House of Secrets (43 page)

After William Dewey’s death, family members began migrating to Canton for better work and pay. William Dewey was a sick man by his late 40s, Nellie said. He suffered from black lung, a heart condition, “and a lot of ailments.”

“My dad was stern, but he was fair,” she said. “He listened. I never got a lickin’ in my life I didn’t deserve. And never in front of other family members. He disciplined the boys, my mother the girls. He believed a man could hurt a girl, so he left us girls to my mom.”

However, according to their silver-haired younger sister, Maggie Sexton, the rule didn’t always apply. Her father was a controlling patriarch, she recalled. He didn’t allow the girls to date. When they did go out, he sent a chaperone. Maggie remembered her late sister Stella running away at age 15. “Daddy whipped her,” she said, “for disobeying his wishes.” Maggie also lives in Canton, in a small, modern apartment. She collects Social Security for epilepsy. Her siblings describe her as “slow,” but she had no trouble recalling youthful memories. She is five years older than Sexton. She remembered a brother who was frequently ill with colds and other ailments. “When Eddie was a child he was ill,” she said. “He was a change of life baby. Momma was putting all her attention to Eddie.

And Otis, the second youngest, got jealous. Otis was always jealous of Eddie.” She said Otis frequently tried to get Eddie in trouble, snitching on him, setting him up to fight neighborhood kids.

Understandably, both sisters believed their youngest brother’s troubles were only a continuation of the rivalry, with Otis working behind the scenes in his criminal case. Orville Sexton, the oldest living brother everybody called “Big Chew” for his love of Red Man, remembered a father not as righteous as many around him assumed. Orville had just come back from World War II when he first learned of his father’s indiscretions.

William Dewey worked as a minister for the Salvation Army in Logan for three years. But he was defrocked, Orville recalled, for his involvement with a woman whose husband was in the service. Orville remembered at least four extramarital affairs. In Ironton, William Dewey took up with a woman who lived across the river in Ashland, and fathered a child with her. “He’d live with Mom one night, then stay with that woman the next night,” he recalled. “The night he died, he just happen to come home. He told Mother he was going to quit. About two in the morning he had a heart attack and died.” Orville said his father suffered from intense guilt, a condition he poured into preaching a gospel that promised deliverance from sin. “He was a strict man. And strict with the kids. He wanted to live religious.

He’d see a picture of Jesus in a window on the street and he’d sit there and cry like a baby. He wanted to live right. But he had a weakness for women.” After his death, the long-suffering matriarch made some small investments in rental properties. She married another man, who eventually died an alcoholic, family members said. The matriarch joined her children in Canton in the early 1960s, living for a short time with her Eddie Lee’s family. “She was an invalid and while she was there we got into a couple of fights,” May would recall.

“Eddie started calling the children names and that in front of her.

And she said if they’re little bastards’ fas he was calling his kids]

you’re a little bastard also, and he got upset with her.” The mother died close to Thanksgiving in 1976. Oddly, considering their relationship, the most affected offspring was not Eddie Lee, but Dave Sexton, who nearly knocked over his mother’s casket, collapsing on it in grief Eddie Lee’s short stint as a minister followed. There was also some mystery surrounding both Eddie Lee’s and Otis’s birth certificates. Both their county birth records report nine children were in the family at the time of their births two years apart, with no dead or stillborn children listed. Both list their father as age 42.

Eddie Lee’s mother is listed as “Lana Toler,” Otis’s as “Leona Toler,”

the name, Otis believes, of an aunt. The documents certainly were no proof Eddie or Otis were products of incest. Perhaps they were only clerical errors. Eddie’s sister Nellie was 13, Stella, 11, and Maggie, 5, when Eddie, the last child, was born. Shelly Croto reported her father once told her that his father had sex with some of his sisters.

But Nellie Hanft was adamant, as was Maggie. There had been no incest in her family, both said. It took nearly a year for the news of Eddie Lee Sexton’s dubious fame to reach the hollows and bottoms of his Logan County birthplace. Today, the green treetops on mountains around Verdonsville hide dozens of closed mine shafts. They’re the remnants of war-time coal booms, a time when it took 100 men, many of them transients and immigrants, to do the same work that three men and a mining machine can do today. Still, it was coal country, “Home of the Billion Dollar Coal Field,” one sign near Williamson proclaimed. Here and there, the brown iron sculpture of mine processing stations just out of the lowland, looking like smokeless oil refineries. Unlike the mountain men of Deliverance, people in these parts are gracious and helpful, seemingly endowed with the luxury of time. A dozen vehicles stack up behind a car parked in the street. Someone runs inside to fetch milk from a grocery.

