“Shepherd” in wolf’s clothing
Marcus Wesson, it seemed, always wanted to be a spiritual leader. He was born in 1946, the oldest of four children, into what could only be called a dysfunctional family. His father, Benjamin, was an abusive alcoholic who never held down a steady job and, once, left the family for several years to live with another man. On the other hand, his mother, Carrie, was a strict Seventh-Day Adventist who led the family in daily Bible studies and would whip the children with an electrical cord.
Despite all this, as a child, Marcus was remembered by relatives as kind and a good singer. His favorite game was “playing preacher.”
Marcus dropped out of high school at 17 and joined the military, where he was a medic or ambulance driver (sources differ). He left the military with an honorable discharge and settled in San Jose, California. There he met Rosemary Maytorena, a woman 13 years his senior, who had eight children from previous relationships. Marcus seemed eager to take on the big family, since he believed they needed a “shepherd” to guide them.
The two soon had a son together. At one point, one of Maytorena’s older daughters (also named Rosemary), struggling with drug addiction, dropped off her seven children, bringing the number of children in the household to 16.
But it was Maytorena’s 8-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, that Marcus was most fixated on. He claimed that God had told him that Elizabeth was his wife, and he held a home “marriage ceremony” to the child. He then took her out of school to begin personally “teaching” her. When Elizabeth was 12, he began sexually assaulting her.
Shockingly, Maytorena’s reaction to this was not to protect her daughter. Instead, she merely insisted that they wait until Elizabeth was of legal age — 15 — to get married. But at 14, Elizabeth became pregnant with Marcus’ baby, and the two were wed as soon as she was of legal age to marry. Marcus would go on to father 10 more children with her before she reached the age of 26.
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