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Speaker 4: Radio.
Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker DTK.
Speaker 5: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 5: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 5: your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 4: Good Evening one October night in nineteen ninety three, at
Speaker 4: one of the campgrounds dotting Florida's Gulf Coast, ex con
Speaker 4: Eddie Lee Sexton told his daughter Pixie to silence her
Speaker 4: crying baby. Incredibly, the young mother smothered the helpless infant,
Speaker 4: stuffed its tiny corpse into a gym bag, and then
Speaker 4: buried it in a shallow grave. Less than a month later,
Speaker 4: Eddie Lee ordered his son Willie to strangle the baby's
Speaker 4: bereaved father during a family picnic. Sexton was priming his
Speaker 4: third victim when the FBI and Florida cops finally caught
Speaker 4: up with him. Authorities soon learned, soon learned that these
Speaker 4: killings were the final heinous acts of a sadistic, in
Speaker 4: so frestuous monster whose reign of psychological and sexual violence
Speaker 4: had begun back in Ohio. For years, Eddie Lee whipped
Speaker 4: his children daily, raped his daughter's, abused his sons, and
Speaker 4: even fathered three inbred Sexton babies. But in early nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety two, after teenage Michelle Sexton's courageous flight authorities, the
Speaker 4: walls of silence surrounding this house of horrors crumbled. We're
Speaker 4: terrifying detail. Lowell Caufield takes us into a shocking world
Speaker 4: of abuse, incest, and family murder, a world ruled by
Speaker 4: a psychopath whose ability to manipulate his children produced one
Speaker 4: of the most sensational cases in true crime history. The
Speaker 4: book that we're featuring this evening is House of Secrets
Speaker 4: with my special guest, journalist and author and filmmaker Lowell Coffeel.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the program, and thank you for a greeting
Speaker 4: this interview.
Speaker 6: Lowell Coffeel, Well, good evening, Dan, and I just got
Speaker 6: to say, listening to your intro makes me just want
Speaker 6: cozy up here in rainy LA right now with a
Speaker 6: hot chocolate and just think about those pantheonic killers. You've
Speaker 6: got some great ones in the opening there.
Speaker 4: Ah, absolutely, and this is going to join the legions
Speaker 4: of in true crime history for sure. Definitely a classic.
Speaker 4: Before we start, I think it's really important, and we
Speaker 4: touched on it beforehand, So why don't we go into
Speaker 4: this a little bit. And what I found interesting, because
Speaker 4: you really don't see this, is that you said that
Speaker 4: this in your introduction, that this book is there is
Speaker 4: no fictionalization whatsoever in the book. Tell us why you
Speaker 4: felt that that was important, and then you can maybe
Speaker 4: talk about the amount of research. Some people spend a
Speaker 4: little bit of time on a true crime book. This
Speaker 4: book tell us how long and tell us about the
Speaker 4: research and tell us why you made a point with
Speaker 4: this fictionalization.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, I I come out of a journalistic background.
Speaker 6: I worked for eight or nine years with the Detroit News,
Speaker 6: which was a big afternoon daily, and then became a
Speaker 6: magazine writer and then got hooked on the idea of
Speaker 6: doing books. And one of my mentors was Jack Olson,
Speaker 6: the great true crime master, who wrote some great books
Speaker 6: like Son of Psychopath and His Victims, And another one
Speaker 6: was Hugh Ainsworth who wrote The Only Living Witness. And
Speaker 6: what I was impressed about was that how these authors
Speaker 6: unfolded so much detail and it had they felt like novels.
Speaker 6: They read like novels. They had all the things that
Speaker 6: novels have, metaphor and great dialogue and symbolism and things
Speaker 6: like that. But as I got to know the authors,
Speaker 6: it says, no, we research, we don't make up a thing.
Speaker 6: And back then true crime books were hardcover, so that
Speaker 6: was the standard you wanted to get to. And in
Speaker 6: order to do a hardcover book, you know, people wanted
Speaker 6: to know the details and they want those details to
Speaker 6: be true. Plus who the hell wants to get sued
Speaker 6: too making anything up? And so just coming out of
Speaker 6: that journalistic background, I just became a research fiend. And
Speaker 6: what I found, and you know, I would attend a
Speaker 6: trial or get a transcript or a trial, and I
Speaker 6: would only look at a trial as like almost what
Speaker 6: we used to call a roller decks or a contact
Speaker 6: sheet of who I had to talk to, and then
Speaker 6: interview all the people that testified in the trial and
Speaker 6: the people that didn't testify, and the family and the
Speaker 6: victims and the killer, and just run a lot of tape.
Speaker 6: I run hundreds of hours of tapes. And I had
Speaker 6: a gal that would transcribe my tapes and then compare
Speaker 6: those two police reports, my own observations and everything else.
Speaker 6: And I became so confident in the material that that
Speaker 6: I was able to do dialogue and things like that.
Speaker 6: But here's the interesting thing that happened, and it happened
Speaker 6: with my first book called Masqueraded True Story, Seduction, Compulsion
Speaker 6: and Murder. What I found that all the things that
Speaker 6: novelists use, and this is kind of the new journalism
Speaker 6: school of journalism that was written about by Tom Wolfe,
Speaker 6: is what I found is that in reality there's symbolism.
Speaker 6: In reality, there's a metaphor. In reality, you need a
Speaker 6: weather description, although I do subscribe to the Elmore Leonard
Speaker 6: thing of book writing, never start a book with weather.
Speaker 6: But if you needed weather in a scene, for example,
Speaker 6: all she had to do was contact the National Weather
Speaker 6: Service and you could determine what the weather looked like
Speaker 6: that day. So I found that all those wonderful things
Speaker 6: that fiction writers used were available to nonfiction writers. Now,
Speaker 6: the beauty of nonfiction. And you know today I write
Speaker 6: for film and television, and I write fiction and script
Speaker 6: and stuff. And you've got to make fiction believable. You know,
Speaker 6: you can't try something absurd because the audience will go, well,
Speaker 6: that would never happen, that things stupid. The beauty of nonfiction,
Speaker 6: particularly nonfiction crime, the crazier it is, and the more
Speaker 6: unbelievable it is, right, the better it is, which is
Speaker 6: the opposite of fiction, which has to be made believable.
Speaker 6: So why would I want to make up anything if
Speaker 6: I've got all these unbelievable events and these ironies and
Speaker 6: things like that. And so, and I hope I'm not
Speaker 6: going too long on this, but every I start every
Speaker 6: book documenting, you know exactly where I got my material,
Speaker 6: you know, from so many hundred hours of interviews, you know,
Speaker 6: trial transcripts, et cetera, et cetera, and other documented, proven
Speaker 6: journalistic sources of information. And I think that you know,
Speaker 6: particularly the hardcover true crime reader, wants that you know, Look,
Speaker 6: we can all pick up a paper, turn on true
Speaker 6: TV and see the surface of the case. But to me,
Speaker 6: what makes a great true crime book is to dig
Speaker 6: way deep underneath into the psychology and into all the
Speaker 6: things that the newspapers never wrote about and get you
Speaker 6: in with the family. You know, families that never typically
Speaker 6: often you know, talk and news stories or they never interviewed.
Speaker 6: And that's a real challenge too as a researcher because
Speaker 6: typically when you come into a true crime case, all
Speaker 6: that's already happened, and you've got a family that's maybe
Speaker 6: been abused by the press, and it's a real challenge
Speaker 6: to get their confidence and get talking to you. So
Speaker 6: that's what I love to do, and I used to
Speaker 6: love to do. I don't do these books anymore. And
Speaker 6: we can talk about why I don't later, But that's
Speaker 6: my approach. And I've Jack Olden and Hugh Ainsworth to
Speaker 6: thank for that.
