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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. No other event in the last fifty years is shrouded in myth like the nineteen ninety three siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Today, we remember this moment for the seventy six people, including twenty children, who died in the fire, or its inspiration of the Oklahoma Alma City bombing, and for the wave of anti government militaryism that followed. What we understand far less is
what motivated Davidian's enigmatic leader, David Koresh. Drawing on first time exclusive interviews with Koresh's family and survivors of the siege, best selling author Stephen Talty paints a psychological portrait of this infamous icon of the nineteen nineties, born Vernon Howell into the hyper masculine world of Central Texas. In the nineteen sixties, Koresh experienced a childhood riven with abuse and isolation.
He found a new version of himself in the halls of his local church and love in the fundamentalist sect of the Branch Davidians. Later, with a new name and professed prophetic powers, Koresh ushered in a new era for the Davidians that prized his own sexual conquest as much as his follower's faith. As one survivor has said, what better way for a worthless child to feel worse than
to become God. In his signature immersive storytelling, Talty reveals how Koresh's fixation on holy war, which would deliver the Davidians to the reward and confirm himself as Christ, collided with his paranoid obsession with firearms to destructive effect their deadly fifty one day standoff with the embattled FPI, and atf he shows embodied an anti government ethic that continues to resonate today, now thirty years after that unforgettable moment.
Koresh presents the tragedy at Waco and the government mistrust it inspired in its fullest context. Yet the book that we're featuring this evening is Koresh The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco with my special guest journalist and author, Steven Talty. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Steven Talty, Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Thank you so much, and congratulations on this incredible book.
Thanks.
Let's talk about how and why you came to this want to be the author of this story.
Sure, So in nineteen ninety three, I was living in New York City. I was twenty eight years old, and I recall just turning on end one day and seeing these images of the place I'd never really heard of, Mount Caramel Compound in Waco. So you know, if you were around back then, you remember that it just dominated the cable news. It was really one of the first big cable news stories, and so it was NonStop. It
was wall to wall. So for fifty one days we watched basically the same camera shot from about two miles away of this compound, and there wasn't a lot going on. I mean, if you recall, you could barely even see the faces in the window. So this whole tragedy unfolded and it seemed like everything was happening off stage. You couldn't see the negotiators, you couldn't hear them, you couldn't
see the Davidians. We had very little idea of, you know, what their attitudes were, Were they being held, were they they're willingly? So even from the beginning, it was kind of an enigma. And after fifty one days, of course, we had the fire that ended the lives of seventy six people, and I remember shutting off the TV and saying to myself, what did I just watch? Really had no idea how these events had sort of come to be. So that was really the impetus, you know, for the book.
I think of it almost as the origin story of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. How did they set on this path that ended up with a leaf of confrontation with the FBI, and what did it mean for the country?
Right away, in this book, you take us to August seventeenth, nineteen fifty nine, Bonnie Clark and Vernon Howell take us back to Vernon Howell's beginnings.
Sure so, Vernon Howell was the future David Koresh's real birth name was also his father's name, but his mom, Bonnie Clark, grew up in a working class you know, you might call it a redneck family, and I think they would accept that without any shame or a Her father were construction had sort of moved looking for ways to support his family for years. So she was raised in the Seventh day Adventist household, pretty strict. It was the fifties and she was a religious girl, so she
went to a Seventh day Adventist school. She went to Sunday School. By the time she was thirteen, she was rebelling a bit. She was going out with her friends from Houston. They would go to the clubs. They were boy crazy, and so that's sort of how her life was going at that time. When she met who she thought was a catch, Vernon Howell. He was older, he was eighteen, who was driving. So she was attracted to him and they, you know, they got together and she
got pregnant. You know, this is the fifties and this is not acceptable in small town Texas life to be a pregnant teenager. So she felt a lot of shame. She felt a lot of I guess anger, if you will, from her family. Her father was an alcoholic, sort of a blackout alcoholic, and this baby didn't improve matters at all. Circumstances to which Vernon Howell came into the world were not auspicious. He had a father who didn't really want to be a father. Parents broke up soon after she
got pregnant. He had a grandfather who kind of disowned him from the beginning. So this became a theme in his life. Rejectioned by older men, which he desperately wanted their approval, He wanted their love, but again and again he found difficulty in finding that. And to me, it's one of the keys to understanding young Vernon Howell what
his needs were. He was a guy with a big ego, thought he could accomplish a lot of things in this world, but he wasn't getting that respect, that acceptance that he really craved.
Even though his mother was Bonnie Clark, he was raised by his grandmother, Earlene. Tell us about that and did he know the circumstances and who his parents really were.
He didn't know, and that became an issue. He really thought Arlene was his mom and Bonnie was his aunt. So from the get go he was kind of set up to feel not only unwanted, but sort of unsure of his own origins. So he had a loving grandmother. Arlene was a very loving woman. Bonnie was off, you know, working trying to create her future and her father and his father was you know, kind of in the wind.
