He didn’t take a plane to Texas but instead remained in the house with the corpses for the remainder of Saturday and all day Sunday, during which time he destroyed his diaries and other personal effects. He also tore up photos which Nancy had taken of her earlier domestic abuse injuries – he was apparently attempting to sanitise his life before the murders, yet made no attempt to hide or destroy his steroids and large stack of non-prescription medicines.
When wrestling officials phoned to ask why he hadn’t turned up, Chris Benoit repeated the lie that his family were ill and vomiting blood. He sounded normal during these phone calls but he had always been good at hiding his feelings. Indeed, he had only broken down twice in public, both times when talking of his wrestling friend Eddie’s premature death.
In the early hours of Monday morning, Benoit sent several texts to a friend, saying that the side door of the garage was open and that his Rottweilers were in the pool area. Satisfied that the dogs would soon be found, he went to his home gym and committed suicide by hanging himself from his weights machine.
After his death, journalists found that a doctor had been supplying the desperate wrestler with 10 months’ worth of steroids on a monthly basis, and an autopsy showed that he had 10 times the normal level of testosterone in his system when he died. His brain was so badly damaged through repeated injury that it resembled the brain of a man more than twice his age.
Sadly, Benoit was an accident waiting to happen. He’d been warned again and again to stop doing specific aerobatics, to start faking injuries rather than doing lunatic stunts which broke bones and caused permanent brain damage. With his million-dollar house, money in the bank and an appreciative fan base, he could easily have moved sideways into another aspect of the wrestling business or the keep fit industry. As Matthew Randazzo, his posthumous biographer, put it: ‘Child killer Chris Benoit is no victim – the voluntary choice to pursue a pro-wrestling career is fundamentally too stupid, irresponsible and silly ever to allow for victimhood.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IN THE NAME OF HONOUR
For most rational adults, making a baby means creating a unique person who grows up to have free will and can make their own decisions. But extreme traditionalist families refuse to let their daughters date – far less marry – the partner of their choice. If the girl insists on living her own life, they are prepared to murder her, often in a particularly violent way. There were 30 such honour killings discovered in Britain between 2005 and 2007 but there are undoubtedly more cases which remain undiscovered, as the killer’s family and community often conspire to cover up the homicide.
MAHMOD MAHMOD
A Kurd who was living in London, the quirkily-named Mahmod Mahmod believed that his 20-year-old daughter Banaz had brought disgrace on the family by leaving her unhappy marriage to an Iraqi Kurd, which had been arranged for her when she was 17. He beat her and called her a whore for becoming westernised. His rage increased when she fell in love with an Iranian Kurd, Rhamat Suleimani. The couple were deeply in love but received death threats from Banaz’s relatives.
Banaz was badly beaten up by strangers and was convinced that her father and his brother (her uncle Ari) were behind this attempted murder. Speaking from her hospital bed, she said that both men wanted to kill her. Her boyfriend took mobile phone footage of her statement, footage which would later be shown in court.
Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari, 50, knew that the police were closing in. On 24 January 2006, they arranged for several young men from the Kurdish community to murder her at her home in Mitcham in Surrey. She was kicked, punched and raped during an ordeal which lasted two and a half hours, after which the men garrotted her to death.
Her boyfriend fearfully reported her missing. If he hadn’t, her disappearance would never have come to light. Meanwhile, someone stuffed Banaz’s broken body into a suitcase and took it to Birmingham where it was buried in a back garden. It was found, badly decomposed, in April of that year.
Details of the 20-year-old’s agonizing last hours came to light when one of her killers, 30-year-old Mohamad Hama, visited a friend in prison. Police secretly taped the conversation, and heard Hama laughing as he described stamping on her neck to get her soul out. He said that Banaz’s uncle had supervised her ordeal.
At the Old Bailey trial, Banaz’s sister Berkhai said that if she hadn’t escaped from her father’s house, she would have suffered the same fate. Mahmod Mahmod was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 2007 for his daughter’s murder, with the mandate that he serve a minimum of 20 years. His brother Ari was given a 23-year minimum sentence.
ABDALLA YONES
Yones, a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan, lived in London with his family. He was a volunteer worker at the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and retained his Muslim beliefs. He wanted his children to marry fellow Muslims and may even have been considering an arranged marriage for his teenage daughter, Heshu.
Heshu suffered terribly at her father’s hands as he beat her for wearing makeup and for going to friends’ houses after school. Planning to run away, she wrote him a letter which said ‘Bye Dad, sorry I was so much trouble. Me and you will probably never understand each other. But I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted…’ She added ‘for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick. I hope you enjoyed testing your strength on me.’
At 16, she fell in love with a Lebanese Christian boy at school and enjoyed a sexual relationship with him. But someone sent an anonymous letter to her father saying that she was behaving like a prostitute. He had wanted to marry her off to a cousin in Kurdistan but now realised that this was not an option as she was no longer a virgin. He decided that the family’s honour was at stake, that Heshu had to die.
