The detectives had reason to suspect that Henry had been more than just a helper. His sister had told them about his sexual interest in her as a child, including one preplanned assault from which she had escaped. And when they forced him to revisit the episode Henry seemed deeply troubled, to a degree they found surprising. Pressed by Katie about the bags and the fire, and told that Lloyd had implicated him, Henry had broken down.
“Just knowin’ those babies wasn’t taken care of like they should have been. I couldn’t deal with it. If I had heard some babies like that I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t! Myself!” he said pointing to himself. “Oh God, no. I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. I’d go kill myself. I’d jump off a damn bridge or somethin’ somewhere.”
9
Wanna Get High?
Lloyd Welch and Helen Craver
JANUARY 28, 2015
A bloody duffel bag, a bonfire, family phone calls from Maryland to Virginia linking Lloyd to the Lyon sisters—the mystery now had a terrible ending. This was not what the squad had been looking for when they zeroed in on the Welch clan, but it was huge. Amid all the man-hours and expertise and effort over the latter half of 2014, the Bedford sheriff’s office, off on a tangent, had found powerful new evidence.
Lloyd had admitted being present when the girls were abducted, and now others had placed him squarely at the story’s end, the disposal of bodies, or of at least one. The squad had always been coy with Lloyd about what they knew, mostly because they knew so little. Now, encountering him again early in 2015, they at last had something solid he had not told them.
Little had reached Lloyd about the extensive effort that had taken place over the previous half year. Teams of expert consultants had surveyed the wooded landscape of Taylor’s Mountain on foot and from the air. Parts of it had been dug up and the soil sifted, work that continued. A persistent search had been made for a car that fit the description of the one used to deliver the duffel bags. If it had carried a bag as bloody as the one described, there might still be traces of the girls’ DNA inside. It was not found. The location of the bonfire had been fixed, and the dirt there scooped out and sifted through screens. A fragment of charred human bone was found, along with scraps of singed fabric that might have been worn by the girls or come from the bags described by Connie and Henry. Melted fragments of beads were found that might have matched a necklace Kate had worn, and a piece of wire recovered might have matched the frame of Sheila’s glasses. None of these items tested out convincingly. No DNA could be recovered from the bone. As with so many other leads in this case, these bits were suggestive but inconclusive. There was nothing distinctive enough to be considered evidence. In the end, they just confirmed that when you looked hard enough you found things that resembled what you were looking for.
This was true of everything except Connie and Henry. Here were two eyewitnesses to what appeared to be the story’s bloody end, whose testimonies jibed, and who had offered them independently. Oddly, their reluctance to tell the full story augmented their credibility. Real evidence.
By January, Lloyd was back in the general prison population. Dressed again in white denim, he looked fitter and better groomed. The gray hair on the sides of his head had been trimmed so short he looked bald, and his white goatee was clipped close to his chin. He was again taken to the upstairs interview room at Dover police headquarters early in the morning. Dave came just before ten, carrying a manila folder and wearing a neatly pressed blue sweatshirt. They had not seen each other in six months.
“What’s happening, stranger?” he greeted Lloyd.
“Well, look who it is!”
Dave set a cup of coffee on the table before Lloyd and then walked back out to ask a guard to remove the handcuffs and chains. When they shook hands, Dave grasped Lloyd’s arm like an old friend. He promised that this time the coffee was hot, “black and all,” just the way Lloyd liked it.
“What have you been up to?” Dave asked. “I see you’re not in the orange.”
“No, I’m surviving.”
“Is it bad in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“I mean, I’ve got my status back and everything, but I hate all this mouth from these guys. Shit comes on TV. They see it in the papers and shit like that. ‘Oh yeah, that’s that motherfucker; he’s the one who did it,’ you know? So I keep my door shut and stay to myself.”
He said he’d had a few “little threats” but no attacks. There had been grumblings when stories appeared about the grand jury and the dig on Taylor’s Mountain. He knew that his uncle Dick had been named as a person of interest in October and that in December his aunt Pat had been indicted. That had all been reported on TV.
Dave told him that he looked good.
“I’m tryin’ to stay positive,” said Lloyd.
“I think we’re at a good spot,” said the detective. “I really do. And that’s why we came back. It has been six or seven months. We wanted to talk. We wanted to share with you all of the things—that day we left here, every day since then, I kid you not, including weekends and nights, we’ve been working on this thing. And I brought a lot of stuff to share with you. I’ve got a lot of questions for you. There are no charges. I know that’s always a concern when we meet.”
“Right.”
Dave repeated this a few more times. He wanted to make sure Lloyd didn’t spook. He called the legal problems encountered by Dick and Pat “unfortunate,” and reinforced the idea that all of Lloyd’s relatives were out to get him. Pat had been caught lying, although about what Lloyd was unclear.
“Okay. I’m here as a sex offender. I understand that. So, yeah, they’re going to say, ‘He did it.’”
“There’s some things that we need to work out between us,” said Dave, “and I think this can be a good outcome, a real positive outcome.”
Lloyd suddenly made a point of saying that he had been only seventeen in March 1975. The age of majority in Maryland was eighteen. As a seventeen-year-old, he might be able to avoid being charged as an adult, but math was not one of Lloyd’s strengths. “I’m fifty-eight now,” he said. “I just turned fifty-eight in December, okay?” That much was true, but if he had turned fifty-eight in 2014, it meant he had turned eighteen in 1974.
Dave didn’t argue with him. He was focused on very specific things—Teddy, the duffel bags, and Uncle Dick. Teddy’s broken arms and the bloody duffel bags undermined two critical parts of Lloyd’s story. Teddy had almost certainly not been involved in the abduction, and Lloyd, who always said he had fled at the first sight of the girls being abused and had never returned, had in fact helped dispose of their remains. Rather than confront him outright, the detective was going to lead him to these contradictions step by step, without showing his hand. He started with Teddy.
“Do you remember when you guys were in the mall or the ride over or the ride back, however you remember it, do you remember if there’s anything wrong with him [Teddy], like, physically wrong with him?”
“Besides being gay?”