“Thanks,” I said with a backward glance at the tall, athletic-looking man behind me.
Oh my God; it’s the police chief!
I’d interviewed the chief more than a dozen times, so he wasn’t a complete stranger. Luckily, he was also a nice guy, with a reputation for being charming. Chief Dyer bent down and handed me my other high heel, which had fallen out of my bag.
“I think this belongs to you.”
I didn’t have time to be embarrassed. “Hold this for a second?” I asked, thrusting my compact-size mirror at him.
He smiled and obliged. With his help, I brushed on two coats of mascara in the overstuffed, smelly elevator, just in time for the alert bell. The doors opened onto a menagerie of flashing cameras, bustling reporters, and curious community members who had heard that the verdict was in and wanted to be there to hear it being announced. I turned to thank the chief, but he’d vanished in the crowd.
Around the corner, the hallway was just as packed. Security guards were setting up a checkpoint outside the courtroom, where all observers, including media, would have their pockets, purses, and bags searched. One of the guards told me they were trying to ensure that no one brought in a weapon to harm Marcus.
I spotted Rosie behind a group of people on the other side of the hallway. She was standing with some relatives near a bench outside the courtroom. I could tell the family was nervous because they kept fidgeting and looking around.
I elbowed my way to where she was standing and raised my hand to cover my mouth in true mafia fashion. “Where’s Elizabeth?” I asked.
Without making eye contact, Rosie walked down the hall, through the reporters and photographers, and into the stairwell.
Aaah, the stairs.
I counted to five and discreetly followed. Elizabeth had chosen a great hiding spot. The Wessons always took the stairs to avoid the media, and soon the cold, stark stairwell was filled with about half a dozen of them and their significant others, all looking at me with forlorn eyes.
I told them how proud I was of them for testifying and that we would all get through this together, that everything would be all right.
“You guys can do this,” I said, like a coach giving a pep talk to a losing team. “The hard part is already over. I’ll see you in there, okay? Call me when you leave court. It’s going to be okay.”
It had become second nature to me by now to keep my relationship with the Wessons a secret from the rest of the media, so I casually walked back into the hallway and joined my colleagues on the benches.
“Hmmm, I wonder where the family is,” one of the reporters said, looking around for them.
“I don’t know,” I replied with a shrug.
JUDGE PUTNAM HAD originally said he didn’t want the family in the courtroom when the verdict was read, but he reversed his decision with no explanation before the jury came back. He ruled that family members could come inside if there was enough room, and if they could “control themselves,” but he warned that he didn’t want any emotional outbursts that could influence the jury’s decision should the trial advance to a penalty phase.
The bailiffs made sure to save enough seats for the Wessons, but even I wasn’t sure if they would be able to control themselves. Elizabeth and Rosie walked in with their heads bowed, followed by Rosemary, some of the boys, and their girlfriends. They sat in the back rows on the left side, where they cried quietly. Scanning their faces, I saw hurt, anger, and a helplessness I could never truly understand.
The past year and a half flashed before my eyes. I saw a bloody Marcus Wesson walking out of the house and surrendering to police. I saw the detectives carrying out the bodies of the dead babies, draped in white sheets. I saw myself running after the family with a microphone in my hand. I saw the girls crying on my couch, with Elizabeth repeating, “My babies are gone. My babies are gone.” I saw Kiani and Rosie laughing as they bobbed up and down in the pool during their first swimming lesson. I saw Elizabeth’s face glowing after Kiani, Rosie, Gypsy, and I decorated my apartment with streamers and balloons to surprise her with a birthday party. I saw little Alysia looking up at me from her hospital bassinet with her tiny hand wrapped around my finger.
It had all come down to this.
Twenty-one
My cell phone vibrated, sending it surging sideways on the wooden pew until it hit the reporter next to me.
“Sorry,” I whispered, grabbing my phone and reading the text message that had just come in from Debbie,* one of my coworkers: “I FOUND OUT THE VERDICT ALREADY.”
I gasped and hit the arrow button to scroll down the screen: “HE’S GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS!”
I read it a few more times, not knowing what to think. Neither the judge nor the jury had come in yet, so I knew I still had a few minutes. I hurried into the hallway, where hordes of people were lined up to get inside, and dialed the station. I didn’t bother greeting Debbie when she answered.
“How do you know the verdict?” I demanded.
She explained that her friend worked at Wal-Mart with a juror’s husband. Apparently, the juror had told her husband about the verdict and he told everyone at work about it.
“But she can’t do that!” I said, exasperated.
“Well, she did.”
“This is crazy. Okay, I have to get back in there.”
I opened the doors with an uneasy feeling.
Should I report what happened? But what if she’s wrong?
Because juror misconduct was such a serious offense, I decided to wait to see if the text message matched up with the verdict. I didn’t want to create a commotion for nothing.
Why do I always get so entangled in this case?
I WAS STILL wrestling with this latest ethical dilemma when the bailiffs brought in Marcus, who was wearing the same short-sleeved black shirt and black pants he’d worn throughout the trial. With his hair messier and beard bushier every day, he certainly didn’t look polished for his most important court appearance so far.
