HOUSE OF SECRETS-Lowell Cauffiel

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bereaved father during a family picnic. Sexton was priming his third victim when the FBI and Florida cops finally caught up with him. Authorities soon learned, soon learned that these killings were the final heinous acts of a sadistic, in so frestuous monster whose reign of psychological and sexual violence had begun back in Ohio. For years, Eddie Lee whipped his children daily, raped his daughter's, abused his sons, and

even fathered three inbred Sexton babies. But in early nineteen ninety two, after teenage Michelle Sexton's courageous flight authorities, the walls of silence surrounding this house of horrors crumbled. We're terrifying detail. Lowell Caufield takes us into a shocking world of abuse, incest, and family murder, a world ruled by a psychopath whose ability to manipulate his children produced one

of the most sensational cases in true crime history. The book that we're featuring this evening is House of Secrets with my special guest, journalist and author and filmmaker Lowell Coffeel. Welcome to the program, and thank you for a greeting this interview.

talk about the amount of research. Some people spend a little bit of time on a true crime book. This book tell us how long and tell us about the research and tell us why you made a point with this fictionalization.

was Hugh Ainsworth who wrote The Only Living Witness. And what I was impressed about was that how these authors unfolded so much detail and it had they felt like novels. They read like novels. They had all the things that novels have, metaphor and great dialogue and symbolism and things like that. But as I got to know the authors, it says, no, we research, we don't make up a thing. And back then true crime books were hardcover, so that

was the standard you wanted to get to. And in order to do a hardcover book, you know, people wanted to know the details and they want those details to be true. Plus who the hell wants to get sued too making anything up? And so just coming out of

that journalistic background, I just became a research fiend. And what I found, and you know, I would attend a trial or get a transcript or a trial, and I would only look at a trial as like almost what we used to call a roller decks or a contact sheet of who I had to talk to, and then interview all the people that testified in the trial and the people that didn't testify, and the family and the victims and the killer, and just run a lot of tape.

I run hundreds of hours of tapes. And I had a gal that would transcribe my tapes and then compare those two police reports, my own observations and everything else. And I became so confident in the material that that I was able to do dialogue and things like that. But here's the interesting thing that happened, and it happened with my first book called Masqueraded True Story, Seduction, Compulsion

and Murder. What I found that all the things that novelists use, and this is kind of the new journalism school of journalism that was written about by Tom Wolfe, is what I found is that in reality there's symbolism. In reality, there's a metaphor. In reality, you need a weather description, although I do subscribe to the Elmore Leonard thing of book writing, never start a book with weather.

But if you needed weather in a scene, for example, all she had to do was contact the National Weather Service and you could determine what the weather looked like that day. So I found that all those wonderful things that fiction writers used were available to nonfiction writers. Now, the beauty of nonfiction. And you know today I write for film and television, and I write fiction and script

and stuff. And you've got to make fiction believable. You know, you can't try something absurd because the audience will go, well, that would never happen, that things stupid. The beauty of nonfiction, particularly nonfiction crime, the crazier it is, and the more unbelievable it is, right, the better it is, which is the opposite of fiction, which has to be made believable. So why would I want to make up anything if I've got all these unbelievable events and these ironies and

things like that. And so, and I hope I'm not going too long on this, but every I start every book documenting, you know exactly where I got my material, you know, from so many hundred hours of interviews, you know, trial transcripts, et cetera, et cetera, and other documented, proven journalistic sources of information. And I think that you know, particularly the hardcover true crime reader, wants that you know, Look, we can all pick up a paper, turn on true

TV and see the surface of the case. But to me, what makes a great true crime book is to dig way deep underneath into the psychology and into all the things that the newspapers never wrote about and get you in with the family. You know, families that never typically often you know, talk and news stories or they never interviewed.

