SOURCE http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/8190050.htm

Slaying suspect led nomadic life
FRESNO MAN, FAMILY MOVED AMONG SEVERAL LOCALES
By Crystal Carreon, Lisa Fernandez and Brandon Bailey
Mercury News

FRESNO - Mass murder suspect Marcus Wesson, the intimidating patriarch of a large and allegedly incestuous clan, lived an erratic, nomadic lifestyle on the fringes of society for more than 15 years.

While some family members defended Wesson as a loving father, others who encountered him over the years described him Sunday as controlling and stern. One neighbor said she heard Wesson lay down a chilling ultimatum on the afternoon that nine members of his extended family were found dead in his home.

``I'd rather kill them before I give them back to you,'' Linda Morales said she heard Wesson shout Friday, shortly before two women called police to say he was refusing to let them take their children from the house.

Wesson and his family had moved several times in recent years, from a small boat anchored at the Santa Cruz harbor, to a squatter's haven in the mountains outside Watsonville, before settling at the site of what Fresno police are calling the worst massacre in their city's history.

The scene inside that house, where bodies lay intertwined in a pile, was so ghastly that some of the first arriving officers have been placed on leave and given counseling, authorities said. Wesson, 57, is being held on suspicion of murder in the Fresno County Jail, with bail set at $9 million.

After announcing Saturday that Wesson had fathered two of the youngest victims by impregnating his own daughters, police had no more to say Sunday about what led to the killings.

But some acquaintances said Wesson's mental condition and physical appearance had begun to deteriorate in recent years.

``We would be talking about the roof,'' said Frank Muna, who sold a home to members of Wesson's family, ``and he would go off on a tangent about a social issue, like the system was bent against him.''

Muna also recalled complaints from neighbors that Wesson lived a polygamist lifestyle with four adult women, who dressed in black from head to toe and were always quiet in front of the older man.

``It was very clear that they were subservient to him,'' said Muna, who also came to believe that Wesson had a physically intimate relationship with the women. Wesson told Muna that two of the women were his nieces.

``They would walk behind him and look down,'' Muna added. ``Whatever he said, they would do. It was clear he was the one in control.''

Family members have denied allegations that Wesson committed incest. Police have said they are looking into the possibility of his having sexual relations with other family members in addition to his two daughters. Eliza Whitney, a longtime acquaintance and neighbor of Wesson's mother-in-law, said he had also impregnated two of his nieces and had a prior relationship with his wife's mother.

Wesson met his wife, Elizabeth, when his family lived near hers in East San Jose during the 1960s, according to Elizabeth's sister, Rosemary Solorio. In a brief interview, she described her sister's husband as religious, loving and a good provider for his family. Relatives say Wesson is a Seventh-day Adventist. In a press release issued Sunday, the Adventist church said it had no record of Wesson being a member.

Others who knew him over the years said Wesson appeared to be struggling to support his extended family.

In the early 1990s, Wesson apparently lived at the Santa Cruz harbor with a handful of young children in a battered, 26-foot sailboat that had no toilet or bathing facilities. Veteran harbor worker Tim Morely said he never saw the children's mother, but he distinctly remembers the kids scavenging cans and bottles for recycling.

Though Wesson was known as something of a ``character,'' Morely said, he was ``pretty mellow and easygoing. He's not somebody I ever thought would do anything violent in any way.''

Wesson was often behind in paying his slip rental fee, however. And the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that he was briefly jailed on a conviction for welfare fraud in 1990.

In the mid-1990s, sometime after Wesson and his family left the harbor, residents in a remote area of the Santa Cruz Mountains recall that Wesson, his wife and 14 children began living in a deeply secluded patch of woods.

Neighbors believe the family was squatting illegally on the property, living in a vehicle or a trailer of some kind, according to Jennifer Wuthers, whose house is about a mile down an unpaved road from the site.

It's not unusual for drifters and even fugitives to camp out in the area, Wuthers said, and no one felt the need to notify authorities. But she said the family was memorable because Elizabeth Wesson seemed extremely quiet and was apparently schooling the children at home.


A few years later, Wesson surfaced in Fresno, where he first approached Muna as an ``adviser'' to four women who ultimately purchased a historic but dilapidated house that Muna owned.


Though he initially found Wesson to be intelligent and well-spoken, Muna said, he became frustrated because the group fell behind on a promise to restore the house and neighbors complained that they were living on the property in a tool shed that lacked plumbing.

It was about a year ago that Wesson and several members of his family moved to another house in Fresno, on Hammond Street. Neighbors say there were several children. The boys were allowed to play outdoors, but the girls were kept inside.

Two weeks ago, one of the women who lived with Wesson came to neighbor Linda Morales' home and pleaded to use her phone. Morales said Wesson came over a short time later and yelled at the woman, telling her to come home with him. The woman stayed until dawn before returning home.

