House of Secrets (44 page)

“Children’s Movies,” and “X-rated Movies.” Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Eddie Lee Sexton’s problems were Otis’s doing. “He’s getting his revenge,” Runyon said. “For all those hard feelings he had against Eddie years back.” Sixty miles up the Big Sandy River, in Ironton, some folks remembered quite a different Sexton family, and a different Eddie Lee Sexton in the years before he and John Runyon hit the road. Eighth Street was one of the town’s black blocks. Across the alley, Seventh Street was white. When the Sextons moved into the shotgun next door at 914 South Eighth, a black woman named Gwen Collins said the entire neighborhood “went to pot.” Now a retired social worker, Collins was 13 at the time. She still has vivid memories of the Sextons, particularly Eddie Lee. “All the time they were fighting and running out of the doors, and just acting crazy,” Collins recalled.

“The mother would run out of the door and fuss at them. Then they’d curse her out.” There were frequent visits by police cars. The Sextons had old cars and a chicken coop behind the house. The homestead bothered Collins’s mother, who was a cook, and her father, a shoe repairman. “Mother was very clean and neat,” she said. Maggie Sexton, just a young teen, often sat on the back porch alone, Collins recalled.

“She acted like she was scared of things, or just stared into space.”

Eddie, not even 10, sat on the porch, too. He played with kitchen matches incessantly. He’d sit there for hours, sticking one after another into the porch, gazing at each match as it burnt down to the floorboards. Eddie tormented animals and picked on vulnerable neighbors, Collins recalled. He threw things at fenced dogs. He’d lure small, harmless neighborhood mutts to his hand with a treat, then kick them viciously. He pinched the bottoms of young girls. When one of Collins’s sister married and became pregnant, he teased Gwen. “Ha, ha, your sister’s gonna have a baby,” he’d say, as if being pregnant was some kind of serious mistake.

Across the alley, Phillip Martin, now a food broker in his 50s, watched Eddie hang chickens on the clothesline and lop their heads off with a knife. It wasn’t necessarily farm chores, Gwen Collins recalled. “One day, Eddie came storming out of the house, mad, and went to the chicken coop,” she recalled. “He came out with a chicken by the head. Then he fetched a hammer and just beat that chicken to death in a rage. It sent chills down my spine.” Both Collins and Martin remembered an act of animal cruelty that alarmed the entire neighborhood. A widow on the corner kept a half dozen cats. They disappeared. Then all six showed up in the Sextons’ backyard, dead, strung up by their necks on the clothesline by Eddie Lee, 13 or 14 at the time. “It was very traumatic,” recalled Martin. “I was six years older than he was at the time and it was traumatic for me. But he thought it was the greatest thing in the world.”

“It darn near killed that old woman,” Collins recalled. “She loved those cats. They were her family.” Eddie appeared to face few consequences. Collins remembered the father often gone, or sick. “The mother always treated Eddie a little different than the rest of the kids. You often saw her with her arm around the boy, but not the other boys or girls.” When William Dewey Sexton died, the Sextons held visitation in their small house. Collins remembered peeking through the window, seeing them all sitting around his coffin. “It was so strange,” she said. When she learned of Sexton’s murder conviction, Collins thought of a connection. Eddie often hung around with Collins’s youngest sister, several years Eddie’s junior. The sister grew up with a host of emotional problems and psychopathic tendencies. She sent their father to an early grave, running him $50,000 in debt in forged credit cards in his name, then died of cancer at 42. It was as if they were some kind of soul mates, she said.

Collins remembered the words of her mother as she watched Eddie and his mischief from her kitchen window one day. “That boy is going to amount to nothin’,” she said. “Just look how devilish he is.” Three days after Sexton’s death sentence was finalized by Judge Bob Mitcham in Tampa, Otis Sexton was picketing outside the courthouse in downtown Canton again. He’d have a T-shirt made up. It read, STOP INCEST.

CHILDREN.

