He honked again—twice this time. She knew he was angry that she was making him wait. It was now or never.
Quietly, she opened the front door of the second-floor apartment and tiptoed as fast as she could down the concrete stairs. She was wearing her work uniform, which consisted of a black skirt and white tuxedo shirt with a black bow tie and vest, and she was carrying her nearly empty purse. Nothing else.
Escaping seemed like an impossible task, but it was one she was willing to die trying to achieve. Marcus was parked on the opposite side of the complex; however, she peeked around the corner anyway, just to make sure he couldn’t see her. The coast was clear.
He was honking repeatedly now, her heartbeat speeding up with each blast. It wouldn’t be long before Marcus realized she was no longer in the apartment. Where could she hide?
She immediately thought of the laundry room in the white and green apartment building next door, so she started walking as briskly as she could in that direction, trying not to draw any undue attention. She could hear that he was still in the car, yet somehow it felt like he was right behind her. She could practically feel him breathing down her neck, and she was terrified of what would happen if he caught her.
Reaching her destination, Gypsy hurried into the closetsize room. The door always stayed open, so she left it cracked to keep him from getting suspicious and squeezed into the narrow opening between the washer and dryer. She took a deep breath of temporary relief, inhaling the lingering aroma of detergent and dryer sheets.
The sound of Marcus’s horn echoed in the small room, sending a vibration through the two metal machines hugging Gypsy’s sides and the wall pressing against her back. Then the honking suddenly stopped.
It was completely silent. Too silent. The stream of thoughts blaring through her head now seemed so loud that Gypsy was certain Marcus could hear them. Marcus had always claimed that he had ESP and that God told him what everyone was thinking. Gypsy held her breath for long intervals, hoping to squelch her booming thoughts.
Over the years, she’d prayed for many things she didn’t believe in, things for which Marcus had ordered her to pray. But that morning, she was on her own. She asked God not to lead Marcus to her cramped corner.
The next hour would be critical. She chewed on her nails until her fingers were almost bleeding, hoping to make the time pass more quickly. Although she didn’t know Marcus was circling the apartment complex looking for her, she could feel his presence nearby.
If she could outwait her father, she hoped he would give up and go away. But it wasn’t the waiting that was difficult—she would rather spend the rest of her life in that corner than live another day with him. It was the wondering.
If she could really escape him, what would become of the other children? What would she do without Lise? She wished Lise and all the little ones could come with her, but she knew that would never happen. Because Lise didn’t work, she had no opportunity to escape. And the little ones? Well, they were too small to understand what was in store for them. Maybe someday, she could go back and set them free, too.
With each passing minute, Gypsy grew more confident that Marcus wasn’t going to find her. For the first time she could remember, she felt safe.
Gypsy peered outside. Seeing no one, she let her eyes adjust to the bright sunlight for a minute, then ran back to Janet’s and asked her to drive to the Radisson so Gypsy could pick up her paycheck. She lay down in Janet’s backseat on the trip over, still worried Marcus would spot her.
She cashed her check, looked down at the few hundred dollars in her hand, and felt guilty. It was Friday, and the kids were at home waiting for their weekly ice cream and cookies. She was the family’s only source of income, and without the money she was holding, Lise and the others wouldn’t get any ice cream. She couldn’t let that happen.
Gypsy pulled forty dollars out and put the rest in an envelope, which she placed under the washing machine that had sheltered her earlier that day. She asked Janet to call Elizabeth and tell her where to find the money. This was the first time Gypsy hadn’t given her father every cent of her earnings.
She stayed in a thirty-five-dollar-per-night motel on the south side of town and cried the entire night. She knew he would come for her eventually. It was just a question of when.
AFTER THE MOTEL, Gypsy moved in rent-free with some female coworkers she had befriended. Two months later, she found a more permanent home back at Janet’s apartment.
Marcus showed up at the Radisson the following month, just as she’d suspected, to reclaim what he felt belonged to him.
