House of Secrets (34 page)
Skipper took a hard drag on a Marlboro. Little Skipper Lee was dead, he said. Pixie had slapped him up and fed him Nyquil in Hillsborough River State Park.
The baby was dead in the morning. It lay in the camper for a couple of days, then Willie and Joel had buried it in a grey gym bag. “Willie showed me,” he said. “Nearby?” Ready asked. Near Campsite Number 89.
There was more from the 19-year-old. Joel Good also had been killed, about a month later, at a different campground. Coming home from a picnic, he saw his father, Pixie, and Willie go into the woods together. When they came back, he sent Skipper and Pixie to buy a shovel. Alone in the car, Pixie told him Joel was dead, that Willie had stabbed him in the chest. When they returned, his father and Willie went into the woods for two hours. When his father returned, he threatened to kill them if they revealed what happened to Joel. “Did Willie tell you what happened?” Ready asked. Yeah, later, Skipper said. Willie told him that before they buried Joel, they’d cut off his head, hands, and feet and buried the torso in a separate spot. “Willie bragged Joel’s head was purple and his eyes were bugged out,” Skipper said. Willie later showed him that grave. “Could you locate both these graves?” Ready asked. Skipper nodded. “On the baby’s, I made a mark on a tree.” Ready asked, “Why didn’t you come forward earlier with this information, Skipper?” He said he was worried his father would kill him. Now his father was in jail. Moments later, Ready talked to Sherri Sexton. She told Ready she was at the campsite when Joel Good was killed. While the parents were at the picnic, Pixie had asked her to watch Dawn and Shasta while Pixie, Joel, and Willie went for a walk in the woods. Fifteen minutes later, she heard Joel yelling, “Eddie!”
from the woods behind the motor home. She started back into the forest, but then saw Willie. She said he told her, “If you go in the woods, I’ll fucking kill you.” She confirmed the rest of Skipper’s story. “Did your mother know about this?” Ready asked. Sherri shook her head. Some of the younger siblings didn’t know either. And everyone was to say Joel left in a red Nissan, she said. It was past midnight when Ready left. Driving back to North Canton, past darkened homes and unlit stores on Market Avenue, Ready thought, no way.
Chopping a guy up. It’s too diabolical. Two people are killed and the rest of the family doesn’t know shit. Maybe Skipper Sexton was trying to take some heat off himself. He knew Lana had accused him of rape.
Ready knew he was only guessing. He’d been a detective nearly two years now, but he wasn’t a homicide cop. The next morning the detective did the only thing he knew how to do. Believe it or not, you check it out.-He drove to the Stark County Detention Center cottages the next morning, where Matt and Christopher were staying, waiting for DHS placement. He approached Matt as if it were fact. “I know all about Skipper Lee,” Ready said. Matt hesitated, then told the Nyquil story.
Christopher gave a nearly identical account. He also asked them both about Joel Good. Independently, they both said, “He left with a woman in a red Nissan.” When he returned to his Renkert Building cubicle, Ready picked up the phone and called the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department. He talked to a corporal named Lee “Pops” Baker, then played phone tag with a homicide detective named Mike Willette. By Tuesday, Ready was telling Willette about the interviews. “Let me get back to you,” Willette said. On Wednesday, he called back. “How’d you and this boy Skippy like to come to Florida tomorrow?” Willette asked.
Steve Ready and another deputy, Shirley Rebillot, already were scheduled to fly to Tampa to transport Eddie Lee and Estella May Sexton back to Ohio that Sunday on the sex charges. A round-trip ticket for Skipper Sexton was waiting at Cleveland-Hopkins, paid for by Hillsborough police. It was the first time Skipper Sexton had set foot in an airplane. He sat quietly next to Ready, hardly saying a word.
When the jet landed at Tampa International, Ready’s stomach was in knots. Maybe it was the $700 ticket on another department’s tab. Or maybe it was the way Ready’s witness looked, Skipper sitting there in a black motorcycle jacket, his pineapple top hair. Or maybe it was what had happened to Glenn Goe, the way Machelle Sexton had bailed. Ready felt like he’d put something into motion he now had no power to stop.
A homicide detective named John King and Pops Baker met them at the gate.