Not a horn will sound, unless a rare big-city visitor happens to be in the line. On a muggy August day, Florence Baisden worked the phones to relatives for two hours for a visitor, trying to locate someone who remembered William Dewey Sexton, his wife Lana, and the boy born halfway up the nearby hill. “Sextons” were all over the county. But “that was a different string of Sextons,” 76-year-old Henderson Baisden finally reported from his hospital bed. Coal miners were always moving in and out, he said. Florence Baisden converted her local filling station to a recycling center and bow hunting shop after her husband died. The bottom-the mountain’s bottom land, was named after her husband’s great grandfather, Julius Baisden. Several generations were born, lived, and died in the same group of houses up Mud Fork Road where Eddie Lee Sexton’s mother gave birth. Before the four-lane came through, a 30-mile trip to the tiny city of Williamson could take a couple of hours on twisting mountain roads. In the 1800s, it took a couple of days. Isolation and limited population almost dictated marriage among cousins. But Baisden Bottom and Little Italy Bottom and Black Bottom and countless others had their rules. Pentecostals and Baptist churches abound. The revival meeting remains one of the most popular venues for local enlightenment and entertainment. The blind see. The crippled walk. The affricted are delivered. The cures, however, may be more moral than physical. In these parts, there’s no shortage of funds for the disabled. Simply by being a late miner’s wife, Florence Baisden said she could receive Social Security, free medical care, and payments from black lung and miner’s welfare funds.

Her two sons were eligible for black lung payments because they’d driven coal trucks. They declined. Many others take advantage, she said. “There’s people on it that never worked a day in their life.

The black lung. Your daddy drew black lung, and his name was Paul Jr.

and you’re named Paul Jr. Your daddy dies. You cash his checks well after he’s gone.” In Logan, a police sergeant named Glen Ables also noticed distinct cultural differences from his home near the Virginia border when he transferred to the Logan detachment of the West Virginia State Police 20 years ago. Most local violence is over male dominance and territory, he said. Fights with friends and neighbors over women and property. Wife beatings. Child abuse. Said Ables, “In one way, even the bad people here aren’t fundamentally bad. A local criminal may steal everything you have, your gas, your TV, your car, but if they pass you on the road and you’re down and out, broken down, they’ll stop, pick you up, and take care of you, or fill your car with the gas they stole. They’ll take care of you. “But there are some fundamental rules of life that people here live by,” he added. “Some of those rules are not what we accept. But they’re solid and consistent with these people. We don’t have street crime as most people know it. But they’ll kill you and shoot you over the fundamentals of life. Property is mine. Possessions are mine. Family is mine.” Incest, he said, has only recently emerged from the closet. “It’s taken people a long time to realize there’s some scientific problems with it,” he said. There have been no studies examining the stereotype, the old West Virginia slam, “My parents met at a family reunion.” Up a few miles Mud Fork from Baisden Bottom, a librarian at the new Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College said her most frequent research requests from local students are for materials on child abuse and incest. She asked that her name not be used in fear of ostracization.

“It’s a taboo subject,” she said. “But growing up here, I would say if people would be truthful with you, it’s seven out of ten families.

It’s still going on.” A culture, perhaps, where Eddie Lee Sexton learned many of his moves. Thirty miles away, near Delbarton, a 52-year-old disabled West Virginian named John Runyon was putting a new engine in a Chevy when a daughter ran out of their mobile home, yelling, “Eddie’s on

TV! “

Runyon had seen Eddie Sexton only three times in the last years, most recently in Canton in 1988. In 1963, when a Mingo County court sent Eddie Lee Sexton to prison, John Runyon was at his side. He’d been Sexton’s best friend for almost five years. They met at 16 in West Virginia. Runyon’s sister had married Eddie’s older brother Joe.

