9: Lloyd Welch and the Disappearance of the Lyon Sisters -- Part 2 of 2

Allison and Jayson last left you in Part 1 with police beginning their questioning of Lloyd Lee Welch, a man who they'd initially thought a witness to the kidnapping of Katherine and Sheila Lyon at the Wheaton Plaza mall in 1975 by their original suspect, Ray Mileski. However, Welch soon takes police on a dark and murky path that leads to him becoming the prime suspect in the girls' disappearance. Chances are if you had any leading theories about this case in the previous episode, they'll probably go out the window by the time you get to the end of this one.

And speaking of theories, Allison and Jayson both give theirs at the end.

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Allison's Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/warpedcortexmedia

Additional Music: "Late Night Radio" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The Silver Linings Handbook Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-silver-linings-handbook/id1665733166

The Silver Linings Handbook Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheSilverLiningsHandbook

Sources:

The Last Stone, a 2019 book by Mark Bowden; the documentary Who Killed the Lyon Sisters?, which was directed by Bowden’s son, Aaron; articles in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore News American, The Washington Post and The Frederick News-Post.

Chapters

• 8:01 Interrogation and Rapport Building
• 13:08 Deception in Investigation - Insights
• 18:44 Family Dynamics and Abuse Patterns
• 34:38 Interrogation Techniques and False Confessions
• 44:24 Sexual Assault Allegations and Suspicion
• 58:22 Search for Evidence in Murder Investigation
• 1:05:27 Lloyd Lee Welch Case Analysis
• 1:13:41 Family Involvement in Mall Abduction
• 1:19:33 Lloyd Welch's Circumstantial Evidence and Confessions
• 1:34:48 Engage With Our Community on Socials

Transcript

Allison Dickson: 0:25

Welcome back for our second episode on the Vintage Villains podcast and a true crime bonus episode of my friend Jason Blair's podcast, the Silver Linings Handbook. I'm your host, Allison Dickson, and we are talking, of course, about the case of the Lyon sisters.

Jayson Blair: 0:41

I'm Jayson Blair.

Allison Dickson: 0:49

And in our first episode we took you through some of the turmoil of 1975, a time when we were just a year out from freshly disgraced President Richard Nixon, a worldwide energy crisis and the beginning of the end of our war in Vietnam, and we discussed how Ted Bundy was still active and the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that was unfolding and President Gerald Ford began an effort to rein in the Central Intelligence Agency. So there was a whole lot going on, of course, in 1975. But then we quickly got to the story that Jason had brought to my attention. That took place, well, began on March 25th 1975, with the disappearances of Catherine and Sheila Lyon in suburban Maryland.

Jayson Blair: 1:31

Yeah, in that episode we discussed the disappearances of 10-year-old Sheila and 13-year-old Catherine from the Wheaton Plaza Mall in Maryland, the manhunt to find them, multiple witnesses across the border in Virginia who saw what they thought was the girls, some early suspects in the case and the discovery of a name in a file of a man named Lloyd Lee Welsh.

Jayson Blair: 1:56

He lived with his parents nearby in Hyattsville, maryland, and we also sort of explored, began to explore how cold case detectives who reopened the case in 2011 sort of explored began to explore how cold case detectives who reopened the case in 2011 couldn't tell whether Lloyd was a witness or a suspect. We discussed a little bit about Lloyd's criminal history, including a series of sexual assaults on children, and his family members' recollections of a trip he and his girlfriend Helen made to his extended family's property more than 200 miles south, deep in Appalachia on Taylor's Mountain. Family members told cold case detectives about a bloody bag that Lloyd showed up with on that spring and a fire that raged for days that had a noxious smell. We also discussed a sexual offender and murderer named Ray Molesky who had ties to the case and perhaps to Lloyd.

Allison Dickson: 2:48

Yeah, and if you haven't heard the first episode, definitely go back and listen just to get the background on this. That's what we largely covered and we're going to pick up at the point where cold case detectives had found Lloyd already serving a long prison sentence in Delaware after being convicted of sexual assault on a 10-year-old girl, and investigators had gone to the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit and Violent Crime Apprehension Program, known as VICAP, to pull Lloyd's full criminal history and find places where missing children may have aligned with his travels and find places where missing children may have aligned with his travels.

Jayson Blair: 3:30

Yeah, and so we're going to just sort of jump off where we left off. We're talking about one prominent case that the analysts found. They found a number of hints and one was strikingly similar as they were looking at missing persons cases in areas where Lloyd had traveled. This one was similar to the Lloyd and sisters case. Welsh was a carnival worker in December 1974. The carnival he was working in was going through Fort Worth, texas, where three teenage girls disappeared from a mall, never to be seen again.

Jayson Blair: 3:57

A December 31st 1974 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described concern for the three girls who had disappeared from the Seminary South Shopping Center. It was 17-year-old Rachel Trila, 14-year-old Renee Wilson and nine-year-old Julie Ann Mosley. They vanished after telling relatives they were going to the mall. The families received a forged note, similar to the sort of extortion that John, the Lloyd's father, got A forged note that said it was from his wife or the wife of one of the fathers, saying the girls had gone to Houston. But the signature didn't match. The girls were never found and the case had gone cold. The detectives had seen Lloyd as a witness first, but now they worried they had stumbled across a serial killer.

Allison Dickson: 4:50

And that's really interesting because you know a lot of people that you know weren't sure that you know the cops had sort of fed information to Lloyd and all this stuff so that he could start giving them details they wanted to hear. This was completely new information, so just to reestablish that for people. And of course again they saw him as a witness to who they thought had really done it Ray Molesky. But now of course you know we have the serial killer.

Jayson Blair: 5:38

But now of course we have this serial killer. And so they convinced Welsh, who was in the Delaware prison at the time, to sit and talk with pedophile. Can he and that's why he may have been paying attention to the girls? Can he really identify the limping man he described, who would have been Ray Molesky? It truly was going in to see him as a witness. So eight interrogations later, the detectives had heard so many stories that it made their head spin, and I'm sure it's going to make your head spin tonight, unprompted.

Jayson Blair: 6:09

In the first interview Lloyd brought up the Lloyd sisters. They read him his rights, but Lloyd declined to have a lawyer. Detective Davis took the lead in the conversation. The other detectives they watched on closed circuit TV in another room. They talked about Lloyd's other charges, his relationship with Helen, who he had met at 16 and she was 20, and they had spent most of their time together in the 1970s. During that time she lost one child and gave birth to three others. One interesting moment was when Lloyd asked the detectives, after they brought up the Lloyd ancestors, whether Helen, who he didn't know had died of cancer years earlier, had brought up his name in connection with the case. So they tried to get the names of Helen's children out of Welsh to see what they could find out. Detective Davis encouraged him to reconnect with his children. This is sort of a part of the report building. Davis asked about what work Lloyd wanted to do when he got out, which was sort of absurd given the length of his sentence.

Allison Dickson: 7:22

Well, that, and also Lloyd was counting on trying to get some sort of a, a speedy kind of like, pardon of like get five years lobbed off a sentence. I think he was going through a process of trying to to get that done, to get a sentence shorted or sentence shorted shortened, um, and so what can happen when you latch on to people's pipe dreams?

Allison Dickson: 7:44

Right and you're right. You're so right about that need to build rapport and anybody who reads this book by Mark Bowden you can read a lot of this interrogation or watch the videos of it, in fact and you'll see that happening.

Jayson Blair: 7:56

Yeah, and I just want to jump in here to say that you know, the apologists for the CIA are wrong. Torture doesn't work. Developing relationships, having conversations, really works. And so you know, a good interrogation begins a bit like an interview on my other podcast. You know, building trust, working people toward revealing more, finding genuine, real connections between you and them, common interests that you have, and having real conversations. You know, in my other work we use rapport building too, in clinical psychology, where we have to convince people to trust us with their deepest secrets, to help them. Right, the whole purpose is to help them, and that's hard enough. In journalism or law enforcement, you have to get people to trust you and convince them to share their deepest secrets when and rarely offer them any benefit and no discernible reason that they should actually uh um, share them with you. So it really requires a special kind of rapport building.

Allison Dickson: 8:57

Yeah, I completely agree with you here, um, and we noticed this throughout the interview when and we noticed this throughout the interview when, for instance, a lot when and I'll bring her up later, but Kate Leggett, I think her name is.

Allison Dickson: 9:10

She was one of the detectives who built this career on busting sex criminals and taking really good polygraph tests like asking the right questions in a polygraph test to try to elicit some idea of the truth. And she would do this by finding the things that that move someone emotionally, like this. You know, finding the things that like they want to be told that they're a good person, they want to be told that they're, that they didn't mean to do this, you know they didn't mean to be this way, you way. And then you get in on that side, you thread that needle in there and you show some sympathy and maybe a little bit of admiration, kind of struck the ego a little bit, and so you really see them putting that on and how that works. With Lloyd in particular, it takes a little bit to crack him, but they finally get there at some point.