On 12 October 2002 his wife went out, taking their 12-year-old son with her. Terrified at being alone with her violent father, Heshu locked herself in the bathroom but Abdalla Yones battered down the door. The 48-year-old went on to stab her 11 times and cut her throat, leaving her to bleed to death. In an apparent murder-suicide, he sliced at his own throat before throwing himself from the third floor balcony of the family’s flat in Acton, west London.
But Yones survived, though he spent the next four months in hospital. He maintained that he and his daughter had been attacked by members of Al-Qaeda, but detectives had read Heshu’s letter and knew how often he had brutalised her. A week before his trial began, he admitted that he’d made up the story about Islamic terrorists and said he’d stabbed the teenager to death. He was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Old Bailey in September 2003.
Afterwards, Andy Baker, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s serious crime directorate said ‘There is no honour in killing another human being.’
ABDEL NASSER IBRAHIM
In an unusual take on the honour killings motive – a kind of pre-emptive strike – this father attempted to murder all seven of his daughters because he was enraged that he had no sons.
A traditionalist, he refused to let the girls attend school. In October 2004, he had an argument with his wife of 18 years over her supposed failure to provide a boy child. (In reality, it’s the man’s sperm which determines a baby’s gender.) Upset and afraid of his rage, she left their home in Sohag, near Cairo, and went to stay at her parents’ house.
Hours later, the 47-year-old Egyptian, who was a mosque prayer caller in Tima, fetched two knives and stabbed his sleeping daughters repeatedly. Their screams pierced the dawn air and alarmed neighbours awoke and, some time later, called the police. They arrived to find that he’d murdered Samar aged 15, Isra aged 10, Fatima aged eight and Zeinab aged seven. The other three girls recovered from their wounds.
Arrested and asked to explain his actions, Ibrahim said that he had feared his daughters would grow up to become promiscuous. His sentence was not reported in the British press.
ALI ABDEL-QADER
Incredibly, some so-called honour killers still get away with murder. Ali Abdel-Qader, an Iraqi with links to t
he police and Basra government, went berserk when he found out that his 17-year-old daughter, Rand, had grown close to a Christian British soldier. She told her best friend that he was called Paul and that he referred to her as his princess. She had met him through voluntary work that she was doing in Basra and he had vowed to take her back to London with him.
But her father was so enraged when he found out about their five-month romance that he beat her to death, repeatedly kicking her and stamping on her throat. He was questioned by Iraqi police for two hours then released without charge.
Weeks after the killing, Abdel-Qader remained unrepentant, telling journalists ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her.’ He added that he believed he was released ‘because everyone knows that honour killings are sometimes impossible not to commit.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HEAVEN CAN’T WAIT
Religious zealots often see themselves as superior to non believers. They also tend to put religious law (or their own version of it) before the law of the land.
The late Ray Wyre, an expert intreating sex offenders, noted that the born again Christian was the bane of his existence. He also treated many members of the clergy who were particularly active paedophiles.
The following case is particularly heinous as this self-styled preacher killed his children rather than let them live independently.
MARCUS DELON WESSON
Raised by devout Seventh Day Adventist parents, Marcus childhood revolved around daily Bible readings, and evening and weekend church attendance and choir singing. Friends would later describe him as a black Jesus. His mother beat him – and his three siblings – with a switch when he angered her. He was also beaten by his sadistic bi-sexual father, who later had an affair with a teenage male relative.
As he matured, Marcus incorporated his religious father’s bisexuality into his own belief system, writing that God and his first creation, Adam, equalled a form of spiritual homosexual union.
In his twenties, he began an affair with an older woman and had a child with her but soon switched his attentions to her 14-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. He married Elizabeth in 1974 when she was 15 and expecting his child. He was 27. At this stage, he worked for a bank but he soon quit and the couple spent the rest of their married life together on welfare benefits.
They had their first son in 1974 and continued to procreate until they had 11 children, one of whom died at six months of meningitis and another who was stillborn. Marcus parented his nine surviving offspring as he’d been parented, subjecting them to daily prayer meetings which could last for several hours. He said that they were being home schooled but, as the couple had little formal education, this amounted to little more than reading the Bible. He beat them when they couldn’t make sense of his teachings and, as the girls became teenagers, he repeatedly sexually abused them in the name of love.
INCEST
He began to create an extended family by impregnating his own daughters, telling them that they had to ‘have babies for the Lord.’ Kiana gave birth to two of his children, whilst Sebhrenah gave birth to one. Brandi was also raped by Marcus from the age of 15 but did not get pregnant by him. However, three of his nieces had children by him, the sexual abuse beginning at age 12 to 14. His wife knew that he was fathering these children and merely told him to have sex with the girls when she was out.
The ever-increasing family moved around California and, as the older girls grew to womanhood, Marcus allowed them to have jobs in fast food outlets. But he beat them if he saw them speaking to male co-workers, reminding them that they must be faithful to him. He said that the family that prays together stays together, that they would lose sight of ‘the Lord’ if they ever left the Wesson’s increasingly-cramped Fresno home.
