Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome into the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know. And if you're gonna do it, do it right?
Do it with us? Is that a song?
It's a George Michael song. Okay, I don't remember the song. He's like, Babe, Babe, I'm your man. Don't you know why I am?
I think that's wham, isn't it?
Maybe could be they're virtually interchangeable. Sorry, Andrew, Oh my goodness. Yeah. Did you know George did everything with last Christmas? I mean he wrote it all, he composed it, He's sang it. Andy played the instruments.
Uh No, I didn't know that. I didn't know he played instruments. And I even saw a document him.
I didn't either, but I saw that somewhere. I didn't follow up about it. Now I'm sweating that it's not true.
Well, hopefully at the end of this episode, no one more remembered George Michael's Christmas song.
Great point, Chuck, because this episode is much more serious than George Michael's heart that he gave away. Foolishly last Christmas. This is about one of the darkest moments in American law enforcement history. Yeah, and very maddeningly one that the federal government just basically walked away from, like just kind of dusting off his hands, like, yeah, we got out
of that one. There hasn't really ever been any real accountability for Waco, despite attempts, Like there are tons of like hearings and stuff like that, but really, like overall, there just wasn't any huge reckoning over it, and there should have been because it was an American tragedy, even if in some ways the Branch to Vidian group were, you know, at least partially responsible for sure, they're part two.
Yeah, Like I hope that comes across in this episode because I know we're going to get a little probably riled up here and there about like how it was handled. But I'll go ahead and just say my takeaway at the beginning. You know, you can't you can't hole up and be a pedophile in a house, and you can't illegally like collect and sell and modify guns into machine guns and sell those Like no one's disputing that stuff, right.
I think the issue is the way this all went down in the end when it could have probably gone down with the loss of zero lives, ye, much less the loss of what was at eighty six.
People total, Yeah, including twenty kids.
Yeah, So that that's sort of the issue at hand for me personally.
Yeah, I think that that hits it on the nose.
Well, let's talk about the Branch Davidians. A. Yeah, because I up until two days ago, I thought that Davidians came from David Koresh. I thought they got that name from him as their leader, just because I didn't know a ton about it aside from, you know, kind of following it as it happened when I was in college
on the news. But the Branch Davidians, they got that name because in nineteen fifty five, a guy named Benjamin Roaden started a branch, a new sect of Seventh day Adventists, a Davidian sect, which had, you know, to do with the monarchy of Israel under King David. It had nothing to do with David Koresh as David.
Right, he retrofitted his name. He was actually born Vernon Wayne Howell, and he's like, yeah, you know, I could probably get a lot further trying to become the leader of this sect, if I changed my name to the same name as the name of the sect, yeah, so yes, they actually split. They were a branch, but then they split fully from the Adventist Church because they started to predict the date of you know, end times, started to follow leaders as prophets, and the Seventh day Adventists are like,
we did that like a century ago. We don't do that anymore. You guys, go away. And so the teachings though of the people before David Koresh. When he came in, there was a woman named Lois Rodent. They attracted dozens of people at any given time. They were probably somewhere around one hundred people who were living and working in worshiping. I guess at the what was called Mount Carmel, their compound outside of Waco. The branch Davidians were pretty well
suited for the Waco, Texas area. They were into guns, they were into religion. They interacted with the rest of the community. They were free to come and go. They didn't believe that David Koresh was God like. It wasn't like a cult in the way that it's often portrayed or that we generally think of cults, but at the same time, they were millennialists. They thought that end times was coming, and that essentially what they were doing and what the ATF was doing to them was bringing about
judgment day. That's what was going on with these guys, and they were such believers that they were willing to dig in and sacrifice their own lives to help bring judgment day sooner, I guess.
Yeah, but some of them fully believed he was the Messiah. By the way, that's really huh. Yeah, did you watch the documentary?
No, I didn't see the documentary. I saw just the stuff I read, basically, was that they believed he was the Lamb, which is the person who can interpret the seven seals that will bring about judgment Day. But beyond that, he wasn't like God or anything like that. He was a prophet of sorts, but not like a Messiah. That's what I saw.
Yeah, Well, he said with his own mouth, I am the Messiah, and there are Davidians that are still alive that believe he was a Messiah.
So well, there goes me.
