“Did you do anything wrong?”
“Nope.”
“Then what the hell would we charge you with?”
“I’m the one that’s in jail.”
“You’re a witness! You’re in jail for something different. I’ve never worked harder on this fucking job, after I left you, trying to corroborate the things that you’ve told me when we sit in this room, and every single time I come back, have I ever presented you with a charge?”
Lloyd shook his head no.
“Have I ever said, Lloyd, it’s time for me to sit down and charge you?”
“No.”
“Every time I sit down and talk to you, we get a little closer to pushing you away from this thing.” The opposite was true. “So you have answered your own question. If you tell me, then my job is to go back out there and figure it out. And if you tell me who did it—which I already know—then it’s my job to take what you’ve told me and turn it into something to make it work, whether it be charging, whether it be to find them bodies, to make it actually work. There’s a reason you told us Teddy. It’s time, Lloyd.”
“What if I tell you who the other person is, and you go and talk to him, and all of a sudden it’s, ‘No, I didn’t have anything to do with it’?”
“We’ve got other things. We’ve already talked to that person. The person’s an asshole.”
“I’ve said his name a few times in here, haven’t I?” Lloyd asked.
“Yeah … he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah. Uncle Dickie.”
“Right.”
All of this Dave had orchestrated. He had taken Lloyd’s own story and thought it through more carefully. Neither Lloyd nor Teddy would have had a car. So somebody else had to have been the driver. Dave’s hunch was Dick, so he had led Lloyd into naming him. It was an iffy interrogation practice, but, technically, he had gotten Lloyd to volunteer Dick’s name.
“Tell me what happened that night,” said Dave.
“All I know is that we were at the mall that day, and the girl came up to me and said, ‘Take a picture,’ and I said, ‘If I had a camera, I would.’ Teddy got talking to these two girls. I don’t know where he came out of. We were actually walking around. Uncle Dick stayed in the car. He [Teddy] got ’em to go outside. We all left. We did go back to the house. I had him drop me off at the store there on Route 1, right where the bridge was at. There used to be a little store. Helen had asked me to pick up something for her, and I told her I’d get it on the way back. They dropped me off. They left. That was the last time I saw the four of them that day, and I went back to the house [Lee’s]. Me and Helen sat there. We ate dinner and stuff. We talked. That was the last I seen those girls was when they dropped me off at the store.”
“Fill in the blanks for me, because we’ve come a long way,” said Dave. What Lloyd had done was substitute his uncle Dick for Leonard Kraisel. Dave wanted a narrative that would flesh out this shift. “And you are now a witness. I’m not saying that I am going to put you up on the stand and [i.e., to] testify against your uncle and Teddy, but there’s some things that we need to clean up. Were they [Dick and Pat] babysitting Teddy that day?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if you’d even call it babysitting or what. He was stayin’ there. I mean, he was with him.”
Lloyd described the car that had driven the three of them to the mall, an old Ford station wagon. He couldn’t remember the color.
“Y’all went up to the mall. Ted gets these … recruits these two girls. Tell me what happens then.”
“We got in the car.”
“Were they willing to go?”
“Yeah.”
“What was the conversation like?”
“One girl sat up in the front with Teddy. I sat in the back with one of them.”
“Do you remember which one?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t honestly. They were talking, and I didn’t really even say anything to the girl. I asked her, ‘What y’all doing?’ and they said they were going to party, and I had them drop me off at the store. And that was the last that I saw them.”
Lloyd admitted he’d been scoping out preteen girls in the mall. He was high, he said. In the days after they took the girls, he said his uncle Dick had turned against him.
Dave asked why.
“I would think that it would be because he was afraid we were going to say something.”
“That’s exactly why,” said Dave.
“You know?”
“Or maybe because you weren’t in for it, that’s why he hates you. Had you gone back and participated in whatever happened, you’d have been one of the boys.”
“Yeah. Believe it or not, I was not into hurting people. At the time I had no sexual thoughts in my mind. Don’t ask me what happened in the nineties [when he did molest children], because I don’t know. I don’t know if shit finally caught up with me, all the drugs and alcohol.”
“Was your uncle Dick into things like that?”
“As the years went on I heard that he was, that he was into younger girls and guys, younger kids and stuff like that. I can’t say that he was and I can’t say that he wasn’t, because I wasn’t around that much.”
Lloyd now said that the story he had told about seeing the girls with Teddy and the other man in a basement was “bogus.” He reverted again to his account of being dropped off at the convenience store; he said it was to buy ice cream for Helen. He walked home with it.
“I think Teddy was thinking something different than what actually happened,” said Dave. “I think Uncle Dick joined in, and then I think Uncle Dick finished it.”
Lloyd nodded.
“And then that’s the demon that’s been in this family for thirty-nine years, and that’s the reason you and Teddy were punished like this, because y’all didn’t agree with it. It’s not what you sat in for.”
But when Dave suggested that Dick had planned the whole thing with him and Teddy, Lloyd shook his head no.
“I went to that mall to look for work,” he said.
COMING CLEAN
Having placed himself with the girls as they left the mall, in the car with those he now identified as his uncle and cousin, Lloyd was now officially a co-kidnapper. To keep him talking, Dave told him the opposite.
“Your involvement in this thing went from solo to high priority to very low priority to, hey, maybe you’re just a witness,” he said. “You’re providing information. And with that being said, you are in a whole lot better spot than you were. But I don’t know that you totally get it. And do I think you are still holding back on me? Yeah, and I understand why.”
“I can’t be holding back any more than what I’ve already said!” Lloyd protested. “I mean, what Teddy and Dick did that day, I can’t say.”
He had found what he considered safe new ground. He had been at the mall looking for work. He had innocently ridden away in the car with Teddy, Dick, and the girls, taking a ride to pick up ice cream. He’d gotten out of the car and left. He was in love with Helen. She was having a baby. He wanted nothing to do with “partying” with these girls. Now that he had admitted knowing something of what happened to Sheila and Kate, he claimed to be haunted by it—a thing he’d denied for months. Lloyd made these shifts with no apparent sense of how false they sounded. He had no ear for it.