As he aged, Marcus’s views became even more deluded. He decided that he wanted to create a Christian-vampire race and called one of his babies Jeva, the first two letters of Jesus and the first two letters of Vampire. He noted that both vampires and Jesus had been resurrected, and he bought mahogany coffins and had the children sleep on top of them. He told his grown up children that, if they were ever approached by social services, they must kill the younger children before turning the gun on themselves – that way they would be reunited in Heaven. He sent his thousand-page religious tract to a New York publisher but they rejected it as being incomprehensible.
Both of Wesson’s nieces fled from his strict control in 2003, but on 12 March 2004, they heard that Marcus was being evicted and would be moving out of state so they determined to return and collect their children. But the row became so heated that one of the women phoned the police.
Marcus blocked the door then fled to the back room when police turned away to phone the child protection agency. His wife entered the room a few minutes later and exited screaming ‘They’re all gone!’ A SWAT team arrived and kept imploring Marcus to give himself up, saying somewhat optimistically that he wasn’t in trouble. An hour later he walked out of the house, his clothes covered in blood.
Officers handcuffed him then entered the back bedroom to find nine young women, children and babies lying dead. They had been shot through the eyes with a .22 calibre handgun which was found to be free of fingerprints. The little ones – a one-year-old boy, a boy and a girl both 18 months, a four-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl, a seven-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy – had been shot first. Marcus’s older children – 25-year-old Sebhrenah and 17-year-old Lise – had died approximately an hour later, also of gunshot wounds.
Afterwards his mother described him as ‘a brilliant, God-fearing child’ and said that she hoped he’d spend his time in jail reading his Bible. His wife said that she’d like to thank the community for ‘all your prayers.’
TRIAL
On 25 March 2004, at Fresno County Court, Marcus Wesson pleaded not guilty to nine murder counts and 14 sex charges. A year later, his trial began. The defence said that 25-year-old Sebhrenah’s gunshot wound was consistent with suicide, that she had killed her siblings and cousins before turning the gun on herself. The murder weapon had been found under her body and she had often said that she wanted to die and go to heaven.
Marcus wife took the stand and said that she’d have done anything to protect her children – but some of the survivors bravely said what they’d been through, describing being beaten and mocked by their father, whilst their mother Elizabeth merely hurried into the other room. Elizabeth had also walked in on Marcus having sex with his daughters and nieces, and had known that Marcus wanted a murder-suicide pact.
After 10 days, the jury found him guilty of nine counts of murder – though he may not have pulled the trigger, they believed that he’d brainwashed his adult children into becoming murderers. He was also found guilty of various sex crimes, ranging from forced oral copulation to rape. He wept as the verdict was read out.
Afterwards, several of his family made religious statements, with one daughter proclaiming that ‘God loves us all.’ Though her all-seeing God hadn’t intervened to stop all seven children being shot through the head, she was sure that He’d put things right during a later Judgement Day.
The judge decided that Marcus Wesson’s judgement day should come sooner rather than later, and handed down a death sentence. He was taken to San Quentin State Prison where he remains on Death Row.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MEN WHO KILL THEIR PREGNANT WIVES
Pregnancy – particularly a first pregnancy – is frightening for many couples. She may fear losing control of her body as her belly swells and she’s subject to morning sickness and ongoing exhaustion. He may fear that the impending baby will take over their lives; that they will lose the freedom and closeness that they enjoyed. It’s a legitimate concern as studies have shown that a couple’s happiness doesn’t return to its pre-baby levels until the children have left home.
But the woman has at least made a positive choice to go through with
the pregnancy, whereas the man has no option. Some men who fear fatherhood will cope by walking away from their pregnant wives, whilst others remain and hide their distress. Yet others lash out – domestic violence often begins during the couple’s first pregnancy.
But a tiny percentage of men, often those who have presented themselves as perfect husbands, choose to kill their pregnant spouse and make it look as if the homicide was the act of a stranger. In this way, he can continue to present himself to his wife’s parents as the perfect son-in-law – and, to his workmates and friends he’s a bereaved husband rather than the ogre who walked out on his pregnant wife.
MARK DOUGLAS HACKING
Mark and Lori Hacking, both from devout Mormon families, were high school sweethearts in their native Salt Lake City, after which Mark went to Canada to spend a year as a missionary. His religion forbade alcohol, smoking, caffeine, masturbation or watching adult movies: a joyless regime for a teenage boy. Whilst on his mission he was only supposed to read religious books and listen to religious music. He also had to preach to others for hours every day and night. But Mark was, at heart, a party animal and after a few weeks he began to hang out with girls and have a few beers. He also took up smoking. When this was discovered, he was sent home early in disgrace.
It’s likely that Mark lied to Lori about why he’d been sent home as the pair of them went on to study at the University of Utah together. She graduated with a business degree and got a top job as a brokerage sales assistant in a Wells Fargo Bank. Mark, in contrast, became increasingly obsessed with playing computer games and dropped out of his psychology course. But he kept quiet about this, desperate to appear as successful as his paediatrician father, who was well liked in the community. His six siblings also did well in their chosen careers. Later, Lori found out about Mark’s deception but he explained it away by saying that the work he did in a hospital laboratory to fund his studies left him too tired to take seminars. In reality, he had struggled to understand the academic work.
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