Jayson Blair: 10:06

Yeah, and it can be sort of like it can be a dark place when you're. You know, I've had times where some of the boards that I've worked on have had me come in to investigate things, different issues, some of them not particularly pretty. But I find in the rapport building you really have to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. You know, some other interrogators aren't like this. They sort of like focus on understanding them. But I think the best ones you get in their heads and like you're understanding why they do the things they do and it can be a pretty dark place. So you know, at this point in the interview Davis went on to ask Welsh about Molesky and showed him a picture. Welsh said quote, that's the freaking guy who had the damn car I was telling you about, the one who is the minister he said.

Jayson Blair: 10:59

Lloyd said he was absolutely certain that Molesky had given him a ride once or twice to Helen's house and that was it. Lloyd said he had no memory of his old statement that he had made to police, that they had found in the file, and said that he did a lot of drugs during that time and that might be why he didn't remember it. So Lloyd also denied any involvement pretty spontaneously, without even being asked, and the detectives came up with a theory that Lloyd might have been one of the boys abused by Molesky and that possibly roped Lloyd into helping with the kidnappings. So that was the third potential option. And so later in the interview Lloyd made a really odd comment option. And so later in the interview, lloyd made a really odd comment. Detective Davis took the opportunity to ask Lloyd for his theories, which is another interrogator's trick, by the way.

Allison Dickson: 11:52

Like what do you think happened yeah?

Jayson Blair: 11:54

Well, you ask somebody for their theory and then, all of a sudden, their theory includes either well, we'll see in a sec, but include some piece of evidence nobody knows about, or, like Lloyd, as we'll see, it's pretty telling. So what happened when they asked Lloyd for this theory? Well, said, well, my opinion is that he killed him and raped him. He killed him and he probably burned him. I don't know. Detectives thought themselves burn them, right? No one said anything about burning anyone, and he found that statement so odd. Right? Sexual assault seems like something that would come to mind, but why burning?

Allison Dickson: 12:39

Yeah, I would say that at that point and I think the documentary about this also did a really good job of saying that this was a bit of a turning point, a breaking moment for them, because they had been hammering away at this dude for months and, by the way, this whole interrogation process was about 18 to 22 months, I believe. So they went down there a lot, had a lot of conversations with this guy and they would be run around like in a maze, and. But this for me was also the moment that sealed it for me, at the very least showed that he knew a lot more than we could have imagined. Because it's such a specific thing to bring up, and I find it interesting that he doesn't want to pin it on the man who's already dead too.

Allison Dickson: 13:25

He could have very easily taken all the outs the detectives had given him, say that Molesky had victimized him too. It would have been so easy. So it's just very strange to me that of all the lies that he could have told and did tell, he simply could not go with the simplest one. That would have likely just ended the investigation right there. The cops were eager to pin it on Molesky. So I found myself, you know, as he's revealing these new details and stuff, like, well, maybe we'll find out a reason why he's so reluctant to go down this road. And then now he's mentioning burning, when nobody else had said it before. So this is not something that Lloyd had been fed. This was something he was giving them because it was giving him power.

Jayson Blair: 14:17

So over the course of the subsequent interviews Lloyd told a couple of really inconsistent statements. So first, in his 1975 statement he told the story of seeing a strange man with two girls miles away from Wheaton Plaza. Second, in the second version he told the Molesky story and seeing a man who he recognized leading them from the mall and putting them in a car. The detectives told Lloyd that the police department was considering going public with his case and like many sex offenders, lloyd worked really hard to keep his offenses quiet. Some people might say that's out of embarrassment, but I don't think that's always the case. I think sometimes it's out an embarrassment. Sometimes if you are a sexual offender and a lot of people in your community know about it, then you're going to get less accessgraph to hold off their bosses.

Jayson Blair: 15:12

Another little trick he agreed and that enters the detective that Allison was talking about, katie Leggett, who took the approach that she believed. You know, lloyd, she told him she believed him and that the polygraph would confirm that. And when the results came back with deception, she really switched modes in a gifted way and focused on, honed in on her disappointment with him. So she was using, you know, it's the yin and the yang. It's the yo-yo right. I build rapport and connection with you and then show the disappointment.

Jayson Blair: 16:00

I like to call it the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I like to call it the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And you know, in his third version, lloyd told the detectives that he admitted being involved with Molesky and taking the girls over to Molesky's house and Molesky taking them into the basement where Lloyd said he heard screams and saw the girls naked. Now he's placing himself as an accomplice at this point, admitting to being involved with Molesky. In Mark Bowden's book the Last Stone, he describes this as hours of bullshit than five minutes of half-truth, and I think he nailed it there Very much.

Jayson Blair: 16:38

Next the Montgomery County Police announce a connection in the case eventually and they call Lloyd a person of interest. This was meant to battle lloyd as much as anything else like getting because it put his name in the news.

Allison Dickson: 16:55

Right, it was no longer quiet and they ran. They said they put on the news affiliate in the, in the lunch room or cafeteria, wherever the common area in the jail, so the inmates would see it.

Jayson Blair: 17:08

The Lord taketh away. Yeah. In the next version Lloyd inserts his cousin Billy and his uncle Richard, who goes by Dickie and we'll call him Dick throughout the story. They asked him. They asked Lloyd, who are you afraid of? Right Another common investigator trick, who are you afraid of? And he eventually said he was afraid of his cousin Teddy Welch. So we got Billy, richard, it's Dick and now Teddy. So Lloyd now says that he had seen Teddy beat up people before and he implied that Teddy had come to his stepmother Edna's house the day the girls disappeared and Lloyd had seen the girls being drugged and raped. He said that Teddy was the one who was running it and somebody that he called quote the other guy were the kidnappers. So Lloyd said he was threatened by them. Lloyd said he was lying about Molesky and was not and that he wasn't the other man. So he said he had never seen the other man before.

Allison Dickson: 18:19

It's just amazing the way that his story changes and the way that he lies, uh, and you know this whole some of the lies.

Jayson Blair: 18:31

How old is teddy at this point?

Allison Dickson: 18:33

teddy was like what, 12 or 13? He was younger than that. Yeah, wasn't he the one that had the, the casts on his arms? I think we might get to that, yeah, so well there, you know, that was in the other detail.

Allison Dickson: 18:44

This is another kind of scapegoat that Lloyd is throwing at us here, and the way that Welsh talks and lies is really key to understanding this interrogation, because too many people that are talking about this case you might see, if you go and look it up on Reddit, the way people are talking about it, because they're taking this really reductive view and saying that police, of course, were feeding him this information that they, you know, based it on moments when Welsh, for instance, might fold in a swear word that a detective would use in the course of questioning. But this is something a lot of people do when they're trying to adapt in a group dynamic. I mean, I do it all the time when I visit my family in the South, I automatically start talking like I'm from the South. The twang just comes, you know. But it's something that a grifter might also do to kind of seat themselves in a little better among the people they're trying to con, and that's not the same as feeding information the detectives. More than anything, we're trying to find the right emotional buttons to push so that Welch might feel inclined to open up to them and share something he was holding back. This is not the same thing as leading a witness and making them regurgitate facts that you're feeding them See the interrogation of Brendan Dassey and making a murderer, for instance although that was eventually overturned and then reinstated by the federal court.

Allison Dickson: 20:07

But we're not talking about Avery today. But make no mistake, this 22-month-long interrogation was far from perfect. Mark Bowden actually portrayed this really well in the Last Stone in showing the ways that the police here might have endangered their own case a little bit by making certain promises regarding immunity, because that was the other thing. Lloyd was asking for immunity while claiming he had nothing to do with any of this. So it was a bit of a paradox he was creating there. But you know these cops were adapting as they were going as well.

Jayson Blair: 20:40

We call that.

Allison Dickson: 20:42

Yes, very much a clue. And you know, and lloyd would spend hours uh denying something only to then admit to like a piece of it, and in doing this he would just end up doing multiple about faces that would give them little pieces of info every single time. He didn't realize that he was sort of shedding uh information as he was. It sort of reminds me of like when the ATF and the FBI talk about how they catch bombers and how a lot of bomb makers and people that use bombs don't realize that it's not that they're eliminating evidence whenever they blow a place up, they are creating mountains of evidence for them, for the police to find them, and so it's sort of like this. The chaos he thought he was creating was only giving them a trail of breadcrumbs to follow.

Jayson Blair: 21:32

See, I have a slightly different theory about that. I come from a very long line of liars. I created a giant scandal telling you before that my grandfather once said, or supposedly said uh boy, boy, never tell the truth when a lie will do. Um, but one of the things about people, what we know about sexual offenders sexual sexual, uh, sexually related homicide in particular, but sexually related offenses is this idea that people get sexual gratification from those offenses. It doesn't necessarily need to be sexual assault, doesn't necessarily need to be homicide. It could be stealing socks out of somebody's drawer and once they're in custody they can no longer get gratification out of those acts. So lying becomes an excellent substitute for it and the part and people get a thrill from you going down the rabbit hole. So you've got to lay out some breadcrumbs that people can grab onto to keep your high going. So the alternative possibility is that Lloyd knew he was dropping breadcrumbs because he wanted to keep them coming back so he could fool them. That's a good point.

