House of Secrets (5 page)

Velva’s 32-year-old son Jack decided to have a man-to-man talk with Joey, advising him about sex and the precautions he had to take. A couple of days later, Velva overheard Joey talking to his brother Danny. Joey wanted his brother to go with him to the drugstore. He said he needed condoms, but was too embarrassed to buy them for himself. Later, she questioned Danny. Yes, he’d bought them for him.

He said Joey had plans to take Pixie to a motel that night. She told Teresa, “I wonder what this Stella wants with Joey. I mean, he’s not a boy who’s ever shown much interest in sex. And she’s had already had two children. I just can’t figure what the connection is.” Soon Joey stopped coming home at night, sometimes for a couple days at a time.

Teresa and Velva tried to put their heads together. Their only option was to try to give him gentle advice. Yelling at Joey would only alienate him. Once Velva had given him hell for leaving fast food containers around his bedroom. He’d gone outside and sat on the backyard swing, sulking like a hurt child. It was on Christmas Eve, 1991, that Velva began to notice how his appearance was changing. He spent the holiday with Velva and her family. Pixie wasn’t with him that night. Velva gave him socks and underwear and flannel shirts.

He’d always been clean cut, but now his hair was over his ears and he was sporting a scraggly beard. “Your razor break?” Velva asked him.

“Pixie likes it on me,” Joey said. Then he disappeared for several weeks, After the first few days, Velva and Teresa took turns calling the Sextons. Sometimes the parents answered the telephone, sometimes one of the older children. It was always the same response. “No, he’s not over here.” Had they seen Joey? “Yeah, he was here with Pixie.”

They left messages for him, but he never returned the calls. The family began checking the places they knew he frequented. The whole family joined the search. They took turns dropping in at Canton Center Mall, walking from store to store, hoping to find him shopping or just hanging out. Teresa visited the house on Caroline, but the Sextons said she’d just missed him. One day, their father Lewis thought he saw him drive by in a car. He followed the car for several miles until it pulled into a driveway, but it turned out to be a look-alike. Then, in January, 1992, Joey called Danny. “Pixie’s pregnant,” Joey told Danny.

He said was going to marry her. He claimed he’d used the condoms, but there must have been some kind of accident. A few days later, Joey showed up at Velva’s with Pixie. He wanted all the phone numbers and addresses of relatives. They were planning a wedding, he said, in February, just a few weeks away. They planned to marry on Valentine’s Day, 1992. Velva went to the basement to get some clothes out of the dryer and collect her thoughts. Joey followed her. Velva began crying, searching for a way to talk some sense into him. “Aunt Velva, don’t you think my mom would want to be a grandma?” he asked. She grabbed his hand. “Yes, but she’d also want you to be careful. “

“Careful of what?”

“You don’t know this family.” She’d heard the cult rumors from her sister Teresa. “But I love Pixie.”

“I love you, and believe me, I want you to be happy. But I also want you to think things out.” As February approached, Teresa, Velva and the rest of the family certainly did their share of thinking. They did it out loud in telephone conversations and family visits. They began comparing observations, particularly of Pixie’s children. Except for a couple of primitive words, everyone agreed, the girl Dawn wasn’t talking, at age 3. She showed no interest in toys. Mostly, she just huddled next to her mother, staring blankly, a bottle always in her hand. “There’s something wrong with those kids,” Sam said the first time he saw them.

“They’re too backward,” Joey’s grandfather said. Teresa recognized something in Shasta that she’d seen in Dawn, something she’d seen that day on Ed and Estella Sexton’s deck. “There’s something wrong with that entire family,” she said. “That child has got that same Sexton stare.”

I

D”M, lvay After five years on the job, Stark County child protection worker Wayne Welsh had come to recognize the smell. It permeated homes. It emanated from children he interviewed, filling his office in the Stark County Department of Human Services, lingering long after they were gone. Some thought the odor was the smell of poverty. Welsh disagreed. Many people who didn’t have money did not have that odor in their homes. No, the smell was more distinctive, and the cause not necessarily economic. The smell meant parents weren’t washing sheets and towels. It meant clothes and underwear had clung too long to little bodies. It meant children were not getting regular baths, or being instructed in basic hygiene. This had little to do with money.

