House of Secrets (19 page)

Black hair cut short on the top. Six-inch locks behind his ears, falling to his shoulders. The young man was upset, Ready quickly determined, but not at the women in the room. His old man had taken him for thousands, he claimed. Eddie Jr. said he’d put up $7,900 of his savings to get his father out of jail. He claimed the money came from an insurance settlement for a back injury. After his father was sentenced, Ed Sr. told him he couldn’t get the bail money back until 170 days after his release. But after his father left town, Eddie Jr.

checked with the Massilon clerk and found the money had been given to his father the very day of the hearing. “I want to find him so I can get my money back,” Eddie Jr. said. Ready had seen it hundreds of times over the years, people who want nothing to do with police, until they were the ones who got screwed. Later, Eddie Jr. would tell Ready and others another version of the rip-off, the true story he’d held back because of pure embarrassment. He and his wife Daniela had two children under five, Elizabeth and Eddie Lee Sexton, III. Daniela had received an inheritance from her grandmother. They had a Mercury Mekur XR4TI and just bought a Dodge van. They also had a 24-foot 73 Dodge Challenger motor home they’d loaned to Eddie Sr. while he was staying in campgrounds that year. From jail, his father put him to work raising the bail money, he said. He’d gotten the bulk of it by taking the Dodge van and the Mekur to Johnson Motors, the owner agreeing to give them half their value, but would hold the vehicles until Eddie Jr.

brought the money back. Eddie and Daniele also sold furniture, a $1,500 stereo system and a new clothes dryer hardly out of the shipping box. Daniela cashed a couple bonds. Finally, he’d also testified at the bond hearing to his father’s good character. Minutes after he was sentenced in Massilon, Eddie Sr. told his son to go outside to talk to a TV news crew outside, to voice his support. Eddie Sr. said he’d go upstairs and get the bond money. When the father came downstairs he said he’d been told by officials he couldn’t get his bond money until his probation was over. Ready thought, the old man had ripped him off, getting paid in cash, while Eddie Jr. was outside pleading his case on TV. And that wasn’t the only money his father owed. Eddie Sr. had borrowed a $1,000 a couple months earlier. Eddie Jr. also had dished out $5,000 for the house he lived in, but then found out his father only had a land contract on the property. His new deed wasn’t worth a damn. His father had taken off with his motor home, Eddie Jr. told Ready and the DHS staff. “Any other vehicles they might be operating?”

Ready asked. Eddie Jr. said they had a grey 83 Buick Electra, a four-door he believed was registered to his sister, Estella Good. Both Ready and Genetin began asking the young Sexton about reports of abuse in the household. All the children were physically abused, he said.

He’d never been sexually abused, he added, but he suspected his younger sister Sherri had. He told them how his father had shipped Sherri to Florida to stay with their uncle Dave. Eddie Jr. had visited her there. She’d told him her son Christopher was her father’s child.

Some family, Ready thought. He also detailed a story about his father taking Sherri for a ride in the family van a couple of years ago.

Eddie Jr. drove to the same store a few minutes later and saw the van parked in the back. No one was sitting in the seats, but the van was rocking. He also believed Pixie had sex with her father. “But I can’t prove it,”

he said. Ready asked him to speculate where the family might be now.

Eddie Jr. said probably on a Cherokee Indian reservation somewhere.

Ready looked for more possible leads. “Has anybody been in contact with your father?” he asked. Eddie Junior said he suspected his sister Pixie had been talking with him by phone from the house on Caroline. His father had an AT&T calling card billed to that number, he said.

Ready could see a few possible skip trace leads, phone bills, vehicles, an uncle’s name. He’d have to ask a county grand jury for a subpoena on the phone bill. “If he calls you or your sister,” he said, “I want you to call me.”

Eddie Jr. had one more thing to add. His father also knew how to find people, too. “He knows where all those kids are at,” he said. He was talking about Matt, James, and Lana, the remaining children in the foster homes. He also predicted that his father would be armed.

Before he went back downstairs, Ready told the DHS staff he’d look into it, but he also reminded them, downstairs, on his desk, he was looking at one hell of a caseload of his own. They had a big Christmas dinner.

