Connie provided her own explanation in another posting to Amy: “I’m really trying to help. I remember some things. I told them today that Dick didn’t even go around Uncle Tommy [Teddy’s father]. They didn’t like each other. There is no way Dick helped anybody do anything bad.”
The police also learned that Connie had reached out to her estranged brother, Henry, who was four years older and lived in nearby Roanoke. It was their first conversation in more than a year. She encouraged him to watch the TV news. There was detailed coverage of the police search on Taylor’s Mountain. She told another cousin, but not the police, that Henry had been with her when Lloyd and Helen had arrived with the bloody duffel bag and that they had come not on foot but in a white car. The car was significant. A number of the Welch cousins recalled a vehicle that was variously described as a big white sedan or a green or yellow station wagon. Some said it belonged to Dick. Its automatic windows were memorably newfangled. The description of a station wagon, in particular, jibed with the old report phoned in by the IBM employee who had seen a blond child bound and gagged in one on his way to work.
Lloyd’s bloody duffel bag, the car (or station wagon), and a raging fire suggested that the girls had been murdered and cut into pieces, stuffed into a bag or bags, and taken to Virginia to be incinerated. Connie and other neighbors remembered one bonfire that had lasted for days and had enveloped the mountain with a dreadful odor. This dovetailed with an odd statement Lloyd had made in the first interview, when asked to speculate on the girls’ ultimate fate. He had said they had probably been killed and burned.
After learning that Connie had not been completely forthcoming, the squad sought to compel her full cooperation. She was subpoenaed by the Bedford grand jury in October, when, now under oath, she again told only part of what she knew. Recalled two months later, after having been warned of penalties for withholding information, she at last told the full story.
“He placed the duffel bag between the four of us,” she said, referring to herself, Lloyd, Helen, and Henry. “It was packed enough to sit up on its own.”
“Was the duffel bag ever opened in your presence while you were outside?”
“Yes, because I seen the bloody clothes on top.” She described the blood as “like present blood bleeding, but it wasn’t dried brown blood to be dried for weeks. So it was, like, a maroon color.” She said it wasn’t just a spot of blood, that there was “a lot.” She said, “It smelled bad. I can remember it smelled bad.”
“Smelled bad like anything in particular?”
“Rotten meat.”
“What did you do?”
“I must have asked him, how did that happen? And he said that him and Helen were going to camp on the side of the road and that was from ground beef, ground beef that went bad.”
The team encountered yet more reluctance from Henry, a frail, prematurely doddering man of fifty-nine with an advanced breathing disorder. He was tethered at all times to an oxygen tank. His ailment caused him to habitually retch up gobs of phlegm, which he expelled vigorously, either into a soiled handkerchief or, outdoors, freely and without much warning—every time he turned his head, Katie would ease away. Connie’s other two brothers had died. In one of her Facebook exchanges with her cousin Amy, Connie confided, “My biggest fear is that my last family member Henry was part of it on the mountain.” She had told the grand jury that her brother often hung out with Lloyd when the latter visited. When asked how Henry might have been involved, she said, “Henry wouldn’t murder the child. He wasn’t in Maryland. I meant help bury it. If he helped bury the bodies on the mountain.”
“Why do you think Henry would bury the bodies on the mountain?”
“Because his momma would tell him to do it. We always did what Momma told us to do.”
Henry had been questioned by the Bedford police on the same day they first visited Connie. He remembered Lloyd as a troublemaker, a thief, someone often in trouble with the law. Significantly, he said that when Lloyd had visited in 1975, there had been talk even then of his involvement in the Lyon sisters’ case. This was almost forty years before Lloyd’s name had been publicly linked to it. He said that before Lloyd showed up on Taylor’s Mountain with “a heavyset girl” in “a big green car,” he had heard “Mom and Dad talking about the [Lyon] kids coming up missing and stuff. And, them talking, saying they wouldn’t put it past Lloyd to do something like that, so I don’t know.”
“Why did they link Lloyd with it?”
“Because of the news and everything and everybody talking about it, you know?’
“Back then?”
“Yeah.”
“Was Lloyd’s name out there then?”
“Yeah.”
It had not been.
Before the October grand jury, Henry downplayed Lloyd’s surprise visit. It was of so little note, he insisted, that he had almost no memory of it. He said Lloyd and Helen had left the day after they arrived—everyone else, including Lloyd, remembered a weeklong stay. He also recalled a phone call to his mother from Lloyd’s father just after his arrival, specifically inquiring about the Lyon girls.
“He asked my mom did he have two kids with him. She said no. So that’s all I heard about it.”
This was startling and unexpected. When Mark and Katie paid Henry a visit the next day to question him further, he was annoyed. Coughing and wheezing, he protested, “I told y’all everything I knew. Ain’t no more I can tell you. It’s like y’all are harassing me now. I’m fed up with it.”
But Henry knew a lot more. For his second grand jury testimony that December, he arrived with a black bag containing a portable oxygen pump connected to his nose by a plastic tube. He was stooped and looked beleaguered. Told there were discrepancies in his statements, he was warned that unless he sorted them out he would be in serious jeopardy. In a small interview room at the Bedford courthouse, Dave and Mark worked him over hard prior to his formal testimony. It was the only time in this case when Dave remembered losing his temper. He knew Henry was hiding something—Connie’s testimony told them that—and he’d had enough. He accused Henry of being directly involved in the crime.
“Do you know what happened to those kids’ bodies?” asked Dave.
“No, I do not know. I wish I knew; I would tell you!”
“Did Lloyd come down here to get rid of those two kids’ bodies?” asked Mark.
Henry was shocked and frightened.
“I don’t know what he did, honest to God! I don’t know. He coulda had ’em in the trunk of his car. I don’t know. I mean, he was gone for a while and then he came back.” Henry speculated that Lloyd might have killed one of the girls with a tire iron on the drive down to Virginia, but emphasized that this was just conjecture.
“When he first got there, what did he have with him?” asked Dave.
“He had his girlfriend with him; that’s all I know.”
“What else did he have?”
“I don’t know. He had some clothes with him as far as I know.”
“This is where we’re going with this,” said Dave, alluding to the grand jury questioning that would shortly take place. “This is the stuff that we need you to tell.”