“No.”
As the grilling continued, Elizabeth stopped talking altogether. She was crying and thirsty again, and she wanted to go home.
“You’re just going to hide everything, huh?” Reese barked at her. “You’re just going to cover it up and make it go away, is that what you want to do? Or do you want to fix it, so you can move on? Elizabeth, talk to me. It’s not going to do you any good to hide it. You see, we already know all that stuff.”
Elizabeth sat quietly, sniffling, as Reese went on.
“And all it does is make you look bad,” he said. “Do you condone that, is that okay with you?”
Sensing that he wasn’t getting anywhere, the detective got up and left the room. A few minutes later, his female counterpart came in and took over.
Ochoa, a short, muscular woman in her mid-forties, her graying dark hair styled in a boyish cut, spoke to Elizabeth in a quiet, gentle voice.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ochoa said comfortingly. “It’s going to be okay.”
If only she were right, Elizabeth thought.
“You know why this happened,” Ochoa said. “And it’s not your fault. You keep wanting to blame yourself, deep down. Do you think you could have prevented these deaths?”
“Probably, if I was there,” Elizabeth said.
“Well, you were. He had Elizabeth [Lise] in his hands.”
Elizabeth started crying again, remembering the sorrow she saw in her daughter’s eyes before Elizabeth ran from the house.
“And you survived.”
“I shouldn’t have run.” Elizabeth couldn’t believe that her babies were dead. “It can’t be real,” she said, still crying.
“Well, I’m here to tell you it’s real. ’Cause I saw those bodies and I … I can’t get it out of my head. You’re trying to get it out of your head, and I understand that. But I saw those dead bodies, and it was the worst thing I ever saw. And telling those parents, Ruby and Sofia, that their children are dead. And me telling you that your two daughters are dead. No, it’s real. Elizabeth, it’s very real.”
Elizabeth could barely talk, she was crying so hard. “I got to see them, I got to hold them, I want to hold them.”
“There’s no more holding them,” Ochoa said. “They’re gone.”
THE REST OF the night was a blur for Elizabeth. By the time the detectives let her go, it was 7:30 in the morning.
Dorian and Adrian came to the station to pick up what was left of their family and took them back to the Econo Lodge. Cramped and musty, their room had a king-size bed with a burgundy and blue bedspread, a long dresser, and not much else. No one could figure out how to turn on all the lights, so it was dark, too.
Although there were eight of them in that room, it felt empty without the little ones.
“You should get some sleep, Mom,” Adrian said. “I love you.”
Elizabeth nodded. Her head was throbbing. She couldn’t see straight. She couldn’t think straight. She felt dizzy and knew she needed to lie down for a while, so she let Adrian help her onto the bed, where Rosemary, Rosie, and Kiani joined her. They were used to close quarters, but on that March morning, they couldn’t quiet their minds enough to fall asleep.
THE NEXT MORNING, a man from the coroner’s office called Elizabeth on her cell phone and told her that a local funeral home had offered to donate services for her children. She felt the bottom of her stomach drop as his words struck her. She was going to her children’s funerals. Parents weren’t supposed to bury their children.
She copied down the funeral home’s name and number, then asked when she could come down to the morgue to see her children.
The man told her to call the mortuary to make the arrangements, then to call back and set up a time to view the bodies.
When she called the coroner’s office back an hour later, the woman who answered the phone was short of helpful. In fact, she was downright rude.
“You’ll need several forms of identification, and you need all of the children’s birth certificates,” she said curtly.
“But I don’t have any of that,” Elizabeth said. “The police took everything I had, even my purse. I can’t get any of my documents back yet.”
“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do for you, then.”
Elizabeth was so frustrated and angry, the tears began streaming down her face before she could even hang up the phone. Why was everyone being so mean to her? She’d just lost her family, yet they were treating her like she was to blame. It wasn’t fair.
Ultimately, Detective Reese took one of Elizabeth’s nephews to the morgue to identify the bodies. Elizabeth didn’t see them until the funeral, lying in their coffins.
STILL TRYING TO decide who was to blame for the murders, Reese came to the motel to collect the keys to the family’s bus and house. Gypsy, who was closer to her brother Almae than to any of her remaining siblings, had been living with his girlfriend, Janet,* for the past few months. The only one of Elizabeth’s daughters police had yet to question, Gypsy happened to be at the motel, visiting, when Reese arrived that day.
“My son has the keys with him,” Elizabeth told him. “Well, we need them right now or else we’ll break down your door,” he said, straight-faced.
Elizabeth grew angry again, but she called Adrian and asked him to bring her the keys.
Reese looked at Gypsy as if he were noticing her for the first time, his eyes widening and the corners of his mouth twitching. He looked almost happy for once.
“I’m going to need to speak with you,” he said. “I’d like to bring you into the station and talk to you there.”
Gypsy wished she’d hidden in the bathroom when she heard him knock on the door. She didn’t want to talk about her father. She hated him and wanted to forget everything he’d done to her. But when she looked over at her mother, Elizabeth was nodding in approval.
“I guess that will be okay,” Gypsy said hesitantly.
“How about tomorrow?” Reese asked.
“That’s fine.”
