TEDDY
Teddy felt the heat, too. The darkly handsome cousin with the curious past was summoned repeatedly for interviews and a polygraph, and he cooperated doggedly, appearing, as always, candid to a fault. He detailed his long relationship with Leonard Kraisel, an association the detectives found hard to comprehend; he acknowledged youthful sex play with siblings; and he continued to insist that he had nothing to do with the Lyon kidnapping. Lloyd, he said, he hardly knew.
Teddy was under tremendous stress at the time. His third wife, Stacy—his first had died of cancer, and the second had left him—had been diagnosed with a fatal malignancy. He and their two boys were still dealing with emotional, financial, and legal fallout from Kraisel’s conviction; the fuel equipment and services company, largely owned by Uncle Lenny, was going under; and Teddy was shepherding a civil lawsuit on behalf of his sons against the old man (which they would eventually win). Now, for reasons he could not comprehend, his cousin had named him as a kidnapper, rapist, and killer.
Looking for ways to lean on him, the squad enlisted a male relative who said that as a boy he had been sexually assaulted by Teddy. Teddy had deduced early on that his cell phone was tapped. His landline at home was not—the squad had been unable to show a pattern of calls to the landline to warrant a tap—but on the theory that Teddy might trust that line more, they had this relative call him on it.
“The police asked me some questions about what happened to me as a child,” he told Teddy. “What you and Michael did to me as a child. With the butter. Sexual.”
“I didn’t do anything to you,” said Teddy.
“You don’t remember what you did to me? Dad and Mom confronting you on the street?” He said Teddy had driven up to his house in a red car. “You came in drunk? Got butter out of the refrigerator?”
“I never had a red car,” said Teddy. “I had a burgundy car.”
They quibbled, and then Teddy said, “If you’re sitting there with the police right now recording this phone call [he was], you can tell them to kiss my ass. Tell them to leave you alone. Lloyd is fucking dragging me into it!”
His cousin Dollie, who had her own grievance, was also enlisted.
“One time at Dick’s house,” she said, “they [Dick and his brothers] were all drunk on the front porch. Your dad [Tommy Senior] told me to get on his lap. I tried to get up, and Tommy pulled me back down.” She said that Teddy had intervened on her behalf, yelling at his father and pulling her off him. “Me and you went around the side of the house, and you pulled your winky out.” She said Teddy, having rescued her, had then pushed her to her knees and tried to put his penis in her mouth.
Teddy said he didn’t remember it, but if it had happened, he was sorry.
Dollie said, “Patty Ann [their cousin, Dick and Pat’s daughter] called me last night drunk off her butt. She called me and cussed me out. She called me drunk, drunk, drunk. Next thing I know, she’s hysterical crying. Said you told the police that her daddy was the driver [in the Lyon kidnapping]. Lloyd is cooperating with the police. Said you were on the scene, raped those girls.”
“Come on, Dollie,” said Teddy. “I was eleven years old!”
“Not by yourself. Were you and Daddy and Lloyd involved?”
“I can’t imagine anything like that.”
“When people get drunk things happen that don’t ordinarily happen,” Dollie said.
“There’s so much stuff going around,” said Teddy. “They took me to the sheriff’s office yesterday, put me on a recorder. I’m not going to worry about it.”
The same tactic was tried with Teddy’s younger half brother, Michael. He phoned Teddy (calling him “Tommy”) in mid-October—two of the detectives were with him.
“Two detectives were here, Tommy. Going through everything, talking about everything. Things that happened in our family, those two little girls—”
“Do you know anything about those two girls?” Teddy snapped at him, cutting him off. He practically hissed the question through the phone, a warning as much as a question. Then he added, “I don’t know anything.”
“They were talking all kinds of crazy shit that went on in your family. Sexual things. They’re just investigating, trying to figure out who killed those Lyon girls. I have a strange feeling that they still think you know something. Let me explain it to you, they can put you in jail for conspiracy. I haven’t a—”
“Are you an idiot?” Teddy asked sharply, cutting him off. His tone suggested that his brother was stupid for even talking about such a thing. “I’m telling you I had nothing to do with it.”
“They come at me with all this other bullshit,” said Michael. “Our family is totally fucked up. Goddammit, I don’t like these two strange motherfucking assholes coming in my house and talking to me about this shit! Cover your fucking ass!”
“I don’t need to cover my ass. I didn’t do anything.”
But Teddy was worried. After the police searched his house late that summer, he set out to prove his innocence. As a boy he had climbed to the icy roof of a local school to retrieve a ball, slipped, and fallen off, shattering both arms. He believed this had happened when he was eleven. After a stay at Washington Adventist Hospital, he had come home with casts on both arms, which were elevated by straps. “I couldn’t even wipe my own ass!” he told the detectives. It had taken many months and repeated surgeries to fully repair his bones. He wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, but he was sure it was in 1975. After his interview at police headquarters that summer, he went looking for his old medical records—and succeeded in finding them. The tap on his phone recorded him battling hard with hospital bureaucracy.
Teddy was able to show that his fall had happened on February 15, 1975, and he had spent a week in the hospital. He even found an old photo of him taken there, his cast-encased arms in traction. This was more than a month before the Lyon girls had disappeared, but he’d worn the casts for months. Two broken arms made him an even less likely kidnapper, even if you believed he was somehow involved at age eleven. It certainly would have been hard to miss him in Wheaton Plaza that day. None of the witnesses remembered a boy with two broken arms. Dee Danner, the woman who remembered seeing the Lyon girls talking to a boy, was asked specifically if he “had anything wrong with him.” She said no. Teddy had even kept the casts, which were taken when his house was searched. They were tested for signs of blood—on the theory that Teddy might have been present at the girls’ murder—and none were found.
He went further still to prove himself to the squad. He agreed to wear a wire for a surprise visit to his uncle Dick. The detectives instructed him to get Dick talking about the crime. Teddy drove over to his uncle’s house on the afternoon of September 16. He sat with him on the swing chair in the front yard and for nearly an hour commiserated with him and Pat about the ongoing investigation. Dick kept reminding Teddy that his lawyer had advised him not to talk about it, but to the extent that he did, he repeated the same denials he had made to the police.
Even after this effort, the squad’s doubts about Teddy lingered. His disappointing conversation with Dick and Pat didn’t convince them that any of the three were innocent; instead they wondered whether Teddy had tipped Dick and Pat off to the wire.