House of Secrets (21 page)

Estella “Pixie” Sexton, the oldest girl, was her dad’s eyes and ears, and perhaps his most regular sexual partner. She was their primary baby-sitter when they were young. She barked orders with her father’s authority and had a direct pipeline to the patriarch. “If I got mad at Pixie, she’d try to get me in trouble in any way she could,” Shelly said. Shelly had seen one of their first sexual encounters on the couch, but didn’t believe Pixie remained a victim of rape. She was in love with her father, she said. “She had gotten really involved. She wouldn’t talk about it. It’s just the way she acted, always wanting to be with him, not wanting to date anybody, then finally being interested in Joel. Because she knew she could control Joel. He was very mellow.”

In the fall, after leaving Otis’s, Shelly had accompanied her mother on a visit to her father at the campground. Pixie and Joel were there.

Shelly talked to Joel alone. He said he’d had sex with Pixie when they first got married, but now she’d cut him off. “He asked me what was wrong with Pixie, why didn’t she want to have sexual intercourse. We were good friends. He could talk to me. I told him I didn’t know ..

. I didn’t want to get involved in I that area. I said to keep trying.

I knew in the back of my mind it was because of my dad …” One day, Shelly watched Pixie’s children, so Joel and Pixie could have the camper alone. Later, Joel emerged smiling, saying they’d made love.

Shelly heard from siblings that her father had ordered the beating of Joel, though she didn’t know the reason. His father also barked orders at him. Joel told her he didn’t like his father-in-law. But, “Joel was just like Willie. More or less what you told him to do, he would do to please anybody. He wanted to be wanted.” Other revelations Anne found even more disturbing. She heard of animal torture, the occult, and some kind of distorted Christianity Ed Sexton apparently preached.

Shelly said her father had killed the only pet she ever had, a rabbit.

He called to her from outside her bedroom window and slit its throat as she watched. Then bolted up the stairs to torment her with it, its severed head and cape draped over his hand like a puppet. She was forced to eat it with the rest of the family for dinner that same night. Ed Sexton held candlelit seances around the dining room table.

Her father’s mother would talk through her brother Eddie Jr. in a strange voice, Machelle said. Ed Sexton claimed to be a mystical figure. He read Bible passages and spun his own interpretations. He seemed to be operating from some kind of Pentecostal foundation, which included speaking in tongues. Anne heard about the Futuretrons. “He said he was the person with special powers because of the mark on his hand,” Shelly said. He was both God and Satan. He would have children look in his eyes until they saw Lucifer. He claimed he could take their souls with him, that he knew all their thoughts. Anne wondered if Ed Sexton really believed that, or was just using it to forge fear and control. Shelly told her about going to a Canton cemetery with her father when she was 15. He brought her brother Willie, then 17, along.

He found a newly dug grave. She had to crawl into it and pull a big piece of cardboard over her. The idea was to test her courage. She stayed in the hole a half hour while he made weird noises nearby.

Willie, frightened, refused. Her father teased him for days. No wonder Shelly couldn’t seem to form responsible, permanent relationships, Anne thought. They were as foreign to her as life in a distant galaxy.

Shelly told her how she met her new boyfriend, the book dealer. His name was David Croto. His family owned a vintage bookstore near Bolivar. He dealt in wholesale books and eventually would open a vintage comic and collectibles shop in Canton Center Mall. When Shelly was living with Pixie and Joel, Croto’s grown daughters were living in an apartment upstairs. Shelly said her father ordered Pixie to put all of Shelly’s belongings in the hall. She knocked on the door of Croto’s daughters. They called their dad. He offered to let her stay in a vacant mobile home he had in town. Then his daughter and his ex-wife offered Shelly $20 to go out with him. He’d been divorced 12 years.

They wanted her to report back to see what he was like on a date. They went to the Athens Restaurant in Canton for breakfast. A couple of days later, she soon told him she was pregnant by the park worker. He didn’t seem to care. “On our first date I should have realized I should marry this guy,” Shelly would say. It didn’t take long. Shelly and Dave went to the February 18 auction at the house on Caroline Street.

They bought her parents’ refrigerator, the one that had been kept padlocked in Eddie and May Sexton’s room. They would be married on Anne Greene’s birthday in the month of June. One more police report was filed in Jackson Township regarding the Sexton family, this time by Eddie Jr.‘s wife, Daniela Sexton, on February 24, 1993. Daniela told police she and her husband had stopped at the house on Caroline Street to check the house and pick up a couch they’d bought at the auction.

