House of Secrets (12 page)

“Why wouldn’t they have said anything before this?” Welsh asked”

Cause they’re scared,” Machelle said. “My dad’s a big guy.” Both Goe and Welsh wanted to know if girls in the house were treated differently than boys. “Sexually?” Machelle asked. “Sexually or otherwise,” Goe said. “My dad had a little thing with the boys, but”

“What was that?”

“Poodentang. ” She laughed. “Okay,” Goe said, then probing with silence. “My dad would be like, you know, I get some butt tonight.”

Or do this, I’ll be up tonight getting some butt.” I don’t know if he was She said one night last summer he took the boys into the bathroom and measured their penises. “Why did your dad do that?” Goe asked.

“I don’t know.” Then she named all their sizes, as if she’d memorized them all. Skipper was one of the shortest. “Skipper said, Well, mine wasn’t hard’,” she said. “My dad said, ‘Do you want to try it when you’re hard?” Skipper said, No, I don’t have to prove anything.”

” The boys were also allowed to date, Machelle said. “Why>” Goe asked.

“Because my dad said the girls would get pregnant. And the guys can get the girls pregnant.” As the interview moved into its third hour, Machelle Sexton appeared to be lightening up. She began smiling, giggling at some of the stories. She covered ground familiar to Jackson police. Responding to a general question about neighbors, Machelle said her father had ordered her oldest brother Patrick to befriend their retarded neighbor Kathleen Dundee. “Somehow he got her to get money out of the bank and stuff, Goe asked, “On his own, or did your dad tell him to do that?”

“My dad did. And my dad showed him how.” She said she was there when her father explained it to him in the dining room “Dad gave him a ring to give her,” she said. “I thought it was She knew all about the Dundee feud. She said one day her father took Skipper outside and beat his arm against the side of the house, then called the police, claiming the neighbor had hit Skipper with a car. The children had to join in on the harassment, she said. “If my dad hates someone,” she explained.

“We have to hate them too.” Goe tried to dig deeper. “Are there more secrets?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. The smile left her face.

“There’s been sexual things that happened to me that I haven’t even told you.”

“Is there a reason why?”

“Yeah, because it’s hard to talk about it.” Wayne Welsh asked Goe, “Can I ask a couple questions?”

“Sure,” the detective said. “What was your nickname, Machelle?”

“I don’t like to say my nickname,” Machelle said, her eyes staring straight ahead. Welsh let silence work for the answer. “It’s Deep Throat,” she finally said. “Who calls you that?”

“My dad.” He wondered about the origins of the nickname. Machelle said she’d learned to swallow a hot dog whole when she was 16. Her father seemed proud of it. He made her demonstrate to relatives like Uncle Otis. Goe wanted to know if father and Otis got along. They don’t get along anymore,” she said. They’d had a fight over a stolen ring late last year, she said. She also said her uncle rescued her once when his daughters were baby-sitting, a time she’d been tied up in her bedroom. Wayne Welsh had heard from one of the other children that Machelle and one of her brothers had witnessed Sexton and Sherri having sex in the van. Supposedly, they were playing in the vehicle when Ed Sexton and Sherri came out. Machelle and her brother hid under a cover behind the backseat. “We just heard things,”

Machelle said. “What kind of things?” Goe asked. “Doing their thing.”

“Having intercourse?” Goe asked. Yes, she said. She thought the year was 1987. “Did you hear your dad talking?” Welsh asked. “He asked her, did she want kids? And Sherri said, not right now. Because she was in school. My dad said, how about later on in life? Sherri said she didn’t care.”

“Why would your dad ask that?” Goe asked. “Did she want any?”

Machelle asked back. “Yeah,” Goe said. “I don’t know,” Machelle said.

She giggled nervously. “Ask him. ” Goe went back one more time to the rape. He asked, “If at some point in time it would be possible to file criminal charges on your father for that, you would want that done?” Machelle thought for a few seconds then said, “You mean to get up in front of a judge and tell a judge what happened?” The detective nodded. “I mean, yes, I would want to do that. But at this point I can’t say every detail what happened as to what my dad did to me because I’ll probably start cracking up. Not laughing, but emotionally, I don’t know what would happen. I’d like to get to the point where I’m strong enough to handle it. The only reason I’m here and want to stay here is my brothers and sisters are out of the house.”

Both Goe and Welsh wondered if in the future she’d talk to someone, maybe a counselor, one-on-one, about other secrets in the house. “I’d like to have one person,” she said. “Every time I find one person to begin talking about it they say, I can’t handle this, and run away.”

