“I didn’t say raped and burned.”
“You did.”
“I said raped and killed.”
“You said they were probably raped and burned.”
“No, I didn’t. No.”
“Lloyd, I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not going to.”
“Okay. So, when are you all going to charge me?”
“Just hear me out.” Mark then explained how their investigation in Virginia confirmed, in fact, that at least one body had been burned.
“Now, again, reasonable person, Lloyd. Two people who haven’t talked to each other in two years who get hit up cold by the police and come up with those kind of details on the same story?”
“I’ll say it again, when are you charging me?” asked Lloyd, who was growing increasingly agitated. He sat with his arms folded, coiled.
Mark went on, “And now all of the sudden we find human bones in that same location? In addition to those bones, we find material consistent with a green army duffel bag. We find this piece of wire”—he pointed to a photo on a sheaf of paper on the desk—“which is consistent with the wire that was in that girl’s wire-framed glasses. We find these beads that are melted together, and we know that one of the girls was wearing a beaded necklace. We find this button from a pair of pants that are the same kind of pants that one of the girls was wearing.” In fact, Mark was deliberately stretching the truth here. None of these scraps could be linked to a duffel bag or to what Sheila or Kate had worn, but Lloyd didn’t need to know that. “So we’ve got a problem here, Lloyd.”
“Your problem is that I didn’t do nothing to those girls.”
“Lloyd, you can explain away each little piece, but when you have to explain away everything, what’s the reasonable person [going to] think?”
“Well, you all think I did it. I mean, let’s be for real.”
Mark said he knew that Lloyd left the mall with the girls, and also that he had been on the mountain at the same time they had been tossed into the fire.
“Now, what happened in between is what I’m hoping you can help us figure out, because those two things are fact.”
Lloyd now offered, at last, something new. He said his trip to Bedford with Helen was prompted by his fear of his uncle Dick.
“He knew that I knew that he had them,” said Lloyd.
“If you are so scared and so upset, why did you go back to the mall and risk being put right in the middle of it?” asked Katie.
“I had a little bit of conscience, a little concern.”
“But then you misled them.”
Lloyd nodded. She was right; this made no sense. If he were concerned about the girls, why lie to the police?
“Every time we jump a little hurdle with you, your face slams in the mud,” she said.
“I felt that if I gave a lie that maybe it would eventually come out,” Lloyd explained, unconvincingly.
“But how does that ease your conscience?” asked Mark. “By putting the police on the wrong trail? It makes it worse!”
“I don’t know. I was a druggie back then. I was an alcoholic. And I’ve told you all that I can tell you. I’m gonna say it for the last time, charge me. I’ll get a lawyer, go from there. If not, I did not do nothin’ to those girls. I don’t want to be charged for something I didn’t do.”
“Then help us sort it out and help us figure out who did what.”
Lloyd was fed up.
“Okay. I’m on state property,” he said. He stood abruptly, walked to the door, opened it, and spoke to the guard in the hallway. “I’m ready to go, sir. This conversation is over with.” Mark leaned back in his chair and grimaced. Then he and Katie stood and started gathering their papers.
“Oh, that’s unfortunate, Lloyd,” said Katie.
But Lloyd abruptly closed the door and returned to his seat. He was in too deep to walk out. Katie worked to salvage the situation.
“We’re sitting here trying to give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “The last thing we want to do is pin this on somebody who didn’t do it.”
Katie sometimes tried to simply overwhelm Lloyd. She would start talking, throwing out ideas, her words flowing in great improvisational gusts, easing from one concept to the next, alternately flattering, reasoning, bargaining, confronting, empathizing. Mark called it her superpower; he joked that sometimes suspects would confess just to shut her up. Katie turned it on full bore now. She invoked Lloyd’s children, who, she said, wanted this all to be over. She talked about mistakes she had made in her own life. She was somebody who knew mistakes. Life, she said, was about learning and moving on …
She was still at it when the session passed the six-hour mark. It was a magnificent torrent of cajolery, all of it delivered earnestly and with a straight face.
And finally, Lloyd, as he did at all these sessions, caved in. He sighed heavily, and, interrupting Katie’s monologue, which showed no signs of slowing down, he asked the question he always asked before offering something new.
“Okay. Let me ask you this question before—I didn’t mean to cut you off. If I sit here and tell you from day one what went down to day two, what’s gonna happen to me?”
DON’T WORRY, YOU’RE IN GOOD HANDS
Lloyd didn’t give the detectives time to respond. Apparently, as he listened to Katie, he had worked out how to modify his story.
“First of all, I didn’t kill ’em,” he said.
“Okay,” said Katie.
“I didn’t burn ’em.”
“Okay.”
“It was not my green bag. It was Lee’s bag out of his trunk.”
This was new. He had now brought his late father into the mix.
“Okay,” Lloyd said, “I did not do that. I can tell you who did.”
“Okay.”
“What’s gonna happen to me?”
“Well, why would anything happen to you?” Katie asked. “If you didn’t do the crime?”
“Because I was involved. I was at the mall.”
“You asked Dave the same question last time right before you told us about Dick, and I’m gonna give you the same answer that Dave gave you. We can’t answer that question for you until we know what your role was and if you were involved in killing them.”
“I wasn’t involved in killing them, and I wasn’t involved in raping them.”
“Okay.”
Lloyd still insisted that Teddy had lured the girls from the mall. The rest of his story was the same, too, but he revised his account of the car that arrived on Taylor’s Mountain early in the morning. He now said that he knew who was in it.
“Dickie came down,” he said. “It was about one, one thirty [in the morning]. There was somebody else in the car. I don’t know who else was in the car. There was a big ol’ fire going, and I seen Dickie and Henry grab a bag and walk over to the fire and throw it in. Me and Helen, after that, said it was time for us to book out, and we left. What was in that bag, to my mind, was the girls.”
“Both of them?”
“I don’t know if it was both of them or one of them. I honestly don’t know. All I know is, yes, me and Ted did pick them up [at Wheaton Plaza].”