“As long as I’m not being charged with nothin’,” Lloyd said finally, and then, to the relief of all, signed.
He then resumed holding forth about … his life … his travels … his jobs … his girlfriends … the children he had left in his wake. His childhood was troubled and lonely. His most significant relationship had been with a woman named Helen Craver, whom he had met when he was just sixteen and she was twenty, a chubby woman who shared his appetite for drugs and drifting. They had stuck together through the 1970s, traveling and using drugs and making babies. Helen lost one child and gave birth to three during those years. After he was sentenced to a second stretch in prison in 1981, they both relinquished parental rights, and Helen went her own way. Lloyd had seen neither her nor his children since.
“They’re all adults now,” Lloyd said. “I should have grandchildren by now. You would think. I mean my oldest daughter’s thirty-four years old. But do you have any idea where they’re at?”
Dave shook his head.
“No? And if they married, their names?”
Again, Dave shook his head.
“I would love to establish a relationship with them, let them know that I did love them and everything, but I thought it was in their best interest to put them in foster homes and get adopted out. Margaret at the time was six, and Amy was just turning five, and Tanya was a little baby.”
“You know, you impress me,” said Dave. “I mean, to be able to—I know they’re your kids but just the amount of time that’s passed—how you’re not only able to name them, but you’re able to say how old they were. I mean, you obviously cared back then.”
“I did. I did. It was just one of them things. It was hard but, you know, in the end it was probably the right thing to do. The only reason I did it was because at the time I was an ugly person. I was an alcoholic. I was a drugger. I was in prison. And I was thinking about how I was treated when I was a kid, all that I was put through, and I figured the best thing for me to do is to have these children go to a home that would love them and care about them and raise them right.”
“Right.”
“I was my father’s son.”
“We talked to some of Helen’s sisters to try to get some insight.” Lloyd nodded and listened here with particular interest. “[They said] you were like the nicest guy one day, and then the next day, you know, they were fearful of you. They were scared to death of you.”
“Yeah.”
“They didn’t know what was going on. They said you guys moved around a lot. All this stuff is as intriguing as hell.” Dave encouraged him to reconnect with his children. “You know, you still have time. You’re gonna get out of here.”
“Well, I’m hoping. I mean, good Lord willing, I’m hoping to be out of here. I don’t wanna die in prison. I really don’t, you know? I really wanna get my life. Like I said, I’ve really seriously thought about going into law enforcement. This is not the life for me. I don’t want it. I really don’t. I’m tryin’ everything I can to get out of prison. This is my second time putting in a pardon package, and I’m just asking for five years. I’m not asking to be set out on the street right away.”
Dave asked what sort of work Lloyd hoped to do when released. Lloyd said landscaping, so they talked about that. The detective then gently steered the conversation back to Helen and the 1970s, which he hoped might lead them to Ray Mileski, the priority.
“How did you get to Helen’s house? Did anyone ever bring you over there or anything? Do you remember back then any names that you might have been hanging out with?”
“One time. I can’t remember his name, though. He drove an old Plymouth. It was a station wagon. He brought me over a couple of times.”
“Do you recall his name?”
“No, but I can—I mean, he had a bald head.”
Mileski had not been bald. Dave asked for more. Lloyd said the man was old, “but everybody looks old when you’re that age.” He had picked Lloyd up outside a church. He thought the man might have been a minister—Mileski had not been. He drove a “dark-colored” car. When Dave pressed him for more details, Lloyd quickly grew irritated. He didn’t understand why such an insignificant thing, a man who many years earlier had given him a ride, was so important. It was a lifetime ago. He had been a druggie. He had taken many acid trips and taken a lot of speed.
“My mind’s almost shot on a lot of things,” he said.
Dave changed the subject. He asked about Lloyd’s father.
Lloyd said he’d been abused.
“How many times do you think he abused you?”
“Oh, I’ll never forget it. Ten times.”
Dave sighed.
Lloyd said it had happened every time Edna had left him alone in the house with his father. He would be berated, then beaten. “It just got to the point where I just didn’t say nothing, you know?” When he did complain about his father to others, he said, no one believed him. He said he still had “a hatred of him.”
Dave was sympathetic. He said. “Yeah, because, I mean, minus that in your life, who knows the potential you may have had.”
IN ALL “HONESTLY,”PART I
They took a break. Dave went next door to confer with Chris, Pete, and Ray Young, the FBI agent. They had expected to be paddling upriver with Lloyd; instead, Dave was navigating rapids. They decided to show him a picture of Mileski. When the interview resumed, Dave placed it on the table.
Lloyd reacted with surprise. “That’s the freaking guy that had the damn car I was telling you about! The one who was the minister!”
He said he was certain. In the next room Chris rose from his chair in excitement. Here was the connection he had been looking for, the primary reason for this interview. He was so pumped that he began pacing. Enormous time and effort had been invested in this session on the hunch that the two men had known each other—and bingo! A big piece of his long-stalled case against Mileski had just clicked into place. Now, what was the true nature of the connection?
“Did he ever offer you anything?” Dave asked.
“He never offered me anything.”
“Never to work for him?”
Lloyd insisted that the man had given him a ride once or twice to Helen’s house. That was it.
“Okay,” said Dave. “He is the focal point of why we’re here. In talking to people that surrounded him—you would have no idea who these folks are—we came up with you, and then we said, ‘Well, look, you know, he [Lloyd] comes from that background of abuse, and what he [Mileski] did to his kids and other folks, he manipulated. He picked up young boys on the street, offered them sex for drugs and alcohol, that sort of thing.’”
Lloyd nodded.
“And that’s why we came here to you, saying, hey, this may be a good day for you. It may be a great day for us.”
“Right.”
“And it may explain things that happened way back when, right? That may never ever get explained without your help.”
“But he never offered me anything like that,” Lloyd said. “I mean, he gave me the ride. It was just something hairy about him I didn’t like. That’s why I didn’t get in the car with him anymore. I got in twice and that was it.”