“It’s gonna bug the shit out of me until the day I die,” he said, a comment so hollow it echoed. “You know? Why didn’t I do anything? I mean, there’s always going to be that question there. Why didn’t I step in and do something?”
Lloyd had completely dropped his tale of going back the next day and witnessing rape. Dave was not going to let him drop it.
He said, “My thoughts on this were, when you separated yourself, at some point you went back over, not necessarily to know anything about the girls, just went back over. It’s your family. You went back to the house, and you saw something and you left. That’s been consistent in every time we talk”—Dave was exaggerating here—“whether it has been at that house or, whatever that guy’s name was … and it was probably around that time frame that you said, ‘I’m going to do something about this, but I don’t know how to do it,’ so you went back to the mall, you got cold feet when security picked you up, because what were you going to do, tell on your uncle? What the hell did you see”—Dave banged on the desk—“that drove you to that?”
“Saw ’em in the basement fucking.”
“Who was fucking them?”
“Dickie.”
“Was Teddy?”
“Teddy was there. I don’t know if he was fucking them or what.”
Dave asked if he knew which girl Dick was assaulting.
“No. She was underneath. I don’t know which one it was. I don’t know if it was the younger one or the older one. I saw one. That was all. I don’t know if Teddy had already done something to them or not. I saw that. I didn’t want nothing to do with it, and I just left. I didn’t even tell Teddy that I was there. I don’t know if he saw me or not. That was when Helen and I had left there again. We went back to South Carolina. We liked it down there. A couple of years later I came back.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“I didn’t say nothing to them. They didn’t say nothing to me. Then I got myself in trouble and ended up in jail.”
“So, who would have killed them?”
“That I can’t say, but if it was me in the house that day, I would say Dickie would do it because he has that much anger in him.”
Dave pushed for more. Did Dick have guns? He had. What else had Lloyd seen?
“Nobody was screaming,” he said. “You know what I’m saying? I don’t know if they were drugged or not.”
“Who would have drugged them? Was Dick into drugs back then? Teddy? Was he into drugs at that age?”
“I can’t say if he was or wasn’t. I knew he was drinking. I know he was a drinker. That was Lee’s [Lloyd’s father’s] best buddy on drinking.”
“A twelve-year-old?”
“Could he have gotten drugs?” said Lloyd. “Most definitely. There was drugs all over that area, you know?”
Lloyd speculated that Dick had kept the girls locked for a week in his basement room, a finished room with a worn old carpet, a built-in bar, couch, chair, a mattress, black-and-white TV on a stand. His “sanctuary” he called it. It could be entered only from the backyard. His wife and children lived upstairs, but no one was allowed into his space. Whenever he left, he locked it.
“If they stayed down there for a week, probably nobody would know, because that door was always locked,” Lloyd said. “Two weeks. No.”
“Is he that sick?”
“He was when I was a kid.”
Dave asked him to describe his uncle Dick. Lloyd recalled an angry, violent, drunken man.
“I’ve wondered where he’d taken them,” Lloyd said. “I’ve wondered what he did to them, you know, how he got rid of them.”
“Do you think they are in Maryland or Virginia?”
“Good question. I never thought of that. I mean, Virginia ain’t that far away. We got relatives that live in Virginia.”
“I gotta ask you, just out of curiosity. I mean, I get the first couple of times that we talked it was difficult to get you to come full circle. How come you waited until this long?”
“Scared shitless.”
“But—”
“Scared shitless. Plain, simple admission.”
“You’ve given us subtle hints, but it has taken damn near a year to get this far.”
Lloyd laughed.
“Well, you’re comforting,” he said, and threw his hands up in the air. “It got me out of my cell.” He said he thought his stepmom, Edna, was the only one in his family who believed he did not kidnap and kill the girls. She still wrote to him.
“Who all in the family other than you, Teddy, and Dick?” Dave asked. “Who all definitely knows?”
“I can’t say. I don’t know who they talk—”
“Do you think your aunt knows?”
“Which aunt?”
“Pat.”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t.”
BULLSHITTING
They took a long break for lunch. Katie came in with pasta and a sandwich for Lloyd. After he ate, she and Mark entered and sat down to talk with him further.
“Dave says you guys have come a long way today,” Mark said. He said Dave would be back in a while.
Katie tried to patch up her relationship with Lloyd. She offered a benign explanation for why he had failed the lie detector test and said she no longer blamed him for it. It was hot. He was tired. He reached over and shook her hand.
“So, let’s just forget it,” he said.
“We were both tired,” she said. “We were both hot. It had been a long day.”
“I thought you were gonna come over and body slam me there,” said Lloyd, laughing.
“I’m actually a nice person that makes pasta salad and sandwiches, see?”
“I’m a nice person,” said Lloyd.
She asked him what he thought Sheila and Kate had been thinking when they left with him and Teddy.
“I believe they thought they were going to hang out, listen to music. I believe they came with that in mind. Thought they were going to hang out with this cute boy. I remember the girl in the front seat asked Teddy where we were going, and he said we were going to go party. I do remember that.”
“Do you think that those girls at that point meant, like, hanging out, listening to music?” She told him that a twelve-year-old’s idea of “partying” was likely to have been different from his at age eighteen.
“I really believe they thought they were going to hang out and listen to music.”
“Just hanging out, being kids?”
“Right.”
Lloyd said the girls had not been distressed in the car at all.
Katie asked him why, after years in prison, after working to be a model prisoner, after finding the Lord, had he never thought to write a letter to anyone explaining what he knew about what had happened to the Lyon girls.
“For the simple reason that I had totally forgot about it completely,” he said. “I mean, totally forgot it.”
“How do you forget something like that?
Mark made a pitch for Lloyd to tell more, to do “one good thing.”
“I’ve done everything I can possibly think of,” he said. “I’ve come clean today, telling who was involved.”