As they wove through the crowd at Tampa Airport, Baker said they’d gotten Skipper Sexton a room at the Sheraton. Skipper could charge meals and essentials to his room. “But first, we got a contingent waiting at Hillsborough Park,” Baker said. Contingent. In money-strapped Stark County, Ready thought, that meant five cops having a cigarette. Minutes later, as they sped in an unmarked car north on Highway 301, Ready realized he was sweating. He hoped they weren’t throwing too much manpower at this thing. He looked over at Skipper, sitting with him in the backseat. “Skipper, look at me,” he said. “I never lied to you, and I never will.” Skipper nodded. “But I want to tell you something,” Ready continued. “And I’m not threatening you.
But I’ve got a lot of work in this. And if you’re making this up, I’m going to kick your ass. ” When the car rolled up to Campsite Number 89, Ready’s hands were shaking. Contingent? Waiting were a lieutenant, a sergeant, five detectives, a pack of deputies from two counties, two park rangers, a half dozen evidence techs with a video crew, an assistant prosecutor, and two K-9 units of cadaver-sniffing German shepherds, borrowed from Sarasota, an hour south. Ready watched John King, a dog, and its handler disappear into j > the brush behind the campsite with Skipper. Just the three of them. They didn’t want to contaminate the area with scent. Ready lit a cigarette and began pacing. After 15 minutes, he sat down on a picnic table. Shirley Rebillot rubbed his shoulders, saying, “Steve, it’s going to be fine.”
No, he thought, he was about to find out what Geraldo Rivera felt like when he opened Al Capone’s empty vault. Twenty minutes later, the evidence crew disappeared into the brush. The dog had hit a scent. A Hillsborough deputy gave Ready a thumbs-up sign. One hundred-and-fifty feet into the woods, a tech was pulling black peat away from a clear plastic tube. Inside was a perfectly-preserved red silk rose.
Thittvminutes later, mhis Tampa office of the Crimmal Investigstion Division near historical Ybor City, the old cigar-rolling district, Hillsborough homicide detective Mike Willette finished pounding out arrest warrants for William L. and sister Estella M. Sexton. He’d been on the phone and radio all day. He’d received photos of the family, fugitive reports from the FBI, and from Ready a location in Moon Lake where Willie and Pixie might be staying. Another crew had already staked out the location. After a judge signed the warrant, Willette sped north to join them, weaving through traffic as he perused reports.
After nearly 13 years in police work, Mike Willette considered himself to have one of the best jobs in local law enforcement. He’d seen the sheriff’s department grow from 20 deputies on the midnight shift in 1981 to well over 100. The department was a full-blown metropolitan police agency, covering everything but Tampa city, ever expanding with the Sun Belt population explosion. The detective worked one homicide at a time, a rare luxury in police work. About a dozen a year, usually. If he needed help, he got it. Already, Pops Baker had three squads of a half dozen men and women working or on standby. Not only homicide cops. As he parked his Crown Vie up the dirt road from Dave Sexton’s compound, Willette knew a child sexual assault detective named Linda Burton was waiting in another car nearby. By late afternoon, word came that Ready, Skipper Sexton, and another evidence crew were at Little Manatee state park. Dogs had hit on four locations behind Campsite Number 18, but a body had not been found. Almost three hours into the stakeout, Willette got tired of waiting. It was 6:30 p. m., well past dinnertime. In four years of investigating killings, the detective had learned there was more than one way to do surveillance, and they had nothing to do with coffee and doughnuts. Willette took off his badge, removed his Ruger 9mm, then strapped a Walther .380 on his ankle. They might be expecting cops, he thought. But a social worker from the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitation Services, the HRS, that wouldn’t set off any alarms. Willette parked the Crown Vie in front of Dave Sexton’s mobile home. He saw the Challenger motor home parked out front, but still no sign of the Grand Prix Ready had told him the Sextons might be driving. He walked up to the front door and knocked. Dave Sexton rolled up to the door in a wheelchair. “I’m here to check on the welfare of the children,”
Willette said. “You from HRS?” Sexton asked. Willette smiled and said he just wanted a little family background. After a few minutes of visiting, he wondered where Pixie and Willie Sexton might be. Willette heard gravel grinding behind him, turned and saw department cars sliding to a stop near a black Pontiac on the road. “They’re visiting their father in jail,” Dave Sexton said. Not anymore, the detective thought. An hour later, Willette and John King were smoking cigarettes in the hallway outside the small interview rooms at the Pasco County sheriff’s substation in New Port Richey. “How do you want to do this?” Willette asked. “I say we just go right at it,” King said. A few minutes later in the room, Willie Sexton signed a consent to interview form. Yes, he could read and write, he said. He’d graduated from 12th grade in Ohio, he added.