Most of the jurors went out of their way to ignore the disheveled defendant as they filed into the courtroom. I thought that could mean they’d found him guilty, but I still wasn’t convinced. I studied each of the seven women on the jury, trying to figure out which one had blabbed to her husband.
What if the family has to go through this all over again because she couldn’t keep her big mouth shut?
The courtroom was silent except for the sniffling and sobbing coming from the Wessons in the back row. Judge Putnam asked his clerk, Barbara Graves, to read the verdict. I held my breath and looked down at my notebook.
I’ve never heard anyone read so slowly. I wanted to yell, “Spit it out already, lady!”
Finally, she read the jury’s decision on the first murder count: “We the jury, in the matter of People versus Marcus Delon Wesson, find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Guilty.
She repeated the same sentence eight more times for the rest of the murder counts.
Guilty.
Then she moved on to the fourteen sex charges. It took her twenty-three minutes to finish reading them all.
Guilty on all counts.
The dethroned patriarch of the Wesson family would never rule again. I didn’t want to turn around to look at the back rows. I could already hear Elizabeth’s weak sobs behind me, and I knew all too well what that looked like. As a friend, I wanted to respect their privacy, but as a reporter, I knew it was my job to look.
I raised my eyes to the ceiling, paused, then slowly turned toward the family. When I saw them, it was worse than I had expected. Tears were streaming down Elizabeth’s face, and her mouth was open with an expression of near panic. Rosie was crying hard, too. Harder than I’d ever seen her cry before. They looked as if they’d lost their family all over again. I wanted to run back and hug them.
I turned toward Marcus to gauge his reaction. I could see only the right half of his face, and as usual, he was in his own world, staring str
aight ahead, apparently unaffected.
You’re finally going to get what’s coming to you.
The bailiffs walked over to Marcus and escorted him out. Then the reporters in the courtroom rushed outside to meet up with our crews, who were positioned on the side of the building. We had been allowed to text-message the verdicts to our stations while they were being read, so word of Marcus’s fate had already spread. A large crowd had gathered nearby, and a few people cheered upon hearing the news. Amid the chaos and noise, I thought about erasing my first text message from Debbie and never saying another word about it.
After all, things turned out the way they were supposed to.
But I didn’t erase it. I showed it to Max when I got back to the station. He said we needed to report it to Judge Putnam and let him decide what, if anything, to do about it.
The following week, before testimony began in the penalty phase of the trial, the judge held a closed hearing regarding my text message. I gave my cell phone to my boss in case he needed to show anyone the message, and prayed there would be no new trial.
Judge Putnam asked Max to name the source of the leak, but my boss invoked the shield law, which protects journalists from naming their sources. After two days, Putnam decided the information had not affected the outcome of the trial, and he kept the jury intact. The penalty phase was ready to move forward.
I had never really given the death penalty too much thought. In my eleventh-grade debate class, I was assigned to argue against capital punishment. I went to the library, checked out all the books on the subject, and read them cover to cover. When I closed the cover of the final book, I wished I was arguing for the death penalty. In class, it became the first and last debate I would ever lose.
The way I saw it, the world would be a much better place without people like Marcus Wesson. No punishment would be harsh enough for what he had done to his family. With him gone, though, maybe they could—and would— finally move on.
* * *
MARCUS REMAINED HIS usual unemotional self during the penalty phase of the trial. Scribbling away once again, he penned a note wishing good luck to his attorney Pete Jones, who would deliver the defense’s opening statement. Marcus was taking an existential approach to his fate, saying his “father,” meaning God, had told him to “let it go, let it flow.”
You will win opening argument. … No matter what you present, the verdict will reflect the plan at hand. If God himself were on [the] stand, the verdict would be the same. … I am happy with the verdict—it reflects my father’s will—as Jesus himself was convicted—I am no better, but the same. … You did your best within the parameters. … I will be freed either way—trust me. … I am here to loose [sic] weight only.
THIS TIME DURING opening statements, Prosecutor Gamoian was brief, giving only a one-minute presentation. She introduced one new piece of evidence the judge had not allowed her to bring up before—a legal document from Santa Cruz County showing Marcus’s welfare fraud conviction in 1990, proving that he had a criminal history.
Jones didn’t have many character witnesses to bolster his case. Marcus’s father, Ben Wesson, had died of cancer a year ago, and his mother, Carrie, said she was too ill to travel from Seattle. Jones had to settle for Marcus’s sister Cheryl, who portrayed her mother as overly religious and her father as an alcoholic who had homosexual affairs and periodically left the family. While Cheryl was on the stand, Marcus kept his head down and eyes closed.
“Open your eyes, Marc,” she said, trying to get him to respond. “I love you.”
Greg Bledsoe, a childhood friend of Marcus’s, also testified. I didn’t think there were any more surprises left in store, but I was sorely mistaken. According to Bledsoe, Ben Wesson used to pay his son’s friends to give him oral sex. Greg also thought it likely that Ben had sexually abused his children, including Marcus. That made sense to me, given that sexual abuse is so often repeated for generations. Greg also mentioned Ben’s sexual affair with his nephew in L.A., noting that Ben moved back home with his wife and kids after Marcus and Elizabeth got married.
