Deadly Devotion

by Alysia Sofios

  “I think he finally did it,” he said. “We need to get to Fresno.”

  Dorian dropped his head. He followed Adrian to the car and got in without a word.

  * * *

  ADRIAN WEAVED IN and out among the cars creeping south along the narrow coastal freeway. The brothers usually listened to loud house and trance music during road trips, but that day, the radio was off.

  Dorian dealt with the stress by sitting silently, while Adrian spewed out rhetorical questions.

  “How can he think he’ll get away with this?” he asked. “Who does he think he is? Why now?”

  After he’d vented for a while, Adrian’s thoughts turned to a chilling conversation he’d had with his sister Sebhrenah two months earlier. He’d been silent on the topic of their father for years, but he couldn’t bite his tongue any longer. He had to make Sebhrenah see that she could go further in life if she broke away from Marcus’s manipulative clutches.

  “Sebhrenah, what Dad is doing with you guys is wrong,” he told her. “He’s controlling you and not letting you amount to anything. You need to get out of the house.”

  He would always remember her robotic response: “Adrian, I don’t want to be like everyone else out there,” she said. “I am doing this by choice. It is what I really want to do and you need to accept it.”

  She sounded as if she were repeating a speech Marcus had dictated to her; Adrian was frustrated that he couldn’t get through to her. This was the first real conversation he’d ever had with Sebhrenah, who, at twenty-five, was two and a half years his junior. Marcus had forbidden him and his brothers to talk to their sisters and female cousins, fearing they would develop sexual feelings for one another. After Adrian hung up the phone with her that day, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Sebhrenah was on her way to a very bleak place.

  Adrian had left the traffic far behind by now. He looked down at his speedometer and realized he was going a hundred miles an hour, but he didn’t slow down. He desperately wanted some idea of what he was going to find once they arrived in Fresno, so he called Serafino for an update.

  It was hard to hear anything over the commotion at the house, so he hung up and dialed every number in his cell phone until he could find someone to give him some answers. He was finally able to reach Marcus Jr.’s friend Michael, who was standing in the front yard, but even he was able to give Adrian only one- or two-sentence news bites before he’d hang up again.

  “Your dad is barricaded inside and we don’t know who’s in there with him,” Michael said.

  The mini-briefings did little to comfort Adrian and Dorian, especially when the news seemed to be getting worse.

  Finally, after dozens of these calls, Adrian heard what he’d been dreading all along.

  “Your dad just came and surrendered to police, Adrian,” Michael said somberly. “I think it’s over.”

  “Okay, who else is coming out of the house?” Adrian asked. “Where is everyone else? Are the kids following behind Dad?”

  “It’s just him, Adrian. It’s just your dad.”

  “Are you sure they’re not coming out?”

  “I don’t see them.”

  “The kids aren’t coming out, are they?” Adrian cried. Turning toward Dorian, he repeated, “The kids aren’t coming out.”

  Adrian felt his mind slowly close down and his hands and feet grow numb. It took every ounce of emotional strength he possessed not to pass out. He had to talk himself into staying conscious so he wouldn’t lose control of his speeding car.

  DEPUTY CORONERS JOSEPH Tiger and Kelly Wiefel got called to the Wesson house around 6:00—an hour after they’d finished working a ten-hour shift.

  Earlier, police had blocked off half the neighborhood, but as soon as they opened the roads, the area became a swarm of people surrounded by the mess of TV satellite trucks that had arrived earlier.

  Police chaplains were comforting family members, reporters were interviewing neighbors and new relatives as they arrived, and paramedics were treating those overcome by the trauma.

  In the midst of all the hoopla, the Wessons’ dog, a black Chihuahua mix named Betty, ran out the front door and raced down the street. Rosie loved that dog like a child, but her escape was the least of the family’s problems that day.

  ADRIAN AND DORIAN pulled up to their family’s home around 7:30 P.M., two hours after the police had hauled Marcus away.

