Deadly Devotion

by Alysia Sofios

  In the dark and cramped bus, the large family whispered and kept their movements to a minimum so as not to alarm the two Doberman pinschers that roamed inside the locked gate at night.

  Marcus didn’t like them to use the portable toilet in the bus, so during the day, the kids held out until their aching bladders couldn’t take it anymore; then they’d sneak outside and dig a hole in the rocky gravel to relieve themselves. At night, the dogs left them no choice but to use the toilet.

  They had plenty of food on the bus, including macaroni and cheese, rice, beans, honey, evaporated milk, and oatmeal, but because Elizabeth had no way to cook, they quickly went through their supply of Spam and pound cake. And, as they had been doing for years, they ate the yogurt and cottage cheese that a nearby dairy store had tossed out after the expiration date.

  Desperate for more help, Elizabeth called Linda again. Linda, who had always liked Marcus, agreed to take in what she’d assumed was his happy, healthy family. However, she couldn’t let them come until her houseguests left in two weeks, so she suggested that the Wessons sleep in an abandoned video store in town in the interim.

  A friend of Linda’s had a key for the vacant store, and she snuck them in late one night so they could set up camp with their sleeping bags. Keeping a lookout for the landlord, the kids took turns peering out a small slit between the sheets of newspaper that covered the store windows. Whenever they saw people outside, they ducked behind the rows of empty shelves and kept silent.

  As bad as things had gotten for Elizabeth, not all of her children felt the same. This was the first time that Gypsy had been happy. While the other girls sobbed on her shoulder about how scared they were and how much they missed Marcus, Gypsy searched for a way to help conjure up tears. She found one without too much trouble: she just had to think of the day her father would come home from jail.

  THE COUNTY LOCKUP in Watsonville allowed family members to visit inmates once a week, but only on the weekends. So, leaving Sofia and Dorian in charge, Elizabeth went to visit Marcus that first Sunday. Hoping to avoid being pulled over, she drove the ten-minute route from the video store very slowly.

  She’d never been away from Marcus for this long, so she wanted his guidance on how to provide the family with food and shelter. He, on the other hand, thought it was more important to talk about sex.

  Marcus said he constantly had erections, so the female guards flocked to his cell every morning to watch him “pitch a tent.” He also said he refused to eat any jail-prepared food because he was sure they’d dosed it with saltpeter—potassium nitrate—to quell the men’s libidos. He said he would show them that he was wise to their scheme by not eating.

  Elizabeth left more confused and frustrated than ever. Marcus was no help at all. He didn’t even seem to care about what his family was going through, so she had to figure out what to do on her own. But, at this point, she had absolutely no clue.

  MUCH HAPPIER TIMES came when Linda let them move into her cute little red house with white shutters, which was surrounded by mature redwood trees and a picturesque creek that flowed through the backyard. Elizabeth brought a couple of weeks’ worth of food at a time from the motor home and used it to feed the kids four times a day—more often than ever before. She also let them roam outside, where the children climbed trees, played tag, and jumped into the creek. For the first time, the boys and girls could frolic together in nature with no rules and no fear. It felt like heaven.

  They weren’t completely carefree, though. As soon as Marcus got access to a pay phone, he started calling Linda’s house every night to make sure the children weren’t misbehaving, ultimately racking up five hundred dollars in collect calls that Elizabeth’s mother and sister had to pay for.

  As the kids passed the phone around, Gypsy nervously watched their expressions change from smiles to frowns within moments. Then it was her turn.

  “Hi,” she said with feigned enthusiasm.

  “Do you miss me, Gypsy?” Marcus said with self-pity.

  “Yes. I can’t wait for you to come home,” she lied.

  Even though no one had told her why he was in jail, Gypsy prayed every day that whoever had put him there would hold him as long as possible.

  As the months of Marcus’s sentence went on, the Wessons’ lives continued to improve. Now that the kids were eating more, they had gained weight and were healthy, especially after being free from Marcus’s beatings for so long.