Joel and Pixie Good came in just after they arrived. Soon she was on the phone with her dad. Then she ordered Daniela and Eddie Jr. out of the house. They all went outside. Pixie went to her car. When she emerged she was holding a .357 magnum revolver. She told them she’d shoot them if they didn’t get in their car and leave. s The rules changed, many who left in the Challenger motor home would later recall.

For years the boys rarely left his sight. Now Skipper and Willie and Christopher had the Challenger to themselves when their parents booked into motels. It was in mint condition. A dinette in the back converted into four bunk beds. There was another bed above the driver’s cab, and a couch behind the driver became a full double mattress. There was a kitchenette and small bathroom. Their father hung a crucifix over the driver’s seat when they left. It would hang for the entire trip. Years ago, Skipper’s father slashed the tires of his bike for riding without permission. Now his parents said they’d be giving him the Pontiac, just as soon as things settled down. “He did a 360,” Skipper said. “I mean, he was a new man.” They began calling him Pops, or “Didi,” something little Dawn, or Cockroach, had come up with before they left. Before their father had demanded “Dad.” He no longer yelled at their mother. They were walking hand and hand, kissing, gazing into each other’s eyes. “Like two couples out of a movie,” Skipper said. May Sexton also put her thoughts about her husband in words. In October, while he was out of the house, she’d sent him a Sweetest Day card, signing, “I’ll always love you, Sweetheart .. Love always, May.” And, before they left for Indiana, she’d told Ed Sexton she was pregnant, writing, “Our new one is doing pretty good .. I hope you are truly happy about it, not just saying you are because we just goofed up and caught an egg.” She promised she would love him “even after death.” If she died before he did, she promised to come back “and cut something off of you” if he ended up with anyone else. When they drove to Oklahoma, Ed Sexton didn’t announce their destination until they’d crossed a couple of state lines. They’d log some 1,600 miles on the motor home with Ed or Willie Sexton driving. The patriarch’s constitution seemed nourished by the highway. For years Ed Sexton had been taking pain medications.

Sometimes he administered drugs to himself with a syringe. On the road, they saw him popping small white pills. Skipper recalled, “I said, Where the fuck we going?” He told us, Oklahoma. I said, What the fuck are we going to Oklahoma for?” He said he was going to get us all put on an Indian reservation. I said, I never seen an Indian with blue eyes.”

Skipper, Shelly, and Matt were the only kids with blue eyes. His mother certainly could pass for an Indian. “And my dad has black eyes.

So I said, What am I, the milkman’s or something?”

” His father laughed hard, saying, “Probably so.” Before the profanity and irreverence would have meant the belt. Now the whippings had stopped. The only one who got bossed around now was Willie. If he didn’t follow orders, he got the fist. “Me, Willie, and Chris, we was close,” Skipper recalled. “Bossing Willie, that got me mad. I hate when somebody does that. And Willie would do it. Cause he’s slow.

That’s what ticks me off.” The boys were together, and they were Army.

They had regulation pants, shirts, jackets, belts, and hats. That wouldn’t be the only combat gear their father would buy. In the Challenger, he had a catalogue subtitled, “A complete guide to 2,000

military surplus stores in the United States and 11 foreign countries.”

He told them stories about Airborne and Special Forces and the Rangers. At one time or another, he was a member of all three, he said. “All the way!” That was the Airborne motto. That included the way a soldier had to keep his uniform. He taught them how to spit-shine their boots and pass inspection. He gave two of them new ages. Chris, 16, was supposed to be 19. Skipper, nearly 18, was supposed to be 20. Willie looked all of his 22 years. “We was supposed to act like we was in the military, just out of the military and going home,” Skipper explained. “We played it off and everybody believed us. People stupid enough to look at a 16year-old and believe he was just out of the Army.” The boys remembered staying at a motel in Oklahoma. Sexton was looking for Indian records for his and May’s family. Exactly where would remain unclear. The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma was just outside Tulsa. There was no Cherokee reservation in the state, only tribal services such as housing, travel, and education assistance. Wyandotte, Oklahoma, was the of ficial home of the federally recognized Wyandotte Tribe. Both tribes had migrated west in the 1700s, the Cherokees from North Carolina, the Wyandottes from Ontario, through Michigan and Ohio and finally the West. May Sexton later couldn’t pinpoint where the research was done. “He wanted to find my heritage number, when the different tribes would give those numbers years ago, and he wanted to find out where mine was. And he thought if he proved he was Indian then he wouldn’t have to go to court in Ohio. But the only trouble, everybody says he’s not Indian, but I don’t know … And I couldn’t get any information that he was. But he was asking about my relatives, not his, so I don’t know.” During another interview, May also would recall she doubted her husband was Native American. “He kept calling me a dirty Indian… because I wouldn’t celebrate Columbus Day.”