The day before, Stark County Prosecutor Robert D. Horowitz had announced he was not going to bring Eddie Lee Sexton back to Ohio to try him on sex abuse charges. He said it was a “security” issue. And a trial wouldn’t be worth the cost to the county. His critics cited cannibal Jeffery Dahmer, who had been brought back to nearby Summit County for trial, even after he’d been sentenced to 15 life terms in Milwaukee. Otis was fuming, as were Steve Ready and many social workers at the DHS. Stark County needed to make a statement against abuse and incest, they argued. But there were other concerns as well. In Tampa, prosecutor Jay Pruner was saying it was only “50-50” that Sexton’s conviction would hold up in appeals. Judge Mitcham had pushed the envelope by allowing Sexton’s bad acts into his murder trial. There was a real possibility Sexton could serve five or 10 years on the conspiracy charge, win his murder appeal, and be released just about the time the sex charges expired. Sheriff Bruce Umpleby went to bat for his detective, saying his department would be the one absorbing much of the costs. He wrote Horowitz a detailed memo. Still, the prosecutor didn’t budge. For Steve Ready, it was more than legalities.

It was personal. His solo, year-long investigation had produced more than a 100 counts of rape and sexual battery against the patriarch.

Now he’d been denied the closure, the satisfaction, every cop savored when a criminal was convicted in court. “The cost to the taxpayers?

What? A plane ticket?,” Ready later said. “Those kids had stood up finally and said, yeah, I was sexually abused by my father, and nothing has happened. And nothing is going to happen. It just isn’t right.”

For Otis Sexton the new scenario was entirely too reminiscent of what had happened in Jackson Township and Massilon. Now he’d heard from his many sources that May Sexton, who would be released from prison in a year, also might not be pursued on more sex-abuse charges. Otis’s advocacy bordered on obsession. He wrote compelling letters to local newspapers urging the passage of a new crime tax. He lobbied Ohio legislators. The state’s specific statute against incest had been repealed in 1974. Like many other states, incest fell under general sexual battery laws. He wrote Bill Clinton, and hung the president’s response proudly on his wall. He called reporters, stoking the Sexton story, tipping them off to new developments. He continued calling Steve Ready, offering new sibling revelations. He appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s daytime show and confronted his younger brother on a satellite feed from his Tampa jail, causing Eddie Lee to walk out. Local Stark Magazine would name him one of the county’s “20 most interesting people” before the year was done. His brother’s children kept him hopping. Sherri married a man she’d met in a psychiatric ward. She told him one day she couldn’t care for her incestuous child Christopher. “Every time I look at my son, I see my father,” she said.

Otis started the process to adopt the child. He talked to Willie Sexton by phone from Chattahootchee. He claimed in interviews that the DHS had ignored his pleas for action against the Sexton family in the 1980s, though records didn’t appear to support that. Relatives accused him of wanting to skim the siblings’ government support payments. He tried to sell the Sexton story for a book, saying he only wanted the money to set up a fund for therapy for the children. Some, including Ready, Shelly Croto, and Judge Genetin, began to question his motives.

At times he seemed like a benevolent version of his brother. Finally, he relented on the demands for the book money, when the writer, after nearly two years, prevailed with his argument that payment would only discredit the credibility of the work. “I’ve never profitted offthese kids and never would,” Otis Sexton later said. He estimated he’d lost $25,000 dealing with his brother’s legacy. Steve Ready said, “And what does it really matter why Otis Sexton did it? Without Otis Sexton, we would have never put an end to all of this.” On November 4, as he picketed with his wife Jackie, Eddie Jr., and Sherri, money was the issue. The taxpayer’s money. His leaflets were no longer handwritten or crude, but professionally typeset and biting with sarcasm. The protestors were demanding May Sexton be brought to trial on the sex charges Otis was hearing from his displaced nieces and nephews.

Prosecutor Horowitz was complaining about lack of money. So Otis Sexton, under the leaflet’s title “Stark County Prosecutor’s Office Dragging Feet?”, concluded, “If the lack of money is all that’s keeping her from being prosecuted, will you as a concerned citizen please drop off a dollar to the prosecutor’s office and join me in raising money to prosecute Estella May Sexton?” The office never reported whether it received any money. But that wasn’t the point. Said Otis Sexton later, “I was out to embarrass Bob Horowitz. Plain and simple. And I believe I did.” After nearly two years of grand jury subpoenas, months of spade work by assistant prosecutors, and various legal delays, a jury was finally impaneled on August 7, 1996. May Sexton was standing trial again. She’d face the same assistant prosecutors and have the same public defender, plus a co-counsel. But there were quite a few more charges this time, a herculean effort by attorneys Jonathan Baumoel and Kristine Rohrer Beard. In 1995, the matriarch had been talking about reuniting with her children upon her release from the Ohio Reformatory for Women at Marysville. She never drew a free breath. A grand jury had charged her with 31 counts, among them rape, qcomplicity to rape, child endangering, and gross sexual imposition.

