House of Secrets (29 page)

Most of the siblings later said they first thought it had died from crib death. Pixie broke down crying as Ed, May, Willie, Pixie, and Skipper sat around the picnic table. Joel was complaining, saying it wasn’t right. The authorities should be contacted. A proper funeral should be held.

Pixie later said her father pulled her aside and told her she’d go to prison for murder if they went to the police. That day, others heard the patriarch talking about the fuss Joel Good was making. “If he keeps this up,” the patriarch reportedly said, “we’re going to have to take him out.” ! They spent hours talking, Otis telling stories, making observations. Otis had a habit of saying the same things over an dover again in different ways, but keeping the facts the same.

Steve Ready had been listening, on his home phone, at coffee shops, over Jackie Sexton’s instant coffee in Otis Sexton’s living room.

Eddie had mistreated those kids for years, Otis said. He told Ready about his daughters baby-sitting at Caroline Street. He told more subtle, but telling anecdotes, as well. Eddie and May savored steaks and Cornish hens, Otis said. The kids munched on hot dogs and macaroni and cheese.

Eddie and May had eggs, sausage, and potatoes for breakfast. The kids got an egg sandwich or oatmeal. When Machelle was staying with him, Otis said, she wouldn’t touch the milk. His wife Jackie asked her why.

“Milk is only for the little kids,” she said. See, something must have happened to Eddie in prison back in West Virginia, Otis said.

Something must have made him this way. The family they grew up in, Otis said, was dirt poor, but not twisted. There was no drinking or swearing or carousing. They got their whippin’s, usually with their father’s miner’s belt. “But Dad knew the limits,” Otis said. And they deserved it when they got it, punished for neighborhood pranks, stealing a neighbor’s toy. Then their father “backslid,” a fundamentalist term for falling away from a religious life, Otis said.

When they were all living in Ironton, Ohio, he moved in for a year with a woman in Ashland, Kentucky. William Dewey Sexton stopped preaching.

Otis, only 12, cursed him when he found out. His mother Lana ran out the door, saying, “Billy, you whip that boy.”

“No, I’m not going to whip him,”

his father said. “Why?” she asked. “I’m not worthy of whipping that boy.” Otis said, “He said he’d much rather go to hell as a sinner than a hypocrite.” But, with Eddie, you never knew what you were getting.

Take that Futuretron nonsense, Otis said. He told Ready about the Futuretrons and the supposed Burger King deal. Eddie had been talking about it for years. He had grand plans. Eddie predicted Futuretron images would be put on burger wrappers and french fry boxes. People would flock to see Eddie “the warlock,” and Lana “the witch.”

“What the hell is Futuretron, Otis?” Ready asked. It wouldn’t be long before Ready would see mock-ups Eddie Sexton ordered Machelle to paint.

One well-done color drawing showed Eddie and Lana in space-age uniforms, red capes flowing from their shoulders, lightning bolts flashing across their chests. Eddie was holding little Lana’s hand.

They stood on a cosmic vista, a jet car in the back, the planet Saturn sinking in sky, the Burger King logo above. Just above their genitals, a left hand appeared to emerge. Otis said Eddie had it all worked out.

He’d have this big semi rig that would roll up to a franchise. The side would open up. A ramp would drop. And Eddie would come roaring out on a Honda Gold Wing in the Futuretron outfit, Lana behind on a bike. There would be a contest in the days before the appearance. The person who guessed the exact time the Futuretrons would appear would win a prize.

And, man, Otis said, could Eddie sell it to the naive. He’d convinced a couple of Eddie Jr. and Patrick’s neighbors to go with him on the road when it happened. Otis watched him do it one day, while the neighbors dug up a broken sewer line. One guy even quit his job. A nephew was ready to take his country and western band on the road with Eddie. But first, Eddie asked him for $2,000. He was raising money for the venture, Eddie said. Otis pulled the nephew aside. “Think about it,”

Otis said. “If he’s getting a million dollars from Burger King, why does he need two thousand dollars from you?” Eddie was a con man, Otis said. He burned houses for profit and filed false police reports for insurance claims. He plastered the

stickers on his car to avoid police scrutiny. He also had a Masonic ring he’d bought at a pawnshop. He wore it camping and on other outings, using it to break the ice or curry favors from other Shriners.

