Criminal Minds (32 page)

Cult “experts” at the time claimed that fifty thousand to two million children in the United States were ritually sacrificed to Satan every year. In fact, the entire murder rate in the country at that time was around twenty-five thousand a year. Under leading questions by investigators, children told horrific stories of ritual abuse at day-care centers. No proof of this abuse ever turned up, but evidence that the kids were only telling the investigators what they wanted to hear was abundant. Teenagers sometimes turned to the occult and satanism, but out of boredom and alienation, rarely with real seriousness of intent. Without a smoking gun, the media moved on to other pursuits, and the whole panic fizzled.

 

 

IN “THE POPULAR KIDS”
(110), profiler Spencer Reid uses Jim Jones and his People’s Temple as an example of a murderous cult. Jonestown, Jim Jones’s Guyana hideaway, is referred to again in the episode “Minimal Loss” (403), about a cult’s disastrous standoff with government officials.

James Warren Jones was born in Indiana and began his career as a preacher there in the 1950s. He developed a large, mixed-race congregation, which was very rare at that time and place. He moved his temple, which practiced what he called “apostolic socialism,” to California after the government started looking into his claims of cures for cancer, heart disease, and arthritis.

Fearing an imminent nuclear war, Jones took his congregation to Ukiah, California, which had been described as a place that could withstand a nuclear attack. Later he opened branches in San Francisco and Los Angeles and set up headquarters in San Francisco. Jones was prominent in local and national Democratic political circles.

Rumors of illegal activities surfaced, however, and in 1974 the People’s Temple, as Jones called his congregation, acquired land in Guyana. Jones wanted to establish a model communist community there, and by 1977 he and several hundred members of the congregation lived there full-time. In 1978, almost a thousand people lived in the community.

Jones constantly warned his flock about its capitalist enemies. He isolated his congregation from the rest of the world, forcing its members to sign over their possessions to the church. He even made them sign confessions of having sexually molested their children, in order to give him ammunition to use against them if they ever turned on him.

Nevertheless, people did leave the congregation, and the stories they told back home circulated quickly. In November 1978, California congressman Leo Ryan went to Jonestown on a fact-finding trip, accompanied by his staff, the media, and others. On November 18, as he was preparing to leave Guyana to return to the United States, a couple of families asked to be allowed to go with the congressman’s party. At the airstrip, a tractor-trailer carrying armed temple members drove up, and the members started shooting. Five people, including Congressman Ryan and one of the temple defectors, were killed, and nine others were injured.

That night, fearing reprisals, the temple members met in their pavilion. Some of Jones’s aides had prepared a vat of Flavor-Aid spiked with Valium and cyanide, among other additives. Some in the congregation argued against suicide, but once word of Ryan’s death spread, they knew their options were limited. They’d had suicide rehearsals before, so the procedure was familiar. People used syringes to squirt poison into the mouths of infants and children because they weren’t cooperating. Once the adults had poisoned their own children, they weren’t likely to back out. The poisoned began to die within about five minutes.

Jones, who did not drink his own poison, was found with a gunshot wound to the head, either self-inflicted or at close contact. Nine hundred followers joined him in death.

 

 

LIKE JIM JONES,
David Koresh kept his disciples in a contained environment. When you’re asking people to believe that you’re a prophet—a common thread in the lives of megalomaniacs for whom people are willing to kill and die—it’s essential that you control what they see and hear and think about. Some members of Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect believed him to be God Incarnate, so it was not difficult for him to persuade them to do whatever he wanted.

According to reports from inside the sect’s ranch compound, about ten miles from Waco, Texas, Koresh wanted a lot. He fathered at least fifteen children by many different “wives,” some of whom were as young as twelve. When he wanted to marry someone who was already married, he simply used his authority to annul her existing marriage. Then he could marry the woman or girl, and her “former” husband was expected to live in celibacy. Koresh was, he said, entitled to 140 wives, according to his interpretation of the biblical Song of Songs. Koresh dictated all of the rules by which his flock would live. He required them to relinquish their material possessions, which he could keep or redistribute at will.

The discipline he administered was often harsh. He was said to paddle infants, even those as young as eight months, for forty-five minutes. He made adults go into a sewage pit, then refused them permission to bathe afterward. He made children call their parents “dogs.” Only Koresh was to be their “father,” just as he was to be the “husband” of any girl he found attractive, however young she might be. Despite these stories, a child abuse investigation by the state failed to turn up any evidence against him.

Vernon Wayne Howell was born in Houston, Texas, on April 17, 1959, to a fourteen-year-old girl. He never knew his father, and at the age of four he was left with his maternal grandmother, who raised him. Dyslexic and barely literate, the boy grew up lonely and isolated and dropped out of high school in his junior year. He was not unintelligent, however. Before he left school, he had memorized the entire Bible, and throughout his life he was able to talk about it at great length, convincing others that he was spiritually wise. He could usually come up with a biblical passage that would excuse any behavior in which he wanted to indulge. He was also a reasonably good musician who, like Manson, considered a rock music career.

