It was Wednesday, March 12, 2004. A small Californian community’s destiny was changed in a single day. In the front yard of a tiny house, two women shouted angrily while being surrounded by friends and family. They sought the freedom of their children. After observing the commotion outside, the neighbors called the police.

The police believed it to be a standard child custody dispute when they arrived.

On the other hand, the gloomy man with the long dreadlocks went back inside and locked the door.

He was asked to open the door so they could talk by the officers. The first gunshot was heard at that moment. Within minutes, the air was pierced by a hail of gunfire. Police officers surrounded the home. The same enormous man covered in blood, Marcus Wesson, walked calmly into the direct sunlight. As he was taken into custody and handcuffed, he was unusually quiet.

The Troubling Crime Scene

When they found nine bodies stacked in one of the home’s rooms, the authorities were in for a grisly sight. All nine victims—seven of them minors—were under the age of twelve.

The mothers who frantically called for their children on that terrible day were Sofina Solorio and Ruby Ortiz. Those mothers were his nieces, and the man with the graying dreadlocks was Marcus Wesson.

Wesson killed nine of his children and grandchildren because he thought he was Jesus and that “we would all go to heaven” if anyone tried to split up.

Marcus Wesson’s depiction of Jesus Christ as a vampire is even more terrifying. They both had the key to eternal life, he reasoned. He wrote, “Drinking blood was the path to immortality,” in his own personal bible. Months prior to the massacre, Wesson had also acquired twelve antique coffins for the family, solidifying the Anne Rice way of life. Later, he claimed that his children had beds made out of the burial goods.

The Welson Family

The Wesson family in Fresno, California, had become notorious as the terrible details of their past came to light.

The patriarch of the family, Marcus Wesson, was the father or grandfather of all eighteen of his offspring.

He had an incestuous relationship with his nieces Rosa, Sofina, and Ruby Ortiz as well as his children Kiani and Sebhrenah. Wesson also had several children from his child marriages, including two of his daughters and three of his nieces.

One of the nieces, Ruby Ortiz, testified that Marcus Wesson started physically abusing her when she was eight years old. She claimed that Wesson had claimed the sexual assault was “a father’s way of showing affection to his daughter.”

When Ortiz was thirteen years old, Wesson informed her that she was of legal age to marry and that “God wants man to have more than one wife.” God’s people are disappearing, he continued. We must protect God’s children. “We need more children for the Lord.” This resulted in Ortiz and Wesson having one child, a baby boy named Aviv.

The women in the family, according to Marcus Wesson’s daughters and nieces Kiani Wesson and Rosa Solorio, were happy. They said that everything that happened in the house was done with communication and consent. It was all voluntarily done. We lived in a democratic household. There was never any coercion or rape.

The females revealed that they conceived through “artificial insemination.”

Wesson’s sons, who claimed that their father nurtured them as Seventh-Day Adventists and that “he’s the best parent anyone could ever have,” had a very different experience from his daughters. One of the murderer’s sons, Serafino Wesson, expressed shock and said, “He appears incredibly threatening… I can’t believe he did it, though, because he’s such a nice guy.

The Wesson sons were raised apart from their sisters because it was discouraged for women and men to interact with one another. The kids knew very little about the strange lives of their father and sisters.

And on that fateful day, Sofina Solorio and Ruby Ortiz discovered Marcus Wesson was preparing to move the entire family to Washington State when they arrived at the Wesson residence.

Sofina and Ruby hastened to seek custody of their sons, fearful of losing all contact with them, they protested. This pushed Marcus to kill his children because he thought that of instead of being separated, they would rather all go to heaven.