Another thing I didn't know is that that Mount Carmel had been active since nineteen thirty five, so it had been around a long long time. It's about thirteen miles northeast of Waco, Texas, And so they had been around for a long long time, and in fifty five is when that official split came, and then fifty nine was when. And I think that's why they were like, hey, don't predict these second comings, because when they don't happen, you end up looking kind of dumb, exactly, And that happened
in nineteen fifty five. The second coming did not happen, and so they ended up there with that last group, Like you said, about one hundred people. Koresh had been around since he was in his early twenties. He got off to a kind of a rocky start there because he had had an affair with Lois Roden, who I guess was Benjamin Roden's wife, Yes, if the math checks out.
She was in her sixties and he was in his twenties, and he got into a squabble with her son about who was going to become leader and ended up shooting him, and like he was arrested and everything, and it was a hung jury, so he never he never had to serve time for that shooting.
Right, So he took over like after that he was pretty much the undisputed leader. One of the first things he did was he married a fourteen year old member of the church, and her parents consented and said, yeah, sure, be married to our fourteen year old daughter who you're ten years older than, which made it legal in Texas at the time. That was you know, sign number one.
But if you rewind a little bit before he showed up at the branch Davidian compound, he had actually been d fellow shipped is what it's called where the Adventists kick you out, because he had seduced, Yeah, which I think means that he sexually assaulted and actually successfully sexually assaulted a fifteen year old daughter of one of the church's elders.
Yeah. You know, he had a pretty rough upbringing before that. Like you said, he was born in Houston. He was reportedly had suffered sexual abuse of his own at the hands of older boys. He had dyslexia and did not do well in school. I think he failed first grade a couple of times and was a dropout by the time he was in middle school. And yeah, so you know that was his sort of rough childhood.
For sure, and over the years he kind of got into guns. He really got into the Bible like that was one of the things that I think people were drawn to about him at the Branch Davinians sect was like he knew what he was talking about. He was also very charismatic, and he could essentially run Bible studies that ran, you know, ten twelve hours at a length, and people weren't getting fatigued, like they were still just jazz the whole time. So he definitely knew what he
was talking about. He wasn't just making stuff up the top of his head, like he very much understood the Book of Revelations in particular.
Yeah, for sure. One of the first things he did once he was in charge was he said, God has told me that I need to bear a lot of children, and I need to have multiple wives in order to do that. I think he was supposed to God told him to have or at least he said, God told him to have twenty four children and they would be sort of the rulers in the future kingdom. And so at first he started with the single women of the group, and then that wasn't enough and he was having a
lot of kids. I think he had seventeen in the end. Then he moved on to the married women and separated the couples out and said, all right, you can no longer be with your husband. I'm the only one here. I'm the only male here who was allowed to have intercourse. All the other guys have to remain celibate. And they all went along with it. And you know this included taking children up girls. That was this one woman, Cathy Schrow, who was very disturbing because she still believes all this stuff.
But she was interviewed who said that they were all trying to stay awake, all the girls at the end of these marathon Bible studies, even though they were exhausted, so he would pick them to go back to his room and have sex with them. And she also it was really hard to watch, but she still to this day was like, they weren't children. We weren't children. They sure some of them were as young as ten, but they were adults in our culture. Yeah.
Man, you know how the world found out about that too?
Chuck about which part.
Well about him sexually abusing minors children. It was a current affairs show. Well, first the Way Tribune Harald did a series of articles on it, so that caught the local attention. But a current affairs show called a Current Affair, the Australian version, back in nineteen ninety two went and
interviewed David Koresh. And this is before anybody knew who David Koresh was, so they had a lot of foresight and they went and investigated it because this is a I mean, obviously it's a really big deal that there's a yeah, essentially what everyone thought of at the time and still do in a lot of ways. A cult leader who is sexually abusing the children of his sect, that's definitely worth investigating. That's not what the ATF investigated him for them.
No, they're the ATF. They don' dabble in that kind of stuff. What they do dabble in is guns and firearms, and that is what got them. You know, I mentioned early on they were illegally collecting and buying and selling and retrofitting basically making machine guns and then selling those illegally at gun shows, and so that's what caught their attention.
And you know, they were collecting these guns and supposedly like more than like close to two million rounds of ammunition, training everyone in there to use, like including the kids. To use these weapons. They were preparing for the end days.
Yeah exactly, and they were going to go out with guns blazing.
Yeah, well, well, which is what they did allegedly.
The thing that initially caught the ATF's attention. They were already aware that there was such a thing as the Branch Davidians and that they had a business selling guns at gun shows. But the thing that really caught their attention was apparently a UPS driver was delivering a box and I guess the box fell open and a bunch of grenade shells fell out, and the UPS driver thought that's odd, like who gets fifty grenade shells delivered to
their compound? And I guess alerted the federal authorities, and that's when they really started investigating the Branch Davidians. I say, we take a break and talk about how well that investigation was conducted. How about that?
