Chris had run out of moves. Continually paging through the files, he felt as if he were wearing deeper ruts in a well-worn road. No lead had gone unpursued, no witness unquestioned. It made him angry and stung his pride. He considered himself a pro, and he had struck out. He was at his desk one evening, early that summer, reviewing documents so familiar he could almost recite their contents, when it struck him. He was finished. He had done everything he could do. He was not a man to give up, but he had reached a dead end. The feeling surprised him. He walked to the lavatory and splashed water on his face. It was not so much a decision as a recognition. There was nothing left for him to do. It was deeply disappointing but also a relief. He would put the burden down. If Sheila and Kate were still alive, they would both be middle-aged, a good bit older than John and Mary had been in 1975. Like all those before him, Chris had failed. At least he could tell the Lyons, in good conscience, that he had done everything possible.
But when he returned to his desk, staring at him from a stack of old familiar files was one he could not remember having seen—the six-page transcript of Lloyd Welch’s April 1, 1975, statement. He was first astonished that he had somehow missed it. How could that be? And how had it come to sit on top of the papers on his desk? Could someone else have put it there? No one was working nearby. It had clearly come from his own collection. He read it for the first time, somewhat amazed, and felt a jolt when he reached the end. This witness had told the detectives that the man who led the girls from the mall “walked with a little limp.”
That had to be Mileski! During a lifetime of run-ins with the law, Mileski had once been caught in a home burglary and had been shot in the leg by police. Afterward, he limped.
Chris could not believe he had never seen this. Here was someone, this Lloyd Welch, who may have actually seen Mileski in the mall with the girls! If this was true—an eyewitness!—it might be the break he needed.
He showed the old statement to two robbery detectives who worked for him, Dave Davis and Kari Widup.
As they read it, Chris could hardly contain his excitement.
“See the part about him walking with a limp?” he said. “He’s describing Ray Mileski!”
Both detectives agreed that it was intriguing, but neither knew enough about the case to fully share Chris’s excitement. Dave, the seasoned interrogator, noted that the witness’s recall in this old statement seemed suspiciously detailed. In his experience, it went well beyond what any normal teenager would have to offer. Most would never look twice at two little girls. Still, he could see the importance of a potential living witness.
“He would be in his fifties now,” said Dave, which meant there was a good chance he was still around.
Welch’s old flunked polygraph didn’t mean much to Dave; he put little stock in the device. He told Chris he thought it was a good find. Running to a meeting, Chris asked him to do some Internet sleuthing to see whether he could find the man.
A quick scan of state criminal records disclosed Welch’s repeated run-ins with Montgomery County. There was a photo attached to a 1977 arrest, showing Welch staring sullenly into the camera. He looked older than his years, kicked around, hardened, a man with scars on his broad face and wide, crooked nose. His thick brown hair was parted in the middle, held down by a dirty, rainbow-colored headband.
Dave confirmed that Welch was still living by calling family members, some of whom were named in the police records. He called an old number in Tennessee, and Welch’s elderly stepmother, Edna, answered. Dave identified himself. “We’re doing an investigation,” he said. “It’s from a very long time ago.” Edna sounded confused and said she could not hear him well—he suspected that she was trying to get rid of him. She told him to call her son Roy, Lloyd’s younger half brother.
“I know he’s incarcerated,” said Roy, with what sounded like a chuckle—wouldn’t a cop know this already? “He’s in Delaware for something to do with little kids.”
Those words rang loud. Roy didn’t offer any more, but Dave now cast a wider digital net. Using a national police database, he found all of Welch’s arrests and his disturbing history of sex crimes against children. He had worked for a traveling carnival, which explained the wide-ranging geography of his criminal past. The most recent photo, a prison shot, showed the same face grown older and thicker, sneering down at the lens. Lloyd had lost his hair, his youth, and his freedom. He had a gray mustache and goatee.
When Chris didn’t pick up his phone, Dave texted him: “We’ve located him. Issues with sexual stuff with kids. Currently incarcerated.”
That brought Chris out of the meeting. When Dave showed him the old arrest photo, Chris’s face paled. He took Dave upstairs and found the old police sketch based on the description given by Danette Shea, the thirteen-year-old girl who had seen a man staring at girls in Wheaton Plaza that day. They were a virtual match. How could this have been missed?
They had seen Welch as a possible witness. Now they were even more intrigued. Chris knew Mileski had groomed young victims to help attract other children. Could he and Welch have worked together? Two little girls would be far more likely to follow a teenage boy than a middle-aged man. Both Welch and Mileski had come forward years earlier to volunteer information about the Lyon sisters—how could that be a coincidence?
The find rejuvenated the case. Over the following months, Dave began working it with Chris. They waded back into the piles of paper looking for links between Mileski and Welch. Welch did not fit the profile of a child kidnapper in every way or as neatly as Mileski. There were three instances of child sexual abuse in Welch’s record, all with young girls, but all involved children he knew—daughters of girlfriends—in their homes. While bad enough, these incidents were a far cry from kidnapping two unknown girls from a public place and likely killing them. Still, here was a man sexually attracted to little girls. If he had been working with Mileski, it might explain why he’d gotten involved in something more extreme.
There was more. The FBI helped the squad build a Lloyd Welch time line, cross-checking his travels against unsolved missing children cases around the country. There were a number of curious hits. One was spookily reminiscent of the Lyon sisters’ case. Welch’s carnival made an annual trip through Texas in the winter months, and in December of 1974, in Fort Worth, Texas, three teenage girls had disappeared from a mall, never to be seen again.
Could they have stumbled on a serial killer? The FBI thought it was possible. Chris and Dave then spent months fleshing out their understanding of Welch. They interviewed other members of his family, a collection of odd characters in Maryland and Virginia who had preserved their rural accent and outlaw attitude over generations.
All this provided insight for their sit-down. Despite the other intriguing clues, Welch remained important to them, first, as a witness, someone who might be able to identify Mileski as the man “with a little limp.” Whether or not the 1975 statement was true, and whatever his motivation had been in giving it, Welch had clearly been present. Shea’s testimony and the drawing confirmed that. Beyond this potential, however, was a richer possibility. Had the two men known each other? After all, if teenage Welch knew Mileski, how likely was it that both men had just happened to have been in the mall at the same time the girls were taken?