Speaker 4: Well, we will have to thank them for that certainly
Speaker 4: now Before we get right into this story, and I
Speaker 4: I love the way you open, and I love the
Speaker 4: way you unfold this story. And it's really in the
Speaker 4: end when you read it, at the very very end,
Speaker 4: you go, yeah, that's really the best way, and you
Speaker 4: know the necessary way to unfold this. This is your last,
Speaker 4: This was your You didn't write any more non, I
Speaker 4: mean true crime after this, So.
Speaker 6: This one finished me off.
Speaker 4: Tell us how you came to write this book, why
Speaker 4: you felt compelled to write this, or what were the
Speaker 4: circumstances surrounding you coming to write House of Secrets.
Speaker 6: Well, this is kind of ironic. I had a multi
Speaker 6: book contract with Kensington, which publishes a lot of true
Speaker 6: crime in a great editor there named Paul Denis, and
Speaker 6: I had one more book to do and under the contract,
Speaker 6: and one day he sends me some ap stories about
Speaker 6: this murder down in this campground and this patriarch, Eddie
Speaker 6: Lee Sexton, who was being charged for murder even though
Speaker 6: he hadn't committed the murder, he had ordered his son,
Speaker 6: his daughter to commit a murder, and his son to
Speaker 6: commit a murder. And I immediately went, oh, Manson, you know,
Speaker 6: because Charles Manson never hands On killed anybody. And as
Speaker 6: I look at the associated press reports of this said,
Speaker 6: I thought, oh, this is going to be an easy book.
Speaker 6: You know, famous last words, Right, this is going to
Speaker 6: be easy book. I can just really work into the psychology.
Speaker 6: How did he manipulate, you know, the son and daughter
Speaker 6: to do this? I could fulfill the contract and kind
Speaker 6: of move on. I was thinking about also getting into
Speaker 6: fiction at that time, and so I took it on,
Speaker 6: thinking it was going to be easy. Easy turned into
Speaker 6: three years of work, three years of two and a
Speaker 6: half years of research. The case takes place in Canton, Canton, Ohio.
Speaker 6: At the time, I was living in Detroit Detroit area,
Speaker 6: so that's about a two and a half hour drive.
Speaker 6: And as I begin to get into this thing, it
Speaker 6: was like a black hole. I mean, that's the best
Speaker 6: way to describe it. It was like a bottomless pit.
Speaker 6: As I begin to interview the kids and the people,
Speaker 6: it was so much more than what I thought it was,
Speaker 6: And it was like a It was not only a
Speaker 6: house of secrets, it was a house of mirrors. And
Speaker 6: the key, some of the key characters are the key.
Speaker 6: Older kids were highly traumatized because of the way they
Speaker 6: had been brought up. I mean, these kids had been
Speaker 6: tortured and raped, routinely, abused, had to keep secrets with
Speaker 6: each other. We're always, you know, either fighting with each other,
Speaker 6: but loved the dad, but then the dad would turn
Speaker 6: them against each other. It was like I called him,
Speaker 6: America's most dysfunctional family. And all this was taking place
Speaker 6: behind this facade of a suburban home in Canton, Ohio,
Speaker 6: where people who met this family thought, oh, what a wonderful,
Speaker 6: big family. There were seven seven girls and five boys,
Speaker 6: I believe, yeah, no, seven boys and five girls, well
Speaker 6: behaved kids, you know, the perfect kind of big, loving family.
Speaker 6: But behind this facade was this absolute sadistic insanity going on.
Speaker 6: So as I began to put the story together and
Speaker 6: then getting the court transcripts and everything, I began hearing
Speaker 6: things like, well, you know, one time, you know, Shelley
Speaker 6: had a baby and we killed it and we had
Speaker 6: a ritual over it, and I'm thinking this is all bloney.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 6: Those were some of my first impressions that these kids
Speaker 6: were exaggerating. But as I worked harder on it and
Speaker 6: worked closely with the police detective that investigated it, this
Speaker 6: stuff was true, and just about the time we'd get
Speaker 6: some new information to think, oh, no, that couldn't have happened,
Speaker 6: but it did happen. So on and on and on.
Speaker 6: It went for three years, getting deeper and deeper and deeper,
Speaker 6: and at the end of it it was like a
Speaker 6: trip through through the heart of darkness. I couldn't believe
Speaker 6: the human beings, particularly family members, could do these kind
Speaker 6: of things to each other, and that this patriarch at
Speaker 6: Eveley Sexton, who was this madman psychopath who believed he
Speaker 6: was creating some kind of master race called the Futuitrons,
Speaker 6: had done this to his kids. And it never ended.
Speaker 6: There was always something new we were finding out, and
Speaker 6: then here's what happened. And this is the answer your question. Directly,
Speaker 6: this was like true crimes version of King Tut's Tomb Curse,
Speaker 6: because all of us who investigated this case started having
Speaker 6: things happen to us. The detective Ready who broke the case,
Speaker 6: had two heart attacks, they had a Department of Social
Speaker 6: services went into a clinical depression. The social worker who
Speaker 6: carried who directly worked with the kids, started carrying a
Speaker 6: gun and then he had a heart attack. And this
Speaker 6: woman named Anne Green, who was one of the real
Speaker 6: advocates for one of the kids that disclosed developed a
Speaker 6: brain tumor and had to be operated on. And then
Speaker 6: I went into this incredible clinical depression. I didn't know
Speaker 6: it was clinical depression at the time, but when I
Speaker 6: tried to write the book, I only got out twenty
Speaker 6: eight pages in three months. And I'm a six to
Speaker 6: eight pages a day kind of writer, and I just couldn't,
Speaker 6: you know, I just couldn't write it. I called up
Speaker 6: Kenjington and says, I'm not going to do the book,
Speaker 6: forget it right. You know, I can't do the book,
Speaker 6: and they threatened assue me, so that kind of motivated me.
Speaker 6: I still couldn't write. I finally went and saw Position
Speaker 6: and he told me I was suffering from a former depression.
Speaker 6: I went on antidepressants. I went into my writing studio
Speaker 6: and I wrote this book in thirty eight days, which
Speaker 6: is unheard of. I was kicking out fifteen pages a day,
Speaker 6: twenty pages a day, but I felt like I was
Speaker 6: climbing out on a ladder out of hell. And when
Speaker 6: I what's so funny about this is when I finished
Speaker 6: the book, I packaged it up because back then we
Speaker 6: were you know, we put it in manuscript form on paper,
Speaker 6: and I shipped it off FedEx, and I had a
Speaker 6: note to Paul Dannis. I said, Paul, I never want
Speaker 6: to hear about this book again. I don't want to
Speaker 6: see the cover. Go ahead and publish it. I fulfilled
Speaker 6: the contract, I don't want to hear about it. And
Speaker 6: a year and a half and I did do one
Speaker 6: TV show. But then after that, about a year and
Speaker 6: a half later, Google had just come, you know, gotten popular,
Speaker 6: and I googled my name and I see Lowell Coffeel
Speaker 6: in New York Times. What was I doing in New
Speaker 6: York Times? And I was on the best seller list.
Speaker 6: And I called the editor and said, hey, man, I'm
Speaker 6: on the bestseller list. You know, why didn't you tell me?
Speaker 6: And they laughed and said, well, he said, you didn't
Speaker 6: want to hear anything about the book, so but it
Speaker 6: finished me off. I really felt that, like you know,
Speaker 6: I was always fascinated with the dark side of the
Speaker 6: human experience, because I don't think you can understand the
Speaker 6: positive side of human experience and unless you understand the
Speaker 6: dark side. And I felt I had mind it completely
Speaker 6: and I just didn't want to. You know, my father
Speaker 6: also died while I was writing the book, and so
Speaker 6: I mean it was like this curse and everybody that
Speaker 6: touched it. And you know, you've read the book. There
Speaker 6: are some paranormal things that go on in this book
Speaker 6: where you have three kids in different parts of the
Speaker 6: country having psychological breakdowns all in the same hour as
Speaker 6: if the baby's being killed a thousand miles away in Florida.
