Deadly Devotion

by Alysia Sofios

  Despite being a leader in his own home, Marcus was easily influenced by controversial religious leaders like Berg. Often, he would try to emulate these figures by donning robes, carrying a walking stick, or ordering his girls to wear head scarves and long skirts, the boys to dress only in brown. Over the years, he wove these influences into a strange spiritual tapestry, colored by his own interpretations to rationalize corporal punishment, polygamy, and incest— even vampirism.

  In a letter to a friend, he wrote that he used discipline, spanking, and criticism on his children for their betterment, “to create the love they have today.” That meant Marcus beat his children from the time they were infants. If they looked, spoke, or acted the wrong way, he would leave welts and bloody wounds on any of them who cried too much. He demanded perfect behavior during the morning and evening prayer sessions he held daily, testing his children’s devotion and self-control by holding the second session late at night.

  Elizabeth hated when he did this, so she sat near the youngest children in order to nudge them if they dozed off. She also made sure each of them had gone to the bathroom before Marcus began his sermon. They had to hold out as long as possible, because if any of them got up to go before Marcus was finished, he would beat them.

  Marcus preached that Jesus was married—and not just to one woman but to many. Sometimes, he talked about God being a woman. God, he said, was very sexual.

  In the late 1990s, while Elizabeth was reading the work of the gothic novelist Anne Rice, Marcus asked his children to be vampires for the Lord. He likened Jesus to a vampire because He had eternal life and his followers drank his blood. Marcus later gave three of his children vampire names at birth: Sedona Vadra, Marshey St. Christopher, and Jeva St. Vladensvspry, whose first name combined “Jesus” and “vampire.”

  “My children have never been to church . . . but we have built into many understandings,” Marcus wrote in a letter. “All we know of my Father is from my head. The Bible simply conveys principles of the Father, like a map, depicted in the lives of various people.… I, the Christ, walk in this temple called Marcus.”

  Marcus’s religious fervor escalated until he came to see himself as God, saying he would ultimately become thin and fit, wear his hair short and blond, and have blue eyes. Like most wives, Elizabeth learned to live with her husband’s idiosyncrasies, although his were clearly more bizarre than most.

  “Marcus, you’re not crazy, but you’re insane,” she’d tell him. “You’re way out there.”

  Marcus would just look at her and smile.

  AS THE NOMADIC Wesson family moved from place to place, Elizabeth had three more children: Gypsy in 1983 in Fresno, and Serafino and Elizabeth, whom they called Lise, in 1985 and 1986, respectively, in Watsonville.

  During this time, Marcus and Elizabeth would visit with her family on holidays for barbecues at Rose’s house, where some of Elizabeth’s brothers, sisters, and kids still lived. Her brothers never really accepted Marcus after he’d fathered a child with their mother, then run off and married their little sister. They also didn’t like the way he isolated Elizabeth and her kids. The Wesson girls, knowing that Marcus didn’t want them talking to outsiders, and men in particular, would sit near him at these gatherings to show their allegiance. They would be cordial to their uncles but usually limited their conversations to friendly hellos.

  In the fall of 1986, the family began renting a second piece of land deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains for about $150 a month. The two-and-a-half-acre plot, which was about a mile away from their old house, was overgrown with trees and vegetation.

  With winter quickly approaching, a dense, cold fog hung low over the rough terrain, nearly swallowing up their property. Knowing it would only get worse in the coming weeks, Marcus decided they needed to clear the land right away. By then he’d replaced his first used city bus with a powder blue Travelall, an oversize wagon-type vehicle made in the 1960s, with the hauling power of a modern SUV.

  Needing all the free labor they could get, Elizabeth enlisted the help of three nieces, one nephew, and her little brother. Marcus loaded all sixteen of them into the Travelall, which was hitched to a small trailer full of handsaws, sleeping bags, and a chain saw.

  He played oldies on the radio during the long, bumpy ride, while the kids talked quietly among themselves, cramped in the back. Once they arrived at the property, Marcus lined up the children, handed out tools, and began issuing orders.

