House of Secrets (36 page)

Detectives weren’t sure if it had been rifled, or if the Sextons just traveled that way. They found no guns or other weapons, though they limited their search to the items involved in the homicide. In fact, the initial

FBI

raid also had turned up no arsenal of firearms, though some of the teenage boys had loose ammunition in their pants pockets. During the FBI surveillance, agents in the FBI airplane had stopped two teenage boys wandering around in the Little Manatee woods with a shovel. They speculated to Yale Hubbard that perhaps the Sextons had buried their arsenal. But when Hubbard searched the area, the ground appeared undisturbed. Some Sexton siblings would say some guns were hocked at Florida pawnshops as the clan ran out of money. Either way, Eddie Lee Sexton appeared totally unprepared for the firefight he’d been predicting for months. Other, perhaps ill-advised, amateur searches would only spawn more mysteries. The report was carried in Sunday’s edition of the St. Petersburg Times, part of an explosion of stories on the Sexton family and the developing case. The story began in Shady Hills, culled from an interview with the Sextons’ former Treaty Road neighbor, Bob Wilson. Wilson’s brother had discovered a plywood box a couple of days before, buried six inches under the ground in the woods behind the mobile home the Sextons had rented. But the brother had covered it back up. After reading a Saturday paper about the death of a 9month-old baby, Wilson picked up a shovel and dug up the box. It was 3 feet long and painted yellow. He opened it but found nothing inside. Skipper Sexton plopped down in Steve Ready’s room at the Sheraton a couple of days into their Tampa stay. Saying, “See my ring?”

Ready eyed the large gold nugget on his finger. “That’s pretty nice, Skipper,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“Bought it down in the gift shop.”

“How much?”

“Four hundred,” Skipper said. “Where the hell did you get that kind of money?”

“I charged it to my room.” Ready’s mouth dropped open. “Skipper, you’re going right back downstairs to that gift shop and take it back,”

he said. He could just see the reaction of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department when that showed up on the bill. Earlier, on Friday, Ready had sat down with May Sexton at the Hillsborough County Jail, sexual assault detective Linda Burton joining the interview. He asked her to respond to the charges being made by some of her children regarding sexual abuse. She denied she’d been involved in any assaults. Then she denied any of her children had ever come to her regarding incest with their father. The whole matter was Otis Sexton’s doing, she said. May maintained Skipper Lee Good was taken to the hospital by Joel and Pixie, but she couldn’t name the hospital. No, her husband never got mad about the baby crying, she said. Joel had gone back to Ohio, as far as she knew. Midway into the interview, she changed her story. Yes, she knew Skipper Lee was dead, but hadn’t heard the baby crying that night. The baby was not breathing when Pixie woke everyone up the next morning. Family members tried to resuscitate it in the motor home, then Joel and Pixie took it to the hospital, she said. May remembered coming back from the picnic and seeing Willie covered with dirt, needing to take a shower. Willie had beaten up Joel once, she said. Willie had a bad temper, she said. “So do I,” she added. See no evil, hear no evil, Ready thought. “She’s a great con artist,” Burton said. “I got the feeling she was happy we weren’t getting anything that we wanted out of her.” Maybe in time, they agreed, one of her kids would give her up. On Sunday, January 30, three days after the baby’s body was found, Steve Ready and deputy Shirley Rebillot hooked up with May Sexton again, this time to take her on a flight back to Ohio to face grand jury charges. Eddie Lee Sexton remained in Florida. He’d been charged with first degree murder in the death of Joel Good. Pixie now faced murder charges for both her son and her husband. Willie also was looking at two counts, one for Good’s homicide, the other for being an accessory in the baby’s death because he’d helped bury the child. In a matter of days, Florida social service workers would remove Dawn and Shasta Good from Dave Sexton’s house, where they’d been left by their mother upon her arrest. They would be examined for possible sexual assault. And blood would be taken from not only Dawn and Shasta, but Sherri’s child Christopher.

Samples also would be taken from Pixie and Sherri. With a search warrant, a nurse would take a vial from Eddie Lee Sexton. It would take several weeks of genetic testing, but soon all the investigators in the case would know once and for all if Eddie Lee Sexton was both the father and grandfather of the children. Ready and other detectives also would discuss drawing blood from the corpse of little Skipper Lee.

