House of Secrets (18 page)

“He said he’d done every sin that was known, but now he was saved,”

Townsend recalled. “But then he said he worshiped both God and the devil. I’m telling you, he ain’t no preacher for God. He is a preacher for the devil. That’s for sure. “See, cause I would sneak out there [to Caroline] and they wouldn’t even know I was there. One day I went to the open window and Willie was with Pixie and Eddie had a cat on the table, worshipping the cat with candles and stuff. I turned around and left “See, I’m a sneaky little bitch, excuse my English. I wanted to know what was going on. So another time I parked my van about three blocks around the corner. I was nosey. I caught him fucking this girl in that shed right when you first come in. I don’t know what girl. Sixteen, eighteen, I can’t say. She was not as tall as me. I mean, the man was a whore to his days, you hear me? “Then, after he moved out of the house, we used to go out to the trailer park and see Eddie Sr. He kept moving, because he was supposed to stay away from his wife. I went out there, sir, and Pixie come out with some shorts up the crack of her ass. You could see her pussy. Excuse my language. You could see her nipples through her shirt. I went into that trailer and I’m telling you, it smelled just like good-time pussy.

“I said to my [cousin] we better get the fuck out of here now. I didn’t see any other man around but Eddie, so evidently there had to be some deep fucking going on. Before we left, the mother drove up. She spoke to me, and when she went in that trailer, man, she was throwing dishes and everything else at Eddie Sexton. She knew her daughter was fucking that man. “That girl Pixie, I seen it in her a long time ago that she’s very jealous about her dad. She’d come around the house.

Too jealous. I mean, it’s just like a husband-and-wife jealousy. And she didn’t want nobody close to her daddy. It was like, don’t get two feet in front of my daddy.” Augusta Townsend said it was her cousin and a Sexton nephew who beat Joel Good, on the street, not a hundred feet from her door. They jumped him when he stepped out of a car. Ed Sexton was nowhere around. “He was too scrawny to beat that boy like that.”

Eddie Jr. and Pixie were also there, she said. A couple of weeks before the standoff, Eddie Sr. had offered to trade Townsend his Chevy van for her Ford truck. She signed over the truck, but he never showed up with his paperwork. Then he landed in jail. Townsend confirmed that she’d offered May, Christopher, Kimberly, and Skipper a place to stay after Eddie Jr. put a gun to his mother’s head. Soon Eddie Jr.

dropped by, trying to raise bond money. “When you get around Eddie Jr., he was very possessive, just like Pixie was. Of his daddy. I said, my Godj what did [Eddie Sr.] do? Fuck em all? Excuse my English.” She gave Eddie Jr. $500, figuring once Ed Sexton got out of jail, she’d be able to get the van. It had been a relatively uneventful week while the mother and children were there. But then Ed Sexton showed up, out on bond. The atmosphere changed not long after he walked through the door. At first he bought groceries and had his boys do repairs on her house. Willie moved in as well. Ed Sexton had a .38 revolver with him, Townsend said. “He’s the kind of man who push the situation.

Aggravate you to do things. Yeah, manipulate. “I gave the kids clothes and shoes, just to help them out. Because they said they was trying to get an Indian reserve … cause the Indian reserve was going to give them their freedom. I got the clothes from Soldier Boy. Plus, I had camouflage pants. I said, I’m gonna tell you something, at night can’t nobody see you in camouflage, you know. So we went to the Army store and we bought different things. “Okay, and the mother was nervous and all that. But she’s just as wrong. Because I’m gonna tell you something, if she was any piece of woman, I wouldn’t allow my husband to fuck my kids … do that freaky fool shit. He’d have been the hell out of my house and he’d have never come back. “All of them was [sexual]. I seen his little girl [Kimberly] just crawl, climb, and squirm like some sex maniac on top of her daddy. It’s just like you train a dog. If you train a dog to hump, he will. Everybody acted like they was deep in love with that man all the way down to the youngest. And they don’t want you around their daddy. They look at you like a demon that’s going to kill you. “But the mother acted like she didn’t give a fuck. Excuse my English. All she cared about was Christopher. And she showed me those [family] pictures. She was in the bedroom. She said This is Chris, my love.” Something ain’t going on right, I thought.” The boys were sleeping in Townsend’s living room, Christopher and Skipper on a roll-out sofabed. Kimberly was sleeping with her parents in another bedroom. “And that night I come downstairs to use the bathroom. And I saw them. The mother was on her hnees on the side of the bed, sucking that boy’s dick [Christopher’s].