She waited trial for nearly a year in the Stark County Jail. By August, the charges were split into two scheduled trials. As the first unfolded, the entire story might have seemed familiar, had it not been for the many disclosures of May’s direct involvement in her husband’s brutality and sexual obsessions. Kimberly, now 12, told the jury both parents “rubbed her private parts” as she slept with them in the master bedroom. She told of playing the Hershey Kisses game with her mother, being frenchkissed during her wedding ceremony, and being forced to model for her dad the bra and nightgown Steady Ready had retrieved from the Challenger motor home. She saw her mother fondle Christopher in the motor home in Florida, she told the jury. Then her mother gave her Nyquil and ordered her siblings out of the camper. Her mother and father then shaved her legs with a razor they kept in the Challenger’s safe. They both fondled her, then put the razor away, “until next time,” she said. The shaving episode appeared to be another family ritual, to which both Lana, now nearly 16, and Shelly Croto, 23, testified. Their mother helped their father shave their pubic areas.

The patriarch cut both the girls. “He put blood on my finger and made me sign a piece of paper and he said I was selling my soul to the devil,” Lana told the jury. Shelly testified she had a scar on her private parts she had no way of explaining to her husband. “They didn’t want us to grow up,” she told the jury. “They wanted us to be kids, stay babies.” Using diagrams of the house on Caroline, prosecutors portrayed the master bedroom as a virtual sexual torture chamber run by both parents. Shelly testified her mother rubbed her breasts in fake breast exams and sodomized her with her fingers under the guise of “looking for worms.” She’d also undergone a marriage ceremony with her father when she was 13, she said. Kimberly, Lana, and Christopher, all of them now in stable homes, held up well on the stand. Shelly, six months pregnant with twins, had thrown up in the bathroom before she took the stand, and also during a break. But it wasn’t morning sickness. “Seeing her,” she later said. “I just couldn’t handle it.” There were more revelations about play and punishment. Kids were forced to stand, holding pennies against walls with their noses for five hours at a time. The family dances were held every weekend in the summer, once a month during school. The children were allowed to drink beer during the parties, Christopher testified.

No account was more brutal than Lana’s revelation of being raped at age “8 or 9,” her mother a willing accomplice. Her parents took her into the master bedroom one night. “What’s the first thing that happened after they closed the doors?” prosecutor John Baumoel asked. “I asked them what they were going to do, and they said they were going to punish me,” Lana said. She couldn’t even remember for what. Her mom took off her shirt, her father her pants and panties. Her mother got on the bed, holding her arms down, Lana’s ankles propped over her own shoulders. Her father then raped her. “It hurt,” she said. Lana said, “I kept screaming but they wouldn’t listen to me.” Baumoel asked her what her mother said. “She just said this was for punishment,”

Lana said. Medical reports, school absentee records, and psychological reports supported many of the accounts. There also were far more subtle looks at the tattered fabric of America’s most dysfunctional family. Shelly identified herself to the jury as “Shelly Sexton,” not Shelly Croto, as she remained tied forever to the Sexton name. The prosecution introduced a letter May wrote to her husband, calling him “sweetheart.” Apparently it concerned Kimberly. It read, “Our little one is doing pretty good so far. I’m sure it will stay that way for its daddy. Our little girl has really straightened up a lot. She’s being a lot more grown up too since the secret was told to her.” It will stay that way. Lana was asked what she remembered good about her mom. “We always went camping together, swimming together, and it’s like when my dad is not there, my mom’s really nice, but when he’s there, she gets real mean.”

“Lana, how do you feel about your mom today?” Baumoel asked. “I just want to tell her I still loved her,” she said, using the past tense.

Then she added, “I am upset at what she done and let my dad do to us.”

Christopher, when asked why he never reported anything, said, “I thought it was a normal family.” Estella May Sexton’s defense consisted of telling a long story of abuse, unsuccessful escapes, and fist fights with her husband. She denied every bad act. She said her husband handcuffed her to the bed and sexually assaulted her. She’d never escaped because she was worried her husband would kill one of her kids, she said. Baumoel mocked what he called her “duo defense” in his closing argument. “First off, none of this happened … They all lied.