Yeah, we'll be right back, all right. I think I snickered when we left because you Riley said, we'll talk about how that went, because it did not go well for a while. In fact, none of this went well before the raid ultimately happened. There were a lot of just kind of stupid moves from the ATF one time, they were like, hey, we need to keep an eye on this. So there's a house sort of nearby. I think it was like seventy acres the whole compound, but there was a house about a half a mile away,
and they said, let's pose this college students. They're like renting this house, but they come in there. I feel like anytime like these people try to go undercover like that, like let's pose as kids out having a good time, and it just never goes well. And it didn't. They had suitcases, they had rental cars, like new rental cars. They eventually were like, I think they're onto us, so
let's have a party. And one of the branch Davidians came to the party and I'm sure they were like, hey, would you like a Bruski and the branch Davidian went back on like, by the way, those are definitely not college.
Students, right right. Don't you hate mortgages too, fellows, Yes, young person. I saw they also carried briefcases as well, rather than backpacked and stuff. So yeah, it wasn't the
best undercover operation. They sent another undercover agent to pose as a UPS employee, and he did all sorts of stuff that ups employees don't do, Like he insisted that they Branch Davidians let him use the phone in a bathroom, and then he went to another part of the compound and tried the same thing, and they met him at the door with a roll of toilet paper, and then another guy, Robert Rodriguez. He actually managed to successfully embed
himself in the Branch Davidians. He showed up as a student and a follower and started attending Bible studies and it was successful in that, like he was never kicked out, but it was unsuccessful in that they knew that he was a federal agent almost from the outset, and later on, I think during these negotiation talks, the FBI was like, well, if you knew he was undercover, why didn't you kick him out? And I don't remember who said it. One of them said, we liked him, like we saw it
as core. He was a good guy and we liked being around and we came to like him, so why would we kick him out? So it was really weird, like they were almost toying with the Feds because they knew the Feds were investigating them, And it was so clumsy that they didn't feel particularly threatened at this point, but the whole thing started in May nineteen ninety two, and by February nineteen ninety three, I guess the ATF was like, we have enough information that we're going to
we're going to carry out a raid. We're not just going to show up and ask him to come out. We're going to carry a hard hitting raid. And why did they do that?
Chuck Well, I mean, they got a warrant, so they had enough information to at least get a like a legal warrant to search everything. Their goal initially was to
just get those illegal weapons. Arrest David Koresh, who, by the way, and I think you found this was that like he had a relationship with the local sheriff, and at any point the local sheriff could and I think did say like hey man, once you come in and like talk to us about what's going on, and that happened, so like none of this seemed to have been completely necessary.
I think they also were the und of the impression that like they were bunkered in and like he never left the compound, But upon further investigation, they found that he kind of regularly would leave the compound and they probably could have lured him out, but they you know, they were kind of bungling this from the beginning, so they planned a surprise kind of raid warrant serving where they would force entry, and they were like, we're going to catch them off guard, they won't have time to
arm themselves, and it's going to go great.
They had a lot of bad intelligence too, that this raid was based on. One. I don't know where they got this, but they were under the impression that all of the weapons were kept under lock and key and that you only access those with Koresh's direct permission. That's not true at all. The weapons were all over the compound and basically everybody walking around the compound knew how to use them and was prepared to right. That's a
really big intelligence failure when you're planning a raid. Another is there was a pit that they assumed that most, if not all, of the men would be working in, and apparently during the surveillance the most bend that had ever been seen there at one time was thirteen. So that was a bad assumption. And then, like you said, they were like, he never leaves the compound, so we have to raid them there's one other thing about the raid. So the ATF was conducting the raid at the time.
The ATF reported to the Treasury Department, and they planned this raid based on the element of surprise, right, The whole thing was supposed to have the element of surprise, And later on there would be a lot of disagreement about whether this was said or not. But supposedly the higher ups of Treasury were like, if there's no element of surprise anymore, if you lose it, yeah, don't do the raid. And that's not what happened.
No, And you know, part of this makes me wonder if they were feeding that informant bad information too. Oh yeah, I didn't ever see anything about that, but like I've seen enough movies to know if they kept inviting this guy back to Bible study, then they may have been saying, like, you know, all the guns here are under lock and key or whatever. But who knows. That is chuck speculations. Don't quote me on it.