And that's a real challenge too as a researcher because typically when you come into a true crime case, all that's already happened, and you've got a family that's maybe been abused by the press, and it's a real challenge to get their confidence and get talking to you. So that's what I love to do, and I used to love to do. I don't do these books anymore. And we can talk about why I don't later, But that's my approach. And I've Jack Olden and Hugh Ainsworth to thank for that.

commit a murder. And I immediately went, oh, Manson, you know, because Charles Manson never hands On killed anybody. And as I look at the associated press reports of this said, I thought, oh, this is going to be an easy book. You know, famous last words, Right, this is going to be easy book. I can just really work into the psychology. How did he manipulate, you know, the son and daughter to do this? I could fulfill the contract and kind

of move on. I was thinking about also getting into fiction at that time, and so I took it on, thinking it was going to be easy. Easy turned into three years of work, three years of two and a half years of research. The case takes place in Canton, Canton, Ohio. At the time, I was living in Detroit Detroit area, so that's about a two and a half hour drive. And as I begin to get into this thing, it was like a black hole. I mean, that's the best way to describe it. It was like a bottomless pit.

As I begin to interview the kids and the people, it was so much more than what I thought it was, And it was like a It was not only a house of secrets, it was a house of mirrors. And the key, some of the key characters are the key. Older kids were highly traumatized because of the way they had been brought up. I mean, these kids had been tortured and raped, routinely, abused, had to keep secrets with

each other. We're always, you know, either fighting with each other, but loved the dad, but then the dad would turn them against each other. It was like I called him, America's most dysfunctional family. And all this was taking place behind this facade of a suburban home in Canton, Ohio, where people who met this family thought, oh, what a wonderful,

big family. There were seven seven girls and five boys, I believe, yeah, no, seven boys and five girls, well behaved kids, you know, the perfect kind of big, loving family. But behind this facade was this absolute sadistic insanity going on.

So as I began to put the story together and then getting the court transcripts and everything, I began hearing things like, well, you know, one time, you know, Shelley had a baby and we killed it and we had a ritual over it, and I'm thinking this is all bloney.

trip through through the heart of darkness. I couldn't believe the human beings, particularly family members, could do these kind of things to each other, and that this patriarch at Eveley Sexton, who was this madman psychopath who believed he was creating some kind of master race called the Futuitrons, had done this to his kids. And it never ended. There was always something new we were finding out, and

then here's what happened. And this is the answer your question. Directly, this was like true crimes version of King Tut's Tomb Curse, because all of us who investigated this case started having things happen to us. The detective Ready who broke the case, had two heart attacks, they had a Department of Social services went into a clinical depression. The social worker who carried who directly worked with the kids, started carrying a

gun and then he had a heart attack. And this woman named Anne Green, who was one of the real advocates for one of the kids that disclosed developed a brain tumor and had to be operated on. And then I went into this incredible clinical depression. I didn't know it was clinical depression at the time, but when I tried to write the book, I only got out twenty eight pages in three months. And I'm a six to eight pages a day kind of writer, and I just couldn't,

you know, I just couldn't write it. I called up Kenjington and says, I'm not going to do the book, forget it right. You know, I can't do the book, and they threatened assue me, so that kind of motivated me. I still couldn't write. I finally went and saw Position and he told me I was suffering from a former depression. I went on antidepressants. I went into my writing studio and I wrote this book in thirty eight days, which

is unheard of. I was kicking out fifteen pages a day, twenty pages a day, but I felt like I was climbing out on a ladder out of hell. And when I what's so funny about this is when I finished the book, I packaged it up because back then we were you know, we put it in manuscript form on paper, and I shipped it off FedEx, and I had a note to Paul Dannis. I said, Paul, I never want to hear about this book again. I don't want to see the cover. Go ahead and publish it. I fulfilled

the contract, I don't want to hear about it. And a year and a half and I did do one TV show. But then after that, about a year and a half later, Google had just come, you know, gotten popular, and I googled my name and I see Lowell Coffeel in New York Times. What was I doing in New York Times? And I was on the best seller list. And I called the editor and said, hey, man, I'm on the bestseller list. You know, why didn't you tell me?

