“Tell us how that went down,” said Mark.
“Just asked them if they wanted to get high, and they said yeah.”
“Now, how did that happen?” Mark asked. “Did you approach them inside the mall first? Outside?”
“We saw ’em go in. We tried to catch them and ask ’em if they wanted to get high before they got all the way into the mall, but we didn’t get a chance to get to them, so I guess that’s why they saw me watching, because I was trying to see who they were hooking up with and where they were going. So I guess that’s why everybody said they saw me watching them. We were gonna party, that’s all, but I guess you could say in the long run, I got scared and I didn’t want any. I told Ted and them, I said I didn’t want anything to do with it. Dick did take us all back to his house. I did get out at the store, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I was scared.”
“Who set this up from the beginning?” Katie asked.
“Dick, I believe.”
“So you guys were at Dick’s house when this went down?”
“Yeah, he said he had some pot.”
“Okay, let me ask you this before I forget. Was he dressed in a certain way?”
“He had his security uniform on.”
“Dick did?”
“Yeah.”
This was plausible, both the uniform and the pitch about smoking pot. In 1975, marijuana was a craze. It had moved aggressively from black America and the fringe hippie subculture to white suburbia. Many youngsters, especially teenagers, were eager to try it. This new version of the story was believable in another way. Grabbing two girls had been carefully premeditated. In Lloyd’s earlier version, Teddy had just happened on the Lyon sisters. Dick sending Lloyd into the mall (Teddy’s involvement, despite what Lloyd said, was highly doubtful) to lure the girls made more sense, especially with what the team had learned about Welch men. Dick’s uniform also made sense.
“He said it would be easier,” explained Lloyd. “The girls would probably not be as scared.”
The uniform also would have made it less likely for a bystander to intervene if the girls had objected or tried to pull away.
“So, did you guys formulate this plan?” Katie asked. “How is this set up?”
“It took two days for them to talk me into going into this plan,” said Lloyd. “He [Dick] said, let’s go party with some young girls.”
“Okay.”
“You know?”
“And ‘party’ to you means he was gonna have sex with them probably.”
“Get high and shit like that. To me, back then, partying was gettin’ high, drinkin’, you know.”
“So that’s a way to buy you in, because you were part of that scene?”
“He just said, ‘Look, I’ll drive you up to the mall. I’ve got some pot. Just find a couple of girls that look like they might want to party or something like that, bring them on out, [we’ll] bring them back to my place, we’ll get high, we’ll have a little sex.’”
There were shopping centers closer to Dick’s house, but Lloyd said they chose Wheaton Plaza because it was farther away. It was less likely that they would be seen by anyone who knew them. Lloyd still insisted that Teddy was part of this plan and that he must have been wearing a coat or a jacket that covered his arms.
“He drops you guys off,” said Katie. “How long did it take you to find the girls? Convince the girls?”
“About an hour, hour and a half at the most. We went walking around. Like I said, we saw those two go in, and we said, ‘Hey, how about them two? They look like they might get high,’ or something like that. And then I guess you can say we followed them around, starin’ at them or whatever to see who they were hooking up with.”
“So the whole story about Helen is not true?” said Katie.
“Yeah. Helen wasn’t there.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, and the job thing. I was gonna go up there and put in applications, but I didn’t that day.”
“What do you say to the girls to get them to come out?”
“We asked them if they wanted to get high. If they liked to party. They didn’t say no. They didn’t say yeah. They didn’t say anything. They said, ‘I don’t know, let’s see.’”
“And they just follow you guys?”
“Well, they walked out with us.”
“And at some point, you’ve been very clear from day one that the little one starts crying. What makes her start crying?”
“I guess she got scared when she saw an older person in the car.”
“Does he say anything to them?”
“Alls he said was, ‘Don’t worry, you’re in good hands.’”
At that point Lloyd reverted to his old version of the story. He got in the back with Kate. Teddy and Dick sat in the front on either side of Sheila. They drove around, he said, for about two hours, which seemed inordinately long, but Katie let it pass. When he told Dick he wanted out, his uncle turned around and gave him a dirty look, “like, Don’t say anything.”
“So you know in your gut that shit ain’t right,” said Mark.
“Right.”
“Because this is a planned situation. Of course, they have no idea that they are going to be killed and burned.”
Lloyd said that when they were all still in the car, Dick made a comment about the girls, “Going to meet their Maker.”
“That’s one of the main reasons why I got scared and got out of the car.”
Lloyd said that when Dick showed up on Taylor’s Mountain more than a week later, he was driving the same station wagon—it was yellow according to Lloyd. After Dick and Henry threw the heavy bag onto the fire, his uncle drove away.
The detectives pushed for more, but Lloyd was finished changing his story for that day.
Katie thanked him. “I pray and I hope that this story that you told us is really true.”
“It is the truth.”
“It makes a lot of sense to us,” Katie said.
Dave came back in for a few minutes before the session ended. It had lasted almost seven hours. Lloyd was worried.
“I just wanna know what’s going to happen to me,” he said to Dave. “I mean, my involvement was helping to get the girls in the car, and that was it. I didn’t touch ’em. I didn’t rape ’em. Didn’t have sex with ’em. Didn’t kill ’em. Didn’t carry them down to Virginia. Didn’t do none of that. I was a scared-shitless little boy, you know?”
“Well, we’ll work through it,” Dave said, noncommittally.
Lloyd had now greatly strengthened the kidnapping case against himself. It had been planned. He had lured the girls with pot and led them away. He had driven off with them. Lloyd still had his immunity letter, but that wasn’t going to help. That had been contingent on his not having committed a crime.
And Lloyd knew it. In one of his last comments to Dave that day, he remarked that the letter “ain’t worth shit now.” He was right.
10
The Whole Thing from Beginning to End