House of Secrets (46 page)

She also filled in some gaps. She discussed the trip to the college library. She revealed the purpose of the secret attic compartments in the house on Caroline. “We hid in there,” she said. “That was the only safe place in the house.” She appeared to have lost entire blocks of her teenage years. She couldn’t even remember her two high school friends, identical twins Terry and Traci Turify. She also may have lied. She said she never knew the contents of the letter Teresa Boron had sent her husband saying his grandfather was deathly ill. She didn’t know that her interviewer had the statement from Eddie Sexton Jr. And Eddie Jr. could not know the contents of the letter, unless she told him. “Eddie [Sr.] tore the letter up,” she also said. “Joel never saw it.” She seemed unmoved by the notion that some people thought she was a murderer, an ally of her father. She had no words for them specifically. “I don’t know what I’d say to them,” she said.

“Everybody has the right to feel what they want. As long as I know I’m telling the truth, it doesn’t matter to me what anybody thinks.” For two hours, she never called Eddie Lee Sexton her “father” or her “dad.”

She called him Eddie. “I call him Eddie because I don’t consider him my father,” she said. “Because of Eddie, I lost everything I had.”

More than two years after the murder trial, the courtroom revelations of her nephew’s torture and death still hung with Teresa Boron and the rest of the family like an old, chronic injury. It would be a long wait for justice. Appeals made the average stay on Florida’s death row 10 years. Joey’s brother Danny sued the Sextons in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. Joel Good’s estate won by default against the penniless defendants. The family felt some gratification. The judgement would allow Good’s estate to attach any money Eddie Lee Sexton might receive from tabloids or talk shows. No money ever came.

For remembrance, the family hunted down the name of the hospital in Kentucky where Skipper Lee was born and ordered baby pictures. They put up Joey’s groomed high school portrait. The prom pictures with Pixie were kept put away.

When Teresa found out that Pixie had told her brother, Eddie Jr., that she knew of her letter to Joey, Teresa wept. “At least, then, he knew we loved him,” she said. That was some consolation. Then Pixie claimed her husband never saw it. Or did he? Why was he so adamant about flying back that day in the library? “I chose to believe he did,”

Teresa said. Many months earlier, across town, an ongoing argument raged between the identical twins, Traci and Terry Turify. Terry thought Pixie Good was a victim. Traci recalled, “I thought, Stella, you bitch. I wanted to kill her. ” For days after news of the murder broke, Traci didn’t make contact with Joel Good’s family. She was too embarrassed. She thought, I introduced Joel to Pixie. Then she heard about the funeral. At the last minute, when she learned the details, she raced to the funeral home, but found no one there. The service was over, the procession gone. She sped to the cemetery. When she arrived, the dirt was still fresh on the grave, the area scattered with flowers and snow. Traci Turify Dryland stood there in the wind, weeping. Thinking, what have I done? “I thought, if I would have just went out with Joel, he probably would have never met her,” she later recalled, crying again over the memory. “It was all my fault.” She found Teresa Boron’s new address in North Canton and drove over, but spent an hour going up and down her street. She couldn’t find the house. Finally, she knocked on the door to Boron’s newly-built Victorian. Traci told Teresa she wanted to apologize for introducing them. They hugged and cried a lot. He was her Forrest Gump. “Joel never had a chance,” Traci said. She felt better, but not serene.

“She’s a baby killer,” Traci later said. “She’s a fucking bitch.

Joel’s not at rest. It’s not complete. The Sextons. All of them. I just feel they all should die.” The ambivalence of the identical twins found its way into dozens of individuals touched by one of the most brutal public cases of family abuse in American history. Steve Ready, Otis Sexton, and Judee Genetin were among them. Ambivalence not just toward Pixie, but Willie and Skipper. For Steve Ready, even May.

“Look at their world,” Ready said. “Their existence. What else did they know?” All the patriarch’s creations. On another cold day in February, when she found out that Pixie Good had returned, Teresa Boron began thinking about making plans. When the time was right, she planned to drive over and knock on the door of Otis Sexton. Saying, “I’d like to have a talk with Pixie.” Teresa Boron planned to take her pastor. She’d need a minister, and some kind of miracle. She was looking for some kind of peace. The Bottomless Pit When Steve Ready visited the house on Caroline Street with Jay Pruner, the Tampa state attorney immediately saw the handless Jesus, and wanted it. “God, what a perfect memento,” Pruner said. “I want that sitting in my office.”