At age twenty, Howell joined the Seventh Day Adventist Church, leaving only when a dispute with the pastor, over Howell’s interest in the pastor’s daughter, soured his relationships there. He moved to Waco in 1981 to join the Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic sect that had splintered off from the Seventh Day Adventists in the 1930s. In 1955, the sect had established a ranch outside Waco, which they called the Mount Carmel Center.

The group’s prophet was an elderly woman named Lois Roden. Her adult son, George, expected to be the next prophet, but Howell claimed the gift of prophecy and began a sexual affair with Lois. She declared that God meant for her to have a child with Howell and that this child (who never came along—no surprise, given Lois’s age) would be the Chosen One. George Roden objected, and the group was divided in its loyalties.

Howell took some of his followers and set up a splinter of the splinter ninety miles away in Paradise, Texas. For the next several years he worked on building that group. There he began his controlling ways, forcing people to break bonds and attachments made on the outside and show loyalty only to him. He also developed his interest in polygamy—for himself, but not for anyone else—after Lois died.

When George Roden saw his own support fading, he challenged Howell to a contest to see which one of them could raise the dead. Roden dug up a corpse to practice on, and Howell, sensing an advantage, alerted the authorities. Told that he had to supply proof that Roden was abusing a corpse, Howell and some of his followers went into Mount Carmel, armed, to take photographs. A shoot-out ensued in which Roden was wounded and Howell, among others, was arrested. A mistrial freed Howell, but Roden was soon arrested for the murder of another rival. With Roden in a mental institution and a large amount of unpaid back taxes, Mount Carmel was put up for sale by the state. Howell bought it, renamed it Ranch Apocalypse, and brought his followers to live there.

In 1990, Howell legally changed his name to David Koresh. He claimed (erroneously) that
koresh
meant “death” and that he was the rightful heir to the biblical House of David. He also claimed to be the son of God, who could open the Seven Seals of the Book of Revelation. He reiterated this belief to FBI agents during the Waco siege.

Having taken over the group, Koresh made several improvements to the facilities and started up new commercial ventures to provide funding, including a gun business.

The Branch Davidians had always believed in imminent apocalypse, and Koresh wanted to be ready. Although his supporters explained their massive weapons stockpiles as simply being wares bought and sold for their business, the fact was that the compound had laid in quantities of weapons and explosives that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) found disturbing.

On February 29, 1993, the ATF finally made its move. A “surprise” attack failed to be a surprise—which was not all that surprising in itself, since a mile-long convoy of more than eighty government vehicles had been required to stealthily approach a compound in rural Texas, far from any town. Koresh, alone and unarmed, opened the door and asked the agents what they wanted. He was told to get down, and he closed the door. Shots were fired, but heated debate over who fired first continues to this day.

The Branch Davidians called 911 and reported the shooting as it was happening, and eventually a cease-fire was ordered. Four ATF agents were dead, and more were wounded. Six Davidians died, although it’s possible that two were shot by their fellow members to put them out of their pain when it appeared that medical help would not be coming soon. Among the wounded inside the compound was Koresh.

The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) took over the scene, and the cease-fire became a siege. During the first week, twenty-two children and two elderly women voluntarily left the compound, but the rest were determined to stay put, and they released video messages explaining their loyalty to the sect. The FBI tried various means of driving them out, including loud music played over public address systems and bright lights blasted at the compound all night.

The siege lasted fifty-one days. During that time, Koresh was busy inside, dictating a final explanation of his beliefs about the Seven Seals that would bring about Armageddon. Before he was finished, the FBI received approval from Attorney General Janet Reno to breach the walls and begin spraying gas into the compound. On April 19, the agents moved armored vehicles in to do that. They announced that no one would enter the buildings, but they were met with gunfire nevertheless.

Somehow—and this is a source of controversy—a fire started. The FBI and official reports claim that the Davidians themselves started it; the Davidians claim that the FBI fired an incendiary device into a building they had already filled with gas.

At least seventy-five Davidians died in the blaze. Some were shot, and again there’s disagreement over the circumstances of those shootings. Some say that the FBI shot people who were trying to escape the fire, and others say that the Davidians shot one another and themselves to avoid burning to death. Koresh was one of those shot.

The Waco siege was badly conceived and executed. Although no one can say with certainty exactly what mistakes were made, it’s obvious that there were many, and the whole tragedy is a black mark on the FBI’s record. April 19 became a day that antigovernment activists remember as a day of infamy, and it has been commemorated with other major attacks, such as the Oklahoma City bombing.

The episode “Minimal Loss” (403), in which a standoff at a polygamist compound called the Separatarian Sect Ranch, prompted by allegations of child abuse, ends in a bloody gunfight and a fire, is reminiscent of Waco as well as the investigation into child abuse complaints at the fundamentalist Mormons’ Yearning for Zion polygamist compound near Eldorado, Texas, in 2008. The Waco siege is also mentioned in the episode “Identity” (307), which recalls the Ruby Ridge standoff of 1992.