House of Secrets (17 page)

There’s an element that it’s somehow their fault.” Family Court Judge Julie Edwards later wondered if all the of ficial secrecy in the juvenile court system somehow contributes.

“There certainly doesn’t need to be any more punishment for the victims. The intention is to spare the victim the embarrassment. But why should we? They’re not the perpetrators. They’ve done nothing wrong. Maybe in our effort to protect their identities, we encourage the stigma, by keeping it secret.” By late 1992, the secrets, the ones kept by social workers and policeman, were actually working to Ed Sexton’s advantage. If the public knew the detailed reports from the house on Caroline, it’s doubtful the good people of Stark County would have stood by while Ed Sexton was released. Judee Genetin later said she had called Captain Steve Zerby, stressing Sexton stay in jail.

She’d also dispatched a staff attorney to the hearing. Somehow, the children’s interests appeared to have been overlooked. Part of the condition for probation was that Sexton stay away from his wife and children. Zerby thought the plea deal gave the police more leverage.

Any contact and he could be arrested and jailed for contempt. “These hostage situations are not that uncommon in police work,” Zerby would later say. “In this case, nobody knew the depth of the situation, other than a few accusations we had.” Detective Glenn Goe attended the hearing. He recalled that he wanted to see Sexton get a jail sentence.

Though Machelle Sexton had recanted her charges, he said, the man had threatened DHS workers and cops. Robert Zadell, the part-time assistant prosecutor for the Massilon Law Department who handled the case, would maintain police never demanded jail time, nor did anyone from the DHS. When they didn’t have the witnesses for the felony, they cut a deal on the misdemeanors. It happens in American courts every day. “If somebody would have said jail, I would have said fine,”

Zadell later said. “But everyone who was there agreed.” Massilon Judge Eugene Fellmeth would later say he freed Sexton on the recommendation of the assistant prosecutor. “They’re the ones that investigate the case,”

he’d tell the Beacon Journal months later. “I never question them if I think it’s reasonable.” The final installment in the standoff story wouldn’t even be covered by most news agencies. Days after the hearing, Ed, May, Christopher, Kimberly, and Charles would take flight from Stark County and the State of Ohio. Teresa Boron did not subscribe to any of the local newspapers. She learned about the standoff from a Channel 5 report she saw the next day at the family machine shop. She watched Eddie Sexton, Jr. proclaiming his “good family.” One of the workers, a Jackson graduate, pointed at Eddie Jr.

on the screen and said, “He must have forgot about all those times he came to school with black eyes.” Yes, Teresa had seen black eyes. Only a month earlier, she was backing out of the shop driveway, heading to lunch, when she saw young men walking toward her in the car mirror, one of them very large.

“That’s Pixie’s brother, Willie,” she wondered out loud. “But who’s that with him, and what are they doing here?” When she turned she recognized him. God, it’s Joey. He had a scraggly beard, scraggly collar-length hair. Both of his eyes were black, blue, and purple, his cheeks and jaw swelled. She jumped out, screaming, “What the hell have they done to you? Who did this to you?” She glared at Willie Sexton.

“I’m all right,” Joey said shyly. Teresa began crying. “Who did this?”

she demanded, grabbing him by the shoulders. “I don’t know.” ‘(Ye*

you do. ” She turned back to Willie. “Who did this to him?”

“A cousin,”

Willie said. The story trickled out. Joey had called a paraplegic girlfriend of the cousin a “gimp,” so the cousin beat him up. She glared at Willie again. “What’s the matter with your family? Why don’t you just leave him alone?” Joey put his arms around her, hugging her. “I’m all right,” he kept saying. “I’m all right.” No, she thought. Joey would not call someone in a wheelchair a gimp.” She doubted he even knew the word. “Where was Stella?” she asked. “What did your wife do, sit there and watch?” He said Pixie had taken him to the hospital. “She was crying, too,” Joey said. Willie Sexton looked at her with earnest eyes. “I told him never to go around them again,”

he said, nodding. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever let anything happen to him again.” Now this, Teresa thought, looking at the TV again. The Sextons were making news. Joel Good showed up hours later at his grandparents’.

He was soaked to the skin, crying, and clutching a note. He said he’d walked 12 miles from Bolivar. Pixie had thrown him out of the car.

She was on her way to visit her father in jail, he said. “Why?” Lewis Barrick asked. Joey said he’d asked his wife what she wanted for Christmas. Pixie’s answer was in the note he still had in his hand.