“You’ll never have that with us,” said Welsh. After they talked with Machelle, they brought Otis Sexton into the room, talking to him alone, the tape recorder on again. Goe had talked with Otis Sexton informally before. “You said at one point in time you thought there was some type of abuse or problems in the family, some things that struck you?” Goe asked. “I didn’t think,” Otis said bluntly. “I knew.” He said 10 or 15 years ago, his daughters had called him while they were baby-sitting at Ed Sexton’s former home on Cathy Drive in Canton “One of my daughters went over to baby-sit and called and told me the kids were tied up,” he explained. “I told them to immediately untie them. I went over to pick my daughter up and I talked to Eddie.” In fact, he recalled the kids being tied up on at least three occasions during his daughters’ baby-sitting jobs. “I can’t remember which ones, but I know it was little Eddie Lee and Willie. The last time I told Eddie, I’ve had it.”

Otis said he told his older sister Stella, now deceased. “I guess the next day, Stella turned him in.” Apparently, it was the 1979 anonymous tip in the DHS case file. Otis Sexton said he also suspected incest.

He was working on a painting job with his brother. “Eddie and Sherri I saw kissing on several occasions,” he recalled. “She was fifteen or sixteen at the “Did you approach him about it?”

“I told him it didn’t look right.” He said when Sherri became pregnant, his brother claimed the child belonged to a boy she was working with at a restaurant in Massilon. They’d supposedly had sex in the restaurant freezer. “But the thing they forgot,” Otis said, “Sherri hadn’t worked at that restaurant for about fifteen months.”

Otis digressed into the incident in Jackson police files, the time their retarded cousin was “kidnaped”

from Eddie Lee’s house. He said his brother was beating the boy regularly and cashing his Social Security checks. Otis said he went to the house to try and straighten out the situation, the cousin complaining he was being held hostage. This was the same day Eddie told me that our father had abused my sisters,” Otis said. He added that he’d checked with his sisters on this, and they denied it. Eddie, he said, flew into a rage against the cousin. “I was ready to hit Eddie over the head with a chair before he stopped,” he said. Otis Sexton said sometimes the Sexton boys, Willie usually, would call and complain about their father’s behavior. “Willie was the main one who came to me and talked. Eddie Lee is aligned with his dad now. I don’t understand why.” Otis gave a brief description of his brother’s criminal past. Otis had a theory. Prison had corrupted his brother sexually. “That’s when I think all this started,” he said. At the end of the interview, Goe asked, “You’ve heard some of the things Machelle has said. Do you think she’s telling the truth?” ‘Yes, she is. This is not a put-on. I told her, ‘Machelle, don’t exaggerate.” And this fear that she has is real. And I know for a fact that if her dad knows where she’s at, he’s going to come and get her. But he won’t come to my house, because he knows what I’ll do to him.” All the kids were scared, he said, adding, “It’s like Willie said when he called me the other day. If my dad knew I was talking to you, he’d kill me.”’ He said Willie had called him over the ring incident mentioned by Machelle. Willie had stolen Otis’s diamond-studded 25th anniversary ring, but later confessed and offered to pay him back. He gave $300 to his dad to give to Otis. “But his dad spent it, and tried to put me off. That’s why my brother and I split. It was over this ring.” Goe was intrigued by the baby-sitting story. Before Otis left, he wrote down the names and addresses of Otis’s daughters. He wanted to check the stories at the source. Two days later, Wayne Welsh called Goe. He said in interviewing the children again, some said their father had never been in prison. He was a licensed minister, they said. Uncle Otis was the convict, their father told them. Goe ran criminal record checks on both men. Ed Sexton had a sheet, a five-year term at Moundsville State Prison, then parole. Otis Sexton’s record was clean.

Over the next two weeks, Goe interviewed all three of Otis Sexton’s daughters, all married and living in Canton and nearby towns. One after another they came to the PD and told disturbing, detailed stories. Theresa Samblet, now 29, remembered arriving at the house to baby-sit at 16. She found 3-year-old Machelle lashed to the bed, her wrist tied to one post, her ankle to the post at her feet. Machelle s hand was purple. She was laying in her own waste. She said she called her father because she couldn’t get the shoelaces untied. Eddie Jr., Skipper, Machelle, and sometimes Sherri were tied up most often, she said. Never Pixie. “She seemed to be her dad s favorite,” Samblet said. “A lot of times the kids would be locked in the bedrooms, Samblet recalled. “Not every one of them. Just certain ones.

Sometimes I’d use the knife to get the doors open. Sometimes I couldn’t get them open, so my dad would have to come over.

