They hid in their room the rest of the day. My dad went out and got us dinner, then picked up our plates when we were done eating. I could see it made the girls uncomfortable, as if they felt they should be cleaning up. The following day, he brought some Chinese food for lunch. This time, the girls jumped up and tried to serve him.
“Go ahead and sit down,” he said. “I can get it for you.”
They looked at each other with shocked expressions. I glanced up at my dad and saw the antithesis of Marcus Wesson. Physically, he was tall, thin, and tanned, with neatly trimmed gray hair, a pointed Greek nose, and a large, bright smile that never left his face for more than a few seconds. Emotionally, he was optimistic, gentle, and caring. I knew his kindness was putting Marcus’s paternal behavior in a whole new light for the girls.
“Your dad is so nice, I can’t believe it,” Kiani said.
Her father had never even let her speak to men outside the family. She had never seen another father-daughter interaction so closely before, and I sensed that watching my dad treat me so differently—and with so much respect—was difficult for her.
A few days later, Kiani decided to move into Adrian’s apartment in Santa Cruz. Unbeknownst to me, things had been building up for a while. Gypsy had invited Kiani to go to Universal Studios with her and her boyfriend, but after Rosie said she’d report her to Marcus if she did, Kiani decided to stay home. Kiani also had developed a crush on one of her brothers’ friends and knew she couldn’t take that any further as long as Rosie and Elizabeth were watching her every move.
Kiani clearly felt she couldn’t get on with her life without making a break from Elizabeth and Rosie, who were still pining away for Marcus and didn’t want anyone in the family to go against his teachings. I was happy for Kiani but could see she was going to have a rough road ahead of her.
MY FATHER WENT home, and we all celebrated our first Christmas together with a tree, stocking stuffers, and gifts.
Late on Christmas afternoon, my mom called, crying. “Alysia,” she said. “Dad is in the hospital. It’s his heart.”
“Is he going to be okay? What happened?”
“We’re not sure. The doctors say he’ll need bypass surgery, and they may need to replace his aortic valve. It’s very serious, babe, but please don’t worry. I’ll call you when we know more.”
I froze. Marcus Wesson’s vile image popped into my head, and I couldn’t get it out.
“What’s wrong, Alysia?” Elizabeth asked sympathetically.
At that moment, I didn’t want to talk to her or Rosie. I knew I was being irrational, but it just seemed so unfair. How could my dad—the nicest man I’d ever met—be in the hospital, while Marcus was alive and well in his jail cell? My dad would never hurt anybody and he was the one with the heart condition? It made me sick.
Why can’t they just trade places?
I wanted to offer Marcus up for the operating table instead. If he didn’t make it, everyone would be better off. No painstaking trial, no more public scrutiny.
If he was sentenced to death, it would be a joke. He would probably live another twenty years on death row before he was executed—if he didn’t die of natural causes first.
AS MY CONTEMPT for Marcus grew in the coming days, Marcus’s family finally got permission to visit him. While Elizabeth and Rosie touched up their makeup and put on perfume for their first weekend visit, I stewed in my room, wanting to stop them. I was afraid he would send them secret messages to kill themselves.
They seemed depressed when they got home, as if they felt bad leaving him in jail, and I could tell from their red eyes that they’d been crying. As mad as that made me, I told myself that they’d actually thought they were happy all those years. Which meant, I guess, they were happy. How do you tell someone she wasn’t happy?
Marcus had convinced these women that he was a good man. An unemployed, overweight, middle-aged, abusive, controlling, delusional, insecure pedophile had convinced these smart, beautiful, intelligent women that he was a god. I understand why they fell for it as kids, but now that they had been exposed to mainstream society, enough was enough.
Elizabeth and Rosie had four children who were murdered. He’d left them out on their asses without the tools to succeed. Now he was locked up, they were stuck fending for themselves and, still, they felt sorry for him. I couldn’t bite my tongue any longer.
