House of Secrets (20 page)

Skipper said. “Did what?” Colleen asked. “Killed a cat. We sat at this table, with lit candles.” Colleen turned, a little shocked. “You mean you did this in your house?” Skipper immediately dropped the subject. Then, the strange sleep behavior started. Bonnie could hear him all the way downstairs, while she was sleeping on the couch. She d hear him talking loudly in the dead of night. “Who’s he talking to up there?” she asked her mother. “God knows,” Colleen said. Sometimes the night talk turned traumatic, Skipper screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!

No, don’t! Stop it!” Colleen would rush into the bedroom. Finsd him sitting up in bed, his eyes glazed with terror. She’d calm him down, telling him it was just a nightmare. Something traumatic has happened to this boy, she thought. “Skipper, if there’s something wrong, you can tell me,” she asked him one night. “You know, I can help.” She asked him a dozen different ways a dozen different times, but he’d clam up as soon as he got his wits. Tuck took Skipper on the road for a couple trips, hauling cars. He showed him how to handle a big rig, how to handle the gears through the mountains, how to spot the crackpot drivers on the interstates. On one trip to Florida, they met May and Eddie at a restaurant for lunch. The Sextons said they were down there visiting relatives. As they talked over coffee, Tuck had a hard time believing Eddse Sexton was the same man who’d pulled a gun on his sister years ago. He was so laid back, so exceptionally polite. “Yes, ma’am,” he’d say to the waitress. “No, ma’am, that’s fine. He gave Skipper some spending money before they left. Tuck and Skipper had a few good talks in the truck. Skipper soaked up information, asking about the trucking business and ways to deal with life on the road. He said little about his family. But during one trip, Skipper mentioned “welfare” had taken some of his brothers and sisters from his house.

They were accusing his father of all sorts of lies, he said. When Tuck pressed for details, Skipper clammed up. When the school year started in September, Colleen became concerned. She called up May. “May, I think you need to come and get him,” she said. “Or, if he’s going to stay here, I need to get him registered for school.” The Sextons picked him up the next day. But two weeks later, Colleen returned from a trip to town and found Skipper Sexton sitting on her doorstep, a big bundle of clothes in his lap. He looked depressed. Tuck was on the road.

“Skipper, what’s going on?” she asked. “What’s wrong>” He wouldn’t say anything. “If you can’t tell me what’s going on, then you’re going to have to leave.”

“They’re gonna pick me up in a couple of days,” he said. Later, Colleen Carson would maintain she couldn’t get any information out of him. What happened a couple of days later, she described this way, The two of them were sitting in the living room watching TV

when a sheriff’s deputy and another man hnocked on the door. “Is Charles Sexton here?” the deputy asked. Colleen told him she knew the Sexton family, but she didn’t know any Charles Sexton. After they left, she turned to Skipper, saying, “Who’s Charles?”

“Whew,” he said, lighting a cigarette and exhaling. “That’s my real name.” Colleen later recalled being angry. “This is my house,” she told him. “There’s something going on.” She said she called Ohio and May Sexton picked up the phone. She demanding he be picked up at once.

“Whatever is going on, I don’t want to be in the middle of it,” she said she told her. Two of his brothers picked him up the next day.

Then, in the weeks around Christmas of 1992, the Sexton family began circling again. May Sexton called Colleen first, while Tuck was on the road. She said she was calling from a local motel. “We thought we’d stop by for a visit,” she said. “We’re kind of tired of Ohio.”

Colleen thought, which is it? Something was going on. May told her they might head out to Oklahoma. Then, the Carsons didn’t hear from them for a couple of weeks. May called again, saying they were back at a nearby motel on Highway 62. Tuck drove up to visit. Both May and Eddie were there. The family looked as if it were on the move. They had an old Buick Electra. Kimberly, Christopher, Skipper, and Willie were with them. They had a Dodge Challenger motor home. Eddie said they’d just been to Oklahoma, trying to document the family’s Indian roots. Tuck didn’t question it.