Allison Dickson: 22:50

That is not a bad point at all when you do consider the fact that this is a man who's been locked up in prison. He hasn't been able to get the dopamine rush of crime in quite some time. And, of course, nearly every word that he speaks is truth wrapped in a lie, which is, coincidentally, a very popular definition for fiction. And in his evasion of truth he just kind of meets out just enough honesty to get himself to the next intersection. And if he hits a dead end he'll completely change directions, like it's the most natural thing in the world, and not even acknowledge that anything he'd said previously was a lie or half true. And so it's just this pattern of a lifelong abuser, grifter, street hustler, con man. And yes, he enjoys this. And, like I said, I used the word pathos when you and I were talking privately earlier.

Allison Dickson: 23:41

But that is his bread and butter. He always paints himself as the victim. Per the Last Stone, I just like this direct quote. Lloyd repeated that he always owned up to his crimes, by way of arguing that his denials about the Lion Girls should be believed. But his past demonstrated something else Lloyd would admit a thing only when he had to, after he'd been caught and only those parts he couldn't refute. All his admissions had been calculated to mitigate his punishment. They were grudging, limited and laced with denial. In every instance, even his admissions about his molestation charges. He portrayed himself as an innocent victim.

Jayson Blair: 24:21

So the detectives interview Lloyd's cousin, cousin teddy, and eventually find out a really remarkable story. Teddy's mother had sold him to a notorious area sexual offender named leonard kreisel for wall-to-wall carpet and tile in our house. Um, I would find this story odd if I hadn't heard it so many times before, both in my reporting in Appalachia and my mental health work. The number of parents who will not just abuse or neglect their child but will utilize their child as a tool to get what they want, you know we'll flip your head if you visit that dark, dark area. You know it's. It may be part of the culture, particularly in Appalachia. I have a good friend.

Jayson Blair: 25:18

Her mother did something very similar to her with her uncle who was in a relationship with her mom and thought, oh wow, I mean, it's the only way he could keep. He would keep the relationship going on is if he could also have the daughter. Um, so you know. Jumping back to teddy, over the years teddy and his wife maintained a relationship with chrysal and were living in a house. Uh, kreisel had given Teddy. He was living in it with his family. When he was interviewed by detectives, one of Teddy's three children disclosed at school to a school counselor later that all three siblings had been molested by Kreisel.

Jayson Blair: 26:00

So that's Teddy's kids, teddy and his wife at that point, once they found out about it, did cut Kreisel off. But investigators could find no evidence linking Teddy to the disappearance of the Lloyd sisters and they found out that Teddy had been in an accident about a month before the disappearance and had both arms and casts at the time and was barely capable of getting around. The abuse that Teddy and Lloyd experienced as children was not an aberration in their clan, it was the norm. Fathers beat and raped their children, brothers terrorized and raped their sisters and cousins. Alcohol, drugs, violence colored every relationship.

Jayson Blair: 26:45

By the 1970s the Klan had two branches, one in Hyattsville, maryland, and one in Thaxton, virginia, a place that the locals called Taylor's Mountain. Some of the relatives moved into sort of more modern communities in and around Bedford, but one branch of the family, the Parkers, still lived in Taylor's Mountain. The Maryland branch lived in a remarkably different suburban environment. This country family really lived shoulder to shoulder with city dwellers, strip malls, big retail outlets, and there was enough of them the Welches, the Overstreets, the Doolies, the East Steps, the Parkers to fill a local park for their annual family reunions in Maryland. They may have, you know, different places, but the family was very much the same in the Mountain Hollers as they were in the city.

Jayson Blair: 27:40

Suspicion of outsiders, contempt for authority, the poverty, the jump very quickly to violence and the sexual abuse, the incest and so many of those have become norms in places where social isolation exists and all of a sudden taboo taboos sort of become integrated and but it's way out of the norms of Hyattsville which is in Prince George's County, maryland. Still, criminal behavior in the family rarely led to even internal family center, much less the authorities getting involved. An important point to hold on to.

Allison Dickson: 28:27

Yeah, for sure, For sure. I mean they all kind of cover for each other in some ways or just know about things, but they don't snitch on each other.

Jayson Blair: 28:36

And there's this great example. One female family member alleged their Uncle Dick, along with his brothers, including Lloyd's father, were out on the front porch in Hyattsville at one point and one uncle told this girl to get on his lap and when she tried to get up he pulled her back down onto his lap. A cousin intervened kind of out of nowhere, yelling at his own father and pulling her off Right, and then the cousin took the girl around the side of the house. So this was rare, that family censure would happen. But then that cousin who took the girl exposed himself on the other side of the house.

Allison Dickson: 29:21

Oh geez what, what a fun family, uh, to hang out with it just kind of. It does give me that texas chainsaw vibe too, you know, in addition to all the other movies we might reference here.

Jayson Blair: 29:35

Yeah um, the things I don't like about my extended family. I turn around and say I'm blessed when I pay attention to things like this.

Allison Dickson: 29:45

Yes, very much so, Very much so, oh go ahead.

Jayson Blair: 29:50

Yeah. So the detectives began to believe that the Lloyd sisters may have fallen into sort of the cesspool of this clan. You know, teddy's life of abuse seemed to turn his focus into protecting children, while Lloyd's led him to become a sexual predator. Lloyd emerged from the culture of his family, you know, both as a victim himself and also as a predator. We talked earlier about the fact that he had been kicked out by his parents, had been living on the street. He claimed to have experienced sexual abuse. Lloyd strayed from the family's grip, but not from its behaviors, and I think that's an important thing to remember. It's a lot easier.

Jayson Blair: 30:35

We used to have this saying. I remember this. One time I was at the New York Times and I was whining to one of my colleagues and I was like I just need to leave this place and I need to go to some other city. I'll go work for the Los Angeles times or whoever, and she said, oh, you want to go geographic? And I was like yeah, and she was like one problem is, wherever you go, there you are, so that is one of my favorite sayings actually.

Jayson Blair: 31:04

I never heard it until a moment. That was like so you know, at this point lloyd has not yet implicated dick or dick's wife or in aunt pat or any of the other people in the family. But the detectives found it really curious that after their interview with teddy, teddy, teddy called Dick and Pat, who he rarely called, and he asked to meet Dick in person, which they found very interesting, and the detectives at this point had had a wiretap, a pole camera, above the house and they were tracking Teddy's cell phone location. Teddy said that there was something important and urgent to discuss and one thing that also happened around this time a witness named Dee Daner so they've announced Lloyd's name saw Lloyd's picture on TV and got in touch with the police. She told them of seeing a suspicious man who looked like Lloyd at Wheaton Plaza that day, the young man with long brown hair and a mustache who scared her. She said the man was staring at her intently enough so that she looked for a security guard.

Jayson Blair: 32:18

And one of the things I can say we talk a lot about the downsides of publicity. I will be the first to get on somebody else's podcast to whine about how terrible YouTube creators are and how horrendous the publicity is. But there is an upside to publicity. In cases People come out of the woodwork. Oh yeah, we'll see. In some of these upcoming cases like Delphi, idaho, you know, right now I think we're seeing a lot of the downside. I suspect when we see the witness lists in those cases we're gonna have a number of people who came forward with things because of things that they heard in the news.

Jayson Blair: 32:53

So, this is much um.

Allison Dickson: 32:55

It just creates more work for the investigators ultimately.

Jayson Blair: 32:59

No, it's not a downside to it, right, because they overwhelm by information. But sometimes you can get nuggets, uh but you want that info yeah, yeah.

Jayson Blair: 33:09

So you know, on april 24 2014, lloyd gives his I think it's like his fifth version of the story. He acknowledges a lot of what he had said had been a lie. Lloyd said that Teddy and Carousel had disappeared for a while when they were hanging out so he's incorporating Carousel into it now and came back in a Camaro. He said he used to go party at Carousel's house where they had the sex parties with the minors all the time, and he remembered seeing two blonde girls and he left. Um, and it was the. It was somewhere in the days after girls disappeared. Um, he described the girls clothing in this version and it was spot on.

Jayson Blair: 33:55

It was exactly what they were wearing oh, that's interesting too, and the pictures didn't show all of it, so later they got a sixth version. The detectives noted that Teddy was 12 or 11 at the time of the disappearance and Lloyd altered his story to say that Teddy's dad and Lloyd were in the car with the girls, with his uncle and some other man was driving. This time Lloyd said the girls came up to him and asked him to take a picture of them. Dick was in the car. Teddy convinced him to go to the car. Lloyd said he and dick dropped them off at a store on route one, which was baltimore avenue, and never saw the girls again. Then we got the seventh version, lloyd.

Allison Dickson: 34:41

Keep stepping up your acquaintance.

Jayson Blair: 34:43

Take it a swing.

Jayson Blair: 34:45

I find it so amazing looking at the videos of the lying. It's not like when he gets caught in a lie, like most people will like your good old narcissist will like try to gaslight you and be like but what I said was and you're interpreting it wrong, or whatever, or other people will be embarrassed. Lloyd is just like but what I said was duh, duh, duh. And you're interpreting it wrong, or whatever, or other people will be embarrassed. Lloyd is just like yep, I lied. And moves along. So to the seventh version. Lloyd places himself with the girls as they left the mall in a car with his uncle and his cousin, and he now is going in the opposite direction. In this version Lloyd says he was not dropped off, but when he went to the house he saw Dick sexually assaulting the girls in the basement. Lloyd speculated that Dick kept the girls locked up in his basement for a week, in a space that the cousins all corroborated that nobody else was allowed to go into.