Gypsy knew she shouldn’t get in a car with him or he might make her pay, stabbing her like he had Sofia. But when he came to collect Gypsy at work, he brought Rosie and Sebhrenah as backup, sending them inside to fetch her. It was so cruel. She missed the girls so much it hurt. Still, when she saw him sitting in his car in front of the hotel, gesturing for her to get into the front seat next to him, Gypsy was determined not to make the same mistake her cousin had.
“Get in,” Marcus said. “We need to talk.”
Until recently, she’d always done what he told her. Only this time, she felt it would be safer to climb in the backseat, where she sat in between the other two girls. Rosie’s face didn’t register much emotion, but Sebhrenah looked really sad. Gypsy could feel Sebhrenah’s disappointment in her for leaving the family.
Marcus didn’t talk much as he drove them to the Hammond house. After pulling into the driveway, he began to deliver a contrived speech, but Gypsy couldn’t process the words. Over the years, she’d gotten good at drifting in and out while looking interested during his hours-long sermons.
“… So God is telling me I need to get all my flock together,” he was saying. “I’m going to go get Ruby and Sofia back. I am the shepherd, and I’ve got to find my sheep. We’ve got to get back to what’s right, get back to the Lord. They will come back to us, just like the prodigal son, and you’re going to come back, too. Satan is picking up the family, bit by bit, and I’ve got to do whatever it takes to get it back together. Are you ready to come home now?”
Gypsy wondered if he was actually delusional enough to think that one lecture could erase nearly twenty years of abuse.
“Gypsy, don’t you miss the babies?” he asked.
There he went, preying on her biggest weakness. He must have known Gypsy would feel guilty for leaving the others behind. Of course she wanted nothing more than to see the kids again, if only to say good-bye properly. So that was what she decided to do. She’d see them one last time, then leave the past behind.
“Yeah, I do miss them,” she said. “I miss them a lot.”
She was ready to head into the house when Marcus turned his huge frame around and, through his thick dreadlocks, stared piercingly into her eyes.
“First, Gypsy, I need to know. Are you still willing to die for the Lord?”
She had answered that question thousands of times over the years, always with an emphatic yes. But today was different.
She knew he’d chased after Sofia and Ruby when they ran away, and had gotten a yes from them in answer to this same question. They may have been ready to die, but Gypsy wasn’t. And she wasn’t going to fold to his whims today. She just wasn’t.
“No, I’m not,” she declared. “I want to live for the Lord. Only God can decide when we die. We shouldn’t decide for ourselves.”
Marcus gasped. But Gypsy didn’t break eye contact with him. In her peripheral vision, she could see Rosie and Sebhrenah shaking their heads, looking down at their laps.
The empowering feeling of standing up to her father was painfully short-lived.
“What did you say?” he screamed.
Gypsy blinked, realizing he had no intention of letting her see the kids. The yelling escalated into insults. She regretted ever getting into that car.
Her cell phone rang, but Marcus barely missed a beat of his tirade. When her phone rang a second time, he wasn’t as forgiving.
“Who keeps calling you?” he asked testily. “Sebhrenah, take her phone and turn it off.”
Sebhrenah snatched the phone away and, with it, Gypsy’s chance to call a coworker—or anyone else—for help. Marcus was telling her that he was going to tie her to the bed until she came around, but she knew that wouldn’t be the worst of it. In his mind, defiance was a cardinal sin, and she had just committed it. Gypsy wondered if she should jump out the window. How else could she get out of this alive?
She finally figured out what to do: She crossed her fingers behind her back and tried to cross her toes inside her work shoes.
“Dad?” she interrupted. “I want to move home. I realize I was wrong, and I want to come back.”
Marcus seemed skeptical. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because you are right,” she lied. “I lost my way and I miss my family.”
As they talked some more, Gypsy could feel Marcus giving in.
“Can I go back to work to get my things first?”