Then on Friday, neighbors say, a number of adults drove up to the house where Wesson lived. There was shouting, followed shortly after by gunshots.

A coroner's official told Fresno television station KFSM that all the victims appeared to have been shot, and that authorities are still investigating the possibility that one victim may have also fired shots.

Paul Harvey, who was raised in an Adventist home, in his noon news program did not mention the Wesson case by name. But instead, he quoted from the sermon of Pastor Charles White of the Phoenix, Ar. church from last Sabbath's service about being like migrating geese. It was very positive and shed marvelous light on Adventists and their teachings. Good for him, good for all of us.

SOURCE http://www.in-forum.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D81B281G1

Six of Nine Fresno Victims Were Shot
By JULIANA BARBASSA Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press - 03/15/2004

FRESNO, Calif.

At least six of the nine family members discovered slain in a Fresno home over the Weekend had been shot to death, the coroner's office said Monday.

Investigators were still working to determine the cause of deaths of the three others. The victims were found tangled in a pile of clothes when police went to the home about a child custody dispute Friday.

Marcus Wesson, thought to be the father and grandfather of the victims, walked out of the home covered in blood and was booked on suspicion of nine counts of murder.

Police said Wesson, 57, may have been involved in polygamy and is thought to have fathered children with at least four women, including two of his own daughters.

Police said Wesson has cooperated with the investigation, but no motive had been determined.

Wesson's arraignment was scheduled for Wednesday, and bail was set at $9 million.

Authorities expected to complete the autopsies later Monday and release the names of the victims: a 24-year-old woman and eight children ranging in age from 1 to 17.

Coroner Loralee Cervantes told the Fresno Bee that police conducted tests to determine if there was gunshot residue on the hands of one of the victims, indicating Wesson may have had help with the shootings. Police Lt. Herman Silva said that checking for residue is standard practice.

Acquaintances said Wesson and his family appeared to live a nomadic, insular existence. The family moved several times in recent years, from a small boat anchored off Santa Cruz to the mountains outside Watsonville, before settling in Fresno.

In the early 1990s, Wesson lived with a few children on a battered, 26-foot sailboat that had no toilet or bathing facilities.


During that time, he was jailed briefly after being convicted of welfare fraud, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported. Wesson failed to list his boat as an asset on welfare forms. He also was frequently delinquent with his slip fees, the newspaper said.

Others acquaintances said Wesson appeared with women and children who seemed to be under his control. Frank Muna, a lawyer who once sold the murder suspect a house, said the women wore dark robes and scarves, walked behind Wesson and did not speak when he was present.

The children were home-schooled because Wesson did not trust public education, his sons said, and Wesson, who did not work, was supported by the women.

His sons, Dorian, 29, who lives in Santa Cruz, and Serafino, 19, who lived at the Fresno house, could not say whether he was married or how many children he has fathered, the Fresno Bee reported. They said the family belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist church.


Associated Press Writers Brian Melley and Brian Skoloff contributed to this report.

For me..it is always on a case by case basis.

I have had people think I was a Mormon or Jehovah Witness..
There are all different levels of personal knowledge out there.
In case a family member asks...I will respond depending on the words and tone of the question.

As far as the knee jerk emotion/reaction..to the news that Wesson was SDA...it was sort of like when a Marine heard that Lee Harvey Oswald was a former Marine...

SOURCE http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/8193849.htm

Coroner: All 9 Fresno victims were shot

By JULIANA BARBASSA

Associated Press

FRESNO, Calif. - All nine family members discovered slain in a Fresno home over the weekend had been shot to death, the coroner's office said Monday.


Investigators were still working to determine the relationships among the victims, who were found tangled in a pile of clothes when police went to the home about a child custody dispute Friday.


Marcus Wesson, thought to be the father and grandfather of the victims, walked out of the home covered in blood and was booked on suspicion of nine counts of murder.


Police said Wesson, 57, may have been involved in polygamy and is thought to have fathered children with at least four women, including two of his own daughters.


Police said Wesson has cooperated with the investigation, but no motive had been determined.


Wesson's arraignment was scheduled for Wednesday; bail was set at $9 million.


Authorities expected to release the names of the victims later: a 24-year-old woman and eight children ranging in age from 1 to 17.


Coroner Loralee Cervantes told the Fresno Bee that police conducted tests to determine if there was gunshot residue on the hands of one of the victims, indicating Wesson may have had help with the shootings. Police Lt. Herman Silva said checking for residue is standard practice.


The victims, who had six different mothers, showed no signs of physical or sexual abuse, Cervantes said Monday.


Acquaintances said Wesson and his family appeared to live a nomadic, insular existence. The family moved several times in recent years, from a small boat anchored off Santa Cruz to the mountains outside Watsonville, before settling in Fresno.