“It’s the stench of neglect,” Wayne Welsh said. Neglect was one of the three criteria that allowed the DHS to act. That was Ohio law. A neglected child was a child abandoned by his parents. Or, he lacked proper parental care, such as going without proper food, education, moral guidance, or health care. A second criteria was abuse. An abused child was a victim of what the Ohio code called “sexual activity”

and/or physical attack. The law did draw certain exceptions, allowing parents to use corporal punishment, unless it threatened the child’s “health or welfare.” The third was dependency. A dependant child was homeless or destitute, and not necessarily through the fault of his parents, guardian, or custodian. Dependency also applied if a child was in danger of being abused or neglected by the parents themselves.

Because the latter condition dealt with something that had yet to happen, that kind of dependency could be the most difficult to prove.

Wayne Welsh left those judgements to the legal department, where lawyers argued the definitions of the statute’s terms and decided if they had enough evidence to file a state custody case. Usually, the best evidence was the child’s word. If a child disclosed a situation covered under the statute, they could remove the child from the home, then prevail in a shelter care hearing in the Stark County Probate Court. In any month, Welsh had 15 to 20 child protection investigations underway. His caseload ranged from 150 to 200 a year.

When he was assigned on the morning of February 11, 1992 to investigate a counselor’s referral at Jackson High School, Wayne Welsh began thinking about disclosure. The agency had been accumulating a file on the Sexton family of Caroline Street since 1979. But across 11 years and a dozen referrals, reports, and investigations about strange behavior in the Sexton family, not a single Sexton child had disclosed.

Now, Welsh had been told, Machelle Sexton was waiting for him at Jackson High School. Machelle’s guidance counselor, Ruth Killion, reported Machelle, a senior there, was “willing to talk about problems at home.” Welsh knew that when it came to the Sexton children, that could mean anything. It certainly didn’t guarantee that she would disclose. The Sexton case file had been an exercise in frustration for Welsh. He’d first become involved because of another high school referral three years ago. It began a series of probes involving Sexton teenage girls and boys. On February I, 1989, a student reported to a school of ficial that Machelle’s older sister Sherri had told her that her father had beaten her with a belt. Sherri reportedly had marks all over her legs. The next day, Sherri did not show up at school. Sherri Sexton’s counselor was particularly acquainted with the family’s dynamics. It was a job Welsh knew well. Before joining human services, he’d counseled 7th through 12th graders in schools in east Canton. Welsh knew confidentiality reigned in the field. It fostered rapport and trust. He also knew that if a situation blew up, if a case generated sensational headlines, a counselor could not step forward and publicly discuss details of a case. That was left to administrators, who typically shared little more than general policy. He worked under similar restrictions in DHS, unless a situation became public in open court. In Welsh’s 1989 investigation, the Jackson High School counselor did not believe Sherri Sexton was in imminent danger. Sexton children were frequently absent, “and the parents always provide excuses,” the counselor said. The counselor predicted the other Sexton children would not talk about discipline in their home. They were under orders to share any problems they had with their oldest sister, Stella, also known as Pixie. In fact, they were forbidden from discussing any aspect of home life with anyone, the counselor said.

