Marcus Wesson : A Different Kind of True Crime Story
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In 2004, I was sitting at my desk at The San Diego Union Tribune, reading the day’s top stories on the news wire when I came across a shocking article about a guy in Fresno, California, who had killed nine of his own children, some of whom he’d fathered with his daughters and nieces. Talk about tragic and twisted.
Marcus Wesson was a scary looking man, not just because he was a hulking 300 pounds, but also because his long frizzy gray dreadlocks made him look even more menacing. He had come out of his house wearing a black T-shirt, drenched in fresh blood, leaving his nine dead children behind, stacked in a pile in the back bedroom. The horror of it all made even the police officers cry.
The details that emerged were pretty bizarre, the kind that stick in your mind for years. Wesson had been running his own mini-cult in that house, controlling his wife, his daughters, sons, and nieces with isolation, abuse, incest, and a brainwashing religious regimen. And now he had ordered his 25-year-old daughter to 
shoot eight of the younger children, three of whom were still in diapers, and then herself – all so CPS couldn’t break up the family. So the family could stay together in heaven.
A year ago, I got an e-mail from my literary agency asking if I’d be interested in working with TV reporter Alysia Sofios to write a book about her own take on this story for Simon & Schuster/Pocket. Only it wouldn’t be your basic true crime book.
This one would be more of an inspirational and hopeful memoir, chronicling Alysia’s decision to secretly take several female survivors of the Wesson family into her own apartment. In doing so, she put her entire career at risk, casting aside her journalistic objectivity and choosing instead to be a human being, a decision she says she has never regretted for a moment.
The idea of writing a true crime book with such a positive, uplifting twist was a vastly attractive concept to me after I had spent the better part of a year writing about Wayne Adam Ford, a serial killer who had tortured, raped and killed four women before turning himself in to authorities. The only catch was that we had only 11 weeks to turn in a first draft.
I accepted the challenge, and I am truly glad that I did. I dived with enthusiasm into the world that Alysia and the Wesson women had created together over the past four years. Theirs is a story of building a new family with hope, of women helping women, and of healing, recovery and resilience. I found their story to be profoundly inspirational indeed.
Alysia and several of the Wesson family members will be appearing on “Dr. Phil” on Thursday, September 24, to talk about their story in light of the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping by Phillip Garrido. And now, just for ICB readers, is an excerpt from Where Hope Begins, which was just released last week.
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