In the early 1990s, Wesson lived with a few children on a battered, 26-foot sailboat that had no toilet or bathing facilities.


During that time, he was jailed briefly after being convicted of welfare fraud, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported. Wesson failed to list his boat as an asset on welfare forms. He also was frequently delinquent with his slip fees, the newspaper said.


Other acquaintances said Wesson appeared with women and children who seemed to be under his control. Frank Muna, a lawyer who once sold the murder suspect a house, said the women wore dark robes and scarves, walked behind Wesson and did not speak when he was present.


Muna said Monday police interviewing him said Wesson killed his children because he didn't want them taken away from him.


"He really thinks what he did was right," Muna said.


Silva, the police spokesman, refused to confirm Muna's account, saying only, "We're looking at every possible motive and not dismissing anything."


The children were home-schooled because Wesson did not trust public education, his sons said, and Wesson, who did not work, was supported by the women.


Police Chief Jerry Dyer said investigators will likely need DNA testing to determine the biological parents of all the victims. "We're in the very early stages of a very complex investigation," he said.


Wesson's sons, Dorian, 29, who lives in Santa Cruz, and Serafino, 19, who lived at the Fresno house, could not say whether he was married or how many children he has fathered, the Fresno Bee reported. They said the family belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist church. A church spokeswoman said Monday there's no record of Wesson's membership.


(Associated Press Writers Brian Melley and Brian Skoloff contributed to this report.)

I could not click on your link. I clicked it, but it did not work. I then noticed that the whole web address was not part of the link. I had to manually type in ,2933,114154,00.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,114154,00.html

I pasted it here to see if it works. Maybe the problem is with my computer but just in case it isn't I posted this message.

FoxNews does someting different, they use commas, never seen that done before and it switches you back to the main page.

here it is

SOURCE http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fresno19mar19,1,3161849.story?coll=la-home-local

CALIFORNIA
Family Tries to Fathom Killings in Fresno


FRESNO CA
MASS MURDERS
POLYGAMY
CALIFORNIA
FRESNO CA MASS MURDERS FAMILIES POLYGAMY
FAMILIES

By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer


FRESNO — The man accused of killing nine of his children and grandchildren in a mass murder involving polygamy and incest grew up in a sheltered world shaped by two hard-working parents and the strict ways of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

People searching for clues to Marcus Wesson's alleged crimes need not look at his childhood, his elderly mother said Thursday.

"The Marcus Wesson on TV I don't recognize. That's not my son," Carrie Wesson told The Times from her home in Washington state. "The Marcus Wesson I raised was a brilliant, loving, God-fearing child."

One week after the worst mass murder in Fresno's history, as the image of the stout man with a face full of bushy hair and dreadlocks to his knees found its way across the globe, members of his family tried to fathom what forces might have pushed him over the edge.

His mother said he had called her two days before last Friday's killings to inquire about his father, who is fighting cancer. He sounded upbeat, she recalled, saying he was hard at work converting another school bus into a gleaming motor home so his younger children could see the country.

"He was so concerned about his father. He ended every conversation with 'I love you, Dad. I love you, Mom.' He never forgot our birthdays. Never forgot Mother's Day. And he felt the same way about those kids.

"To make him do this, there must have been some big trauma. Something that pushed him over," she said. "My son was not an animal. My son was loved."

Relatives said they remained baffled over a possible motive. Wesson never told them he felt cornered, that he was facing eviction from yet another house or that the estranged mothers of his young children were demanding custody.

"If Marcus is guilty, I would really feel disappointed in my country if it didn't make him face the penalty," his mother said. "But I'm a biblical person too, and I don't believe in capital punishment.

"What I would like for Marcus to do is sit in prison and think about what he's done and read the Bible. I think he will come back. Spiritually he will come back. Because I want to see my son in heaven someday," she said, sobbing.

Members of his family recalled the boy born in Kansas who could put together intricate puzzles that confounded adults, who constructed go-carts and electric cars out of parts picked up at flea markets and passed on this love of building to his children.

"My dad wanted his children to make something out of nothing," said his oldest son, Dorian Wesson, 29. "If I wanted a toy, he'd buy the wood and supplies and tell me to use my imagination and create what I wanted.

"He didn't trust the outside world. Public schools, kids taking drugs, gangbanging, computers and TV. That was considered corrupt. He wanted something better for us. I grew up feeling free."

Marcus Wesson lived an odd life, they acknowledged, fathering two sets of children — 16 altogether — in different parts of California. There was Dorian and an older group of sons and daughters who ranged in age from 17 to 29 and were raised by one mother. They grew up following their father as he moved from one renovation project to another, houses in San Jose, Santa Cruz and Fresno and boats in Marin County.

And there was a second group of children ages 8 and younger who were born to different mothers and lived with Wesson in a small house in a working-class neighborhood of central Fresno. Those children are now all dead.

