House of Secrets (16 page)

“How did he get them to do that?”

“He just asked them.”

One of the sisters told their father and Skipper was “whupped. They talked about beatings of all the children. Goe began confirming details Machelle Sexton had told him before she recanted. Goe wondered why the children always denied problems in the home when they were questioned by social workers. “Because my dad had a surprise planned,”

James said. “Like what?”

“We was going to go to Disneyland.” But the trip never happened, he said. That same afternoon, DHS returned to Family Court with the new charges by Lana and James. Judge Edwards gave the custody of Charles back to the DHS, but then permitted May Sexton to send her son to an aunt’s house in Orville, Ohio. Charles Sexton was to have no contact with any of the children while the investigation continued, she ruled.

Glenn Goe also attended the hearing. He and Tracey Harlin spoke with May Sexton after the hearing.

She said James’s story was a fabrication. She said, yes, she’d slapped Skipper, for saying dirty words “Could you bring Charles in so I could talk to him?” Goe asked. Tracey Harlin wanted to interview him as well. “Yes,” May Sexton said. When they didn’t show up that afternoon at the police department, Goe called May Sexton at home. She’d hired an attorney for her son, she said. The lawyer didn’t want Charles giving any statements. She was taking him to his aunt’s. Later, May Sexton told the DHS that complications forced her to send Skipper to her brother’s near Jeffersonville, Indiana. At the time, the DHS was not aware that it was the same place he’d stayed while he was on the run. Eight days later, on Tuesday, November 17, social workers couldn’t locate May Sexton or her children. Bonita Hilson called Skipper in Indiana. He said he hadn’t seen his mother since he left home. He had no idea where she was. Later, the DHS asked police in Clark County to drop by the uncle’s house and confirm he was indeed there. That same day, a staffer from Jackson Middle School called Christopher hadn’t been in school all week, and most of last week That afternoon, Bonita Hilson drove over to the house on Caroline Street.

No one was home. She left a note on the door addressed to “Mrs.

Sexton.” She dated it and noted the time at 3,25 p. m. “Please call me tomorrow. It is important,” it read. A half hour before lunch an assistant assignment editor named Julie Cairelli took the call in the newsroom of Channel 5, a Cleveland station. It was Saturday, November 21, four days after Bonita Hilson had left her note. “I’m tired of being harassed,” said the caller. He identified himself as Ed Sexton, of Jackson Township Ed Sexton said he was being harassed by the Department of Human Services and its children protection workers over bogus allegations. Every newsroom routinely received complaints from citizens facing problems with local, state, and federal bureaucracies.

Some were transferred to reporters to investigate. Others were dismissed by editors on the spot, determined groundless or not newsworthy Ed Sexton offered an instant news angle. He was barricaded with his wife and children in his home in Jackson Township, he said.

He believed social workers were coming to take away his son. “I’ve got weapons,” he said. “I’ll kill any worker or police that pulls into my drive.” Then he hung up. Cairelli called Jackson Township Police.

She’d report Sexton’s call then have a reporter keep in touch with the department all day. Inside the house on Caroline Street, Ed Sexton was ready for battle. Earlier in the week, he and his son Willie had gone to Indiana to pick up Charles after police visited the house there, looking for Skipper. Charles later said they’d returned to Ohio and spent a couple of days in a Canton motel. “My dad was saying we got to get those kids back,” Skipper later recalled. “Me and Willy and my dad, we came up with some schemes for the standoff. So we loaded up the car. Got a bunch of chicken wire, started getting weapons. Canned food. We had food out the ass. A big-ass propane stove. I mean, we was ready.” The plan, as Charlie would recall it, was to force DHS to give all the children back to May Sexton. Then, Sexton would continue living away from home, but return on Christmas, pick up his family and flee the state. He said he had friends in the Mafia. They could get them new identities and jobs. But he wouldn’t be taking James, he told Charlie and Willie. He was going to tape James up in the basement and leave him there to starve to death for talking to authorities. Sexton and his sons prepared the house like suddenly besieged characters in The Night of the Living Dead. Fhey jammed mattresses and furniture against the entrance doors. They hoisted heavy table tops over the picture windows, then drove spikes into the trim. When they ran out of tables, they pulled interior doors off their hinges. They covered one window with maple kitchen cabinet doors. They used the chicken wire for the shooting positions. They stapled the wire across small windows, then hung black garbage bags over them so police snipers wouldn’t get a profile from inside lights. They piled the cans of spaghetti, liters of soda, and boxes of dry goods in the den, just under the eagle on Ed Sexton’s Airborne flag. Ed Sexton took a position at a window at the kitchen counter. The house is on a hill, he had the high ground and a view of his driveway and Caroline Street.