  Adrian lifted the yellow tape so he could run toward his family; no one tried to stop him. He reached the group of women and wrapped his arms around them. Then, he took inventory of the faces.

  Elizabeth, Rosie, Rosemary. Wait a minute, where’s Kiani? Where’s Sebhrenah? Where’s Lise?

  Adrian prayed they were standing somewhere else. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Kiani in the back of a police car.

  Thank God, she’s alive.

  He ran toward the car to greet her. This time, an officer grabbed his shoulder to restrain him.

  “Who are you?” the cop asked.

  “I’m Adrian Wesson. That’s my sister back there.”

  Kiani stared out the window at her brother, her eyes red and glassy. She looked so lost.

  Adrian searched around for the other girls but had a sinking feeling he wasn’t going to find them. He stopped searching when he heard Ruby and Sofia’s side of the family behind him, saying that, by process of elimination, there must be nine victims.

  That meant Sebhrenah and Lise were dead, too.

  How could Dad do this?

  After that, the night was one long wait. He watched the police load his mother and sisters into two police cars, which he and Dorian followed to the police station. The boys sat outside numbly for more than five hours, hoping the police would finish questioning the women and release them.

  Around 1:00 A.M., the brothers gave up and found a motel.

  THE POLICE WERE finally able to get a search warrant allowing a small team of investigators to take a preliminary walk through the house at 8:30 P.M.

  Forty-five minutes later, several police detectives, two CSI technicians, and four members of the coroner’s office entered the three-bedroom house and walked single file past the three cannons and the half dozen or more Indonesian mahogany coffins that were stacked in the living room and on to the back bedroom. They wondered what the hell these people were doing with so many coffins—twelve in all.

  The air was warm that night—77 degrees inside the house. But it seemed even hotter with all those people crammed into the back bedroom. And the smell was sickening. It was going to be a long, grueling night.

  Tiger and Wiefel were used to processing crime scenes and examining dead bodies. But they’d never seen anything like this. A pile of dead children. Babies.

  The brunt of it didn’t really hit them until they started to pull the bodies off the pile, one at a time, bagging them and moving them into the living room, where they could be examined further.

  Sebhrenah was found facedown on top of the pile with a .22-caliber revolver under her right arm; presumably she’d been the last one to die. She was wearing a black and yellow flowered dress, zippered brown boots, and on her right hand two rings, one of which was a wedding band. A hunting knife lay on the floor nearby.

  At the time, investigators didn’t know the names of any of the victims. They all had black hair, and their faces looked so much alike. So, for the time being, they were identified simply as Jane Doe One or Baby Jane Doe Two, in the order they were pulled off the pile, which was assumed to be the reverse order in which they died.

  As the investigators worked their way down, Lise was right under Sebhrenah, and under her, they discovered the bodies of three babies in diapers—tiny thirteen-month-old Jeva, still wearing a bib labeled “Princess”; eighteen-month-old Sedona; and nineteen-month-old Marshey.

  As they picked up little Sedona, they noticed that her white Onesie had turned a deep red, saturated with not just her blood but that of her brothers and sisters as well.


  Four-year-old Ethan was next, the only one who was shot twice—once in the right eye and once in the right side of his abdomen.

  Then came eight-year-old Illabelle. On the very bottom of the pile—apparently the first ones to be shot—were Aviv and Jonathan, the daughter and son of the women who had initiated the confrontation with Marcus. That made a total of nine victims.

  EXCEPT FOR SEBHRENAH’S son, Marshey, who was shot in the left eye, all the other victims were shot in the right eye or just below it.

  The investigators put the bigger bodies into white bags and wheeled them out to the van, but the babies were too small for the standard-size bags. Instead, the investigators draped them in white sheets and walked them out, cradled in their arms, an image that played repeatedly across the TV news that night.