  “The boys and I will be at the top, chopping down trees,” he said. “The girls will cut the branches off all the trees, drag the brush to the bottom of the mountain, and get rid of it. The trunks need to go near the road, where they will stay for us to use as firewood.”

  The Wesson assembly line started up, while Elizabeth stayed at the base making sandwiches, nursing the children’s cuts, and taking care of Lise and Serafino, who weren’t old enough to walk.

  When darkness descended, the family retired to their tents and sleeping bags, rising at dawn to start clearing brush once again. After two days of intense labor, it was time to head back to Fresno so Elizabeth’s relatives could return to school. Marcus instructed his four oldest sons to stand on the trailer hitch so he could reattach it to the Travelall.

  “Don’t move,” he yelled at the boys, aged four to twelve.

  But the young boys weren’t heavy enough to hold down the hitch, which slowly began to rise. They looked at one another in fear, frantically trying to anchor their small bodies so as to get the hitch to drop. But it was no use. “Dad!” they yelled. “Dad! Dad!”

  Marcus walked out from behind the trailer, where he saw the boys riding several feet in the air. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked angrily. “You’re idiots. You’re all idiots.”

  Marcus shoved the hitch down. “Don’t move this time!” With that, he latched the trailer and drove the family home.

  OVER THE NEXT few months, the Wessons frequently made the four-hour trip from Fresno, where they were staying with Rose and Rosemary, through the windy mountain roads of Santa Cruz to their property. Elizabeth’s nieces and nephews came with them as often as possible. They enjoyed going to the harbor, where they would fish, collect cans, and barbecue hot dogs and hamburgers. By late summer, they had cleared nearly enough land for the house foundation.

  Sofia, Ruby, Brandy, and Rosie especially loved spending time with their uncle Marcus. Once school started again for the three older girls that fall, they were sad they couldn’t go back to the mountains with the rest of the Wesson clan.

  “Please let us go with you,” Sofia, the oldest, begged Elizabeth.

  “I’m sorry, we can’t take you,” Elizabeth apologized. “You have to go to school, mi hija.”

  At the time, Elizabeth had no idea Marcus had already staked his sexual claim on their daughters Kiani and Sebhrenah—let alone Ruby and Sofia—so she honestly felt bad that she couldn’t bring her nieces with them.

  Marcus called it “loving,” telling each girl that the sessions were necessary to prepare her for her future husband. The progressive sessions began when the girls were about eight, just as they had with Elizabeth. At first, he touched them over their clothing, then after a year or so, he advanced to rubbing their bare breasts and private areas. When they were ten or eleven, he taught them how to touch his penis and, a year later, how to give him oral sex. Marcus didn’t like it when the girls referred to him as Dad or Uncle Marcus, so they started calling him Baby, and it stuck.

  Within a year, Elizabeth’s nieces got their wish and joined the Wesson family full-time.

  Rosemary had spent six months in jail on drug-related charges and was still fighting her habit, so she thought it best for Elizabeth and Marcus to raise her four daughters.

  By this time, Marcus had moved on to wedding ceremonies, “marrying” eleven-year-old Ruby and her sisters and cousins when they turned thirteen or fourteen, using the same Bible ceremony as before. Although he made the girls swear not to tell anyone about the
se weddings, he gave each of them a symbolic ring to wear once they became his “wives” and the molestation had progressed to sexual intercourse. The rings made it clear who had joined the ranks, but the girls never spoke to one another about what was happening.

  BECAUSE THE FAMILY always lived in such close quarters, contagious illnesses spread quickly among the children. When one of them acted sick or stayed in bed too long, coughing or blowing his nose, Marcus would let him have it.

  “Get up,” he’d yell, pulling the child upright. “You’re not sick.”

  Elizabeth would run into the room and protest. “But Marcus, he is sick,” she would say. “He needs to rest.”

  “It’s all in his mind. He can’t be making noise like that. He just wants attention.”

  Marcus would beat the child, then say to Elizabeth, “He’ll never do that again. Next time, he’ll control himself.”