He had a Remington 20-gauge pump with two boxes of deer-hunting slugs.

In his pants, he tucked a stainless Taurus .357 revolver. He had five dozen rounds. He placed the boxes and shells on the counter next to a large ashtray and a clipboard with a yellow legal pad. Skipper Sexton also maintained later that both he and Willie had pistols and pump shotguns.

They were standing guard from the windows above the kitchen, he said.

By 11:40 a. m., two Jackson patrolman in cruisers were dispatched, but they didn’t go to the house on Caroline Street. They met at a Dairy Mart on Wales Avenue, a few hundred yards from the property. Instead of approaching the house and possibly drawing gunfire, they used the store pay phone to call the house. Estella May Sexton answered. Yes, it was true her husband had weapons, she said. He was angry that DHS

was planning to pick up her kids. “Can I talk with Mr. Sexton?” a patrolman asked. “He won’t come to the phone,” she said. The patrolman was able to get from May Sexton the name of the family’s personal lawyer. Detective Glenn Goe arrived. He called a worker at child protective services. There was no pick-up order for Sexton children, she said, only the no-contact order already in place for weeks. A Jackson police captain named Steve Zerby arrived. “I know Ed Sexton,”

he said. “Hell, I used to cut his hair.” Zerby had been a barber before he got into police work 22 years before. Zerby fed coins into the pay phone. Somebody would pick up at the Sexton house, then hang up. Zerby called one of Sexton’s attorneys who also placed a call to the house. Zerby talked to May Sexton, asking, does he have weapons?

“Yes,” she said. “Do you think he’ll hurt you or the kids?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Zerby moved a couple of cruisers to Caroline Street, then went back to the police department where he could try to negotiate with Ed Sexton without having to feed the pay phone. Sexton finally got on the line. “It’s the system against me and my family,”

Sexton said.

“They’ve already taken some of my kids. But they’re not going to take Charlie.” It was mid afternoon. Channel 5 still hadn’t dispatched a news crew. Zerby decided to make that work for him. “You know, we’re going to have TV stations down here pretty soon,” he said. “You’re going to have cameras all over, and that’s going to be reflected when you go to court. And you will have to go to court, Ed. The smart thing is to handle it in a quiet manner.” Eventually, Sexton began talking about making a deal. He wanted a letter from child protective services that he and his wife would get the kids back now. Zerby passed it on to an on-call worker at DHS. A few minutes later, Judee Genetin walked into Zerby’s office. The negotiations continued for three more hours. Finally, Sexton took Genetin’s latest offer. She’d write a letter stipulating that she would remove social worker Bonita Hilson from the case. She would promise not to remove Christopher and Kimberly from the home at this time. At 6 o’clock, it was already dark when Steve Zerby walked up to the house, floodlights illuminating the driveway, the small square window of Sexton’s shooting perch looming just over the captain s head. Channel 5 had just arrived. Charles “Skipper” Sexton later claimed he and his brothers had two handguns aimed right at Zerby. “I thought I was gonna shoot somebody. You know, my adrenaline was built … I was pissed. And then Captain Zerby comes out … I thought it was going to be a little fight at least.

The old man walks right out. Damn. What the fuck’s going on? I mean, if I heard a firecracker or something, Captain Zerby was through. fOr]

just shoot a couple times. That’s fun, not shooting people. I mean just shooting a gun. It gives you a rush. It’s a fun sport.” Sexton and Zerby walked out together. Police would find only a 20-gauge Remington pump and a .357 Taurus revolver, the serial number ground off, considerably less than the arsenal Charles later claimed.

Sexton was cuffed and put in a squad car, his long fingers wrapped around one of any jail’s most precious commodities. Two cartons of Camels. Charles Sexton would later say he and his brother Chris went out that night and beat up a couple of teenage boys on Wales. They needed to blow off steam, he said. Ed Sexton would be taken first to a county crisis center, then jail, after a psychiatric examination showed he was mentally sound. While he waited for transport in the Jackson Township police station, a Channel 5 crew interviewed him. He claimed DHS was framing him. Asked why he’d barricaded himself in the house, he said, “I just had to do something. And that was the only thing I could do.” The reporter asked if he’d ever molested his children.

Sexton smiled, his eyes twinkling. “No,” he said. Detective Glenn Goe also sat Sexton down for an interview. He wanted to ask him about Shelly’s original complaint and Charles’s alleged assaults on Lana and James. He read Sexton his rights, then asked him to sign a form acknowledging Goe had read them. Sexton wouldn’t sign the form.