They’d find the children naked in a pitch-dark bedroom removed of furniture. The baby-sitters would find urine and stools on the floor.

“There was no electricity,” Samblet said. “Was there an explanation for that?” Goe asked. “The father said the kids peed in the light sockets and he had to disconnect the wires so nobody got shocked,” she said.

Samblet remembered a particular night she found James in a room, then just a toddler. He was in a playpen in a bare, dark room. A blanket was over the window. “When I took him into the light, he went nuts.

Like the light was killing his eyes. He was a mess. He had dried up stool all over him God knows how long he was in there.” James was “slow” now, she said. “In my opinion that’s the reason. The way he was treated growing up.” Goe asked another sister, Faith Mcdaniels, now 25, what the parents said before they left. Mcdaniels said, “The father would say, The kids are upstairs. They’re bad. Don’t worry about them.”

” When the sisters liberated the children, at first they moved around the room cowering, like skittish, abused dogs. “As soon as the parents pulled out of the driveway, I went to get the kids out of the rooms,”

Samblet explained. “And the ones that were out said I was going to get in trouble, or the kids were going to get in trouble. They’d getting a whuppin’ because they got out of the bedrooms.”

“Were they ever a problem to baby-sit?” Goe asked. “No, they were angels,”

Mcdaniels said. Mcdaniels told the story of how the children would run into the front yard in the rain, waiting for Jesus to come. All three former baby-sitters relayed their suspicions of incest None of the Sexton girls had boyfriends. Willie even took Sherri to the senior prom, they said. Lana and James had stayed with Theresa Samblet the night they were taken from the Sexton home. The two of them kept asking her, “You promise I don’t have to go home. ” Lana spent the night playing in Samblet’s daughter’s room, enthralled with dolls and toys. The two kids talked with her that night. She recalled, “They kept asking, Don’t you ever hit your kid?” When she appeared to be hungry, Samblet gave Lana a beef stick “You promise I don’t have to go back that house,” Lana asked again. Samblet promised. Then Lana told her that her father used to buy long beef sticks and use them to hit her in the head. When the DHS removed the kids to take them to foster homes the next day, per the court order, James and Lana cried, she said “It was heartbreaking,” Samblet said. “Did you believe them?” Goe asked. Theresa Samblet seemed shocked the detective had even asked the question. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Especially after what I’ve seen.”

Later, Detective Glenn Goe decided there was one more way to put Machelle Sexton’s story to the test. On the morning of May 5, Goe and a detective named Tom Taylor drove Machelle to Rich eld, south of Cleveland, to the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, a forensic unit run by the state attorney general. Machelle Sexton had agreed to take a polygraph. Goe asked Taylor to stay with her in the lobby while he went upstairs to talk to the examiner about the case.

As they were waiting, Machelle suddenly became impatient and stomped out the door. Taylor caught her on the highway outside It took him several minutes to convince her to come back inside. Two hours later, she emerged from the lie detector test. Her eyes were bright, her mood upbeat. Examiner James Krakora had tested her on her father’s promise to talk about her future, the rape in the van, and his threat to kill her if she told. Krakora reported no indications of deception, writing in a later report, “It is to be considered, therefore, that this person told the substantial truth during the tests.” Afterwards, they drove back to Canton. The detectives offered to buy Machelle lunch. They stopped at an Italian restaurant. After the waitress handed Machelle a menu, she asked, What do you do?” She was looking at the menu as if it were in Arabic. “I’ve never been in a restaurant before,” she said.

Freedon End Fear Pixie was pregnant again. “You’re kidding,” Teresa said, smiling, but thoroughly shocked. The baby was due next January, Joel and Pixie said. They were at the Faith Bible Church in North Canton. It was after Sunday service. For several months Joey and Pixie had been attending. They’d been baptized together there in a ceremony for newlywed couples. It had given Teresa some hope. Now this. She couldn’t believe they’d done such a foolish thing. Neither had jobs. She thought, another baby? That meant three kids. Joey said they were looking for an apartment in Bolivar, a small town about 15 miles south of Canton. Teresa asked, how were they going to pay for an apartment? They were on welfare, Pixie said. He was receiving unemployment. Teresa tried to look on the bright side. Joey was getting away from the Sexton family. And Teresa’s brother lived in Bolivar. At least Joey would be close to family there. A few days later, Teresa’s sister-in-law, Sue Barrick, said the couple had stopped by to chat during their apartment search. She reported their conversation, We’ve got to get out of Stark County,” Joey said. Get out?” Sue asked. “Why?”