Speaker 6: You know, there's weird stuff that goes on. And so
Speaker 6: it's really you know how it's the secrets. I think
Speaker 6: it's beyond true crime. It's like a rob zombie movie
Speaker 6: or you know, Texas chains on Masacre kind of thing.
Speaker 6: It's a it's a horror story.
Speaker 4: Well, speaking that of that, and that's a great segue
Speaker 4: for our audience. We like to really go back. Somebody
Speaker 4: just commented yesterday about how they like that we talk
Speaker 4: about the killer's background, not that there's any real answers
Speaker 4: to some of these people. And certainly, once we give
Speaker 4: all the details of this story, there's no explaining this.
Speaker 4: But let's go back to leave Sexton and his background,
Speaker 4: and then we'll go to a Stella mat his wife
Speaker 4: and talk about a little bit about their background. If
Speaker 4: there is you can offer some kind of somewhat of
Speaker 4: an explanation for some of the behavior.
Speaker 6: Well, Lee Junior or Eddierley text and you know, grew
Speaker 6: up in coal country in uh in West Virginia, and
Speaker 6: uh there were there were a lot of people that
Speaker 6: came out of West Virginia and you know, moved to Ohio.
Speaker 6: But when he was a kid, I mean, he had
Speaker 6: some of those classic uh, you know traits that among
Speaker 6: you know, psychopaths we all love and hate. He was
Speaker 6: a fire starter. Uh he killed people's pet animals, things
Speaker 6: like that. But he he he he came from a
Speaker 6: very kind of a poor family in West Virginia and
Speaker 6: uh a religious family. And interestingly enough, you know, I
Speaker 6: believe I'm trying to remember here. It's been a long
Speaker 6: time since did the book, but I believe he did.
Speaker 6: He served some time in the military, and when he
Speaker 6: got out and then he moved to Ohio, that religious
Speaker 6: upbringing that he got in West Virginia kind of became
Speaker 6: part of his psychopathology. I know, he had sort of
Speaker 6: a mail order minister's license and one of the real
Speaker 6: crackpot psychopathic ideas he had in which he manipulated his
Speaker 6: kids with as he began having children with his wife
Speaker 6: Stella May was he was using some scriptural references that
Speaker 6: are contained in the Old Testament, which, by the way,
Speaker 6: today a lot of conspiracy theorists are into this, that
Speaker 6: there there were beings that came down out of heaven
Speaker 6: and they bred with women, you know, human women, and
Speaker 6: created this special race. And he thought that he was
Speaker 6: part of that lineage. And he told some of the
Speaker 6: kids that they were part of that lineage, and he
Speaker 6: called them future trons. And as the kids got older
Speaker 6: than he would have marriage ceremonies for the daughters, and
Speaker 6: nobody knew, of course, this was going on except within
Speaker 6: the family. Then have sex with the daughters and then
Speaker 6: produced these There were three inbred children that were produced
Speaker 6: as a result of that. But the answer your question directly,
Speaker 6: I don't know what makes a psycho past. I mean,
Speaker 6: they come from and every from every kind of background,
Speaker 6: every kind of Some of them are abused as kids,
Speaker 6: some of them aren't. I'm trying to recall whether Eddie
Speaker 6: Lee was abused. I think there was some of that.
Speaker 6: You know, they come from poor families, they come from
Speaker 6: wealthy families. But I came to the conclusion with Eddie
Speaker 6: Lee that he was just evil incarnate. So that's about
Speaker 6: the best explanation I have for this guy. And I
Speaker 6: have no sympathy, you know, for him in any kind
Speaker 6: of way, and he's certainly not any kind of a
Speaker 6: victim in any kind of way. But he was also
Speaker 6: a con man. He knew how to work the social
Speaker 6: services departments for food stamps. He claimed to be disabled.
Speaker 6: He was drawing Social Security for you know, being disabled.
Speaker 6: That was a whole charade that he put on. He
Speaker 6: had a social service worker to come and visit, and
Speaker 6: he had a hospital bed in there, and he'd be
Speaker 6: in a wheelchair, and you know, he had all the
Speaker 6: typical cons of the sea out of a lot of psychopaths.
Speaker 6: But I think what made him unique was this idea
Speaker 6: of blending of this old style can't revival religion in
Speaker 6: with his evils.
Speaker 4: You say in the book too, that you start off
Speaker 4: with describing the home itself. The house itself again a
Speaker 4: little bit of imagery for the family's not in there.
Speaker 4: This trial has concluded, this case is concluded, and someone
Speaker 4: else is going to buy this house. And they were
Speaker 4: a neighbor that didn't know the family that well. But
Speaker 4: you described the house itself. Somebody might want privacy or
Speaker 4: create privacy if you're saying twelve people, twelve kids plus
Speaker 4: the two parents. But what did this house consist of?
Speaker 4: You talk about, you know, nine by eight rooms.
Speaker 6: You want me to talk about.
Speaker 4: Tell a little bit, Yeah, tell us a little bit
Speaker 4: about the house. What you could really gleam from, because
Speaker 4: you open the book with it, and what you could
Speaker 4: really gleam from looking at this house, and you take
Speaker 4: the audience into this house to look at what's left,
Speaker 4: even what you can see from the We'll say, for example,
Speaker 4: the windows seem to have been boarded up from the inside, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the opening chapter. I don't write prologues because nobody
Speaker 6: reads them. I also don't write introductions because nobody reads
Speaker 6: those either. I learned that one from Melmore Leonard two.
Speaker 6: He was one of my menors in Detroit. But the
Speaker 6: name of the first chapter is called House on Carolyn Street,
Speaker 6: and I kind of parachute in after everything's happened, and
Speaker 6: there's a couple there that has bought the house on
Speaker 6: an auction for just dirt cheap because nobody wanted it,
Speaker 6: and they had gutted the house and torn it down
Speaker 6: to the studs and redd the house. But they begin
Speaker 6: to tell me what they found when they bought the house.
Speaker 6: And this is after everybody's convicted, the family's abandoned the home,
Speaker 6: and the house itself told a very bizarre story in
Speaker 6: that they noticed that all the locks had been taken
Speaker 6: off on ali the bedroom doors, and I believe that
Speaker 6: there were locks on the outside of some of the
Speaker 6: bedroom doors of the kids. And then up in the
Speaker 6: upper bedrooms there were like you know, Cape cod style homes,
Speaker 6: they have what's called a false attic, and there's sometimes
Speaker 6: little trap doors on the sides of the bedrooms. Everybody's
Speaker 6: living in one of these houses, they know what I'm
Speaker 6: talking about, and they opened up these little trap doors.
Speaker 6: In there they found little kids toys and blankets, and
Speaker 6: their immediate impression was these were like hiding places where
Speaker 6: the kids would would hide. And then they went down
Speaker 6: in the basement and they see that there are rings
Speaker 6: that are bolded into the rafters that look like somebody
Speaker 6: could be strung up, you know, by their wrists, on
Speaker 6: and old mattresses. But on the mattresses there are drawings
Speaker 6: that looked like they were drawn by children of male
Speaker 6: and female anatomy and like sexual kind of images. And
Speaker 6: one of the creepiest things was that out in front
Speaker 6: of the house there was this statue of Jesus. We've
Speaker 6: all seen this kind of lawn art, you know, about
Speaker 6: three or four foot high, you know, made out of plaster,
Speaker 6: and Jesus's hands are outstretched, you know, like with his
Speaker 6: palms out opening, but the hands are broken off. And
Speaker 6: I thought that was, you know I was speaking about
Speaker 6: earlier about having great metaphors, what a great metaphor that was,
Speaker 6: because I ended up with a line in the book
Speaker 6: saying that, you know, nobody could help the kids, not
Speaker 6: even the hapless Jesus outside. And then there was a
Speaker 6: neighbor who came over after they bought the house and said, yeah,
Speaker 6: there were all these kids there, and real strange things
Speaker 6: would happen. And one time they described it that there
Speaker 6: was a big, huge rainstorm with thunder and lightning outside,
Speaker 6: and the little kids all ran out into the yard
Speaker 6: with their eyes looking up to the skies, lightning flashing
Speaker 6: in their face in the rain, and the babysitter or
Speaker 6: whoever it was, asked him, what are you doing out there?
