It evoked such a sad scene, Kate with her head averted in the back seat, staring out the window, wondering where they were going, who these men were, and what might happen to them. Lloyd said his uncle responded by encouraging the ten-year-old, saying, “Why don’t you get high!” This was also about the time that Dick, clearly annoyed, told Teddy, “They can always meet their Maker.” Later, Lloyd said, Sheila took her little sister’s hand as they got out of the car and led her into the basement room.
The detectives picked away further at Lloyd’s story. Why would he have gone back to Dick’s house the next day if what his uncle had said—“They can always meet their Maker”—so scared him? All of Lloyd’s reasons were feeble. He wanted to say goodbye to a cousin. His uncle had good dope.
“Lloyd, did an anonymous nine-one-one call ever go through your head?” Katie asked.
“No.”
“Just because you were saving your ass?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, fair enough.”
“I didn’t want to go to jail.”
“Fair enough.”
“It was me who was at the mall.”
“Right.”
“It was me who everybody saw, you know? I mean, y’all have got a picture of me.” He was referring to the old police sketch.
“Right.”
“Or close enough.”
“That’s the kind of honesty I’m talking about. Because that’s not an easy thing to say, but it’s the truth and it’s fair, and we don’t judge you any. In fact, we are happy that you say it.”
“Yeah. Nine-one-one just—”
“That’s a hard pill to swallow,” said Katie, finishing the thought for him.
Lloyd nodded.
“Knowing that this little girl was getting raped and possibly drugged, dead, whatever?” she asked. “And you could have prevented it, and you didn’t because you were preserving yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the kind of stuff that we are looking for.”
Lloyd finally acknowledged unequivocally that he had gone to the police with his false story because “I didn’t want them to come lookin’ at me. Because I didn’t know if somebody had seen me talking to them.” He had been, he said, “covering my ass.”
Mark pushed him once more on what happened in Virginia.
“You were involved with this thing in the beginning. It ended. And you’re there when it ends. It’s like a coincidence that you just happen to be there?”
“Coincidences happen.”
Mark laughed.
“All through life, coincidences happen,” said Lloyd.
Then Katie launched into another of her empathetic stem-winders. She believed in her heart, she said, that Lloyd had been sucked into the crime by his uncle, that these were “shitty people,” that he was the only decent and honorable one in the family, that he was “a teenager trying to do better with Helen,” and that he had gotten into a bad situation because of drugs. She said he had fled to Virginia because his uncle had probably threatened him, and that he had kept his mouth shut about the whole thing for forty years because he was frightened. His family had set him up, essentially framed him to take the hit for the crime, and now they were all free, “living their lives,” trying to make sure that the blame came to rest solely on him. They were getting away with it! He needed to come clean so the detectives could help him protect himself. Dick was the evil one here. He had probably done this multiple times and gotten away with it! “He’s still getting away with it!” she said. Lloyd had a chance to bring him to justice, avoid being made the scapegoat, and unburden himself. “We can’t unless you do,” she said. “I wish you would just let it out. Let it go. If that means you have to cry, if that means you have to punch something …” Katie was on a roll.
And almost six hours into the session, true to form, Lloyd once more buckled—or seemed to. He started rubbing his eyes. He announced that he was tired. Then out came the question: “What’s gonna happen to me?”
And as they always did, the detectives finessed the answer. He had already confessed to having helped kidnap the girls. They did not tell him so, but this alone was enough to lock him away for the remainder of his life. They wanted more. They wanted to know exactly what happened.
“You’ve asked that question so many times,” said Mark. “What’s going to happen to me? You said something earlier today: ‘Everything I’ve said hurts me.’ And that is absolutely true, and it’s true because what you have said up until this point leaves you looking bad.” Mark was returning to Dave’s argument, that Lloyd needed to tell them more about what happened, in order to defend himself.
“Okay,” said Lloyd. “Do you want Dave in here too, so all three of you can hear the whole story?”
THE WHOLE THING FROM BEGINNING TO END
Helen’s invented journal would pay a dividend after all. It had evidently been gnawing at Lloyd. Told that Helen had written of their being with the Lyon girls some days after the girls’ disappearance, he was faced once more with tangible evidence—or what he thought was tangible evidence. Lloyd rarely resisted provable facts. Katie’s artful fiction would now force another maneuver.
When Mark left to fetch Dave, Lloyd pleaded with Katie, “I just don’t want to do no more time. I want to get out.”
Katie was not about to dash his fondest hope, not while he was still talking. She dodged it.
“Look, I’ve seen you struggle,” she said. “This is just you and me talking now. The reason you want to keep giving us more is that you want to do the right thing. It’s just time. It’s just time. You’re tired. We’re tired, and nobody is taking care of you.”
“But the only problem with this all is I tell you all everything, the whole thing from the beginning to the end, and it’s still my word against theirs, and there’s more of them than there is of me.”
Mark and Dave entered. Dave, who had removed his tie, pulled the chair Mark had been sitting in even closer to Lloyd and leaned toward him. Mark and Katie sat behind the desk.
“Okay,” said Lloyd, leaning back in his chair and clasping both hands behind his head. “March twenty-third. Dick approached me and Teddy with this plan to go up to the Wheaton mall, like I said, to pick up a couple of girls, party with them, have sex with them.” This was a new admission; Lloyd had always insisted on just the euphemism “partying.” “I told him no, I don’t want to do that. I’ll party with you, I’ll party with the girls, but I’m not having no sex with those girls. I’m with Helen. She’s with child. I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t even want to be in this. You can leave me out.’ Couple of days later, he talks me in. Says, ‘Look, I got pot, man. I got plenty of pot. Got some good drugs. We’ll all get high,’ and stuff like that. So finally he talked me into going up there. I go up there. I go into the mall. I saw the two girls come walking through. I followed them for a while. I approached them and said, ‘Hey, do y’all wanna get high?’ You know, I did say it that way. ‘You wanna get high?’ And the older one said, ‘We’ve never gotten high before. We don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ll try it. Everybody’s doing it. I mean, it’s the seventies. Peace, love, and rock ’n’ roll.’ And the older one finally said, ‘Yeah, let’s get high.’ The younger one said, ‘No, I don’t want to go.’ And her sister said, ‘Oh, come on, we’re just going to get high,’ you know? So, we go out of the mall, and Dick pulls up. I don’t know where Teddy came out of, but he came up behind me. The older girl got in the front, like I said. I got in the back. The other girl got in the back, and we drove around for a while, started getting high. Ted was giving shotgun to the girl [blowing marijuana smoke directly into her mouth], and we were just talking up front there.”