Ready considered returning at night and outright stealing it. He thought, pack it up in a big box and send it off to Tampa. Then better judgement took over, a cop’s judgement. He could see the headline, SEXTON DETECTIVE ARRESTED IN SEXTON BURGLARY. Perhaps appropriately, a Dumpster truck carted off the statue with the rest of Eddie Lee Sexton’s trash. The patriarch had left much behind, years after the case. Judee Genetin and social workers put together a Christmas party for the siblings, only to have them argue and start pointing fingers at each other over petty jealousies. They seemed to clamor for each other’s company and love, but couldn’t form any lasting, healthy relationships. The Exchange Club named Steve Ready deputy of the year for his work. Before Eddie Lee’s trial, he was assigned to a federal fugitive task force. But cops and lawyers and social workers and relatives still called Ready with tips. There was a hazy report from Skipper of an unidentified adult male being killed by Eddie Lee years ago and buried in a park called Ohio Powerland. Ready, working part-time, was never able to develop enough evidence. The unidentified body Machelle Sexton saw in the trunk haunted the detective. One day, Otis Sexton revealed a relative said it was him. He’d apparently been beaten by Eddie Lee and dropped off next to a freeway near Toledo, presumed dead. He woke up in a ditch and needed a month in the hospital to recover. But he wanted nothing to do with the law. He was still terrified of Eddie Lee. Other agencies started reaping Eddie Lee’s harvest. Some siblings needed psychotropic drugs to control depression and hallucinations. Eddie Jr. showed up at the Jackson Township Police Department, wanting to be admitted to a mental hospital. In the summer of 1996 he was arrested for theft from Sears and picked up with a crack pipe. His wife Daniela left him. In 1997, he went into treatment. Sherri had more breakdowns and marital trouble. Skipper seemed incapable of serving out his burglary sentence on good behavior and was placed on extended probation. He was not charged with abusing his siblings. Shelly Croto miscarried her twins after testifying at her mother’s trial. Willie was continually ruled incompetent in Florida. Like other siblings, he kept having flashbacks and auditory hallucinations. Sherri’s son Christopher, Eddie Lee’s son/grandson, remained in foster care. Dawn and Shasta were in custody of Florida social services, their fate confidential. It appeared unlikely their mother would ever get them back. In early 1997, psychologists evaluated Willie Se%on again and declared him competent to face charges. A murder trial was scheduled later in the year, his fate uncertain. He wasn’t the only sibling with a pending homicide case. In November of 1996, James Sexton, 20, was arrested and charged with murder. He’d allegedly burned his 38-year-old roommate to death in a house fire as the man slept on the couch. The man had sex with him, he said. In one interview, James claimed he’d seen his father sitting on the couch. He was trying to burn the old man, not the roommate. “Just because I’m a Sexton, that doesn’t mean they have to charge me with murder,” James said. “Maybe felonious assault, cause I burned my dad’s arm.” Said Ready, “As we speak, there’s some kid somewhere who’s going to go into law enforcement or social work who’s going to find himself dealing with these kids.” All wasn’t lost.

Social workers were hopeful for Kimberly, Lana, Christopher, and Matthe . They had been adopted, their names changed. Some were in long-term therapy. But others, such as Shelly and Skipper, lacked either the will or the money. Those involved in the case paid a price.

Frustrated with Sexton’s house of mirrors and enraged by the graphic disclosures, Steve Ready found himselftrying to understand. “These people changed my whole life,” he said. “You find yourself Lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, and trying to think like them. And that makes me crazy, doesn’t it?” Then, Ready had a heart attack. “As I lay in the hospital, the first thing I thought was, Did that sonovabitch down on death row put some kind of mojo on me?” Judee Genetin, after returning from the Florida trial, went into a deep, month-long depression. She’d brought a Rottweiler for protection.