Speaker 6: And he says, we're praying and hoping that Jesus will
Speaker 6: come and take us away. I mean, these are the
Speaker 6: kind of creepy things that you get an idea. This
Speaker 6: is indeed a house of secrets.
Speaker 4: Now what kind of neighborhood was this house? They were
Speaker 4: a little bit out of the way in terms of
Speaker 4: they were a little bit isolated. And you had mentioned
Speaker 4: too that they had the windows up were exceptionally up
Speaker 4: high or built in this house or it seemed odd
Speaker 4: that he really was meant it was some kind of
Speaker 4: barricadeer wall that gave them even more privacy to this
Speaker 4: own But what kind of neighborhood was this these these
Speaker 4: people living in at that time.
Speaker 6: Well, he had put a deck i believe on the front,
Speaker 6: which kind of made it difficult to access the windows,
Speaker 6: and in terms of the where it looked like it
Speaker 6: had been boarded up on the inside. There's a there's
Speaker 6: a point in the story and in the book where
Speaker 6: social services comes to take the kids away and Eddie
Speaker 6: and his sons are waiting for them, loaded with ammunition,
Speaker 6: and there was a standoff with the with the local police.
Speaker 6: So they had boarded up the home like it was
Speaker 6: some kind of bunker waiting for Social services and the
Speaker 6: cops to come, and it was a couple. It was
Speaker 6: I think of twenty four hour thirty hours standoff until
Speaker 6: they finally talked him out of there. There was also
Speaker 6: a pond, a pond on the property. In terms of
Speaker 6: the neighborhood, this is a classic everyday folks, middle class neighborhood.
Speaker 6: This is a nice area of canon. This isn't the hood,
Speaker 6: this is you know, this is typical kind of suburbia.
Speaker 6: This is this is what's so interesting about it is
Speaker 6: he was able to pull all this stuff out in
Speaker 6: a in a neighborhood like this. But he had such
Speaker 6: control over the kids of all, and they ranged in
Speaker 6: age from seven to twenty four. I believe it was
Speaker 6: that they kept the secrets. They never took They didn't
Speaker 6: talk to the neighbors, or if they did talk to
Speaker 6: the neighbors, they were all super polite. They were known
Speaker 6: as like the politest kids around. And they also remember
Speaker 6: had to all go to school. Now, all schools have
Speaker 6: social workers, and if something was going on, you would
Speaker 6: think that somebody would disclose. And eventually Michelle Sexton, or
Speaker 6: Shelley as she's known as, did disclose to a school counselor,
Speaker 6: which started this whole cross country crime spree and them
Speaker 6: fleeing and the murders all into motion. But all the
Speaker 6: kids were ordered to keep an eye on each other,
Speaker 6: and they all had to carry quarters in their pockets
Speaker 6: because if they saw one of their siblings, and we've
Speaker 6: got twelve kids who all are with each other at
Speaker 6: school keeping an eye on each other, and if they
Speaker 6: saw one of their siblings talking to a social worker
Speaker 6: or a teacher or beginning to disclose anything, they were
Speaker 6: to go to the payphone and drop a corner and
Speaker 6: call dad. So he had security going on, physical security
Speaker 6: in terms of the house and the way it was
Speaker 6: constructed so nobody could look in. But he also had
Speaker 6: a form of psychological security going on with the kids
Speaker 6: all ratting each other out, and this is what created
Speaker 6: this kind of dysfunctional environment in terms of what was
Speaker 6: the threat of that. Routinely, on any given night, he
Speaker 6: would line the kids up in a line and had
Speaker 6: a whip and would pick out kids that he felt
Speaker 6: weren't acting proper and those kids would be beaten while
Speaker 6: the other kids watched. So everybody was always trying to
Speaker 6: be on Dad and Mom's good side. They didn't want
Speaker 6: to get beaten. But it's the old you know, waterboarding
Speaker 6: carrot and the stick idea. You know, you're either rewarded
Speaker 6: or you're punished, and you never know which one it's
Speaker 6: going to be. So he's always had the family and
Speaker 6: the kids in the state of this iron control from
Speaker 6: a young age.
Speaker 4: Now, let's talk about the way you introduced that as
Speaker 4: well in the book. Is that, of course, we you
Speaker 4: introduce this real sad character obviously as we'll hear it
Speaker 4: as we speak about Joel m good. But we talk
Speaker 4: about Stella meeting the two twins Tracy and Terry Turrify
Speaker 4: at school, right and they start. You know, Terry goes
Speaker 4: up to Stella and says, you know, looks at her
Speaker 4: and kind of greasy haired, mousey quiet, really not one
Speaker 4: of the people that would be cool at school, but
Speaker 4: she felt for her and went and introduced her. And
Speaker 4: tell us a little bit about this interaction, because this
Speaker 4: is part of the unraveling of this story as well,
Speaker 4: and a good way to introduce Joel to this nightmare
Speaker 4: that he enters into.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Joel Imgod is this you know, high school senior
Speaker 6: who has got a aq IQ of about eighty five.
Speaker 6: He's not what we would call, you know, mentally handicapped
Speaker 6: or retarded as we used to call it. But he's slow,
Speaker 6: but an innocent kid, a loving kid that likes people
Speaker 6: and has his own little bit of tragedy in his
Speaker 6: life and that his mother died and his aunt is
Speaker 6: raising him. And senior prom's coming up, right, the high
Speaker 6: school prom, and so there's some matchmaking that goes on
Speaker 6: and they think, well, Joel, that's the perfect date for Pixie.
Speaker 6: That was Estella. She's also known as Pixie. Some people
Speaker 6: have a hard time following my book because there's so
Speaker 6: many nicknames who different names from these kids, you know,
Speaker 6: like Skipper Lee and Pixie. I'm gonna call her Pixie, right,
Speaker 6: she kind of looks like a Pixie. And so they
Speaker 6: set them up and he takes her to the prom,
Speaker 6: and these pictures are in the book, and this is
Speaker 6: a this is like a big thing for him. Man,
Speaker 6: he's proud of him. He's got a date. They go out,
Speaker 6: but they're they're both, you know, they're both a couple
Speaker 6: of outsiders. Well, Eddie Lee Sexton has already had a
Speaker 6: baby with Pixie, and she's got a infant and of course,
Speaker 6: he doesn't want the world to know that that's his
Speaker 6: incestuous granddaughter daughter. However you want to call it, kind
Speaker 6: of like Chinatown. You know, she's my mom, she's my
Speaker 6: certain No, she's my mom, she's my sister. And so
Speaker 6: Eddie Lee's m O is to get a beard, someone
Speaker 6: who poses as they can become like the husband of
Speaker 6: one of these girls and ostensibly look like the father,
Speaker 6: so not to create suspicion. So he motivates Pixie to
Speaker 6: get closer to Joel. And Joel is this innocent guy.
Speaker 6: He's got a girl that likes him, and you know,
Speaker 6: he thinks she's nice, and he doesn't see it coming.
Speaker 6: And the next thing, you know, you know, and shut
Speaker 6: amount of time, they're married, and now he's part of
Speaker 6: the family. And his aunt is suspicious of the family
Speaker 6: because she's heard a couple of little rumors about it,
Speaker 6: and she makes Eddie Lee's kind of weird. But she's
Speaker 6: sort of happy for her nephew at the same time
Speaker 6: she's worried. So that's how that pairing comes together.
Speaker 4: What's interesting, too, is when Pixie is in school and
Speaker 4: she meets the two twins, they ask her, we'll say
Speaker 4: why don't we get together? Why don't we go to
Speaker 4: your place? Why don't you come to my place? Normal
Speaker 4: conversation for a teenager, requests. What was her response was?