And they laughed and said, well, he said, you didn't want to hear anything about the book, so but it finished me off. I really felt that, like you know, I was always fascinated with the dark side of the human experience, because I don't think you can understand the positive side of human experience and unless you understand the dark side. And I felt I had mind it completely

and I just didn't want to. You know, my father also died while I was writing the book, and so I mean it was like this curse and everybody that touched it. And you know, you've read the book. There are some paranormal things that go on in this book where you have three kids in different parts of the country having psychological breakdowns all in the same hour as if the baby's being killed a thousand miles away in Florida. You know, there's weird stuff that goes on. And so

it's really you know how it's the secrets. I think it's beyond true crime. It's like a rob zombie movie or you know, Texas chains on Masacre kind of thing. It's a it's a horror story.

and talk about a little bit about their background. If there is you can offer some kind of somewhat of an explanation for some of the behavior.

uh a religious family. And interestingly enough, you know, I believe I'm trying to remember here. It's been a long time since did the book, but I believe he did. He served some time in the military, and when he got out and then he moved to Ohio, that religious upbringing that he got in West Virginia kind of became

part of his psychopathology. I know, he had sort of a mail order minister's license and one of the real crackpot psychopathic ideas he had in which he manipulated his kids with as he began having children with his wife Stella May was he was using some scriptural references that are contained in the Old Testament, which, by the way, today a lot of conspiracy theorists are into this, that there there were beings that came down out of heaven and they bred with women, you know, human women, and

created this special race. And he thought that he was part of that lineage. And he told some of the kids that they were part of that lineage, and he called them future trons. And as the kids got older than he would have marriage ceremonies for the daughters, and nobody knew, of course, this was going on except within the family. Then have sex with the daughters and then produced these There were three inbred children that were produced as a result of that. But the answer your question directly,

I don't know what makes a psycho past. I mean, they come from and every from every kind of background, every kind of Some of them are abused as kids, some of them aren't. I'm trying to recall whether Eddie Lee was abused. I think there was some of that. You know, they come from poor families, they come from wealthy families. But I came to the conclusion with Eddie Lee that he was just evil incarnate. So that's about

the best explanation I have for this guy. And I have no sympathy, you know, for him in any kind of way, and he's certainly not any kind of a victim in any kind of way. But he was also a con man. He knew how to work the social services departments for food stamps. He claimed to be disabled. He was drawing Social Security for you know, being disabled.

That was a whole charade that he put on. He had a social service worker to come and visit, and he had a hospital bed in there, and he'd be in a wheelchair, and you know, he had all the typical cons of the sea out of a lot of psychopaths. But I think what made him unique was this idea of blending of this old style can't revival religion in with his evils.

You talk about, you know, nine by eight rooms.

He was one of my menors in Detroit. But the name of the first chapter is called House on Carolyn Street, and I kind of parachute in after everything's happened, and there's a couple there that has bought the house on an auction for just dirt cheap because nobody wanted it, and they had gutted the house and torn it down to the studs and redd the house. But they begin to tell me what they found when they bought the house.

And this is after everybody's convicted, the family's abandoned the home, and the house itself told a very bizarre story in that they noticed that all the locks had been taken off on ali the bedroom doors, and I believe that there were locks on the outside of some of the bedroom doors of the kids. And then up in the upper bedrooms there were like you know, Cape cod style homes, they have what's called a false attic, and there's sometimes

little trap doors on the sides of the bedrooms. Everybody's living in one of these houses, they know what I'm talking about, and they opened up these little trap doors. In there they found little kids toys and blankets, and their immediate impression was these were like hiding places where the kids would would hide. And then they went down in the basement and they see that there are rings that are bolded into the rafters that look like somebody could be strung up, you know, by their wrists, on

and old mattresses. But on the mattresses there are drawings that looked like they were drawn by children of male and female anatomy and like sexual kind of images. And one of the creepiest things was that out in front of the house there was this statue of Jesus. We've all seen this kind of lawn art, you know, about three or four foot high, you know, made out of plaster, and Jesus's hands are outstretched, you know, like with his

palms out opening, but the hands are broken off. And I thought that was, you know I was speaking about earlier about having great metaphors, what a great metaphor that was, because I ended up with a line in the book saying that, you know, nobody could help the kids, not even the hapless Jesus outside. And then there was a neighbor who came over after they bought the house and said, yeah, there were all these kids there, and real strange things

would happen. And one time they described it that there was a big, huge rainstorm with thunder and lightning outside, and the little kids all ran out into the yard with their eyes looking up to the skies, lightning flashing in their face in the rain, and the babysitter or whoever it was, asked him, what are you doing out there? And he says, we're praying and hoping that Jesus will come and take us away. I mean, these are the

kind of creepy things that you get an idea. This is indeed a house of secrets.