Her head was between his ass and going up and down. And Skipper was watching. Willie was asleep in the chair. I crept back up the stairs.” She spoke to Soldier Boy. “I said I don’t play that, when I get upset I cuss, I said, Soldier, I don’t play that bullshit.” I said, I brought those kids back to protect them. I didn’t bring these kids here for them to take advantage. Daddy in the bed with one.

Mommy on the side of the bed sucking the boy’s dick. “They was going to leave anyway, but I started bitchin’. I said don’t nobody pay enough bills in this motherfucker but me. I said, I’m the boss. I said, ain’t gonna be no motherfucking shit going’ down in my house. I said, I love kids …

And they started packing.” They left in the middle of the night.

Augusta Townsend lost the $500 for the bail, and never received the paperwork for the van. She found only a hollow point bullet standing on her kitchen counter She figured Eddie Lee Sexton was sending her a message. “Because I seen something happen at my house, I thought I was going to get killed,” she said. ” Cause I’m telling the buck-naked truth, them is some freaky motherfuckers, excuse my English, please.”

“An interesting family.” That was the word Canton attorney James Gregg would first use to describe his longtime clients, Ed and May Sexton.

Even so, Gregg figured there had to be some kind of foul-up somewhere that led to the standoff. They first met in the 1960s, when Gregg was a young attorney for Legal Aid. Sexton walked into his office one day saying he needed a divorce from his first wife. In the ensuing years, Gregg had handled general practice work for Sexton, accident claims, title work, and the like. But every visit across 15 years, Sexton would mention it. “This is the man who got me my divorce,” he always said. Sexton had a couple of other odd routines. Gregg smoked Lucky Strikes, and Ed Camels, his fingertips always yellow with tobacco stain. He always brought Gregg a pack of cigarettes, dropping them on his desk before they conducted business. Also, he always paid in cash.

Two months earlier, on September 2, Sexton had come in to deed a second home he owned in Canton to his son, Eddie Sexton, Jr. The patriarch didn’t want a title search done. That would have guaranteed to Eddie Jr. that he was receiving the home free and clear of liens or other attachments. Gregg warned Eddie Jr., “You know, I don’t even know if your dad owns this. I’m not certifying anything.” Eddie Jr. wanted the deed, nonetheless. Seven days later, Estella May Sexton showed up at his office. There was a lien on the house on Caroline Street for an unpaid hospital debt, she said. She wanted to know what could be done.

She wanted to sell the house. The bank was also foreclosing on the mortgage. Gregg was able to prevent the foreclosure, but the title could only be cleared by paying the debt. Records later showed the title was clouded by nearly $7,000 in liens from clinics and hospitals.

When the DHS came against the Sextons, Gregg referred the case to attorney Pat Menicos. “Luckily, I was just heading out for a vacation at the time,” he would say later. Sexton’s defense in Massilon Municipal Court was handled by another lawyer as well. That attorney wasn’t paid in cash. “He ended up stiffing the defense attorney for $2,500,” Gregg later said. But for Gregg, Ed Sexton was the perfect client. Once, Ed and his brother Otis were in a car accident together.

Ed Sexton accepted the insurance company settlement without protest.

Otis wanted to hold out for more. “The reason I liked him was he never gave me any problem,” Gregg would recall. “He never second-guessed me once.” The only difficult case Sexton ever faced was back in the mid1980s when a paternity claim was filed against him by a niece who’d lied with the Sextons while she was finishing high school. Sexton denied the baby was his child. A blood test was planned. But then the girl dropped the case. There was another oddity. Ed Sexton told Gregg once that he was expecting a very large contract with Burger King restaurants to do a promotional tour. The money was coming any day, he said. He wanted the attorney to help him set up a company with the assets. But the money and the company never materialized. On the Thursday before Sexton made bail, Eddie Jr. had stopped in Gregg’s office, trying to raise money to get his father out of jail Gregg tried to counsel him, saying it wasn’t worth the time or expense The hearing was scheduled for Monday. If they all just waited four days, Gregg said, the judge would probably let his father out of jail. There was one more thing about the Sexton family. James Gregg would notice it every time Ed and May Sexton came through the door. They smelled.

“Maybe interesting isn’t the right word to describe them,” Gregg would conclude one day. “Maybe the word I’m looking for is macabre. ” Otis Sexton held all of them responsible, the Jackson Township police, the Massilon prosecutor, Indian social worker Mel Fletcher If Glenn Goe had pursued Machelle’s charges, if Goe and Steve Zerby had lobbied Massilon’s attorneys, if Mel Fletcher had kept his nose out of a DHS

