“So they’re still blaming it all on me, ain’t they?”
“Shit, yeah. They’re blaming it on you.”
“‘Lloyd did it. Lloyd’s in jail.’”
“That’s the easiest thing to do.”
Reflecting back on the long, damning chain of falsehoods Mark had recited in their last session, Lloyd allowed that he looked guilty, and if he was hoping for reassurance from Dave, he was disappointed.
“You got it,” is what the detective said.
“I agree with you one hundred percent on that,” said Lloyd. “Looking at it on paper, the way he said it, it’s like, damn, Lloyd did do it, you know, or he was there.”
The task today, Dave told Lloyd, was to shift that blame to Dick. This was not, in fact, his primary objective. The squad did believe Dick had been involved, so anything more about him was welcome, but the primary goal was to coax still more about what had happened from Lloyd. He was going to try to get himself off the hook by damning Dick, but no matter what else he said at this point, he would share culpability.
Dave asked for more details about how the kidnapping was conceived.
“The original plan was me and Teddy would go into the mall, find a couple of girls that looked like they might want to party or something like that, ask ’em if they’d like to get high, bring them out, we’d all get in the car, and we’d go up and get high, you know, and party. That was the original plan. Not one thing was mentioned about sex. Just to party. Nobody said anything to me. Nobody said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna bring ’em up and have sex with them.’ You know?”
This was, of course, beyond belief. Dick had been a thirty-year-old man. The idea that he would plot to lure two little girls to his house in order to get them high or drunk and have a few laughs was ridiculous, as was Lloyd’s contention that he had been only an innocent ride-along. But Dave played along.
Lloyd said he went to Dick’s house that morning. His uncle was wearing his security guard uniform. They rode with Teddy in Dick’s yellow station wagon.
“We went to the mall and saw the two girls. There was a bunch of them walking into the mall. I heard Dickie say, ‘Well, what about them?’ I didn’t know who he was talking about at first.” Dick pointed them out, and they watched the girls enter the mall.
Dick stayed in the car, Lloyd said, while he and Teddy went after them. They offered the girls a chance to smoke dope.
Lloyd recalled Sheila answering, “Yeah, I’d like to try.”
“That was all, you know?” he said. “‘Oh, it sounds like fun,’ you know? Kids.”
Dick pulled up to the curb as they exited with the girls.
“Okay, you said one got in the front and one got in the back,” said Dave.
“Right.”
“The young one was in the back.”
“Yeah, I think that was …” Here Lloyd encountered a new problem. If the girls had left with them cheerfully, looking forward to smoking dope and hanging out, why had the younger one been crying in the back seat? “Like I said, I don’t know if she was really cryin’ or not. I don’t know. It sounded like she was.” He whimpered softly to illustrate. “But that could just have been a sniffle, because she had her head turned the whole time. She didn’t say nothin’. The girl in the front didn’t say nothin’. They didn’t ask where we were going to party or anything like that, you know.”
In the previous session, Lloyd had told Mark that they’d driven around for two hours. Dave pointed out that this didn’t sound right. Hyattsville was only about fifteen minutes away. Lloyd insisted that he’d never said two hours—he didn’t seem to realize that all these interviews were recorded. Several times he joked about it, once telling Dave he had checked the desk drawers looking for a recorder when he’d been left alone in the room. “Because how in the hell does he remember everything I said?” Lloyd asked. But he never got serious about the question. Dave would swiftly change the subject.
Lloyd continued recalling the ride away from the mall.
“I know there was some joints already rolled up. I know Dick smoked pot. I was smoking one in the back. The girl [Kate] was sitting over there, she didn’t smoke at that time. I should have asked, ‘Are you okay?’ or something like that, but I wasn’t thinkin’. I was gettin’ high.”
“Ah, see, to me, I don’t think that that’s odd,” said Dave, who in fact found the whole situation horrifyingly odd. “Look at it this way. If you’re loading two girls to go party, in your mind you’re partying, you’re hanging out. In Dick and Ted’s mind—you don’t know what they talked about but—more than likely they’re talking about having sex with these two girls after they get them high and drunk, right? I mean, I’m just sayin’.”
“Right. But I guess what scared me the most is when we got up there by the university [University of Maryland], Dick didn’t turn all the way around. I guess he was talking to Teddy or somebody, and he said, ‘Well, you know, they can always meet their Maker.’ You know? I guess that is what scared me the most, because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”
“Why do you think he said that?’
“I don’t know. They [Dick and Teddy] were having a little whispered conversation back and forth to where I couldn’t really hear them too much.”
“I said, ‘Hey, can you drop me off at the store there. I’m gonna get some ice cream.’”
“Let’s break that down,” said Dave. “Something had to happen where it pissed Dick off. Why else would he have said that? Were they throwing a ruckus? What happened?”
“No! They weren’t raising their voice or anything like that.”
Dave asked, “How do you go from ‘I’m gonna have sex with these girls’ to now suddenly thinking about killing them?”
“I believe that the little girl in the back is the one who was getting him upset because of her little sniffle.”
Lloyd stuck with his story that he had exited the car, bought ice cream, and walked back to his father’s house in Hyattsville. He retold the story of returning to his uncle’s house the next day, when he saw one of the girls being raped. Four days later he had gone back to the mall to tell his misleading story, and then he had panicked, he said. He and Helen left to hitchhike to Virginia the following morning. He repeated his story about seeing Dick show up early in the morning on Taylor’s Mountain and watching from a window as his uncle and Henry lugged a heavy bag out to the fire.
He decided now to admit that Lee had called ahead to alert Lizzie (Lee’s sister)—the call Henry said he’d overheard. Lloyd continued to deny the rest of what his cousins remembered. When they reached the end of this version, Dave again asked him to speculate about the girls’ fate. Lloyd said that he believed it was Kate Lyon’s body in the bag that went on the fire.
“When you looked out the window and they put the bag on that fire, you knew exactly what was in that bag,” said Dave. “I mean, there was no doubt in your mind.”
Lloyd nodded.
“You don’t drive five hours to throw trash on a fire in Virginia at one thirty in the morning.”