REESE AND OCHOA not only interviewed Gypsy but also insisted on doing a second round of questioning with Elizabeth, Kiani, and Rosie a week later. This round lasted a total of six hours and was much more grueling than the first. The investigation into the Wesson family had progressed, and not even Ochoa was nice this time.
Elizabeth was growing increasingly defensive about the life she and her husband had led and the way he had raised their family. Marcus had always told them that the world was cruel and that no one would treat them as nicely as they would treat one another. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, his words were proving to be prophetic.
“You were in the room when it happened, weren’t you?” Reese said accusingly to Elizabeth, referring to the murders.
“No.”
“People saw you go in the back room. What did you see?”
“Eyes. I just see Lise’s eyes.”
“And you saw your children lying there, didn’t you?”
“No. I didn’t see them.”
“You saw them.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Reese had a crime scene photo on the table, which he said depicted the bloody stack of her dead children. He threatened to show it to her to jog her memory.
Elizabeth was getting sick of his threats and provocation. “Fine,” she snapped. “Show me.”
But for some reason, Reese didn’t follow through.
Elizabeth shut down nonetheless. “I want to go home,” she said wearily. “I’m tired. I just want to go home.”
The problem was, she didn’t have a home to go to. She and the girls had moved from the Econo Lodge to the cheaper Super 8 on Motel Row, a strip of low-budget motels where prostitutes worked the corners and police had made numerous drug arrests.
The boys had scraped together enough money for the family to stay there a week, but they didn’t know where they were going to go after that. Moving from place to place was nothing new for the Wesson family; they’d
always found a way to manage in the past. Only this time, Marcus wasn’t there to take care of things.
As if everything else wasn’t bad enough, the police wouldn’t leave them alone. First they wanted Elizabeth, Kiani, and Rosie to come in for DNA tests. The women didn’t understand why that was necessary, but they grudgingly let the detectives swab the insides of their cheeks. A couple of days later, Reese called with another request. This time, he wanted blood samples from the girls, threatening to arrest them if they didn’t comply.
The girls already felt violated and now the police wanted their blood?
“Do what you have to do,” Elizabeth said. “Go ahead and arrest us. We don’t care anymore.”
WHEN REESE SHOWED up at a relative’s house a couple of weeks later, Elizabeth thought he’d come for the blood. The detective tried to hand her an envelope, but Elizabeth wasn’t going to take anything more from this man.
“I don’t want that,” she said.
“You have to take it,” he replied.
Reese threatened again to arrest her, so she took the envelope. The detective handed one to each of the girls as well. After opening them, they were surprised to see that they’d been subpoenaed by the district attorney’s office to testify against Marcus. Against Marcus? As his staunch supporters, they’d thought they would be testifying for the defense, not helping the prosecutor send their husband and father to prison. They also didn’t know that spousal privilege didn’t apply to felony crimes against a couple’s children.
The women thought Marcus was being unfairly targeted. He’d trained them to defend him to the death, and that was what they intended to do. They didn’t want to help the police, especially when they felt Detective Reese had been so insensitive to them through all of this.
Then, to make matters worse, Elizabeth looked closer at the name on her subpoena. Someone had typed in “Elizabeth Breani Kina Wesson”—the name of her dead daughter.
It felt like a cruel taunt.
THE DIVIDED WESSON family wanted separate ceremonies at separate funeral homes for their loved ones. So Ruby and Sofia organized a funeral for Jonathan and Aviv, while Elizabeth handled arrangements for the seven other children. Both funerals were on March 24, but the two factions did not attend each other’s services.
A few days beforehand, Elizabeth went to buy new clothes for the children. She still hadn’t seen their bodies, but she had decided on an open-casket ceremony nonetheless. The women decided to do their shopping at Ross, a discount department store that offered a change from their usual practice of buying used clothes at thrift stores or sewing their own.
Elizabeth, Kiani, Rosie, and Gypsy wept and hugged as they made their way up and down the aisles, searching for just the right outfits. They started in the baby section and slowly worked their way up to the adult sizes.
Kiani chose dresses for her two daughters, Illabelle and Jeva; Rosie found a dress for her toddler daughter, Sedona, and a shirt and tie for her son, Ethan. Elizabeth was too emotional to make decisions for any of the children. She couldn’t escape the image of Lise’s tearful eyes in that bedroom.
“Gypsy, baby, can you pick Lise’s dress for me?” Elizabeth choked out. “She would have wanted it this way.”
Lise had been Gypsy’s best friend in the house, and Gypsy knew her mother was right—Lise would have wanted Gypsy to pick out her dress. She searched through the endless racks until she spotted a calf-length blue number with a white floral print.
“I think she would love this one,” Gypsy said, holding it up for the others to see. Blue had been Lise’s favorite color and, well, the dress just looked like her.
It had been eight months since she’d run away, and during that time Gypsy had developed a clothing bug. She’d always dreamed that someday she and Lise could go on a carefree day of shopping. And now here she was, picking out a dress for Lise’s funeral.
The sorrow was too much for her to take. Gypsy’s knees gave way, and she collapsed on the cold linoleum floor, still clutching the dress. She broke into a wail, her body shaking as she sobbed. Her family rushed to console her.
