House of Secrets (38 page)

for his ability to rig a blaze. A retired Canton fire investigator named Dave Demeo later recalled his dealings with the clan. He said Eddie Lee Sexton appeared to have burned his way up the real estate market, eventually making enough profit to buy his Jackson Township home. “They made a living out of the profits from insurance companies, Demeo later recalled. He believed Sexton was working a particularly crafty scam. Sexton would sell slum properties he owned on land contract at inflated prices to relatives, then burn the homes and get a pay-off well over the home’s value. But Demeo could never directly link Eddie Lee Sexton to the fires. He was always out of town when they occurred. In the rubble of two homes, Demeo found rigged heat-producing wires and a fish aquarium heater, ways to delay ignition so the arsonist could distance himself from the scene. A 1977 fire on Fifth Street, three years before they bought the house on Caroline, paid off $16,000. Another Fifth Street landlord later recalled Sexton chatting with him after the fire.

Sexton told him if he ever wanted to start a fire, he knew how to do it. You put a candle on a paper plate, he said, placing it in the basement. “He said that he would pile a bunch of clothes under the stairwell and the candle would burn down, light the plate and then the clothes,” the landlord recalled. “Then it would go right up the stairwell.” It wasn’t long before Jack Espinosa, Hillsborough’s police spokesman and a former stand-up comic in Cuba, was proposing a new test question for the local academy, “What is the one crime that Eddie Lee Sexton did not commit? Answer, petty theft.” In Tampa, Willie Sexton kept requesting interviews with Willette, despite the advice not to do so from his attorney, Nick Sinardi. He changed his story, saying his father had held a 9 mm to his head and ordered him to kill Joel. Then he threw the gun away in the woods behind Campsite Number 18.

Willette, Willie, and a crew with metal detectors combed the site for a day, but found nothing. Then Willie admitted he’d lied. In Canton, the bizarre stories from siblings within the house on Caroline increased in intensity. Patrick Sexton, the oldest halfbrother, said, “I’m embarrassed to have the name Sexton.” He said he kept his distance from the family after he moved out of the house. He told Willette his father used morphine and syringes for his back pain. His father had predicted the problems with social services would one day have a deadly result. “Somebody is going to get killed before this is over,” his father said. Skipper told Willette about his father instructing them in seances and animal sacrifices, but denied he’d ever seen an actual sacrifice. He revealed another punishment. One time his father made a couple of boys rub Ben Gay on their penises after accusing them of putting the ointment on a sister’s jacket. May Sexton, in a jail interview, said her husband was tougher on the boys than the girls, though he did whip the girls. She denied any cult activity. She read the Bible to her children, she said. Christopher Sexton said he’d heard a conversation between his father, Willie, and Pixie about getting rid of Joel, apparently on the road to Ohio.

Willie said, “We’ll have to get rid of Joel.” His father asked Pixie what she thought of that. Pixie said, “I don’t care.” Christopher was uncomfortable talking about life in the house on Caroline, particularly about sex. He said his father hadn’t “messed with me since I was a teenager.” Willette asked, “What does mess with you mean?”

Christopher touched his pubic area and said, “Up the backside.” Shelly Croto told her entire story, laying out the punishments and abuse now being confirmed by siblings. Shelly remembered seances and her father “calling a spirit” out of Sherri’s dead cat on the table. But more than dead animals were involved in the rituals, she said. Her mother had three or four miscarriages that she could remember. After one, she said a fetus “as big as a notebook” was boiled by her mother and eaten by the family. A hand-holding seance preceded the dinner. Her father said he’d call the spirit out of the fetus and it would speak out of one of the kids. “I became sick,” she said. Then, she didn’t want to talk about the incident anymore. On May 3, Willette had a long interview with James Sexton in the DHS offices in Canton. He said his father allowed them to have only one friend, but no visitors. He prohibited them from using deodorant. They could bathe only once every two weeks. James said his father cast Satanic spells on them, using a Satanic bible and praying in “weird” foreign words. He had an occult library, a crystal ball, and a Ouija board. He had a “romance” shelf of pornography. He showed them hard-core porn films. James’s interview also centered around dead fetuses. He claimed his father took his mother’s miscarriages and chopped them up, cooked them, and served them on the dinner table. He served one’s bones to a dog. He said his father had killed a baby in the 1970s and buried it under the basement at the family’s former home on Oxford Street. He’d seen him kill a cat, chop its head off, and hang it on a cross. James said, “If I didn’t do what Dad wanted me to do, he would tell the kids that he would kill us and make us sleep with the dead baby.” Willette said, “James, you understand here that I need you to tell the truth.” His siblings had told him nothing about this, Willette told him. James said that was because the rest of the siblings liked his mom and dad.

