House of Secrets (8 page)

Charles, James, Matthew and Christopher slept in another bedroom down the hall. The two oldest brothers left home at 18, she said. Patrick and Eddie Jr. were married. Patrick was a half brother, really, born before her parents married. Both brothers lived in Canton now.“Eddie Bug,” she said, still came around a lot. They all had nicknames.

Eddie Jr. was Eddie Bug. Patrick was Bozo. Stella was Pixie.

William was Willie Bug. Sherri was Bunny. Charles was Skipper. James was Bird. Christopher was Sugar Tooth. Lana was Angel. And Kimberly was Ground Hog, or just Hog. Her father had come up with them. He’d named Pixie’s daughter Dawn “Cockroach,” or just “Roach,” because she was short. Machelle Sexton said she was Candy, until she began to rebel in her teens. Now her father called her “Diarrhea Mouth.” She figured it was because she talked too much and asked too many questions. An idiot clown. A fairy. Animals and insects and God’s messenger sent from on high. Goe looked at Anne Greene, then back at Machelle. “Your sister’s children,” Goe said.“Where are their fathers?”

“Everyone knows they’re my dad’s kids,” she said. “How do you know that?” Goe asked. “We just do.” She said it like somebody relaying a mundane fact of life, as if she were naming the make of a car someone drove. The interview continued. She rarely responded in more than one or two sentences at a time. Goe asked her about her father’s assault.

It was in December, she said. Her father told her he wanted to take her for a ride to discuss her future. She was a B and C student.

Maybe she could go to college, he said. “It was a big deal,” Machelle said. College is a pretty big deal, Goe agreed. No, the ride was a big deal, Machelle said. Other than attending school, she was not allowed out of the house on Caroline Street. For as long as she could remember, a ride with her dad to the gas station or local convenience store was a big deal. It was a big deal to get out of the house. It was a big deal to ride in the family’s 6-year-old brown and yellow Chevy van. It was a really big deal if Dad would buy her a candy bar.

Dad drove the family van to the Wales Square, a quarter mile from her house. He didn’t park in front of the market there, she said. He drove to an isolated lot behind the store. It was evening, a dark winter night. “I told him, I thought we were going to talk about my future, she said. “And what did he say?” Goe asked. “He told me to shut up.” Machelle said then her father slapped her, then forced her into the back of the van. She was wearing a jean skirt and a blouse.

He ripped off her panties. He pinned her arms so hard, she said, his handprints showed up as bruises the following day. She was reluctant to talk about the details. It took Goe several tries. “Did he penetrate you?” he asked. “Yes,” she said.

“Did he threaten you?” She reported her father saying, “Say anything to anybody and I’ll kill you. It would be very easy. Girls disappear every day.”

“Did you believe you were in danger?” Goe asked. “He knows people who would do it for him,” she said. And, she added, her older brother Eddie Jr. hung out with some tough people as well. Goe wanted to know more about the family. With a family that size, he asked, just where did the household income come from) “He’s on some kind of disability,”

Machelle said. He supposedly had a back injury, she explained, but she’d always been suspicious of it. Dad had a part-time house painting business with her uncle, Otis Sexton. They painted in the summer. She believed her father also received help from charities for multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. “He gets in his wheelchair whenever those people come to the house,” she said. “Then after they leave he gets up and he’s fine.” When the interview was over, Ann Greene said she’d also placed a couple of calls to the Department of Human Services. “I’ve got a call in to Wayne Welsh,” she said. Anne kept asking her husband Gerry, “Did Glenn Goe call?” It became a daily question, as was her husband’s answer, “No.” Two weeks passed. Welsh apparently hadn’t returned her calls It seemed as if nothing was getting accomplished. She thought, Lord, what more do they need? Why don’t they march right over there and arrest Ed Sexton? Children were in danger. Anne not only continued visiting Machelle, she began bringing her home for visits. Machelle appeared as excited as the kids at the holiday dinner in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. She touched dishware and accessories in the kitchen. She tried out furniture. She gazed at portraits of the Greene family on the mantel, then met the children and Gerry. She appeared more awestruckby the way they all joked and hugged and talked than the material possessions. “I realized this was the first time this girl had seen a normal family with genuine love,” Anne later would recall. She was tempted to have Machelle move in with them. But when she began discussing it with other family members, her son-in-law, the sheriff’s deputy, told her it wasn’t prudent to get so close. Anne spoke to a longtime Jackson officer, a name her son-in-law gave her. “Look, you don’t want to get involved with the Sextons,” the cop said.“That family has been nothing but trouble out here for years.” Anne thought, is that what Christ would do? Not get involved? In this Christian family, that’s not what we do. She wanted to invite Machelle to move in with them, but she couldn’t do that if it would put her own children at risk. Machelle Sexton began to disclose even more. She said the real reason she’d gone to her counselor and left home had little to do with her father hitting her. That morning, she said, she’d watched her father kiss her sisters Kimberly and Lana on the lips, saying goodbye before school.

