“When he was hitting you, didn’t you hate him?” I asked, wincing with empathy.
“No. It’s like young women in abusive relationships. The men beat them and disrespect them, but the women still love them and make excuses. They defend their boyfriends to everyone. That’s what we did. We didn’t know any better. Somehow, I thought I deserved it.”
Elizabeth had brought us coffee from McDonald’s, and I could tell Serafino was uncomfortable, because he kept fiddling with the stir stick, swirling it around in his cup every few minutes.
“If you could go back in time, what would you change?” I asked.
“To put it in mild terms, I’d stop it. All it would have taken is one phone call. Think about it. Not the way my cousins called the police in the end, because my dad was prepared for that. He had his soldiers. He literally trained soldiers to be on command because he was preparing for that day. I hate thinking about it, but I was one of the soldiers.”
Serafino looked down and shook his head, recalling how he’d blocked the doorway the day of the murders, willing to take a bullet for his father. He said an officer pulled his gun halfway out of the holster, but Serafino just stood there.
“For some reason, I finally moved. They rushed in, but, of course, it was too late by then. Standing there with Rosie and Kiani, I was just pushing people out of the way, and without knowing it, we were doing what my dad had trained us to do.”
“Are you mad you stood there now?”
“Of course, I resent it with a passion. It sounds so corny when other people say it, but I really blame myself for what happened. People tell me I was a victim, but I don’t know. I just did what I was trained to do.”
“Do you think a lot about the last time you saw everyone alive?”
“Oh yes. I saw some things that no one knows. I didn’t tell anyone because they didn’t ask me the questions. I would not have lied, but they just didn’t ask.”
I was frozen with shock. So many people had speculated for years about what had happened in that room, and I’d thought Marcus was the only one with the answer. Could Serafino solve the mystery?
“What did you see, Fino?” I asked, scooting closer to him, my elbows on my knees, with rapt attention.
But after a long silence, he shook his head and said nothing. He wasn’t ready to talk about the details.
“I will say, those things will haunt me for the rest of my life,” Serafino said sadly. “I saw something that wasn’t right.”
We both drifted off into deep thought. I didn’t want to push him any further. I realized for the first time that I might not really want to know what happened in that room.
So I asked another question that still perplexed most everyone who heard about this gruesome story: “If it was Sebhrenah who did it, what do you think was going through her mind?”
“I know she had no choice. She was put on a path that she didn’t know any better. It’s like all my family was born in a dark room. We lived in that dark room, and it was not a good life. Then my dad opened the door and we saw a light. And we were told to go to the light because it was the only way out. Sebhrenah walked toward the light that day.”
Serafino thought for a minute. “You know how I can best describe the way everything went down? It was an invisible gun.”
“Invisible gun?” I asked, not understanding his analogy.
“Yeah. All our lives, it was like we had an invisible gun pointing at our heads. My dad put it there when we were born. We spent our lives doing everything with a gun to our heads. At the end, Sebhrenah did what she did because of the invisible gun.”
I studied Serafino carefully. “What about now? Is the gun gone?” I asked.
He smirked, turning his head left, then right.
“It’s almost gone,” he said, reaching up and swiping the air where I’d been looking. “It’s finally almost gone.”
Twenty-six
Icouldn’t shake the “invisible gun” theory. Ever since I’d met them, I had been struggling to describe the syndrome afflicting this family, yet Serafino had summed it up flawlessly in just two words. As disturbing as those words were, I felt somewhat relieved. I finally had an explanation for the family’s behavior that I could pass on to my friends and family. After all, how could people really know what they would do with guns to their heads?
I knew Marcus’s hold was loosening on Elizabeth, Rosie, and the rest, but they weren’t free yet. They were still holding on to him, too, and I was determined to find some way to help them break those ties. My quest kept me up at night. They weren’t the only ones needing closure, and I wasn’t about to wait for Marcus’s execution to get it.