Allison Dickson: 35:44

And so many different stories, so many confessions, and you know we want to talk a little bit about how confessions can be unreliable, because at this point we're hearing all sorts of lies. Oh, our listener, jessica, here Just the Facts. True Crime Research said Casey Anthony vibes, very much so Very similar class of liar, and confessions are really only as good as the techniques used to derive them. In many cases, I believe we already mentioned how we've already talked about torture studies done on enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding a discussion we were all having during the war on terror years and there is a line where you can't really trust the information derived from a person in deep pain or distress because they'll say anything to make the torture stop. This is again why the rapport building that jason mentioned is so important.

Allison Dickson: 36:43

Uh, and while the police here really towed the line, uh, they talked about how, when lloyd was most tired and ready to tap out, uh, that was when he would offer them a different piece of information. Uh, so he uh made it a practice to keep him on the weary side. But did you have something you needed to say about that?

Jayson Blair: 37:18

I was just going to jump in with a point here, sort of like touching on what you said in the beginning about interrogation techniques, because I think that is a really important point to emphasize. So we're constantly hearing, sometimes in cases where the police have charged someone and someone else confessed to the crime. When you get a confession, you want a couple things right. You want to have some holdback evidence, right Things that people don't know, and you want the person confessing to bring it up on their own and you want cooperation. So, for example, you know, if I were, if someone were to confess to something like the Delphi murders, I was on the bridge and this happened and this happened and this happened. I saw this truck and that's in my confession.

Jayson Blair: 37:56

Then you go get the other guy who was driving the truck and then you have this piece of cooperation that nobody else had. So that's kind of what you want. And the same thing when I've done corporate investigations, you know we're sitting at the table and we're holding back a bunch of stuff that we know and we're asking the person questions. We're waiting for the person who tells us something we know that we haven't brought up. And so I just want to say, cooperation and hold back are key to getting good compassion oh, very true, and and yeah, it gives you an ability to completely write off something.

Allison Dickson: 38:27

Um, that's interesting too, because even just reading about this particular interrogation, it's interesting how they didn't have a lot to hold back. Uh, so, really, lloyd was just giving them a little again, those breadcrumbs, but they were able to corroborate it and it was independently corroborated by the family themselves, which we will get into. But you know, they puffed up his ego as much as they could. They reminded him that he was a good guy. I think I read that phrase ad nauseum throughout it and I could imagine that they themselves wanted to throw up in their mouths every time that they would say this to him.

Jayson Blair: 39:07

And you know, saying that, you know you're capable of doing the right thing, but you know having hung out with a bunch of detectives not, they went into the other room and laughed at themselves man, I don't know.

Allison Dickson: 39:20

Sometimes, like I would just say, you know there were some things that he said that just I'm not a cop. For a reason though, but you know, things really picked up again when Katie Leggett came in because you know she was going to administer this second polygraph. The documentary made mention of the fact that bringing this polygraph machine into the prison was kind of a challenge, a logistical challenge, for them to even do. But he wanted to take the polygraph to clear his own name, which, again, you'll see criminals thinking that that makes them look more innocent. But if you're a narcissist, you already think that you're going to beat the polygraph.

Jayson Blair: 40:03

And, of course and also, if you're not an idiot, you realize that the polygraph machine is just meant to trick you.

Allison Dickson: 40:08

That's the whole point yeah, and you know, katie, here she really, uh, knew how to use that um as the investigative tool that it is meant to be, this little bit of sort of trickery to kind of um to see if you can convince someone to confessing, you know, after they've been found to be deceptive, and that's ultimately what happened, she puts on this whole act and makes herself kind of look like this dumb little woman that doesn't know how to work the machine, and you know she's like, oh geez, it's breaking again. Oh, you know. And so she's, she's doing this whole act. It was, it was pretty great, and of course he's kind of fallen into it because he's becoming a little charmed by her.

Allison Dickson: 40:50

And that was, though, like as they're talking, and then she finds out that he's lied or that he failed the polygraph.

Allison Dickson: 40:59

Then she comes in and said you know what? I stuck my neck out for you, I did all this, and you know I thought we really had something. And she's really getting in his face about it at this point. And also, then she finally was just like as she was trying to burrow into what could get him to finally open up and find that sort of emotional fulcrum to lean on. Is, you know, saying, well, maybe you had stumbled onto something so horrific that even you're afraid to admit what you saw. And then that was probably the one little bit of bait that he picked up, because then his story sort of changed again after that and it broadened about like who he saw and who, or what he saw and who he was with, and of course it involved a lot of his family members, many of whom the police hadn't really met or talked to yet, and they would later, of course, like I said, corroborate a lot of these highly incriminating things.

Jayson Blair: 42:01

Yeah. So this sort of gets us to August of that year and at that point you know the detectives are getting, you know, super, super suspicious about things and they take a trip to Taylor's Mountain, to the house and the property owned by Lizzie Parker, lloyd's aunt and sister, to his father, lee and Dick. You know, for those of you who are with us live, if you take a look, these are some of the key locations. In the beginning you know you've got Wheaton Plaza, the Loins home, the home that Lloyd was staying at, on Baltimore Avenue, down the bottom right, and this gives you an idea of how far Taylor's Mountain is down into Appalachia.

Allison Dickson: 42:54

It's pretty far out. Looking at this map, I mean it's it's well removed from that cluster of city up there.

Jayson Blair: 43:03

And so when they get there a neighbor mentions a graveyard up on the hill and the police find a graveyard with 30 markers and the police got wiretaps on a lot of family members, found some cooperators in the family, targeted the cell phones of Dick, teddy. Pat placed a camera on that telephone pole outside of Dick and Pat's house and in a key moment one relative calls Pat and said police were digging up on the mountain and noted that she feared quote they were going to find those girls. But Pat said they were digging in the wrong place Things not to say when you're being wired out. So Dick and Pat had been making in-person trips to Virginia and other locations to tell family members their phones had been tapped because they had sort of figured it out. Regardless of whether there was a family conspiracy in 1975, there was one now. The police searched Dick and Pat's house and didn't find any evidence. The police held another press conference and named Dick as a second person of interest. At the same time investigators were still interviewing Lloyd. They were working as family. So Lloyd had gone on after 1975 to get in a lot of trouble but remained relatively free.

Jayson Blair: 44:24

In 1992 in South Carolina a 10-year-old girl who had been staying with him, was watching a horror movie with him, became frightened, got in a bed with Lloyd. It's a pretty normal thing that kids do when they're scared, right? They expect that us, as the adults around, are a safe haven wherever they are, and if they need a hug or they need to hold on to us or they need to sleep in the bed with us, it's a pretty normal thing. But this girl awoke and said she found Lloyd molesting her. In 1994, lloyd pleaded guilty to, and was sentenced to, 18 months in jail. Lloyd pleaded guilty to, and was sentenced to, 18 months in jail.

Jayson Blair: 45:03

Three years later, in Delaware, lloyd had started playing pornographic movies in front of a 10-year-old girl. That girl said he sexually abused her for more than a week after that. He pleaded guilty to that and that's how he got the long sentence in Delaware. The similarities to the Lloyd sisters stands out. They're ages, right, it wasn't stranger abductions, but they're ages, so there's no question. By the way, by the time we get to 2014 or 2011,. Even before the case is open, some of his family members had suspicions and right around this time, as the detectives were discovering this, then came the eighth version from Lloyd.

Allison Dickson: 45:47

Eighth or ninth or tenth. I mean man, yeah, so many.

Jayson Blair: 45:51

So the detectives had talked to Connie. She was Connie Parker I think she was Connie Akers by the time that happened and she was a cousin who had mentioned Lloyd appearing with Helen in the duffel bag filled with what he had said was told her was rotten hamburger meat. She said that Helen was pregnant and the visit was in the spring of 1975. You know Connie, as a reminder, led them to her estranged brother, henry Henry Parker, who said he had been with her when Lloyd and Helen arrived with the bloody duffel bag and they had not come on foot, as Connie remembered, but in a green or yellow station wagon that belonged to Dick. The police discovered that Helen and Lloyd left in another car and that the station wagon never made its way left to go back in another car and the station wagon never made its way left to go back in another car and the station wagon never made it off the mountain. Both Connie and Henry both recalled Lloyd placing the duffel bag between all four of them, but Henry remembered him saying that it was a dead dog, not hamburger meat. Henry and Connie remember the duffel bag being packed up enough to sit up on its own on its side, and later Lloyd had made a comment about transmission fluid potentially having spilled. Connie said Lloyd opened the duffel bag and she saw bloody clothes on top of it. Henry didn't remember him opening it but they both remember how bad it smelled. The police had intercepted a Facebook Messenger message where Connie had said to another cousin that she feared Henry. Her brother was involved in helping bury the girls, but Henry said he was only involved in throwing the bag on the fire that burned for.

