House of Secrets (33 page)

He’d told the bureau he’d seen at least five weapons with the Sextons, including two pistols and an “Uzi-like” weapon. The FBI didn’t want another Ruby Ridge. That day, as campers left, the ranger did not assign any new campers to sites near Campsite Number 18. Soon he had a third of the circle vacant around the Sexton motor home. Hubbard was worried about Raymond Hesser. He knew the handicapped camper from previous stays. For several days, Hubbard and another longtime camper had been teasing him about Pixie, calling her “his girlfriend.” They knew she’d been visiting Hesser’s trailer. “Ray, you know she’s a married woman,” Hubbard joked. They’d busted his chops, Hesser playing coy. Guy stuff. Hubbard didn’t know if he was actually sleeping with the girl, or just wanting them to think he did. Now the ranger was concerned. He tried to drop subtle hints. “You know, Ray, all that glitters isn’t gold,” he told him. “You don’t really know these people at all.” Hesser did say they seemed awfully nosey. He told the ranger that Pixie and Willie followed him to the camp pay phone when he transferred electronic funds. He felt like they were trying to learn his

PIN.

“Ray, just be careful,” Hubbard said. Raymond Hesser hadn’t even washed up yet when Willie showed up at 9 a. m. Soon, they were shooting the breeze at the dinette. Then Ed Wise was at the door. Inside, Ed Wise did all the talking. He began talking about the Winnebago again.

How many people did it sleep? Where would they sleep? His eyes kept going toward the back of the motor home, then at the ceiling. He stood up and said, “Well, Willie, you ready to be my eyes?” The two of them left. At 11 a. m., Pixie was at his door with her two children. “I wanted you to meet the two girls I was telling you about,” she said.

She’d been over the night before. She’d already told Hesser she was divorced, had the two kids, and that her ex-husband was in Arizona.

She was a very pleasant girl, Hesser later said. Seemed normal. She liked to joke and laugh. Hesser gave the kids a couple of Pepsi’s.

Dawn, her 5-year-old, asked Hesser to come with them to see the ducks.

They walked down to the canoe launch on Little Manatee, but there weren’t any ducks that day. On the way back, he saw Ed Wise, his wife, and Willie drive by, Ed driving. He thought it strange, considering Ed Wise’s comments about his eyes. Pixie walked over to the car. They seemed to be having some kind of discussion among themselves. The car turned around and drove back the other way. Pixie continued walking next to Hesser’s scooter, but left when they reached his campsite. She said something about having to take her parents up to a local store.

When Raymond Hesser got back to his camper, Willie was waiting. “Are you and my sister going to be friends now?” he asked. Eddie Lee and Estella May Sexton were arguing in the Nissan as they drove to Sun City. Christopher, Kim, and Pixie were in the back. Sexton had been looking into Seminole Indians and local reservations, still clinging to the idea there might be sanctuary for them with an Indian tribe. That had brought up the subject of Mel Fletcher, back in Canton. May later said her husband was accusing her of sleeping with Mel Fletcher again.

Sexton parked the car in the large Winn Dixie parking lot, a supemmarket. They’d driven to Sun City for milk and juice. “Pixie’s going in,” Sexton told May. “Your ass is staying in the car.”

“Fine,”

she said. It was 1:36 p. m., January 14, 1994. They had been on the run for 13 and a half months. Both doors flew open the moment Eddie Lee Sexton turned off the ignition. Doors pulled open. Eddie Lee snatched out one side, May the other. Then the kids. Men in camouflage clothing, shouting “FBI!” They were both facedown on the pavement, guns pointed at their heads. The children, too. “Go ahead and move and you’re dead,” somebody said.

As the news broke in Canton newspapers of the couple’s arrest, Steve Ready’s name and the leads he’d developed that resulted in the capture were never mentioned in the newspapers. It didn’t bother Ready a bit.