But Pixie was saying the baby was Joel’s child. “Leave it be,” Ready said. “Why add any more pain to his people back in Ohio. It’s already bad enough.” Ready and Skipper had just buckled themselves into their seats when Ready noticed the young Sexton, his leather jacket off, was wearing a new silk shirt and a black leather tie. His hair was combed back. “Nice tie, Skipper,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

“The gift shop,” Skipper said, smirking. Steve Ready had no idea what his room bill totaled. This time, he didn’t even want to ask. Besx willies It was a double funeral with a single, closed casket. On February 10, they carried the lone coffin across the snow to the chapel at Forrest Hill Cemetery in Canton, the wind whipping, biting nearly 100 people’s cheeks. The family had asked the funeral director to bury the baby cradled in Joel Good’s arms. They were laid to rest in the same plot as his mother and father. He’d always wanted a family, Teresa Boron thought. Now they were all together. Still, she couldn’t shake the memory of her promise to her dying sister. I’ll always be there …

Lewis Barrick had already found Pixie Sexton’s letter and given it to homicide detective Mike Willette, the threatening letter Joel had clutched in his hand that rainy night. Teresa told detectives about the beating he’d received a year ago in Canton. Teresa was buying newspapers now, only to learn new cruelties. Sherri and Skipper and Eddie Jr. were giving interviews, revealing abuse in the home, details about the fugitive flight. Sherri claimed in one story that the infant they’d just put in the grave was her father’s. “The important thing is that Joey considered Skipper his son,” Teresa said. “He loved that child, no matter whose it was.” One paper carried a picture of Eddie Jr., Skipper, and Sherri sitting on a couch together. They stared off the page with dead eyes. Everyone in Canton was talking about the Sextons. Everyone was talking about that Sexton stare. Five days after the funeral, word came that Eddie Lee and Willie Sexton had been indicted by a Florida grand jury on first degree murder charges for Joel’s death. But another development shocked the entire family.

Pixie Sexton hadn’t gone before the grand jury. Teresa thought, what are they doing? Joey followed that girl everywhere. She had to be involved. A colleague pulled Jay Pruner into the fourth-floor hallway of the Hillsborough County Courthouse Annex. “Hey,” he said. “There’s a major league meeting on these bodies in the parks.” Soon the 36-year-old prosecutor was sitting among fellow division chiefs in a meeting chaired by Harry Coe III, a former judge and the State Attorney for Hillsborough County. A dozen lawyers attended the two-hour strategy session. Most agreed, The state’s case had a couple of big problems. As Pruner recalled the session, “It’s apparent from initial interviews that Eddie Sr. is the domineering, Machiavellian, no, that’s too euphemistic for him, the Rasputin of the group. But for him, it all wouldn’t have happened. We know we’ve got Pixie involved in the baby’s death. We know we’ve got Willie confessing to the death of Joel. And we know Eddie’s involved with him. But at that point in time, the only thing we have linking Eddie Sr. to the murder is Willie’s statement.” But it was also likely Willie’s statement could not be used in the murder prosecution of Eddie Lee Sexton. A statement by a codefendant would not be admissible if Willie chose not to testify in his own defense. It was a longstanding rule in American criminal law. Willie Sexton had the constitutional right not to incriminate himself on the stand. Therefore, Eddie Lee Sexton’s lawyer would have no way to cross-examine him about the confession, which would negate the patriarch’s constitutional right to mount a defense. In Florida, the law required the state to bring a murder defendant to trial in 175

days, unless waived by the defense. If the defendant demanded a speedy trial, that dropped to 60 days. Under court guidelines, prosecutors also knew Willie and Eddie Lee Sexton would be assigned a top-flight attorney skilled in capital cases. But even a greenhorn would see the problem with Willie’s statement. Sexton’s lawyer would likely demand a speedy trial before the state had time to shore up its case with other family members who might have heard of the plan to kill Good.

Detectives believed the Flatliners needed time away from Dad before they’d be forthcoming. Eddie Lee Sexton was the bad actor, everyone in the meeting agreed. They needed to prosecute the patriarch like Charles Manson. They needed to make a deal. They could offer Willie Sexton a plea, guaranteeing he’d testify. But Willie Sexton had strangled Joel Good with his own hands. That left Estella “Pixie”

Sexton. The meeting became heated. It was Hobson’s choice. “Judge Coe was not really thrilled about making a deal with someone perceived to be a baby killer,” said Jay Pruner, an eight-year trial veteran.

