House of Secrets (28 page)

Tabatha said. She changed her mind, but at the group, she was not herself. She lay on the floor, scrawling in coloring books, frequently interrupting. “She had absolutely no manners,” Tabatha would recall.

“It was as if everything we’d taught her was suddenly gone.” When they returned home, Lana had her bath, but Tabatha sent her to bed one hour early, at eight o’clock, for being so disruptive. As Lana slipped under the covers, she wanted to hear a music box the Fishers kept in her room. Tabatha wound it up and put it on her small TV, turning off the light. The music box played the Carpenters’ classic, “Close to You.” Downstairs, Tabatha heard the music stop, then Lana tiptoe across the room to wind it, “Close to You” playing again. Then, both Tabatha and Ted heard a strange sound. Tabatha climbed the stairs.

Lana was cradling the music box in her bed. Tabatha reached for the box, reminding Lana it was time to go to sleep. “Suddenly she began this whining, a whine I’ve never heard before,” Tabatha later recalled.

“A whining like an infant, or a toddler.” Tabatha put the music box back on the TV. Then it began. Lana Sexton was jumping on the bed, screaming. Tabatha scurried over, but Lana swung at her. Ted came running up the stairs. Lana had thrown tantrums before. When they hugged her, she usually calmed. But not this time. “She went absolutely beserk,” Tabatha later recalled. They wrestled her to the bed, where her body suddenly went strangely limp. They laid her head down on the pillow. Then she sat up abruptly, her eyelids wide open, only the whites showing. Her body posture changed, as if another personality had crawled inside her skin.

A deep, menacing voice came from her throat. “You’re not getting her,”

the voice said. “You’re not taking her. She’s mine.” Ted Fisher began praying. Tabatha tried to talk to Lana. “I want to talk to Lana,” she kept saying. “Lana, are you all right?”

“Do you want to talk to Lana?”

the voice asked back. “Yeah, I want to talk to Lana,” Tabatha demanded. Lana passed out again, her body limp. In seconds she opened her eyes again. Now she was crying, bawling. With terror.

“Everything’s okay, honey,” Tabatha kept saying. When Lana stilled, Tabatha asked, “What’s wrong, honey?”

“Help me, Mommy,” she said. “Help me.”

“I’m here,” Tabatha said. Lana began rubbing her own throat, then her arms. Saying, “I gotta go, Mommy. He’s got my throat. I gotta go.

He wants me. I gotta go.” She passed out again. “And then this thing came back again,” Tabatha later recalled. Ted started praying out loud, asking Christ for help. “Fuck Jesus!” the voice shouted. “Fuck Jesus!” Lana began spitting on him defiantly. The voice went into a tirade of more obscenities. Within a few minutes, Ted’s shirt and face were covered with her saliva. Then, she passed out again. In a calm period, Lana said, whimpering, “I love you, but she hesitated, then continued, “You know too much.” The 12-year-old looked at them both and added, “I’m going to have to kill you. You know too much. It’s time to kill you now.” Then, she had to kill herself, she said. Lana attacked them again. They wrestled her to the bed. She weighed only 90

pounds, but it took both adults laying directly on top of her to hold her down. She passed out again. This time, she didn’t get back up.

Tabatha tried shaking her shoulders, then took her pulse.

It was very slow, though only moments later she was tossing their sprawled bodies up and down like a white-water ride. Ted scooped her up in his arms and carried her downstairs to the car. They arrived at the local emergency room at midnight. Lana was still unconscious as a doctor tested her reflexes. “She’s faking,” the physician said. “This girl is not faking,” Tabatha said. “You have no idea what we’ve been through.” A few minutes later, Lana opened her eyes, as a nurse put cool compresses on her head. The next morning, an ambulance took Lana Sexton to the psychiatric ward at Akron Children’s Hospital, the Fishers not far behind. It was October 18. The Fishers, social workers, and others working the Sexton case might have written the episode off to hysteria, or acting out, or a viewing of The Exorcist) though there was no evidence Lana Sexton ever saw the film. A psychiatrist said it was post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The manifestations were flashbacks, the occult manifestations perhaps triggered by the upcoming Halloween. They might have been. Then the next day, October 19, another Sexton showed up at Akron Children’s Hospital, a sibling Lana hadn’t seen for months, a sibling living in a foster home some 70 miles away. Social workers had received the news the day before. James-Sexton was having psychotic episodes. He’d dreamt his father was telling him to kill himself, the same night of Lana’s episode. Three days later, Machelle Sexton would report to DHS