Speaker 4: What did she say to these two twins when they said, Hey,
Speaker 4: why don't we go hang out sometime?
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Speaker 6: You'll have to remind me of that.
Speaker 4: Well, really, she wasn't allowed to do anything. She wasn't
Speaker 4: that allous. She said, no, we can't have anybody here,
Speaker 4: I can't go there. And yet she said I had
Speaker 4: a baby, And then so there was this kind of,
Speaker 4: you know, very strange conversation where she was had no
Speaker 4: privileges whatsoever, and was severely restricted, it seemed like. But
Speaker 4: yet when she mentioned having a baby, no big deal.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and again I gets back to the mo of
Speaker 6: control by Eddie Lee. You know, they weren't allowed to
Speaker 6: go play with other kids. And it's an interesting thing.
Speaker 6: I mean, you think of a family, you know. Frankly,
Speaker 6: I've never looked at big families the same way since
Speaker 6: this book. There's twelve kids. And in some of the
Speaker 6: research I did, and I and I use her in
Speaker 6: my book, a psychiatrist who wrote a book on father
Speaker 6: daughter incests and that typically the incestuous family is always
Speaker 6: a big family. I begin to think of the Jackson's,
Speaker 6: you know, on this one. And the reason for that
Speaker 6: is the reason for all the kids is that that way,
Speaker 6: if the father's having incestuous relationships with the children, his
Speaker 6: number one threat is the mother, right, the wife. You
Speaker 6: would think that, you know, motherly instinct, right would be
Speaker 6: say what are you doing to my kids? But if
Speaker 6: if he's got the wife pregnant and carrying babies every
Speaker 6: nine months and with all the duties of raising children,
Speaker 6: she's too exhausted and too dependent to mount any kind
Speaker 6: of defense or rebellion, and I'm telling you everything in
Speaker 6: that book. When I see one of these big families,
Speaker 6: I think, I wonder what's going on there?
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 6: That's why you have all the kids if he needs
Speaker 6: to keep his wife. Estella may pregnant and busy. Although
Speaker 6: she eventually becomes just as much a part of this
Speaker 6: nightmare as anybody else.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, I mean, before you lump her
Speaker 4: with anyone else, she is a very unique creature herself.
Speaker 4: So we'll get to that soon enough. So we have
Speaker 4: Jewel Good joins this family. They have these older brothers,
Speaker 4: some of them larger, some of them have a tendency
Speaker 4: to like to fight. What happens to Joel soon after
Speaker 4: joining his family, and why.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he gets beat up by a couple of the
Speaker 6: brothers or one of the brothers. And you'll have to
Speaker 6: forgive me, because you know, I wrote this book a
Speaker 6: long time ago and there's so much information here. But
Speaker 6: he gets he gets badly beaten by one of the
Speaker 6: family members, and I'm trying to remember what the motivation
Speaker 6: was for that, and the fact that these kids are
Speaker 6: sadistic little bastards, because you know, they've learned, they've grown
Speaker 6: up in an atmosphere of violence, in an atmosphere of abuse,
Speaker 6: but yests. He gets badly beaten, but then they come
Speaker 6: up with some kind of excuse that they're not the
Speaker 6: ones that did it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there seems to be at first that they're just
Speaker 4: this humiliating sense of humor where they sense he's sort
Speaker 4: of a little bit of a half wit, and besides,
Speaker 4: they just have violent tendency, so they beat him up.
Speaker 4: But it graduates finally because even though at eighty five
Speaker 4: and IQ and innocent, he starts asking some questions. And
Speaker 4: that comes around to when she seems to be pregnant again,
Speaker 4: I believe, and he starts to question. I don't know
Speaker 4: if he questions the paternity or not, but he starts
Speaker 4: asking some questions anyway, And that's.
Speaker 6: Why you get asking some questions, and she becomes pregnant again.
Speaker 6: And if you look at the pictures in the book
Speaker 6: and see these children, which are really Eddie Lee's children,
Speaker 6: they have a certain look, you know. That's the best
Speaker 6: way I can describe it. But what really sets the
Speaker 6: whole thing in the motion, the whole crime in the motion,
Speaker 6: is there's one one kid, Shelley or Michelle Sexton, who
Speaker 6: isn't going to go along with the program. And she
Speaker 6: was known for taking beatings better than anyone. She'd been
Speaker 6: whipped many times and she'd say, just you know, you know,
Speaker 6: go ahead, hit me harder. This is the rebel of
Speaker 6: the family. And one day she goes into the social
Speaker 6: services person in her school and says, I'm pregnant and
Speaker 6: they're trying to kill my baby. My brother kicked me
Speaker 6: in the stomach, and when my sister was pregnant, they
Speaker 6: kicked my sister in the stomach too, and she miscarred.
Speaker 6: Well by law, then they have to report that to
Speaker 6: social services, so they send her over to social services
Speaker 6: and she's telling this whole story about being pregnant and
Speaker 6: she actually wasn't pregnant, but they needed to do something
Speaker 6: with her while they investigated, so they sent her to
Speaker 6: this They had a program, it was called a shepherding
Speaker 6: program where if you had a kid that was in
Speaker 6: trouble or whatever, they had families that would volunteer to
Speaker 6: take almost like a temporary foster person. And they placed
Speaker 6: her with this wonderful woman who I call Anne Green
Speaker 6: because I wanted to protect her identity, because she was
Speaker 6: scared to death of the sections, and that's the only
Speaker 6: thing I ever changed. Sometimes I'll change a name just
Speaker 6: to protect that person, but I know to the reader
Speaker 6: in italics that that name's been changed, but it's a
Speaker 6: real person. And she and Shelley begin to bond, and
Speaker 6: then Shelley discloses my dad raped me and they held
Speaker 6: that then to social services, and now they've opened a
Speaker 6: social service case against the family. And as Social Services
Speaker 6: begin to investigate the family, Eddie Lee barricades the family
Speaker 6: into the house, puts boards on the windows. He's got
Speaker 6: all this weaponry and there's a standoff, and amazingly they
Speaker 6: don't arrest him after this, or they do, and he's
Speaker 6: let out on bond, and so there's a sort of
Speaker 6: minor charge and he packs up the family into a
Speaker 6: twenty two foot motor home and hits the road with
Speaker 6: I believe the total was oh Social Services removed some
Speaker 6: of the minor kids, the seven year old and a
Speaker 6: nine year old and a fourteen year old, and so
Speaker 6: he's left with the older kids and the boys, which
Speaker 6: Social Services didn't feel were in jeopardy while they were investigating.
Speaker 6: He packs them all up into a motor home and
Speaker 6: hits the road and so now they're on the run
Speaker 6: as a family with like twelve people, including Joel Good too,
Speaker 6: you know, the baby, the other sister who's got a baby.
Speaker 6: I mean, god knows what that motorhome is like. And
Speaker 6: they hit the road on the run, and that's what
Speaker 6: starts this whole thing into motion. And He's got all
Speaker 6: these ideas that he Lee's going to go look up
Speaker 6: his Indian in Native American background, which is probably a
Speaker 6: lot of fiction too, and one thing leads another. They
Speaker 6: knock off some convenience stores through some robberies, and they
Speaker 6: end up down in Florida, staying with a relevant for
Speaker 6: a while, but then pretty much put up a great
Speaker 6: camp or a homestead in one of the campgrounds down
Speaker 6: there near Tampa, Florida, in Hillsboro County. And that's a
Speaker 6: typical kind of thing. There's a lot of snowbirds, you know,
Speaker 6: out of the north. When the snow comes, they'll take
Speaker 6: their RVs and they'll camp all winter, you know, in
Speaker 6: this camp ron. And so that's where they end up.