They felt like they were talking to an 8-year-old. Ask something, he answered. Single sentences. Yes. No. He seemed to have no grasp of the big picture. Willie Sexton seemed to have no idea of the deep trouble he was in. By the time they gave him a coffee and cigarette break not an hour and a half later, he’d sketched out his personal history, the family’s, the fugitive flight, the way the Sextons supported themselves on the run, and the death of his nephew Skipper Lee. Pixie gave the baby Nyquil, he said. He, Pixie, and their father decided to bury the baby at the camp, he said. He and Joel buried it.
He checked the grave for seven days in a row afterwards. “Why would you do that?” Willette asked. “To see if there was any smell coming from it,” Willie said. After the break, Willie signed a consent to search the Challenger. The motor home was in his name, he said.
Willette and King turned up the heat a couple of degrees. “Where’s Joel Good?” Willette asked. A woman, probably his aunt, picked him up about a week before his parents were arrested, he said. In Little Manatee. He was probably in Ohio. “At his grandmother’s,” Willie said. “His grandmothers?” Willette asked back. “Or his brother’s.”
Willette paused, then said, “Willie, Joel Good never left Little Manatee state park.” Willie Sexton became quiet and still, his eyes locked on to Willette’s. They stared at each other, Willie’s eyes never going to King’s. It was a bluff. They still hadn’t found Good’s body. Willette waited. Through five minutes of complete silence.
Then Willie said, “I buried Joel.” And he said he’d strangled Joel Good. It was Pixie’s idea to kill him, he said. And one more thing about Pixie. There was more than Nyquil involved. “I saw her jap slap the baby,” he said.
Then, he said, she covered the child’s mouth with her hand. Down the hall, in another interview room, Detective Linda Burton had been asking a lot of questions of Estella “Pixie” Good, also getting a lot of one-word answers. Burton, 43, had been working child sex crimes for four years, at a grueling rate of a case a day. The job had taken her everywhere from white trash trailers and migrant camps south of Tampa to the million-dollar homes in Avili, an exclusive, guarded suburb in north Tampa. “Incest,” she would say. “It’s always occurred, rich or poor. You can read about it in the Bible. Up until the 1980s, you kept it hidden in the family. Why do they do it? It’s a form of control. It’s not sexual. It’s all about power.” Burton had seen only one trend since taking the job four years ago. It had become a division joke. They seemed to get a lot of cases from one particular state. It wasn’t West Virginia, or parts of Appalachia. It was the heart of America. “Are you from Ohio?” she’d ask victims and perpetrators. “I don’t know what it is about that state,” Burton later said. “But a lot of them say yes.” But by 10:30 p. m., three hours after the arrest, Linda Burton had never seen anyone like the young mother sitting across the table from her. From any state, or social strata. Totally flat. No hand movement. No body language. No smile or frown. Not a tear or a tinge of emotion, even when she talked about the death of her own child. She was unnerving. Pixie Sexton’s eyes were dead. Pixie said her father gave the baby the Nyquil. He wouldn’t let her seek medical treatment. Her father made them bury Skipper Lee. Her father and Willie killed her husband Joel. He was killed because he wanted to go back to Ohio. Her father held his hand over her baby’s mouth. The door from the interview room opened. Mike Willette came in, sat down, and told Pixie Sexton that her brother Willie had told them the entire story about the baby. “Estella,”
Willette said. “He saw you hold your hand over the baby’s mouth.”
Willette got up and left, closing the door behind him. Burton stayed with the death of Joel Good. Willie wanted Joel to go into the woods, she said. To get a stack of camping gear stolen from another campsite.
Her father was at the picnic, but she knew that Willie and her father were planning a murder. They’d never said how it was going to be done.
Willie came back to the camper, took something out and returned to the woods. After about 45 minutes, Sherri reached for the TV, turning it down and saying, “Listen.” They heard Joel yelling “Ed!” Like he needed help. She and Sherri went back in the woods, getting above the high brush by standing on a fallen tree. Willie had a rope around Joel’s neck, an arm across his face. “Get back to the camper,” she reported Willie said. Back at the motor home they found her father.