Word for word it read, What I want for Christmas is for you to leave me and the girls to start our life over and you go your way. Then maybe my family can get along with out (sic) you. Right now no one can do +

say any thing you being there. Cause we don’t know what you are “going” to do in the future. Are (sic) marriage is over any way.

Which it has been for the past 2 months. Me + you don’t get along +

neither does the girls. About the baby you can see it if you want but as far as raising it I will raise it. I will raise it with the girls myselfœ And what ever (sic) you do don’t try any thing (sic). Or your family better not try any thing (sic). Because I have already talked to dad + his people + they said any trouble just call + they will help me. Love Pixie l The next day, Teresa Boron took her nephew to an attorney, telling him she’d be paying his legal bill. He’d decided to file for divorce. The entire family had suspected the marriage was in trouble, their troubles beginning not long after the pregnant Pixie began to show. Joel had lost his driver’s license after ruining his uninsured car in an accident. Pixie had been dropping Joel off to do laundry at his grandparents’, Pixie driving away in her mother’s car.

She’d leave Joey with Shasta, telling everyone she was taking Dawn to the doctor or running other errands. But often she didn’t return until late at night. Sometimes she didn’t come back at all. “Where does she go?” his family asked him. “I don’t know,” he’d say. Teresa’s brother Sam Barrick said one day, “I’ll bet she’s seeing her dad still. I’ll bet they still got something going on.” But despite the visit to the divorce attorney, Joel still defended Ed Sexton against the DHS. He seemed appalled anyone had even accused his father-in-law of sexual abuse. After Joel showed up at the Barricks’ with the letter, Teresa sped over to her parents’, picked him up, and brought him back to her house. It was Thanksgiving week. Soon Teresa’s mother was calling.

Pixie kept phoning, she told Teresa. Pixie said she and her brother Eddie Jr. were trying to raise bail money for their father. They needed Joel so they could get a security deposit back at a private campground in Bolivar called Bear Creek. Gladys Barrick wanted to know why they needed her grandson. Pixie said the camping spot was in Joel’s name because he was the only one with a state ID. “Don’t think I’m stupid, Stella,” Gladys shot back. “You don’t need a state ID.

You have a driver’s license.” At the time, nobody but the Sextons knew that in September, Ed Sexton had also used Joel Good’s name for camping permits at Portage Lakes. He’d also used Pixie’s name and the aliases “Franklin” and “Sarah” Sexton to skirt the 14-day camping limit there.

He was cited for alcohol in the campground and warned about litter.

When rangers warned Sexton for exceeding the limit, he moved to Bear Creek. After a couple of days, Joey wanted to go back to his grandparents’. Reluctantly, Teresa drove him back. -But by Thanksgiving weekend Teresa Boron was back in her car, looking for her nephew again. Her father called, explaining what happened. Pixie had spoken to Joey on the phone. Joey asked his grandfather if he could drop him off at Canton Center Mall, where he planned to have a talk with Pixie. A couple of hours later Joey had called from the mall.

“Would you all hate me if I went back with Stella?” he said. “I told him we didn’t hate him, we were just worried about him,” Lewis Barrick said. Nobody had heard from him in a couple of days. “I’m going to find him,” Teresa said. She recalled later, “I had a horrible feeling he was dead.” Teresa drove to his favorite haunts, then over to the house on Caroline Street. It looked dark and abandoned up on the hill.

The handless Jesus waited by the walk, its stone eyes vacant. She was too frightened to approach the door. She came back later with her husband.

They pounded on the door for nearly a minute. When it opened, Pixie poked her head out. Then Joel stepped out. “What are you doing?” his aunt asked. “We want to work it out,” he said. Pixie said she’d moved into the house. Her parents were gone. Teresa said, “If you want to work it out, fine. If you don’t work it out, I’ll be happy either way.” She looked right at him. “Don’t you ever do this again,” she said. “Don’t you ever leave and not tell anybody what you’re doing. I thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“Why?” he asked. “The way they beat you up,” she said. “They’ll kill you next time.” May Sexton would later recall her version of the events surrounding the police standoff. “Like I’ve told a lot of people, if they ever heard that Elvis song-you know, walk a mile in my shoes, then they’d know why. If they had the things said to them that were said to me, I didn’t want anybody to get hurt. There’s so many things that a woman can do now to get out of a situation like mine. I would have done it if I had known then. “I told Eddie he’d have to get out because I wanted my kids back.