So they had boarded up the home like it was some kind of bunker waiting for Social services and the cops to come, and it was a couple. It was I think of twenty four hour thirty hours standoff until they finally talked him out of there. There was also a pond, a pond on the property. In terms of the neighborhood, this is a classic everyday folks, middle class neighborhood. This is a nice area of canon. This isn't the hood, this is you know, this is typical kind of suburbia.

This is this is what's so interesting about it is he was able to pull all this stuff out in a in a neighborhood like this. But he had such control over the kids of all, and they ranged in age from seven to twenty four. I believe it was that they kept the secrets. They never took They didn't talk to the neighbors, or if they did talk to the neighbors, they were all super polite. They were known as like the politest kids around. And they also remember

had to all go to school. Now, all schools have social workers, and if something was going on, you would think that somebody would disclose. And eventually Michelle Sexton, or Shelley as she's known as, did disclose to a school counselor, which started this whole cross country crime spree and them

fleeing and the murders all into motion. But all the kids were ordered to keep an eye on each other, and they all had to carry quarters in their pockets because if they saw one of their siblings, and we've got twelve kids who all are with each other at school keeping an eye on each other, and if they saw one of their siblings talking to a social worker or a teacher or beginning to disclose anything, they were to go to the payphone and drop a corner and

call dad. So he had security going on, physical security in terms of the house and the way it was constructed so nobody could look in. But he also had a form of psychological security going on with the kids all ratting each other out, and this is what created this kind of dysfunctional environment in terms of what was

the threat of that. Routinely, on any given night, he would line the kids up in a line and had a whip and would pick out kids that he felt weren't acting proper and those kids would be beaten while the other kids watched. So everybody was always trying to be on Dad and Mom's good side. They didn't want to get beaten. But it's the old you know, waterboarding carrot and the stick idea. You know, you're either rewarded or you're punished, and you never know which one it's

going to be. So he's always had the family and the kids in the state of this iron control from a young age.

she felt for her and went and introduced her. And tell us a little bit about this interaction, because this is part of the unraveling of this story as well, and a good way to introduce Joel to this nightmare that he enters into.

raising him. And senior prom's coming up, right, the high school prom, and so there's some matchmaking that goes on and they think, well, Joel, that's the perfect date for Pixie. That was Estella. She's also known as Pixie. Some people have a hard time following my book because there's so many nicknames who different names from these kids, you know, like Skipper Lee and Pixie. I'm gonna call her Pixie, right,

she kind of looks like a Pixie. And so they set them up and he takes her to the prom, and these pictures are in the book, and this is a this is like a big thing for him. Man, he's proud of him. He's got a date. They go out, but they're they're both, you know, they're both a couple of outsiders. Well, Eddie Lee Sexton has already had a baby with Pixie, and she's got a infant and of course, he doesn't want the world to know that that's his

incestuous granddaughter daughter. However you want to call it, kind of like Chinatown. You know, she's my mom, she's my certain No, she's my mom, she's my sister. And so Eddie Lee's m O is to get a beard, someone who poses as they can become like the husband of one of these girls and ostensibly look like the father, so not to create suspicion. So he motivates Pixie to get closer to Joel. And Joel is this innocent guy.

