House of Secrets (23 page)

The motorcycle sighting and the breakin also had DHS workers concerned. “We had the kids pretty well spread out around the state,”

Judee Genetin would recall later. “But it wasn’t spread out enough, obviously. And then you face another dilemma. One of the things you’re supposed to do with the children in foster care is not move them from home to home. The more placements, the more detrimental that is.

But we were confronted with real fear for them.” > On May 10, the legal staff went back to Family Court with a new legal angle. Since the Indian pleadings, a four-year staff attorney named Edith Hough had been doing the legal trench work on the ongoing Sexton case. Hough filed a motion seeking permanent custody of James, Christopher, Matthe Lana, and Kimberly. Hough and Judy Genetin reasoned that if DHS had permanent custody of the kids, they could surpass confidentiality rules. They could identify the children publicly, put out missing fliers, and maybe even involve “America’s Most Wanted” in the search.

In reality, DHS only had physical custody of Lana, Matt, and James.

But unlike getting a warrant, the court rules would allow DHS to proceed without serving the Sextons with hearing papers. They could simply publish a notice of the proceedings in newspapers. “What we were trying to do is make them surface,” Genetin later explained. “We were hoping they’d surface to fight it.” The notices were published in the Canton Repository on May 18, announcing a hearing date set for August 4. The Sextons did surface, but not to file legal briefs. Four days later, an on-call worker at DHS received a late evening call from the Bair Foundation. Andover police were searching for Matdhew Sexton.

He’d run away from his foster home just after dinner. Now, as DHS

waited for its custody hearing, Eddie Lee Sexton seemed to be picking them off one by one. By Memorial Day, only James and Lana were left under the agency’s vulnerable wing. It went down real smoodh, Skipper said. They parked near the Andover foster home. Skipper got out of the car. He saw Matt in the yard. “I got Matt’s attention, told him, Let’s go.” So we picked up Matt and we jetted. We were gone.” But back in Indiana, the family appeared to be increasingly restless. The cramped conditions in the motor home and trailer were taking their toll. They watched TV and listened to the patriarch read Bible verses.

He marked dozens of his favorite passages with family photos between the delicate pages of a black King James edition. None of the children went to school. The only relief was periodic trips to town, their own midnight excursions, or their father’s combat drills. Ed Sexton apparently also came up with a method to still the younger children, Dawn, Shasta, and Kimberly, who sometimes became restless at night. It was called Nyquil, a potent mix of alcohol and cold drugs. May Sexton would later claim she and 9-year-old Kimberly took Nyquil nightly because of asdlma. But some Sexton children said it was routinely given to quiet the younger ones before bed. One night, Skipper, Joel, Matt, and Chris were sitting around the trailer. They began talking about a plan to leave. Skipper said he knew about a cave in the area where they could spend the first night. During his summer stay with his aunt and uncle, he’d learned local teens partied there. All they needed was food and cigarettes, and they could jet, he said. “Joel was in for it at first,” Skipper recalled. “Then he says, ‘Well, what about Pixie?” I’m like, well you see what’s the matter with Pixie.

She’s in love with the old man.” He says, Don’t talk about her that way. She’s my wife.”

“I’m thinking, well, believe what you want to believe. We had the shit packed. Was ready to go. And then we thought about it. I’m like, damn, you know, we’re running away. We’re gonna leave em. I said fuck it, and went back to bed.” Diane Beckort, the 50-year-old manager of Bushman’s Lake and Marina, remembered the day Ed and May Sexton drove up to her office, wanting to rent a mobile home on the river, just five months before. May Sexton said she was pregnant. Beck looked her over. As far as Beckort was concerned, she was too old, and too heavy to really tell. They had a young brown-haired girl with them, Kimberly. Sexton said he was selling his home in Ohio. Beckort had a mobile home for $300 a month, plus a $300 deposit, the first month paid in advance. The mobile home was unfurnished. That’s okay, Sexton said.

He had some furniture he was going to bring from his Ohio house. [

Sexton peeled off $600 in cash. She asked for no references. She had four rental homes of her own and managed rentals of another two dozen in the resort. She’d learned references were unreliable. Beckort had too many great recommendations from other landlords who lied to help move their bad tenants out. Bushman’s Lake included a little bar and burger stand, but Beckort never opened it until Memorial Day. When it was broken into one night, the last people she would have suspected were the Sextons. “He was so polite and so nice,” she’d later recall.

