House of Secrets (30 page)

remained still and silent. He saw only a handful of adults and children there on his daily tours. That raised another flag with Hubbard. You didn’t see families that quiet. Hell, even the old-timers made some noise. The survival strategies developed with each new location. Eddie Lee Sexton had designed a state park defense plan for “those stupid sonsabitches” in the FBI. If the law arrived, Eddie would start shooting to pin down the agents. Willie would start the camper and bulldoze through the police line. Christopher would return fire from the back window. If that wasn’t possible, they’d flee into the woods. They spent time in Little Manatee practicing escape routes and places to hide in trees. For 10 months now, the patriarch had drilled the boys on firearms, knife throwing, and a variety of hand moves. In Florida, he’d added another maneuver, strangulation by garotte. You made a garrote by attaching both ends of a rope to wooden handles, he said. You wrapped it around a cop or agent’s neck from behind, then you twisted. Even a couple of sticks would do. The handles gave you leverage, that was the key. In Florida, siblings would later say, Willie Sexton began carrying one in his pants. The patriarch seemed to take more interest in his daughter’s marriage. The couple’s bickering only continued. The makeshift burial of the baby was a new dispute. Sexton took Pixie on walks, counseling her. “Treat him like a husband,” he told her. “Have relations with him.” Other siblings saw him encourage the couple to hold hands. He told Pixie and Joel to go on walks together. Find some privacy up the road.

“Sometimes he would tell them to take a blanket with them,” Sherri later said. In 1993, Teresa Boron had made every effort she could think of to find her missing nephew. She kept checking the house on Caroline and his old apartment in Bolivar. She called her lawyer, who suggested she contact Jackson Township police and file a missing person report. She called the department, telling someone on the phone everything she could think of about her nephew and the Sextons. A police officer told her she couldn’t file such a report. He was over 21. He was married. She couldn’t file it unless she was his legal guardian or his wife. She tried again with the Canton PD. “It was basically the same thing,” she later recalled. “They said I was overreacting. They said you might be missing your nephew, but he may not be missing his aunt.” She went to the post office and found Joey had filed a change of

address to the Sextons’ post office in Massilon. She wrote him a letter there. If he didn’t want anything to do with the family, she wrote, that’s fine. Just let us know where you are. She never rece*ed an answer. Teresa wrote again in September, making the same case, but adding this time that his grandfather was very ill from emphysema.

Grandpa was asking for him. His condition was day to day. She included family home numbers and the 800 number for the shop. Still, no answer came. On Thanksgiving, November 25, Teresa had the entire family over for the holiday. Gladys and Lewis Barrick. Brother Sam and Sue. Sister Velva. They were all talking in the kitchen, the turkey roasting. “Everybody’s here but Joey,” Teresa said. “Aunt Tee Tee.” That’s what he used to call her. A feeling overwhelmed her.

She found herself saying, “I think Joey’s not with us anymore.“t It was a perfect fall day for studying. The morning temperature was climbing out of the 40s. Cloudbursts sprayed the campus of the University of South Florida at Sarasota as students crammed for finals or finished papers for the end of the term. A 43-year-old reference librarian named Gail Novak had her hands full in the J. B. Cook Library, a modern, light-filled facility in pink, blue and walnut motiœ She was the only librarian working reference. Another staffer checked out books. The public copying machine was on the fritz. Novak was shuttling student copy requests to a machine in the back office. Every minute or two, students leaned against her desk with a reference question or request.

Gail Novak had a masters in library science, taught a library class at the university and, with six years at J. B. Cook, knew the collection well. She looked as if she’d been sent over from central casting.