However, agency records showed a few small cracks in this wall of silence had opened from time to time. In October of 1988, a counselor reported concerns about different stories Pixie Sexton was giving relating to her pregnancy, but the agency couldn’t investigate because she was a legal adult. A month later, a teacher reported that 7-year-old Lana Sexton said her father teased her, tickled her and touched her “titties.” A DHS worker investigating determined there were “no indications of abusive behavior,” adding “teasing and tickling” do not constitute abuse. Six weeks later, the same teacher reported that every time Lana played with a Barbie doll, she pulled off its top, pointed to the chest and said, “Look at those titties.” When a counselor tried to interview Lana, however, she refused to talk. A similar pattern extended back to 1979. In three other referrals, an anonymous relative, a hospital professional, and township police had contacted Human Services. The referees concerned dirty children, cruel punishments, and family fights. Workers talked to Sexton children privately, but they maintained everything was fine. Surprise visits to the home in 1979 and 1983 revealed not filth and squalor, but a clean and well-organized household. One worker noted that Ed and Estella Sexton appeared to be concerned parents struggling to raise a large family. In a 1983 investigation, one worker even noted that she had complimented Ed Sexton on his parental skills. In the 1989 referral concerning Sherri Sexton’s beating, Wayne Welsh started with Pixie. He pulled the oldest daughter out of class. She maintained there were no problems at home with her sister Sherri, or any other sibling. Welsh told her he understood she’d had a baby. He asked where the father was. “He’s in Mexico,” she said. Welsh interviewed Sherri Sexton in 1989. She was a full-figured 16-year-old with dark features and penetrating eyes. He went gently, trying to find common ground by talking about his cats and dogs, what kind of pets she might have. He tried talking about schoolwork. “I couldn’t make any kind of connection,” he would later recall. Eventually, he asked to see the back of her legs. She lifted her skirt. Her thighs had several horizontal red marks. “Sherri,” he asked gently, “who beat you?”

“No one,” she said. He tried the question several ways. “I told her my job was to protect kids, to make sure kids were safe,” he later said. “If there was something scary happening at home, we can protect her. But she refused to disclose a thing.” That same day, he received new information from the counselor. Another Sexton child, Willie, a junior, was reportedly a fire starter. Twice he’d set the family home on fire. Welsh interviewed several teachers, staffers, and other students, but came up with nothing the legal department could use in court. He met with Sherri Sexton again a couple of days later. He wondered if there had been any repercussions at home from his interviews. Not one, she said. Two years later, during May of 1991, it was Machelle Sexton who brought Wayne Welsh back to Jackson. She looked different than the other Sexton teens Welsh had interviewed before. Unlike her siblings’ stark, dark coloring, she had blond hair and eyes that sparkled blue.

Machelle had been quite talkative with Ruth Killion. The counselor appeared to have a very good rapport with the girl. Before Welsh arrived, Machelle told Killion that her parents had shunned her. She said she got home from school, cleaned, cooked, and got her younger siblings ready for bed, then had to be asleep by 9 p. m. Her brothers and sisters were told not to talk to her, her father accusing her of trying to “poison their minds. ” She told the counselor she wasn’t allowed to leave the house, or even use the phone. She was threatening to kill herself. Killion reported to Welsh what he suspected two years earlier. After the report from Sherri in 1989, Machelle said, the father had instructed the kids to travel in groups. Every morning, Ed Sexton gave them all a quarter. They were to find a pay phone and report to him if a sibling talked to classmates or school staffers. If a sibling spotted a contact and didn’t call, he or she would be punished as well. Despite this, the counselor predicted Machelle might talk to Welsh. His interview with Machelle was more frustrating than the one two years earlier with her old sister Sherri. She confirmed what she’d already told her counselor, but wouldn’t disclose what the family had to hide. Welsh asked her if he thought the family’s home life was appropriate. “There’s only one way to do anything,” she said.

“There’s only one way to think.”

“And what way is that, Machelle?” he asked. “Dad’s way,” she said.

The father appeared to be the common denominator in all her fears and concerns. Machelle said her father had told all the children that if they talked to officials they would be taken away and he would be thrown in jail. They would be helpless without his care. Welsh explained that the goal of the agency was to keep families together, but that some parents did need help, such as counseling. “He would not go to jail unless he did something pretty bad,” Welsh said. “I just can’t,” she said. After that 1991 interview, Welsh decided he was seeing a pattern, but not one common in dysfunctional families he’d investigated in the past. He recognized it from a professional seminar he’d attended months earlier in Akron, a symposium on cults. A DHS

report later summarized this evaluation of the Sexton situation, “Worker (Welsh) describes the family dynamics as a cult with Dad as the undisputed leader … Worker noted that he had very strong suspicions of dark secrets being held within this family.” Welsh later explained, “Whenever you’ve got somebody who’s controlling everybody else by that much fear, and encouraging other members of this group to turn on each other, it shows that the leader is very frightened about something getting out. The leader is guarding something that is terrible.”