House of Secrets (11 page)

“No corroborating evidence. It was her word against her father’s. And that was about it.” He’d also been struck by Machelle’s odd behavior in their first interview, Her fragmented accounts. Her inability to recall dates and times. Her absence of emotion. She’d given him no indication she’d be able to testify, and even if she did, he wasn’t sure she would be believable in court. “Frankly, I wasn’t convinced Machelle was telling the truth,” he added. “It wasn’t so much the allegation, because her details were consistent. Her behavior was just real odd. Was that behavior because she was abused, or because she was fabricating? I just wasn’t sure.” Wayne Welsh arrived at the department. He would sit in on the interview. Both men needed more details, Possible witnesses. Names of relatives. Hospital or police reports they could link to abuse. And this time, Goe wanted to get Machelle’s account on tape. Otis Sexton waited outside while Goe and Welsh took her into an interview room. It was a Monday afternoon.

They went over the family structure again, the nicknames. Machelle Sexton spoke in a quiet voice, but this time she was using more complete sentences and seemed to be responding thoughtfully to the questions the detective asked. Goe began asking about Pixie. Goe wanted to know how Machelle knew her children Dawn and Shasta were her father’s. How did she know Stella and Ed Sexton had sex? Machelle said before Dawn was born, she and her sister Sherri and her brother Matt began confiding in each other, wondering if her father and Pixie were involved sexually. One night they hatched a plan. Pixie, or Stella, was sleeping downstairs in the living room that night.

Machelle pretended to sleepwalk down the stairs. When she shuffled into the living room, she saw her father naked with her sister. “What were they doing?” Goe asked. “They were doing what husband and wife do,”

Machelle said. She reported what she saw to Sherri and Matt, but later she also suspected Sherri of having sex with her dad. One time Sherri and her father took a drive in the van. When they came back, her father’s zipper was halfway down and his shirt was hanging out of his pants. “Didn’t you ask Sherri?” Goe asked. “No,” Machelle said.

“Why not?”

“We never talked about each other. We’d only talk about our sister Stella.”

“Did you ever talk to Stella about what happened? “No.”

“Because she was Daddy’s girl. She’d tell him everything we said.

Machelle was convinced Dawn and Shasta were her father s because Pixie did not date until after she had the children. Then her [ father encouraged her to date Joel Good. Goe wondered how Pixie and Joel supported themselves. Pixie was on welfare, she said. “She has to turn the money over to my dad,” Machelle said. She thought he was saving it, but he was spending it. When they’d ask him for money, he made up an excuse. Goe wanted to know why she suspected Sherri’s son Christopher was her father’s. “She’s never had a boyfriend in her life,” Machelle said. Sherri also was pregnant once before, she said, but she miscarried. “Any other instances when your father had intercourse with a sibling?” Goe asked. “No, but I know he’s got other kids. He’s got other kids out there.” (,the Seketl her to elaborate. She named a relative on her mother’s side of the family.

She d had a little girl by her father, she said. Goe noted the name.

The detective moved on to the physical abuse. “I know there is a difference between abuse and discipline,” Goe said. “Is there a time you felt like you or your brothers and sisters were abused? “It depends how old you are,”

Machelle said matter-of-factly. “What do you mean by that?”

“If you’re sixteen you get the fist. If you’re under sixteen, you get the belt or the switch.”

“Did you ever get it?” Goe asked. “Oh yeah, I got it. Getting bad grades in school. When I was sixteen, I got the fist because I talked to a black person. Goe pressed for details. Her father sometimes used his trouser belt, often wielding the buckle end, she said. He also used a “kidney belt,” an eight-inchwide belt used by truckers and weightlifters for support. All the kids were beaten totally naked, she said, usually in her parents’ bedroom. The number of times they were hit depended on how they reacted. “How much you move is how much you get,” she said, saying it as if it were sacred law. [ One time, she said, her father produced a paddle drilled with holes and beat them simply to determine who could take the most punishment. I “He said it was an Army thing,” she said. [ Routinely, he’d line them up and beat them one after another, bending each over the living room couch. I “Did that happen a lot?” Goe asked. “Yeah.”