The way he understood the family tree, his grandfather was pure Wyandotte, his mother part Cherokee. One of his brothers, in fact, had legally changed his name to a tribal name. Eddie had mounds of paperwork he wanted to show Tuck. He’d been having trouble with welfare officials in Ohio, he said, but the matter was straightened out now. He laid out letters and documents with legal letterheads on the motel bed. He pointed to one, showing where the children had been released back to him. Tuck wanted to know what the problem was. Eddie said welfare officials in Ohio were accusing him of incest. His brother Otis was behind the whole thing. “Can you believe that?”

Eddie asked. “That I’d do something like that to my own children?”

“No, not really,”

Tuck said. “It would take a sick sonovabitch to do that.” Eddie wanted the dispute settled by the tribe, he said. But they hadn’t been successful in documenting their heritage in Oklahoma. He talked about going back to Ohio to research graveyards where May’s grandparents were buried. He also wanted to make a quick trip back to Canton to pick up his disability check, then get the rest of his kids. He was selling his house, he said. He asked Tuck if he knew where they could find a place to live locally. They needed a temporary place to stay until the deal went through. “I’ll check around,” Tuck said. As they visited, somehow the subject of guns came up. Tuck was a hunter. He appreciated a good shotgun when he saw one. Eddie said he’d brought his guns with him. He began pulling out cases and laying weapons on the bed, a 30-30 lever action rifle, a riot shotgun, a .357 magnum revolver, a .45 semi-automatic pistol, a big .44 magnum revolver, like the kind Dirty Harry had. “He had a goddamn arsenal,” Tuck would later recall. Later, Eddie demonstrated how his kids could handle firearms.

All the boys could break down the pistol. Then, little Kimberly, hardly 10, demonstrated, taking the handgun apart for inspection and cleaning, then assembling it. “Why have they got all those?” Colleen asked him later “They’re moving,” Tuck said. But certainly not in with them.

Later, the Sextons visited their house. Eddie sipped coffee and talking about how important it was to keep his family together. Kids need a parent’s love, he said. Bureaucrats had no business meddling in a family’s affairs. When he left he told Colleen, “We sure appreciate your hospitality, ma’am.” But later, Colleen would say there was something she didn’t like about Eddie Sexton. “His eyes are weird,”

she said Soon Tuck gave them a lead for a home rental, a place about 20

miles up the road, off Highway 62. Everyone called it Bushman’s Lake.

It was a summer resort community of mobile homes on the Ohio River. In the winter months, he’d heard they always had plenty of homes to rent.

The Sextons picked out a home, but it was mobile, a trailer on a lot with the Ohio River as its backyard. Soon the family grew considerably. The Carsons met Pixie, her husband Joel, and their three kids. When Colleen saw the setup she found it pretty amazing. That little two-bedroom trailer. Little children. Teenagers. Adults.

Eleven people in all. Later, she would say she felt sorry for them.

How were they going to get by with so little room? One of the few times Clyde Howard Scott, May Sexton’s father, had contact with his daughter May and her husband Ed was later documented in a 1982 FBI report. Clyde Scott called a Jackson Township arson investigator, claiming his son-in-law was an arsonist The Jackson investigator involved the FBI. The agent interviewed Scott, who was living in Indiana at the time, then filed his report, Scott advised that a couple years ago, he and his wife moved to Jeffersonville, Indiana, and have continued to live in this area since that time. About July of 1981, they were in Massilon, Ohio, visiting with their daughter … and Eddie Lee Sexton. At that time, Scott’s daughter and Sexton were residing at 8149 Caroline … While they were visiting, Sexton asked Scott if he would set fire to the residence. Sexton told Scott that he would give him $10,000 from the insurance money if he would set the fire. Sexton also told Scott that he wanted four or five of their children in the house at the time of the fire and for them to be burned up in the fire … During his conversation, Sexton told Scott that he gets chemicals out of Detroit, Michigan, through Mafia connections, and uses these chemicals and places them on the wiring in the center of the house.