There was only one thing left that I hadn’t tried, but it came with a price. I could face the monster head-on, and try to get answers to the questions his family was too afraid to ask. What really happened to the kids? Who pulled the trigger? Why wasn’t he sorry for all those years of abuse? But even the prospect of sitting face-to-face with him nauseated me.
So first I had to ask myself a question. Was I really going to be able to confront Marcus Wesson, the subject of my nightmares, the most evil man I knew in the world? Yes, I could do it—and felt I had to do it—for the survivors I had grown to care so much about.
Settling down to write him another letter, I had to swallow my pride. I knew I had to be nice.
Marcus,
I hope all is well since the last time we corresponded. I’ve been quite busy lately.… The weather in Fresno is beginning to cool off for the season. The thick fog is rolling in and blanketing the valley again. I miss the hot and dry days of summer. Growing up in Michigan, I’ll never take another blue sky for granted.
Getting to the point of my letter, I would like to visit you. As I expressed earlier, I have many unresolved feelings. I realize you are not able to answer the questions I’m left with; however, I know it would help to meet you face-to-face (and perhaps talk about the weather some more).… I hope you will oblige my request. Who knows, it may resolve some things for you as well. Anyway, please send me a form to expedite the visitation process. I expect you’ll understand why this is important to me.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Alysia Sofios
I wasn’t sitting on eggshells waiting for his response, but the thought of meeting him continued to loom over my head like a cold, black cloud.
I CAME HOME one day to find that Elizabeth had rearranged the furniture. Everything seemed a bit out of place, especially the blue couch, which now blocked one wall and had become the unattractive focal point of the room. That made two of us. I had been feeling a bit out of place myself lately.
I heard the girls’ familiar footsteps on the path below as they approached the stairs in their high heels. Rosie and Kiani were surprising me with a visit. I knew it was them, but I acted surprised nonetheless.
Elizabeth, Gypsy, and little Alysia walked down the hall to greet them, joining us in the living room. I thought back to the first time they had walked into my apartment, and I marveled at the drastic changes I saw before me now. Everything about them was different—except for the shoes. And they all seemed, well, so happy.
While Kiani and my roommates were distracted with giggly conversation, Rosie signaled me to follow her into the bedroom.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
She closed my bedroom door, her face lit up like a sixthgrader’s. I had never seen her look so innocent or so overjoyed.
“I have a boyfriend,” she whispered back.
I stood there trying to comprehend the magnitude of her news, but I couldn’t. I thought I must have misheard her.
“Okay, say that again.”
Rosie laughed and repeated that she did, indeed, have a boyfriend.
“It’s true, Alysia. You were right.”
I could feel a heaviness lift from my shoulders, and I swore I could hear a faint chorus of “Hallelujah.” I grabbed Rosie and squeezed her tight.
“Do
n’t tell anyone yet,” she said, still whispering. “And don’t laugh, but he’s a police officer.”
Talk about poetic justice. I followed her into the living room in a blissful daze.
It doesn’t look so weird in here after all.
All of a sudden, I loved the stuffed blue couch that matched nothing else in the room. I sank into its tired cushions and wondered why they felt more comfortable than ever before. I felt a burst of euphoria even as my eyes welled up with tears.
Turning to look out the window so the others wouldn’t see me crying, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what I saw: a mourning dove was sitting on the ledge of my balcony, staring at me. We exchanged knowing glances until I regained my composure. Then, the dove spun around, spread its wings, and flew into the sun. I tilted my head, watched as it disappeared in the cloudless blue sky, and mouthed the words “thank you.”
“Are you okay, Alysia?” Kiani asked.
I turned back toward the smiling group and froze the image in my head. Elizabeth, holding a book open, was reading to a captivated little Alysia. Kiani and Gypsy were smirking at me in between bites of ice cream from their overflowing bowls. I looked down at Rosie’s hand and saw that her wedding band was gone.
“I’m more than okay,” I responded with a wink.