“I didn’t want to see the same thing happen to them that had happened to me,” she said. It became clear to Anne very little was normal in the Sexton household. Machelle often revealed anomalies in the middle of otherwise banal conversations, seemingly unaware of their impact.

They seemed routine to Machelle, but sometimes made Anne’s heart pound.

Conversations that went something like, “That’s a nice dress, Anne.”

“I got it at Belden Village.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“You’ve never been to the mall?”

“I’ve never been shopping. My mother bought my clothes.

I told you, I never went anywhere.” The only time she was out of the house for any extended period was in the summer when her father took them on short camping trips. Or, “So, Machelle, what were your neighbors like?”

“You don’t talk to neighbors. You get whupped for that.” The whuppin’s seemed to have a ritualistic quality, Anne learned. The children were required to go to her parents’ bedroom, remove their pants, and expose their naked bottoms. Her father would hit their thighs or buttocks. Her mother was usually there, watching.

“Sometimes you got to pick out your own stick in the yard,” she said.

The thick ones left bruises, she said, while the thin ones stung. She didn’t want bruises. Bruises kept you home from school “I loved school,” she said. “School meant I wasn’t at home.”

“When did the whuppin’s stop?”

“They didn’t.”

“How often?”

“Every day, more or less. Me, especially. I was the rebel of the family.” Or, “Machelle, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

“Normal.” She apparently spent her teenage years researching exactly what normal entailed. It came slowly by reading and watching and listening, Machelle said. She read about “normal” people in romance paperbacks and novels in high school literature class. Restricted to the house, she took advantage of her only luxury at home, a 52-inch Mitsubishi TV. She could watch TV in the living room after school and after dinner if her chores were done. Normal families functioned in TV

sitcoms like Fun House. Normal adults had fun in shows like Cheers.

She regularly watched a program on Channel 4 called After School Specials. The show covered school and family life, relationships, friendships, sex and conflict. What behavior was appropriate, and what behavior was not. “A lot of people say TV is no good for kids,”

Machelle would later say. “But the way I figure, television probably saved my life.” Anne wondered, didn’t other students suspect something was very wrong in her life? “I learned to fake it,” she said. She studied her classmates, she explained. She listened to what they said about friends and parents. She listened to them talk about the activities they did after school. She tracked the movies they saw and learned the names of stores inside Belden Village, what hits were selling in record stores. Then, in school chatter, she mimicked them, as if she’d done that, been there. The only dances Machelle attended were the ones held by her father. On Friday nights, he would gather all the boys and girls in the living room, turn on a rock station, and order them to dance, sometimes for hours. “He’d sit in his chair, just smoking a cigarette and watch,” she said. Or, he’d move the girls around, putting them up front where he would dictate the way they moved their torsos and their hips. There seemed to be two sets of rules.

Some of the girls were restricted constantly, others allowed to have restaurant jobs. Boys had more leeway. They got to go places with their father and leave the house alone. Some participated in school sports. Willie, though out of high school, spent much of his time at his father’s side. When Anne asked about her mother’s role in the home, Machelle would say her father was the one in charge of the house.