They got em, that was the important thing. He had work to do. He worked the phones all week with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, Florida social services, riding herd on the children’s whereabouts as Eddie and May Sexton were held in the Hillsborough County Jail on the fugitive warrants, an extradition hearing set. Christopher, Matthe and Kimberly were taken into custody by Florida child protection workers and were flown back to Ohio into the custody of the DHS. Rangers ordered Willie, Pixie, and Skipper to leave the campground hours after the arrest. There would be no more extensions. They left in the Challenger and the Pontiac, leaving the Nissan behind. Ready tipped the Hillsborough County sheriff’s office that it was a stolen car. As he talked with officers and agents, the only people he hadn’t accounted for were the boy named Joel Good and the Goods’ son, Skipper Lee. Ready was anxious to pursue a full-blown sexual assault case against the parents, and anxious to glean more information from the rest of the Sexton kids. That week, Eddie Jr.

drove to Florida and picked up Skipper, Sherri, and her son. But Willie and Pixie, with her two children, wanted to stay at their Uncle Dave’s. On Thursday, nearly a week after the arrest, Ready sat down with Sherri Sexton at the Renkert Building. Her appearance moved him more than any Sexton to date. Her vacant eyes. She seemed only a shell of a human being. He went slowly. She denied she’d been sexually abused by her father at first, but in time she began disclosing. He’d started when she was 13. “It hurt,” she said. “He told me he was going to make a woman out of me.” They’d had intercourse five times from 1985 until 1991. Her father, and her father only. Christopher was born during that period. She’d also had a miscarriage while living in the house on Caroline Street. “How would you feel about taking a blood test with Christopher?” Ready asked.

“That would prove it.” She agreed.

Ready talked with Charles “Skipper” Sexton. He bared little resemblance to the teenage wrestler Ready had seen in family photos.

The road had hardened him. His face was long and gaunt, his hair disheveled, a cigarette hanging from his lip. They talked about his sexual abuse of his siblings. He was adamant. No way. Ready kept working him, slowly, reading from the DHS reports from Lana and James.

“Skipper, look,” he said. “I can understand you not knowing any better. From what I gather, this kind of thing was going on in your family all the time.” He said Lana once asked him to “do what our mom and dad do.” He started to sodomize her, he said, but “chickened out.”

He was beaten severely for it. Then he said, no, he made it all up.

He’s all over the place, Ready thought. He could have worked him hard, like Orville Sexton. But he decided to go easy. The kid already has been through a meat grinder, the detective decided. Plus, he might need Skipper Sexton later on. Ready switched subjects.. “Where’s Joel Good and the baby?” he asked. “Haven’t seen them,” Skipper said. He said they’d left a couple weeks before Christmas, heading back to Ohio.

“Him and Pixie weren’t getting along,” Skipper said. “You saw them leave?”

Skipper shook his head. The detective wondered what car they left in.

“A grey Buick,” Skipper said. Otis Sexton told Ready he was told by family members Joel Good left the Sextons sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. A woman picked him up in a red Nissan, they were saying. Grey Buick. Red Nissan. Ready picked up the phone and called Lewis Barrick, Joel Good’s grandfather. No, they hadn’t seen Joel at all, he said. On January 19, Willie, Pixie, and their aunt Jean Sexton sat in the visiting room at the Hillsborough County Jail in downtown Tampa, the patriarch talking to them one at a time. It was one of three visits the two siblings would make to the jail to see their father in the days between January 17 and 27. Pixie visited her mother only once, Willie not at all. The plan was still a good one, he told them individually. They could still get the Winnebago and the money.

They could post bail for him when bond was set back in Ohio. Eddie Lee Sexton leaned forward, whispering to Willie. “Do you think you can pull the job off?” he asked. When Raymond Hesser drove up to his Winnebago the next day in his Bronco, he saw them at his campsite, sitting on the hood of their car. He was surprised, considering everything. Hesser not only knew about the arrest, but the stolen Nissan and their phony names. On the day of the arrest, they’d visited his campground, wanting to borrow $20 for gas. That same day, Skip had also shown up, wondering if he could “buy a piece.”

“I don’t carry a gun,” Hesser told him. He wondered why he needed it.

“My father told me to uphold the family name,” he said. Now, on January 20, he got busy. “I’m getting ready to leave,” Hesser said, as he went about the time-consuming process of getting himself out of the Bronco. “I don’t have much time.”

“Where you going?” one of them asked. He said he was going to a place called Camping World to stay OVERNIGHT while some repairs were done on his motor home. “Did you drive the motor home back to Ohio?” he asked “No,” Pixie said. “Yes,” Willie said. At the same time. They said they wanted to tell him the whole story, about their parents’ arrests, about the FBI. “We want to tell you inside,” Willie said. As they moved toward the motor home, Willie told him, “Pixie is ready to get close to you.” Moments later, they were at his table, telling him about false charges against their father. Willie seemed to be trying to control the conversation. He seemed like he wanted to control everything. He was pushing Pixie on him. Hesser asked Willie to go outside. He wanted to talk to Pixie alone. He complied, but soon came back inside the motor home. Hesser saw a ranger drive by. He pointed.