Jayson Blair: 47:45

More than a week Later in grand jury testimony, henry speculated that Lloyd might have killed one of the girls with a tire iron on the drive down to Taylor's Mountain. I want you to hold on to that tire iron. Later police played parts of Lloyd's statements to Connie and to Henry, where Lloyd now said that Dick and Henry had brought the bag and thrown it onto the fire. Henry gave even more details at this point about the duffel bag, down to its green color and it being cinched at the top with draw strings. He admitted to helping Lloyd throw it in the fire and they were called Lloyd, arriving at about 630 am. So think about that A five hour drive from Hyattsville that would have placed him leaving at like 1, 130 am. So detectives made up a story with Lloyd about Helen who I'd mentioned had died having a journal, and it worked. It did Having a journal, yeah, and it worked, it worked, it did, it really did.

Allison Dickson: 48:44

And his face in the video of the interrogation, when they revealed that she had journals, his face completely froze, it was. He was like, oh great, now I have to switch gears again.

Jayson Blair: 48:56

You're not bad liars themselves those detectives. So Teddy did a described at this point he's been interviewed several times a recovered memory of going to Lloyd's parents around the time of the disappearance and hearing Helen talk about babysitting girls and hearing something in the attic. Right there was an attic with a mattress, in the closet a pool table, and he remembered seeing two young girls sitting there. In this new version by Lloyd, that happens after the Teddy interview. Lloyd says he remembers the moment that the two girls were there, but they weren't the Lloyd sisters. He thinks they were family members.

Jayson Blair: 49:33

Lloyd said he was going to tell the detectives everything and he said that on March 23rd Dick, who was a security guard near Wheaton Plaza, approached him and Teddy with a plan to go to Wheaton Plaza to pick up a couple of girls to party with. Lloyd said that nope, he wasn't going to do it because he was dating Helen and he wasn't interested in picking up girls and she was pregnant. And Lloyd said that instead he and Helen got high, which I find interesting because her pregnant girlfriend does better, yep, okay, anyway. So in this version, lloyd said that he approached the two girls.

Allison Dickson: 50:14

It was the 70s.

Jayson Blair: 50:15

Right, yeah, I don't think it was about the 70s, my friend. In this version, the newest version, lloyd says he approaches the two girls, offers them the opportunity to get high and they both get in the car. Lloyd put himself in the front seat this time and said Sheila seemed excited about getting high and Catherine, at some point, started to cry. He said that he and Helen agreed to babysit the girls for Dick. So in a search of the mountain, the investigators turned up a part of a wire frame that could have been a part of the glasses that Sheila wore, and beads that might have been a part of a necklace that Catherine was wearing on the day she disappeared.

Allison Dickson: 50:56

It was some of the only physical evidence they found up there. Yeah, the only physical evidence they found up there.

Jayson Blair: 51:01

Yeah, so in 2017, investigators at Taylor's Mountain discovered a tooth which was judged on site to be that of a human and belonging to a child of 12 years old. I don't know who judged it. I'm sure they didn't have a forensic dentist on site. Although I don't know, it was tagged and bagged and sent to the Bedford County Sheriff's Office. When the cold case team went to get it the next day to send it to the lab, it was gone. Nobody knows what happened to it.

Allison Dickson: 51:32

That's so frustrating Probably the most frustrating part of this case.

Jayson Blair: 51:37

Absolutely yeah. So in the summer of 2014, the detectives had an interview with another Welsh cousin, wes Justice, who is about 10 years younger than Lloyd, so he would have been about eight around the time that the murders happened, and at first Wes too denied knowing anything about the murders other than what he had read in news publications, implications In wiretaps. Earlier, though, in a conversation between Wes and his cousin, norma Jean Welsh, wes had said and the police had learned that he had told her he was worried about a quote green station wagon that had been used to carry the girls, and that was the first the investigators had heard of it. When investigators asked him about the green station wagon, he broke down sobbing and said he did have relevant information. At first Wes said he was unsure of the details until one cold case detective used one of the oldest tricks in the books in referring to Catherine and Sheila's parents and pointed to Wes's grandchildren who were in the other room and said can you imagine those two beautifully young kids? He got there. They know talking about the loin parents. They know their kids got raped and murdered, and investigators brought a copy of what they said was Dick's grand jury testimony.

Jayson Blair: 52:59

It was not true it was a bluff. Dick's grand jury testimony it was not true it was a bluff and said that he had talked in detail about the case. This all caused Wes to open up and he said he remembered talking to Uncle Dick about the Loyan sisters case relatively recently and his uncle had come out and told him that he had raped those girls. Wes said Dick had mentioned the station wagon just a few months before.

Jayson Blair: 53:23

Eventually, west later told the Bedford County Virginia grand jury that was investigating it that Dick quote just hopped up out of the blue about the station wagon up in the mountains in a barn and he said it was covered up and I think he said there were blankets in the back of it. West told investigators that Dick said he and his brother, lloyd's father Lee, were involved with raping the girls. West said that he was told that Lloyd lured the girls from Wheaton Plaza and then they were raped repeatedly on a pool table in Dick's house before being killed. Then he said he was told they were taken to Taylor's Mountain in a green station wagon and the car had been hidden in a barn that was falling apart on the property. He said Dick wanted to go up to the mountain and smash the car. After the renewed investigation began and Wes's cousin, who I had mentioned before, norma Jean Welsh, told about hearing a similar story on the wiretap similar story on the wiretap.

Allison Dickson: 54:25

It's amazing that they didn't. It just shows how isolated and detached from regular society that they are that this car had sat in that barn for decades because they had no worry or they had no concern. It's amazing that they didn't dispose of it right away. You know, it takes a level of brazenness, I think, to do something like that well, and it also speaks to the isolation and the ownership.

Jayson Blair: 54:44

Remember the deputies were afraid to go up to the mountain.

Jayson Blair: 54:46

They knew they were kind of immune up there to uh observation in a lot of ways, scrutiny and so you know, west said that dick had told him about how the girls had been lured by ll from Wheaton Plaza and he said something curious in this part of the story it tied back to something curious that Lloyd had said to the detectives. You know he said I understand something. You're right. Something terrible happened. Cut them up, burn them or something. And the cold case.

Jayson Blair: 55:23

Detectives later told mark bowden, who's the author of the last stone, that they couldn't help but noticing a lot like his cousin lloyd. It was hard to bring a story out of west, but after they did it was hard to tell how much was true. But these two references to burning, yes and so in. So on May 1, 2015, lloyd's interviewed again and he now says he didn't know. He did not know the girls were at his uncle's house when he made the initial report, but he had seen them there at his uncle's house and thought they were runaways.

Jayson Blair: 55:57

He struck up the. He stuck up to the rest of his last story saying Dick drove up at night with the duffel bag and told them about the fire and the horrible odor. Lloyd speculated that Dick had killed them under a bridge in Hyattsville where he used to go fishing. And so the detectives go to this bridge and discover basically it's exposed, the water is low, terrible place for fishing, everybody could see everything and they were really disheartened because they were hoping to find some kind of physical evidence. But on the way back to the office, detective Humrick recognizes this house from the files it's Lee and Edna's house at 4714 Baltimore Avenue, and he's-.

Allison Dickson: 56:41

We mentioned that address way at the beginning, uh-huh.

Jayson Blair: 56:45

And so the detective convinces the current owners to let him in and search the basement, and the basement matched Lloyd's description. One of the things that Lloyd had said in his interviews was that the basement had a backdoor entrance with a certain kind of cove in it, and this is 4714 Baltimore Avenue, and that absolutely matched the description. Now, in Lloyd's story he described it as his Uncle Dick's house, but it matched the description of his parents' house.

Allison Dickson: 57:24

Yeah, another one of those things of where I'm going to tell you the truth that there was a house. He's just giving a different house, sort of like. I saw a man at the mall with the girls but it's a. You know he's just picking a different man, but it was really him, you know.

Jayson Blair: 57:42

It goes back to. It goes back to the thing I was saying about lying right, Like if you're going to lie about something, and lie about something big, like it happened at Dick's house and not my house, you may reach for other details that are very similar, and I think to some extent that's probably what happened with the bridge and the fishing. He reached for a detail near where it really happened, you know. So your mind goes to the truth, it jumps off of the truth to find the lie, and that's part of the reason why the truth is often very close. If you flip the prism, if you play with the Rubik's Cube a little bit, it's very close Rubik's Cube a little bit, it's very Rubik's Cube.

Jayson Blair: 58:22

No, the detectives are able to convince those owners to go into the house and do a search of the basement. Totally matches Lloyd's description. Forensic technicians go in and spray the basement with a chemical called Blue Star, which is used to detect blood by binding with hemoglobin, and the basement lit up Big time, Not just in spots and on pipes. You know Blue Star. It's relevant because Blue Star can give false positives for certain minerals like magnesium. But it was in strings across the walls and puddles on the ceiling everywhere, and the detectives wanted to have the entire wall taken out to be tested, which proved a little bit impractical. So they had portions of the cement blocks pulverized and sent to the lab.

Jayson Blair: 59:19

That material was later tested and found to include hemoglobin, and that's the protein-containing iron that facilitates the transport of oxygen in red blood cells. You know, almost all vertebrae, except for one kind of fish, have hemoglobin. Almost all vertebrae, except for one kind of fish, have hemoglobin. But they believed that this was human. The hemoglobin ultimately was too degraded to find a match for blood type or to find DNA. But they had a pretty good idea. Right now Something terrible happened in that basement connected to them.