James told of his father putting a rifle to Willie’s head and demanding secrecy about the family. His mother even told him she’d had miscarriages, he added. “What did the baby taste like?” Willette asked. “Chicken,” James said, adding he couldn’t eat poultry to this day. James recited a litany of sexual acts. He said he’d been ordered to perform fellatio on his father at age 6. His father drew a face on his stomach and made him suck his belly. He, Matthe and Skipper had to perform fellatio on each other. He said Skipper told him they could do anyiing as long as they didn’t get semen on the floor. He’d been sodomized repeatedly by Skipper. His father would give the boys a dollar if they’d suck on their mother’s breasts. His father made James “shake” his penis until “stuff came out.” He saw Skipper make Tesna suck on his penis while he looked like “the Statue of Liberty.” He quoted his father as saying, “It’s all within the law. It’s natural.”

His father was also a thief, James said. He said the patriarch didn’t mind the children stealing from convenience stores. He’s seen his father take a tent from a campground. His father stole brass eagles out of a house. (Later listed as a stolen property on Sexton’s own insurance claim.) His father ripped off a boat motor, then ditched it in the family pond. Before the session ended, Willette probed for a positive experience. He asked James what his best memory was. James said, “Any day we didn’t get beat.” The day before, attorney Jay Pruner visited the house on Caroline Street. It was unlocked. He and Steve Ready searched for a Satanic bible, but found none. Pruner, too, heard all the stories about dead babies and miscarriages fromiames, and later Shelly. The prosecutor was going through a familiar syndrome common to everyone who investigated the Sexton case. First disbelief, then entertaining the possibility, then discovery of facts that tended to support the children’s claims. For several nights he hashed out the details with Steve Ready, Mike Willette, and Linda Burton over drinks in Canton bars. Ready began analyzing the ages of the Sexton children.

Between Eddie Jr. and Machelle, May Sexton had five births, one child every year. She missed a year, then had Skipper, James, and Matthew in one-year successions. Christopher, Lana, and Kimberly’s births were spread out over five years. Then she stopped having babies in 1984

when she was 37, still at child-bearing age. Pixie Good later said, “She was always having babies. And she was always saying she was pregnant.” As she had on the fugitive flight. “We know she has a baby every year,” Ready said. “But what happened in those years she missed?

Why did she just stop? Did she stop, or were there miscarriages?” By the evening of May 5, the date of James’s interview, Pruner was spent.

He’d met with Judee Genetin and prosecutors for Stark County. There had been interviews with two other Sexton siblings and with Augusta Townsend, the woman who’d housed the Sextons after the standoff.

Pruner, Willette, and Burton had one more stop. The family of Joel Good was waiting at Sam Barrick’s house in Bolivar. The prosecutor had talked to them on the phone several times, but he wasn’t leaving Canton without explaining to them face-to-face why Pixie Good had been allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. Half a mile from Sam Barrick’s hilltop ranch house in the rolling hills outside Bolivar, Willette pulled out in front of a semi he claimed he didn’t see. The big rig narrowly missed them. Jay Pruner should have seen it as an omen of what was waiting for him inside. They all crowded around the dining room table. Sam and Sue Barrick, Teresa and Chuck Boron, Lewis and Gladys Barrick, Aunt Velva. Joel’s brother Danny was there, and nieces and nephews. There were at least a dozen people. Pruner had expected four or five.

For an hour and a half they all shot questions at the attorney. They were all upset, and they hadn’t even heard yet about the stories of their loved one being abused with hot sauce, being beaten with a sweeper cord, being burned with cigarettes. “Why did you make a deal with Pixie?”

“You saw her threatening letter to Joey, didn’t you?”