  Suspecting a cult angle or a bizarre ceremonial ritual, investigators initially wondered if the victims had been drugged, like the thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who had committed suicide by eating applesauce laced with phenobarbital and vodka. But when the toxicology tests came back, the Wesson family members were found to be drug- and alcohol-free. Nothing had dulled their senses during their final terrifying moments.

  Rigor mortis had already started to set in by the time investigators began the examinations. After taking Sebhrenah’s liver temperature, they determined the approximate time of her death was 5:00 P.M.—two and a half hours after the police responded to the initial 911 call. The pathologist would later determine that the seven younger children were killed between 3:00 and 4:00 P.M., some possibly while Marcus was standing at the front door talking to police.

  Marcus was the only one alive who knew what really happened in the back bedroom that afternoon, but his offspring—and everyone else—would speculate about this tragedy for years. Although neighbors and some family members would claim they heard one to three shots fired between 2:30 and 3:30 P.M., Fresno police insisted they never heard a single gunshot.

  Elizabeth lost two of her own daughters, Sebhrenah and Lise, in the massacre, but she carried the heaviest burden of grief and guilt of all the Wesson women. Even though she had given birth to only two of the children, she felt as if she had been a mother to all nine. And she had been unable to stop the massacre.

  Two

  I was frantically typing to meet my noon deadline on March 12, 2004, when I saw that one of the other TV stations had scooped me on a story. They’d learned that the city councilman who had driven his car over a curb on election night had registered a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit. I’d been making calls all morning trying to get those test results.

  A police lieutenant called to apologize a couple of hours after I left him a frustrated message. “Sorry about the miscommunication, Alysia,” he said.

  “You really owe me one,” I countered, playing the guilt card to the hilt. “Give me the scoop about something else to make up for it.”

  “Well, I’m sending a SWAT team over to a house near Roeding Park,” he said. “No one knows about that yet. Not even some of my officers.”

  I looked at the big round clock over the radio booth and perked up. I still had about twenty minutes before my first radio report at 4:00 P.M. “What’s going on?”

  “Sorry, looks like it’s just a domestic. Custody issue or something, but it may turn into more, you never know. Let me get that address. 7-6-1 West Hammond, in case you want to check it out.”

  “A domestic?” I asked, disappointed. I settled back down a bit. I couldn’t sell that to my news director. “Got anything else going on?”

  “Not at the moment,” he said, chuckling. “I promise you’ll be the first to know when something happens.”

  I was doing double-duty at KMPH’s radio and TV stations for a couple of weeks, so I spent most of the day working on stories for six radio spots from 4:00 to 6:30 P.M., then a short one that would air on the TV news at 10:00 P.M.

  The radio and TV stations were separated by a narrow parking lot, but the working environments couldn’t have been more different. Although the radio deadlines came more frequently, the mood was more relaxed. Fewer radio workers were packed into closer quarters, so no one had to raise his voice to be heard. Even the police scanner’s volume was set on low. It was a nice break.

  Or so I thought.

  For the third day in a row, I’d spent the day interviewing people at gas stations about skyrocketing prices at the pump. This time I was asking whether they had changed their driving habits. I was running out of new angles—and patience. What I really wanted was to dump the gas story and chase down something new.

  “So,” I said, turning toward Adam,* my radio boss. “There’s a lot of SWAT action at a house in southwest Fresno. Sounds like a pretty big deal,” I embellished. “The lieutenant thinks it could be something.”

  I asked if we should call over to the TV side to see if they wanted to send someone to the scene—I was supposed to stay in the radio newsroom until 7:00 P.M.—or if I should head over there myself. I’d found the story, so I wanted to cover it, but I knew he would probably tell me to stay put.

  I was right. He had me call TV and let them find out if it was a story worth pursuing. I told the TV assignment editor that the SWAT call hadn’t hit the scanners yet, so we would have a head start on the other news outlets.