  When a stomach bug was circulating through the Wesson home, Marcus would get angry just walking past the bathroom.

  “Who was in here?” he’d yell.

  One of the boys would come forward.

  “That smells unhealthy. You’ve been sneaking food, haven’t you? Get in the room!”

  “The room” was where the kids went to get their punishment. Depending on where the family lived, it was a designated area of the house, woods, or boat. More often than not, the kids didn’t know what they’d done wrong. Another child might have ratted them out, or Marcus would claim that God had told him.

  They were usually punished in groups, told to file into the room and spread out with their backs against the wall like in a police lineup. Then, they’d wait.

  Marcus would leave them there for a while to think about what they’d done before coming in with a beating implement. Sometimes, it was a spoon with holes, which pierced the skin, or a yellow broomstick; he reserved a metal pole for the boys.

  During the beatings, Elizabeth would often stay outside the door and pace. In extreme cases, when Marcus seemed out of control, she would burst in. “Marcus, that’s enough,” she would plead. “Please, Marcus, just stop.”

  When the family lived in the mountains, Marcus would send the naughty children outside to fetch sturdy sticks to be beaten with. The children had to choose carefully, because if the sticks were too small, Marcus would swap them for ones twice the size and beat them twice as hard.

  Marcus would often wave the stick around before giving a lengthy lecture, then, depending on their offense, he would hit the children on the hand or bottom. He’d have them lie facedown on the bed, drop their pants or lift their skirts, then he’d hit them anywhere from seven to twenty-one times—three times a day for the next two to four weeks.

  Serafino, the youngest boy, got the worst of the beatings, so he was always relieved when Marcus left the house on an errand, knowing he would be spared the stick for a couple of hours.

  But even then, Marcus would call the house and ask Rosie or one of the older girls who was misbehaving. As the girl whispered into the phone, the other kids prayed she wasn’t tattling on them. But they found out soon enough. She would hang up, approach the guilty party, and say, “Dad wants you to wait in the room for him.”

  Often, it was Serafino she was addressing. While he lay bare-bottomed on the bed, his stomach would drop as he smelled the exhaust of Marcus’s old car approaching. Even into adulthood, that smell still triggered fear in him.

  Serafino got in trouble for many reasons. One of his worst beatings came after he committed the heinous crime of sneaking a spoonful of peanut butter from the cupboard. Marcus was so angry that he wrenched the thick TV cable from the wall and used it to whip his son for half an hour. Serafino knew better than to try to run away; if he had, the beating would have continued for days. He tolerated the pain by rotating slowly so that the cable struck him on different parts of his body. By the time Marcus had finished, Serafino was covered with welts and bruises.

  Sometimes, Marcus would make the children ask for their thrice-daily beatings—before breakfast, before their afternoon nap, and before bedtime: “May I have my spank now, please?”

  Serafino, who got smacked most every day, didn’t always remind Marcus about his punishment—just to get a day’s break from the pain, which mounted exponentially during a month’s worth of beatings in the same spot. Bruises would develop on his bottom so severe that he could barely sit or walk, yet he’d have to keep asking for another spank. Sleep would help them heal a bit, but eventually he’d get to the point where he just couldn’t take any more, regardless of the consequences.

  When Marcus got so busy writing his book that he didn’t notice Serafino had been hiding in the corner until the day’s end without reminding him, he would add ten more days to the punishment, then another ten days two weeks later when Serafino failed to remind him once again.

  AS A RESULT, the children tried not to anger their father at all, often keeping their illnesses to themselves.

  Eight-year-old Gypsy was only halfway through her father’s morning sermon when she felt the need to cough. Her throat had been sore for a few days, but she didn’t dare complain. She’d already been holding in the cough for two hours, and the urge was growing increasingly difficult to control.

  Her chest began to pulse, and she pursed her lips tightly to keep the cough from erupting. Her face turned red, and tears streamed down her sucked-in cheeks, until finally, the intense feeling passed. She took a long, deep breath. If only she could fight this off for two more hours, she knew she’d be safe.