It seems like it could be.
But yeah, so the raid is blown because of another just this wasn't so much a blunder by the ATF. It was just a blunder by the media. Yeah, because it was a cameraman named Jim Peeler and a reporter. He was he's all over this documentary. He stopped on the way out there because he was tipped off. They don't know who. Maybe a shriff, steput or somebody tipped him off that this is going to be going down.
So he wanted to scoop so he couldn't find the compound, and he stops a mail truck, a friendly mail carrier. It's like, hey, where's this Branch Davidian compound. I think there's a raid going on and I want to cover it. And that mail carrier was a Branch Davidian. So he high tailed it back there and was like, we're about to get raided, you guys.
Yeah, And so when he tells David Koresh this, we're about to get raided. Robert Rodriguez, the undercover student who had embedded himself as a follower who they knew was a fed, he's standing right there talking to David Koresh when the mail carrier, David Jones, runs up and tells
him they're about to get raided. So, knowing that the element of surprise has been blown, Robert Rodriguez runs back to the safe house to call his superiors, gets int such of them and apparently is like, the surprise is blown, we need to call off the raid, and the I guess the speers were like, oh, bad, bad connection, I can't hear you, see you. We're gonna go rate them now,
And that's essentially what happened. They carried on with the raid, knowing full well that koresh knew they were coming, and that apparently gave them a sense of urgency that hadn't
even been there before. And then on top of that, one of the reasons why they planned the raid in the first place, this big, whizbang fourth century raid with like like a tactical team going in, was that they were up for a budget review, congressional budget review, and they wanted something splashy to get the attention of Congress and be like, see, this is what you give us money for. So they had every incentive to go in unnecessarily roughly.
Yeah, for sure. So on February twenty eighth, there were seventy six armed agents that came up from Fort Hood. They were obfuscated and cattle trucks. They had canvas thrown over the back of these trucks hiding. Of course h and them knew they were coming anyway, so it's not like that mattered. And at the very beginning of this thing, David Koresh comes to the front door, and it's on video, like all the stuff you can watch happen, and eventually you were watching it in real time as it played out.
But it's it's all over this documentary. Like Koresh comes to the front door and opens it and says, hey, man, there's a bunch of women and kids in here. You don't want to you don't want to do this kind of quickly shuts the door and goes back in and all hell breaks loose. And from the descriptions I saw and and just sort of watching it like rewatching it, I guess it was. It was a war, like thousands and thousands of rounds being exchanged.
Yes, And there is a lot of disagreement still today. Who was the first one to shoot? Right?
Yeah, I mean that's the thing is. And again later with the fire, you still get two completely conflicting stories from each side.
Right, So the Branch Davidians say that the Feds fired first, and the Feds obviously say the Branch Davidians fired first. The thing that supports the Branch Davidians claim is that there was an ATF agent who was part of the raid who apparently told an investigator right after the raid that they may have shot first because one of the agents shot a dog as they were coming into the compound and that that would have set off all of the shooting in general. He apparently later retracted that when
asked about it. But apparently the Branch Davidians also say that their dogs were shot too, So it's entirely possible that that's when the shooting started. It's also possible the Branch Davidians started shooting first.
Yeah, because in their on their side, at least, this is what they say. They said that the first rounds that they heard as the ATF speaking, were from an M six and a fifty cow rifle, and those are guns that they didn't have. And I'm just reminded, didn't they shoot the dogs at Ruby Ridge too?
Yeah? Yeah, So, like you said, this was like a war. People died here, Like I think four four agents died during this raid. I mean, the Branch Davidians had like massive firepower, and I think six Branch Davidians were killed in the exchange as well. A bunch more were wounded.
David Koresh was wounded, and all of a sudden, this raid had been so thoroughly botched that it became day one of a fifty one day siege where the atf and then eventually the FBI surrounded Mount Carmel and we're trying to get the Branch Davidians to come out, and the Branchavidians were like, no, we're not coming out, you guys, go away.
Yeah. And you know, they also had the superior ground. I think one of the guys that was like, you know, when we pulled up on this place, we were all of a sudden a little shaken. He said it was full of windows. He said it was the high ground. And he said, this is not the kind of like like we were immediately at the oh what do you call it. When you're at a disadvantage, that's the worst.
Yeh yeah, yeah, like a siege of a castle up on a cliff. You're not in the best position unless you're in the castle.
Yeah. And it also had a tower that's where Koresh's bedroom was.