But just before Memorial Day, Beckort noticed that the Sexton family seemed to be growing. She lived on the other end of the road along the river, far from the Sexton trailer. Now she was noticing other vehicles. She saw several young men and boys around the trailer. She approached Sexton. “I never would have rented the trailer if I knew you were going to have this many people,” she told him. “The septic tank can’t handle it.”

“I understand, ma’am,” he said. “It’s no problem. We’ll just move.”

He asked for a week. She saw the family moving out furniture over the next few days. He came by, asking for his deposit. She inspected the trailer. They’d left it spotless. She gave him back $300. “You couldn’t ask for a nicer tenant,” she said. Two mondhs after the February auction, the couple who’d made the winning bid of $67,000 for the house on Caroline Street still had nothing to show for their earnest money. Veteran auctioneer Ed Fernandez had finally arranged a clear title. Now Ed Sexton wouldn’t return to Canton to close the deal.

Sexton wanted Fernandez to give the paperwork to his daughter Pixie.

“I can’t do that,” Fernandez said. “You’ve got to take care of it personally.” Sexton stopped calling. Then Pixie phoned repeatedly, trying to convince him to release the paperwork. The buyers tired of waiting. The sale fell through. The entire auction had been a bust, as far as Fernandez was concerned. He’d sold the house’s contents to a crowd of 50 people, calling bids from the home’s open garage. “I hated bringing my crew into that garbage pit,” he’d say later. “That filth.

That stink. Most of the stuff was just junk.” The contents brought only $700, not enough to cover the auctioneer’s expenses. It was the second time Ed and May Sexton had burned him. He’d signed a contract to auction the house a year earlier, in the late winter of 1992, but Sexton had changed his mind. Ed Sexton was a low-rent hustler, Fernandez thought. He, too, had heard the talk about some big promotional deal Sexton said he had with fast food franchises. “He was an ugly manipulator,” Fernandez would later recall. “He thinks he’s smarter than everybody, but he surrounds himself with losers. He was a con man. Lazy. One of those procrastinators who always had something coming down the road.” Now Fernandez wished Sexton would show up.

He’d relish calling up the detective named Steve Ready at the sheriff’s department. He’d enjoy turning the con man in. Pixie and that husband of hers had also been no help. She was clueless. The husband was a mute, he figured, maybe an IQ of seven. When it appeared no one was staying in the home anymore, Ed Fernandez went over to inspect the premises. Inside, he found the place gutted of remaining furniture, garbage all over the house. The badhroom toilets were filled with human waste, like some kind of sick, defiant goodbye notice. He called his lawyer and turned over all the paperwork. As far as he was concerned, Ed Fernandez would count himself ahead if he never saw another Sexton again. Tuck and Colleen Carson had visited the trailer at Bushman’s Lake a couple of times. They had seen the crowded conditions and the older boys with handguns tucked in their belts. On one visit, Eddie showed Tuck his hand and pointed to what he called “a continuous life line” in his palm. “You know what that means?” Sexton asked. Tuck shook his head. “It means I’m destined for life in the hereafter.” He may have calmed down compared to the early days, Tuck figured. But Eddie Lee Sexton was still as weird as all hell. Colleen was struck by the boy named Joel. “He acted like he was even scared to talk,” she’d recall later. “Like they were going to bite him or something.” In late spring, Eddie and May announced they were moving to Florida. The sale of their house in Ohio was almost wrapped up, they said. They had a new couch and love seat. They wondered if they could store it at the Carsons’ house until they sent a truck to pick it up.