He's got a girl that likes him, and you know, he thinks she's nice, and he doesn't see it coming. And the next thing, you know, you know, and shut amount of time, they're married, and now he's part of the family. And his aunt is suspicious of the family because she's heard a couple of little rumors about it, and she makes Eddie Lee's kind of weird. But she's sort of happy for her nephew at the same time she's worried. So that's how that pairing comes together.

a big family. I begin to think of the Jackson's, you know, on this one. And the reason for that is the reason for all the kids is that that way, if the father's having incestuous relationships with the children, his number one threat is the mother, right, the wife. You would think that, you know, motherly instinct, right would be

say what are you doing to my kids? But if if he's got the wife pregnant and carrying babies every nine months and with all the duties of raising children, she's too exhausted and too dependent to mount any kind of defense or rebellion, and I'm telling you everything in that book. When I see one of these big families, I think, I wonder what's going on there?

but yests. He gets badly beaten, but then they come up with some kind of excuse that they're not the ones that did it.

I believe, and he starts to question. I don't know if he questions the paternity or not, but he starts asking some questions anyway, And that's.

was known for taking beatings better than anyone. She'd been whipped many times and she'd say, just you know, you know, go ahead, hit me harder. This is the rebel of the family. And one day she goes into the social services person in her school and says, I'm pregnant and they're trying to kill my baby. My brother kicked me in the stomach, and when my sister was pregnant, they kicked my sister in the stomach too, and she miscarred.

Well by law, then they have to report that to social services, so they send her over to social services and she's telling this whole story about being pregnant and she actually wasn't pregnant, but they needed to do something with her while they investigated, so they sent her to this They had a program, it was called a shepherding program where if you had a kid that was in trouble or whatever, they had families that would volunteer to

take almost like a temporary foster person. And they placed her with this wonderful woman who I call Anne Green because I wanted to protect her identity, because she was scared to death of the sections, and that's the only thing I ever changed. Sometimes I'll change a name just to protect that person, but I know to the reader in italics that that name's been changed, but it's a

real person. And she and Shelley begin to bond, and then Shelley discloses my dad raped me and they held that then to social services, and now they've opened a social service case against the family. And as Social Services begin to investigate the family, Eddie Lee barricades the family

into the house, puts boards on the windows. He's got all this weaponry and there's a standoff, and amazingly they don't arrest him after this, or they do, and he's let out on bond, and so there's a sort of minor charge and he packs up the family into a twenty two foot motor home and hits the road with I believe the total was oh Social Services removed some of the minor kids, the seven year old and a nine year old and a fourteen year old, and so he's left with the older kids and the boys, which

Social Services didn't feel were in jeopardy while they were investigating. He packs them all up into a motor home and hits the road and so now they're on the run as a family with like twelve people, including Joel Good too, you know, the baby, the other sister who's got a baby. I mean, god knows what that motorhome is like. And they hit the road on the run, and that's what

starts this whole thing into motion. And He's got all these ideas that he Lee's going to go look up his Indian in Native American background, which is probably a lot of fiction too, and one thing leads another. They knock off some convenience stores through some robberies, and they end up down in Florida, staying with a relevant for a while, but then pretty much put up a great camp or a homestead in one of the campgrounds down there near Tampa, Florida, in Hillsboro County. And that's a

typical kind of thing. There's a lot of snowbirds, you know, out of the north. When the snow comes, they'll take their RVs and they'll camp all winter, you know, in this camp ron. And so that's where they end up. And you know, Eddie Lee is still working the scams he's got, you know, he's got pixie like chatting up a senior citizen who's down there alone with his motor home thinking about the stealing his motor home. I mean,

the guy's always scheming. There's always something going on, and so that's where the capital crimes begin to take place. Is done in this camp.

So tell us so many other details that come up.

my plug in here. And the book has been reissued by Kenston with a new cover and a update on the end that wasn't in the original edition. And it's also available as a knee book on Amazon or but you can also get a paperback. But you'll see these pictures in the book. He dresses these little girls, I mean five years old, seven years old, twelve years old with bridal veils and has formal marriage ceremonies with the girls. Again getting back into the you know, the incestuous idea,

and that the daddy is is he dad? Or is he you know, is he the husband? There are stories of miscarriages being buried different places on the property. Apparently there were a lot of babies being born and some of them didn't live. Some of them may have been killed potentially thrown in this pond to as well. I believe there was one story that one of the babies was There was talk of actually cooking one of the babies. I mean, it's crazy and it becomes difficulty like to