social workers the same dream on the same night as her siblings. Dad, and other voices, she said, were telling her to kill herself and her new husband, Dave Croto. Everyone might have written it all off to PTSD, coincidence, and Halloween. But it wouldn’t be until years later that someone would come up with one more coincidence by computerizing all the significant dates in the Sexton case. As Lana and James were reunited in the psychiatric ward, little Skipper Lee Good was being murdered in the Challenger at Hillsborough River State Park. Four months later, James Sexton would tell police a haunting anecdote. The day before the children were first removed from the house on Caroline Street by the DHS, he said, his father sat the entire family down at the kitchen table. “He told us if we talked,” James said, “he would see us in our dreams.” l Campsiffi j _ Detective Steve Ready always parked the department Chevy on South Erie, across the street from the Massilon Post Office. He always walked inside and eyeballed P. O. Box 1305. When it was empty, he moved on to other business. When it was full, he went back to the car and sat. He had a pair of binoculars and a clean line of sight through the building window at Eddie Lee Sexton’s postal box. Ready would sit for a couple of hours in the mornings or late afternoons during the workman’s comp pay periods at the beginning and middle of the month. He thought, these people can’t be very smart.

They’ll screw up. It was just a matter of time. One day, after a half day of watching postal patrons, he asked himself, what am I doing here? This is bullshit. But he sat anyway. Back at the Renkert Building, the Sexton case was taking on trappings more suitable to a serial killer hunt than a DHS child custody matter. Workers and attorneys had put up poster boards of the children with family pictures, identifying them with their dates of birth and nicknames. It helped keep track of who was who. The news of James’s and Lana’s psychotic episodes hit the

hard. Both siblings were scheduled for the Stark County grand jury the week of the hospitalization. The DHS asked for an independent psychological evaluation. Everyone wondered, would they be in any shape to testify? No testimony, no indictment. No warrant, no help from the

FBI.

“The whole thing was going down the tubes,” Genetin would later say.

Steve Ready couldn’t get his hands on the Sextons, but his knowledge base was growing. He’d gotten an earful not only from Otis, but from Anne Greene, who’d filled him in on Machelle’s saga since she’d left home. She’d lived in a dozen homes, gotten pregnant, and now was married. She’d miscarried the baby she was carrying. Now she was three months pregnant with her husband Dave Croto’s child.

Ready decided to talk with Wayne Welsh, the original social worker on the case. Nearly 14 months had passed since Machelle Sexton had recanted.

He asked, has anybody bothered to talk to her lately?

“Let me give her a call,” Welsh said. The next morning, Ready and Welsh drove to Bolivar. The small trailer where Machelle and David Croto were living was in a little mobile home park on the edge of town, on a road called Lover’s Lane.

Shelly Croto was happy to see Welsh. So happy that by 9,30 a. m., Steve Ready had a tape recorder running. She gave Ready the most complete statement in the case to date. Not only had her father raped her behind Wales Square, he’d tried to have sex with her at 15, but found her too small. He’d also tried to make her give him oral sex, but she’d refused. He knocked her against a coffee table, chipping her tooth.

Ready was already counting to himself. That was three felony counts, and they’d just begun. For the first time, Shelly revealed in detail what seemed to have precipitated her rape. Again, she recalled the day before the assault, seeing the bloody body in the trunk. The argument in the van behind Wales Square was over what she’d seen, she said. She believed the body was somebody named “Uncle Toehead.” She didn’t have a last name. Supposedly, Uncle Toehead had been beaten for showing pornographic pictures to Pixie.

Ready moved on to possible assaults on other siblings. She told about seeing Pixie having sex with her father on the couch. She detailed how she and Matt saw their father have sex with Sherri while hiding in the family van. That’s five counts, Ready thought. “Did Sherri tell your mom that your dad was doing this?” Ready asked. “No, Stella did,”

Shelly said. “Estella told her, and you told her too, right?”

“Yes.”

Their mother didn’t believe them, she said. Ready moved onto areas of ritual abuse. He’d been reading the disclosures coming from Lana and James. Shelly said her father, dressed in black, once gathered them around a dead cat on the table, having them hold hands. “He said he needed a sacrifice, or whatever, to make spirits come,” she said. Once he made them drink deer’s blood out of his cupped hands on a hunting trip. Ready wondered if she knew anything about dead babies in the household. James and Lana had disclosed that to social workers.