“I shouldn’t have left Lise behind,” Gypsy said. “I feel so guilty.”
“It’s not your fault,” they said. “It’s not your fault.”
After the crying subsided, Gypsy sat on the floor with her hands over her eyes, taking deep breaths until she could compose herself enough to stand up. She had to be strong; she needed to pick out a skirt for herself, too. She’d thrown all of hers away. Marcus had never let them wear pants, so that was all she wore these days.
But as much as she wanted to defy her father, Gypsy would wear a skirt to her sister’s funeral. She knew Lise would have wanted that, too.
Four
Saturday was my day off and I tried to sleep in, but I kept jumping up with the startling feeling that I was late for something. The biggest story of my life was playing out a few miles away, and I couldn’t stop replaying the image of the coroner’s investigators carrying the Wesson children out of the house.
How could their father have done this?
Why didn’t the children scream?
I grabbed my cell phone from the floor next to my bed and saw that I had nine messages, far more than usual. I’d turned off my ringer when I got home so no one would wake me up. One of the messages was from the sports guy at my last TV station, in Lansing, Michigan, who was known for his sarcastic humor.
“Alysia, what kind of scary town did you move to? Just making sure you’re still alive. If you are, call me back. If not, I call dibs on your CD collection.”
The rest were pretty similar—friends and family nationwide who had seen the Wesson story and wanted to know if I had been at the scene. My reporter friends who were stuck in smaller markets peppered their messages with jealous comments about the magnitude of the story I was getting to cover.
“I can’t believe you move and this happens right away,” one said.
“You better get the exclusive on this one, Alysia. Do it for the little people,” another one said, laughing.
Fresno, three hours southeast of San Francisco and three and a half hours north of Los Angeles, had been my home for the past five months. I’d always wanted to live in California, but I hadn’t always wanted to be a TV reporter. While I was studying journalism at Michigan State University, my professors said newspapers were dying and there was no money in radio, so I chose to go into television. It didn’t take long before I knew I’d made the right choice. I loved it.
I dug into my career with fervor, toiling long hours and putting my job before everything else—family, boyfriends, even the chance for a vacation. I spent three years at the Fox affiliate in Lansing, then jumped to the station in Fresno, a bigger market, where I’d been since October 2003.
Getting the big story often involved working on my days off, even if I didn’t get paid for them, and I knew this was going to be one of those stories. So I jumped into the shower to get ready for my “day off” at the Wesson crime scene.
THE ONLY TIME I’d taken the Olive Avenue exit on Highway 99 was for a trip to the Chaffee Zoo shortly after I’d moved to town. The Wessons’ house, less than a mile from the zoo, was surrounded by a dozen live satellite trucks. I couldn’t park anywhere near the house because of all the media and spectators, so I promised myself to bring a marked news van next time for better access.
Families were lined up as if it were a haunted house on Halloween, peering in through the mail slot to see the coffins stacked in the living room, and taking photos of the bloodstained carpet through the cracked windows. After sufficient titillation, they ran away squealing. I couldn’t believe that the yellow police tape was down already.
I walked over to a group of reporters gathered near a makeshift memorial that was growing on the sidewalk.
“I didn’t know you were working this weekend, Alysia,” said one of the TV reporters who had been at the party the night before.
“I’m not,” I sai
d, laughing.
“Me neither,” he responded with a wink. “Couldn’t stay away, huh?”
The memorial must have had more than a hundred mementos already—smiling teddy bears; yellow daisies, red roses, and pink carnations; homemade cards with handwritten poems, held in place with rocks; and nine prayer candles, their flames quivering in the wind. A constant flow of community members moved like a conveyor belt down the sidewalk, stopping every few inches to read the heartfelt messages.
My phone rang as I was reading one of the poems.
“What’s all that noise?” Max asked. “Where are you?” Worried he would make me stick around and work through the night, I ran out to the nearest clearing so he wouldn’t hear the crowd noise anymore and asked him what he needed.
“We need you to come in tomorrow to cover the Wesson story,” he said. “I’d like an extra reporter on the scene.”
I panned across the crowd and nodded. “I’ll be here—I mean, there—tomorrow.”
I’m pretty sure he already knew where I was, but that confirmed it.
“Very good,” he said.
Realizing I’d have to spend the entire day at the creepy house on Sunday, I got back into my car and took one last look before I drove home.
I WOKE UP at 7:30 on Sunday, way before my alarm was set to go off. Most people don’t need an alarm to wake up at 10:00 A.M., but I never went to sleep before three or four in the morning. Since I was already awake, I decided to go to work early.
This time, I drove a marked news vehicle and was able to pull right up to the action. The crowd was much larger than the day before, but far more subdued now that the police tape was back up and blocking off a large perimeter around the house. Apparently, photos of the scene had been posted on the Internet and, after realizing that the hundreds of people stomping around the area could put their homicide investigation in jeopardy, the police had strung the tape up again.
Hundreds of onlookers were just staring at the house, almost as if waiting for a bloody Marcus Wesson to walk out all over again. I understood why. Thinking about what must have happened inside was mesmerizing.
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