  Elizabeth was prospering, too. When an acquaintance offered to help her get a driver’s license, Elizabeth cautiously accepted her offer. On Elizabeth’s thirty-first birthday, she filled out the paperwork, took the tests, and proudly left the DMV with her license in hand.

  Everything was moving in the right direction until September, when Marcus called Elizabeth. The jail was releasing him, so he told her to pick him up in three days, just after midnight. She had mixed emotions about the news. She was somewhat relieved that he would take over the decision making, but she dreaded the inevitable interrogations about the family’s activities while he’d been away.

  ELIZABETH PULLED INTO the jail parking lot as instructed, leaving the motor running while she listened to oldies on the radio. About ten other cars were parked in the spaces next to her, their headlights shining on the gate where the inmates would emerge from the tall metal fence.

  Elizabeth had decided she was eager to see Marcus again. When the first man came out, she leaned into the windshield, hoping it was him, but she soon realized the man was too light-skinned. Three more men came out before Elizabeth finally turned off the engine.

  Forty-five minutes later, a large man carrying a backpack walked briskly toward her, repeatedly looking over his shoulder, then broke into a run as soon as he was through the gate. Elizabeth recognized Marcus, and was pulling up to meet him when she heard him yelling as he ran to the car.

  “Don’t stop, keep driving,” he said.

  Elizabeth kept the vehicle rolling, watching his face for approval.

  “Yes, just keep going,” Marcus said, panting, as he caught up to the back door on the passenger side, which he opened, then dived onto the floor.

  “What are you doing, Marcus?” Elizabeth said, frightened as she glanced back at her husband.

  “Don’t look back here. Just drive,” he ordered, clearly in a high state of paranoia. “I don’t want them knowing I’m in the car with you. They’re going to follow us tonight, so we can’t go back to the kids. I don’t want them to know where we’re staying.”

  Five minutes later, Elizabeth had reached downtown Watsonville, and Marcus sat up. “Go to a hotel,” he said. “We’ll need to stay there tonight, so they won’t find us.”

  Elizabeth’s sister had sent her some money to help with the kids, so she spent thirty dollars of it on a room.

  The next morning, Marcus reunited with his children at Linda’s house. After a round of hugs and kisses with the thirteen boys and girls, he backed away.

  “I know you all have been breaking the rules while I was gone,” he said. “I am going to have a talk with each of you to find out what’s been going on.”

  As part of his probation, Marcus was ordered to search for a job and to pay off the outstanding harbor bills for the Happy Bottom. However, he complied with neither order, choosing rather to make up for lost time in disciplining his children.

  Linda was gone for the day, so he used her bedroom to conduct his questioning. Beginning with the youngest kids, he grilled them about their thoughts and actions during his absence. He also demanded an accounting of every sibling’s disobedience. He soon learned that the older girls had been talking to the boys, and that some name-calling had been going on.

  Armed with this knowledge, he began to carry out weeks of systematic beatings on all the children. It was hard to believe, but his stint in jail had made him even more abusive— and perhaps even more resistant to government authority.

  Gypsy didn’t have to make herself cry anymore. The tears came far
too easily.

  MARCUS WAS MORE paranoid than ever. He reported seeing suspicious vehicles in the rearview mirror. He tried to lose the tails by taking roundabout routes to their destinations, never using his blinkers and taking sudden, sharp turns that made the tires squeal.

  One afternoon, he was convinced he heard a helicopter overhead and panicked. As in a scene out of an action movie, Marcus believed that the government was searching for him from above. He drove erratically until he found a big tree at the side of the road and parked the Travelall underneath it. “They won’t see us here,” he told the family.

  After hiding there for three hours, Marcus patted himself on the back for evading the government once again. But as soon as they got back to their property, he sent his children out to do a full security sweep.