Sherri had a miscarriage at the house, Shelly said. “And there was a baby?” Ready asked. “It wasn’t formed.” She was five or six months along, she said. Ready wondered what happened to the fetus. Shelly didn’t know.

She hinted at some kind of ceremony, but had no details. “My dad said they had to save its soul or something like that. I don’t know. I didn’t stay and get involved in it. I couldn’t. It was gross.” Ready wondered if she’d seen any other rituals. “He married Angel,” Shelly said. “He married Angel?”

“And Kim, too.” To himself. They had white gowns and veils, she said.

He was in a suit. Then he took his young brides away one by one.

“Where?”

“He’d always say it was their honeymoon, or whatever.” He took them to the bedroom, she said, adding that her mother went into the bedroom, too. After the tape was turned off, Ready and Welsh talked to her for at least another hour. They needed her to testify before a grand jury, they said. She was reluctant. Nothing happened the first time she’d gone to police, she said. Why should it now? Besides, she’d recanted, she said. Nobody would believe her. “Shelly,” Ready said. “You’re really not that unusual. In these kind of cases, people often recant for one reason or another. It kind of goes with the territory.” It seemed to make her feel better. “You know, this is the time to tell it,” Ready said. “You have other brothers and sisters with them.

They’re in danger.”

“When would I have to go do this?” Shelly asked. It was October 21.

Ready asked, how about this afternoon? The body of Skipper Lee Good had remained in the Challenger most of the entire day before, October 20, the corpse still in its night clothes. Numerous hazy stories later were told by the Sexton siblings about what went on that day. Skipper saw the baby’s body turn colors, marbling. The likely cause was livor mortis, producing red and purple streaks under the child’s skin.

Family members came and went from the Challenger, and the campsite.

There were stories of the baby being taken away in the car by Willie, Pixie, and Joel. There were stories of Sherri and Joel being forced to stay in the motor home with the dead child, watching that it wasn’t discovered by outsiders who might wander into the camp. They were to say nothing to anybody, Ed Sexton warned. Few details of Joel Good’s whereabouts, his feelings about his dead son, or his role in the aftermath would be revealed in later accounts, as if he were little more than a transparency in the drama. Most would remember the patriarch’s wishes. Contacting the authorities and arranging a proper funeral was out of the question, he said. What’s done is done. But they were still fugitives. The

was on their tail. A decision was made to bury the baby in the park.

Some said the decision was Eddie Lee Sexton’s. Some said it was Pixie’s. Some said it was both. Late that afternoon, Pixie took off the child’s pajamas and fitted the corpse with burial clothes, its joints cracking with rigor mortis. She put a white shirt and blue overalls on Skipper Lee, patches with five stars and “U. S. Army” on the bib. She placed a pacifier in the baby’s mouth and a blue, red and yellow dumbbell rattle in its right hand. That night, in the dim motor home, Eddie Lee Sexton held what his family members described as a “service.” They would offer no details as to exactly what that entailed. Pixie Sexton slept with the dead baby that night. Some siblings later said she was hoping it would return to life. The next morning, Pixie wrapped the corpse in a blue and white afghan. It was placed in a blue duffel bag, zippered across the top. The bag was placed in two black garbage bags. Joel carried the bag, Willie, a collapsible army shovel. They walked into the mossy hardwoods behind Campsite Number 89. Fifty yards in, they stopped. Skipper would later recall the spot, but give two versions of how he knew where the grave site was. At first he said he was taken there by Joel after the burial. In a later version, he said he joined the burial party. He’d say, Joel dug the hole. Joel was crying and scared. He kept repeating, “Why me? Why does it have to be my son.” The hole in the black Florida peat was knee-deep when they hit water. They placed the bag in, then started filling. Skipper brought some broken fire bricks from the campsite to weight down the gym bag. As Joel and Willie filled, Skipper took one of the bricks and made a gash on a large oak nearby. “What you doin’?” Willie asked. Said Skipper, “I just want something to remember him by.” They covered the fresh earth with fallen leaves. Later, Pixie would be shown the spot. She’d bought a silk rose in a plastic tube, the kind sold at convenience stores. She placed it on the grave, hiding it under a couple inches of peat. The subject of the baby apparently dominated conversation all that day.