Lloyd had known exactly what he was doing when he named his cousin. Chris, Dave, Mark, and Katie were, at heart, conventional cops. To them, Teddy lay so far outside their concept of normal that they were willing to believe almost anything about him. The sexual bargain Teddy had struck as a boy, the way his story had played out in recent years with Uncle Lenny, and his odd sexual history with cousins and siblings—it all made Teddy smell complicit.
Ultimately, the wiretaps produced more questions than answers. They were useful in fleshing out the tawdry context of Lloyd’s family, and some of what was learned, as we shall see, would help move the case forward, but the keen anticipation at their launching went unfulfilled. By the end of 2014, the bistate siege of the Welches was looking like a great dollar- and time-consuming dead end.
EDNA
If there was a moment that captured the exasperation of these months, it was the appearance of Edna Ayline Welch, Lloyd’s ailing and obese stepmother, before the Bedford grand jury on November 7. Edna was a deceptively simple, mean country woman in her eighties, sharp as the cut rim of a tin can and prone to didactic and random biblical quotations. Her letters to Lloyd in prison were full of them—like textual glossolalia. These missives were written in her hand, although she said she was illiterate. Edna lived in Tennessee in a filthy, cluttered house littered with dog droppings. Her soft, full, lined face had sprouted gray whiskers, which were a source of family amusement. Her daughter had posted to Facebook a video of herself plucking hairs from her mother’s chin to the sound of banjo music.
Edna was of particular interest for several reasons. She had been living with Lee Welch in the Hyattsville house at 4714 Baltimore Avenue, where Lloyd and Helen had sometimes stayed during March and April 1975. Edna had told of cops knocking on her door there looking for Lloyd in the weeks after the girls disappeared, something which the detectives had not known and for which there was no record. She said Lloyd and Helen had gone off by then; she did not know where. Even if she knew nothing about the Lyon girls, as she claimed, she at least might be able to corroborate or debunk bits of information Lloyd had dropped about those days. And there was reason to believe she knew much more than she let on. Soon after Dave had first phoned her in the summer of 2013, searching for Lloyd without mentioning why, hard-of-hearing Edna had apparently written to Lloyd to tell him that the Maryland police wanted to talk to him about the Lyon girls. She had made the connection immediately. Her letter to Lloyd was never recovered, but a search of her Tennessee home revealed one he had written to her in response, five months before the first police interview.
“I don’t know about 2 girls missing from Wheaton, MD,” he had written. “Tell me who called and what they say I did or think I did because I’ve never done anything to 2 girls to make them come up missing. So write me back and let me know what is going on on this.”
So Lloyd, whom Chris and Dave and Pete had hoped to surprise, had been prepping mentally for the encounter for months. In the same letter, he had asked Edna a surprising question: “Mom, have you ever heard from Helen or from any of the girls? I don’t know where Helen is.”
Why, out of the blue, a question about Helen? Lloyd had neither seen nor heard from her in more than thirty years. He didn’t even know that she had died of cancer some years earlier. But it was Helen who sprang to mind. The detectives could imagine a good reason for this. Helen had been with him when the kidnapping occurred. If she were still alive, her memories of those days might be very damaging to him. When Dave saw this letter, and realized that Edna had never written Lloyd an answer, he kicked himself for having told Lloyd that Helen was dead. If Lloyd were worried about what she might say, this would have given the squad useful leverage.
Edna was in the last year of her life. She was not happy about the summons to Virginia. She arrived weary and in a snit, a backwoods matriarch beset by the powers that be. Leaning heavily on a cane, she worked her way to the witness chair, disheveled, her curly gray hair cut short and jutting out untidily. She had, as the detectives had already learned, a hearing problem that fluctuated with her mood—a disorder common in the ornery elderly. She heard what she cared to hear. There was much to be learned from her if she chose to be helpful, which she did not.
“Ms. Welch, can you hear me?” asked Virginia prosecutor Randy Krantz. When there was no response he asked again, “Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you right—I might miss some words,” said Edna.
“All right. If I—if anybody—asks you a question that you can’t hear—”
“Would you come closer?”
“I’d be happy to,” said Krantz.
She started out fine, answering questions expansively. When Lloyd was still a boy, she had agreed to take him in briefly, because her husband “kept whining about wanting his kids.” Lee, as she put it, “drinked a lot.” She obliged him, hoping it might mellow and sober him, “which it did not,” she said, emphatically. He showed no affection for Lloyd. Instead, the boy seemed to make him angry and abusive, so Edna’s kindly gesture only heaped new hardship on her already strained home life. She had not had it easy, as she put it, “with a drunk husband fussing and carrying on.” She said she had to intercept Lee’s pay every week, “or else he would go drink it up.”
Edna had trouble remembering the names of all her children and stepchildren. She described as “difficult” those early days with Lloyd, then a boy, in her house. After being retrieved from foster care, “he didn’t listen to me, for one thing. And I don’t even remember what kind of trouble he got into or what. We had to go to court with him, or I did. My husband wouldn’t have a thing to do with him, with nothing, PTA, children. ‘No,’[he’d say], ‘that’s you,’ you know? I had my hands full. And so, I told the judge I just couldn’t handle it. And he put Lloyd in some kind of house or something. And that’s the last I seen of him there, for years.”
Edna’s hearing began to falter as the detectives, Mark, Dave, and Katie, took their turns.
“Do you remember when you learned that Lloyd was being investigated about the disappearance of these two girls?” asked Mark.
“When you called me.”
In that first phone call, since Dave had been careful not to mention it, they wondered how she had so quickly surmised they were working on the Lyon case.
“Did you relay that information to Lloyd?” Mark asked.
“What? Now, wait. Run that by me again.”
“Do you remember when those two girls disappeared, the Lyon sisters?”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t until you-ins brought it up.”
“And what did you remember about it when we brought it up?”
Edna asked for a drink of water.
“I told them I hadn’t even got my coffee this morning.”
“Oh, I can relate,” said Mark.
“We drove all night. We drove. We just got here.”
She got her drink and then, with Mark’s prompting, recalled Lloyd and Helen discussing the missing girls on a couch in her living room after seeing a report on TV.
“I don’t remember what they said or anything, but Lloyd is kind of—I always thought he wanted to be noticed. A little wanting, wanting something. I don’t know how to explain what I’m trying to say.”