Oversized glasses. Blousy dresses and sandals with socks. Timid, but quietly diligent and eager to shepherd young patrons through the world of books. She saw the young man walk through the glass doors in late morning, then wander across the sandstone carpet to her desk. He seemed hardly able to talk. His voice was slurred and he accented some of his vowels, as if his tongue were too long for his mouth. He told her his name, but she could hardly understand him. Soon a young woman with racoon eyes appeared at his side. Gail Novak later would remember the day as being November 30, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. She was sure of it. Shetd marked down in her date book a lecture she had to give in the mid afternoon. The new candidate for university president also visited that day. The boy’s name was Joel, she learned at the desk. The woman’s name was Pixie. Pixie’s shoulders were hunched, collapsed in. Her hair was a mess. And those eyes. The circles were so dark, they looked like bruises. Joel and Pixie wanted information about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS. “How does a baby’s head and arms look when a baby dies of crib death?” Pixie asked. She wanted books. She wanted to see a picture. Then another young man wandered into the library, joining them. She’d later remember his name as “Billy,” but maybe it was Willie. Later, she would identify Billy as William Sexton. “Willie drove us down Highway 301,” Joel said, introducing him. Highway 301 ran north to Tampa. But the group, she later learned from their conversation, was staying in a nearby state park, somewhere off Highway 301. They followed Novak over to a patron reference computer, where she started pulling references. But the girl Pixie seemed disinterested, lost in her own thoughts. She was half talking to Novak, half talking to herself, repeating a story over an dover, as if she was trying to memorize it. She said they were camping and she’d had a baby. Now it was dead. It was the second baby she’d lost in quick succession that fall. “The old man is the father,” she told Novak. She didn’t even have time to name it, she said. All morning, Pixie added, they’d been looking for a migrant clinic, a place to take it. Willie got lost on Highway 301, saw the campus. The library building. And that’s why they were there. They said they had the baby in the car. Novak kept her eyes on the computer screen, but thought are these people serious? Or were they really students, playing some kind of gag? Months later, when Novak was told that Skipper Lee Good had been killed six weeks earlier, and there was no evidence Pixie was pregnant, she stuck to her story and her November date. “No, Pixie said there was a second baby,” she said. “I’m sure of it.” Joel shuffled to the vestibule outside and lit a cigarette.

All three would do that for the next few hours, spend time in the library, then go outside to smoke. Novak saw Joel making a call on the pay phone. Novak had turned up a couple of books for Pixie, but didn’t have time to thoroughly research more reference hits. When Joel came back Novak offered to take his name, telling him that she could call him later with more research. “I’m not going to be here. I am going to be in Ohio, but maybe you could get in contact with Pixie.” Pixie said she had no phone. “I’m going on an airline to Ohio,” Joel said.

He said he’d just made a reservation on the phone. Then Joel said, “They told us we should have a funeral for the baby.” But as he rambled on, it sounded as if the young man really didn’t know the details a funeral entailed. Then Pixie grabbed Novak’s arm. She wanted the librarian to come out to their car, to look at the dead child. Pixie began pleading. “I’m very busy,” Novak said, thinking, she wasn’t leaving the library, certainly not with them, certainly not for that. Willie wondered if he could use the library’s phone. Novak took them to another desk. Willie dialed, then sounded as if he were asking a park ranger to get someone to come to the phone. After a few minutes, he spoke to someone. Afterwards Novak pulled out a Yellow Pages, opening it up to funeral homes and handing it to the boy named Joel. She dialed the number of one for him, and handed him the receiver. She heard him ask someone on the other end of the line about a grave marker. My God, she thought, there is a dead baby. These people do need help. She called the library director upstairs, but there was no answer. She called the campus emergency number. It was staffed by students at the campus police department. “This is Gail Novak at the library,” she said “There’s people with a dead baby over here.”

“Is it a baby belonging to a student?” a female voice said, snickering.

“No, it’s people that have walked into the library.” She put Joel on the phone, who slurred words into the mouthpiece. He’s either retarded, or on drugs of some sort, Gail thought. Novak got back on the phone. “Quit playing pranks,” the emergency staffer snapped. She threatened to fine the librarian. Then she hung up. They don’t believe me, Novak thought. It was finals time. It wouldn’t be the first practical joke played on police. “Will you let me call a hospital or go to the emergency room?” Gail asked Pixie. “We don’t have money for an emergency room,” Pixie said. “The baby’s already dead.” Novak thought, what in the world is going on with these people?