Speaker 6: And you know, Eddie Lee is still working the scams
Speaker 6: he's got, you know, he's got pixie like chatting up
Speaker 6: a senior citizen who's down there alone with his motor
Speaker 6: home thinking about the stealing his motor home. I mean,
Speaker 6: the guy's always scheming. There's always something going on, and
Speaker 6: so that's where the capital crimes begin to take place.
Speaker 6: Is done in this camp.
Speaker 4: Ron Now you say that Michelle and you call her
Speaker 4: the hero in this as well for coming forward and
Speaker 4: of course staying strong during the trial. What are some
Speaker 4: of the other claims that start coming out eventually, because
Speaker 4: not everything comes out. All these secrets don't come out immediately.
Speaker 4: They come out in trickles, and and like you say,
Speaker 4: it seems almost unbelievable because this is unprecedented stuff and
Speaker 4: nobody's probably heard this kind of stuff. It seems almost unbelievable.
Speaker 4: So tell us so many other details that come up.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, it seems like Eddie Lee had a
Speaker 6: penchant for, like launching some kind of unexpected sadistical act
Speaker 6: on the family to cement his reign of terror, killing
Speaker 6: the fam the pet rabbit, the love the beloved pet rabbit,
Speaker 6: cooking it and making everybody eat it even though it's
Speaker 6: the pet, you know, and making making jokes about it
Speaker 6: and things as he does it. Having marriage ceremonies in
Speaker 6: the book. You'll see uh in the book, by the way,
Speaker 6: is available as an ebook. Now I got to get
Speaker 6: my plug in here. And the book has been reissued
Speaker 6: by Kenston with a new cover and a update on
Speaker 6: the end that wasn't in the original edition. And it's
Speaker 6: also available as a knee book on Amazon or but
Speaker 6: you can also get a paperback. But you'll see these
Speaker 6: pictures in the book. He dresses these little girls, I
Speaker 6: mean five years old, seven years old, twelve years old
Speaker 6: with bridal veils and has formal marriage ceremonies with the girls.
Speaker 6: Again getting back into the you know, the incestuous idea,
Speaker 6: and that the daddy is is he dad? Or is
Speaker 6: he you know, is he the husband? There are stories
Speaker 6: of miscarriages being buried different places on the property. Apparently
Speaker 6: there were a lot of babies being born and some
Speaker 6: of them didn't live. Some of them may have been
Speaker 6: killed potentially thrown in this pond to as well. I
Speaker 6: believe there was one story that one of the babies
Speaker 6: was There was talk of actually cooking one of the babies.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's crazy and it becomes difficulty like to
Speaker 6: separate from like what's reality and what's not. But as
Speaker 6: you'd hear these stories. They all became believable because the
Speaker 6: extent to which Eddie's sadism, Now, the other thing that
Speaker 6: was going on was the mother. The mother eventually becomes
Speaker 6: Stella May. The mother eventually becomes his sex partner in
Speaker 6: the sexual abuse of the kids. So like a seven
Speaker 6: year old girl would be brought to Eddie's bedroom, he
Speaker 6: would have sex with her, and the mother would have
Speaker 6: sex with her. And that was a really compelling interview that,
Speaker 6: you know, I did a really long staression was a
Speaker 6: Stella May after she was convicted and imprisoned, And what
Speaker 6: I saw was a woman who was probably pretty normal
Speaker 6: that married this demon, and he slowly chipped away, you know,
Speaker 6: through first physical abuse, getting her pregnant and all that,
Speaker 6: and she reached kind of a Stockholm syndrome state of
Speaker 6: mind where I can't fight this man, so I'm going
Speaker 6: to join him. And she became as twisted as he did.
Speaker 6: And she was convicted for raping assisting in the rape
Speaker 6: of her own seven year old daughter, Lana, and then
Speaker 6: fled guilty to thirteen more counts. She's still in prison
Speaker 6: down in Ohio. Her next role hearing is two thousand
Speaker 6: and seventeen and we want to interviewed her. There was
Speaker 6: a part of me that felt for because I'd seen
Speaker 6: what he had done to her, But the other part
Speaker 6: of me said, you know, why didn't you leave? You know,
Speaker 6: but you know, I've done a lot of stuff on
Speaker 6: abused domestic partners. It's once you get caught up in that,
Speaker 6: it's tough. So she was taking part in the sexual
Speaker 6: abuse of the kids as well, So yeah, it got
Speaker 6: pretty creepy.
Speaker 4: There was real talk of Satanism here as well. And
Speaker 4: maybe it wasn't maybe like a Stella said, it really
Speaker 4: wasn't part of any organization. But it's not like this
Speaker 4: information is hidden either.
Speaker 6: So US rituals. There was ritual abuse, and you know
Speaker 6: there's been in some false cases of ritual abuse that
Speaker 6: you know, the Martin School case, and you know we've
Speaker 6: heard about this, but yeah, dressed up in robes and
Speaker 6: this sort of thing. But the reason that Eddie did it,
Speaker 6: and the way that I saw this is that if
Speaker 6: you can surround the abuse with something fantastic like that,
Speaker 6: like my dad was in a black robe and he
Speaker 6: had a candle and he did this, that's actually a
Speaker 6: preventive measure that child abusers will use because if the
Speaker 6: child discloses and says, you know, last night, my dad
Speaker 6: came to me in a black road with a candle
Speaker 6: and he made me touch him and all this, and
Speaker 6: people think, oh, this is just a kid's imagination. So
Speaker 6: it's not that he really necessarily believed in the Satanism.
Speaker 6: It's a method of control, and it's a method of
Speaker 6: should they disclose, nobody will believe them because it's too fantastic.
Speaker 6: And that's what I think he was doing.
Speaker 4: But a Satanist could say the same thing. He could say, Jeez,
Speaker 4: they'll not believe this either, because nobody believes in this stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's right music, But people didn't believe. People didn't believe
Speaker 4: that people abused their kids, or the priest did, or
Speaker 4: other people of trust would've done it.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: So now with Eddie Lee's Sexton, there is another son
Speaker 4: that's very crucial to the story, and that's Willie. And
Speaker 4: tell us a little bit about Willie. He's another guy
Speaker 4: that doesn't he's not the brightest guy. Tell us a
Speaker 4: little bit about Willie and how important he is to Eddie.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Willie is is is you know another special led
Speaker 6: you know, kind of level student that that easily manipulated,
Speaker 6: and Eddie kind of turns him into his his enforcer,
Speaker 6: his his his hit man. And what happens, and he's
Speaker 6: very easy to manipulate. Not real bride, it's kind of
Speaker 6: almost like Joel's, you know, equal but you know, part
Speaker 6: of the family. And what happens is that it's you know,
Speaker 6: it's a it's a it's a dark knight down in Florida.
Speaker 6: And Eddie's a little paranoid because they've been staying so
Speaker 6: long a's one campground and by the way, the FBI
Speaker 6: is looking for them, you know, there's warrants up for
Speaker 6: their arrest and that and the the baby, little Skipper Lee,
Speaker 6: that Joel is ostensibly the father of. In fact, Skipper
Speaker 6: Lee may actually be the child of Joel, we don't know,
Speaker 6: is crying a lot because it's it's either collicky or
Speaker 6: it's sick, and it keeps crying. And so Eddie's brilliant idea,
Speaker 6: or Pixie's idea, one of their ideas to keep the
Speaker 6: baby quiet is feed at Nike will Yeah, which is
Speaker 6: a strong you know, I call fleet medicine. But that
Speaker 6: doesn't work, and so Eddie says, either shut that baby
Speaker 6: up or I will and Pixie smothers the baby and
Speaker 6: kills the baby. So now they've got a dead baby.
Speaker 6: They bury it out in the back, and Joel has
Speaker 6: bonded with this baby, and he's all upset and now
Speaker 6: he's starting to say, you know, I'm I'm out of here,
Speaker 6: I'm going back to Ohio. I'm I'm leaving this situation.
