The following content contains disturbing accounts of violence, including sexual violence. Discretion is advised.
The list of atrocities Eddie Lee Sexton committed against those he was bound to love and protect defies reckoning.
The father of 12 tortured and sexually abused his children for years, exerting such power that they killed at his command, prosecutors said.
Sexton died in a Florida prison in 2010, 16 years after his 1994 murder conviction.
But the horrors he inflicted on his family still resonate.
“He was very calculated, very controlling and just a really, really dark person,” Sexton’s former defense attorney Rick Terrana tells A&E True Crime.
Reports of rapes and beatings brought police to Sexton’s rural Ohio home in 1992. He was jailed briefly, then eluded investigators, taking his clan on a cross-county odyssey where he compelled family members to kill each other.
“It sounds like this man did not have a conscience at all,” psychologist Christine Courtois tells A&E True Crime. “He knew what he was doing, and he was doing it anyway.”
‘I Didn’t Want Anybody Hurt’
Sexton grew up in a religious family, journalist Lowell Cauffiel wrote in the book, House of Secrets. His father was a part-time Baptist preacher, but Sexton went in the opposite direction, holding up a gas station at age 19.
After prison, he began courting his future wife, Estella May, alternating sweet-talk and violence.
When Estella May sought refuge with her sister from her boyfriend’s beatings, Eddie Lee Sexton threatened to kill her entire family.
“‘I didn’t want anybody hurt because of me, so I went back,'” she told Cauffiel.
Sexton had an itinerant career: die forge worker, painter and self-appointed minister at a failed storefront church.
“‘The only people in the congregation were Eddie’s family and a couple of friends,'” his brother, Otis Sexton, recounted in House of Secrets.
‘He Was Satan’
The family home on a wooded lot near Canton, Ohio, was a place of misery.
Babysitters spoke of finding the young Sextons naked, locked in their bedrooms and sitting in darkness.
At Sexton’s 1994 murder trial, four of his children described growing up with a patriarch who whipped them daily, impregnated his daughters and espoused bizarre beliefs.
“He said he was Satan and a warlock because he had only two lines in the palm of his hand,” son Matthew Sexton testified, according to a Tampa Bay Times October 4, 1994 article.
Daughter Estella “Pixie” Sexton Good told the jury she was 13 when Eddie Lee Sexton first raped her. He fathered two of her children.
Daughter Michelle Sexton recounted being dressed in white for a “marriage” to her father at age 13. He chipped her tooth once when she refused oral sex.
Sexton’s sons testified their father forced them to stand naked while he compared their penis sizes.
Wary of being caught, Sexton gave each school-age child quarters to call him if another sibling sought help from teachers.
“The only good snitch was a dead snitch,” was Sexton’s mantra, youngest son Christopher testified.
Their mother, Estella May Sexton, offered no refuge, holding Sexton Good down once while her father raped her.
Brainwashed by Abuse
Florida State University criminology professor Emma Fridel tells A&E True Crime that parents like Eddie Lee Sexton manipulate their children by intentionally isolating them.
The impact on children is “they are conditioned since birth to believe what their parent is saying. They’re also conditioned by abuse when they try to deviate from any of the commands, and they’re conditioned to obey,” says Fridel, an expert in violence and aggression cases.
The family stayed under the radar until spring of 1992 when Michelle Sexton defied family orders and confided in a school counselor.
Police and the Stark County Department of Family Services investigated, but Eddie Lee Sexton denied any wrongdoing.
When officers came to his door in November 1992, Sexton barricaded himself in the house, armed with a 20-gauge shotgun, 357-magnum handgun and 70 rounds of ammunition.
He surrendered after six hours, was jailed several days and released. Then Sexton disappeared, fleeing Ohio on a multi-state road trip with a number of children and grandchildren in tow.
Back-To-Back Murders
The clan was staying in a cramped motor home at a state park near Tampa, Florida in October 1993 when Sexton Good’s baby, Skipper, fell sick.
The infant’s wails incensed Eddie Lee Sexton, who threatened to silence the 9-month-old unless his daughter did.
Sexton Good covered her son’s mouth with her hand until Skipper stopped breathing, court records show.
The baby was buried clutching a pacifier and rattle.
Sexton Good’s husband, Joel Good, was described by his relatives as a quiet, kind man with a learning disability.
Good was understandably distraught at Skipper’s death, and Eddie Lee Sexton became convinced his son-in-law would snitch, his children testified.
The family gave conflicting stories about what happened next.
Sexton blamed his son, Willie, for strangling Good with a hand-made garrote in the woods, some weeks after Skipper’s death.
Willie Sexton said he killed Good on his father’s orders.
On January 14, 1994, FBI agents working with Florida and Ohio police, converged on Eddie Lee Sexton at a supermarket parking lot.
Shortly after, authorities found the bodies of Good and his son buried in separate state parks.
Sexton’s Lawyer Looks Back on the Family
Terrana, an expert in death penalty cases, was appointed to represent Sexton.
He describes his client as “very soft-spoken, quiet, but you could tell he was very smart—he wasn’t dumb—and very calculated in what he said and how he said it.”
But if Sexton was a smooth talker, his children were not.
The family was so disturbed, “you couldn’t have a lucid conversation with them. It was sad,” Terrana recalls.
“Pixie just had those eyes. Those million-mile eyes staring at nothing. There was no emotion. It didn’t matter what you asked, what the subject was. There was nothing there,” he notes.
“Willie had a stare like he didn’t know what world he was in.”
Eddie Lee Sexton “always had the same expression, which was just a bit of a grin,” Terrana says.
And although he was in custody, Sexton still exerted control, Terrana speculates.
“Were they still scared to death of him? Absolutely.”
Courtois, who specializes in the treatment of rape and incest, says children who experience incest suffer “huge betrayal trauma.”
Fathers committing incest with their daughters is, unfortunately, “not an uncommon situation,” she explains. “But what make this case more difficult is the issue of killing off a child, and killing the child’s father and engaging his children to do that. All of that is way, way out on the spectrum of psychopathy.”
‘Their Own Private Horror Story’
A jury convicted Eddie Lee Sexton of Good’s murder and he was sentenced to death in 1994. He appealed, was granted a second trial and found guilty again.
Estella May Sexton was first convicted on sexual abuse charges in 1994 and sentenced to two years in prison. She was convicted on additional sexual abuse charges, including complicity to rape, in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison but died in 2017 after serving 23 years.
Willie Sexton, who suffered from mental health issues, was originally ruled incompetent to stand trial, but pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1998.
Sexton Good pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1994 and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Looking back, Terrana notes the Sextons “weren’t outlaws. They weren’t robbing banks and raping strangers. Everything was kept within the family.
“They weren’t a crime family, per se, in terms of committing fraud and stealing money. They didn’t mess with other people. It was their own private horror story.”
Help and information about sexual abuse is available at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.
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