Now Mark leaned into the conversation.
“When we talked the last time, you told Katie and I that it took Dick about two days for him to talk you into it because you were scared.”
Lloyd nodded in agreement. He had said that.
“What were you scared about?”
“I didn’t want to get involved in going and picking up girls, you know? That was really not my scene.”
“Was it that there was going to be some trickery involved to get these girls? That’s what it seems like, that he’s wearing a security uniform to make them feel safe.”
“I don’t know if at that time you could say there was trickery or anything like that. Like I was saying, I really didn’t want to cheat on Helen.”
“Let me ask you this. If Dick hated you so much, why would he involve you in his plan?”
“I think I was being used.”
“Well, I get that sense, too.”
“Because I was the one who walked around that mall the most.”
“And approached them?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re the sacrificial lamb,” offered Katie.
“I was the one with the headband. I was the one with the long hair. I’m the one who looked like a total hippie, you know? Yeah, like you said. I was the lamb. The sucker.”
Lloyd then offered a little more detail about luring the girls. He watched them for a while, and when they were alone he approached them. He said he asked, “Have either one of you ever gotten high before? Ever thought about getting high?”
He replayed how the conversation went:
“I’ve thought about it,” said Sheila, “but I’ve never done it.”
“Well, I’ve got a little pot, and I’m just hanging around here. Would you like to get high?”
Sheila said yes, but Kate balked. “We can’t do that,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” Sheila urged her. “It isn’t going to hurt us. Everyone is doing it.”
Katie immediately cast doubt on that dialogue.
“These girls didn’t smoke. I mean, they were ten and twelve.”
Lloyd said that was how it happened.
“Their parents say there’s absolutely no way that they would have gotten in the car with strangers,” said Katie.
“Well, their parents lied.”
“It’s not that they’re lying. You know, parents want to think the best of their kids.”
Mark asked why, if Dick had decided to drive all the way to Wheaton, because he did not want to be seen picking up girls close to his house, did he bring the girls back to his house?
“That’s a question I’ve asked myself so many times, and I can’t answer that because I don’t know. All I know is he got high down in that basement down there, and that’s where he did all of his partying then. I guess he felt safe in that area.”
Again Lloyd said that he got out of the car at the convenience store. Here is where he had decided to take his stand. He had innocently participated in taking ten- and twelve-year-old girls to “party” with his pedophiliac uncle. The rest had come as a shock to him—although not enough of a shock to impel him to take a single step to aid the girls. Mark scoffed. He leaned toward Lloyd and fixed him with a steady, troubled gaze. He spoke very calmly, asking again why Dick would have taken the girls back to his own house, where his wife and children lived.
And then Lloyd tripped up. He said that Pat wasn’t home “when we got there.”
Mark did not draw attention to it immediately; he just ran with it.
“So, you guys pull in the driveway, do you all go back around to the basement?”
“I shouldn’t say we pulled in,” Lloyd said, backtracking fast. “I’m saying they pulled in. Pat was at work. I can see the house when I’m walking by the tracks.”
“See, and that’s the kind of thing the jurors are going to get tripped up on, because when you said just a minute ago—”
“I said they.”
“—when we pulled into the driveway.”
“When we pulled in, yeah.”
“All right? And if you pulled in, if you didn’t get out at the store, that’s fine.”
“No, I got out at the store and got ice cream.”
“You established a lot of credibility with us now, and we completely understand that back then you didn’t know where this thing was going,” Mark lied. “And you were scared and all that stuff. If you went to Dick’s house from the mall, that doesn’t change things as far as the way we’re looking at all this.”
“No, I did get out at the store.”
“Lloyd, did you get back in the car?” Katie asked. “Because, honestly, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah. I walked down the railroad tracks You can see their house from the railroad tracks.”
“But hear me out,” said Katie. “You’re saying that they dropped you off, and you went about your business, and you didn’t know anything until the next day, and now you’re putting yourself looking at them pulling up to the house with the girls. So it doesn’t matter if you were in the car, it doesn’t change anything other than the fact that we can believe in you. Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“I understand,” said Lloyd. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Because it doesn’t make you any less guilty or more guilty. If you’re in the car when they pulled up to the house—already you said somewhere in your mind you knew there was probably going to be sex, not necessarily that you were gonna participate—what curious nineteen-year-old boy isn’t gonna go and see what’s gonna happen? They [the girls] weren’t that much different in age than you. There were totally different things goin’ on back then.”
Katie was smoothing the path for Lloyd. She was allowing, for purposes of easing Lloyd’s concerns, that having sex with prepubescent girls was somehow a normal thing, especially in the anything-goes 1970s.
“I can understand important parts where you want to take yourself out,” she said. “This isn’t one of them. I know it’s in our nature to protect ourselves, and I get it. But it just doesn’t make sense. I’ve got a pretty good Lloyd bullshit meter. Mark has a good Lloyd bullshit meter, as you know.”
Lloyd chuckled to himself. This was true.
“You know, because you always end up giving it up to us anyways,” Katie said.
Lloyd laughed, leaned back, and threw up both arms in an attitude of surrender.
“Okay, goddamnit! Damn. I did get out at the store there and get some ice cream. We drove to the house. I got out. I left the house. There was nobody at the house. I said I was leaving and I left.”
This retreat was telling. Katie was right; it made little difference whether Lloyd got out at the store or a few minutes later at the house. But the shift revealed Lloyd’s whole method. He told the truth up to a point, but then extricated himself when things turned bad. He removed himself from the scene. When trapped into admitting he was present, as he was here by his own slipup, he became the innocent victim, a sucker, a patsy. Just easygoing Lloyd, along for the ride, exploited.
Having loosened up a little on this, Lloyd offered some more information about those first few hours of the Lyon girls’ nightmare. He said they initially drove all over the area, smoking dope in the car. He said Teddy was blowing marijuana smoke into Sheila’s mouth in the front seat, while Kate whined in the back. “She really didn’t want to go, but her sister talked her into it,” he said. “I guess you could say she was acting up. She did ask her sister at one point, ‘Are we gonna go back to the mall anytime soon?’”