This sexual aggression lasted for years, Joann said, until she was old enough to understand and to complain. When she was a teenager, playing pool with her cousins in his house, she said Dick kept suggestively thrusting his pool cue between her legs until she fled downstairs and complained to Pat. “Just stay away from him,” Pat advised. When Joann gave birth to her first child at Prince George’s Hospital in May 1975, she came home to her sister’s house in Hyattsville and then had to wait until Pat sobered up for a ride home to Virginia. Dick, now thirty, also drunk, kept coming into her room that night and touching her. She would squirm away from him. He left her room in anger, bellowing through the house, “I want a piece of pussy!” Joann said this continued until she complained to her sister.
This picture of a young, wolfish Dick Welch made it easier to imagine him in Lloyd’s latest scenario. Joann was recruited to confront Dick directly, something she had never dared to do. She was crying when Pat picked up the phone.
“I just wanted to talk to him,” Joann said. “Ask him why he did what he did to me. He never apologized! I thought I was the only one he did it to, but I’m learning otherwise. Pat, I’m putting two and two together. He was a security guard at the Wheaton Plaza when those Lyon girls went missing.”
“He was not,” said Pat.
“My God, did he have something to do with that?”
“He didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“How? If you didn’t know he was messing with your own kids?”
“Because I know that.”
“Is he ever going to apologize for having sex with me?”
“I’ll talk to you later,” said Pat, and hung up.
Joann dialed her back. She said the detective, Katie Leggett, had asked her about the sexual assault. She said she couldn’t fathom how the police knew about it.
“Let me tell you something,” said Pat. “They make lies up. Let me tell you. They are trying to catch anything or anybody, and they will make things up. They will lie that they heard it from somebody else or whatever.”
“But it’s the truth,” Joann said. She reminded Pat that she had confronted her repeatedly in those years about her husband’s behavior.
Pat said she had no memory of it. She said, “If you told them that’s what happened then they’d arrest him.”
“But I denied it.” She said she was now worried about what might happen to her because she had lied to the police.
“You don’t have to talk to them,” said Pat. “You know that, don’t you?”
“But if I don’t talk to them maybe I’ll get in trouble. I don’t know.”
“No. You don’t have to talk to them.”
“You want me to keep lying to them, or do you want me to tell the truth?” she asked. This was a key question. If Pat counseled her to keep lying, she would be obstructing justice. She was much too canny for that.
“Just don’t talk to them,” she said. “These people are very persuading. They tell lies.”
Nothing rattled Pat. Late in September, Dollie Estep, her niece, who lived in Bedford, called with an urgent message. Lloyd, she said, had confessed to kidnapping, raping, and killing the Lyon girls, and had named Dick and Teddy as accomplices. She said Teddy had also named Dick. This, of course, was not true. Mark and Katie were sitting with Dollie as she made the call. They had misled her in an effort to stir things up, and suggested the warning call to Pat. Dollie urged her aunt to make a deal with the detectives to save herself and Dick.
“Don’t say anything to me,” Dollie told Pat immediately. “I’m going to do the talking; you’re not. They took me to the police station today. They took my picture. The death penalty is on the line. Teddy is putting Lloyd there. Rapings, beatings. He’s gonna make a plea deal. You need to start talking. Patricia Ann [another of Pat’s daughters] is in danger. Teddy wants to silence her. They’re saying they have evidence. The death sentence is on the line. If you and Dick don’t talk first, Dick is going to get the death penalty. You need to talk because Tommy Junior [Teddy] is throwing you under the bus. You need to talk to them. Do it now! Don’t let Tommy Junior do this to you.”
“We don’t know anything,” said Pat, calmly.
“Junior is throwing you under the bus big-time. Call your lawyer and take him with you to see them. I’m worried to death about Dick.”
Pat was unmoved.
In poking around on Taylor’s Mountain, the detectives found much to interest them. There was that old cemetery with unmarked gravestones and the remains of a large fire pit used to dispose of brush and trash by the Parker family (Lizzie Welch had married Allen Parker). “They burned everything,” their daughter had said. It was not an uncommon practice in rural areas. Sometimes the bonfire burned for days at a time. Suspecting it might have been used to incinerate the Lyon girls’ bodies, investigators had begun marking off places to excavate. Part of the land was still owned by Dick and Pat. Dollie called them again at the end of September.
“They have marked your property up here as a crime scene,” Dollie said.
“As what?”
“As a crime scene. They’re gonna dig it up.”
“Okay, that’s cool.”
Dollie said, “I told them, ‘The person that killed those girls is dead.’”
“I’ll call you back,” said Pat, and hung up.
Despite Pat’s seeming calm, she was worried, and even though she was cagey on the phone, there were plenty of hints that she knew more than she let on. Her daughter Kim Pettas called her as more reports were aired of the digging on Taylor’s Mountain, prompting another of the exchanges that the squad found so suggestive.
“You better look at the news,” Kim told her.
“I’ve been looking at the news. We’re going to jail,” Pat said.
“You ain’t goin’ to jail.”
“Oh yeah? I ain’t got time to look at the news ’cause I’ve got to get ready to go away.”
“Mother, they [the Lyon girls’ remains] was found up on Lizzie’s property.”
“What was found?”
“The grave site.”
“That’s not their grave site. They’re still looking.”
Pat’s worry that she and Dick were about to be arrested suggested that there was incriminating evidence to be found.
In order to avoid polluting these conversations, the detectives had told no one the details of Lloyd’s ever-changing account. So they were especially interested when comments by family members seemed to corroborate it. In his most recent version, he and Teddy had left Wheaton Plaza with the girls and got into a car waiting in the parking lot. The detectives were startled to hear Pat, discussing the case with Dollie, present virtually the same scenario.
“Didn’t you say that the detectives said they know it was Lloyd and Junior [Teddy]?” Pat asked.
“No. He said Lloyd admitted to it and that Tommy [Teddy] was involved. Lloyd admitted to the girls, and Tommy Junior was involved with him. It was him and Tommy.”
“Well, who was the other guy?”
“They didn’t mention the other guy.”