Wayne Welsh, who started carrying a gun, had a heart attack. And Anne Greene, after leaving Canton for Florida, largely to get away from the Sextons, developed a rare brain tumor. After surgeons removed it, she was left with speech and motor skill problems and faces extended therapy. It’s not even clear if she remembers the Sexton case. For me, unlike most true-crime accounts, it simply became clear that the Sexton story was endless. The principal perpetrators had been exposed and imprisoned, but many secrets remained buried everywhere, still waiting to be discovered. The case had an obsessive pull. The depth of Sexton’s pure evil both repulsed and fascinated. Yet, I was not disappointed when he promised an interview, but never delivered. I’d done it with other criminals many times before, but I wasn’t sure I had the patience to sit very long in a small room with the man. Incest network founder Ann Marie Eriksson told me, “I tell professionals, if you’re going to get programs for incest, you need to make them suitable for your local banker and senator. It cuts across all groups, all religions, all incomes.” But for me, the Sextons broke the true-crime book mold of the perfect family concealing unthinkable crimes. The fact that the Sextons were so dysfunctional, and Sexton himself an ex-con, made it even more astounding that he’d pulled off what he did for years. I tried to understand May Sexton. She was courteous and helpful in interviews, but remained a Flatliner herself. She took a Millon personality test for me. It showed her to be obsessive-compulsive, self-destructive, and a pathologically dependent personality who clamored for social approval. My obsession concerned the babies. The fact that no alcohol was found in Skipper Lee was troubling. Was the Nyquil story just a cover for his suffocation, or was something far darker going on? The biggest riddle began at the J.

B. Cook Library in Sarasota. When I first interviewed librarian Gail Novak there, she broke down, as she had with authorities. She complained no one would believe her that there was a “second baby,” a burial on the grounds. She claimed Sherri Sexton had come to the library after her parents’ arrest and asked her, “Where’s the grave?”

I knew authorities considered the strange aspects of her story to be hysterical imaginings. Trying to calm her, I asked the librarian to take a walk outside and show me the spot. As we approached the line of palmettos in the vacant field, she nearly collapsed. She had been afraid to visit there since the arrest. Now, there was a hole in the ground, the size of the grave for an infant. I called campus police, who seemed to dismiss the entire matter. I took pictures anyway. I chased the mystery of that hole for nearly a year.

Who’d dug up something? What? And why? After I told Steve Ready and Otis Sexton of the discovery, other siblings began to disclose.

Willie, from a phone at the mental hospital, said there had been a second baby, not Pixie’s but Sherri’s. It had been born on Treaty Road, then killed by Eddie Lee Sexton. Skipper confirmed. He told me Sherri delivered the baby in the bedroom. His father took it into the bathroom, still screaming from birth. When his father emerged, it was dead in his hands. “Then what did you do?” I asked. “We went back into the woods, you know,” he said. “You know what the old man was into. Sacrificed it, then buried it.” It all seemed to match the neighbor’s news account of a baby screaming and finding a buried box behind the Sexton trailer. Sherri later confirmed the delivery and death to Steve Ready. The baby supposedly had been unearthe and moved by the patriarch, eventually ending up in Little Manatee State Park, said Willie in a fragmented account. By late 1996, Pasco County cops were digging. They took Pixie Good out of jail to show them the sight of the grave Sherri had shown her on Treaty Road. They found nothing.

They got Willie from Chatahootchee and returned to Little Manatee.

Willie thought he could find the spot where the baby was buried. They dug at two locations, but found nothing. Otis Sexton, who went to Florida for the excavations, was also hearing from siblings that the dead child had been moved again once more before the arrest in Little Manatee. Had that been what the FBI air surveillance saw when they spotted teens with a shovel in the forest? Talking to elusive siblings for more details was often impossible. Just finding them, and trying to commit them to an interview, often took weeks. Pasco County police decided they had spent enough time and resources. A detective marked the case inactive. When I interviewed Pixie Sexton days after she was paroled, I carefully moved into the subject. Independently, she verified virtually all of Gail Novak’s account. Yes, it was many weeks after Skipper Lee’s death. “The first baby” was the miscarriage soon after she’d married Joel, she said. The “second baby” was Skipper Lee.

She admitted seeing her father burying something outside the library.

I asked, what was it? “It was Sherri’s baby,” she said. “Sherri told me after they were arrested Eddie had buried it at the library.” Then later, dug it up again. She claimed she didn’t know it was in the trunk. “Eddie” would not let them near the trunk, she said. “Novak said you wanted her to come out and see the baby?”