Usually, he tries to put it on the wiring underneath a stairwell. The chemicals eat through the insulation of the wiring and cause an electrical fire. Sexton told him that by using these chemicals, there is no way to determine if a fire is an arson. Sexton also told Scott that he has set fires to his residences in the past and that he and his two nephews … set the fires. Sexton told Scott that he usually is out of the area at the time of the fires and makes sure someone can vouch for his presence at the time of the fires. Scott stated he was very upset when asked to do this by Sexton, and told him he wanted no part of anything like this. Scott stated he was not sure if Sexton was actually serious about burning the residence .. until he learned this house did burn approximately two to three months ago … It is his understanding that Sexton (and his wife) took their favorite children and went someplace and left the other children at the residence with the baby-sitter … Scott advised he feels that Sexton probably wanted the baby-sitter and the children to be in the residence at the time of the fire. That fire was May 30, 1982. Firemen had already determined the blaze began in the stairwell, spread upwards and caused nearly $50,000 in damage. The arson investigator never was able to prove how the fire began. Nor did he have the evidence to charge Eddie Lee Sexton. Ed and May Sexton were not home. A couple who’d been staying with the Sextons were baby-sitting. Four children were home at the time of the fire, including Machelle, Sherri, and Willie. They were not hurt. The baby-sitter had taken them out for ice cream moments after the fire began. She was running from crisis to crisis. She ran from her uncle Otis’s back to the house on Caroline, then ran to a friend in Bolivar’s, then to Pixie and Joel’s. Now she was living in a small mobile home in Bolivar. Along the way, Shelly had fallen in love at least twice. First to a married, 26-year-old park worker at a campground where her father stayed. He’d dropped her after she’d gotten pregnant. Now she was in love with a used book dealer twice her age. In the early months of 1993, Anne Greene was feeling less like a mother figure and more like someone who handed Machelle Sexton water and towels in a marathon race. “When she’d get in trouble, she’d call,”

Anne would later recall “We’d jump and put a temporary fix on the problem, then wait until next time.” But, Anne thought, why should that come as a surprise? After all their nail-painting chats together, Anne believed she had a pretty good family portrait. Ed Sexton, the patriarch, ruled his household with iron authority. But unlike the great fascist dictators, stability wasn’t the order of the day.

Interpersonal relationships among family members were entirely mercurial, Anne learned. They changed from day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment. Everyone courted Dad’s favor and Dad’s attention.

It was the prime motivation for ratting on each other. They tipped him when a sibling crossed the street without permission. They squealed when a brother or sister talked to a neighbor. They courted favor with each other and tried to build favors, particularly with Pixie, hoping for enough immunity to attempt a brave jaunt to the local convenience store. May Sexton was right in the middle of the competition among the girls, Shelly would explain. “My mother never supported me,” she said.

“She was always on his side. She loved to lie, especially on us older girls. She’d lie on the older girls to get his approval, too.” The mother and father also battled. Anne heard about yelling matches and flying dishes and ashtrays. The mother didn’t seem to fear getting in the father’s face. And once, during a fight between the parents, some of the kids jumped the father, injuring his arm. The next day, May was back on her husband’s side and the children were beaten for the brief rebellion. Ed Sexton also courted his children’s loyalty individually, Shelly ._ saying, “He’d tell each of them separately, I love you most.

You’re the one.” He’d tell Pixie and Sherri the same thing, then say, But you can’t say anything about it. It’s our secret.”’ There seemed to be a hazy pecking order, Skipper appeared to have some freedom.

Skipper was allowed to wrestle at school. Willie, the muscular, stuttering older brother was very restricted, the father often calling Willie “little dick.”

“Willie was always downgraded,” Shelly said. “He was always [called] a wimp. And my dad was always stronger. He’d always slap him around.

Make him feel small. And yet, Willie would do anything for him.” In his teens, Willie tried to run once, taking off on his bike. He didn’t get far. Shelly said her father took off in the family van and saw him riding. He jumped the curb with the van and pinned him against a brick wall, tearing the flesh on his arm.

Kimberly, the youngest, was coddled, which in the Sexton definition of the term, meant she got less “whupllings.” Christopher was Mother’s favorite. He was allowed to join the junior high school football team.

Matthe was the stealth sibling. He’d perfected to an art form the ability not to draw attention to himself. Lana was the Futuretron.

Her father rehearsed her on how to pose before cameras and the public appearances that never came. James was always the butt of jokes from both parents and siblings because he was slow. Sherri alternated between being a favorite and being in the doghouse, particularly when she refused to slow dance with her father at the weekend house dances.