Oh yeah. It was also made almost entirely of like plywood. Right, there was some concrete to it, but wasn't the most part, wasn't it wood?
Yeah, I mean it was huge, but it was definitely one of those things that was kind of built by hand over many years. Yeah, for sure. I think it was a three hour gun battle, and eventually there was a call from the inside to the outside where David Koresh gets on the phone with an Officer Lynch and he says, he says, he's Officer Lynch, and Koresh says, that's kind of a funny name. And then he says, this is David Koresh, the Notorious, And he said, what'd you guys do that for?
Yeah, that's the I think that's the thing, Chuck, Like, I'm so conflicted about this is like he was genuinely a bad person for sexually abusing kids. They were preparing for the end of days, but at the same time, he was aware enough of what they must have looked like to outsiders, like a crazy cult or something like that, that he wasn't just like, he wasn't out of his mind.
It seems like at any given point in time, he was just kind of like an average dude who had kind of worked his way into this really unique situation and then abused it in many, many different ways. But he wasn't crazy. He wasn't some relig It wasn't like talking to Charles Manson, Like imagine trying to negotiate with Charles Manson. It was nothing like that. It was like negotiating with somebody who had different views with you than
you that were so far out as far as religious. Yeah, this goes that even a religious negotiator wouldn't have common ground in that sense. Right, So they seemed crazy to the FBI, even though they weren't crazy people. It's really hard to get that across and not sound like an apologist or like I'm crazy myself.
Yeah, for sure. We should point out that Koresh was wounded in this initial gunfight, and the religious imagery was not lost on his followers because he was shot through the wrist and he was shot through the side. You know, those were the wounds Jesus suffered on the cross and he was thirty three at this point, and I think most people think that's how Jesus was when he was crucified, so they all think this is like, you know, supreme like religious symbolism. Happening, right, Do.
You want to take a break and come back and start talking about the siege and the negotiation attempts.
Yeah, sure, okay, okay, Chuckley.
So, like I said, the raid very quickly turned into a fifty one day siege, which makes it very ironic that one of the ATF agents was so confident that the raid would be over and done with very quickly. He had set up a tea time for the same afternoon as the raid, and he missed the tea time obviously, because, like I said, it turned into a siege at first.
So the FBI was on the scene almost immediately, because when a federal agent is killed, the FBI investigates and they're like, well, we might as well stick around, since this is now a siege, we're going to take over from the ATF. So basically, on day one, the FBI took over this and their negotiators started to getting to work. Apparently they had trouble finding the phone number for the compound, but I think the branch Davidians called them first. Is that correct?
I mean, I know that during the shootout they called out, but I'm not sure about afterwards.
Okay, Well, at any rate, they were in communication on the phone very very quickly, I think maybe even the same day.
Yeah, and things were going pretty well, like negotiations were going well at first, I mean, I think for front and everyone's mind was let's get these kids out of here, because they knew there were a lot of children inside, and so they were trying to get you know, Korresh to agree to get the kids out. He said, yep, we can do the do this two by two is what he said. And he said in return, I want to broadcast this hour long sermon on the Christian Broadcasting
Network and that'll be the swap for the kids. And so they're working on this. They're trying to get everybody out basically and surrendering. And on March second, it was almost there, like everybody was about to come out and they were relenting, and then Koresh said, no, I got a message from God and he told me to wait.
Yeah, and I'm sure the FBI negotiator pinched the bridge of his nose harder than he ever has in his life. Yeah, for sure, So that that kind of did that. I think more children were released after that, twenty one total between the first day and the fifth of March that left about twenty still remaining in there, and they started
negotiating for milk. I guess Kathy Schroeder, who you mentioned earlier, she was on the phone with the FBI negotiator saying, Hey, we need a bunch of milk for the kids, and they're like, all right, you send out some kids and we'll give you some milk. And she's like, what are you talking about. Our little kids need some milk. Just give us some milk. This isn't a bargaining chip. They ended up bringing them I think six gallons of milk
three times. And I guess the branch Davidians gave them proof of health and wellness by sending videotapes of the kids.
Yeah, And I think the other thing those videotapes did was it sort of sent a chill through the FBI because it was really clear when you watch these videotapes that no one was being held hostage, nobody was being held against their will. They all were believed that what they were doing was right and was God's plan in the end, Like Janet Reno never saw those tapes, so there's a lot of speculation on what information she was being fed because she'd ha been on the job for like a week or two.
Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot about that.