The librarian walked away. Students were waiting at the reference desk. Thirty minutes after the threesome arrived, Gail Novak noticed someone she’d later call “the old man.” He was tall, bearded, and had angular features. He looked angry, his fists clenched. Within minutes he was at her desk. He wanted to see books on names for American Indians. He wanted to see books or maps that identified local campgrounds. Novak walked him over to a shelf of Native American reference books. He stood so close they almost touched, staying that way as she moved down the shelf of volumes. Invading her space. Novak pointed out the Encyclopedia of the American Indian. “That’s not the kind of Indian names I wanted,” he snapped. His face was red with agitation. He said he wanted names like the Boy Scouts used, names with “running” or “jumping” in them. Then, Willie approached. The old man seemed to turn his frustration toward the younger man. “You left me with that back-breaking work,” he told Willie. “I expected you to help me. Anyway, the grave is ready for tonight.” The old man added he’d dug a hole big enough to bury a truck.

Novak went about her business, but listened. The old man was mad that Willie had burned up gas in the car. “Why did you drive all the way down here?” he asked. “There was no funeral parlor on the road,”

Willie said. “That’s why we drove so far.” He’d gotten lost, made a wrong turn. Was looking for a large building and a phone. The old man’s move was instant, “cat-like,” Novak would later recall. He dug his nails into Willie’s collarbone, then pushed the knuckles on his other hand into Willie’s Adam’s apple. Discreetly, he slammed the young man into a bookshelf, then into a computer table. Then, he marched him across the library, bouncing him one more time off the edge of the alcove at the men’s bathroom. He took him inside, then returned alone. The old man wanted a map now. Novak could see Joel and Pixie outside, smoking cigarettes just outside the doors. The librarian was moving quickly now. She wanted to be away from this man. She spread out a Florida map, started to leave him with it. He didn’t like that map. “Where is a park near here?” he demanded. She pointed to a state park south of Sarasota. No, he said. He didn’t want to go south.

“Where is one north of Tampa near the Interstate?” he asked. She showed him Hillsborough River State Park. No, he said, standing close to her again. He’d camped there before. Too many campers. Too many mosquitos and fleas. Plus, they took down license plates there, he said. She listened passively, blinking, as the old man went into some story about abuse charges made against him by one of his kids. “The welfare people believe whatever kids tell them,” he said. His girls would do what he told them to do, he added. “The welfare workers would believe them if I told them to tell them that we stick pins in dolls, kill cats, and things like that.” She’d had enough. “Look, I’m sick of hearing this,” she said. It was time for her lunch break. Moments later, she was out the door. Gail Novak drove over to a nearby Mcdonald’s, then back to the campus, parking her car in an empty lot behind a business on Tamiami Trail. She had a frozen yogurt she wanted to finish. She could see the library across a vacant field. Then she saw him, the old man, a hundred yards away near a line of palmetto trees. He’d pulled a silver pickup truck there. He was making a motion like he was digging with a shovel handle, but she couldn’t see the ground. An old foundation in the field blocked her line of sight.

After he was done with the shovel, she watched him get a machete from the truck. He hacked off a couple limbs from a palmetto tree. Novak finished the yogurt and drove slowly back to the library, watching.

She watched the old man put the shovel in the back of the pickup, then cover it with the palmetto leaves. At the library, she bought an ice tea from a machine and stood under the building’s portal. It was drizzling now. The old man wheeled the pickup into a spot in front of the library. Novak turned sideways, looking disinterested. She found herself frozen with both curiosity and fear. Willie backed a large, black car up to the pickup. Joel and Pixie came out. The old man kept asking Joel to transfer the shovel from the pickup to the car, but he didn’t want to do it, and went back inside. Novak tried to finish her drink quickly. But before she could, the group wandered toward the entrance. The old man was sweaty. He had wet clay on his left shoe and wet sand up the side of his leg, a Big Gulp cup from a 7-Eleven in his hand. She heard him tell Pixie and Willie that he’d drunk a couple of cordials of liquor. It sounded as if he also had some in the cup.

When they reached the sidewalk, the old man, Willie, and Pixie were arguing, oblivious to her, lost in their own world. She heard Pixie and Willie say they wanted to have a little cross for the baby’s grave.

They must be talking about that funeral, Novak thought. “We can’t afford a marker,” Sexton said. “How we gonna find it?” Willie asked.