His mother and oldest son said they were never aware that Wesson had a sexual relationship with two of his own daughters and that two of the deceased children were products of incest.

"I thought it was strange that my sisters had these babies and they never said who the fathers were," Dorian Wesson recalled. "They told me the kids came from artificial insemination, and I believed them."

As perverse as the family dynamic became, they said, Wesson held on to some of the core values he grew up with. He loved his children and tried to safeguard them from the more negatives aspects of American culture. Despite media speculation, they said, he wasn't a member of any fringe sect.

"Our family is a good family," Carrie Wesson said. "This is a Christian family. This is not a cult."

From the earliest age, she said, her son exhibited a nimble mind for building things and a big heart for rescuing animals. He was their first child — an earlier pregnancy ended in a still birth — and she and her husband, Benjamin Franklin Wesson, doted on him. They had a tall stack of gospel records, and she'd tell him she wanted to hear one song in particular and he knew exactly where to find it.

"He was only 2 years old and I'd say I'm in the mood to hear 'I Don't Possess Houses of Gold,' and that little Marcus would hunt through those albums in nothing flat and put it on the old-fashioned turntable."

He cared for lizards, snakes and toads and once found a dog left for dead in a trash can. "I told him, 'That dog's dead,' but he wouldn't believe me. 'Momma, I can hear a faint heartbeat.' He fed it milk all day and night and brought it back to life."

After the family left Kansas and moved to the San Jose area, they remained devoted members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. They worshiped on Saturdays, didn't attend dances, dressed modestly and kept to a vegetarian diet.

"His entertainment was the church. He wasn't running around seeing what little girl he could catch," his mother said. "Instead, he'd be at the table eating food, always stuffing his face. That's why he got that big."

She said he grew up in a solid middle-class home with a father who had a steady job, though she declined to say what it was. "I want to keep our privacy as much as possible," she explained. In his teenage years, her son began to build all sorts of motorized vehicles out of shopping carts and scrap metal. One caught the eye of an engineering professor at Stanford, she said.

"I know I'm bragging, but this professor asked Marcus where he got his training to build it. Marcus told him he didn't have any degrees, no formal education beyond high school. He told him, 'It's a gift from God.' "

During the Vietnam War, Wesson was stationed in Germany and came home with a different political outlook, she said.

"We always liked nice things, nice furniture, but Marcus said we were too materialistic. He got married and kind of dropped out," she recalled. "I wouldn't say he became a hippie, but he had some of that hippie lifestyle."

Wesson met Elizabeth Solorio in San Jose and married her when she was 15. They had five boys — Dorian, Adrian, Almae, Marcus and Serafino — and four girls — Sebhrenah, Kiani, Gypsy and Elizabeth. Wesson has been charged with fatally shooting both Sebhrenah, 25, and Elizabeth, 17.

"Dad home-schooled us," Dorian said. "He taught us algebra and trigonometry. We kept to the Seventh-day Adventist teachings, but we didn't go to church as often."

They lived in a modest house his father built in the Santa Cruz Mountains and then sold the house for three acres nearby. "We flip-flopped from San Jose to Santa Cruz to Fresno when I was 10. And then we moved back to Santa Cruz."

Carrie Wesson recalls her son buying a bus and renovating it into a motor home. "It was a piece of junk when he bought it," she said, "and he turned it into something beautiful. It had a shower, beds and a laundry room with a chute for dirty clothes."

In 1998, Wesson and wife Elizabeth returned to Fresno, while Dorian and several of the older siblings found jobs and stayed on the coast. It was about this time that Wesson began living with several women — women related to each other — and having more children.

The women worked as hotel clerks and restaurant waitresses. Wesson had enough money to indulge his passion for expensive antique and reproduction furniture. He was a frequent visitor to Dugovic's antique store in Fresno, where 11 hand-carved coffins from Indonesia caught his eye in the late 1990s. He bought the coffins for about $5,000 with the idea of using their mahogany on one the boats he still owned in Marin County, said owner Lois Dugovic.

Wesson put a lot of dreams into a historic home in the middle of Fresno that had been gutted by fire, his family said. He and the women put a down payment on the house and began renovating it. He built an elaborate roof and did the framing by himself, but he ran out of money and defaulted on the loan.

They moved into the house on West Hammond, and he and the women began spending more time renovating a new bus — this one with bright yellow paint, gleaming chrome sides and even a spa in the back. It was halfway done when the killings stopped everything.

Wesson had kept the coffins, stacked in the living room, as part of a plan to move back to the coast and fix up the boats, family members say.

"He told me, 'Momma, you won't believe it. I'm back into another bus. This one's going to be as nice as the last one,' " his mother said. "He sounded good. He was a beautiful and caring man. Some big trauma. Something big pushed him over."