  “Look for bugs and wiretaps,” he whispered, his hand cupped over his mouth. “I know they’ve planted them here.”

  “Why are you talking like that?” one of the children asked.

  “Sssh. We are being watched,” Marcus replied softly. “They are listening to us.”

  That night, he said he spotted shadowy figures lurking. When he went to confront them, however, they were gone. “They must have heard me coming,” Marcus said. “But I found some cigarette butts out there where they were standing, spying on us.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, Marcus decided they needed to move in with Elizabeth’s sister Rosemary in Fresno, so he packed up their supplies and drove everyone to the storage unit, where he loaded half the kids into the motor home and the other half into the Travelall. Three hours later, the Wesson clan arrived at Rosemary’s duplex.

  Each unit had one bedroom and one bathroom. Rosemary and the girls slept upstairs; the boys, Elizabeth, and Marcus slept downstairs, where he also conducted Bible studies, beatings, and weekly sit-downs with the girls.

  Now that the county had cut off the family’s welfare benefits, Marcus sent Dorian and Adrian out to work fulltime jobs they found through one of Elizabeth’s relatives— cleaning houses, apartments, and businesses.

  Marcus had all eight girls working, too. He bought them strands of beads, bundles of string, and boxes of clasps, which the girls spent hours each day crafting into chokers, necklaces, bracelets, and anklets. Before long, each of them was churning out several pieces daily and selling them to friends and classmates of Elizabeth’s brothers and nephews for two to ten dollars each.

  * * *

  OVER THE NEXT four years, the family lived at the duplex, occasionally driving to the Santa Cruz property for a week or two during the summer. Being in a more densely populated area like Fresno put the Wessons’ illegal lifestyle in jeopardy, especially when the police started coming by the house.

  The first time was during their morning Bible study. Three officers, looking for one of Elizabeth’s brothers, knocked on the front door. When no one responded, they knocked again.

  “Police,” one of the officers yelled. “Open up.”

  Marcus had repeatedly said that the police and the government didn’t understand the way they lived and would try to break up their family someday, so the kids sprang up and darted into the back room, piled into the closet, and closed the door. Dorian and Adrian held the door to the room shut while Marcus let the three policemen come inside.

  “May I help you, Officers?” he asked.

  The police asked whether Elizabeth’s brother was around, and Marcus informed them that he was not.

  “What was all that running going on when we were knocking on the door?”

  “Nothing,” Marcus answered.

  “Can we take a look around?”

  “Sure.”

  The officers went up to the barricaded back door and demanded entry. “Open up. This is the police.”

  Adrian and Dorian reluctantly twisted the doorknob. The uniformed men pushed their way through and walked to the closet, where they saw the children hiding inside.

  “Come out here, it’s okay,” they said.

  The frightened children filed out and stood before the officers.

  “What is going on here?” one officer asked. “Why were you running from us?”

  Gypsy wanted so much to tell them the truth. She wanted to scream and cry and grab on to one of them, begging them to rescue her from Marcus. But she couldn’t bring herself to say a word. All the kids were silent, so the officers ushered them into the living room to join their parents.

  “Why are these kids so afraid of us?” one of them asked Marcus.

  “This is a bad neighborhood,” Marcus explained. “We hear gunshots a lot, so we make them lie on the floor. They didn’t know what was happening.”

  “But we’re the police. We’re here to protect people. Why don’t they know that?”

  “They were just confused, Officer.”

  “Well, why aren’t they in school?”

  “We’re on vacation, visiting family,” Marcus lied. “We live in Santa Cruz, and the kids are enrolled in school there.”

  “But it’s not vacation time. I think we’re going to need to investigate a little further.”

  The officers looked around. In the bedroom, they found Marcus’s gun inside the familiar brown and tan leather bag. Everyone in the house knew Marcus kept a .22-caliber Ruger in that bag, because he’d take it out and polish it from time to time.