Across from the motel was a buffalo ranch and a gift shop. The boys stayed in the camper, the parents and Kimberly in the motel room. The boys roamed the street at night. Sometimes looking for trouble. “We’d go out every night trying to derail trains and shit,” Skipper said.

When they left Oklahoma, his father didn’t leave entirely empty handed, Skipper recalled. He bought some kind of assault rifle. On the road, he made threats about people in Ohio. He said he planned to kill a dozen officials and potential witnesses, among them, social workers, Machelle, his brother Otis, and even his namesake, Eddie Jr. “A good snitch is a dead snitch,” he said. Within two weeks they were back in Clark County, Indiana. It was the perfect setting for developing a military mind-set. As they drove up Highway 62 to their new home on Bushman’s Lake, they passed the Indiana Army Munitions Plant. It was the biggest property in the county. The massive complex stretched for 20 miles along the highway. In World War II it built rounds for mortars and eight-inch howitzers. Nearly 19,000 people worked there during Vietnam. Now its endless perimeter fence was rusted, many of its 1,600 buildings decaying. But reminders of the armed services were everywhere. Bushman’s Lake itself was little more than a pond dug out a few hundred yards from the wide, muddy Ohio River. The resort was at the end of a narrow country road that cut through four miles of cornfields then wound down the riverbank to the resort. There were a hundred small houses and mobile homes. In the middle of winter less than a third were occupied. There, the boys spent much of their time being trained from furloughed soldiers to sentries. They had to be prepared in case the authorities came. Ed Sexton hatched an escape plan in the new trailer. They were to escape out back windows while two remained behind and shot it out with authorities, then regroup in a secret meeting place. He began drilling them in the ways of war and survival, gleaned, he said, from two tours of jungle duty in Vietnam.

He showed them hand-to-hand combat. There were specific maneuvers.

How to sweep a man off his feet by chopping him in the legs. How to do choke holds. How to do kidney hits and jugular hits. How to break a man’s nose, then drive it into his brain with the heel of the hand.

Sexton gave his sons handguns to carry when they were on watch. He vowed his enemies would never take him in again alive. Sometime in February, Joel and Pixie arrived. Actually, it was their second trip to the Hoosier state. They’d visited in January, the time when Joel’s family couldn’t determine where he’d gone. On January 16, 1993, Ed and Pixie were driving on Highway 62 in Tuck Carson’s car when they were rear-ended by a driver who claimed he fell asleep at the wheel. A Clark County sheriff’s deputy filed a crash report, but Sexton’s name would not have alerted any law enforcement data base. There was no warrant pending at the time. Hours after the accident, Pixie was in labor. She’d had her baby Skipper Lee the next day in a hospital in Louisville. Ed Sexton got more than a new grandson. Family members later said Ed Sexton collected $5,000 from an insurance company for the crash. When Pixie and Joel showed up a second time, some of the new family chemistry changed. Skipper said it was difficult to miss that something was going on with Pixie and his father. One day, in the trailer they were renting, his father and Pixie played what became known as “the chocolate kisses game.” Skipper had seen it before over the years, using Hershey Kisses. His father played it with his mother and all his sisters. “He and Pixie were eating these little cherries in chocolate with white shit inside them, like you might get your old lady on Valentine’s Day,” he explained. “He put one in his mouth, and I thought he was going to eat it. Joel was in the living room. I was sitting right at the table. And Pixie was standing there. And he put his mouth up to her mouth, lip to lip, and passed it. Like you’re French kissing your old lady. That shit was sick. I got up and walked out.” Soon the relationship between his father and mother changed.