He didn't see him much, So up until about four or five years old, he thought Arlene was his mom and he loved her, and Bonnie was kind of an afterthought. So when Bonnie came home and said, I met a new man. We're going to move to Dallas, you know, when to start a new life. And by the way, I'm your mother, it came as a tremendous shock to him because he'd already felt rejected by his grandfather, rejected by his father, and now he's finding out his mom
is not really his mom. So you can imagine to a child with a big ego but a fragile ego, what a blow that must have been.
You talk about the Seventh day Adventist and what they believed in and what they taught and what Vernon heard growing up.
Yes, so you knoweventh Day Adventists go back almost to the eighteen forties. So they were one of these sects that emerged out of the revivals that kind of swept America, you know, swept upstate New York first of all, but then kind of spread across the country. And really the core of the sect of the belief was that the end times were coming and coming soon. So this is something that Vernon Howell heard frequently growing up, not only
in the preachers in the radio. He listened to all those Texas preachers who have their famous speaking style and really kind of sucks you into the radio, but he heard it from his family members. He went to Sunday School, Sabbath School, so he grew up a little apart, you know. He grew up in Baptist country, essentially the Bible Belt, but an Adventist had slightly different beliefs to kind of set you apart. So David, let's call him Vernon for now,
was very religious child. His brother remembered leaving him in the morning and Vernon is kneeling by the bed and praying, and his brother would come back hours later and Vernon was still there. So there was this real deep belief, deep faith that I think comes from his rejection from other people in his life. He was looking for reassurance. He was looking for a presence that loved him, and he found that in God. He became really obsessed with religion,
wanted to go here live preachers. Of course, this was not completely unusual and his atmosphere there's a lot of religious families in Texas in the sixties, so he wasn't unusual in that way. But he was really almost obsessive in his faith.
At the same time, at school, socially he did not succeed whatsoever. So tell us about school grades and socially at school.
Sure, so Vernon had a learning disability. He had trouble reading. He would say later it wasn't dyslexia, it was just a problem with understanding the words on the page. And I think this is important when we think about him later as a preacher who's famous for getting up and speaking, flipping from one book to another and connecting them and
giving giving the scriptures his own original interpretation. And one of the things we learned early on is that he couldn't understand a book the way that other people did. He couldn't read sentences and get the same sense that an average six or seven year old could. So he began to sort of invent what he couldn't understand. If he read something and there was a passage that he didn't quite get, he would kind of make up in his own head what was going on. And that's something
he really did later on with the Bible. He would take liberties with the scriptures and say, you know, I'm giving this kind of a radical interpretation. And I think some of that goes back to his learning disability. He couldn't get the text, so he made things up. So his grades were not great. Socially, he was something of an outcast. He was put in a special class for slow learners, and of course he heard the chance of retired and four eyes in the schoolyard. He wore pretty
big glasses that he kept through his life. So yeah, after the rejection from the men in his family, he felt the rejection of his peers. He was not popular, he was shy. And the interesting thing when you can prepare and contrast that to David later, you know, later on he's almost a Texas stereotype. He's a gun geek, he's into muscle cars, he loves rock and roll, he's aggressive, you know, this whole macho thing that goes with the Texas boyhood. Was really evident. But in his real boyhood
he was very different. He was, you know, his stepfather would accuse him of being almost girly because he wore his hair long. It was the seventies, and so he was not this typical gung ho Texas boy. He even when he got into sports, he was a great runner, and he joined the football teams, which is what you do in Texas. There's nothing bigger than Friday night high school football. But Vernon didn't love it. He didn't love the aggressiveness. He didn't love the coaches say saying, go
kill that guy. He was kind of a softer personality. So it's interesting that he kind of grew into something that he rejected early on.
What he finds early on Vernon is the power of music to not only help him, but also the attention that he had never gotten before things had changed.
Explain Yeah, and you know what a lot of people that I interviewed said, if David had made it It's a rock star, he would never have become this messiah, this cult leader. He was looking for a way to set himself apart and to be admired, even exalted, and he found that in rock and roll. He was a pretty good guitarist. He would play for the FBI later on, and you know, I spoke to some agents and they were like, you know what, not bad. He could play.
So he had his little bands with his friends, you know, when he was a young teenager, you know, set up a rehearsal space in the little room he was living in. And he definitely had fans. You know, he was kind of a big deal in his high school and things like that. So this was his real first taste of admiration, of respect. The girls and the kids who used to tease him and mock him now came up to him
and said, you know, great playing, great work. So that was the first sort of hint of approval that he got, and he just absorbed it like a sponge. That was very important to David. Like a lot of these cult leaders, like Charles Manson and Jim Jones, you know a lot of them have had these wounds from childhood that they're trying to repair, and that's certainly true of David Koresh In music. He found a way to impress the girls, but there was always a catch for him because he
felt that he was playing the devil's music. He wasn't playing gospel. He was playing Jethro Tull fog hat kind of the soft rock of that era. And when he was playing sometimes he would actually take the guitar and throw it down on the ground and he would tell people, I felt the devil, you know, in the music. The
devil was trying to get a hold of me. So even in this sort of joy he found with music, there was always this kind of snare that was he wasn't doing God's work, he was doing the devil's work.