Speaker 6: And Eddie Lee says, we can't let him leave. He's
Speaker 6: seemed he knows too much. And so at the family picnic,
Speaker 6: at a family picnic of all places, he decides that
Speaker 6: Joel's got to be taken out and got to be killed,
Speaker 6: and so he enlists Willie to do the job. He
Speaker 6: teaches him how to create a go out you know
Speaker 6: rope with two pieces of wood, and they strangle Joel.
Speaker 6: There's some evidence that maybe Picks he might have taken
Speaker 6: part in this too, and so they've kill him and
Speaker 6: you know, bury him. And so those are those are
Speaker 6: the two murders that take place in that campground. There's
Speaker 6: almost the evidence of other babies that were born that
Speaker 6: were buried near the library near Tampa, and there's potentially
Speaker 6: other bodies being buried mainly children and you know, babies
Speaker 6: that are born. Stuff. We never could quite get to
Speaker 6: the bottom of them. Again, that's another one of these
Speaker 6: open threads that I could still be investigating this.
Speaker 4: You talked about the rape of the girls, but the
Speaker 4: boys didn't escape the sexual assaults either, did they No.
Speaker 6: No, and often at the hands of the mother, but
Speaker 6: also sodomized by the father. And then then the siblings
Speaker 6: begin getting sexually live with each other as well. It's
Speaker 6: a real uh, it's a real uh house of horrors. Interesting.
Speaker 6: The interesting thing about it, though, is that with all
Speaker 6: this crap that went on, Look, crap is the name
Speaker 6: of the right word. With all this insanity that went on,
Speaker 6: I did it the Lisa Gibbons Show. Uh. This was
Speaker 6: the one TV show I did, and we did two
Speaker 6: hours uh and uh. They had five of the family
Speaker 6: members on the show, and they had to keep me
Speaker 6: in a separate room with a police officer because they
Speaker 6: were threatening to kill me even though they were my friends.
Speaker 6: So you never know when they were going to turn
Speaker 6: on you, right, the kids and all that, And we
Speaker 6: get out on the Lisa Gibbons Show and we're telling
Speaker 6: the story of the family and all this is all
Speaker 6: live television. Everything is, you know, pretty calm and everything,
Speaker 6: and Lisa Gibbons says, we've got a We've got a
Speaker 6: a surprise for you. He says, We've got a message
Speaker 6: from your father from prison. And the big screen TV
Speaker 6: lights up and it's Eddie Lee in prison and he's going, kids,
Speaker 6: I know, you know that I never did anything wrong.
Speaker 4: I know that, you know.
Speaker 6: And he's like pitching his case and the TV goes
Speaker 6: off and it was like a switch turned. Pretty soon
Speaker 6: the kids are fighting with each other and you know,
Speaker 6: they're yelling at each other. I mean, and at that moment,
Speaker 6: I really saw in real time the effect that he
Speaker 6: had on those kids, and how he could manipulate them
Speaker 6: and keep them in turmoil and turn them against each other.
Speaker 6: But at the same time, if you asked him though,
Speaker 6: they would say, you know, but I loved my dad.
Speaker 6: It was baffling.
Speaker 4: You talked about you touched on it. And I think
Speaker 4: it's important because it's really an eerie part of the
Speaker 4: book and I'm not really into given so much credibility,
Speaker 4: but it was his overwhelming kind of evidence of the
Speaker 4: paranormal there. They thought that he almost had some kind
Speaker 4: of supernatural ability. He's based on someone being slow and
Speaker 4: then just the manipulation and the isolation, and then tell
Speaker 4: us about the paranormal event.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's hear that story, because it was. It was
Speaker 6: truly frightened for me. When I write a book, I
Speaker 6: create a calendar and it's an overlay calendar, so like
Speaker 6: I'll have like December third, so and So's arrested. I
Speaker 6: put that in the calendar, and then I'll have like
Speaker 6: interview December third. Joe said that he went to see
Speaker 6: his mother, you know, and all these things stack up
Speaker 6: over a period of a couple of years. I'm just
Speaker 6: entering events, entering events, entering events, entering events. And I
Speaker 6: had heard, or I knew through the through the interviewing
Speaker 6: that some of the kids that had psychotic breaks. One
Speaker 6: of the one of the like the seven year old,
Speaker 6: woke up and saw her father standing at the foot
Speaker 6: of the bed shaking his head and said, keep your
Speaker 6: mouth shut, and he's shaking his head, and she went
Speaker 6: into almost a demon possessed psychotic break, ended up in
Speaker 6: a psychiatric order children's hospital. That also happened to two
Speaker 6: other okay, two other kids, and the cops thought these
Speaker 6: were all unrelated events. It just happened to happen. Well.
Speaker 6: At the end of my research, I clicked the calendar
Speaker 6: when I brought all the dates together, and all three kids,
Speaker 6: in different parts of the country, hundreds of miles apart,
Speaker 6: had the psychotic break, all at the same time, all
Speaker 6: at the same hour, all with the same hallucination or
Speaker 6: the father at the foot of the bed, And it
Speaker 6: was exactly the time when they were killing the baby
Speaker 6: in Florida. And when that popped in front of me,
Speaker 6: the cops didn't even know about that. This was something
Speaker 6: I found. It was like ice going up my spine
Speaker 6: and I said, oh my god.
Speaker 4: What am I dealing with her?
Speaker 6: And I thought, oh, this must be some kind of
Speaker 6: anniverse three syndrome or whatever.
Speaker 4: Right, So I did.
Speaker 6: Extensive amount of research on it. Was that date important
Speaker 6: to the kids in any kind of way. Was that
Speaker 6: when there was a you know, a ritual that was done,
Speaker 6: but there was no connection other than the killing of
Speaker 6: that little baby, Skipper Lee. At the exact same time
Speaker 6: they were all having a psychotic break thousands of miles apart. Now,
Speaker 6: I don't know what you want to do with that,
Speaker 6: but it was it was very disturbing. So that's because
Speaker 6: you know it, yeah, I mean it's a horror story.
Speaker 4: It is. It's a true horror actually, you know yea
Speaker 4: for those I hear this a lot from some people anyways.
Speaker 4: Maybe I don't know how seriously are true crime readers,
Speaker 4: but they say, well, I don't like reading about the
Speaker 4: trials so much. Well, this is one of those trials
Speaker 4: you want to read about because if you thought there
Speaker 4: was any foregone conclusions, this trial is a real circus.
Speaker 4: Because if this is a horror show, well then this
Speaker 4: is a real this is a wild trial. So we
Speaker 4: won't give that. We won't really give that away, but
Speaker 4: we've alluded to that these you know, Ostella and Eddie
Speaker 4: Lee get theirs. But tell us a little bit more about, uh,
Speaker 4: the experience for you and some of the interviews you
Speaker 4: did with other family members with Eddie Eddie Lee Junior,
Speaker 4: and just sort of the collateral. We'll say damage.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's a you know I get I get letters
Speaker 6: from readers all the time, particularly on Facebook. And how
Speaker 6: are the children doing? You know, I get that all
Speaker 6: the time. Well, the younger children apparently are you know,
Speaker 6: they were adopted by foster parents and eventually the parents.
Speaker 6: And it's my understanding that the younger kids are doing okay,
Speaker 6: but that's kept very confidential for social services, very and
Speaker 6: and you know, you got to respect their privacy, particularly
Speaker 6: after what they went through. But the older kids, there's
Speaker 6: been a real impact. You know, Eddie Sexton Junior, who
Speaker 6: was kind of served as the oldest, he's had nothing
Speaker 6: but trouble. And he recently just you know, he called
Speaker 6: me a couple of years ago and said, I want
Speaker 6: to do a book on my life. And I said, Eddie,
Speaker 6: I said, I just don't think that there'd be the
Speaker 6: kind of interest there. Everything's in the book, and come
Speaker 6: to find out a few months later, he flipped out
Speaker 6: and threw a rock through a liquor store and like
Speaker 6: robbed three liquor stores and went on to terror and
Speaker 6: now he's serving twelve years in prison. Willie became a
Speaker 6: witness against his father and was able to get second
Speaker 6: degree murder and is serving twenty five years. Shelley, I
Speaker 6: haven't heard from She got married to a real decent
Speaker 6: guy and last I checked, you know, she was getting
Speaker 6: by Okay, Pixie, she's kind of disappeared, But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 6: how do you get.