separate from like what's reality and what's not. But as you'd hear these stories. They all became believable because the extent to which Eddie's sadism, Now, the other thing that was going on was the mother. The mother eventually becomes Stella May. The mother eventually becomes his sex partner in the sexual abuse of the kids. So like a seven year old girl would be brought to Eddie's bedroom, he would have sex with her, and the mother would have

sex with her. And that was a really compelling interview that, you know, I did a really long staression was a Stella May after she was convicted and imprisoned, And what I saw was a woman who was probably pretty normal that married this demon, and he slowly chipped away, you know, through first physical abuse, getting her pregnant and all that, and she reached kind of a Stockholm syndrome state of mind where I can't fight this man, so I'm going to join him. And she became as twisted as he did.

And she was convicted for raping assisting in the rape of her own seven year old daughter, Lana, and then fled guilty to thirteen more counts. She's still in prison down in Ohio. Her next role hearing is two thousand and seventeen and we want to interviewed her. There was a part of me that felt for because I'd seen what he had done to her, But the other part of me said, you know, why didn't you leave? You know, but you know, I've done a lot of stuff on

abused domestic partners. It's once you get caught up in that, it's tough. So she was taking part in the sexual abuse of the kids as well, So yeah, it got pretty creepy.

this sort of thing. But the reason that Eddie did it, and the way that I saw this is that if you can surround the abuse with something fantastic like that, like my dad was in a black robe and he had a candle and he did this, that's actually a preventive measure that child abusers will use because if the child discloses and says, you know, last night, my dad came to me in a black road with a candle and he made me touch him and all this, and

people think, oh, this is just a kid's imagination. So it's not that he really necessarily believed in the Satanism. It's a method of control, and it's a method of should they disclose, nobody will believe them because it's too fantastic. And that's what I think he was doing.

And Eddie's a little paranoid because they've been staying so long a's one campground and by the way, the FBI is looking for them, you know, there's warrants up for their arrest and that and the the baby, little Skipper Lee, that Joel is ostensibly the father of. In fact, Skipper Lee may actually be the child of Joel, we don't know, is crying a lot because it's it's either collicky or

it's sick, and it keeps crying. And so Eddie's brilliant idea, or Pixie's idea, one of their ideas to keep the baby quiet is feed at Nike will Yeah, which is a strong you know, I call fleet medicine. But that doesn't work, and so Eddie says, either shut that baby up or I will and Pixie smothers the baby and kills the baby. So now they've got a dead baby.

They bury it out in the back, and Joel has bonded with this baby, and he's all upset and now he's starting to say, you know, I'm I'm out of here, I'm going back to Ohio. I'm I'm leaving this situation. And Eddie Lee says, we can't let him leave. He's seemed he knows too much. And so at the family picnic, at a family picnic of all places, he decides that Joel's got to be taken out and got to be killed,

and so he enlists Willie to do the job. He teaches him how to create a go out you know rope with two pieces of wood, and they strangle Joel. There's some evidence that maybe Picks he might have taken part in this too, and so they've kill him and you know, bury him. And so those are those are

the two murders that take place in that campground. There's almost the evidence of other babies that were born that were buried near the library near Tampa, and there's potentially other bodies being buried mainly children and you know, babies that are born. Stuff. We never could quite get to the bottom of them. Again, that's another one of these open threads that I could still be investigating this.

hours uh and uh. They had five of the family members on the show, and they had to keep me in a separate room with a police officer because they were threatening to kill me even though they were my friends. So you never know when they were going to turn on you, right, the kids and all that, And we get out on the Lisa Gibbons Show and we're telling the story of the family and all this is all

live television. Everything is, you know, pretty calm and everything, and Lisa Gibbons says, we've got a We've got a a surprise for you. He says, We've got a message from your father from prison. And the big screen TV lights up and it's Eddie Lee in prison and he's going, kids, I know, you know that I never did anything wrong.

entering events, entering events, entering events, entering events. And I had heard, or I knew through the through the interviewing that some of the kids that had psychotic breaks. One of the one of the like the seven year old, woke up and saw her father standing at the foot of the bed shaking his head and said, keep your mouth shut, and he's shaking his head, and she went into almost a demon possessed psychotic break, ended up in

a psychiatric order children's hospital. That also happened to two other okay, two other kids, and the cops thought these were all unrelated events. It just happened to happen. Well.