FOR THE FIRST time since my accident, I had some downtime. My grandma had just died, so I booked a flight to Florida to be with my family and attend her funeral. Elizabeth, who knew I had a five-hour layover, shoved a manila envelope at me as I ran out the door.
“It’s reading material for your wait. I won’t be needing it anymore,” she said. “Tell your mom I’m thinking of her. Have a safe trip.”
She hugged me tightly, and I stuffed the envelope into my carry-on bag without another thought.
I waited until I was sitting in an uncomfortable orange metal chair at the airport to open the mysterious package. I couldn’t believe what I saw inside: a thick stack of letters Marcus had written to Elizabeth, filled with the same crazy talk that had controlled his family for so many years. To let go of them was a staggering accomplishment for her. I was thrilled that, at long last, she was ready to take a stab at life on her own terms.
With a bittersweet smile and tears in my eyes, I flipped through the pages and skimmed Marcus’s insane demands. Knowing now that they would never be fulfilled, I wanted to share this revelation with my fellow human beings—even the twenty-something guy in the funny striped hat sleeping in the chair across from me. I wanted to run through the crowded airport, shredding Marcus’s rambling instructions and screaming, “Take that, Marcus! How do you like me now?”
But figuring that the last thing I needed was to get arrested, I simply raised the envelope to shoulder level and gave it a quick victory shake, inadvertently dumping a small pale object onto the worn carpet below.
It was Elizabeth’s beloved seashell.
After she’d kept it so close to her all these years, I was amazed, but gratified, that she was finally able to let it go, too. I knew instantly what to do with it.
THAT WEEK IN Florida was one of sad and somber reflection. Several hours after my grandma’s funeral, I walked along the miles of beach near her house, still wearing the flowing blue dress I’d worn to the ceremony. She loved it when I wore blue to match my eyes; black, she said, was too depressing. My grandma and I had made the trek down that stretch of beach together so many times that I could almost picture her footprints next to mine. I found an outof-the-way spot near an empty lifeguard stand and sank into the warm sand below. Soothed by the sound of the waves crashing, I flashed back to March 12, 2004.
I could still remember every last grim detail. Until that day, I had been in my own selfish world, but that all changed when I met the Wessons.
As I watched the setting sun sparkle across the endless blue ocean, everything seemed to make sense at last. The past few years had been filled with so many ups and downs as I risked everything to help this family right their upsidedown world. But I could see now that it had all been part of the bigger picture. We had come together for a reason. I had arrived in Fresno thinking only of my professional growth, but thanks to our symbiotic journey together, my development had taken me on a far more personal and spiritual path. I was so thankful that I’d chosen to let down my emotional walls and follow my human instincts. If I hadn’t, I never would have realized what I’d missed.
I thought about my dear friend Elizabeth. She was so busy making up for lost time as a parent that she didn’t have time to think about herself. Someone always needed her help, or her advice, or a ride somewhere. I was pleased that she finally had the freedom to bond with her grandbabies without having to worry that Marcus would beat them for crying when she left the house.
Over the past few years, I’d seen her struggle through the typical stages of grief and then some. Even now, she still felt so much pain and guilt—emotions that Marcus should have been feeling but wasn’t. She was the one stuck explaining her husband’s actions to her kids, when really, there was no explanation. But she was stronger now, she had her own voice, and she even spoke louder. I knew she was finally seeing Marcus for the man he really was.
My feelings were raw from losing my grandma, so I felt an even deeper sense of loss than usual for those nine wonderful souls who would never have the chance to realize their potential. I was sad that I would never know Sebhrenah, Lise, Illabelle, Jonathan, Aviv, Ethan, Marshey, Sedona, or Jeva. I gazed up at the puffy white clouds with wet, blurry eyes, then reached into my pocket for Elizabeth’s weathered little seashell.
