The only way to find out was to ask Lloyd Welch. Because the detectives felt he would be more likely to confirm his connection to Mileski if he did not know they were investigating the Lyon case, Dave would start by trying to establish a connection between the two men. Only then would he ask about his old witness statement and try to nail down the vital Mileski ID.
That, at least, was the plan.
3
In All “Honestly”
Lloyd Lee Welch, 2013
OCTOBER 16, 2013
The plan did not survive the first thirty seconds. Dave met Lloyd Welch in an upstairs hallway of the Dover police headquarters. Before him stood a pale, bald old man with a potbelly in baggy white prison denim, shackled hand and foot. He had big features and a ponderous brow over clever, liquid blue eyes and a wide nose that had been broken and healed bent. He had an unsettling forwardness. This was unmistakably the man in the old arrest photo, bulked out over three decades, especially in the middle. The word that came to Dave was hard, a shell baked by years of lockup. He immediately threw the detective off balance.
“I know why you’re here,” he said with a sly grin. “You’re here about those two missing kids.”
So much for surprise and for gauging Lloyd’s first reaction. If he intended to rattle Dave, it had worked. The detective’s mind raced. How could he know? It had to have come from his family, yet the detectives had taken care to avoid saying exactly why they were looking for Lloyd. They’d said, at most, that he might have witnessed a very old crime. Of course, the police do not actively investigate old minor crimes, and the Lyon case was notorious, but it was still a highly specific assumption. What did it mean that Lloyd had been given a heads-up?
Then Dave realized that part of the responsibility was his. That morning, without thinking, he had pulled on a dark blue polo shirt with a gold crest that read, “Montgomery County Police / Major Crimes Division.”
They were shown to a bare interview room, a small windowless space with gray walls and black trim, olive carpeting, a table, and two chairs. Lloyd was visibly disappointed. When he had been awakened early that morning, he had hoped the interview would be about a pardon petition he had filed recently. The emblem on Dave’s shirt had dashed that hope.
The detective asked about prison life.
“It sucks,” said Lloyd. “It sucks.”
“How much longer do you have?”
“I’m waiting to go for a pardon recommendation, and if I get that, right now I’ve got nine, about nine and a half years.” He was requesting that the final five years of his sentence be dropped as a reward for good behavior, which, according to the intricate algebra of detention, meant he might be eligible for work release in just two. Dave ran with it.
“Do you think prison has been that rehab that they talk about, or do you think you’re gonna fall right back into whatever it was that you were doing back then?”
Once freed, Lloyd said, he hoped to go to Tennessee, “out in the country,” near where his stepmother, Edna, lived.
Lloyd was nothing at all like the man the FBI analysts had led them to expect. He appeared to enjoy talking for its own sake, and even though he knew Dave was working on the old Lyon case, he seemed indifferent to the risk. He talked like a man addicted to talk, free-associating, and Dave, who had worried for so long about how to get him going, just sat back and listened. Riffing at length about prison life, Lloyd got around to contrasting Delaware to Maryland, where he’d served an earlier stretch. Dave’s state, he said, was “ten times better.”
“I mean, the staff is a lot better, the food is a lot better, the pay’s a lot better [he was being paid eighteen cents an hour for his work detail in the Delaware prison kitchen]. They’re more concerned about rehabilitating people. This place isn’t.”
He then launched into the sort of lament cops hear often from inmates, so routine it was rote, about how awful his life had been, how events had forced him into crime, about how he had learned his lesson, turned his life around, found the Lord, and become a productive citizen who didn’t belong behind bars. Dave nodded agreeably.
“I’m fifty-six years old,” Lloyd said. “I’ve lost a lot in life because I had a screwed-up life. You know, I had a screwed-up father. I never knew my real mother. So at fifty-six, if I can get out, I could probably give a lot to the community. I’d prefer to help law enforcement in finding these sons of bitches and drug dealers.”
Lloyd was like a burst dam. Words cascaded. Unprompted, he came to the offense that had gotten him locked up for so long. Such injustice! He was, he wanted Dave to know, a good guy. He had been grossly over-punished. His “crime” had been a simple misunderstanding. He was not a child molester. His victim was the daughter of his girlfriend, a child he cared about and would never harm. His crime had been, at worst, a momentary lapse.
“I got drunk. I got high. You know, the girl had me in her trust and everything like that. I was stupid for doing what I did. I admit it. I had all the remorse in the world for what I did to that child, you know? She was gonna be my stepdaughter, you know? I thank God that I didn’t go all the way with what happened and shit like that. Even though they say I penetrated, in the state of Delaware, if you put your little pinkie in there [a vagina] or your tongue, you’re considered to have penetrated.”
Dave swallowed his bile. He had children of his own. His daughter was just nine. Here was a man arguing that the sex acts he had performed on a ten-year-old were trivial. Dave pretended to be surprised.
“It’s considered penetration?”
“Right. My penis never went in her. She was still a virgin because I stopped myself, you know? And I feel bad about what I did to her.”
“How old were you then?”
“I was forty.”
Dave shook his head.
“Yeah,” said Lloyd. “Stupid. Very stupid.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know what I’m sayin’?” Lloyd said.
Dave nodded and then got to work: “Along those same lines, minus the sex part of it, when you were talking about your upbringing and your family, believe it or not, that’s why we’re here to talk to you.”
“Okay.”
Dave told Lloyd that he could take a break whenever he wished, and that if he wanted to order food—a special treat for an inmate—“We can make that happen. I mean, this is very informal.” But before they got down to business, even though they were just friends talking here, Dave was a cop and Lloyd was an inmate, so there were formalities. Lloyd had to give written consent. Despite the fears this might arouse, Deputy State’s Attorney Pete Feeney had insisted on it. Dave had the statement before him on the table.
“I’m going to read it to you, we’ll sign it, we’ll put it away, and then we’ll start to talk a little bit,” he said. “Like I said, we have all day.”
He read: “You have the right now to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you. You have the right to a lawyer before or during any questioning. You can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you.”
Dave reassured Lloyd that this was just red tape; he was only a witness. There would be no charges. Lloyd listened, nodding, and squinted skeptically. Dave—and his colleagues in the next room, watching on-screen—waited nervously.