She was not defensive about her mother. She was evasive. The kids appeared to do all the housework. To Anne, May Sexton seemed to be little more than a shadow in the house. In the two months before she left home, Machelle said, her father changed one stringent rule. It started when he suspected she was pregnant. It was as if he had ESP, she said. She’d never told him she’d missed her period. But when no one else was looking, he would thrust his hips forward and waddle by her, folding his hands in front of him as they were resting on a bulging belly. Then he would plop down in his chair, light a cigarette, and laugh. One day he came right out with it. He patted her tummy and said, “I know what’s growing inside.” Then he told her she could find herself a boyfriend, Machelle continued. She’d never been allowed to date before. When she was 13, he’d turned away a boy who brought her a present for her birthday. A couple years ago, another boy who dropped by to study was told to leave at gunpoint, she claimed.

She invited a boy over who’d shown some interest in her in literature class. He was short and skinny and wore glasses. His name was Jeff.

“The perfect nerd,” she said. Jeff was allowed to come over and study, or watch TV in the living room. Her father watched them closely.

Soon, she said, Dad was spending more time with Jeff than with her. He could turn on the charm, she said. He told folksy tales about the mountains and coal mines of West Virginia. He spun storses about deer hunting. He’d stand under the Airborne flag he’d hung in his den and describe battles he’d fought in Vietnam. He could talk for hours about the little church he ran in Canton years ago. Honor and honesty and the importance of family. This was all that mattered, Dad would say.

He showed Jeff how to use tools and explained the trade secrets of house painting. He took him along to the hardware store and the gas station and the used car lot. He made him feel like part of the family, she said. Just as he’d done with Joel Good, she said. One night in December, Jeff sat down with her in the living room and pulled out a ring. It looked like a quarter carat diamond. She wondered where he got it. “Your dad gave it to me,” he said. Jeff wanted her to marry him. Yes, Machelle told him. “I thought it was my ticket out,”

she told Anne Greene. After she left home, she never saw the boy again. One night in late March, Anne received a call from the women’s shelter. Machelle Sexton had signed out earlier that day, but hadn’t signed back in by curfew. It was well past 10 p. m. Anne thought of Ed Sexton’s threats. “We’ve got to find her,” she told her husband Gerry.

They sped from North Canton toward downtown, then cruised up and down Market Avenue, looking. When they didn’t spot her on the street, Anne insisted Gerry stop at the curb. She explored bars and bowling alleys and gas station bathrooms. They drove down alleys. She looked in Dumpsters and dark rear doorways. The search went on for two hours.

They were on Market when Anne saw her. “Stop, honey,” she yelled.

Machelle Sexton was shivering inside a flimsy coat and hole-ridden stretch pants. She was walking, one cheek turned into the blowing snow. Anne leaped out before the van stopped, running across four lanes of traffic. Inside the van, Anne asked why she’d left the shelter. “I hate it there,” she said. They took her home that night and let her spend a couple of days with them. After she returned to the shelter, she didn’t stay long. Soon the shelter evicted her for revealing the location of the safe house to a boy she’d met. Machelle moved in with an older woman she’d met at the shelter. It would begin a series of stays at a half dozen locations over the next few months, with relatives and battered women she’d befriended at the safe house.

Machelle Sexton, the rebel of the Sexton family, had a problem with authority figures, Anne decided. And was it any wonder? Ironically, it had liberated her from the house on Caroline Street. Now she seemed incapable of shutting it off. In early April, Anne received another alarming call concerning Machelle Sexton. This time it was from a triage nurse at Timken Mercy Medical Center. Machelle was in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. She’d been admitted the night before.

Machelle had asked the nurse to call. Anne and Gerry sped to the hospital. They rang the security buzzer to the psychiatric ward, but were admitted only after the staff checked their names on the visiting list. They found Machelle laying in a hospital bed, and very talkative.

Her stomach had been pumped the night before. She’d taken a couple of handfuls of painkillers, at the house where she was staying. The rape.