Slaying suspect not son I know, mother says

FRESNO, Calif. — 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 mother said Thursday from her Washington state home.

"The Marcus Wesson on TV I don't recognize. That's not my son," Carrie Wesson said. "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 around the globe, family members tried to fathom what forces might have pushed him over the edge.

His mother said he had called her two days before the March 12 killings to inquire about his father, who is fighting cancer. Wesson sounded upbeat, she recalled, saying he was 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 is not an animal. My son was loved."

Relatives said they remained baffled over a possible motive. Wesson, 57, never told them he felt cornered, that he was facing eviction from 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," she said, sobbing, "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."

Family members 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. There was Dorian and an older group of sons and daughters who ranged in age from 17 to 29 and were reared 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. Those children are all dead. His mother and oldest son said they hadn't known Wesson had a sexual relationship with two daughters and that two of the dead 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."

Wesson loved his children and tried to safeguard them from negatives aspects of American culture, mother and son said. Despite media speculation, they said, he wasn't a member of a fringe sect.

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

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, although she declined to say what it was. "I want to keep our privacy as much as possible," she said. Her son, as a teenager, 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.

"He told him, 'It's a gift from God.' "

Wesson was stationed in Germany during the Vietnam War 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," his mother recalled. "I wouldn't say he became a hippie, but he had some of that hippie lifestyle."