And so they are basically saying, like, no, they kept those tapes from her because it showed a different picture of what was going on inside. And he was painted to her as like, you know, a sex offender illegally selling guns. They killed four of ours, and it's a cult that's holding like he's kind of holding all these people hostage, yeah, which apparently was never the case.
Yeah, And that was the general consensus among law enforcement. This is a crazy cult, just like all the other crazy cults, and that just did not fit into that whole paradigm, right, And so that kind of undermines a
lot of what you're trying to do. And there was a lot of undermining going on within the FBI itself because essentially it was almost like two different branches of the multiverse that were this event layered over one another at once in one reality, because you had the FBI negotiators who were trying to negotiate and get this resolve peacefully, and simultaneously you had the FBI's hostage Rescue Team, which
is like the FBI's version of the swat team. Yeah, like, let's just go in there and get this guy and we'll just end it like that. And they kept there, was like just this tension, like the negotiators would would make some progress and then the hostage rescue team would do something to take off the branch of idiots and so that would put a kaibash on those recent negotiations. And it just kept going like that.
Yeah, it was. They weren't communicating well either. It was just a real mess. At one point, they a very sort of legendary criminal defense attorney in Texas was called by Koresh's mom and said, I need you to go get my son out of there and like do this in court. And so he went out there. He managed to talk to the FBI and to letting him walk up and knock on the front door, and he went inside. He's the only one who ever got inside and met with Koresh and was like, hey, listen, man, I'm a
criminal defense attorney. My job is to look after you and see that you and everyone here gets out alive and that we handle this in court. He said, because between you and me, they haven't done this right. And like, you know, you've got a lot going in your favor, and Koresh was like, all right, I trust you, but what I need to do is stay in here until
I write. God told me to write my own version of like an up book of Revelation basically, and when I delivered that manuscript, I'll willingly come out.
Yeah. And that was thanks to two Bible scholars, Philip Arnold and James Taber, who had been following this like the everybody else, at least in the United States, on CNN and every news network. It was just constant, wall the wall coverage. You could just get up in the middle of the night and watch what was going on
at the siege in Waco for weeks. Right, these guys had seen it, and they it became clear to them that like the FBI had no idea, no touch point with what the Branch Davidians believed, and that they were just talking over each other. They just couldn't grasp who they were dealing with. And these guys are like, we can, We're Bible scholars, we understand what's going on. So I guess they went on TV and we're talking about what
the Branch Davidians believed. Koresh saw it and he That's when he was like, I need to write down my interpretation of revelations and give it to these two who can actually do something with it that are trustworthy for safe keep. Yeah, so that lawyer, like you said, negotiated that and Koresh was like, sure, I will come out. And there I read a transcript of him talking to negotiators and they're like, what does that mean though, what
does it mean you're going to come out? Like you can come out guns blazing, you can come out two weeks, ten days, one day, Like when are you going to come out? And he's like, I'm going to come out right after I'm done.
What is that like? Two weeks?
What does it mean you're going to come out? It's like I'm going to come out and go into a jail house. So it was very clear that he was willing to come out after this. The FBI was like, we don't believe you, Like we've already you've already missed deadlines left and right. This is just a stalling tactic.
Yeah, for sure. So they're hearing one thing from the FBI negotiators like trying to get them out peacefully. In the meantime on the news and with their own eyeballs out the windows. They see them pulling up with Bradley fighting vehicles, like clearing obstacles and setting up a perimeter. So they see some of the kids get let out and immediately like our kind of jumped on and having
all their stuff searched right in front of them. They see Kathy Schroeder leave and get arrested, and like see her in an orange jumpsuit on the news, and so they're getting all these mixed messages. Eventually they see two Abrams tanks pull up. That's the mother of all as I think it's the largest war vehicle in the US fleet is an Abrams tank, and they at one point one of the guys is Bragg and he's like, you know, I could take one of these tanks and drive through
this house from one end to the other. And the FBI negotiators said, why would you do that? Yeah, like what are you even talking about? So it just kind of puts a pin on like how in conflict they were.
Right and the FBI in general was just treating this like a normal hostage situation. But again, the Branch Davidians weren't hostages. They were there on purpose and I guess when you have a normal hostage situation, you have demands, and then you also are slowly or maybe even not that slowly increasing like your tactical presence, like showing up
with tanks. I think there were fourteen other combat vehicles on site, basically showing like there's no way out of this except you coming out if you want to do
this peacefully. And they also did a lot of tactics that had been used before in normal hostage situations, which was basically, you keep everybody inside from being able to sleep, from being able to think, from being able to hear themselves, and you do that with really bright lights all night and loud speakers playing all sorts of annoying stuff.