Allison Dickson: 59:57

Yeah, and there's a possibility, as know, that technology could evolve to a place to where they might be able to test this better. I mean it. Who knows? We're hearing about cases like this all the time Exactly, and Idaho.

Allison Dickson: 1:00:11

And then you hear the cases being referred to with the West Memphis three and you know the shoelaces and things like that, and that they don't want to have to test these things and destroy them. So cause, that's kind of what the risk is right now. So we just kind of sit on a lot of this stuff and wait for science to catch up.

Jayson Blair: 1:00:30

Yeah, and I don't think they're going to have any shortage though, cause they can always go back to those walls. So this have any shortage though, because they can always go back to those walls. So this brings us to lloyd's final version. Lloyd talked about the search of baltimore avenue, home with the detectives and said quote, they found blood down there and he was referring he said he was referring to sheila. They said yes, which was not exactly true, because they had just found the hemoglobin.

Jayson Blair: 1:00:57

Lloyd changes his story at this point from it being at Dick's house to it being at his father's house. Lloyd said he was a part of abducting the girls, that he didn't rape them, that it was orchestrated by Dick, that his father, lee, was there, participated in the rapes and that they were filmed for child pornography and that Dick broke Catherine's neck out of frustration because she was crying Remember he said she had been crying before too, in the car and that they all chopped or that they chopped them up with a long-arm axe that was hard to wield and hit the ceiling. So Lloyd made two small alterations to that story during that interview, saying he didn't participate in chopping Catherine up, but took one swing and then changed the story to his father, lee strangling Catherine as she laid in the basement floor and breaking her neck, and Dick chopping them up. He said they used old rugs and blankets to soak up the blood and stuffed everything into a bag with pieces of Catherine's body. He said he took them to Taylor's Mountain out of fear that he would be caught up to. The murder weapon had changed from an axe at this point to a hatchet.

Jayson Blair: 1:02:12

He told a different story than West right. He said he had driven a 1965 Chrysler New Yorker belonging to his Aunt Pat's father. He said Dick had given him $40 for gas. He said he was worried that if he stopped blood might leak out of the trunk. So he said he made the trip straight. He said he arrived back at 4714 Baltimore Avenue at daybreak, showered, slept, he said. A few days later he and Helen hitchhiked back down to Taylor's Mountain. He said he didn't know what happened to Sheila. Some law enforcement speculated that she was killed in Maryland. Others thought she could have been taken to the mountain and killed there. The case was seen as stronger in Virginia and Virginia was a death penalty state. So the detectives asked Lloyd why he brought Teddy into the story and he simply said scapegoat.

Allison Dickson: 1:03:07

So many scapegoats in his stories.

Jayson Blair: 1:03:10

And one of the things I want to throw out we've got no bodies at this point Still no body and no body. Homicides are difficult. I remember in 1998, when I was a reporter at the Times, I covered the case of Kenneth and Sante Kimes. Kenneth, his mother, sante, were living in this Upper East Side mansion and a woman named Irene Silverman owned it. She was like an 82-year-old socialite former ballerina and Kenneth was a tenant in one of Silverman's apartments and came under suspicion once she disappeared because he had used an alias to get the apartment. And on the day that she disappeared the police actually arrested Sante and Kenneth on a fraud check charge in another state. They really suspected them and this was one of the first. I think it was the first nobody homicide case, no DNA in New York history. So it is super rare to solve a nobody homicide case and that's part of why the focus is on this piece.

Allison Dickson: 1:04:18

Yeah, and you know I think these no-body cases again, they seem to mostly bother people who really struggle with the idea of circumstantial evidence and what that means. You know they hear that word and immediately think flimsy evidence. And you know a murder case without a body, it requires a lot more inference and deduction and footwork. And you know piecing together the most random of you know pieces to see how they fit. And you know people who think DNA and fingerprints, which are also circumstantial evidence, in that category. They believe that. They think that they're only. They think those things are the only path to the truth of whodunit and they don't usually feel comfortable doing that. You know harder work of separating the wheat from the chaff. It's hard. I think we humans are sort of programmed to want to take that shortcut and you know DNA is a great shortcut to going like we found them. So when you don't have a body and you don't have the DNA and you have to piece together all these other things, it's a lot more work but you'll still get the picture.

Jayson Blair: 1:05:23

This takes us to, I think, july 14, 2015. Lloyd Lee Welch is indicted for capital murder by the Commonwealth of Virginia. He had the potential of being sentenced to death. They wanted to leverage that to see if they could get closer to the truth. After Lloyd's indicted, the prosecution filed the names of 10 women who were willing to testify that they were attacked or nearly kidnapped by him. Two women told detectives that they got into Walsh's vehicle near Wheaton Plaza sometime near the spring of 1975, but according to court documents quote seeking danger or sensing danger, they attempted to exit the vehicle. However, the door handles were inoperable and they were forced to roll down the windows to escape to avoid abduction.

Jayson Blair: 1:06:13

Another woman alleged in 1985, 10 years after Sheila and Catherine disappeared, lloyd and his then-girlfriend were living in North Carolina in a trailer park and he started a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl who lived there. After getting caught, the woman claimed Lloyd beat the girl Around. The same time, the person said Lloyd kicked his girlfriend, who was pregnant, in the stomach, sending her into premature labor. In the end, four people implicated Lloyd Lee Welch, himself, teddy, who told detectives that he saw the two young blonde girls at his Uncle Dick's house on Easter Sunday with Lloyd and his girlfriend Helen Wes. Justice said that Richard or Dick Welch confided in him and that several family members raped, murdered, chopped up and then burned Sheila and Catherine. Lloyd made a plea deal where he admitted to participating in the girls' abduction but not their sexual assault and murder. He pled guilty to two counts of first degree murder. They had to use the statute that was in place in 1975. And at that point Virginia didn't have a felony murder charge, which is you know, so he had to actually plea to killing them. Beyond speaking to enter the plea, lloyd refused to allocate to any of the details. Catherine and Sheila's parents were at the hearing. Lloyd received two concurrent 48-year sentences plus, a few years later, a concurrent 12-year sentence related to two sexual assaults he admitted to committing in Manassas, virginia. Lloyd will be transferred to Virginia in 2026. I look forward to saying hi Once he completes his sentence in Delaware. This is the oldest nobody homicide case solved in the United States. He'll be eligible for parole in his 80s, but authorities say there is slim to no chance of that happening.

Jayson Blair: 1:08:16

Edna, his stepmom, was charged with perjury for providing false testimony. He was accused of passing false information to investigators and encouraging a conspiracy of silence within her family. Leslie Inkling, dick Welsh's brother-in-law, was charged with felony perjury. Amy Welsh Johnson, dick's granddaughter, was charged with obstruction of justice and misdemeanor. Gladys Stangee, dick's sister, was also charged with obstruction of justice. Each was accused of misleading a Bedford County, virginia, grand jury. Leslie, who lived in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, virginia, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison, with five suspended and placed on probation. Amy, who lived in a bedroom community in Severn Maryland, had her charges dismissed and so did Gladys, who lived in Bedford near Taylor's Mountain.

Jayson Blair: 1:09:12

Lloyd's father had a history of child abuse and rape, according to the family, but he died after moving to Tennessee and his widow, edna, was hostile and unhelpful. Whether or not Lee had broken Catherine's neck and taken any part of the outrageous was moot. His destiny had been sealed. Dick was not charged, the prosecutors could not make the case against him and some of the prosecutors thought Dick had nothing to do with the crime.

Jayson Blair: 1:09:42

A few months before Lloyd's trial was to begin, patricia Ann Welsh, his cousin and his uncle, dick's daughter, told Washington's NBC affiliate and WTOP radio that quote. I just think there's a really big cover-up in Bedford. It may have started on Montgomery County, but it ended there. Pat said she believed her own father, dick, was not responsible for the murders. In 2020, detective Homeroke, speaking to a Fox News reporter about the case and the conviction of Lloyd Lee Welch, told a reporter, quote Even though we got a conviction, we still don't really consider this a success. Adding, there are some open questions that we never really got answers for. We never really found the remains which we wanted to bring home to the families. We can only really speculate about what happened to those girls the last day they were alive. Now we're going to jump to our theories.

Allison Dickson: 1:10:45

Yeah, man, this is heavy. I mean, it's interesting to see how many members of this family eventually went down in some way shape or form due to this case. And in that I would say you know, justice is hard to come by, in this one full justice, but they did the best they could. So, as for theories, I elected to go first, jason, and I have not discussed this amongst ourselves. I have no idea what your theory is, jason, so we'll see where we diverge and where we converge. It'll be fun.