  “I’ll send someone right away,” she told me. “We’ll call you back and let you know what it is.”

  I started editing my gas story for my first two radio reports, hoping that I could use the SWAT story for my third hit. I walked across the parking lot to TV—as fast as my high heels would allow—to see if they’d heard anything yet, then I dashed back.

  I made it into the booth just in time to pull the headset over my ears and yank the microphone toward my mouth, hoping it didn’t pick up my panting.

  “Alysia Sofios joins us now with more on the rising prices at the pump and reaction from valley drivers,” the radio anchor said to introduce me, and off I went.

  Shortly after my 5:00 P.M. report, the TV reporter called from the SWAT scene to say that the police chief was about to hold a news conference, and that he would go live afterward. A few minutes later, he called back with a breathless report that went something like this:

  “What apparently began as a domestic dispute in this southwest Fresno neighborhood has turned into a massive crime scene. Officers have discovered the bodies of seven children inside a bedroom in a house on the seven-hundred block of Hammond Avenue. The SWAT team is still here, and Police Chief Jerry Dyer is expected to hold another news conference with more information any minute.”

  Turned out it was something after all.

  Temporarily numb with shock, I quietly exited the booth while the anchor was still on the air and headed for my desk. Before I had a chance to fully process the gravity of what I’d heard, my phone line lit up.

  I answered it on the first ring. “KMPH Newsradio, this is—”

  “Alysia,” my TV news director interrupted. “Get over here, now! We need—”

  Max* hung up before he even finished his sentence, so I figured I’d better hop to it and get the hell over there. A Vietnam veteran and former national news reporter, Max could be pretty intimidating.

  I ran across the parking lot and pulled open the heavy outer door that led into the newsroom. The temperature in there was always kept frigid so that the equipment functioned properly. But on this night, the wall of air that hit me seemed even colder than usual, sending goose bumps down my arms and legs.

  Inside, nearly twenty people were swirling around, picking up phones and slamming them down. Arms were gesticulating wildly. The scanner was blaring. And the two anchors were shouting out orders to editors, reporters, and writers as everyone worked to throw together a series of newsbreaks that would cut into the regularly scheduled programming throughout the evening.

  The square newsroom spanned two stories, with the executive producer’s and the news director’s glass offices ups
tairs and the rest of us downstairs. The two levels were connected by an open staircase covered with black rubber to prevent people from slipping while running up and down on deadline.

  The on-air set was at one end of the room, where dozens of TV monitors sat on desks and hung from the walls and ceiling. The rest of the space was dedicated to edit bays and circular desks for the reporters and writers. Seen from above, the area was shaped like the Olympic logo, only the desks were separated by dividers like the spokes of a wheel. That meant everyone had several phones within reaching distance, a factor that was about to come in handy for me.

  “What angle should I chase?” I yelled over the dull roar to no one in particular. No one responded.

  As I listened to my producer talking with the anchors about the latest details of the story, I heard the words “incest,” “polygamy,” “occult,” “suicide pact,” and “vampires.” I couldn’t believe this crazy story was breaking in my town—and I was going to get to cover it.

  Journalists live to work high-profile stories like these. It’s not that we don’t understand the seriousness of the event or are not sensitive to the victims’ plight. We do and we are. In fact, that’s what makes them such good stories. Everyone’s emotions run high at such times, so we know that viewers will be glued to their TV sets, hungry for more information. But at the same time, we have to remain objective and detached while we gather the most gruesome details. Making dark jokes often helps us keep our sanity. And this story was getting more intriguing by the minute.

  I looked upstairs and saw Max glaring down at me from behind the stacks of videotapes and résumés that cluttered his desk. I could tell he was frustrated that I wasn’t doing anything yet.

  I wished I could be at the scene, but with such a big story, everyone, including me, would get a piece of it. No one had given me a specific assignment; we were expected to wait for direction, which usually came after the editors and anchors finished discussing story strategy among themselves.