He had an obsession with music somewhat, but his real obsession was with the Bible, and that obsession grew, and he also was reading the studies of William Miller and the lectures of Ellen G. White, who were major figures in the Seventh day Adventist Church. He was looking for something, you wrote, So tell us a little bit about what he reads with the writings of Ellen White and William Miller.
Sure, so, yeah, David was searching. He was definitely on a quest. He wanted answers, He kind of wanted revelation. So he went to different churches. He went to the Baptists. He would sort of attend their services. He would go to these big tent revivals that they still had in the seventies and Texas where preachers would come in and talk about the end times coming. But again and again, what David wanted with sort of immediate answers. He wasn't
looking for something in the afterlife. He really felt, you know, I'm in pain now, I have problems now, I need solutions now. So he kind of turned away from the traditional churches and went back to his mother's church, the Adventists. So he went to Tyler, Texas and found this congregation and he was you know, he would tell people like, I'm a newborn baby, I need to learn, I need
to have prophecy. And he was at first quite popular because he was so passionate about it, and they were like, you know, this young man has come in very sincere, really looking for what they call the light, the new light, you know, the new sort of truth about God. But what you soon realize about Vernon Howell is that it was never enough. He would be in the pews and he would be listening, but soon he wanted to preach. He kind of tried to take over these, you know,
these church meetings. So at times he would actually rush up to the pulpit, kind of shoulder the pastor aside and give his interpretation. So I think right here we see the kind of just how insatiable he was for control. Really, he didn't want to be a receiver of wisdom. He wanted to give it out. He wanted to be, you know, in the spotlight. So this caused a lot of This caused a lot of consternation among the congregation, and they
began to sour on him. But to your question about what was Ellen White, what were the other sort of prophets of that church teaching? A lot of it was about prophecy. This is a prophetic church. They were looking for sort of signals that the end times were coming for the Adventists and a lot of similar sex. That's not a horrible thing to imagine, because the end times of course bring the return of Jesus and God's new kingdom.
So it was actually something to look forward to, so very much a millennial church, very much looking for the return of Christ soon as opposed to two hundred years from now. And this really, this is something that David took in and began to be It began to be part of his theology.
You write about a woman named Linda, a girl named Linda, fifteen years old, and the relationship that David or Vernon strikes up with her, and the relationship that the father allows as well. Tell us about that.
Sure, that was his real first girlfriend, and he became infatuated with her. And you know, when you think about his mother getting pregnant at thirteen, he was three or four years older than her, So it wasn't so unusual for rural, working class Texas to be dating a girl in her mid teens, as sort of crazy as that seems to us now. So of course she felt pregnant and this completely changed the relationship. David actually told her
I'm impotent. I can't be the father over the phone when he first heard this news, and she was crushed and he hung up the phone and felt terribly guilty. She ended up getting an abortion, and David was very sort of depressed about this. He felt that he had murdered somebody. And he had actually grown to like the idea of being a father. He thought, I can do it in a way that, you know, I don't have to raise a child the way that I was raised. He was going to do it better. So this whole
relationship kind of threw him into impression. Who was living in his car, who was writing poetry that at times seems suicidal. So he was definitely in this kind of emotional spiritual crisis. And again just goes back to the churches looking in the scriptures. David really wanted answers. Now that's really kind of what sets him apart. And that goes on to the Branch Davidians. He promised the Branch Davidians the apocalypse in your lifetime, not in the afterlife.
So that became very important to his theology.
Now along the way in his development, he goes to a Seventh Day Adventist preacher, Jim Gilly in Arlington, Texas, and you write that Vernon was wrapped. He went to the seminars seven days that week, and then he approached Jim Gilly. What did he have to say to Jim Gilly? And how about the ideas that were forming in his mind as a preacher himself.
Sure, So what Gilly did that was kind of interesting is that he would take passages from the scriptures and compare them with things that were in that day's news. So you'd actually have a video screen setup and he might have an image from you know, the Bible, and he would have not a screenshot, but a picture of a headline about a disaster in Indonesia or locusts or some other disaster. And what he was saying is that, you know, if you look at the news, you can
tell that the end times are approaching. So David was absolutely entranced by this. As you said, he came every night for the whole week and what he saw were two things. I think one was the ability of one man to move a crowd and really get those people behind it and totally you know, feel what he was saying. So David always wanted to be that guy at the
head of the room. He was in the pews listening, but he had to go and talk to Jim Gilly, so he went backstage and what he said to Dave Jim Gilly was, you know, it's a fantastic presentation, but you're skipping the Seventh Seals. So the Seventh Seals are a part of revelation that book of you know, the end Times in the Bible, and the unlocking of each seal is very important. Each seal has to be sort of unlocked to unleash the apocalypse and bring about this
new Kingdom of God. So David Koresh was like, you're almost there, but if you don't talk about the Seven Seals, you can't really be speaking the truth. And he actually volunteered to become part of Gilly's presentation and sort of specialized in the Seven Seals. And Gilly, I'm sure he'd heard things like this before, told him thanks for your time, but no thanks. And I think David really walked out of those meetings thinking I can do what this guy does.
