”
Lloyd sighed and shook his head sadly.
“And then you talk to them and you find out about all the craziness and weird activities that they’ve been doing, and all the lying that they’ve been doing, you have to take a step back and say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s more to this story.’ Why you are not telling us what the hell happened, I don’t know. They trashed the shit out of you.”
“Oh, I’m sure they did. ‘He’s a sex offender. He’s in jail.’”
“Right! ‘Look at him.’”
“Yeah, ‘Look at him and look at all he’s done.’”
“I’m trying to figure out when you are going to kick back and say, ‘I’m in this for myself,’ and say, ‘Look, this is what happened.’ This is where I step in and say, ‘Wait a minute!’” Dave banged the table for emphasis. “‘Look at what he’s done.’ So what? Has he ever done anything to a stranger? His DNA’s in the system, right? It has been there since 2003. That’s eleven years. And have you caught any additional charges?”