Yeah, for sure, like they were. I think on March twenty first, they were close to having this resolved again. I think Koresh was in the final stages of his book of revelation, and they were negotiating, like fairly successfully to get more people out. I think they got five
people out of March twenty first. The guy in the documentary said a two dozen more were set to be released, and that's when the hostage the HRT team started unilaterally just making decisions like playing that music they played, these boots are made for walkin twenty four hours a day. They just as a complete like show of power, they ran a tank over David Koresh's antique Ford Ranchero vehicle
in full view of everybody. So they're doing this stuff to like they're purposely agitating them these people that are already And one of the Davidians is like, we were already Like like you think this is going to solve anything? To agitate us further with this music and by keeping us a week awake, He's like, this could only lead to tragedy.
Yeah, And so since the FBI started buying the idea that his agreement, Koresh's agreement to come out after he finished this book of revelations interpretation was just stalling. They went to Jane Reno and they're like, look, we have this plan to go in with gas. It's not lethal gas. They're not going to like it, but it'll make them come out and just sign off on this. But that was essentially like the premise of them going in, and
they basically did. But you said that one guy was talking about they drove a tank through the wall at least one wall of the compound for sure.
But yeah, they called in and said, hey, we're not shooting, we're not coming in, but we're placing tear gas in the house. Like that's what we're doing. I know, you see it's coming to the house. All we're doing is placing tear gas in there. It's not going to kill you. It'll just irritate your eyes and skin. Because we're trying to get you guys out so we can get this resolved without any more bloodshed. So they fully announced they were doing this. They filled the house up with tear gas.
There were a lot of high winds, so they think it was like kind of blowing the tear gas away. So that's when they rammed the tank through because they thought they were kind of huddled in this bunker where the tear guests couldn't get to them, and they also had gas masks. So they're ramming this thing with the tank at this point, and all of a sudden, you know, hell kind of breaks loose again.
Yeah, the place starts to catch on fire. Very importantly, this was about four hours after the tear gas was used, right, So just remember that once the place caught fire, that was that was essentially it. We kind of talked about how it was made mostly of wood and it was kind of made slipshod, it was, and it went up really fast, not just because it was made of wood, but also they had like blocked entrances with hay bales and mattresses and stuff like that. So yeah, there were
Coleman lanterns everywhere. There was a lot of fuel and accelerant for the fire, so it went up pretty quick.
Yeah, And I think what I took from listening to the people, like all the agents and everyone was they all to a person said we thought, all right, they got to come out now, Like they just kept waiting, like any second now, people are going to come pouring out of there and we're not going to lose any more life. And that didn't happen. I mean, I think a handful of people came out, but everyone basically stayed in there, and it's sort of anyone's guess what happened
in there. I know Koresh was found dead from a single bullet to the head and forehead, and there's a lot of speculation that his number two, Steve Schneider, kind of realized he was a fraud and shot him in the head and then killed himself, but no one knows what bullet ended up in David Koresh's forehead.
Yeah, I think you said some people, just a few people rushed out of the building. There were nine people who left while this building was on fire, right, Like imagine like your dedication to your beliefs that you're like, no, not going to leave this burning building. There were seventy five other people inside. At least twenty were kids, and I think thirteen of the adults were found to have fatal gun shot wounds. Two most were to the head, two were in the back, which is very awful to
think what was going on with that. And then three kids were shot to death, and I think six women and children were deemed to have died of blunt force trauma, and the narrative that was created around that was that they were beating each other to death. Apparently, later on they it was determined that they died of blunt force trauma when the FBI came through with their tank and a bunch of concrete fell on these women and children and killed them. That was where the trauma came from.
But that's not to say that they didn't do other unspeakable things, Like we said three kids were shot. One boy died of a stab wound to the chest. Like there's just no other way to interpret that, you know, like you don't accidentally stab a three year old to the chest at when the FBI's coming through your door, you know.
Yeah.
And I think that's where all the speculation comes from, is like what was going on inside there. I know one of the guys was like shot in the stomach and asked to be put out of his misery by his own people, which they did. So yeah, it's just I mean, I can't imagine what was going on inside that place. It's horrific to think of it.
And I mean all this happened in minutes, you know.
Yeah, once that fire started, it was pretty quick.