Allison Dickson: 1:11:25

Now, as most of you know, I'm not a cop, I'm not a journalist, I'm not a criminal profiler or a psychologist, I'm just an author. But 99% of the work involved in constructing a compelling story is understanding the way humans behave and the logic, such as it is, behind their choices. Fiction writers, fantasy, because, similar to detectives, storytellers sort of examine a scene and the people in it from every angle in order to find the best explanation for what happened. And I've been thinking like this for the last two decades of my life, so I hope this lends itself well. I don't normally get into true crime theory too much so, but this story is rare and because it's anything but dull, it's like this gothic winding thing with a lot of dark corners, let's see so like. I don't think it takes any special insight to see that Lloyd Lee Welch was involved in the kidnapping and murder of Kate and Sheila Lyon. Kate and Sheila Lyon, given his proclivities for young girls, as exhibited by all the molestation charges, his known penchant for abandoning one girlfriend for another once he impregnated her or she edged too far beyond the age of consent, I firmly believe he also raped them. Why else would he have kidnapped them in the first place? It wasn't to have a harmless tea party in his daddy's basement. He would never admit to that. Of course, for some reason he never fully admitted to his other sexual assaults against children, calling them accidental touches or quote slipping in a finger, as he admitted in the course of one interview, like it was something everyone did. When he says repeatedly throughout his interrogations I'd never hurt anyone like that, these are lies, because he did hurt someone like that. A lot of someones, and many of them lived to tell the tale of his abuse and faced him in court. Lloyd Lee Welch is, at bare minimum, a predatory, pedophile drifter, a low rent Carl Panzeram who should never be out in free society ever again, and thankfully he won't be On that day.

Allison Dickson: 1:13:41

In Wheaton Plaza, welch was on the prowl. Those who witnessed him described a man who was leering or staring intently at the girls. But how did he convince Kate and Sheila to come along with him? The way he tells it, he, or one of his cousins or whatever, offered them a chance to get high. And you know, maybe he actually did make that offer. But I don't think that would have enticed a couple of young innocents like these, even if they were edging into that more rebellious phase of life. So, having failed at that, into that more rebellious phase of life. So having failed at that, he wasn't going to give up. No way, not a con man with two perfect fish on the hook. He would have to try something else.

Allison Dickson: 1:14:24

I think it could have been one of two things. Maybe he offered the girls a ride home. Perhaps Sheila had said she needed to get back soon to run her paper route. Well, heck, I can get you back home a lot quicker, he might've said. And if Lloyd's girlfriend Helen was indeed with him, as he claims that day, the presence of a woman might have mollified the sisters just enough to take him up on that offer.

Allison Dickson: 1:14:50

And remember, this is still only 1975. Not all the trust in our fellow humans had faded into the guarded cynicism of the 80s just yet. And remember, lloyd was a talker, a con man, a carny. His only gift in life has been his ability to work young, vulnerable people into doing what he wants. So another possibility is that if the girls didn't take him up on his offer of a ride, he followed them as they left and grabbed them by force somehow along their route home. It was only a couple miles, but I'm sure there was a stretch along there where he could act without being seen. He never needed an accomplice to be successful at this, but Lloyd did always seem to be hanging out with people, so it just seems to fit more that someone tagged along and helped out.

Allison Dickson: 1:15:41

But some people out there have claimed that Lloyd, being only 18, seems a little young for a crime so brazen. But I would argue that when you're already an antisocial type like Welsh and not particularly bright, youth with all of its natural impulsivity can further embolden someone with certain tendencies. We're now living through the age of the school shooter, so I think we can all agree that teenagers are quite capable of murder, and I don't think that's a new thing. From war to the Wild West, history is riddled with stories of murderous kids. You'll learn about many of them here, and remember there are some very similar still unsolved cases involving young girls in places that Welsh's Carnival was known to stop. So it's likely that day at the mall was not his first rodeo at kidnapping. It just so happens to be the one that caught the most attention.

Allison Dickson: 1:16:32

So how else did these other characters get involved? Maybe I'm using more artistic license here, but bear with me. Given the pedophilic, incestuous nature of this family and the difficult relationship Lloyd had with his father, I see this as an act he did to please them. Perhaps Bring a couple girls back for them to all play with. Maybe daddy and stepmom Edna would let him and his pregnant girlfriend have a place to stay for a while at least, until the desire to get back to the drifter life overtook him again.

Allison Dickson: 1:17:04

But this was a family affair. I fully believe this. Many in that clan knew, or at least suspected, that Lloyd had something to do with this. His cousin Henry helped him with the bloody duffel bag. Another cousin helped him wash the blood from his clothes. The wiretaps caught family members talking feverishly about it many decades later, like something that had only happened a month ago. And this isn't some long buried family secret gradually working its way back to the surface. Oh no, it has always been front and center for them. It has stuck in their minds. They have undoubtedly passed that knowledge down to the younger generations like a terrible heirloom and they'll keep passing it down. That's how this family works.

Allison Dickson: 1:17:47

But this case is rife with so many red herrings. Right, that's to be expected too, given the sprawling family shrub involved here. But it's also common when a crime happens in a place that's highly public, like a shopping mall. The tape recorder man, for instance, is a prime example of this. There are always going to be people in places doing things that seem strange in hindsight, when something bad occurs and a man with a microphone approaching kids just sticks out. But that lead went nowhere and even though others reported seeing him, the guy vanished like a fart in the breeze, which, hey, people do. But given the testimony of the Welch clan, I think it's easy to write this guy off as a main character in someone else's story character in someone else's story.

Allison Dickson: 1:18:40

But what about Ray Molesky, the career criminal and pedophile who was a known figure around the area and in that family social circle. He probably had direct knowledge word of mouth as to what happened with the girls and he would use that knowledge to taunt cops for years because it gave him joy to do so. One of the only things most criminal types are united by is their disdain for authority and their code to never snitch on each other. Ray was already dead by the time. Lloyd was on the hot seat in 2014 or whatever year it was, but word would still get out to people who know, people in those weird pedophile circles. He ran in some who might be in prison with Lloyd, for instance, and those people would know Lloyd was lying. Perhaps he was worried about retaliation. This explains why Lloyd refused to implicate him, despite being given multiple opportunities by the police to do so.

Allison Dickson: 1:19:33

Remember, most of them were eager and ready to pin this on Molesky from the start, and it was one of the few things Lloyd refused to yield on. It's, if nothing else, a strange show of loyalty for a man who shared a lot of selfish interests with the guy and for those who would argue that the police merely fed Welch info so that he could regurgitate it back to them. The real bait was right there the whole time. If the case had ended with a dead Ray Molesky being found responsible and I'd watched back the interrogation tapes I might feel like they walked him into that. But that's not what happened, because Lloyd was leading them with facts they had not previously known. And I also wouldn't doubt that Welch and Molesky had done some pretty awful things together in the past. We already knew they ran together, smoked, dope together, diddled other kids together.

Allison Dickson: 1:20:26

That said, when it comes to the Lion Sisters, I stand by Molesky being, if anything, a bit player in all this. He probably heard all about what went down on the basement Taylor's Mountain, probably wished he'd been there. Hell, maybe he even was there, who knows? Jason might have a detail on that that I've missed. I'm looking forward to hearing it, but for now I still see him as more of a pink herring rather than a red one.

Allison Dickson: 1:20:57

But again, this is a family affair. There will always be lingering questions about the sequence of events that went down that day and the weeks that followed, how long the girls lived after they were taken, how they died, where their remains rest. But those details will forever be lost in the labyrinth of time and drug-addled depravity that has wound its way through much of this family's history for half a century or more. Lloyd Welch can meander his way around the truth all he wants, obscuring the finer details that implicate him in the most horrific deeds one can inflict on another. But we know that's his MO. He rents responsibility like a cheap fleabag motel room where he'll lie his head for a little bit, but quickly move on. Its memory faded into the tapestry of broken lives. That will be his only legacy the end.

Jayson Blair: 1:21:42

Take a breath next time. So I like that. I like the Molesky thing and the point that you made about him being unwilling to implicate him. I tend to think that Lloyd just hated his family, so I think that's a good piece. This is where being the fiction implicate him. I tend to think that Lloyd just hated his family, so I think that's a good piece of it.

Allison Dickson: 1:21:58

This is where being the fiction writer comes in Cause, like I said, I'm going for drama.

Jayson Blair: 1:22:05

So you know, a metaphor that people use when they talk about circumstantial evidence is that you go to sleep at night and there's no snow on the ground and you wake up and the ground around you is covered with snow. Now you can assume, probably, that it snowed. Now someone could have put a snow machine outside your window, but the odds of that are relatively low and there's a lot of circumstantial evidence tying Lloyd Lee Welsh to the case. You have the direct evidence, the physical evidence and the confessions. They're a little bit weaker but they surely line up with the circumstantial evidence that was collected. The reality is, in life, indirect circumstantial evidence is often stronger than direct evidence. But we have the confessions, the details from Lloyd, henry Parker, connie Parker that line up with the trip to Taylor's Mountain. We have the timing of Helen's pregnancy, dick Walsh's statements to West Justice. We have Teddy remembering two blonde girls at a pool table at Dick's house. We have the hemoglobin in the basement of Baltimore Avenue, the tooth found on Taylor's Mountain and the beads in the wireframes. We have the smell of the fire and we have evidence of other bad acts lots of arrests and some convictions for sexual assaults by Lloyd and some damning allegations of sexual abuse against other male family members. When it comes to Lloyd's confessions, I kind of throw out everything that's not corroborated by other evidence. My friend Julia Cowley, former FBI profiler and host of the Consult.

