Wesson Gets Death in 2004 Mass Murder

A jury decided Wednesday that Marcus Wesson should be put to death for killing nine of his children in a cult-like murder-suicide pact in this city’s worst mass murder.

Jurors deliberated nine hours before deciding on the death penalty for the 58-year-old Wesson, who had been convicted June 17 on nine counts of homicide in the March 2004 shooting deaths, even though he probably did not fire the murder weapon. Testimony indicated that Wesson’s 26-year-old daughter may have shot and killed her younger siblings before turning the gun on herself.

Wesson had subjected his children to years of incest and religious teachings that urged group suicide as a way to foil any attempt by government agencies to break up his family.

As the jurors walked into the courtroom, some smiling and waving and others near tears, Wesson, an aspiring songwriter, pretended to play a piano tune across the defense table.

Moments later, as the verdicts were read -- and each murder count was followed by a call for death -- Wesson looked straight ahead with his arms crossed and his hands clutching his shoulders.

Five of his seven surviving adult children, seated in the back row, held their heads in their hands and cried softly as their mother, Elizabeth Wesson, tried to comfort them.

Their father, wearing a bushy goatee, did not turn around to look at them.

Outside the courtroom, Fresno County prosecutor Lisa Gamoian, who had argued that Wesson directed the “extermination” of nine of his 16 children and “threw the babies in a pile like trash,” declined to comment. “I can’t say anything.”

Defense attorney Peter M. Jones said he was “extremely disappointed” with the jury’s decision. “You ask yourself, ‘What more could I have done? What else could I have done?’ You always second-guess yourself in a case like this.”

Jones had argued that Wesson’s life should be spared because he did not fire the murder weapon and his acts stemmed from an obvious mental illness -- two mitigating factors recognized by the courts. With a life sentence, he said, Wesson’s surviving children could benefit from his “good side.”

In addition to the nine counts of murder, Wesson had been found guilty two weeks ago of 14 counts of rape, oral copulation and sexual abuse involving three of his daughters and four of his nieces.

Testimony in the three-month trial showed that the Wesson clan faced the threat of a breakup March 12, 2004, when Fresno police officers arrived at their rented house to mediate a child custody dispute between Wesson and two of his former common-law wives, who were also his nieces.

As Wesson calmly talked to officers at the front door, his older daughter, Sebhrenah, gathered eight of her siblings, ages 1 to 17, in a rear bedroom. Each one was then shot in the head with a single .22-caliber gun. Sebhrenah was found dead atop the pile of bodies, the gun beneath her right arm.

Even if Wesson didn’t pull the trigger, jurors found, he brainwashed the children into following the murder-suicide pact through years of sexual abuse -- he fathered his own grandchildren -- and religious beliefs that mixed the worship of Jesus and vampires with a constant rant about a soon-to-come apocalypse.

His two sets of children and multiple wives evolved into a cult-like band that supported his financial and sexual needs as they moved from the Santa Cruz Mountains to Tomales Bay to the San Joaquin Valley -- from tent to houseboat to converted office.

His daughters and nieces were barely 8 when Wesson began his lessons “in loving,” testimony showed. At first, he fondled them over their clothes. As they grew older, he resorted to oral copulation and sexual intercourse.

“He controlled their bodies, their hopes and dreams,” Gamoian told jurors at the close of the two-day penalty hearing. “He controlled their deaths. He controlled the timing of it. He controlled the manner of it. Imagine the terror in that bedroom.”

Jones tried to portray Wesson as the product of a conflicted family that vacillated between religion and vice. His mother, a devout Seventh-day Adventist, spent long hours each day lecturing her children about the Second Coming, filling boxes with her notes and papers on the book of Revelation.

His father, an alcoholic, could not keep a steady job. He propositioned his son’s male friends for sex and lived for several years with a nephew. Growing up, Wesson stuttered and brought home stray dogs and cats that he nursed back to health.

But Jones had a difficult time digging deeper into Wesson’s background during the penalty phase. Wesson’s father died last year and his mother, Carrie, was too sick to travel from Washington state to testify. Wesson’s younger sister, Cheryl Penton, did testify but gave only sketchy details about how her mother’s religious beliefs and her father’s drinking and homosexual affairs had shadowed her brother.

Standing over a lectern, shoulders slumped, Jones spoke in somber tones about the gravity of the decision before the jury. “In this community, in this case, putting Marcus Wesson to death would be an easy thing to do,” he said. “Of course these crimes demand your outrage.... But you cannot view Marcus Wesson in a vacuum.”

Jones reminded jurors about trial testimony that Wesson had a kind, mentoring side all but lost in the depiction of him as a monster. “He is not the worst of the worst,” Jones repeated. He recounted a recent jailhouse visit between Wesson and his son Marcus Jr. in which Wesson counseled the young man not to let anger get the best of him.

Wesson told him that each of the men he had gotten to know in jail -- no matter their age, color or crimes -- shared one overriding trait: anger. “That pit has no bottom,” Jones quoted Wesson as telling his son. “You fall into the pit of anger and it goes all the way to hell.”

The lawyer read back testimony that revealed Wesson’s tenuous hold on reality, how he heard “electricity in his head,” how his older sons began to reject the “insanity” of his worship of Jesus and vampires. Jones said he was not arguing diminished mental capacity as a rationale for the crimes. But he said jurors could consider mental illness in choosing a life sentence over execution.

Gamoian used her closing to project pictures of the crime scene on a large screen, recalling what each child was wearing -- a bib, a diaper -- when he or she was shot through the eye. Whenever Gamoian underscored that Wesson directed the murders or may have pulled the trigger, Wesson shook his head no. But he did not protest when Gamoian called him “the master puppeteer, the manipulator.”

“He controlled their environment. The girls were not even allowed to talk to their brothers,” she said. “He insisted on complete isolation from the outside world.”

Superior Court Judge R.L. Putnam set July 27 for formal sentencing.