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A review by sistermagpie
By Their Father's Hand: The True Story of the Wesson Family Massacre by Monte Francis
2.0
I hadn't heard about these murders--a fact that the author points out is surprising. They happened right around the time of the Scott Peterson trial and people were more interested in that. There could be some troubling reason for the disinterest, but reading the book was really just depressing. As horrible as it is that this man either killed or brainwashed his daughters to kill 7 children and themselves, the story is distressingly familiar.
You take a guy with a Bible, his own imaginative interpretations of the Bible (Jesus was a vampire and so are we....) and a women and you've got a misogynist cult. Marcus Wesson married his wife when she was 14 after having a child with her mother, then had more children, and had children with those children along with his nieces. The girls in the family were molested from early ages and given tons of lectures about correct behavior (don't talk to other men). The women made all the money in the family and did all the work, even heavy lifting. Some of the surviving family to this day blame the girls who rebelled for the murders, because if they hadn't tried to get their children away from the guy nobody would have had to shoot them all in the eye.
You take a guy with a Bible, his own imaginative interpretations of the Bible (Jesus was a vampire and so are we....) and a women and you've got a misogynist cult. Marcus Wesson married his wife when she was 14 after having a child with her mother, then had more children, and had children with those children along with his nieces. The girls in the family were molested from early ages and given tons of lectures about correct behavior (don't talk to other men). The women made all the money in the family and did all the work, even heavy lifting. Some of the surviving family to this day blame the girls who rebelled for the murders, because if they hadn't tried to get their children away from the guy nobody would have had to shoot them all in the eye.