You know, I have this knowledge, but I have actually more knowledge. I know the Seven Seals intimately. And he began to think of himself not as a full blown prophet, but someone who saw visions. He always felt that God spoke to him and he had a direct connection with the Lord. So what did Jim Gilly have that he didn't have? So very soon after that he ended up in Waco and discovered the branch Davidians.
We didn't talk about Linda, but Linda doesn't want to have anything to do with him, but at this time with Jim Gilly, even though he is not detracted from his mission by listening to Jim Gilly. He also has a vision at that time, and the vision is that the Lord would bring Linda to him in good time.
Yes. So this is where we begin to see something kind of disturbing about David, and that is he begins to reinterpret the Bible to justify events in his life and justify his own behavior. So after he and Linda broke up several times, but after one of the breakups, he read the Bible and somehow got out of it that if you sleep with a woman, she is your wife, which does not say in the Bible. It actually says the opposite, that the Bible of the course is very
anti extramarital flings things like that. But David, in his sort of obsession and in his narcissism, said well, this is my interpretation. So he called Linda up and said everything's fine, we're actually married in the eyes of God. And she told him to get lost. That's not true. So he actually went and started dating the daughter of the pastor at the Tyler, Texas church that he attended.
So really the same pattern repeated. It starts out, really, well, they're both into the Bible, Sandy's a very intelligent girl, holds her own with him scripturally. But over time she sees that whatever David wants, he starts finding in the Bible, he starts finding passages that he says authorize him to do what he wants. So it's almost like he's taking the place of the prophets, almost like he's taking the place of God and his words more important than God's.
And the people around him, those people who are rooted in the Bible and in the scriptures finding this very disturbing and to try to deter him, Sandy told him many times, Listen, if you're having a vision, it's not necessarily from God. It just might be your own voice, your own desires speaking to you. But David would never accept that.
David or Vernon meets a woman in her fifties and name Harriet. Tell us about this relationship with Harriet, and what does Harriet direct him to?
Right, So, Harriet was a member of the Adventist Church in Tyler, and he grew friendly with her, actually stated at her house, and what he would come home and tell her again and again is I need the new life. Meaning I've read the Bible, I've read all the prophets, I've read all the Adventist thinkers. But I need new revelations to help me with the problems in my life, and I'm not getting that from the church. So he's like, where are the living profits. I'm tired of living. I'm
tired about reading about dead people and their thoughts. And Harriet knew of this sort of very small, obscure sect called the Branch Davidians, led by a woman named Lois Rodin, who were camped out in Waco, Texas. And she said, the Branch Davidians follow a profit. Lois wrote is a living prophet and she's giving new light. She's giving Bible studies that you give these new interpretations that will help you out. And David is you know, David is game.
He drives up to Waco and it's kind of this dusty compound actually outside the city limits, buildings scattered all over and really a population of probably back then fifty or sixty people. The sect had been around since the thirties. It was kind of a split off from the Adventists, shared a lot of the philosophies, but with their own sort of quirky interpretations of different scriptures. So David goes there and at first he's really a nobody. He's like
a handyman, a cleaner. So he begins to study and listen to Lois Rodin, who who's been leading them for over a decade by now, and he finds something new here, which is Lois is saying the end times are right around the corner. And so the interesting thing about the Branch Davidians is they're looking for what they call the seventh Angel, meaning the final prophet before the end times, who's going to guide the followers through the apocalypse and
into God's new kingdom in the Bible. That's, you know, that's an actual figure, the seventh Angel. So Lois Rodin has proclaimed that she's the sixth Angel. So he founds sort of a ready made situation for himself. They were looking for a new leader, and he said to himself, well, I'm the guy. And he started to give Bible studies, which is the way in the Branch Davidians. The way to sort of advance is to give prophecy, to give new interpretation, and so Vernon began to do that.
And what were some of these new prophecies that he brought to the grit Well.
One of the main one was ones was he called the Cyrus doctrine. King Cyrus in the Bible is the king that defeats Babylon, defeats the Infidel, And David said the Branch Davidians had these sort of disbelief in types and anti types, meaning people appear in different stages in the Bible. So one figure might be the type, say Saint John the Baptist preparing the way, and later on you'll see a similar figure. And to the Branch Davidians,
this is an anti type. This is sort of a not an exact reincarnation of the first person, but someone continuing the same work and serving the same purpose in the Bible. So David says, well, I believe I'm the anti type of King Cyrus. He defied, he defeated Babylon in the old days. I'm going to defeat the New Babylon. And for him in the Branch Davidians, David began to teach that the United States was part of the New Babylon.
The Federal government was sort of tyrannizing Christians, becoming more and more secular, and they became the enemy of people of faith. So he discovered that I'm in the Bible, I'm a major figure, and I have this ability to confront the infidels. So that was one of his first sort of prophecies, it's first revelations.
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You talked about the development of his message, and his style and his delivery, because when he first tried to do any lead of Bible study he failed miserably.
To say.
The third time that he was given an opportunity, he really shown what had Vernon discovered, especially in terms of the message he delivered.
Sure, so I think what he discovered was his voice. I think his delivery came before any sort of major new theology, and I think it harkened back to those old creatures that he used to listen to on the Texas Radio who are exceptionally good at sort of dramatizing the Bible and taking a passage from one book and relating it to another and a way that is sort of new and fresh. And that's really what David did. He would stand up and would give these Bible studies.