case, Otis reasoned, Eddie might have been in jail and future problems avoided. Otis wondered if the Jackson police would have dragged their feet with other families in the township, particularly the ones who lived in the quarter-million-dollar homes. He reasoned, The department has a long file on the family. A girl from the family says her father raped her. The girl passes a lie detector test. Her brother and sisters reveal horrors. Even an old hillbilly could figure that one out. “And what do they do? Nothinghe told friends The DHS wasn’t entirely off the hook either, he’d later begin to say. While it’s not shown on the DHS summary of the Sexton case later filed in court by the agency, Otis Sexton would eventually claim he’d made nine complaints about his brother’s treatment of the children between May of 1979 and April of 1992. He also would say he complained to high school and grade school counselors and several police agencies. He’d recall, “It was always the same answers, We’re short on staff. Or the kids have to admit the problem themselves.” Now they had, he decided, and still nothing. Judee Genetin would later say DHS had not rece*ed the Otis Sexton referrals. “If nobody believed me, that makes me a liar, doesn’t it?” he would later explain. “And I’m not a liar.” Ten days before Christmas Otis heard rumors in the family that May Sexton was living with his brother Dave near Tampa. He called DHS, which contacted Florida officials, but May was not found. A few weeks later, Otis’s daughter called, saying she’d just spotted Eddie, May, and Kimberly in a Giant Eagle grocery store where she worked. Otis called DHS. DHS

called Jackson police. But the family was already gone. He’d later explain his passion this way. “Everybody has somebody. I’ve got my wife and daughters. The police and social workers got to go home to their families. But what did those kids have? Nothing. Now they didn’t even have each other, all spread out in those foster homes, or out there with Eddie on the run. “It just kept going through my mind.

Over an dover. Who did they have. Who was going to stand up for those kids?” There was one more event that made him furious. A few days after Machelle had left his home, he called Wayne Welsh. “I’m surprised you’re not in jail,” Welsh said. Machelle Sexton had been in the prosecutor’s office. She signed paperwork claiming Otis had not only beaten her, he’d sexually abused her as well. Four days after Christmas of 1992, a Stark County sheriff’s detective named Steve Ready swivelled away from a pile of police reports and asked Judee Genetin to clarify what she was saying. “Now, Judee, who did you say was out there?” he asked. “One of the Sextons,” she said. “Steve, we need you to sit in with us on this.” She’d walked down a flight of stairs, not waiting for the elevator. She looked worried. Ready knew everyone on the floor above him was on edge. They were worried that Ed Sexton was going to show up at the Renkert Building and start blasting away.

Genetin had ordered every office door locked and extra security posted.

Everyone had seen Eddie Jr. on TV supporting his dad. Now he was outside, Genetin said, brooding in the hallway. Ready sighed, looking straight ahead. At an inch over six feet, he wasn’t sure if these DHS

women wanted him for his interview skills or his muscle. He knew little about the Sexton case. A month earlier, Ready had caught the TV

coverage as he sat in his living room with his wife Judy in their North Canton home. It was the first time he’d heard the name Sexton. He thought, what an asshole. Holding hostages. Going to shoot people.

Shit, the guy can’t win that fight. That’s about all he knew about the Sexton clan. A uniform and 13 years of cruising the streets of Stark County had produced a soft-spoken mix of humor and cynicism in the 41year-old deputy. Before, Ready shipped ingot in a steel mill, sold insurance, pushed paper at a rental car agency, and guarded courtrooms as a bailiff in Canton Municipal Court. He got his chance to be a cop in 1978. “As long as I can remember, that’s all I ever wanted to be, ever, ever, everhe’d later say. “You want to say it’s because you wanted to help people. But, shit, it seems all you do is get spit on, so I don’t know if that’s still it.” Ready had made detective. He was working in a suit and tie. He had a cubicle in the DHS. He investigated child sexual abuse. He’d picked up the pathology of pedophiles in seminars and from social workers. It was work a lot of cops didn’t have the stomach for very long. Ready was still optimistic about the job. It felt good to be out of uniform. He’d had the assignment only eight months. Canton was a friendly Midwest town where people made eye contact and thought nothing of striking up conversations with strangers. Ready knew that also worked in most interviews. He considered himself “a hands-on kind of guy. ” He’d cozy up, rubbing a suspect’s shoulder, giving an appropriate pat on the back. Recently, a 52-year-old pedophile who’d stonewalled social workers had confessed to a dozen felonious counts after a couple of hours alone with the detective. “You catch more flies with honey,” he’d say. If that didn’t work, Ready figured, then you took your last shot by raising a whole lot of hell. They gave Ready a quick briefing on the case. He sat at a table with Genetin, social worker Tracey Harlin, and a DHS supervisor as Eddie Sexton, Jr. was shown into the small conference room. Eddie Sexton, Jr. looked like somebody begging to have his car searched, somebody trying to look hip, but badly missing the mark. Almost six feet with a scraggly goatee and ragged sideburns.