“You don’t need to go back there! You can’t work there anymore. It’s a bad influence.”
She, too, could sense people’s weaknesses, so she homed in on the family’s financial difficulties. “I need to get my purse,” she said. “I left it there.”
Marcus went silent for a moment, deep in thought. He looked first at Rosie, then at Sebhrenah.
“You know what? I’m going to let your sisters decide your fate. Girls, do you think Gypsy is being honest? Should we let her go back to work?”
Gypsy prayed they had fallen for her story.
“I think she’s lying,” Rosie said. “You shouldn’t let her go.”
It was harder for Sebhrenah to sell her sister out. “I don’t think she’s telling the truth,” she said reluctantly.
“You know what I’m going to do,” Marcus said to Gypsy. “I’m going to try something different. I’m going to take you back to work and trust you. I know you will do the right thing.”
There must be a catch.
Gypsy tried not to let her renewed hope show in her face. “Okay,” she said quietly. “I mean what I said.”
Marcus turned on the engine and backed out of the driveway. Gypsy took one last look at the house and knew she’d never go inside. She was on pins and needles all the way back to work, wondering if Lise and the rest of her siblings had been aware that she’d been right outside.
“Finish your shift and I’ll pick you up at midnight,” Marcus said as he pulled up to the hotel. “Be here waiting and don’t talk to anyone.”
Gypsy didn’t like the look on his face. She recognized that look.
“Oh, and Gypsy?”
“Yeah?”
“You need to come over here and give me a kiss. Just so I can feel that you’re telling the truth.”
Gypsy had promised herself that she would never touch him again, so it took everything she had to pull it off. But she knew it would be the last time. She was kissing her abuser good-bye.
Then she had to face her sisters. She hugged Rosie and tried not to look her in the eye. Next, she hugged Sebhrenah, who cried as she held Gypsy tight.
“Please come back,” Sebhrenah pleaded.
“I will, Bhrenah,” Gypsy said. “I promise. I love you.”
Gypsy backed away and closed the car door behind her.
As Marcus drove off with his two somber passengers, Gypsy dropped her poker face. She burst through the glass doors, ran hysterically down the hotel hallway, checked in with her supervisor, and then took off, escaping from Marcus once again.
Against all odds, she’d made it out in one piece. Freedom tasted sweet.
Later, that moment would become searingly bittersweet. At the time, she’d had no idea that would be the last time she would see Sebhrenah alive.
Eighteen
It was unusually hazy the morning of March 3, 2005, when fifty people were lined up waiting to get into the Fresno County courthouse on Van Ness Avenue. Wanting to avoid the line, I walked around the crowd and ducked in the side door. Technically, it was the attorneys’ entrance, but the security guards let media in, too.
One of the guards, whom I’d met during Marcus’s preliminary hearing, held out a cup for my keys and cell phone so I could walk through the X-ray machine.
“Good morning, Alysia. It’s the big day today, huh?”
“It is,” I said, sliding my shiny new laptop and notepad through the scanner. “Aren’t you going to get sick of hanging out with us every day?”
“No way,” another guard said, yelling from behind the X-ray machine. “This is the most excitement this place has seen in a long time.”
The courthouse had two elevator cars that always seemed to take forever. I waited along with the twenty other impatient people gathered in the lobby, where we stared up at the lighted sign indicating where the elevators had stopped. Only half of us were going to fit at a time, and when the first car came, I made sure to cram my way in.
“Five, please,” I said, after realizing I couldn’t reach the numbers. The mix of freshly applied musky colognes and floral perfumes made my eyes water, and when the double doors opened, I couldn’t push my way out fast enough.
Scooting around the corner into the main hallway, I was stalled again by a large group gathered in front of the courtroom. Other than the verdict, the opening statements drew the most media during a trial. I saw at least a dozen video and still cameras, with at least twice as many reporters and photographers. I assumed some were from out of town because I didn’t recognize them.
