House of Secrets (10 page)

That’s where I met Pat’s dad, Bill, the father of my oldest. There was a small town down the road where they had a big barn that had rock and roll. As teenagers, we all went there on the weekend. I went to a few dances with him and he enlisted in the service. But we dated a lot before he left, and I got pregnant. Then he went to Vietnam. But we never married. That’s the last I heard of him. I don’t know if he’s still alive or got killed. “Pat was born in 1967. I was twenty. I went to Canton to stay with my oldest sister. From Farmington, you had to travel to far down into West Virginia to get work, or go north. So I came up to Canton and got a job working at Grant’s, a five-and-dime.

I was saving money so I could go to a cosmetology school which was right across the street. “My brother-in-law, Dwayne, introduced me to Eddie.

Eddie’s brother Otis had a church at the time. They asked me to go to church with them. They said Otis had a nice looking younger brother so I went to church with them. I was raised a Lutheran. I was really shocked, me being in that kind of church. It was storefront with only thirty people. His version of the Bible. He stomped and yelled a lot.

“I sat next to Eddie. Afterwards, a couple days later, we were invited to a weenie roast at Otis’s house. I had Patrick with me. He was nine months old at the time. At the picnic, that’s where I really met Eddie. “We just start talking. He was working for Goodwill as a truck driver. He also did painting on glass. He was painting an advertisement or something for Otis’s church. He asked me, was I married) I-I told him, no, I’ve never been married. And he said he wasn’t | married, which I later found out was a lie. He asked me if I was | dating. I told him I still had feelings for Bill. | “A couple months later I went back to West Virginia with my | mom. And he came all the way down to West Virginia to see me. l› We went out to eat while he was down there. He was real mannerly. | He was real polite with my mom. And I came back to Ohio and stayed with my sister. “We began dating. Most of the time we’d go out to the bar and listen to his brother-in-law play. His brother-in-law had a country and western band. Eddie drove a burgundy Firebird. His mother bought it for him.

And he was real good to his mom. Anything she wanted, he would get for her. And he was the same way with my mom. I “We went out three or four times before he even kissed me. And I thought, maybe he was gay, you know, but I didn’t ask. Afterwards I told him, I was having my doubts. I thought, you go out with a boy, the least they’re gonna do is kiss you. But he was just real polite. And he was real nice looking. He had a lot of hair then. It was dark curly. He was clean-shaven and he was well-built “I had no idea he’d just gotten out of the penitentiary at the time. The Family Court hearing room was not built for protocol, but efficiency. Hardly the size of the average living room, it contained only tables, chairs, and a raised platform for a presiding referee. These were closed-door, juvenile proceedings, meant to protect children’s identities. The records of the proceeding were sealed to the public Not that it mattered. On April 17, one day after the Sexton children were removed from their home, local reporters were oblivious to the emergency shelter care hearing and the entire Sexton case. Edward Lee Sexton would later recall his version of what happened at the hearing in a videotape he made for higher authorities.

He said he protested his children being removed by the DHS. Sexton told the court referee he was upset his children had been placed with his older brother Otis. He claimed his daughter Machelle and Otis had trumped up the charges. Sexton said, “And that one social worker, Mr.

Welsh, he gets up … and really vilified me and my wife. And we were sitting there the referee says all right, you’ve ground up enough meat, you ve ground up enough hamburger … So then my wife and myself asked our attorney if we could have the children taken from Otis’s home, because Otis, he’s got a mental condition and he’s always doing this kind of stuff. He’s always interfering in everybody’s life.

The court ordered the minor children placed in temporary foster care while the DHS continued its investigation. A couple of weeks later, Ed Sexton would return with an attorney named Patrick Menicos and secure a court order preventing his brother Otis or any family member from having contact with his children while the case was pending. Otis Sexton told social workers he never wanted custody of the children.

Any suggestion of a conspiracy, he said, was entirely in his younger brother’s mind. Eddie was always doing that, he said, taking his own faults and trying to attribute them to him. Later, in fact, Machelle would reveal that her father had told her that Otis liked to have sex with his girls.