  Gypsy was strong, and she made it through. Sebhrenah wasn’t as good at hiding her pain.

  When she was sixteen, Sebhrenah felt a sharp throbbing in her side. Knowing she wasn’t allowed to alter her routine, she tried to get through the day, but her body wouldn’t let her. She was pale, sweaty, and doubled over in pain as she overheard her parents arguing in the next room.

  “Marcus, there’s something wrong with her. She needs to see a doctor.”

  “She’s fine, Elizabeth. She’ll get better.”

  “She is not fine.”

  “It’s nothing serious. Stop worrying.”

  Elizabeth kept at him for two days. On the third day of excruciating pain, Sebhrenah was in even worse shape.

  “Come look at her, Marcus,” Elizabeth said. “She needs help.”

  Marcus reluctantly checked on her. “Fine. Go ahead and take her to the hospital.”

  Elizabeth gathered Sebhrenah’s things and rushed her daughter to the emergency room. They arrived just in time. The doctor said Sebhrenah’s appendix was moments away from rupturing; he wondered how she’d tolerated the pain for so long.

  Elizabeth stayed by her daughter’s side during the surgery. Marcus stayed home.

  ALTHOUGH HE WAS absent when his children’s health was in jeopardy, Marcus was a constant force in what he considered their character development—which any outsider would have described as character squashing.

  Marcus didn’t like it when his children expressed themselves, reprimanding them when they were loud or assertive. They soon learned that their only alternative was to be submissive.

  Perhaps due in part to his autism, Dorian always felt a little different from his brothers and sisters, a characteristic Marcus never appreciated. Dorian was the most artistic of the children, and he also found it more difficult than his siblings to repress his emotions.

  When he was eight, he decided to draw his father a picture. What could the harm be in that? Dorian sketched the Santa Cruz Mountains, added in some buildings, then enthusiastically showed it to Marcus.

  “Here, Dad,” he said.

  In this case, Dorian made two mistakes—expressing himself creatively and drawing on a Saturday, the Wessons’ holy day. No fun allowed.

  “Take off your clothes,” Marcus said crossly.

  Dorian knew he was in trouble, so he stripped naked.

  “Now go take a shower, and don’t dry off,” his father ordered.

  The
water only intensified the sting as Dorian stood there wet, naked, and humiliated while his father struck him twenty times with a switch, from his back to his ankles.

  Dorian never let his father see him drawing on a Saturday again. And although his drawings were quite good, he lacked the self-confidence to develop his artistic talents any further.

  Twelve

  The thick fog that hugged Fresno each fall crept in every night like a vampire and vanished by sunrise. I hadn’t noticed it the year before, but with my new hours, it became a nightly driving hazard during my forty-five-minute commute to Visalia.

  I drove one of the station’s marketing vehicles, a shiny white van that could hold fifteen passengers, was painted with our brightly colored logos, and put me at eye level with the truck drivers. The murky haze obstructed my view and, paired with the steady stream of air the heater blew into my face, almost lulled me to sleep. To get my adrenaline flowing, I had to pinch the top of my thigh periodically, creating an instant jolt and an ugly bruise that never got more than a weekend to heal. I made sure it was high enough to hide above the hem of my skirt, so it wasn’t visible on TV each morning.

  The grueling days of covering the Wesson case were a distant memory by now. I was enjoying the lighter stories that went along with the morning show, such as interviews with high school band members, the casts of touring musicals, and the senior citizen who won a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot.

  Another upside of the new shift was that it allowed me to spend more time with Elizabeth, Kiani, and Rosie. After I’d arrive home at noon, we’d go get lunch, then bring it back to my apartment, where we’d sit, eat, and talk. I tried but rarely made it to bed by 6:00 P.M., though I always got up at 11:30 to watch Seinfeld with the girls. Kiani would hand me my special Frank Sinatra mug full of coffee with milk and one sugar, and she would drink a cup or two with me. Around 12:30 A.M., I would get ready for work while the three of them got ready for bed.