“But if we didn’t get Sexton, he’d walk away forever.” That soon became Pruner’s problem. Days later, he was assigned the Sexton case.

On February 15, they all talked with her. Mike Willette, Linda Burton, two assistant state attorneys, and later Steve Ready, who’d escorted Skipper Sexton back to Tampa for more interviews. They brought Pixie Good to the state attorney’s office. Pixie’s courtappointed attorney Manuel Lopez, a public defender, had made her available for the interview. The deal had been struck. She’d be charged with manslaughter only, for her baby’s death, then throw herself before the mercy of the court. There were more one-word and one-sentence answers.

Some admissions, too. Pixie said she’d given the baby Nyquil, as ordered by her father, and held her hand over Skipper Lee’s mouth. She reported her father saying of the crying baby, “Quiet that baby, or I will.” She said she was afraid her father would harm the child. She maintained she had no idea she’d killed him. Pixie said she’d heard Joel’s murder being discussed on a trip to Ohio with her father, Skipper, and Willie, but offered few details about the conversation.

The day of the murder, she said she’d seen Willie strangling Joel.

When her father returned from the picnic, she’d followed him back into the woods. She said her father kicked Joel’s body with his foot and told Willie, “Now, finish him off.” She confirmed the plot against disabled camper Ray Hesser. She said Willie told her he’d been sodomized by his father at Bear Creek, the campground in Ohio.

Everybody feared Dad, she said. Everybody had been punished.

Sometimes her father beat her mother. Their mother never protected them. “He controls everything,”

she said. Burton and Ready covered her sexual history. Her father picked her up from work one night when she was 17, she said. She was sitting on the couch when he came out of the bedroom in only his underwear. The rest of the family was asleep. “Do you know how babies are made?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “I want to have some,” he reportedly said. That was the first assault, she said. She struggled, but he held his hand over her mouth. She’d also been raped by her father behind Wales Square. He came to her regularly for sex. He’d hold his hand over her mouth, take her while the rest of the family was sleeping. He took her once while her mother was away at a teachers’

conference. She protested, but also feared him. She told her mother once, but May told her, “You’re crazy.” Dawn and Shasta were her father’s, she said. She told Joel this, she said. Joel confronted her father, saying he wasn’t going to be raising his children. Her father beat Joel, she said. She said this was back when they were living on Caroline Street. In other interviews, she’d say the beating took place in Florida, just after Skipper Lee’s death. Linda Burton asked Pixie why her father would want to have sex with her. “To have more children,” she said. “Why not use birth control?” Burton asked. “My father didn’t believe in birth control,” she said. Eddie Jr. and Otis Sexton drove to Florida to retrieve the Dodge Challenger. When they returned to Canton in early February, Steve Ready hit a jackpot of evidence. The detective was running back and forth daily from the DHS

to interviews with Sexton siblings, to assisting Hillsborough homicide detectives to visits with Otis Sexton, who was coming up with one lead after another from conversations he was having with his displaced nieces and nephews. In the Challenger, Ready found credit and phone cards in the name of “Everett Sexton” and names he didn’t recognize.

There were pawnshop receipts from Florida. There were videotapes of the Sexton family, the Reno-Clinton tape, and one of the Sexton children gyrating in a house dance on Caroline Street. Ready found a mauve silk robe and a nightgown and a blue silk bra. He asked Sherri and Skipper about the lingerie. The siblings said Kimberly wore them.

Ready took them into evidence. They were inappropriate for a child of 9. Otis Sexton handed him some photographs he said he’d found in the Challenger. There were three of Eddie Lee Sexton and his daughter Kimberly, one with Lana. The girls were wearing wedding veils and sheer lace skirts. A Christmas tree was in the background. The patriarch stood with the girls as if he were taking their hands in marriage. It seemed to confirm a story Ready had been hearing from Sherri, Skipper, and Shelly Croto. Eddie Sexton married Sherri, Shelly, Lana, and Kimberly. In one account, he took daughters into the bedroom, saying, “This is where we’re going to have the honeymoon.”