“Do you think he feels sorry for you guys right now?” I blurted out.
The girls looked at me, stunned, and didn’t answer. I felt so cruel for stating the obvious, but I realized that my home was the only place in the world where I was in the minority for hating Marcus Wesson.
AFTER A SUCCESSFUL quintuple bypass and with a new aortic valve, my dad joined me in recovery. And on February 1, my doctor cleared me to go back to work.
When I called my boss with the good news, he gave me some news of his own.
“How would you like to come back to work in Fresno, back on the night shift?” he asked.
“Really? Like a normal schedule again? No more foggy drives in the middle of the night, pinching my leg?”
“Nope. What do you say?”
“I say thank you, and I’ll start tomorrow!”
“See you then.”
I would be back in Fresno just in time. The Marcus Wesson trial was set to begin a month later. Now I had to tell my boss about my roommates.
Fifteen
If there was ever a time when the Wesson family seemed normal, it was on Friday nights, when Marcus allowed his children to watch movies on the VCR. The kids enjoyed the weekly treat so much they would mark a 6 in the corner of their diary entries every Saturday, kicking off the countdown. It was the only thing that made life bearable.
Marcus would bring home large tubs of Neapolitan ice cream and bulk boxes of vanilla and fudge cookies, the only sugar the kids were allowed. The little ones were given small portions before being sent to their room, while the older children built wobbly houses of vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate ice cream, supported by cookie walls, which they carefully carried to their assigned seats in front of the television.
The family didn’t have a TV until 1990, when one of Elizabeth’s brothers sold them his old eighteen-inch set. Marcus began buying previously viewed videos from a liquidator, and within a few years, the Wessons had accumulated a movie library with dozens of titles in each category. Nonetheless, Marcus often replayed his favorites, including Pretty Woman and Road House, until the kids knew the lines by heart.
By the same token, the children learned when to cover their eyes or turn their heads while Marcus fast-forwarded through the scenes featuring sex or extreme violence. If he caught any of them peeking, he would wait for the movie to end, then beat them.
After the films, Marcus would put on dance tapes. The boys danced in one half of the room, the girls and Marcus in the other, romping around until the early hours of the morning.
Sometimes Marcus and the boys would perform Friday night skits for the girls. He’d have the boys put on hobo costumes, and he would don a long dress and red lipstick.
When Dorian was fifteen, Marcus took his son into a room to get dressed for that night’s performance. He pulled out some cosmetic powder and eyeliner and began applying it to Dorian’s face.
“What are you doing, Dad?” Dorian asked, surprised.
“This is what actors do,” Marcus said, explaining that he used to take theater classes in Beverly Hills.
Dorian found all of this very strange, given that Marcus often quizzed the boys individually about their sexuality.
“Are you gay?” Marcus would ask.
“No, Dad.”
“You know, homosexuality runs in our family. But I’m not raising any fags.”
Although Marcus attempted to emasculate his son, Dorian still had the dreams of a typical teenage boy—going to high school and playing football—even though he knew his father would never allow it. But one day, Dorian’s athletic urges got the
best of him. “Dad, I was thinking that I’d maybe like to go to high school,” he said.
Marcus turned to his son and squinted, his nostrils flaring like those of an angry bull. “I’d rather see you dead than see you in school,” he said.
Dorian never brought it up again. That was why he was so confused a couple of years later when Marcus pulled him and Adrian aside.
“Do you want to go to school?” Marcus asked.
The boys looked at each other, knowing it sounded too good to be true.
“Yes, of course,” Adrian said, waiting for the punch line.
“Are you serious, Dad?” Dorian asked.
“Yes. I have decided to allow you to go to a school for Japanese martial arts,” Marcus said. “You will learn nonviolent ways of self-defense and discipline.”
It wasn’t football, but the teenagers gladly signed up for aikido classes at a studio in Fresno, which they subsidized by doing yard work for the neighbors. They didn’t even care that they had to foot the bill themselves.