At the end of my research, I clicked the calendar when I brought all the dates together, and all three kids, in different parts of the country, hundreds of miles apart, had the psychotic break, all at the same time, all at the same hour, all with the same hallucination or the father at the foot of the bed, And it was exactly the time when they were killing the baby in Florida. And when that popped in front of me, the cops didn't even know about that. This was something

I found. It was like ice going up my spine and I said, oh my god.

won't give that. We won't really give that away, but we've alluded to that these you know, Ostella and Eddie Lee get theirs. But tell us a little bit more about, uh, the experience for you and some of the interviews you did with other family members with Eddie Eddie Lee Junior, and just sort of the collateral. We'll say damage.

after what they went through. But the older kids, there's been a real impact. You know, Eddie Sexton Junior, who was kind of served as the oldest, he's had nothing but trouble. And he recently just you know, he called me a couple of years ago and said, I want to do a book on my life. And I said, Eddie, I said, I just don't think that there'd be the

kind of interest there. Everything's in the book, and come to find out a few months later, he flipped out and threw a rock through a liquor store and like robbed three liquor stores and went on to terror and now he's serving twelve years in prison. Willie became a witness against his father and was able to get second

degree murder and is serving twenty five years. Shelley, I haven't heard from She got married to a real decent guy and last I checked, you know, she was getting by Okay, Pixie, she's kind of disappeared, But yeah, I mean, how do you get.

that water. And I said, I really don't want to do it, and she says, well, we'll hire a writer to write the epilogue, to ghost write it for you, and will you just kind of check it? And I said, yeah, we can do that. But you know, look, my father died in the middle of this. What happened to me, what happened to others. I'm a science based kind of guy. I'm an evidence face kind of guy, but this one, you know, I'm living out in Holly you know, La. Now I'm writing in La La Land. I don't want to.

I didn't want to go back into that bottomless pit. I just really didn't want to do it. And I think you know, I did five books. They're all, you know, people say, are great books. They're all hardcover. I'm on a lot of best of true crime lists, and I took it. I took the genre as far as I

could take it. And also, the publishers don't give us the kind of advances we used to get, and to do one of these books correctly, you really need a year to two years, so that means you need to advance it's going to carry it for a couple of years, because I think I think true crime writers deserve more than just to rewrite a headline. They want to know the story under the story.

case is a perfect example. You know, a meme gets started as storyline and it just runs and you know, here we are months later, and I've read all the grand jury testimony of a Ferguson case, and there's witnesses we never heard about. And you know, it's so I've become very I love the journalism bains. I love being a reporter, but you know, you're on a deadline. There's not a lot you can find out in a day when you're chasing the story. And that's why attribution is

very important. I tell my friends, I says you, when you listen to a news report, look for the attribution. You know who said that, Where did that come from? Don't just take somebody's word for well.

this documentary, or contradictory information or conflicting or confusing. So after the more I read, the more confused I was after that. So that's not a great result from the media, you know, from journalism. So that's why I really loved the Long you know, the True Crown book, because basically the authors really are entrusted to do the research, all the research and get all the detail. And maybe it's not for everybody, but there's certainly many many people love

like myself and this audience that loves the detail. So you've done a remarkable job in laying out this book and inviting us into this horror show and bringing us into one of the most amazing dysfunctional is definitely an understatement. So it's a very evil and evil environment, like you say, to produce this house of horrors.

I was. I you know, I learned a lot about myself doing these books.

reeling from thirty years before. You know, and then the true crime author like you say that it affects you so much that it really affects your health and your well being and your disposition because you are that affected. So I applaud you for this book, and anyone that's daring enough to read this book will be drawn into this incredible story. I want to thank you very much for coming on Lowell and talking about House of Secrets. And for those that might want to contact you. Are

you on Facebook? Do you have a website?