The thing is is, you know, there are plenty of accusations by the Branch Davidians and their supporters and critics of the federal government that the FBI actually started this fire. The FBI said right off the bat, we didn't use any incendiary tear gas canisters, and then three years later they're like, well, we used some incendiary tear gas canisters. Despite that, it does not seem that the Feds started this fire. Remember, they used tear gas, and the fire
didn't start for four more hours. It started in three different places, none of which coincided with where tear gas was used, so the tears almost certainly didn't do it. They also had I guess they had like monitored like listening devices inside, is that right.
I don't know.
I saw somewhere that they had monitoring, like they were monitoring them over audio, and that they had heard them talking about like previously talking about lighting the place on fire. So it's almost one hundred percent certain that the branch Davidians set the place on fire.
Yeah, and you know, the surviving Davidians say that absolutely did not happen, and it was all framed to look that way. So it's and then the guy comes on right after and says, well, he's a liar, so it's it's definitely one of those things where they're both still digging in.
The thing that got me chuck, this really upset me was after all this was done, after the fires were put out and everything was like starting to get calm, somebody raised the ATF flag on the compound's flag pole. They had just been conquered and I found that really awful.
Yeah, it's pretty awful. And like you mentioned earlier, no one from the government side was brought upon charges or anything. The FBI and the Clinton administration was clear to brongdoing
in two thousand. There was a report in nineteen ninety three that was, you know, they didn't say they did it right, that it was a pretty damning report about the ATF raid and that became like, you know, a teaching moment for any new ATF students coming in there, like, hey, look how bad things can go when you really screw things up. And the one big result from this was it really inspired and galvanized the militia movement and right
wing anti government radicals. Like there's there's video footage of Timothy McVeigh there he went to Waco during the fifty one day siege and was like selling anti government bumper stickers and talking about how awful this was. And then, of course, you know, on the same day, on April nineteenth, two years later, carried out the Oklahoma City bombing.
YEH killed one hundred and sixty eight people and nineteen children in as payback for Waco. And yeah, I remember very clearly in the throughout the nineties, like that whole New World Order, black helicopter, FEMA, concentration camps, conspiracy theories, and that was I mean Waco. To people who believed in that, this was like proof positive that yes, the goverment, if you had guns and you were religious, the government would send a tank through your house and set it
on fire and kill you. So this really helped that and Ruby Ridge both really fed into this end of the millennium paranoia that I think the X Files roaded so high on.
Oh yeah, I mean this was less than a year after Ruby Ridge, So I'm not that guy at all, but I remember being in college and all this stuff was going on, and it was just a real uneasy feeling in time.
For sure, it really was.
For sure, the Branch Davidians are still around too, Chuck. Did you know that although they have changed their name to Branch the Lord Our Righteousness, but they're still at Mount Carmel.
Yeah, for sure. Nine of them were convicted. Nine of the nine survivors, that is, five on voluntary manslaughter and weapons charges. I think a few got weapons charges and one other I don't know what the charge, but it just says a lesser charge, but they're all out. They've all been out since at least two thousand and seven, and you know, at least the two surviving members that stayed till the end, or I guess the one was arrested.
They're still believers and still think David Koresh was the Messiah and that they were doing God's will and they don't have any regrets. The one woman who got out as she was one of the children that was really just really really all of her interviews were just devastating because she's just a lost person now, you know.
Yeah, she lost both of her parents.
Right well, her mom split once they said separate and I'll start impregnating you. Her mom left him in the middle of the night, but they removed her from her father basically and said you can't even be with him in the compound anymore.
Man's that whole story is just rough from beginning to end.
Huh, Yeah, for sure, I mean there're nobody won you know.
No, definitely not. There's a lot more that you can read about this stuff if you're interested. Be very very careful who you believe in, in where your sources are, because there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there, and then of course there's a lot of cover up associated with it too, but there's a lot more to read. This is basically just the tip of the iceberg.
I'll tell him about Madonna. You gotta tell him about Madonna.
So apparently David koresh he had a picture of Madonna taped to his motor cycle and he had told one of the Brench Davidian members that God had told him I will give Madonna onto the So basically he was just waiting for God to have Madonna come hang out at the compound and he get to impregnate her too.
Yeah, so we started out talking about George Michael and we ended up talking about Madonna.
Right. The funny thing is is under different circumstances, like you know, he might have had a shot with early nineties Madonna, he might be right. You got anything else?
I got anything else?
Okay, Well, then that's it for Brinch Davidians as far as we go. And that means it's time for listener mail.
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