“Why isn’t Pixie charged with Joel’s murder?” He tried to explain the law, the court rules. They couldn’t put Eddie Lee and Pixie away with Willie’s testimony. Pruner said, “We don’t like using Pixie. We know what she is.”

“What would it take to charge Pixie?” Teresa Boron asked. “Look,”

Pruner said. “We’ve cut our deal.” They had Eddie Lee Sexton on the defensive now, he said. Attorneys for Eddie and Willie had not sought a speedy trial because they needed time to build a defense. The case was expected to go before a jury by fall. A flurry of questions came from all directions. Teresa Boron waited for a moment of silence, then said it. “You don’t understand. Pixie was the one who brought him into the family. But for Pixie, Joey would still be alive.” Pruner said they’d be seeking the death penalty for Eddie Lee Sexton. But there was no way to convince them they would get justice.

In fact, that was not a guarantee he could make. Under another set of court rules, there was a very real possibility that many of the revelations by the Sexton kids would never be heard by a jury. Without the stories, they’d have difficulty proving Sexton’s control and premeditation. From day one, the strategy had been a calculated gamble. As the family shot more questions, Jay Pruner did not tell anyone that. Tampa attorney Rick Terrana said of his new client, “I can tell you this. I have dealt with all types. Some I’ve liked a lot.

Some I’ve disliked a great deal. From an attorney-client perspective, he was one of the most cooperative, pleasurable clients I’ve ever had.

And he’s very intelligent. Eddie Lee Sexton is no dummy.” Terrana, a 33-year-old former public defender, was homegrown Tampa, a product of the city’s Italian community, growing up on the bay. Tall, dark, and shrewd, Terrana dressed meticulously and savored hand-rolled double coronas. He tried about 20 major felony cases a year. Eight had been capital cases, but the attorney had yet to have a jury send one of his clients to death row. On weekends, he made Cabernet wine he dubbed “Italian moonshine” and donned camo to pursue Florida’s wily deer herd as a skilled bow hunter. Terrana and Willie Sexton’s Tampa attorney Nick Sinardi also were making trips to Canton, Ohio. Florida has one of the most liberal discovery laws in the country. Defense attorneys not only receive copies of all the evidence gathered by the state, they can put potential witnesses under oath and build their own record in sworn depositions. In late summer, the attorneys deposed the Sexton family, park rangers, homicide detectives, and the state’s chief accuser, Estella “Pixie” Good. A plausible second theory of the murder developed. Joel Good’s death was not ordered by Eddie Lee Sexton, Terrana believed the evidence showed. It was planned by Pixie and Willie, who were incestuous lovers. Willie had told police in his video interview that Pixie had set her husband up. Christopher had said she “didn’t care” when the murder plot was discussed during an Ohio trip.

There appeared to be no independent corroboration from other siblings that Sexton had ordered Good’s murder. That was Pixie’s version. There were the puncture marks on Good’s hand and talk from Willie at the campsite that Pixie had “stabbed” Joel. By many accounts, Sexton showed surprise and concern when he was told of the murder. Pixie had driven to buy the shovel, and participated in the cover-up well after her parents’ arrest. The depositions only fortified the theory.

Siblings told of the alleged plot to kill Joel for insurance, the couple’s frequent arguments, and the outright torture of Good in Moon Lake and Shady Hills. Terrana later recalled, “We also had endless testimony on how well Joel and Eddie got along. It was never controverted by anyone-except Pixie.” Terrana took Pixie’s testimony in three lengthy depositions. She distanced herself from every bad act or premeditation. She denied accusing Joel of sodomy, or torturing him. She denied any complicity in the plot of kidnap camper Ray Hesser, also the subject of depositions. She admitted Joel had yelled “Ed” as Willie attacked. In her last deposition she sounded as if she might be covering for Willie when his attorney Nick Sinardi took over the questioning. “Did you ever warn Joel that your father may have been considering taking him out?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t think he was going to actually do it.” In that August deposition and a previous one in July, Pixie said when she took her dad into the woods Joel still was alive. Her father kicked his leg, she said. Joel moved. “Now finish him off,” she quoted her father as saying. Standing near the body, Willie was saying he didn’t intend to hurt Joel, she said. Willie apologized a short time later, she recalled. “He just told me he was sorry for it,” Pixie said. “What did you tell him?”