And every time, Lloyd broke. For all his vaunted street smarts, he never seemed to catch on to how he was being played.
On this day Lloyd got his lunch break after four hours with Dave. He was given his choice of take-out food, and the detectives always brought back additional orders from the same place for his guards. Lloyd consistently disappointed them by selecting Arby’s. When he’d finished eating, it was Mark and Katie’s turn.
“We’re back,” said Mark.
“Are you surprised?” asked Katie.
Katie had prepared an elaborate backstory about Helen’s invented journal. It was, she said, “My big thing that I’ve been working on.” Showing a flair for fiction, she explained that the journal had gotten waterlogged, and that Helen’s handwriting was so small it was hard to decipher, so it had taken her some time to make sense of it.
“It had some emotional stuff, but I didn’t want to come in here and give you bullshit, so what we did was send it to the FBI lab, because they have ways of re-creating, you know, gluing stuff and putting them in air containers and getting stuff back together.”
“I never knew she kept a journal,” said Lloyd, skeptically.
“She didn’t, I don’t think, when she was with you. It was very clear that you were kind of the love of her life, you know.” Katie was laying it on thick here. “And I’m not saying that to blow smoke up your ass. I mean, her husband was—what’s the right word?—alienated by that, which I think you can understand.” Katie went on and on about the diary that did not exist.
Katie sat behind the desk, and Mark took a chair alongside Lloyd, who was silently chewing gum. She began by presenting an entry that described a room with a pool table at Uncle Dick’s house: a room that had a bed on the floor in a closet. This was a tidbit they had gleaned from the wiretaps and from a new tip offered by Teddy Welch. Still struggling to free himself from suspicion, Teddy had called with a recovered memory. He said that on a visit to Dick and Pat’s house, he’d heard the click of pool balls and had followed the sound upstairs, where he opened the door to an attic-like room that had a pool table—this is where the couple said their pool table had been. Teddy said he saw Lloyd at one end of the table, and Helen sitting on a mattress tucked into a small closet, watching. Sitting on the other side of the table were two blond girls. Teddy said he had then been called back downstairs. The detectives wondered why he hadn’t mentioned it earlier—this was after multiple police interviews, a polygraph session, and several grand jury appearances. Since they were always accusing him of holding something back, Teddy explained, he had been working hard to recover whatever memories he could.
He was convinced that this brief encounter explained why Lloyd had chosen to name him as the kidnapper. Lloyd would have recalled being seen with the girls, so he had acted to head that off by blaming Teddy. To the detectives, it was hard not to view Teddy’s recovered memory as tit for tat.
But to test out the scenario, Katie said Helen had written of the upstairs poolroom in her diary.
“Yeah, that was in the back room where the pool table was, yeah,” said Lloyd. “Right off the living room.”
“It sounds like she [Helen] is describing something like an attic almost,” said Katie. “Like a finished attic.”
“Oh, we really never went up there.… We stayed at Dick and Pat’s maybe two or three different times.” Lloyd said the room upstairs was kept locked.
“She talks about this time there was a mattress in the closet, a pool table, and she speaks about two girls being in this area with you guys.”
“Yeah. Could have been the kids. I don’t know. Not the girls from the mall. It could have been Pat’s kids. I don’t remember that. That’s got me confused.”
“I’ll bring the copies next time so you can see them,” said Katie. “But it sounds like you and her and these two girls, and so I was wondering if somehow you guys ended up staying there because you needed a place in the interim and didn’t know that the Lyons girls were there and [they] ended up being in that room with you guys.”
Katie was really pushing it here.
“Nah. We didn’t stay at Dick’s house. We were at my mom’s house. When those girls came up missing we were at my mom’s house.”
“Well, they didn’t come up missing. You guys took them from the mall.”
“Well—”
“Right? Okay?”
“I’m saying when they were announced missing,” said Lloyd.
Katie forged on. “Okay. The only thing that she said was, something I wanted to share with you, was that she hopes someday that you would do the right thing and make peace with this situation.”
Lloyd said nothing. He shook his head and then flipped his right hand dismissively, as if to say, I have no idea.
“Obviously, I’m telling you that she was able to piece this—I don’t know if you guys had a conversation—but she was definitely able to piece some of this stuff—”
“I never told her about them girls. Could she have pieced it together? Knowing Helen? Yeah.”
“Oh, she did. I mean, I’m reading that she pieced it together.”
Lloyd seemed unaffected by this. The diary ploy didn’t appear to have troubled him at all—though it had—so Katie dropped it. She went back over Lloyd’s most recent version, and let him know that, as it now stood, he had still failed to produce enough verifiable information to nail Dickie.
“You’ve told us the beginning part. We’re piecing together the end part based on the stuff you’ve already told us and stuff that other people have told us. The middle part is what we really need to hammer him on, because you’re saying, basically, that he had these girls and he’s the one who brought them there [to Virginia]. What we’re looking for are unique facts that we can hammer him on where he can’t refute, you know. Somebody killed them. Somebody kept them alive. He [Dick] has got his damn hands full. He doesn’t care if Lloyd and Helen are going to Bedford. You know what I mean? We can’t go and present to a grand jury in trying try to put something together against Dick that [says] you are there and then consequently these bodies just end up there. You know what I’m saying? Like, it doesn’t make sense?”
“I know it looks like Lloyd’s the one who did it.”
“Well, sure. And that’s what everyone is painting. And if you had a part of it, tell us! Clearly you were a teenager that got pulled into all this bullshit. You know I’m a little bit more sensitive than the average guy. You and I have had some heart-to-heart conversations. It sucks to be the outcast of the family. It sucks to be the one who nobody wants around and feel unloved, so I get that. ‘And these people finally want to have something to do with me. I’ll go smoke some dope and party with these girls if that makes me fit in.’ But there are holes that don’t make sense. I’m not saying that you did more, but you knew more about what happened on the back end of this, and you just don’t wanna say anything, because you don’t want to be involved. But the truth is, you’re already involved.”
Lloyd didn’t budge. He reiterated his story about hitchhiking, about seeing Dick pull up in the middle of the night with the bag. He was sure Dick and Teddy had sex on their minds when they went for the girls, but not him. He was loyal to Helen.