Slowly, I walked waist-deep into the frigid water. I said a prayer for my grandma and the nine children, pulled my arm back like a baseball pitcher, and threw the shell as hard as I could into the crest of a wave. As I watched the purple and orange rays of the sunset fade into the horizon, I felt the overwhelming sense that my grandma was out there somewhere, taking care of those nine Wesson children.
If a fragile seashell could make its way out of the Pacific Ocean and end up in the Atlantic three decades later, anything was possible.
Epilogue
Today, the survivors of the Wesson mass murder are thriving.
Elizabeth continues to encourage her children to establish the close sibling relationships Marcus never allowed them to form. She no longer blames her nieces Ruby and Sofia for the murders and has apologized to both of them. In May of 2010, Elizabeth was legally divorced from Marcus. She has not written to him in years. She is attending community college in Fresno and has recently qualified for a scholarship based on her 4.0 average.
Rosie and her boyfriend had a baby girl in 2009. The happy family lives in Northern California. She has earned her GED and is taking courses to become a nurse. She continues to rescue and care for stray animals.
All the push-ups and sit-ups paid off for Kiani, who has become a fitness model, showing off her rock-hard abs and toned arms in runway fashion shows and print ads. She works in a pharmacy in Santa Cruz, where she lives with her boyfriend and their daughter.
Gypsy is attending a university in Fresno and is set to graduate with a business degree this fall. She works as an apartment manager and lives on her own with little Alysia. Alysia just finished kindergarten at a charter school, where she is thriving.
Dorian still lives in Santa Cruz and is pursuing his dream of becoming a martial arts instructor. Casting agents have approached him about becoming a model. Adrian moved to San Francisco. He works as a personal trainer and is taking college courses in nutrition and food science. He loves spending time with his two children.
After earning his GED, Marcus Jr. enrolled and graduated from a fire academy in the Fresno area. In 2010, a local fire department hired him as a firefighter.
Serafino works as a security supervisor in Fresno, where he and his wife are raising their two sons and a daughter. He still hopes to become a police officer someday.
Sofia and Ruby are both integrating themselves back into the family
, as the two split factions slowly learn to forgive each other.
The Fresno police detective Doug Reese was honored for his work in the Wesson case. He received a prestigious Investigative Excellence Award from the Robert Presley Institute of Criminal Investigation. Upon accepting the award, Reese said, “It was a big relief that there was closure.”
The Wessons’ house on Hammond Avenue was sold to a man who demolished it as a community service in July 2006, ridding the city of an unpleasant reminder.
Alysia recently moved to Los Angeles for her reporting career—these days focusing on American Idol and other entertainment stories, rather than hard news. She received one more letter from Marcus, giving her his permission for a prison visit if she would call him her friend. She refused and has no intention of responding.
Marcus remains on death row at San Quentin, where he has refused to meet with the defense lawyer handling his appeal. Due to a temporary moratorium on lethal injection in California, no one has been executed in the state since January of 2006.
The Wesson children’s physical scars of abuse are still fading, and the whole family, many through therapy, is working to erase the emotional scars. So far, Kiani, Rosie, Gypsy, and Marcus Jr. have changed their last names to disassociate themselves from their past—and Marcus Wesson.
Acknowledgments
Most of the information in this book came out of extensive interviews with the surviving Wesson family members. Special thanks to Elizabeth and Gypsy Wesson, who endured countless hours of relaying emotional details of their traumatic past. They, along with Kiani Wesson and Rosa Solorio, will always be an important part of my life. I am also grateful for my friends Dorian, Adrian, Marcus Jr., and Serafino Wesson for their candid interviews and honest answers, even when my questions were tough. Also for their, along with Almae Wesson’s, broadcast interviews early on in the case.
Much of the dialogue in this book was reconstructed based on Marcus Wesson’s wife and children’s memories of their lives with him. For police interrogations, 911 calls, diary entries, and trial testimony, I used court transcripts and exhibits whenever possible, or cross-checked information with published news reports. I also used portions of Marcus Wesson’s letters that he wrote me, as well as letters and songs his family made available to me after the trial.
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