AS HIS OLDEST sons matured, Marcus beat them even more savagely. After having separated them from the girls for years, he decided he didn’t even want them to interact with each other. The two oldest boys had become close friends, and Marcus seemed set on breaking that bond.
Marcus tested Adrian’s allegiance by forcing him to watch Dorian get beaten with a metal pole. Adrian wanted to do something to stop his brother’s pain, but he did nothing, knowing that any action against his father would only escalate the conflict.
Adrian had already seen where challenging Marcus would lead. One summer the family was crammed into the Travelall for a trip down the mountain to pick up supplies in Watsonville. It was a sweaty, grueling ride with no air-conditioning. Clouds of dust often engulfed the vehicle as they careened along the winding dirt roads, but Marcus usually rolled down the windows once they hit pavement.
This time, he didn’t.
Adrian, who had been diagnosed with childhood asthma, had been inhaling dust all the way down and had been unable to take a deep breath for twenty minutes. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he asked his mother to roll down the window.
“Don’t do it,” Marcus said to Elizabeth, who obeyed her husband.
“Mom, why don’t you come back here and see how hot it is?” Adrian asked.
No one said a word, and the windows remained closed.
Ten minutes later, the family reached its destination— a used tire shop on the outskirts of the city. Everyone got out, gasping for fresh air, except Marcus.
“Adrian, don’t go anywhere. Come back here,” he said. “Now lie down on the front seat and lift your shirt.”
Adrian complied, lying facedown on the seat. Marcus pulled out a thick tree branch, wet and heavy with sap, and beat his son with it.
Leaning in close to Adrian, he said, “Every time you scream or make a move, I’ll start the count again.”
Strike after strike, Adrian finally realized his father wasn’t counting. His brothers and sisters waited outside, wandering around the stacks of old tires and rusty car parts, until Marcus finally stopped.
“Get up,” he said as Adrian tried to pull his wounded body into an upright position. “If you ever get smart with your mom again, I will bury you. I will kill you and put you in the ground.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Adrian said, regretting his misbehavior and leaning over to give his father a hug. “I love you, Dad.”
Although the children loved their father, they were terrified by the prospect that he could murder one or more of them, and no outsider would ever be the wiser. They had already seen that he was capable of killing.
They were walking toward Rosemary’s duplex in Fresno when they accidentally disturbed their uncle’s dog, Charlie, who had been napping under a tree. Charlie, startled awake, snapped and lunged at Elizabeth, but because he was tied to a tree, the rope wouldn’t let him get close enough to make contact. Without even flinching, Marcus reached down, whipped out his hunting knife, and stabbed Charlie seven times in the neck as the children looked on in horror. Marcus dug a hole at the foot of the tree, buried the dead dog, and went into the house without another word.
The children took note that the slaying seemed of little consequence to Marcus. One of them could be next.
IN EARLY 1996, sixteen-year-old Brandy ran away and moved back in with her mother, Rosemary. For two days after she disappeared, Elizabeth was frantic, sending the kids to search the hills for her missing niece. She begged Marcus to drive her down the mountain to call Rosemary, and when he finally did, she found out that Brandy was safe after all. When Elizabeth questioned Marcus about what had happened, he called a family meeting and announced that Brandy had run away because she was jealous. She’d wanted to be part of the plan to have babies for the Lord, and she’d grown angry when Marcus said it wasn’t her time. Elizabeth, along with the Wesson girls and Elizabeth’s other nieces, believed his story.
That fall, Marcus decided Dorian and Adrian should leave the family, too.
The boys, now in their early twenties, had been working for a couple of years at McDonald’s in Santa Cruz. Without a car, they had to stay in town during the week, often having nowhere to sleep but the streets or the beach. On the weekends, they would walk or hitch a ride up the mountain, where eating meals with the family and sleeping on cots inside the tent made for a nice treat.
After a tough hike up the mountain one Saturday morning, Dorian and Adrian were shocked to find no one at their family’s campsite. The tent was still up, but the supplies, food, and, most important, the people, were gone.