Machelle came back, she and I sat down, and she told me about what her father did to her. She said Pixie said Dad had done the same thing to her, too. I said, Well, when was this all going on?” And she said, When he’d take us to the drugstore.”

“I was shocked, because Eddie didn’t let on anything like that was going on. Well, the girls didn’t either. And I couldn’t understand why, you know, they didn’t tell. Unless he was saying, I’m going to do this or that if you say anything.” I don’t know. I don’t know, you know, what was going on. But I believed her. “But he was sneaking in the house, yeah. And I told him what was gonna happen [with the DHS]

and he said, Nobody is going to find out.” I said, Well, what happened with the bigger ones isn’t going to happen with the little ones.”

“When I was on Caroline, when I got custody back of the kids, he was accusing me of having an affair with Pat Menicos, who was my attorney.

“I didn’t trust Eddie. I couldn’t trust him anymore. In September, he threatened me with a gun while Shelly was there. I called Jackson Township police and they came and I was telling them and they said, well, we can’t do anything about it, unless he was there and they seen something and all this stuff.

“The only reason Machelle recanted was because she was threatened by her dad. He asked her how long she was gonna stay with me and I said, She’s going to stay as long as she wants to stay. You don’t have anything to say about it.” He said, Well, she better be writing a statement that I didn’t do anything to her because I’m not going to have lies told on me.”

“Well, I just wanted to get away from him. Because I had Kim and Chris and I didn’t want to lose them over his stupidity, coming to the house all the time. He wanted me to meet him with the kids one night and I told him, I’m gonna call social services and have them come get the kids. You don’t deserve them.” He told me I was going to pay for it.

“So we packed some things in the van, Chris, Kim, and I, and I went to Elizabethtown, Kentucky. I was gonna get in touch with my brother to help me find a place to hide from Eddie. And I was planning on calling social services. But the van broke. Something happened to the brakes.

So I called my daughter Pixie and asked her to wire me some money. But she let her dad know where I was “Eddie Jr. brought Eddie down in his van. They fixed my van and that’s when we came back to Ohio, arguing all the way. He brought us back from Kentucky to a motel. And then Willie left in the morning, and when he came back, there were all kinds of wire and stuff in the back of the van. We went to the house and him and William started putting this wire and stuff all over the house.

“After they took Eddie to jail, I took off with the kids again. I moved to Eddie Jr.‘s house.

But Eddie Jr. wanted to get his father out of jail. He put his dad’s rifle to my head, like his dad did, and threatened me if I didn’t get him out of jail. He was drinking, and I was petrified. He wanted to sell my van for bail money. “I wanted to get away from there. So the kids and I went and stayed with this black lady. I don’t even remember her name. She’d been at our house before. It was the only place I could figure out to go because Pixie had my Pontiac. I was afraid of my son and afraid of Eddie. Eddie was always talking about, you know, he’s got friends here and he’s got friends there, and I was a nervous wreck “I didn’t even know there was a [Family Court] hearing. We stayed with the black lady about a week because we were there Thanksgiving. She fixed Thanksgiving dinner for the kids. “Then, Eddie [Sr.] come driving up in my Pontiac. And him and the black lady got into an argument. He owed her money, quite a bit, I guess. And he acted like he was gonna stay all night, but as soon as she went up to bed, that’s, you know, when he told us to get into the car. “We went to the Lincoln Motel and we stayed there. Pixie and Joel came there, something about switching the tires on the car. Eddie had a big envelope of money. I don’t know where he got it. But it was really full. He left the motel, and Chris and I were talking about if we could just get some of that money his dad had, what we were going to do. But when he came back, he had Eddie Jr.‘s motor home. I don’t know how he got it. But he had the boys put everything in the motor home. “And that’s when we left Ohio.” Augusta Townsend paced the small kitchen in her Canton inner city home, getting ready to tell a visitor about her encounters with the Sexton family and their two-week stay in her house after the police standoffinlate 1992. She was an athletic-looking, blunt-speaking black woman in her early 40s. She said she was on disability for an old steel plant injury. She said she also took care of her 87-year-old husband, a World War II vet she liked to call “Soldier Boy.” She liked to wear military uniforms herself, explaining that in her neighborhood, “You dress army-style, they’ll leave you alone.” Augusta Townsend said she’d known the Sexton family a couple of years, introduced through her cousin, who hung out with Eddie Jr. Eddie Sr. called himself a “preacher man.” When Townsend’s cousin’s girlfriend committed suicide in her house, Sexton blessed the home, saying, “All the demons are out.”