“Every day?”

“No, every week. Usually on weekends. Not on weekdays because of school.” They needed time to heal, she said. After punishment, they often had to stay upstairs. Machelle said the last birthday she’d been allowed to celebrate was at 13. Her father always had a reason to deny her a little party. The last five years, she said, he’d beaten her the night before. Sometimes their mother administered the naked whippings.

“To me, she got a thrill out of hitting my brothers,” Machelle said “Because when she started, she couldn’t stop.” During the bedroom beatings, she said, other siblings would huddle outside the door and listen, counting the lashes. One time, they counted Skipper getting 49. That was the night he’d been accused of fondling Lana, Dad’s Angel.

Mother also attacked him, she said choking him, leaving his neck swollen and marked. Goe asked, did she witness this? “I don’t know, because I wasn’t in the bedroom,” Machelle said. “But I could hear her.

My mother was making cat calls and everything …” She ran out of words trying to describe her mother’s guttural sounds. After the beating, she said, Skipper was locked in a closet until the next day.

“When he let him out, my dad said, It hurt me more than it hurt you to do that to you, Skipper. But you know how it stands if anybody touches one of the girls.”

” Goe asked, “Was that something that happened? Were kids locked in the closet for a period of time?”

“Just that one night.”

“Has that ever happened to you?”

“Yeah. I bought some cards. Me and Sherri went to the store with my mom and we bought some cards. My mom didn’t see us get them. We came home. Started playing. Got caught. “You were locked in the closet?”

“Yeah. He put roach spray in there.”

“In the closet?” She said her father sprayed it under the door.

She passed out. Her mother took her out, but then her father found out. “He beat my mom and put me back in,” she said. Goe wondered if she’d ever been hospitalized for inuries. No, she said, adding later that none of the children had. Her father received all the medical attention, she said. He took powerful painellers such as Darvocet and Percodan for his back. She was suspicious of his back problems. He climbed ladders painting. She added that he put Eddie Jr., Patrick, Willie, and PDrie to work in his painting business, too. “Where does he work, out of the house?” Goe asked. Where s his office?”

“He calls it under the table,” Machelle said. “So is he disabled?”

“My dad can move faster than I can,” she said. Machelle said her father also told everyone he had muscular dystrophy. She’d heard him say he had terminal cancer. “These charity people came out and looked, she recalled. They remodeled the house for my dad,” she said.

Foundations gave him a hospital bed, a wheelchair, and completely refurbished the master bathroom with new fixtures. “Is he on disability?”

“My mom says he is.” Machelle explained how her father became more vigilant after DHS investigated the marks on Sherri’s legs three years ago. He made all the children keep diaries. They had to list all their activities and contacts in school. She said her father paid them for telling on each other. “I wasn’t a snitch,” she said. “I knew a lot, but I never told. Goe wanted to go over Machelle’s rape in the van again. She began by recounting the argument they had before he assaulted her. “My dad asked, did you see anything in the basement?

she began. “Then he started getting madder and madder. Goe made a note. He hadn’t heard anything about the basement before. He’d follow up later. For now, he wanted to establish the statutory elements of first degree rape. She stuttered through the details. Yes, he’d penetrated her with his penis. Yes, she’d asked him to stop. Yes, it was against her will.

Afterwards, she added that he’d taken her to a gas station and told her, “Clean yourself up.” When they got home, she ran upstairs. Her father complained to her mother that she’d started her period. Goe wondered if she’d had any previous sexual contact with her father. She told him when she was twelve he took her for a ride in the car, her first with her father. She was excited “We got halfway there and he said, Have you ever had a secret? Can you keep a secret?” I said, yes.

Do you know about sex?” I said, no. Do you want me to teach you?” I said, I don’t know.” They stopped by the house on Caroline to pick up the mail. At the time, they were living elsewhere while the house was being repaired after a fire. He took her inside. “He tried,” she said.