They left in the Challenger motor home, Pixie and Joel following them in the Pontiac. There was a 1993 fraternal Order of Police sticker on the Grand Prix’s chrome bumper, and a red-white-and blue sticker on the trunk. It read, GOD, GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA LET S KEEP ALL THREE! After the breakin in East Liverpool, Tabadha and Ted Fisher eventually convinced social workers to let Lana Sexton return to their home, but only for weekends, when they were free to watch her every move. Considering Ed Sexton’s savvy, workers worried Lana could be kidnapped from school. During the week, she lived in a second foster home in Canton. Lana made no secret of whom she preferred. She wanted Tabatha and Ted as her parents. She began calling them Mom and Dad. But every Monday, after they took her to counseling, they drove the girl back to Canton. The Fishers also had taken four other foster children into their home. Even with the weekend visits, the disclosures continued dlroughout the summer, and turned more bizarre. One night, during their bedtime sharing, Lana showed Tabadha the line in her hand. “I’m the only one who has this line,” she said. Tabatha squinted at her palm. She’d never paid any attention to the lines on people’s hands. Lana took Tabadha’s hand and pointed. “See, Mom, you don’t have a line like that in your hand.”

She talked about going to “Futuretron meetings” in Florida and New York with her father. She and her father stayed in a hotel. During one Florida visit he took a lot of pictures of her, having her smile “for the Futuretrons.”

“Did you meet the Futuretrons?” Tabatha asked. “What are they?”

“No, he met with the people,” she said. “I stayed in the hotel.” Lana couldn’t seem to explain who exactly these “Futuretrons”

were or what they did. Other stories were more dark. She heard about the beatings and being kept home from school. She said her father once made her wear a transparent white dress and dance around a table lit with candles. She told that story often, but it was pale compared to other disclosures. One day, when they’d gone swimming, Tabadha noticed a large scar at the base of her spine. “That looks pretty painful,”

Tabadha said. “You get that from a fall or something?”

“No, my dad cut me,” she said. That night she told her more. Lana said she’d been born with a twin sister. But her father separated them at birth, then killed the other twin. Lana eyes welled with tears.

“That could have been me,” she said. “I could be dead.”

“How do you know that?” Tabadha asked. “My sister told me,” she said.

She wouldn’t say which one. Another story about miscarried babies unfolded. Lana said her father would hit her mother in the stomach when she was pregnant. He did this several times. “Then the baby would die,” she said. And, Lana added, she had to drink its blood.

“Did you ever see the baby?” Tabatha asked. “On a tray,” Lana said.

Tabadha Fisher called Lana’s social worker. She wanted to know more details about Lana’s family. My God, baby killings, Tabatha said.

What the heck am I dealing with here? The social worker reminded her ritual abuse had been suspected. The stories were likely a ruse by the father to exercise control. Near the end of June, Lana disclosed something Tabatha found more troubling.

Shortly after she’d arrived that weekend, she said one of the girls in the other foster home had touched her inappropriately. Tabatha reported it to the Bair Foundation. On Sunday, as they took her back to Canton, Lana was upset. She wanted Tabatha to sit with her in the backseat.

During the ride, she lean closed to Tabadha. Her father and her brother weren’t the only ones who’d done sexual things to her, she said. “My mother touched me,” she said. “Touched you how?” Tabatha asked. “She put things in me,” Lana said. Tabatha Fisher reported the disclosure to the foundation. On July 1, DHS worker Tracey Harlin interviewed Lana about the revelation. The disclosures seemed to carry a price. She became bulimic, eventually losing 20 pounds. She made vague references to suicide. She became more convinced her father knew she was talking. Soon her fears manifested in more disturbing behaviors in the Fishers’ house. She withdrew deeper into her Barbies and became defiant, her personality sometimes taking on a vicious quality, profanity spitting from her mouth. In the evening, Lana often went upstairs with her Barbies. One night, Tabatha and Ted could hear her talking to someone. Tabatha went upstairs. “Who you talking to?” she asked. “I’m talking to the voices,” she said. “What voices?”

“I’m not allowed to tell.” Tabatha decided not to make a big production out of it. Maybe Lana was just clamoring for attention. It happened the next night, and on a subsequent weekend. One night, they heard her crying.

Tabatha snuck up the stairs this time. Lana was in a corner between the wall and dresser. She was as white as a sheet and shivering. It was a hot summer night. “What’s wrong?” Tabatha asked. “He wants me.”

“Who wants you?”

“My dad.”

“Your dad’s not here, honey.”

“He told me he wants me. He’s coming after me.” Her father was Satan.

He had powers, she said. The Fishers began to feel like a dark presence was taking over the house. They started praying regularly.