House of Secrets (45 page)

They all made these things up. It’s all part of their imagination, but in the alternative, if this did happen, forgive this lady. This lady was justified because of domestic violence. There’s only one victim in this trial and that’s her, according to her.” After three days of testimony, it took a jury of six men and six women only 120

minutes to convict her on eight counts. Stark County Common Pleas Judge Harry Clide immediately sentenced her to life in prison for helping her husband rape Lana. Later, she would plead guilty to 13 more counts and avoid a second trial. At sentencing, May maintained her innocence and said, “All I can say is God is the only one who can help me now.” She will be eligible for parole in 2011, when she’s 64. May Sexton finished her coffee, glanced around the interview room at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, then recalled her involvement with the Futuretron project. “He had me call different chains of restaurants, Burger King, Mcdonald’s and Wendy’s. Burger King said send them some drawings and information and stuff and we did. The lady on the phone said they’d send it to their office in Chicago, maybe, and keep it for down the road. And that’s what got him all excited.

“Eddie just kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and traveling back and forth to Florida, wasting all kinds of money. I told him, you can’t just walk in there. I tried to set up appointments, a Chris somebody, and he said he had a lot of things to do. He wouldn’t be able to see him right away. But he’d go on a whim.

Eddie thought, if I get down there and I get my foot in the office, I’ll be able to talk to him.” May was asked, what were the Futuretrons, what was their selling point? “They’re just, you know, the way they were dressing. If anyone asked what a Futuretron is, well, maybe future generations would all look the same. “That’s what Eddie said.”

The tendency among some chroniclers of the Sexton case was to look for the easy explanations. But they were as elusive as the patriarch had been during all his months on the run. On the surface, Sexton appeared to fit the profile of what author and former cult member Linda Blood calls the “new satanists,” in her 1994 book of the same name.

Literature on ritual abuse abounds with stories of baby sacrifices and dead fetuses. Skeptics doubt their credibility. But that’s exactly the point, ritual survivors argue. The key element of ritual abuse is to make the reality of the victim’s experience so outrageous, no one will believe the child. Blood also makes observations about contemporary Satanism astoundingly similar to Eddie Lee Sexton’s claim that he was “both God and the Devil.” She writes, .a Contemporary satanism, however, is based not so much on the explicit worship of evil but on the contention that “good” and “evil” do not exist in any objective sense. Modern satanists proclaim that their goal is to rise above these mundane human designations into a godlike position of total, unrestricted freedom and power that places them beyond “good and evil.” Blood also provides a chillingly familiar description of the activities in organized satanic cults, They engage in the sale of narcotics, weapons, kidnapped children, and child pornography, as well as burglary, insurance and computer fraud, and arson for hire.

However, no evidence has yet to link Sexton to any kind of organized Satanic group. More likely, Satanism was just one more tool of control. In fact, Eddie Lee Sexton was a loner. He interacted only with family. Other than John Runyon in his teens, he appeared not to have a single close friend. On the other end of the morality scale, Sexton also seemed to embrace scripture. Pixie Good would tell a story about the time she’d returned from church and confronted her father with a sermon she’d heard with Joel Good. Incest was a sin, the pastor said. Her father countered with scripture, but she couldn’t recall which passages. Incest is dealt with in the Bible in the story of Lot in Genesis, and also in sexual guidelines in the book of Leviticus.

After failing to marry, Lot’s two daughters have sex with him, “Come let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father.” The storyteller appears to absolve Lot of guilt by having the patriarch in a drunken blackout during the act. Likewise, Leviticus lays out a dozen prohibitions by God against a man having sex with relatives, including in-laws.

Curiously, one is never mentioned, a man having sex with his daughter.

Some incest survivors also believe the gospel’s essential message of forgiveness serves as an easy balm for perpetrators and victims alike.