Joey was there, but not Pixie. He brought Dawn and Shasta. Joey said Pixie was celebrating the holiday with aunts and uncles. One of Teresa’s daughters tried to teach Dawn to roller blade in the basement, with little luck. But at least the little girl was talking now. In early January, 1993, Joey and Pixie showed up at Teresa’s parents, Pixie apparently in labor. They wanted to leave Shasta, but take Dawn to the hospital. Gladys Barrick warned them. They wouldn’t let a 4-year-old in the maternity ward. “Then we’ll just have to keep her in the lobby,” Pixie said. Later, Gladys Barrick would say, “Shasta couldn’t talk. Dawn could. I think they were afraid Dawn was going to tell us some of the things that were going on.” Shasta cried for hours, bawling from the time they left. Gladys Barrick couldn’t comfort her. She finally cried herself to sleep. It was a false labor. In mid January, Joey disappeared again for a couple of weeks.

No one answered the phone. No cars were parked outside the Caroline house. The entire family worried again. One day, Pixie finally picked up the phone. “We couldn’t get a hold of you,” Teresa said. Pixie said they were visiting her relatives in Kentucky. Later Teresa asked Joey, “What family?” Joey said he didn’t know. But they had good news. Pixie’s baby had been born on January 17. They’d named the child Skipper Lee, after her brother Charles “Skipper” Sexton. But it wasn’t until a couple weeks later, in early February, that anyone saw the child. Teresa came home from the grocery store to find Joey, Pixie, and the children there. They all sat around the kitchen table, drinking soda and coffee. Baby Skipper was a cute child, Teresa decided. He had sandy brown hair and an acorn-shaped face. The infant looked healthy and active. Teresa studied the eyes, baby blue and as focused as any 3week-old infant’s. Later, she would pull out Joey’s hospital baby picture. Little Skipper was the spitting image of his dad. And he was born on Joey’s father’s birthday, two days from Joey’s own birthday on January 19. Teresa wondered why they didn’t incorporate the name “Joel” somewhere in the child’s name. Joey, too, was named after his dad. One thing about the infant did disturb her.

Little Skipper smelled. Not because he’d soiled his diaper. She thought, this baby needs a good bath. She said nothing. She didn’t want to offend the new parents. Teresa wondered about baby pictures.

They didn’t have any. She asked, where was the baby born? “Mercy,”

Pixie said. Teresa gave them all the baby clothes she could find.

Pixie said they were going to be moving from the house on Caroline.

The house and its contents would be auctioned on February 18, she said.

They were staying there to keep it clean for realtors.

“Where are you moving?” Teresa asked Joey. He looked at Pixie. She answered, “Back to the apartment.”

“In Bolivar?” Teresa asked. She nodded. “You’ve been paying rent for all this time?”

“Yes,” she said.

When they got up to go, Joey walked over to Teresa and gave her a big hug and kiss. “I love you, Aunt Teresa,” he said. She thought, why’s he doing this? He hadn’t hugged her like that for years. The same day, Joel Good stopped by his grandparents’. He’d called earlier, but Gladys Barrick had told him she had the flu. Give her a couple of days to get better, it wouldn’t be a good idea to expose the baby, she warned. They showed up anyway. Gladys Barrick decided she better not hold the infant. “Next time you come over, I’ll be better and I can hold it, she told Dawn, who wanted to bring her the child. The grandmother later told Teresa that she couldn’t understand why they’d ignored her warning and come over. “We didn’t realize it at the time,”

Gladys Barrick would say many months later. “But Joey was telling us all goodbye.” Every big family had one, the family character, the odd duck. Tuck and Colleen Carson would say Tuck’s sister May Sexton and her husband Eddie were all of that, and more. Tuck had not laid eyes on May for years, until she and her family showed up at their father’s funeral in Indiana, then their mother’s burial in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1991.

“They looked like gangsters,” he’d later recall. They rolled up to the funeral home in a big black Cadillac. Eddie and all his boys wore dark suits with dark shirts and ties. They all wore sunglasses. They all stuck together, hardly mingling with the rest of the mourners. Outside of the funeral home, one of the teenage boys pulled out Eddie’s pistol from under the car seat, eager to show it off. Tuck Carson respected firearms and the right to carry them. And that meant you did not wave them around in a public parking lot. Tuck and Colleen lived in a small, well-kept ranch house between Jeffersonville and Charleston, just down the road from grazing cattle, blackberry patches, and soybean fields. Louisville was a half hour away. Tuck saw more of the highway than his doorstep. He was on the road five days a week, logging two to three thousand miles hauling Fords and Chevies and luxury cars to dealerships from Detroit to Florida, and most of the states in-between.