Eventually they grew to six eight hours, and he knew the Bible so well, even though he had trouble reading, he almost had a photographic memory. He could remember an obscure figure from the Book of Daniel and related to somebody who occurs two hundred pages later on. So what David's gift was as an orator was if he had you in the room, if he had you in front of him, he could persuade almost anyone that he was that he had a special connection with God. It's just
a verbal gift that he had. So people really stood up and took notice, because when he first showed up, he was kind of a bum. People expected nothing of him. So what they saw was God doing work in this man. He had started off kind of stuttering, shy, and now he was as good as any preacher you saw on TV. So to them it had to be God doing his work. Some people actually thought that he was kind of faking it, that he had started out mumbling and kind of slurring
his words in order to have this rapid progress. That would be evidence of his specialness. So anyway, David, you know, after that third try at Bible studies, he was actually a better speaker than Lois Rodin. She'd been teaching the same stuff for ten years, and the people had sort of been waiting around for for the end of the world. This was a millennial faith that was supposed to happen soon, and David really latched onto that. He said, God is
watching us, he has plans for us. We're going to be by his side when we fight the infidels, and I'm going to lead you there, and that was something that was new. David was saying, it could be next year, it could be two years from now, and Lois Rodin had never said that. It was always off in the sort of the misty future. So to hear that, you might be meeting Christ in a year was tremendously exciting for these people.
Now, Vernon was spiritually ambitious, to say the least. What happens with Lois this idea of an immaculate conception, and how Vernon is able to wrestle the command of this group in short order.
Sure, So you know, David was a young guy. Lois Roden was in her sixties, her husband had died and she was lonely. So what David did, whether it was genuine or whether it was you know, kind of canny of him, is he started spending a lot of time with Lois, and eventually the two fell in love, if you can believe that. I think it was more love on Lois's part. She had this handsome young man sort of catering to her. And so that's how David sort of approached the throne of power. He fell in love
with Lois and became sort of her partner. You know, he would travel with her. She was traveling all of the world, meeting with the Marcoss, the Philippines, meeting with her friend's famous preachers like Jimmy Spiger, and David was always there. So he sort of glombed onto her, learned her tricks in a way, and then slowly began to kind of cast out on her. And one of the main reasons he did the main ways he did this,
Lois declared that she was pregnant. David had told her, like Sarah in the Bible, even though you're past the age of childbearing, God is going to give you a child and we're going to raise him together. And of course Lois fell for this story head over heels. She actually had a pregnancy test that she showed to the other Davidians which showed a positive result, and apparently it
was just a defective test. So of course no baby arrived, and whispers began about this prophecy that had not come true. So David began telling people behind Lois's back, well, it's because Lois is not holy enough, she's not obeying God's law, and he's punished her by, you know, basically with a miscarriage. So this really worked on the minds of the branch Davidians. You know, they began to separate. There was a Lois camp and there was a David camp, and so he
really caused dissension. It was kind of divide and rule at this point, he really kind of undermined her, this woman he was supposedly in love with, but it's pretty clear to see that he was just after the power.
An important person in Lois's world and in the church itself was someone named Perry Jones. Now Burnan sidles up to Perry Jones. What does he ask of Perry Jones?
What does he do?
Sure? So, Perry Jones is a longtime member. He brought his whole family into the Branch Davidians, and he has a large family. And at one point David says, God has spoke to me in a dream, in a vision, and he's told me that I have to marry your daughter. And the daughter is fourteen years old. So Perry Jones is at first very disturbed by this. But again in
the Branch Davidian tradition, prophecy is almost everything. If somebody is speaking to a member, you have to obey what they say, And David was starting to abuse this whole idea of the vision, you know, to get his way. So he went to Harry said I need to marry your daughter, and the two of them just ran off and got married in town, and David raped her that night of course she was under the age of consent. She might have agreed verbally, but this was, you know,
against the law. So it began a pattern of David using visions to sort of get his way, and his way involved young girls. I think the tragedy of David Koresh is that he escaped a very painful childhood and then recreated that childhood at Wakego. I mean, he used the same fear and terror that his stepdad had used with him, the same humiliation against his followers. He used sexual abuse to get what he wanted the same way
that he had been subjected to it. So, you know, to me, the disaster is that David realized that these things that had been done to him were wrong, and he told people they were wrong, but he couldn't helped himself in a way. Once he got power, he just recreated the nineteen sixties childhood that he'd experienced and was unable to really get beyond it.
We talked about the battle for this Davidian group. George Roden is criticizing Vernon and calling him the anti Christ or Satan, and so is Lois as well tell us about this criticism church.
So George roden was Lois's Rodin's son, and until Vernon showed up, he thought he was going to inherit the title. You inherit the throne. He was mentally disturbed. He wore a gun on his hip all the time at Tourette's syndrome. Not a natural leader, and so David sort of took over from him and created an enemy. So George Roden said that, you know, David crashes a snake. He's an impostor.