During the testimony, I looked around at the other reporters. None of their faces reflected any emotion.
Am I the only one who thinks this is the most bizarre case in the history of the American justice system?
For a brief second, I felt compassion for Marcus. He must have been abused. But my sympathy dissipated as quickly as it came. Millions of people were abused every day and they didn’t act like him. Could this be happening to another family out there somewhere?
Gamoian, in her closing argument, asked the jury not to “give him the gift of life. He doesn’t deserve it.”
She projected images of the nine bloody children stacked in the back bedroom and the deadly gunshot wounds under their eyes. Some of the jurors cried as she talked about the children’s last moments of life and how their father had played a role in their murders.
“He controlled their bodies, their hope and dreams,” she said. “He controlled their deaths. He controlled the timing of it. He controlled the manner of it. Imagine the terror in that bedroom.”
It was such a powerful message that even Marcus wiped away tears.
In Jones’s closing, he argued that jurors should spare his client’s life because he did not fire the murder weapon, contending that Marcus’s acts stemmed from an obvious mental illness. Both of these points were mitigating factors. The jury’s job was to decide whether such factors outweighed the aggravating factors. If so, the jury could recommend a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. If not, death.
Jones ended by telling jurors, “You’ve heard a lot of bad. But there’s some good there.” If sentencing Marcus to die by lethal injection could “undo the harm done, your job would be simple,” he said.
This time, it took the jury only nine hours of deliberating over three days, and it took Clerk Barbara Graves only six minutes to read the panel’s recommended punishment. The verdict was a finding for the penalty of death for the murders of Sebhrenah, Elizabeth, Jeva, Sedona, Marshey, Ethan, Illabelle, Aviv, and Jonathan.
The man who had ordered the end to his children’s lives would be put to death himself. I felt very relieved—and that feeling alarmed me.
I’m relieved that another human being is going to die.
Marcus had his arms crossed, his hands grabbing his shoulders. He stared straight ahead and never turned around to look at the back row, where Elizabeth, Rosie, and four of his children were crying once again.
After it was over, the other reporters and I chased down the attorneys outside the courtroom. Although Lisa Gamoian said she couldn’t say anything yet, Pete Jones stopped to talk.
“Obviously, I’m extremely disappointed,” he said, his face wilted with defeat. “I’m second-guessing myself of what more I could have done or should have done.”
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked into my apartment that night. I had stayed late at work to archive some of the video and my notes from the trial, so I didn’t get home until after 1:00 A.M. Elizabeth and Rosie were still up, watching TV.
“How are you guys doing?” I asked.
Elizabeth looked more angry than upset; Rosie simply looked empty.
“He didn’t have a chance,” Elizabeth said after a few moments of silence. “They were going to give him the death penalty from the beginning.”
Although I was sure this was a debate I could win, I knew it wasn’t the time to engage them on the subject.
“I’m really tired. I’m going to bed,” I said, removing myself from the conversation before I said something I’d regret. “Good night.”
THE FORMAL SENTENCING hearing was a little more than three weeks away. The judge had told the family members that they had the right to address Marcus before he made his recommendation. Elizabeth thought she would be too emotional to stand in front of the court; Gypsy didn’t want to either. So, instead, they decided to write letters to the judge, explaining their posit
ions.
“Can I borrow your computer to type a letter to the judge?” Gypsy asked me.
“Sure. What are you going to say? Do you think your dad should get the death penalty?”
“No. I think it will make everything worse,” she said sadly. “I don’t agree with it.”
She sat down and began composing her letter.
Your Honorable Judge R. L. Putnam,
I hope you take the time to consider my plea to save my father’s life. I beg that you not adhere to the recommendation of death that the jury put forth to you.
I ask that you consider us, the family members. We have gone through so much sorrow since March 12th. Putting our father to death will only add to our grief.
I know many people believe the punishment fits the crime. But we ask that you take into consideration all the hardships we have been through and grant us this favor and not put our father to death.
There have been enough deaths in our family and I don’t think that we can handle one more.
I hope that you take those into consideration. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely yours,
Gypsy Wesson
* * *
WHEN HE BEGAN the sentencing hearing, Judge Putnam acknowledged that he had read the family’s letters, then asked if anyone wanted to address the court at the podium. About ten people accepted his offer, including Ruby, Sofia, Kiani, and several of her brothers, but some of them directed their comments at Marcus.
“Those were not children who belonged to you,” Sofia said, with a sense of empowerment. “It was not your decision to take them away from this world.”
Kiani stood up to defend her father and her family’s lifestyle. “I am proud of all my family, of the way we were raised,” she said, crying.
She and her brothers tearfully talked about the “good times” with their father and told Marcus how much they would always love him. It reminded me of a funeral. Family members talking about what they would remember most about their beloved. Except this time, the subject of their kind words wasn’t dead.
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