Sarah, Orville’s wife, was also kin. Eddie always said he was a year older than Runyon. He was shocked to find out later they were born the same year. As teenagers, they worked odd jobs together, scrapping cars and selling produce in Ironton. They followed relatives to Canton, working for a Manpower office there. On weekends, they cruised towns back in their home state, picking up women. Drag racing with Eddie’s 4-year-old Buick. Sowing wild oats. They never hurt for money or a place to stay, Runyon recalled. Eddie’s mother and sisters gave them money when they needed it. They crashed in their bedrooms, never putting down stakes. “Eddie was the type of feller, his whole family went out of the way to help him,” he recalled. They hooked up with a married woman in Canton, Runyon recalled, carrying on an affair with her while her husband was at work. It ended when Otis told the woman’s husband, he said. “There’d always been bad blood between those two brothers,” he recalled. “We’d work all week, take the money, and run around all weekend. Typical teenage stuff. We never got in trouble with the law, though. We didn’t even get a traffic ticket during that whole time.” That all changed the last weekend of May 1963. They’d cruised into Delbarton on a joy ride, stopping to visit brother Orville, ending up at a place called Betty’s Beerjoint. “It was the first serious drinking we’d ever done,” Runyon said. That night they bought a case of beer and went home with a local. When the man passed out, Eddie made a move on his 15-year-old daughter Sarah. “She was a brown-haired girl, five-five, about 110 pounds,” Runyon recalled.

“We’d had dozens like her. But Eddie fell head over heels in love.

Next thing I know, he says he’s gonna marry her.” They drank all weekend, Runyon finally talking Eddie into going back to Canton with the last few dollars they had. It was around midnight when they finished their last beer in the car. They were driving through Naugatuck, maybe 20 miles down the road, when they passed an all-night gas station. Then, “Eddie brought it up,” Runyon said. He wanted to turn around and marry the girl. “We hardly have money to get home,”

Runyon said. “How you going to get married? I just couldn’t figure it, either. I don’t know what set him off so much about this girl.” A few minutes later, they pulled into the gas station with a tire they’d purposely flattened. A 20-year-old man was working in the station alone. As he fixed the tire they jumped him, knocking his head into the tire machine. They took the entire cash register, $309 inside.

That night they slept at Orville Sexton’s. The next day, Eddie was married to Sarah by a local preacher. “The girl’s family thought the Sextons had money,” Runyon recalled. “They were the kind of family that did a lot of bumming, so they didn’t mind.” They wanted the money close by. When Eddie decided to take the girl back to Canton, her parents called the law. State police showed up the next morning at Orville’s. Runyon and Sexton had dumped the cash register and its contents. But the police produced a gas station receipt from the Buick and jailed them both. Eddie Lee had been married only one day. A few weeks later, they pled guilty to armed robbery, both of them sentenced to Moundsville Penitentiary, serving five years of 5to-18-year terms.

In the pen, Eddie dropped him, Runyon recalled, picking up with his cellmate, Paul Shortridge, the man later known as the “Ice Man.”

Sexton and Shortridge ran a poker and dominos games and made book on sporting events, Runyon said. “As far as I know, him and Eddie never was in a fight in prison,” he said. “Eddie was Eddie, no matter how you sliced him. His attitude never changed. He was not the type of person who had a lot of friends. He’d pick one person, and stay with him. “I can’t understand how Eddie turned out this way, if it’s all true. From the time we met to the time we got out of prison, he wasn’t criminal-like. He didn’t have a con mind. If he got that, he got it from Shortridge.” There was one more revelation from that period.

Eddie Lee Sexton had never even been in the armed services, Runyon said. It was a cover story to account for his years in prison, he said. Runyon now belonged to the Church of God in Hatfield Bottom.

Otis Sexton, he said, helped him get his life back together after he got out of prison. Otis helped him get a job in Canton, but he later moved back to his home state after he hurt his back in a battery salvage job.

As far as Runyon could tell, Eddie was totally reformed when he and his wife stayed with the family one night in Canton in 1988. His children were perfectly behaved. They served house guests coffee and made their beds. Eddie talked about the Bible and preaching. But he also showed Runyon and his wife a collection of videotapes. Three trays, kept near the family pictures. They were labeled “Family Movies,”