“I can’t believe they left us,” Adrian said.
For the first time, the oldest Wesson boys were completely on their own.
ABANDONING HIS SONS was just one of the adjustments to the family’s living arrangements that Marcus decided to make now that there were some new additions.
Starting in September 1995, Marcus had had a daughter, Illabelle, with Kiani; a son, Jonathan, with Sofia; and a daughter, Aviv, with Ruby. After he left the boys behind, Marcus moved the family back to the duplex in Fresno for a few months until he was able to find them a new home: a boat called the Sudan, which was docked in Tomales Bay in Marin County.
Life on the boat ran relatively smoothly until 1998, when Ruby took off. She had run away before, but this time she was determined to stay gone. For the past few years, she had been Marcus’s favorite, so he was noticeably agitated when she betrayed him. He followed her to Fresno, where he would stay for days, hoping she would have a change of heart.
While he was away, Marcus left Sofia in charge of her siblings and cousins. Sofia took her responsibilities seriously and kept watch for any potential problems. She knew to keep the kids quiet and hidden on the lower deck so outsiders didn’t get suspicious and call police.
In early 1999, she saw a van marked “Progressive” repeatedly driving past the Sudan. Unaware that the van bore the name of an insurance company, Sofia had everyone worried that the driver was with the government or CPS and had come to break up the family. After weighing her options, Sofia decided it was time to put Marcus’s suicide pact into motion and send herself and the children “to the Lord.”
The only problem was, she wasn’t familiar with Marcus’s gun.
“I don’t know how to load this,” she said, searching through the manual. Following the instructions, Sofia fully loaded the clip with twelve bullets, one for each of them, then told the kids to write their half-page suicide notes.
“This is nobody’s fault,” fifteen-year-old Gypsy wrote. “We did this on our own. We do not want our spirits contaminated. This is want we wanted. No one is to blame.”
Although Sofia thought Marcus would approve, she felt uneasy about carrying out the plan without checking with him. So she told Kiani and Rosie to row ashore and call Marcus on a pay phone while she and the rest of the family prepared to meet the Lord. She and the girls washed and dressed the babies in clean outfits;
then Gypsy and Lise changed into their nicest clothes, did the dishes, put away books, and wiped down the tables.
Twelve-year-old Lise took one last look at her favorite possession: a thick stack of celebrity photos she had cut out of magazines and kept hidden in her backpack. Marcus didn’t allow the girls to read pop-culture publications, but the older girls had been sneaking old TV Guides out of the hotel conference center where they worked and giving them to Lise. She often dreamed of going to Hollywood someday to meet Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and her personal favorite, Chuck Norris.
“I can’t leave them behind,” Lise said to Gypsy. “I want to take them with me.”
Gypsy watched Lise pick up a cutout, thinking she was going to look at it more closely. But to her surprise, Lise opened her mouth, shoved the paper in, and started chewing.
“Now they can be a part of me,” Lise said, stuffing in a picture of Chuck Norris.
“Eat Nicolas Cage for me,” Gypsy said, handing her one of her favorite stars.
Lise swallowed it down as well, and by the time she finished, she’d eaten a dozen of them.
The whole family gathered around the two small windows on the lower deck while they waited for Kiani and Rosie to return with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.
“I can see them,” one of the children yelled.
Kiani and Rosie had their hands in the air, their thumbs pointing down. Marcus had aborted the mission and sent word he would come talk to them that night.
He was beaming when he arrived around 9:00 P.M., and even happier when the oldest girls ushered him to a drawer to hand him the suicide notes.
“You are true followers of God,” he said, smiling. “This was a true test for you.”
Tears came to his eyes as he read them, one by one. They had never seen him so proud.
But the good feelings didn’t last long. After Sofia reported that Lise had picked up the loaded gun, Marcus threatened to spank her.
“Don’t you know that’s dangerous?” he yelled.
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