He seduced my mother in order to get power, which was not wrong, but George Roden was not really credible figure at that time because of his mental illness and his sort of erratic behavior. So David was able to beat both of them, Lois and George at their own game. He was reaching more exciting things. He was giving the branch Davidians a promise of eternal life in this life, so they really couldn't compete with that, and David was just more charming in person and more persuasive, so he
won that battle. He actually had a gunfight with George Roden that went to trial, And the importance of that is that even though David was acquitted along with his men, he found the whole experience humiliating, being arrested, thrown down on the ground, being booked, put in jail with everyday criminals. He felt humiliated in a way that he hadn't since childhood. Again, these were older men disrespecting him, and he vowed never to do that again. He said, I will never be
back in jail again. And of course this comes into play when he's surrounded by the FBI and he knows if he comes out, he's going to jail. So a terrible experience that really sort of changed the course of his life.
You write about how important Israel is to Vernon's plan and the Davidian's plan and Rachel. You rite of Rachel being pregnant and them going to Israel. What is the purpose us? How does Israel play into his plans?
So branch Davidians before David, and David himself often preached that the end times were going to begin with a war in Israel between Israel and the Arabs. So America would come into the war on israel side, Soviet Union would come in on the Palestinian side, and we'd have beginning of the apocalypse, which to him into his followers was a desirable thing. They wanted this to happen, so God come back to Earth. So yes, he went over
when she was pregnant. He wanted to have the child born in Israel to sort of cement his relationship with Israel, and later on he went back to actually see where he could move the branch Davidians. He was looking for a landing spot where they could live and wait for the war to happen. So I'm jumping ahead a little here, but one of the dissidents from the group eventually called the Israel consulate and said, you have this madman over there trying to convert people and a very dangerous guy.
And so David was banned from Israel, which was a crucial blow to his theology, because if you don't have Israel, how are you going to have the End Times? So that's another way in which David sort of corrupted the Bible. He said, well, Israel really means wherever I am. It could happen in Waco, Texas. As long as I'm there, we can have the End Times. That was the importance
of Israel. It was supposed to be the location of the beginning of the apocalypse, but David changed that when he could no longer visit the country and said, you know, Israel is kind of a state of mind is where I am.
Tell us about Mark brill b.
Sure, Mark, it's actually pronounced bro. Mark Brow joined the group sort of later on in the late eighties, very smart guy, theology student, and he was actually David's equal when it came to theology. He could sort of go blow to blow with David on scripture. So he joined the group and kind of became David's, you know, right hand man. But Mark Bro, unlike the others, still maintained
this sort of independent mindset. When David said said something, Mark would analyze it in compared to the Bible, and if wasn't, if it didn't sort of correspond with that, he would confront David and say, you know, you're preaching false doctrine. And David loved this and he hated it. He loved having an intellectual like Mark Bro in the group, loved his knowledge of scripture, but hated any kind of descent. You know, you didn't challenge David koresh It was his group.
So the two of them were friends. They played in the band together that David formed, but slowly Mark Brow started to have doubts and eventually he said, I believe David is actually leading a Satanic movement. He's abusing the Bible and he's leading these people into false doctrine. And he left the group and he became the main rival for David. He moved to Australia and he tried to sort of get authorities to pay attention to what was happening. He said, this is going to be another jonestown, It's
going to be another massacre. And so he really became David's nemesis.
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Let's fast forward somewhat to get to the point where there is interest in David Koresh, Vernon Howell and this Mount Carmel.
Sure, So the government first really starts taking interest when a UPS deliveryman notices a grenade casing fall out of the package that was being delivered to the branch davidians So it's not an actual grenade, it's just the casing that needs to be filled with powder, et cetera. So he reports this to the shriff. The sheriff calls the ATF, and the ATF opens a case on David Koresh, and
what they find is that he's illegal guns. He's buying things, and allegedly he's changing weapons from legal weapons into illegal automatic weapons which cannot own. He even had a fifty caliber sniper rifle, again illegal to own. So it really began with weapons investigation, and then on top of that, there was a state investigation of sexual abuse, but that didn't really figure into the federal indictment the federal warrant against David Koresh. So we're talking about nineteen ninety three,
early months of nineteen ninety three. The ATF is investigating. They have a surveillance team across the road from the compound. But their tragic mistake is they don't pick up on the fact that David koresh leaves the compound. He does it quite often. He goes to restaurants that he likes in town. He goes to car shops, he goes to guitar shops. He's pretty well known around Waco. But somehow, and this just goes down to incompetence. I think the ATF misses the fact they believe that he only stays
on site. So really, from the beginning, this investigation is really kind of being bought not by the guys who carried out eventually, but by middle management, by the planners.
You have the ATF plan to be able to do this. They have three options. What is the option that they decide upon.
It's called dynamic entry. It's basically what you see on cop shows on TV, going to the location, confronting the individuals, busting through the front door if you have to, and sort of shock and awe, sort of getting in there and getting the person you need out before any resistance can form. So you know, They didn't feel they could arrest him in town, they didn't know about his visits.