After the funeral, May started getting friendly, calling periodically.

Wanting to keep in touch. Colleen talked to her mostly. Tuck chatted with her when he wasn’t on the road. May had been through a lot of changes. As youngsters, Tuck Carson remembered his younger sister as their father’s favorite girl. In her late teens, when the family lived near Toledo, she was a beautiful teenager with exotic dark features.

She spent hours on her hair and makeup. She was a high school cheerleader in Toledo, another stop during a string of stays, mostly at bases like White Sands and Fort Knox as their father soldiered his way through three wars. Like a good Army brat, she learned to make new friends quickly. “When it came to going shopping or going out, she was the first one out the door,” he’d later recall. “She was the leader of the pack. An all-American girl. The woman who showed up at his parents’ funerals bore no resemblance to the sister he’d known before he joined the service. She’d gained weight, had little energy, and seemed to have lost all the light that used to beam from her eyes. May also had become a silent follower. She offered few opinions. She rarely smiled, let alone laughed. Before she answered a question, her eyes often went to her husband Eddie. She seemed to have no identity of her own. Their father tried to warn her, as Tuck remembered it.

“There was something about Eddie that Dad didn’t like,” Tuck later would recall. “He said, He’s nothing but trouble.” And in the beginning, he was right.” Tuck remembered coming back on leave after his father Clyde had retired to Wellsburg, West Virginia. The visit was like walking into a hornet’s nest. He found his father rummaging through the house, looking for his rifle. “No sonovabitch is going to shoot at me without getting shot at back,” the retired Ranger was shouting. May had fled to their parents’ house, running from Eddie.

But Eddie had shown up at the house. “Eddie had a rifle and had threatened May,” Tuck recalled. “If she didn’t come and get in the car with him, he was threatening to shoot Dad.” Their mother had hidden the gun. As his dad searched, May left with Eddie. Later, Tuck’s father had news about Eddie Sexton. The retired master sergeant had done a little checking into Eddie’s military background. Eddie was no Green Beret, as he’d claimed to the family. He’d been booted out of the Army. He tried to convince May to dump him. “But she wouldn’t listen,” Tuck recalled. “She was already under his thumb.” A dozen years passed before Tuck saw the couple again, at the funerals. A year after the last one, the Carsons found themselves with May’s son Skipper living in their house. It was May’s idea to send the boy over the summer of 1992. May talked to Colleen, saying, “He’d just like to spend some time with his uncle on school break.” But with Tuck on the road, he’d spend more time with Colleen. Skipper was there almost two months. Colleen was happy to have Skipper. The Carsons were in their mid 40s now. Colleen’s three daughters were grown. She’d never had a boy around the house. Colleen provided nursing care for a 90-year-old woman she’d had in her home for a dozen years. She’d taken custody of the woman when she quit a nursing home job, after promising the woman’s dying sister she’d always provide her care Skipper was helpful and attentive. “He was as nice and polite as can be,” Colleen would recall later. “And we treated him like a king.

They put Skipper in a vacant bedroom. He seemed thrilled to have his own room. He helped Colleen with dishes and housecleaning and yard work. He wanted to go with her on grocery shopping trips. He wanted to go everywhere. They’d drive up the road to Charleston. The town had a water tower, a couple of church steeples, and a burial vaults manufacturer. But for Skipper, the outing was like a trip to the Vegas strip. In late summer, Skipper got a temporary job strieng tents at the local 4-H grounds for the annual fair. The Carsons provided for all his meals and other needs. Skipper was all pumped up about having his own money for cigarettes. It was Colleen’s daughter Bonnie who first heard the stories. Bonnie spent the night at the house sometimes. Skipper seemed eager to impress her. He told her he lived in a $200,000 home with a pond. They had a big-screen TV, a state-of-the-art stereo system, new cars, and a Winnebago in the drive, he said. “It doesn’t make sense,” Bonnie told her mother. “Just look at the clothes he wears.” Skipper wore Tshirts and baggy jeans and unlaced old tennis shoes. One time he wore his jeans backwards “He was trying to look like he belonged to something, but he didn’t,” Colleen later would recall. “He also wanted to be a part of our family. Once, he said he wanted to live here with us for good.” They began to notice strange things about the boy. One time, Colleen and Skipper were sitting on the living room couch watching TV. It was something on one of those learning channels, a documentary about the occult. “My dad did that,”