“He doesn’t drive through here very often,” Hesser said. “He must be keeping an eye on you guys.” Get going, he told himself. They helped him pack up, but were trying to convince him to come over to their uncle’s house near New Port Richey. “What is it you guys want?” he finally asked them. “Well, I want to go traveling with you,” Pixie said. He told her he was looking for a woman, but not one with two kids who smoked. Smokers bothered him. “What do you want?” she asked him.

“I just got to get going,” he said. They helped him hook up the Bronco, Pixie driving it up the hitch. They said they would follow him to the park dump station and help him unload waste. Willie drove their Pontiac, Pixie rode along with him in the motor home. They worked on him more at the dump station. Come to Uncle Dave’s. But already, Hesser had caught Pixie in a half dozen lies. Now, Willie was talking about wanting to ride with him to Camping World, then he could show him where his uncle lived. They had something planned. Hesser was convinced now. They were after his motor home, his car, and his money.

That’s how they were going to leave Florida. Hesser came up with his own story. He proposed that Willie could meet him at Camping World.

He couldn’t come along because he had personal, private meetings in Sarasota to attend to first. “If you don’t let me go now, I’ll never make it back to Camping World tonight,” he said. The place was just north of Little Manatee. The Pontiac was parked in front of the Winnebago, off to the side. “You leave first,” Willie said. “I can’t get around your car,” Hesser said. He waited two minutes after they drove off, then he drove south, in the opposite direction. Later, he’d count himself lucky to get away with his life. Teresa Boron and sister-in-law Sue Barrick called the campground, the FBI, Florida police departments, welfare officials. Then they dialed Tampa area shelters and YMCAs. There was no sign of Joey. He’d gone back to Ohio with his son, an FBI agent said he’d been told by the family. Picked up in a red Nissan. “But there is no car,” Teresa told him. They considered driving to Florida themselves, asking Pixie face to face, where was Joey? But where was she? How would they find her? Teresa talked on the phone with Steve Ready when he called her father. A few days later, she went to the Renkert Building. She talked to the detective, telling him the whole story about the strange family. He gave her the number of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department, suggesting she call them and file a missing persons report. No, not again, she told him. She’d been through that. “Drop my name,” Ready said. He added, “They’re saying he left in a red Nissan.”

“It’s not a Nissan, it’s a Mazda,” she said. “They think it’s a Nissan. That was my car. But he couldn’t have left Florida in it.

With me, or anybody else.”

“Why are you so sure?” Ready asked. “Because it was totaled in March of 1993.”

The Devil& made Me Do It

Skipper Sexton remembered hearing the truth about the baby, his namesake. He was sitting at the picnic table with Pixie before the arrest. “I’m thinking, what are we going to do when all this was over.

And thinking, I wonder where Skipper went? And Pixie was like, I don’t know.”

“I said, Well, it was a kid. It probably went to heaven.” I said, ‘You think you’ll ever tell authorities where that kid is?”

“She’s like, no. “And I go, Why’s that?”

“She said, because she’ll be put away for life. For murder. “I was like, Murder? I thought you overdosed it.”

“And that’s when she slipped up. She said, No, I suffocated it.” But they covered it up as an overdose.” Skipper later recalled, “That’s when it all was over.”

Sitting at Eddie Jr.‘s house in Canton now, a Sunday night, back from Florida only a couple of days. Skipper hadn’t breathe a word. Burning some herb, and thinking about it again. Skipper told Eddie Jr., “I need to tell you something, man.” The same Sunday night. Another phone call from Otis Sexton. Steve Ready hadn’t had an uninterrupted evening in front of the television in weeks. Eddie Jr. and Skipper were at his house, Otis said. They were talking about murder. “Steve, I think you better get over here,” Otis said. When Ready arrived at the two-story on 15th Street, Sherri Sexton also was in the living room with her two brothers. Ready took Skipper into the dining room and turned his tape recorder on. “I understand, Skipper, you want to tell me something about what happened to Skipper Lee Good,” Ready said.