They didn't want to do a long siege because the compound is a huge property, would take an incredible amount of manpower to surround it, and they felt that, you know, David, if they were running out of food, David would feed himself and his lieutenants first and the other people would suffer. So it was dynamic entry, which meant a large rating team about eighty agents, largest in the ATF's history. So this was going to be a big operation. Helicopters, a
lot of agents, a lot of command control. But again, you know, all goes back to the planning. It was a flawed plan from the beginning. So even all these agents couldn't correct what was wrong from the start.
They get reports as well. Authorities get reports about his continued visions about women, young girls, So there was talk of abusing children, but also the sexual assault and rape of these young girls. Just to add to the warrant itself. The warrant is for weapons, but they have this picture that much more is going on behind Mount Carmel doors.
Sure, and the state opened an investigation and investigators went out there and actually interviewed Koresh and interviewed some of the children, but what they found is they couldn't get any of the children to testify that David was abusing them. They felt, i mean, the investigators felt he's exercising mind control over them. But you can't build a case without a witness. So that is mentioned in the warrant, but it's kind of irrelevant. I mean, the federal laws do
not have jurisdiction over or, you know, sexual abuse. The weapons charge is a federal charge, so it was kind of thrown in there almost as like added inducement to do this raid, but they had no standing in law to charge him with sexual abuse.
You read about all the conflicting agendas here. There's the negotiators, there's the ATF. I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but the FBI come in after this failed beginning. But you say that there is a lot of differences in the ideas to approaching this raid in the first place.
Sure, and it's not the first time it happened. There's always a tension between the tactical team, the guys with the rifles, and the negotiators. The tactical team often wants to apply pressure wants to intimidate, wants to make the person on the other end uncomfortable so that they come out. The negotiators always seem to always take a different tack, which is to gain the person's trust, to feel that they're being heard, and to sort of entice them in
a positive way to come out. So these two philosophies clashed again and again at Waco, and the negotiator's got a significant amount of people out that got kids out. But at least when I look at this, I feel that this clash between the two teams really led to fewer people coming out. I think they could have gotten more Davidians off the compound. So the negotiating team is talking to David for fifty one days and the tactical
team is pressuring for an end to this. It's a very expensive operation, you know, it's in the public eye. The FBI agents need additional training, they have to keep up their skills the hostage rescue team. So there's a lot of sort of conflicting motivations going on, and it really detracts from this sort of unified effort that the FBI wanted to put forth.
You say, all the authorities are very, very impatient, and there's all kinds of pressure on them in every way to succeed. But David also exacerbates this with some of the decisions he makes in terms of the statements he wants to make before he can do anything else.
Yeah, you know, David's on the phone with the FBI. He's very charming, he's got a good old boy personality, but he promises things and then does not deliver. He says, we're coming out. I've decided to bring my followers out. He's actually thinking of hiding hand grenades in the stretcher that brings him out. He was wounded in the initial raid, so he's thinking of a kind of a suicide mission to sort of bring on the end times. But the FBI just think things they want. They think he's coming out,
and when he doesn't, they become furious. And David also has his own complaints.
You know.
He says, you know, you're running these tractors, you're crushing my cars, you're disrespecting my home. So each side over these fifty one days sort of gathers their own grievances, as you will in any negotiation, but David sort of has a hard line you know, he won't allow any of his biological children to come out. He won't allow sort of his hardcore followers to listen to the FBI.
So you have really kind of a stalemate by the day fifty one, and that's when the FBI decides to insert the tear Guess you.
Talk about this element of surprise being the cornerstone of this strategy to strike first, tell us about the decision to throw in tear gas and the result.
Sure, so it was originally going to be a very gradual insertion of the tear gas. They were going to sort of hit one area of the building and decrease the living space until over hours or even days, it just becomes super uncomfortable for the Davidians and they come out.
But David has other plans. He's stockpiled a lot of fuel, kerosene, things like that, there's hay inside the compound, and what he has in mind really is the FBI attacking, getting a bunch of agents inside the compound, lighting the fires, and them all dying Davidians and FBI in one big inferno, and this will sort of satisfy the needs to sort of trigger the end times. There'll be a final confrontation between God's people in Babylon. But of course the FBI
isn't coming in. They're just sticking, you know, tubes on the ends of tanks and armored vehicles into the building, spraying the tear gas and then backing them off of The fires have already begun. This is around noon on the final day, and they quickly grow out of control, so it takes only about twenty minutes for the whole thing to burn down. A few Davidians escape, but yes, it's just a total it's a total defeat, really on
both sides. One of the interesting things I found in looking at Waco is that, you know, in past tragedies in American history, there was always at least one hero, Pearl harbor Head guys who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. There were heroes there, even nine to eleven. You know, you could look at Giuliani leading the city out of that tragedy. The thing about Waco is they're no heroes, they're no good guys walking out of this looking better
than when it started. So the FBI, the negotiators, feel they failed. Bill Clinton, who approved the final order, has regrets. Of course, the Davidians are not now dead, most of them, so it's just really kind of a tragedy all around.