Speaker 4: Over something like this.
Speaker 6: I hope that you know that they're all. Have we
Speaker 6: recovered from this. I've seen people recover from some pretty
Speaker 6: bad things, so you know, my prayers and wishes are
Speaker 6: with them. But yeah, a lot of collateral damage and
Speaker 6: collateral damage to all of us who investigated. I ended
Speaker 6: up on Andrew pressants for a year. I was suffering
Speaker 6: from clinical depression. You know, it got so dark that,
Speaker 6: you know, once I finished the book, I kind of
Speaker 6: I kind of came out of it. But a lot
Speaker 6: of collateral damage.
Speaker 4: The decision to not write any more, non to not
Speaker 4: write any more true crime came as a result of
Speaker 4: doing this book.
Speaker 6: Yeah, in here, let me just tell you this. So
Speaker 6: Kensington calls me up the editor and says, we want
Speaker 6: to do an update, and can you write us an update,
Speaker 6: you know, an epilogue where the kids are today, what's happened?
Speaker 6: And I said, yeah, I think I could do that.
Speaker 6: And I thought about it for twenty four hours and
Speaker 6: I said, you know what, I don't want to do it.
Speaker 6: I don't want to put my toes even back in
Speaker 6: that water. And I said, I really don't want to
Speaker 6: do it, and she says, well, we'll hire a writer
Speaker 6: to write the epilogue, to ghost write it for you,
Speaker 6: and will you just kind of check it? And I said, yeah,
Speaker 6: we can do that. But you know, look, my father
Speaker 6: died in the middle of this. What happened to me,
Speaker 6: what happened to others. I'm a science based kind of guy.
Speaker 6: I'm an evidence face kind of guy, but this one,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm living out in Holly you know, La.
Speaker 6: Now I'm writing in La La Land. I don't want to.
Speaker 6: I didn't want to go back into that bottomless pit.
Speaker 6: I just really didn't want to do it. And I
Speaker 6: think you know, I did five books. They're all, you know,
Speaker 6: people say, are great books. They're all hardcover. I'm on
Speaker 6: a lot of best of true crime lists, and I
Speaker 6: took it. I took the genre as far as I
Speaker 6: could take it. And also, the publishers don't give us
Speaker 6: the kind of advances we used to get, and to
Speaker 6: do one of these books correctly, you really need a
Speaker 6: year to two years, so that means you need to
Speaker 6: advance it's going to carry it for a couple of years,
Speaker 6: because I think I think true crime writers deserve more
Speaker 6: than just to rewrite a headline. They want to know
Speaker 6: the story under the story.
Speaker 4: Well, you know that's what I found kind of incredible.
Speaker 4: When I started this, there was guys still you know,
Speaker 4: for example, with Kensington, and they were doing to a
Speaker 4: year and I was going, well, I you know, having
Speaker 4: written a book, I said, I can't I can't believe
Speaker 4: that they could do that. That's hard to do, you know,
Speaker 4: two books in the years so.
Speaker 6: And you know, you start pulling on a thread and
Speaker 6: all of a sudden things aren't what they appear to be.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm really struck by how inact I used
Speaker 6: to be a daily news reporter. I'm really struck how
Speaker 6: how many mistakes and how bad the information is in
Speaker 6: daily news, prictly on television. I mean, even this Ferguson
Speaker 6: case is a perfect example. You know, a meme gets
Speaker 6: started as storyline and it just runs and you know,
Speaker 6: here we are months later, and I've read all the
Speaker 6: grand jury testimony of a Ferguson case, and there's witnesses
Speaker 6: we never heard about. And you know, it's so I've
Speaker 6: become very I love the journalism bains. I love being
Speaker 6: a reporter, but you know, you're on a deadline. There's
Speaker 6: not a lot you can find out in a day
Speaker 6: when you're chasing the story. And that's why attribution is
Speaker 6: very important. I tell my friends, I says you, when
Speaker 6: you listen to a news report, look for the attribution.
Speaker 6: You know who said that, Where did that come from?
Speaker 6: Don't just take somebody's word for well.
Speaker 4: I was investigating a case where a person was convicted
Speaker 4: of murdered it, murdering their entire family, and then I
Speaker 4: saw a documentary by the BBC, even though it was
Speaker 4: an American trial, and from the perspective of the documentary,
Speaker 4: I got a certain amount of information and a certain
Speaker 4: angle to where I thought, you know, guilt or innocence.
Speaker 4: And then I read other articles. So in each subsequent
Speaker 4: article was new either new information it was excluded from
Speaker 4: this documentary, or contradictory information or conflicting or confusing. So
Speaker 4: after the more I read, the more confused I was
Speaker 4: after that. So that's not a great result from the media,
Speaker 4: you know, from journalism. So that's why I really loved
Speaker 4: the Long you know, the True Crown book, because basically
Speaker 4: the authors really are entrusted to do the research, all
Speaker 4: the research and get all the detail. And maybe it's
Speaker 4: not for everybody, but there's certainly many many people love
Speaker 4: like myself and this audience that loves the detail. So
Speaker 4: you've done a remarkable job in laying out this book
Speaker 4: and inviting us into this horror show and bringing us
Speaker 4: into one of the most amazing dysfunctional is definitely an understatement.
Speaker 4: So it's a very evil and evil environment, like you say,
Speaker 4: to produce this house of horrors.
Speaker 6: And you know why people read through Crime. I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm convinced, and that's why I investigated True crime is
Speaker 6: it reassures us. It assures of our own humanity as
Speaker 6: we see the mistakes that the inhumans make and we
Speaker 6: say to ourselves, yes, I'm not that person. I wouldn't
Speaker 6: have done that way. I wouldn't have made that choice.
Speaker 6: And in a way, their morality tails and they reassure
Speaker 6: our morality and our humanity. And I think that's why
Speaker 6: people are fascinated with them. And I know that's why
Speaker 6: I was. I you know, I learned a lot about
Speaker 6: myself doing these books.
Speaker 4: And certainly too. You see the again you say the
Speaker 4: morality play, there's the hard boiled detective that has to
Speaker 4: go do the dirtiest work that no one wants to do,
Speaker 4: or is prepared to do and they do it day
Speaker 4: and day out and be able to survive from that.
Speaker 4: I had a detective one last week. He was still
Speaker 4: reeling from thirty years before. You know, and then the
Speaker 4: true crime author like you say that it affects you
Speaker 4: so much that it really affects your health and your
Speaker 4: well being and your disposition because you are that affected.
Speaker 4: So I applaud you for this book, and anyone that's
Speaker 4: daring enough to read this book will be drawn into
Speaker 4: this incredible story. I want to thank you very much
Speaker 4: for coming on Lowell and talking about House of Secrets.
Speaker 4: And for those that might want to contact you. Are
Speaker 4: you on Facebook? Do you have a website?
Speaker 6: Yes, everything like the Lol Coffee'll author. Just to do
Speaker 6: the search for Lowell Coffee'll Clash author and I'll pop up.
Speaker 6: I also have a personal page, but I usually keep
Speaker 6: that to personal friends, but they can contact me through
Speaker 6: my author page on Facebook. And it's been a real
Speaker 6: honor and a pleasure, and you know, being on your show,
Speaker 6: and I would love your question.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you very much. It's been an honor for
Speaker 4: having you on. And hope to speak to you again
Speaker 4: soon and hope to see some of your work in
Speaker 4: the future. So thank you very much Lowell, and have
Speaker 4: yourself a good evening.
Speaker 6: Thank you all right, thank you Dan, good night night.