“Eddie had a way,” Otis said. “If you really knew him, he couldn’t pull this stuff. But if you did not know Eddie, he could sell a snowball in Alaska. And if you didn’t really know him, he came across as the nicest guy in the world.” The day after Shelly Croto testified to the grand jury, Steve Ready’s patient ear with Otis Sexton paid off.

On October 22, Otis called him. Eddie Jr. was at his house, Otis said. He had something to say about his father. Ready drove to Otis’s house on 15th Street. They sat down at the dining room table, but Eddie Jr. kept glancing at Otis’s wife Jackie, sitting in the living room. “Why don’t we take a little ride,” Ready said. They drove only one block, parking at a power station, its transformers humming outside. They talked for a while in the idling department Chevy. Then Ready turned on his tape recorder, putting the story on the record.

Otis sat in the backseat. “Eddie, you came to me with your uncle, Otis Sexton, and wanted to talk about things that had happened to you while you were growing up in your family’s household,” the detective said.

“Is that correct?”

“Yeah,” Eddie Jr. said, barely audible. The detective told him he’d have to speak up, then asked, “Were you ever sexually abused by your parents?”

“By my father,” Eddie Jr. said. It was a brutal, disturbing story.

His father had raped him “from the backside” when he was 13 or 14.

He’d done it twice in puberty, then another time when he was 17. It was why he’d run away once in high school. Ready wondered if that had happened to any other Sexton boys.

“Probably Willie,” Eddie Jr. said. He added that his father had told him when he assaulted him that he’d also had sex with his other brothers as well. Ready questioned him about his sisters. Eddie Jr.

had seen his father having sex with Pixie. He’d seen the act by hiding under a bed in the family van on a trip to Wales Square. Another assault at the shopping area, Ready thought. Later he’d learn it was also the location where Eddie Sexton taught his kids how to drive.

Ready asked about rituals. “There was weird stuff that went on there,”

Eddie Jr. said. But he hadn’t seen any animal sacrifices, only seances. Ready couldn’t get any more specifics than that. Ready wanted to know about this “Uncle Toehead,” the body Shelly had supposedly seen in the trunk of the car. Otis and Eddie Jr. had given Ready a full name to work with. Yeah, his father had beaten up Toehead, Eddie Jr.

said, for showing dirty pictures to Pixie. But he didn’t know anything about a body. Unlike Machelle’s early accounts, he maintained he wasn’t there. Ready thought, it’s okay for the old man to do his daughter, but God help anybody else who makes a move. Rape. Incest.

Fraud.

Possible murder. Disappearing bodies. Sodomy. He’d talked to only three Sextons, and already he could see a half dozen potential crimes or leads. Ready wondered if Eddie Jr. would testify before a grand jury. “Yeah,” Eddie Jr. said. On October 25, three days later, the grand jury handed down indictments. Besides Eddie Jr. and Machelle, Lana and James had managed to testify. Ed Sexton was faced with four counts of rape and four counts of sexual imposition. May was indicted on gross sexual imposition and child endangering, based on a disclosure by Lana that her mom had fondled her. On November 5, Steve Ready would have a long talk with special agent Randy Howell in the Canton office of the FBI. In between, he was back at the post office. His eyes watched the brass boxes through the binoculars. But too often his mind flashed with disturbing snapshots. They appeared without warning from his imagination. Pictures of Eddie Lee Sexton alone with his daughters and boys. Family portraits no one would dare put up on the shelves.

One day he sat five hours. He’d been thinking it the day Eddie Jr.

told him he was sodomized, getting angrier, getting emotionally involved. He was thinking, How dare that motherfucker do that to those kids? s The names of Eddie Lee and Estella May Sexton of Ohio produced an immediate hit in the FBI network. Special agent Randy Howell received a call from Washington. FBI headquarters knew about the couple. Attorney General Janet Reno’s office had rece*ed a videotape, the return address P. O. Box 1305, Massilon, Ohio. May Sexton had been making follow-up calls to the Justice Department, asking for a meeting.

Three days later, on November 8, an agent in the FBI’s Correspondence Unit called Howell. Actually two tapes had been sent in August, she reported, postmarked in New Hudson and Port Richey, Florida. There was one more thing. May Sexton had called again. She’d been told to contact Agent Howell. May Sexton called at 5 p. m. that day. Howell told her there were outstanding warrants against her and her husband.

May Sexton claimed they’d committed no crimes against their children.