As soon as a tall, skinny bailiff pushed through the crowd and unlocked the courtroom, I headed straight for the defense table and sat as close as I could—on the wooden pew behind it. I opened my crisp new notebook and wrote “WESSON TRIAL: Day One.”
The rectangular courtroom was split by a dark wooden divider a couple of feet high, with a swinging door that squeaked each time someone walked through it. The judge, attorneys, clerk, court reporter, and defendant sat on one side, while the spectators and media sat on the other, known as the gallery. On that day, the gallery was filled mostly with media and a few people who looked like Elizabeth’s relatives.
Elizabeth and Kiani were escorted into the room, both of them hiding their faces, but they were told to come back the day the prosecution was ready to call them to testify. As witnesses, they weren’t allowed to watch the proceedings.
Two bailiffs opened the door behind the judge’s seat, peeking both ways before escorting a shackled Marcus Wesson toward us. Wearing glasses, black pants, and a black, button-up shirt with short sleeves, he had lost some weight since I’d last seen him. He kept coming and coming until he was closer to me than he’d ever been.
As always, he searched the crowd before turning around, then sat in the wooden chair right in front of me so that I was looking at the back of his massive head. If I’d stood up and leaned over the divider, I could have touched him. I couldn’t take my eyes off his dreadlocks, which were the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen. After a year in jail, they were a huge, matted mess that draped down past his waist and nearly rested on the carpet. He could have hidden an arsenal in those things, or hanged himself with them.
Why hasn’t the jail shaved them off?
I couldn’t imagine touching them, all caked with dirt and who knew what else. The girls told me they’d always been his personal groomers, trying to make sure his hair was neat and in order, but they could do only so much. He’d just say the word, and they would swarm around him to scratch his scalp or armpits, or to shampoo his dreadlocks. No matter what, their fingernails would be black with grime. In the last few years, Rosie had taken over the task of tidying his hair each day. She would meticulously separate the clumps, then secure them into a low-hanging ponytail, just as she had done the day of the murders.
Elizabeth told me that during the 1960s, when most boys were growing their hair long, Marcus’s father regularly shaved his young son’s head, which caused h
im to stand out at school. In 1984, a decade into Elizabeth’s marriage to Marcus, he told her he’d gotten a message from above about his hair. “The Lord has told me to grow dreadlocks,” he said.
He started growing his hair out that day, and by the looks of it, he hadn’t cut it since.
I noticed that one of his thickest dreads had almost split into two partway down, with only a skinny clump of gray knots holding it together. The urge to grab it and yank almost overpowered me, and I couldn’t stop staring at the giant rat tail. The guard who’d let us into the courtroom saw me and chuckled.
“Why can’t they cut off that hair in jail?” I whispered to him.
“It’s a civil rights thing, I guess,” he whispered back. “He wants to keep his hair long, so if we cut it and then they find him innocent, he could sue us.”
We both rolled our eyes.
Like anyone would find him innocent. Wait! Could someone really find him innocent?
Although a trial verdict was never a foregone conclusion, this case seemed different. I knew the gist of the testimony the jurors were about to hear, and I couldn’t imagine them letting Marcus loose afterward. I definitely felt he was guilty, but I would never reveal that opinion or let it color my stories.
“All rise,” the bailiff called out.
Judge R. L. Putnam walked in, and when he sat down, so did the rest of us. Everyone was in position. The jury, culled from a pool of 540 potential panelists, was sitting nervously in its box; the attorneys were ready for battle at their tables; and we reporters and photographers had our pens and cameras on point. I checked the droopy dread-lock. It, too, was standing at attention.
* * *
JUDGE PUTNAM HAD taken over the case and would preside over both phases of the trial. He reminded me of Alan Alda. He was tall and lanky, with fine gray hair. But unlike the characters Alda typically played, Putnam was soft-spoken and reserved, speaking only when necessary. He seemed nonplussed during most of the trial, and retired a couple of years later.
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