Anne Marie Eriksson, a former Manhattan probation officer, founded one of the first incest-prevention organizations in the country in 1983, called Incest Survivors Resource Network International, now based in New Mexico. A survivor herself, she said perpetrators are often former victims. “When they’ve had that trauma, they busy themselves in that black and white religion, seeking relief,” she said. “If only they follow this, their life will be peaceful and okay. Of course, it doesn’t work. When I was in probation work and I saw a Bible come into court in somebody’s hand, I used to joke, Okay, here comes a sex abuse case.”

” But at the same time, the good and evil in Eddie Lee Sexton’s world appear only as components in a greater pathology. Anthropologists and sociologists report that incest remains a taboo in every known culture on earth. Yet, it has continued for centuries. One study based on the Kinsey sex surveys among middle-class households reports at least 1 in 100 women have had sex with their fathers.

Experts suspected the practice to be more rampant in impoverished homes. Other, less scientific estimates, claim incest occurs in as many as 1 in 7 American homes. One nationally respected researcher and thinker in the field makes a convincing case for the reasons, and draws conclusions hauntingly revealing when applied to the Sexton case. In her thoroughly researched work, Father-Daughter Incest, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman delved into previous sex and incest studies and conducted her own detailed look at 40 women survivors. The women were all white, educated, and middle-class, many of them church-going Catholics and Protestants. They may have not been of the same social strata as the Sextons. But in almost every way, the study’s results could have been mirrors in the halls of the house on Caroline Street. Dr. Herman writes the taboo of incest has been explained by three different schools of thought. It is biologically unsound, with data showing a higher incidence of stillbirths, early infant deaths, and mental retardation. It is a psychological threat because it disrupts the organization and harmony of the family. And socially, it needs to be deterred among patriarchal societies that view “brides” as “gifts” that are exchanged between fathers and young men of contemporary tribes. Yet, Dr. Herman argues, tacit permission for incest abounds. She cites articles and images from Hustler and Penthouse, promoting it as a form of sexual liberation. She cites the Biblical references that seem to absolve males in the act. Girls are portrayed as young seductresses in pop culture and literature like Lolita. She blames psychologists for dismissing incest reports, arguing that the father of psychology started the trend. Sigmund Freud stumbled upon incest reports in his landmark work, she writes, but incorporated them into his psychological theory as a form of female fantasy, a clinical notion that prevails today. Incest families, however, have particular characteristics, accounts from Herman’s study group clearly show. In the study, fathers, without question, were heads of the households, their authority absolute. They ruled with force if necessary. They secluded all the women in their families from the outside world. But they, themselves, were usually viewed as “sympathe ic, even admirable” men by outsiders. Mothers were full-time homemakers, depending entirely on their husbands for income. The fathers considered the mothers inferior, not only in their achievements, “but simply in their status as women.” Males in the family were considered superior, granted more freedom and privileges.

Daughters were prohibited from establishing outside social lives. Dr.

Herman writes, Fathers exercised minute control over the lives of their wives and daughters, often virtually confining them to the house. The boys in the family were sometimes enlisted as deputies in this policing role. It’s a patriarchal structure sanctified by many strident Pentecostals and fundamentalists with scripture, like Eddie Lee and his father before him as well. Half of the study’s survivors reported physical abuse to enforce the father’s authority. Other children in the family were beaten as well. Their fathers were selective in their choice of targets, One child was often singled out as a scapegoat, while a more favored child was spared. There were also limits. No family member was injured seriously enough to require hospitalization .

.. Although the fathers often appeared to be completely out of control in their own homes, they never made the mistake of attacking outsiders.

They were not known as bullies or troublemakers, in the presence of superior authority, they were generally ingratiating, deferential, even meek. Herman cites other studies that seem to reinforce Eddie Lee Sexton’s profile, a man who relied on inferiors for his dirty work.

Incest perpetrators appear to be both tyrants and cowards. The solution to this apparent contradiction lies in the father’s ability to assess their relative power in any situation and to vary their behavior accordingly. In the presence of men much more powerful than themselves, such as police, prosecutors, therapists, and researchers, the fathers knew how to present themselves as pathetic, helpless and confused. The fact that the Sextons had so many children was consistent with the study. The number of offspring in incest families is well above the national average. Pregnancies are usually imposed on women for a reason, Dr. Herman writes. “Economically dependant, socially isolated, in poor health, and encumbered with the care of many small children, these mothers were in no position to challenge their husband’s domination.” The psychiatrist also studied daughters.