Well, Howell said, the best way to straighten that all out, was to first turn themselves in so the entire matter could be resolved. He asked her where she was. “Down south,” she said. Howell could hear her pumping coins into the telephone. “Is your husband with you?” he asked. “Off and on,” she said. He asked her again if they would surrender. May told the agent she’d check with her husband and call back at 1:30 p. m. the next day. He told her if she didn’t call back, he’d take that to mean they were not coming in, and a federal warrant would be issued for their arrest. The call did not come. But a copy of the video from bureau headquarters did. Agents were struck by Sexton’s statements in the tape, the segment where he said that if the children were taken from him, “God help us all.” Howell began with the phone records provided by Steve Ready. The agent began notifying bureau offices in Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Knoxville, Louisville, Minneapolis, Newark, and Tampa. Agents would be assigned to interview every person the Sextons had called. In his bureau memo, Howell warned agents to proceed cautiously. Sexton had been in a barricaded situation before. Howell’s memo ended with an underlined warning, EDDIE L. SEXTON IS TO BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND

DANGEROUS

WITH SUICIDAL TENDENCIES …

May Sexton later recalled that she, too, had her hands full with Eddie Lee. “I didn’t hear the baby [Skipper] crying, because every night I was getting knocked out with something. I didn’t really know what was going on that night. Eddie wanted to be the doting husband and always wanted to fix my plate. And he didn’t want anybody to eat what I was eating. And it seemed like about a half hour or so after I’d eaten, I’d be out. I’d wake up in the morning half here and half there. He was drugging me. “Oh, he was real hateful. He was going every two weeks for the checks. And it seemed like every time he would come back from Canton it would be worse than when he left. He was in a good mood when he left, and he’d say he’d be back the following day. Real fast.

But when he came back he’d always find something wrong, like I did something wrong, or the kids did something wrong. “His look always scared me. I mean his eyes were always real bloodshot. I didn’t know if it was from the lack of sleep or the medication or if he’d been drinking, or what it was. Sometimes I’d get smacked, sometimes I wouldn’t. Then I’d just get tired of it and smack him back. I’d take a walk. I just wanted to do anything to get out of there. “Now, I called the FBI because I wanted Eddie to turn himself in. I talked to the FBI man. He was trying to make arrangements to set up a court date. Eddie was supposed to turn himself in, and they were supposed to drop the charges against me. I didn’t know what kind of charges they were. And [the FBI man] said they would drop the charges against me and I could go to court and get my children. I said, all right. I told Eddie. “The next thing I know, he’s saying, Oh, they’re just tricking us. I said, Why do you have me call and set these dates up, if you’re just going to make an ass out of me and get the authorities mad?”

“It was my idea to start with. Because I wanted to get out of this situation because it was getting so hot and heated I thought, something is going to happen to one of these kids.” The park was halfway between Tampa and Sarasota, not far from Highway 301. The Little Manatee River State Recreation Area billed itself as “More of the real Florida.” The park featured 1,600 acres of slash pine, swamp, and palmetto, 40 miles upstream from Tampa Bay on a river that rose and fell with the ocean tides. Little Manatee also had seniors, lots of them. They started arriving in late fall with expensive campers and motor homes, usually towing cars behind. They came from Michigan and Ohio and Canada and New York. A few miles up the highway was Sun City, a large retirement community where personal golf carts were legal transportation for seniors buzzing up and down its blocks. Little Manatee catered to the northern retirees on bigger wheels. Many spent the entire winter moving from one Florida campground to another. Little Manatee had only 30 campsites with electrical and water hookups. Fourteen dollars a night.

Eight-person limit. If the park wasn’t full, rangers routinely granted extensions to the 14-day limit. There was no pool, not even a playground. There were picnic tables and a nature trail through the swampy riverbed. As one local ranger would put it, “Most of our campers’ idea of excitement is the toddy hour after supper where everyone sits around and talks about the good old times.” A uniformed ranger named Yale Hubbard noticed the Dodge Challenger the day after it rolled into Little Manatee on November 17. Hubbard had been on the job 12 years. He’d learned to read the subtle signs of problem campers, though in Little Manatee, about the worst that ever happened was illegal dumping or an occasional vehicle B&E. The way the Challenger was parked in Campsite Number 18 immediately caught his eye. Most campers faced their motor homes and trailers toward the paved traffic circle, or toward the fire pit, putting up awnings and mosquito netting out front. The front of the Challenger faced the woods, revealing only the side without awnings or doors. In the days that followed, Hubbard watched for illegal fires and digging. He’d seen campers dump their trash and waste tanks in holes near campsites. But Campsite Number 18