Some of the resentments went back many years. They were the two youngest boys, Eddie Lee the seventh son in a family of 10 children, Otis the sixth. Their late father was a coal miner and a Baptist preacher in Logan County, the same eastern West Virginia coal territory that spawned the battle between the Hatfields and the Mccoys. The Sextons later moved to Sheridan, Ohio, 60 miles up the Big Tuck Fork and Ohio rivers, then to Ironton, Ohio. When their father died of a sudden heart attack at 52, Otis was 12 and Eddie Lee nearly 10. Otis Sexton later recalled those hard years. “We had a normal home,” he said. “The boys had a room. The girls had a room. None of these people raping each other. My dad would bring the whole church home on Sunday. They all sat in the yard and talked the Bible. “But let me tell you, we were poorer than a church mouse. We had to raise our food … hunt. Heat? We didn’t have money to buy coal. We had to walk about three miles across old Route 52, down in Ironton above Ashland, Kentucky. We’d take turns going over there and picking up lumps of coal that fell off the trains. Poor took on new meaning. It wasn’t like the people who get welfare these days.” Eddie Lee never had to pick coal, Otis said. Their mother Lana spoiled him. “Man, he was a momma’s boy all the way.” While the rest of the boys did chores, Otis remembered her coddling Eddie, reading him stories in a rocker next to a pot-belly stove. “Or, let’s take Dave, my older brother. When we were growing up we had to share our toys. At Christmas time, there were two beebee guns bought. Eddie was given his own gun. Dave and I had to share ours. We’d go to the store, my sister Maggie and me with my mom. We’d ask, can we get a candy bar? She’d buy two. We’d bring the candy home. Eddie would get the whole bar. I’d have to t split mine with Maggie.” After their father died, Otis took a job setting pins in a bowling alley for six cents a line. In his teens he worked construction and later became a painter’s apprentice. He gave all his earnings to his mother, he said. “I used to get blisters on my hands.

I had to wrap towels around them so I could use a shovel. I’d save fifty cents for myself to go to the theater and get a pop. Eddie Lee worked about a month at best. Then he quit.” Otis enlisted in the Navy.

Eddie, at 14, landed in an Ohio reform school for a year after he broke into a store in Ironton and took some watches. Eddie eventually enlisted in the Army, but was discharged for bad conduct within six months as far as Otis knew. Ten days before his 21 st birthday, police arrested Eddie Lee Sexton for robbing a gas station near Williamson, West Virginia. He served five years in the state penitentiary in Moundsville. Still, as Otis recalled it, Eddie remained the apple of his mother’s eye. Otis believed she sent him some $6,000 during his prison stay. Meanwhile, Otis was struggling in Canton, starting a family and his ministry. “At that time, we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. But Eddie, yeah, he had it all. In prison, he gambled and set up a store. When he got out of prison, I’m driving this banged-up old Buick. It looked like death takes a holiday. But within seven days of Eddie getting out, mom bought him a brand new Pontiac, within one week!” By 26, Otis was preaching. In 1966, he founded a small church on Navarre Road. Then he created his road ministry, called Burning Bush Revivals. “When I converted our church to the Church of God of Prophecy, that’s a worldwide organization. I was scrutinized, let me tell you, by the bishops of the church. You had to have Bible knowledge and some sociology. I became a bishop myself.” In 1971, Eddie, out of prison and married to May, decided he was going to preach. According to Otis, he took an easier route. He opened a tiny storefront church in Canton, taking Otis’s old name, the Calvary Church of God. Recalled Otis, “Anybody can go out there and get a five-dollar licence and go preaching as an independent. As a matter of fact, I offered to help Eddie where I could. But then I went over there to one of his services and when I heard what was going down, I said, that’s it.” Otis recalled his brother distorting scripture.

Eddie preached that God had thrown a third of the angels out of heaven with Lucifer and they had “gone to earth and married among men.” He told his congregation that this and other scriptural references made men as gods. Otis said he walked out. The church lasted only six months. Few were there to listen anyway. “The only people in the congregation were Eddie’s family and a couple of friends,” Otis said.

As Otis recalled it, over the years they floated in and out of each other’s lives. They held garage and yard sales together. He suggested to Eddie that he start a painting business so he could put his teenage boys to work. Otis showed Patrick, Eddie Jr., and Willie how to hold brushes, glaze windows, and do detailed trim work. Eddie put a business phone for S&S Painting in his den. The little company got jobs for a couple of summers. Otis would drop by the house on Caroline a couple of mornings each week. They’d sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, shooting the breeze. Yes, during those years he got along with Eddie, Otis would admit, but yet he didn’t.