“Can’t we talk, Mr. Sexton?” Goe asked. “Not without my attorney,”

Sexton said. The TV station also interviewed Judee Genetin. But the most troubling questions would come much later, the ones she would ask herself. Letter or no letter, she could have had Christopher, Kimberly and Charles taken into police custody after Sexton was led away. Then, she could have filed for custody of the children on Monday After all, Ed Sexton had violated the court’s no-contact order by going to the home. And Charles Sexton was to have no contact with minor children as well. Instead, Genetin had decided to leave the kids with May Sexton.

Eddie would be in jail, she reasoned. And the kids had faced enough trauma for one night “That was the one mistake I’ve felt guilty about,”

Genetin would later say. “I could kick myselfœ As I look back at all my years with the department, it was the biggest mistake I ever made.”

Within days, the family would begin to disappear.

will The standoff pushed the Sexton story into the stream of news coverage in central Ohio. But Ed Sexton’s flirtation with fame quickly began to fade. One of the last stories appeared December 1, 10 days after the standoff, in the Akron Beacon Journal, headlined, ABDUCTION CHARGE IS DISMISSED.

Eddie L. Sexton, Sr., a 50-year-old Jackson Township man, the Tuesday story went, pled no contest yesterday in Massilon Municipal Court. He was convicted of two misdemeanors, child endangering and inducing panic. Judge Eugene M. Fellmeth dismissed the felony abduction charge because police couldn’t find Sexton’s wife or three children to testify. Fellmeth sentenced Sexton to 180 days in jail and $100 in court costs, but then suspended the jail term, putting Sexton on probation. Sexton got out of jail three days before his hearing by posting a $7,500 bond. The probation stipulated Sexton stay away from his family and workers employed by the DHS. A Monday edition of the Canton Repositoty carried an interview with Sexton, given before his court hearing. The patriarch denied all abuse and called for Ohio governor George Voinovich to look into his case. “I’m going to stomp the streets and get someone to listen,” he said. Just a week before sentencing, two days after the standoff, DHS legal chief Judee Genetin had rethought her decision and gone once more to Family Court, seeking a hearing to return DHS custody of Kimberly, Christopher, and Charles.

May Sexton left a phone message for Genetin, saying she’d see her at the hearing the next day. She didn’t show up. Jackson police had been looking for May and her children all week. In the Repository story, Sexton was outright defiant. He announced that he’d told his wife to flee the Canton area. “I said, Go, put your wings around them and go,”

” he said. “She’s a loving mother. She wants no harm to come to them.

She wants to protect them from going back to foster care and going through this again.” TV coverage on Channel 5 also sought out the family’s reactions. One report featured an interview with Eddie Sexton, Jr., the namesake sitting on the couch with his wife Daniela and two children. “It’s a good family,” he told viewers. “There’s nothing wrong with our family. They’ve got to be making it up …

because I’ve never seen anything out of the way when I lived in the house.” The Sexton family was not without silent support and public indifference. May Sexton got a few support letters from other families accused by the DHS. Nobody reading the papers knew the details. The DHS and police weren’t revealing most of what they knew about the family’s secrets. And bizarre child abuse stories were coming under increasing scrutiny by the national press. Awareness of the problems surrounding abuse cases was at an alltime high nationwide. Stories were airing on networks about innocent teachers and family members imprisoned by junk science, including memory regression and incessant interviewing of suggestible young children. A study showed children often made up allegations to please their interviewers. Some experts likened the prosecution of “ritual” abuse cases to a collective hysteria not all that different from the Salem witch trials. There was no such outcry in Stark County. It was Thanksgiving week, the papers soon filling with ads for local Christmas sales. Belden Village sparkled with smart decorations. Downtown brightened a little, but still looked old and tired. The charges also may have lacked public impact simply because all the victims were among the Sexton’s own. The Sextons, originally from West Virginia, were what some locals called “ridge runners.” For years, people had been migrating from one of America’s poorest states to central Ohio for jobs at Timken, Hoover, and Akron’s rubber plants. Some landed work, others a spot on the welfare roll. The poorest lived in the dilapidated shingle-sided houses a few blocks from the Canton courthouse. Some observers noticed that people didn’t want to deal with confronting a universal human taboo. “Somehow, society seems to have granted victim status to everyone except victims of incest,” Beacon journal reporter Dave Knox would later say. “There’s something about it being all in the family.”