The Last Stone by Mark Bowden

Author:Mark Bowden [Bowden, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4731-8
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

EDNA

If there was a moment that captured the exasperation of these months, it was the appearance of Edna Ayline Welch, Lloyd’s ailing and obese stepmother, before the Bedford grand jury on November 7. Edna was a deceptively simple, mean country woman in her eighties, sharp as the cut rim of a tin can and prone to didactic and random biblical quotations. Her letters to Lloyd in prison were full of them—like textual glossolalia. These missives were written in her hand, although she said she was illiterate. Edna lived in Tennessee in a filthy, cluttered house littered with dog droppings. Her soft, full, lined face had sprouted gray whiskers, which were a source of family amusement. Her daughter had posted to Facebook a video of herself plucking hairs from her mother’s chin to the sound of banjo music.

Edna was of particular interest for several reasons. She had been living with Lee Welch in the Hyattsville house at 4714 Baltimore Avenue, where Lloyd and Helen had sometimes stayed during March and April 1975. Edna had told of cops knocking on her door there looking for Lloyd in the weeks after the girls disappeared, something which the detectives had not known and for which there was no record. She said Lloyd and Helen had gone off by then; she did not know where. Even if she knew nothing about the Lyon girls, as she claimed, she at least might be able to corroborate or debunk bits of information Lloyd had dropped about those days. And there was reason to believe she knew much more than she let on. Soon after Dave had first phoned her in the summer of 2013, searching for Lloyd without mentioning why, hard-of-hearing Edna had apparently written to Lloyd to tell him that the Maryland police wanted to talk to him about the Lyon girls. She had made the connection immediately. Her letter to Lloyd was never recovered, but a search of her Tennessee home revealed one he had written to her in response, five months before the first police interview.

“I don’t know about 2 girls missing from Wheaton, MD,” he had written. “Tell me who called and what they say I did or think I did because I’ve never done anything to 2 girls to make them come up missing. So write me back and let me know what is going on on this.”

So Lloyd, whom Chris and Dave and Pete had hoped to surprise, had been prepping mentally for the encounter for months. In the same letter, he had asked Edna a surprising question: “Mom, have you ever heard from Helen or from any of the girls? I don’t know where Helen is.”

Why, out of the blue, a question about Helen? Lloyd had neither seen nor heard from her in more than thirty years. He didn’t even know that she had died of cancer some years earlier. But it was Helen who sprang to mind. The detectives could imagine a good reason for this. Helen had been with him when the kidnapping occurred.

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