It's fascinating that you describe the some of the negotiations with David Koresh, but also negotiations of family members that try to get people out of Mark Carmel before it was too late.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. A lot of people at this time talk about a second Waco that you know, it's going to happen again, and I think the FBI and ATF made horrible mistakes, but they did learn from those mistakes, and so during Waco they would phone in and have some of the members talk to their family members, but they would never allow the family members to actually go to the compound, you know, and try to persuade the guys to come out. In later confrontations, they actually
did that. There was one in Montana later on, and they brought in family members and they settled that peacefully.
So this was you could say, a mistake, even though it's understandable that, you know, the Davidians were heavily armed, so they allowed the family members to speak on the phone, but it's rarely successful because David has almost total control and he's controlling who speaks to their family members and who doesn't, but he's often by the phone, sort of influencing the person on the phone to stay.
You also say that one person that was paying attention to the Davidians and then later to the tragedy at Waco was a person named Timothy McVeigh.
Yes, Timothy McVeigh became obsessed with Waco. He saw it in the way that many people on the far right did, that this was tyranny in action, that all the rumors that we've been speaking about for years were finally seeing it on CNN. So this was an important event for him. He actually went to Waco. He was selling bumper stickers off the hood of his car, but he was really there just to support the Davidians, and when he saw the inferno on TV, he was filled with his need
for revenge. That's why he planned the Oklahoma City bombing for the Waco anniversary. It was really the trigger that activated McVeigh and activated a lot of the militias that sprang up right after that.
You're right, that's very interesting that McVeigh had listened to some of the same things that Koresh had listened to when he was a kid, a lot of the anti communist, anti government rhetoric, and also the role that the Roman Catholic Church would have in the end times being the representation of Satan. So they shared in that some of the preachers and some of the talk they had both listened to the same kinds of messages growing up.
Yeah, they sure did. And what's also interesting is that it kind of had similar life histories. McVeigh was very upset that he didn't have successful relationships with women. You know. David of course lost his two first loves, his two first girlfriends. So yeah, they had similar outlooks on life. And I think McVeigh really saw Koresh as the model. Here was someone who had stood up to the government
ad stockpile weapons, had defended his home. He saw David Koresh as incompletely in the right, and so he wanted Oklahoma City to be almost the anti Waco. In Waco, it was the Davidians who died, and McVay said, in Oklahoma City, it's the government employees and their families who are going to die. So it's almost like, you know, it's almost like a colin response. He saw this as an answer to Waco.
What's fascinating too, is that the FBI had an undercover agent, Robert Rodriguez, that had infiltrated the group. So it's fascinating that you're write of the many things that he had seen, in witnessed, and that was reporting back.
Yeah, this is one of the ATF's huge mistakes. On the day of their initial raid, they emphasized again and again they needed the element of surprise. So Rodriguez was in the compound that morning talking with David and a branch Cividian comes rushing in and says, the Feds are on their way and you know they're coming to get us. So Rodriguez goes out, calls his boss and says, you know, call it off. They know they know we're coming, and really,
by any measure, they should have called it off. They had multiple opportunities even that morning, you know, to stop it. But it's kind of the fog of war. It's the momentum of these kind of bureaucracies. It didn't happen. So Rodriguez is just an example how badly the ATF knew this, and later on they really attempted to kind of blame it on him in the media. That the media tipped
off the Davidians, which was not true. So not only did the ATF mess up this operation, but they also attempted to cover up, which I think has led to some of the myths and rumors and misconceptions that surround this whole event.
You mentioned the misperceptions and inaccuracies in the writing of this book. One other major I would say issues were uncovered with the writing of this book that dispelled some of the misinformation.
Well, the other always been rumors the FBI snipers were executing Franch Davidians during the fire. Those were really disproven. I think what bothers me about this whole conspiracy culture around Waco is that, you know, government decisions did lead to the deaths of people, both ATF agents four died in that initial raid and the Davidians who were killed initial raid and then later on. I mean, it was really their arrogance and their and just doing a bad
job that led to these deaths. I think David Koresh is responsible for Waco. He initiated it. He actually in a way looked forward to it. But in a way, the conspiracy theories give cover to the government. They come up with these really fantastical theories when the plain truth in plain view is that the government the operation and caused death. So you're looking away from what really happened, and you're kind of giving the government a pass on what they really did by accusing them of these things
that didn't happen. So it's almost defeating the purpose of the conspiracy theorists in giving the government a pass.
Another very interesting thing was the idea that when the ATF agents were injured and wounded, they requested that they be able to get those wounded agents, and the Davidians did not fire upon them.
Some of the injured agents were fired upon, but yeah, there were cases where there was an injured agent and ATF guys went forward to dragging back and the Davidians let that happen. So the real scandal was there was no medical backup, There was no ambulances in cases shoot out occurred. So again it just goes back to this kind of just terrible job that the planners did and organizing this whole operation. There was were no sort of
contingencies if it went wrong. If it went wrong, and it did, it was going to go wrong in a big way.
I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about Koresh, the true story of David Koresh and the tragedy at Waco. For those people that might want to take a look at a website, do you have a website and do you do any social media?
Sure? My website is just my name, Stephen S. T E p h A N t A L t y dot com and I'm on Twitter at Stephen Talty as well.
Thank you so much, Steven Talty, Koresh, the true story of David Koresh and the tragedy at Waco. Thank you very much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.
Thanks then,