Sexual contact followed predictable patterns similar to the Sexton case. Fondling and oral contact in early years, moving to intercourse at the average age of 13 in the study. Many daughters held their mothers in contempt for failing to protect them, or to believe them when they disclosed. At the same time, they found attachment in the special treatment they sometimes received from their fathers. It was not unusual for daughters to “fall in love” with their fathers and compete with their mothers. As they got older, they often became more rebellious, and faced physical and social restrictions. Other researchers have studied the pathology of the incestuous patriarch.

Incest allows the father to structure sex exactly as he wants it, without worrying about performance or rejections. Secrecy adds to the pleasure. In some cases, the daughter’s unhappiness also contributes to his enjoyment. Like rape, for some perpetrators it’s an act of hostility and aggression. The perpetrator’s experience cited by Dr.

Herman is eerily familiar to the West Virginian weekend that put Eddie Lee Sexton in prison, and perhaps motivated him after his mother’s death. In the father’s fantasy life, the daughter becomes the source of all the father’s infantile longings for nurturance and care. He thinks of her first as the idealized childhood bride or sweetheart ..

Another observation explains Sexton on death row thirty years later.

Dr. Herman writes, Disclosure disrupts whatever fragile equilibrium has been maintained, jeopardizes the functioning of all family members, increases the likelihood of violent and desperate behavior, and places everyone, but particularly the daughter, at risk for retaliation.

However, the Sexton case also seemed to break even the boundaries of studies. Detectives and social workers discerned a predictable MO by both parents. Girls and boys first were fondled by siblings and parents. At 13, Eddie Lee Sexton approached girls seeking full intercourse. When boys reached puberty, Sexton sodomized sons, asserting his dominance and authority. With the mentally helpless, like Willie, the sodomy continued. With the sodomy and May’s sexual involvement, the Sextons ventured into extremely rare statistical territory. Mother-son and father-son incest accounted for less than three percent of incest cases in key studies. The Sextons were an anomaly within a deviancy, their house of secrets a warlock’s brew of good, evil, and fantasy. Largely, Eddie Lee Sexton’s fantasy. Indeed, they were Futuretrons. Procreating a new generation of children who “would all look the same.” The Greyhound rolled to a stop in front of the Canton bus station a half hour before midnight on a frigid night in February, 1997. The passenger from Tampa stood for a few moments, looking around as the bus pulled away in a blast of diesel smoke. She carried only a small cardboard box and had less than $100. She was wearing a flimsy blue cotton suit and a pair of white tennis shoes with

“GOOD”

printed in marker across the heel. Estella “Pixie” Good had been paroled after serving two years and three months of her sentence.

She’d wanted to return to be near her siblings in Canton, Ohio. Otis Sexton had informed several siblings of her arrival time, hoping one would pick her up. His own family was in turmoil, some of his daughters urging him to let go. He’d done enough, they urged. But Otis was waiting a block down the street in an idling car. When no other Sextons arrived, the uncle drove up. Pixie was shaking, hardly able to light a cigarette. “To leave her standing there, to abandon her, would go against everything I believe in my life,” he later said.

A few days later, she came down her uncle’s stairs for her first journalistic interview since the entire saga had begun. She clutched a dozen prison certificates of accomplishment. Titles such as, Basic Personal Skills.

Industrial Sewing. Employable Skills. Bible Correspondence Course.

Insight and Feelings. She’d started a job search, and expressed interest in working in hospice care. Pixie Good had gained weight, not obese, but no longer the thinnest daughter dispatched to seduce Ray Hesser. The voice was still quiet, the words few. But she laughed here and there, and when she talked, she held her head up, looking her interviewer in the eyes. She told largely the same story as she did to police, distancing herself from all abuse. She accused Sherri of being the abus*e mother, saying she was “always throwing her baby around.”