Lloyd got a good laugh over this.
“No. Well, other than that. Like, was he injured or anything like that, that might have prevented him from doing something? Was there physically something wrong with him that you could actually see?”
Lloyd, ever agile, offered, “I mean, he did have a limp. He kind of hunched over a little bit, but I didn’t see no injuries on him.”
“He claimed—and it was kind of hard to prove it—that he had two broken arms during that time period. So, we’re like, how can you prove it? We were able to go back and get hospital records, and then we were fortunate enough to get a picture of him.” Actually, Teddy had done these things himself.
“Humph!” Lloyd snorted emphatically. “Yeah, I heard about him being pushed off a building, but I didn’t see no cast on his hands or arms or anything like that, ’cause, I mean, he had a jacket on, so I didn’t really.”
“Right, but you would think you would have known. And I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt in any way.” Dave said that Teddy believed Lloyd had thrown him into the story for reasons of his own.
“Nah,” said Lloyd. “I didn’t throw him in. He was there that day. I’ll take a Bible and put it right there in front of me—like I said, I’m a Christian now—and he was there that day because he’s the one that offered me a ride home. He’s the one who said, ‘How you getting home?’ I said I was going to hitchhike home, and he said, ‘Well, we’ll give you a ride home.’”
Dave reminded Lloyd that this—along with his most recent account, from the July session—overlooked his earlier and oft-repeated insistence that Helen had been with him at the mall.
Lloyd didn’t miss a beat. “She was there for a while that day. But she left because she was going to her mom’s house, and I was gonna meet her back at the house, and she asked me to get some ice cream for her because she was pregnant. You know, she wanted to see her mom.”
This, once more, elided significant parts of Lloyd’s original story that could now be regarded only as completely false—getting on the bus with Helen, his remarking to her about the car he’d seen leaving with the girls, and so on. Lloyd made such edits to his story without hesitation or concern and with no apparent sense of how false it made him appear. Dave moved on. He asked Lloyd to talk about the couple’s carnival travels. Struck by how worried Lloyd apparently had been about Helen’s memory, Katie had come up with the idea of telling him that his old girlfriend had kept a journal. It wasn’t true, but Lloyd wouldn’t know that. They would confront Lloyd with some of the things they had gleaned from the wiretaps, presenting them as entries in Helen’s journal, which would give them more impact. Lloyd rarely pushed back for long against demonstrable truth. His slippery stories were built around the known facts.
Dave said, “And y’all did some things—and I’m not pointing fingers—it’s just that we went and talked to her current husband and she jotted a few things down that you all had done together. She made mention of a green station wagon and about how you broke into a house and stole a gun and a badge. It’s just things that we have read through her journal.”
Police records showed that Lloyd, during one of his youthful robberies, had stolen a police badge and in another had taken a green station wagon. Since the press conference, the squad had been contacted by other women who, as children, had been approached by a man at Wheaton Plaza in the months before the Lyon sisters disappeared. They said the man had flashed an official-looking badge. And the station wagon appeared in Lloyd’s stories, in the IBM man’s tip, and in the testimonies of Connie and Henry.
Lloyd looked mystified.
“Stole a gun and a badge? Stole a green station wagon?”
“No, she didn’t say you stole it, just that y’all were driving around in a green station wagon.”
Lloyd fell silent. Finally, he nodded and smiled broadly.
“That wasn’t a green station wagon, that was a SUV,” he said. It was green, but it had been a Jeep.
The detective asked again about the vehicle his uncle Dick had been driving when they left the mall. “It was definitely a station wagon? It couldn’t have been any other type of car that Dick had?”
“He had a couple of cars, but he was always driving a station wagon every time I saw him.”
Dave asked what kind of work his uncle Dick did. The squad had learned that he worked as a security guard but not at Wheaton Plaza. This might also explain the stories about a man with a badge.
“You are probably thinking to yourself, these are kind of weird questions because we have the whole background,” Dave explained. “We’ve got the beginning. I think we’ve got the end. We’re missing the middle.” Dave said Lloyd’s family, those who were still living, had “taken and built the circle around you, and they basically put you in the middle of it, and they’re pointing their fingers at you. You actually said that when we left here—’You’re gonna go back and talk to him [Dick], and he’s gonna say, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with this.’ And that’s what happened. And what they’ve done is, either through computers or phones, they’ve tried to develop the story, and we’re trying to discredit some of this.” In other words, We’re on your side. “Your entire family has made up this story and it all falls on you. And I said, ‘Well, wait a minute’—because there are people out there that have said, ‘Well, shit, let’s just let it all fall where it may’—and I said, ‘No, no, that’s not right. That’s not the right thing to do.’” Dave was suggesting that others—his colleagues or superiors—wanted to charge Lloyd based on what they had learned. As Lloyd’s champion, he was battling his hostile family and impatient prosecutors. “We’re not here because we want to lock the world up. We’re here for answers, and we’re not gonna get the answers if we shut the door.”
“Yeah,” Lloyd agreed.
“We’ve got to keep that door open. We’ve got to keep the communication going between us, because it’s obvious to me that your whole family knows. The whole family knows. Now, what they know and what their involvement is, it’s gonna be hard, but it’s got to come from you.”
“Well, see, the one thing is I can’t tell you who all’s involved and who all’s not involved because I really don’t know. All I know is, Dickie was driving the car, Teddy was there talkin’ to them girls.” Lloyd was not about to drop Teddy from his account. He said, “If you look at it, he wasn’t a bad-lookin’ kid back then.”
“Right. And neither were you.”
This startled Lloyd.
“I mean, you were a good-looking man. I’ve heard that from several people.”
Lloyd shrugged and laughed.
“We’ve got pictures of you in your younger years.”
Lloyd said that he didn’t flirt with other girls. He admitted eyeing little girls in the mall and talking to the Lyon sisters but said he had always been loyal to Helen. This was disturbing and revealing, and Lloyd seemed unaware of what it implied. It had come up several times. Helen was a twenty-two-year-old woman, pregnant with his child. He was eighteen. The girls in the mall he admitted ogling had been prepubescent, and yet, in Lloyd’s view—today as well as then—they were already sexual objects in the same way Helen was, potential rivals. He equated chatting with a grade-schooler with flirting or potentially cheating on Helen. But he was just warming up for his newest argument.