Especially when the girls started having babies. “There’s two sides to Eddie,” he would say. The afternoon of the shelter hearing, Wayne Welsh interviewed the Sexton children again. They hadn’t even been out of their parents’ care 24 hours, and already they were talking.

Charles, or Skipper, the tough wrestler, began crying. He pushed the tears back into his sandy hair and winged ears, then admitted both parents beat him frequently. He said his father once made him and his brother Matt stand naked in the living room in front of the entire family as they held encyclopedias in their outstretched hands. He was punished for eating without permission or leaving a ball in a neighbor’s yard. He said his mother had choked and scratched him only a few months ago after she accused him of fondling his 12-year-old sister Lana. But he also added that his mother wasn’t spared his father’s wrath. He sometimes beat her, and once held a shotgun to her head. Matt, another sandy blond, had more stoic features than his older brother, but the same penetrating Sexton eyes. He confirmed the encyclopedia story and the frequent beatings. He told Welsh that once Machelle told him she’d gone downstairs and seen her father and Pixie having sex on the couch.

James, 16, spoke slowly. With his brown hair cut short by home shears, his eyes focused inward, he looked like a young prison camp survivor.

Later, the agency determined he was marginally autistic. James said everyone was beaten, frequently. His father usually used a belt, leaving bruises and cuts. He “whupped” Lana on her bare butt. He smacked or struck the older children in the face. Pixie, James said, also struck her children with a belt. He quoted what would turn out to be one of several Sexton mantras, “Until sixteen you get the belt.

After that, you get the fist.”

“How often did you get the belt?” Welsh asked. “About every two weeks,” James said. Punishment and promises. James said his father alternated between the two. He promised them Disney World and college educations and a mountaintop ranch. The promises came with a condition. They had to spy on their brothers and sisters, and they couldn’t talk to anyone from the DHS. James confirmed Charles’s story about being choked. “There’s lots of sex in the family,” he said.

Welsh tried to extract details. “The lovin’ belly,”

James said. He and Kimberly would have to sniff each other’s belly and armpits, then their legs and feet. “He wants me to be a dog,” James said. He wouldn’t explain any more than that. James said he never wanted to see his parents again, but was afraid now that he was talking. “If Dad knew, he would kill me,” James said. “He’s said he would shoot me with a gun.” Lana had sophisticated features for a girl of 12. Her hair was dark and long, her cheekbones high and her eyebrows dark and arched. She confirmed the beatings revealed by her brothers and added a few more of her own. When her brother Christopher failed a class, she said, her father beat him so hard with a belt he bled. Her father beat Willie for trying to run away from home. Willie has scars on his nose and forehead, she said. Recently, she said, her father beat Skipper so bad with a stick his back bled. Two other children had been taken into DHS custody. Christopher was a stocky 13-year-old with a flattop. At only 7, Kimberly had doll-like puffy cheeks and flowing brown hair. Neither were talking. “The worst that ever happens is we get grounded,” Christopher would later say. Four days later, DHS officials transferred the Sexton investigation to its ongoing unit, a group of social workers who would monitor the children in their foster homes and begin to prepare a case for court. After almost a dozen investigations across 13 years, an entry was made in the Sexton case file for the first time, “Abuse and emotional maltreatment both substantiated.” DHS attorney Judee Genetin later said that the Sexton children were also making their own evaluation, conducting their own test, this one on the DHS. “If they can, a child starts testing the system,” she said. “They’re thinking, Is the system going to protect me? Or are the threats my father made true? So the kids try out the system with a few disclosures, then wait to see what happens.

But then, if the father’s threats start coming true, they will only shut down again.” Four days after the children were removed, Machelle Sexton returned to the Jackson Township Police Department for another interview with Detective Glenn Goe. This time she wasn’t afraid to visit the police department. She was accompanied by her uncle, Otis Sexton, who also wanted to talk with police. Despite Anne Greene’s insistance, Goe didn’t feel he was in the position to ask for an arrest warrant for Ed Sexton. “We had no physical exam,” Goe later recalled.