  “Do you have a permit for this?” an officer asked.

  Marcus said he did, but the officers were still suspicious enough to call dispatch. “I think we’re going to need CPS out here,” one of them said. “We’ll need two vans. There are a lot of children.”

  Gypsy was hoping she would be rescued after all, but Marcus confidently talked his way out of the situation. He promised to return his family to Santa Cruz that day, so the officers canceled the CPS request and walked out the door.

  A FEW MONTHS later, the police came back, searching for another of Elizabeth’s relatives. This time, Lise broke down, terrified. “Please don’t take me away,” she said between sobs. “I don’t want to go away.”

  The officers were alarmed. “What made her think the police would want to take her from her family?” they asked Marcus.

  Again, he told them that the kids were used to living in dangerous neighborhoods and that Lise was just confused. The officers didn’t push any further, and left.

  AFTER A HANDFUL of similar run-ins with the law, Marcus got nervous and, as a result, his rules grew more strict and his demands more outrageous.

  For one, he instituted the “twenty-minute rule.” In case the government came after the family, he said, the kids should be prepared to pack their belongings and leave within twenty minutes. That meant the children’s clothing and personal possessions had to remain in bags; there wouldn’t be time to retrieve their things from dressers.

  Marcus began dropping hints during Bible study about what they should do if CPS stepped in. He warned that foster parents would separate and mistreat the family by feeding the kids greasy McDonald’s food and sending them to public schools. Some of the kids thought that sounded pretty good, but they never dared say so. If this ever happened, Marcus decreed that their souls would be lost and their spirits contaminated by the outside world.

  “Do not ever, under any circumstance, let the government separate you,” he cautioned. “It will corrupt you. It is better to go to the Lord than to be apart from your family.”

  Over the years, he issued more specific—and brutal— instructions. Although it took on various forms, the suicide pact typically involved one of the older kids shooting the youngest children, then himself or herself. Initially, Marcus said he would shoot the children, then himself, but he later changed his mind. “I may not even be around when the authorities show up, so I’ll need to train some soldiers to carry out the mission,” he said. “Even if I am around, I will be too weak to do it, because it will hurt me too much. So, even if I tell my soldiers to back off, they need to be strong enough to follow through for me.”

  He didn�
��t tell them exactly how to go about it at first; he simply described definitive ways to kill a person.

  “Shooting someone in the chest or the head doesn’t guarantee they will die,” Marcus said. “But if you shoot them in the eye, it is a direct line to the brain and works every time.”

  To determine which children he would train as his soldiers, he held private meetings with a few of the girls, including Rosie.

  If the police interrupted the plan before everyone had died, he said, all the children knew what to do: kill themselves at the first opportunity. Even if they were in a police cruiser, they should jump out of the moving vehicle. “If the door won’t open, break a window. Just do whatever it takes to join the others as quickly as possible,” Marcus instructed. “It is better to die than to be contaminated.”

  NOW THAT HE had established the suicide pact, Marcus decided he wanted to broaden his “new life” plan to make more children for the Lord. Only this time, it was directed at his daughters and nieces rather than Elizabeth.

  One night in 1994, Marcus called a very important meeting with the girls. He always waited until Elizabeth was visiting her mother or sister to conduct these gatherings.

  Marcus sat on the queen-size bed, his legs stretched out in front of him and his back against the wall; Ruby, Sofia, Brandy, Rosie, Kiani, and Sebhrenah sat in a semicircle around him. Gypsy and Lise were too young to be included, but he wanted them in the room, so they sat on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  As was typical for his weekly rendezvous with the girls, Marcus turned off all the lights. The room was so dimly lit, the only thing the girls could see was the occasional flash of his white teeth.

  “The world is getting bad,” he said. “God is going to be here in a couple of years, and it’s all going to end soon.”

  He told the girls that God wanted them to be fruitful and multiply, so they could bring as many children as possible to heaven when the world ended.