The First Lie

April 1, 1975

Lloyd Welch got himself good and high before he went back to Wheaton Plaza on April Fools' Day. He was stoned enough not to listen when his stepmom, Edna, warned him, "Don't get mixed up in this."

But Lloyd was already mixed up in it, enough to scare him. He needed to do something, even if it meant running a big risk. The marijuana buzz, he figured, would soothe him and help him think straight. Such was his teenage logic.

Screwing up came naturally. He was a seventh-grade dropout with, at age eighteen, a pathetic whisper of a mustache. His long, thick dark brown hair was parted in the middle, strapped down with a headband. He was scrawny and acned and mean; life had treated him harshly, and it showed. And, man, could he talk. Lloyd was a con artist. Words tumbled from him pell-mell, as if their sheer number and urgency could persuade. Whatever was true in what he said came wrapped in slippery layers of guile.

The story Lloyd planned to tell that day concerned two little girls who had gone missing from Wheaton Plaza a week earlier — Sheila and Kate Lyon. Their disappearance had created a media storm. Every newspaper and TV and radio station between Richmond and Baltimore was reporting on the hunt. Children were on lockdown. The Lyon girls' father, John, was a local radio personality, and this gave the crisis even more notoriety. After a week, past the point where odds favored ever finding the girls alive, the police in Montgomery County, Maryland, were desperate. The public had flooded them with tips, none of which had helped. The girls had vanished. In the days since their disappearance, both had had birthdays; Sheila had turned thirteen, and Kate, on Easter Sunday, eleven. The heart of every parent ached.

The plaza was a Main Street of sorts for the suburban sprawl northwest of Washington, DC. An enormous cross-shaped structure that had opened eight years earlier, it had stores on both sides of two partly sheltered promenades. The longer of the two was anchored at its ends by the department stores Montgomery Ward and Woodward & Lothrop; it had a roof open to the sky along the center and was ornamented at intervals with bush-filled brick planters, the sides of which doubled as seating areas. Where the two promenades intersected was a square with a fountain and a modernist sculpture, then decorated for Easter. The mall's style was futuristic, with the long horizontal lines, sharp angles, and neon hues that artists and filmmakers associated with the space age. It was more than a place to shop; it was a social center, a place to see and be seen. Unlike traditional small towns, few of the residential communities that sprouted outside big cities in the 1950s had anything like a nucleus. So the mall filled a need beyond commerce, and like those being built in suburbs all over America, Wheaton Plaza was an immediate and enduring sensation. A towering sign above its vast parking lot spelled out its name, each huge black letter set in a giant orange ball that glowed at night. There were specialty shops, a three-screen cinema, a Peoples drugstore, and plenty of food outlets, including a Roy Rogers, an ice cream shop, and a popular pizza joint called the Orange Bowl. With schools out for spring break, unseasonably warm weather, and sunshine, the plaza was a magnet, especially for children.

Lloyd walked in by himself, looking for a security guard. His plan was to tell his story to a mall cop and leave, but he had a poor sense of situation. Any scrap of new intelligence about the Lyon sisters at that point was a very big deal. The mall cop immediately called the police. "Now I'm screwed," Lloyd thought. "My stepmom was right." Two detectives, Steve Hargrove and Mike Thilia, came promptly. Lloyd was taken to police headquarters, and as soon as a tape recorder was turned on, he did what he did best.

He told them he was twenty-two. He said he had finished high school. He had been at the mall with his wife, Helen. None of this was true. He had seen two little girls who fit the Lyon sisters' description — the same ages, blond hair, the elder one (Sheila) with glasses — talking in the mall to an older man with a tape recorder. All of this was unremarkable; pictures of the girls had been everywhere, on TV, in newspapers, and on telephone poles — the police had posted thousands of leaflets. The unknown "tape recorder man" had been widely reported as the prime suspect. Lloyd offered a detailed description: hair gray around the ears, black and thick on top; a dark, stubbly face — "like a heavy shaver" — about six one, six two; wearing a brown suit, white shirt, and black tie; and carrying a brown briefcase that held the portable recorder. He said he'd overheard the man explaining to the girls that he recorded people's voices and then put them on the radio. This same story had been in all the news reports and was known by just about everyone breathing within a radius of two hundred miles. Lloyd said he later saw both girls leaving the mall with the man and had seen them again outside as they drove off.

"All right, let me ask you a couple of questions before we get to the second time you saw him," said Hargrove. "What brought your attention to the man and the little girls in the first place?"

"Well, because an older man talking to two small girls, just walk up and talk to them, the girls wouldn't know exactly what to say if he was asking some kind of questions," Lloyd said, words spilling out awkwardly. "And the girls looked pretty young, [one] about twelve, the other ten, a little younger than that maybe. I'm not sure how old they were, because I didn't see their face[s], and they just caught my attention when he said he was putting them on the air, and he looked pretty old to be talking to someone that young"— as if it were uncommon for adults to speak with children.

"Did he appear to be alone?"

"Yes, he was alone."

"Working by himself?"

"Right, until he started talking to those two girls."

Lloyd said he saw the man pull the tape recorder out and show it to the girls, and that he himself watched them for five or ten minutes, which is a long time to sit and watch three strangers.

"I was sitting down at the time because I was walking around so much I was tired, and I sat down and that's when I saw him talking to them." He said he had been walking around the mall applying for jobs.

"Did you hear him ask the girls any specific questions?" Hargrove asked.

"Not at the time I was there, no. I didn't hear that."

"Did you hear the girls say anything?"

"One of the girls laughed, you know. Giggled, like."

"Which one? The taller one?"

"The taller one."

Lloyd was a fount of particulars about the girls' departure.

"I came through the Peoples drugstore, and he was standing there, and they were getting ready to cross...