“But I was too small.” Machelle grew silent. They took a five-minute break. When Goe turned the tape back on, he switched the subject to house fires. Machelle remembered a fire when she was 12. They were being sat by a “cousin.” As they left the house, the cousin tossed a cigarette into the house through a window. “His name?”

“I don’t know his name,” she said. “His wife’s name was Rose I remember that.”

“There was another fire after that?” Goe asked “There were a lot of fires. I don’t remember how many there were. ” She was short on details, but she remembered what her father said after the fire when she was 12. “Dad told us to keep our mouths shut,” she said. “But you weren’t supposed to tell the firemen>” She nodded. Goe backtracked to the pregnancies. He wondered about Machelle’s mother. Was she aware of what was going on? She answered, “Me and Sherri were talking about my sister having the kids with my dad, and I said, what does Mom think?

And Sherri said Mom knows what’s going on but she’s too scared to say anything.”

“Why?”

“Because my dad’s a big guy. I don’t know, all of us are scared of my dad.” She told Goe how her father put a shotgun to her mother’s head.

One time, when he was beating their mother, he threw her against the sink, then the children came to her aide. “I bit his leg and Sherri got his arm and broke his arm, trying to get him off my mom,” she said.

“Then, after that, I got in trouble, because they got back together.

Me and Sherri did. So we got beat for even getting involved. I got in trouble for helping my mom. An then when we got in trouble, she didn’t stand up for us. “Do you know why she puts up with it?”

“I don’t know,” Machelle said. Goe moved back to Machelle’s rape.

“You mentioned he was talking about something you’d seen in the basement,” Goe said. “What was that about? She said she was walking up the basement steps after getting some laundry soap. She could see into the basement garage from a small “My dad and Eddie was down there.

I dropped the And ran upstairs.”

“What did you see?”

“I don’t know specifically if it was alive or if it was dead. But I thought I’d seen something in the back of the car. That was it. That s all it was all about.”

“What is it you think you saw? Did you have an idea. “Yeah, I had a pretty good idea. But I’m not going to say. “You thought you saw a body?” Goe asked. She nodded. “What kind?”

“Human.”

“Who was there beside your dad?”

“Eddie.” She nodded. “Your brother?”

“Did your dad explain anything as to what you saw. “He said it was none of my business. In their talk in the van, she said, her father said if she said anything, she wouldn’t go to college. Then he raped her, apparently to punctuate his words. As they talked more, it became clear that in the world of the Sexton children, a simple telephone was forbidden fruit. They all wanted to phone friends, Machelle said, but to do so they had to outwit their dad. There was a phone in his bedroom and one in the hall.

Repeatedly through the day, her father would hit the redial button, to see if they’d made any calls. They found a way to fool him. They’d call a friend, then afterwards call the weather or the time. He finally stopped them by buying a Radio Shack device that taped calls any time an extension picked up. He kept the recorder in his bedroom closet. “Oh, he was smart,” Machelle said, her eyes wide with awe.

Wayne Welsh asked a question. “When was it you decided you didn’t want to live like this anymore?”

“When I was fifteen and realized this wasn’t normal,” Machelle said.

“I started going to high school and saw what everybody else was doing and it didn’t click.” She said she’d run away after her 18th birthday and stayed with a friend from school for a few days. But her dad found her and brought her home. “Since you left the house have you had any contact with your mom or dad?” Goe asked.

“No,” she said. “But I had respect. I sent a birthday card to my mom.

I sent my brothers birthday cards.” She said she called her father once, curious for family news. “I started freaking out and couldn’t handle it,” she said. She’d contacted Eddie Jr. “I started telling Eddie what was really going on in the house. I didn’t know he was passing it to my dad. After I found that, well, they’re after me now.”

“How do you know he was passing it on?” Goe asked. “I started getting phone calls in the hospital from him, saying, ‘You’re no longer my sister. So therefore I have no respect for you. I’m going to finish you off.” And my sister Sherri told me she no longer wanted to be my sister because all the kids would be taken from my dad and it was all my fault. She said I opened my mouth and said things I shouldn’t have said.” Welsh told her some of the other kids were starting to disclose.