recall his version of what happened at the hearing in a videotape he made for higher authorities.
He said he protested his children being removed by the DHS. Sexton told the court referee he was upset his children had been placed with his older brother Otis. He claimed his daughter Machelle and Otis had trumped up the charges. Sexton said, “And that one social worker, Mr.
Welsh, he gets up … and really vilified me and my wife. And we were sitting there the referee says all right, you’ve ground up enough meat, you ve ground up enough hamburger … So then my wife and myself asked our attorney if we could have the children taken from Otis’s home, because Otis, he’s got a mental condition and he’s always doing this kind of stuff. He’s always interfering in everybody’s life.
The court ordered the minor children placed in temporary foster care while the DHS continued its investigation. A couple of weeks later, Ed Sexton would return with an attorney named Patrick Menicos and secure a court order preventing his brother Otis or any family member from having contact with his children while the case was pending. Otis Sexton told social workers he never wanted custody of the children.
Any suggestion of a conspiracy, he said, was entirely in his younger brother’s mind. Eddie was always doing that, he said, taking his own faults and trying to attribute them to him. Later, in fact, Machelle would reveal that her father had told her that Otis liked to have sex with his girls.
Some of the resentments went back many years. They were the two youngest boys, Eddie Lee the seventh son in a family of 10 children, Otis the sixth. Their late father was a coal miner and a Baptist preacher in Logan County, the same eastern West Virginia coal territory that spawned the battle between the Hatfields and the Mccoys. The Sextons later moved to Sheridan, Ohio, 60 miles up the Big Tuck Fork and Ohio rivers, then to Ironton, Ohio. When their father died of a sudden heart attack at 52, Otis was 12 and Eddie Lee nearly 10. Otis Sexton later recalled those hard years. “We had a normal home,” he said. “The boys had a room. The girls had a room. None of these people raping each other. My dad would bring the whole church home on Sunday. They all sat in the yard and talked the Bible. “But let me tell you, we were poorer than a church mouse. We had to raise our food … hunt. Heat? We didn’t have money to buy coal. We had to walk about three miles across old Route 52, down in Ironton above Ashland, Kentucky. We’d take turns going over there and picking up lumps of coal that fell off the trains. Poor took on new meaning. It wasn’t like the people who get welfare these days.” Eddie Lee never had to pick coal, Otis said. Their mother Lana spoiled him. “Man, he was a momma’s boy all the way.” While the rest of the boys did chores, Otis remembered her coddling Eddie, reading him stories in a rocker next to a pot-belly stove. “Or, let’s take Dave, my older brother. When we were growing up we had to share our toys. At Christmas time, there were two beebee guns bought. Eddie was given his own gun. Dave and I had to share ours. We’d go to the store, my sister Maggie and me with my mom. We’d ask, can we get a candy bar? She’d buy two. We’d bring the candy home. Eddie would get the whole bar. I’d have to t split mine with Maggie.” After their father died, Otis took a job setting pins in a bowling alley for six cents a line. In his teens he worked construction and later became a painter’s apprentice. He gave all his earnings to his mother, he said. “I used to get blisters on my hands.
I had to wrap towels around them so I could use a shovel. I’d save fifty cents for myself to go to the theater and get a pop. Eddie Lee worked about a month at best. Then he quit.” Otis enlisted in the Navy.
Eddie, at 14, landed in an Ohio reform school for a year after he broke into a store in Ironton and took some
He said he protested his children being removed by the DHS. Sexton told the court referee he was upset his children had been placed with his older brother Otis. He claimed his daughter Machelle and Otis had trumped up the charges. Sexton said, “And that one social worker, Mr.
Welsh, he gets up … and really vilified me and my wife. And we were sitting there the referee says all right, you’ve ground up enough meat, you ve ground up enough hamburger … So then my wife and myself asked our attorney if we could have the children taken from Otis’s home, because Otis, he’s got a mental condition and he’s always doing this kind of stuff. He’s always interfering in everybody’s life.
The court ordered the minor children placed in temporary foster care while the DHS continued its investigation. A couple of weeks later, Ed Sexton would return with an attorney named Patrick Menicos and secure a court order preventing his brother Otis or any family member from having contact with his children while the case was pending. Otis Sexton told social workers he never wanted custody of the children.
Any suggestion of a conspiracy, he said, was entirely in his younger brother’s mind. Eddie was always doing that, he said, taking his own faults and trying to attribute them to him. Later, in fact, Machelle would reveal that her father had told her that Otis liked to have sex with his girls.
Some of the resentments went back many years. They were the two youngest boys, Eddie Lee the seventh son in a family of 10 children, Otis the sixth. Their late father was a coal miner and a Baptist preacher in Logan County, the same eastern West Virginia coal territory that spawned the battle between the Hatfields and the Mccoys. The Sextons later moved to Sheridan, Ohio, 60 miles up the Big Tuck Fork and Ohio rivers, then to Ironton, Ohio. When their father died of a sudden heart attack at 52, Otis was 12 and Eddie Lee nearly 10. Otis Sexton later recalled those hard years. “We had a normal home,” he said. “The boys had a room. The girls had a room. None of these people raping each other. My dad would bring the whole church home on Sunday. They all sat in the yard and talked the Bible. “But let me tell you, we were poorer than a church mouse. We had to raise our food … hunt. Heat? We didn’t have money to buy coal. We had to walk about three miles across old Route 52, down in Ironton above Ashland, Kentucky. We’d take turns going over there and picking up lumps of coal that fell off the trains. Poor took on new meaning. It wasn’t like the people who get welfare these days.” Eddie Lee never had to pick coal, Otis said. Their mother Lana spoiled him. “Man, he was a momma’s boy all the way.” While the rest of the boys did chores, Otis remembered her coddling Eddie, reading him stories in a rocker next to a pot-belly stove. “Or, let’s take Dave, my older brother. When we were growing up we had to share our toys. At Christmas time, there were two beebee guns bought. Eddie was given his own gun. Dave and I had to share ours. We’d go to the store, my sister Maggie and me with my mom. We’d ask, can we get a candy bar? She’d buy two. We’d bring the candy home. Eddie would get the whole bar. I’d have to t split mine with Maggie.” After their father died, Otis took a job setting pins in a bowling alley for six cents a line. In his teens he worked construction and later became a painter’s apprentice. He gave all his earnings to his mother, he said. “I used to get blisters on my hands.
I had to wrap towels around them so I could use a shovel. I’d save fifty cents for myself to go to the theater and get a pop. Eddie Lee worked about a month at best. Then he quit.” Otis enlisted in the Navy.
Eddie, at 14, landed in an Ohio reform school for a year after he broke into a store in Ironton and took some
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