Jayson Blair: 1:23:36

We talk about this concept of the duper's delight, where even when suspects are caught dead to rights, particularly in sexually motivated crimes, they get a thrill from deceiving people and sending them down rabbit holes. In psychology we would consider this a form of substitution, where a captured person can no longer get that gratification they're looking for from sexual crimes because they're incarcerated. So they get that gratification from lying. And when people lie they tend to lie about the big things, but it takes a lot of energy to lie about the small details. So often big lies come wrapped in the truth For Lloyd. He talks about the description of how the girls could have been abducted, but creates another suspect matching the news reports. He mentions the girls were probably burned out of nowhere. Before implicating himself, he talks about the girls being at his uncle's house and being killed under a bridge a bridge that's only blocks away from his father's house, where he also lived, and from his father's house, where he also lived, and not his uncle's home, where detectives at his father's house found a bloodbath. Like most lies, he probably thought of the truth, made the association between the two locations and told the tall tale. The truth is always slightly adjacent to what Lloyd says.

Jayson Blair: 1:24:54

The other direct and indirect evidence fills in the gaps. There's the porn ring theory and I compare that to the Odinus theory in Delphi. There may have been a porn ring. In one of Lloyd's confessions he talks about Dick having a camera. Dick had showed homemade porn movies at Lizzie Parker's house on Taylor's Mountain, came out in grand jury testimony and Dick acknowledged it. The detectives asked Lloyd whether there was any connection between the porn films and he said yes, that he thought that they were. You know, on Easter they were drugged up because he was planning to do porn with them. It's the only potential Molesky connection for me. But you can't trust Lloyd and there's no evidence that he's correct on that. There's evidence that suggests from what Lloyd said and what Teddy said was that the girls survived at least until May 30th, easter Sunday.

Jayson Blair: 1:25:55

On the porn ring, lloyd is also a selfish man and if he wasn't involved in a porn ring I don't think he was going to go down for it if he wasn't involved. There are lone wolf theories, but Lloyd's history of later sexual abuse without murder is there and he was generally incompetent when it came to getting caught. And the fact that he didn't get caught for so long after getting caught for so many other crimes it kind of leads me to believe that other people were involved. So Lloyd settled on the story that his uncle killed Catherine by breaking her neck and then dismembering her. In one version Lloyd says he took a swing at Catherine with an ax and stopped because he couldn't do it and his Uncle Dick finished the job. He says he didn't know what happened to Sheila. It makes no sense to me. Why kill one girl and leave the most dangerous witness, her sister, alive? Why cop to one murder of a child and deny knowing what happened to the other one? Why is he trying to distance himself from this part of the crime? I believe that someone did kill Sheila, but what Lloyd admits about Catherine is telling, leading me to believe that he was either responsible Lloyd himself for the killing or the dismembering of her. It's what's missing. My belief is that the army duffel bag held the remains of Catherine, which is supported by the wireframe, the beads, everything else Everyone said.

Jayson Blair: 1:27:24

It's unclear to me who at Taylor's Mountain knew about what was happening, but there were a couple clues that somebody did. People don't burn garbage in a controlled fire for a week. That someone has to prepare for in advance. The second clue is the car. Someone had to find a place for it and if it's true that it never came off the mountain, someone's barn it had to go into. So would Lloyd Lee Welch have sexually assaulted all these girls if he hadn't grown up in this family? We're never going to know and I don't think ultimately it really matters.

Jayson Blair: 1:27:58

Lloyd Lee Welch is responsible for the murders of Sheila and Catherine Lamont responsible for them. I believe that Lloyd Lee Welch went to Wheaton Plaza that day with the intent of abducting one or more girls. Remember that story. We heard about the other girls who said that he put him in the car and they had to escape through the window. I believe Lloyd Welch drove the vehicle with his girlfriend Helen where they disposed of Catherine's body. I believe that by kidnapping her he's also responsible for the death of Sheila. But after the reaction of neighbors, my bet is they wouldn't dare start another fire.

Jayson Blair: 1:28:35

To me, the evidence that Lloyd's dad Lee Welsh was involved, seems high. Lloyd implicated him and so does Teddy. I had been on the fence about his uncle Dick, but the statements of West's justice carry weight for me, since he corroborated some of what Lloyd said. I think the girls were abducted by Lloyd, taken to Dick's house where they were seen in the pool room with Helen by both Wes and Teddy on or about Easter Sunday I believe. They were sexually assaulted and eventually, when media attention became too big, became too hot and they hadn't anticipated it, they were moved to Lloyd's dad Lee's house where a plan was formulated to end the lives of those two precious girls.

Jayson Blair: 1:29:17

I believe that Catherine was killed in the basement of 4714 Baltimore Avenue because of the forensic evidence and thrown into the fire at Taylor's Mountain. I believe that Sheila was taken to Taylor's Mountain alive because of what the witnesses in Manassas and Centerville said they saw in the car. I think instead of seeing two girls in the car, what they actually saw was Lloyd's girlfriend, helen, and Sheila. I think Helen was in on it from the start. I hate coincidences and one thing we didn't mention is that a red station wagon was stolen from a dealership adjacent to Wheaton Plaza on the same day the girls disappeared. The car was found a week later parked in Hyattsville where Lee Welsh lived. Red car kept on coming up in Lloyd's stories it was a different kind of car always, but it was red. My guess is Lloyd and the family had no intention of killing the girls but probably didn't anticipate the media firestorm would put pressure on them to get rid of Sheila and Catherine.

Jayson Blair: 1:30:18

I think Lloyd made the trip back to the mall to mislead investigators. I suspect that Catherine's increasing anguish and defiance led him to kill or them to kill her, chop her up in the basement, probably at least with his father's help, lee. His father then phoned relatives alerting them that Lloyd was coming down with one of the girls. I think Sheila was in the car and was brought down alive. My theory is that Lloyd and Helen gave Sheila to Lloyd's cousin, henry Parker, who had a history of sexual predation with his sister Helen, and Lloyd did this in return for helping dispose of Catherine's body. This is bolstered by the conversations that the Parker parents were having about Lloyd's involvement even before he got down there and the call that they got ahead from Lloyd's dad. Someone had to prepare before he got down there for that fire to be started. It's also bolstered by the fact that Henry was there and at the ready on the day and didn't ask questions when Lloyd supposedly said absurdly that he had a dog in the bag. I think Henry abused Sheila, killed her and buried her somewhere in the mountains.

Jayson Blair: 1:31:31

There are two other things that happened with Henry that point me in this direction. It's important to remember Connie and Henry had not talked in some time. As you'll recall, henry said that Lloyd and Helen arrived at the Parker residence in a car, but his sister, connie, said that Lloyd and Helen arrived on foot. I suspect that they were both correct because I believe that Henry met Lloyd and Helen before they ran into Connie and that's why they had the different stories. Chances are that Lloyd and Helen handed off Sheila before they went up to the main Parker residence to burn Catherine's body.

Jayson Blair: 1:32:13

There was another thing Henry said that stood out.

Jayson Blair: 1:32:15

Just as Lloyd had speculated about burning before the detectives had a clue, henry speculated that Sheila was killed with a tire iron on the way down to Taylor's Mountain. I believe that that's quite possible, like with Lloyd, that there was some truth to that and that Henry possibly killed Sheila at some point with a tire iron. My rationale for thinking Sheila was not burned in the fire is that the odor from burning Catherine's body was so strong that they probably never would have dared burn another body. So at the end of the day, in my mind there's only been partial justice for Catherine and Sheila Lloyd's in prison for the rest of his life. Good riddance. Lee Welch, as they say, lost his final appeal and died. The world's a better place for it. Some people just should not be in circulation. Dick Welch is alive and should be brought to justice, and the other family members who lied and lied and lied to cover up these murders of those girls didn't do one day in jail and they should be held to count, because justice delayed is justice denied.

Allison Dickson: 1:33:24

Very, very well said, my friend.

Allison Dickson: 1:33:28

I love that you brought a lot of the very hard facts, the very hard facts, because I think that is one of the things that we can sort of get lost in the maze of words and the sort of tornado of information that has been thrown at us.

Allison Dickson: 1:33:47

But it's great to sort of extract that, bring it back down to the ground and say, hey, this is how it lines up, this is how the courts came to the decision to charge him and this is how he was convicted on the basis of it, and to me it feels very solid, it feels very much on the ground, and I am completely with you about the family and how many of them are still have escaped accountability to this day.

Allison Dickson: 1:34:13

If you're watching this on YouTube, we thank you so much for joining us. Feel free to email me at vintagevillainspod at gmailcom or over on Instagram. You can also swing on over to the Facebook group, the Vintage Villains Soiree, and say hello. We're always happy to see new faces and discuss any of the cases covered on this show or any you'd like to see covered. And special thanks to all the Patreon members who get access to these live recordings as a thanks for their support. It's only a few bucks a month but it helps more than you realize, and all the necessary links to that will be in the show notes.

Jayson Blair: 1:34:48

If you'd like to join us for more discussions with me and other listeners, we can be found on most social media platforms, including a listener-driven Facebook group called the Silver Linings Fireside Chat. For deeper conversations with our guests and live conversations with other listeners, you can also join us on our Patreon at wwwpatreoncom. Forward slash the Silver Linings Handbook. I want to thank all of our Patreons who joined us today for this bonus episode. We appreciate you. We love the inspiration and encouragement that you give us.

Allison Dickson: 1:35:22

In the meantime, get out there and make good history, and I'll see you again soon, in another century.