World Famous Cults and Fanatics (22 page)

It was largely due to Breault’s efforts that the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms finally decided to take action about the enormous cache of weapons and explosives that
Koresh was known to have stored at the compound, and the siege of the Branch Davidians began.
When it ended on 19 April, police found over a million rounds of ammunition still unspent in the
underground arsenal of the compound.

It is not known exactly how many people were killed in the Waco siege.
Seventy-two bodies were recovered from the ashes, and the official count was eighty-six (including the six killed in the
ATF raid) but this was almost certainly not the full count.
All Koresh’s twenty or so ‘wives’ and fourteen of his twenty-two children died in the fire – four of them shot
through the head.
Two weeks after the siege, Koresh himself was identified through dental records; he had died of a gunshot wound in the head, apparently self-inflicted.

Confronted with a case like this, we are inclined to ask the obvious question: was Koresh simply a confidence man, or did he – to some extent – believe what he said?

The answer is: both.
And when we understand how that is possible, we have achieved one of the basic keys to the whole messiah phenomenon.

The first thing we need to know about Vernon Wayne Howell – who became David Koresh – is that he spent the first part of his life looking for security.
Born illegitimate (in 1959) to
a fourteen-year-old girl, brought up by a harsh stepfather, educationally disadvantaged (he was dyslexic), bullied because he was small – he was once even raped by older boys – he was a
shy and not particularly outstanding child.
His refuge from his problems lay in religion – his school was affiliated to the Seventh Day Adventists – and he read the Bible in the way
other children read comic books: to escape reality.
By the age of twelve he had learned the New Testament by heart.
Then his life suddenly changed.
His teacher entered him for a race on the school
sports day.
Vernon had never thought of himself as the sporting type, and had avoided physical competition.
But he had spent a great deal of time racing against his brother on the farm, and could
take off like a whippet.
He won the race – and several others – and the congratulations were an intoxicant.
Suddenly he was asked to join teams; he became the school sports hero.
Determined to maintain his new status, he went in for bodybuilding, taking an enormous pride in his physical strength.
By the time he was thirteen, the shy, quiet boy had become a
“sport-jock” and a leader.

Even as a teenager, Vernon’s natural charm and dominance made him popular with the opposite sex, and he lost interest in religion.
Then, at nineteen, he had an affair with a
sixteen-year-old girl, who bore his child.
He wanted to marry her; she felt he was unfit to raise a child, and left him.
The blow to his ego was painful, and in the emotional turmoil, he turned for
solace to the religion of his childhood, and became a born-again Christian in the Southern Baptist Church.
But now he was religious again, the strength of his sexual impulse began to worry him; he
turned to his pastor, explaining that he was a compulsive masturbator.
The pastor told him that if he prayed to Jesus, he would be given strength.
When this failed to happen, he decided that the
Southern Baptist Church lacked a true link with God, and returned to the Seventh Day Adventists.

He fell in love with the daughter of his new pastor, and while he was praying for guidance, seemed to hear God’s voice telling him that she would be given to him.
When he opened his eyes
he saw his Bible open at Isaiah 34, which declared that none should want for a mate.
Convinced that this was a sign, he went to the pastor to tell him that God had given him his daughter for a
wife.
The pastor threw him out, and when he persisted, he was expelled from the congregation.
(The girl herself seems to have agreed with her father.)

This conflict between his natural dominance and his inability to get his own way became a torment, undermining his self-belief.
He wandered from place to place, doing odd jobs – he had
been trained as a mechanic.
And one day he found his way to Mount Carmel, near Waco, in Texas, and joined the Branch Davidian sect as an odd job man; for a long time he was the dishwasher.
He later
described himself as “the camp bum, the loser that did all the dirty jobs”.
Yet he was also disliked by most of the other sect members, due to his arrogance and egotism.

By comparison, Lois Roden, the head of the sect, was everything he had dreamed about.
Still attractive at sixty-eight, she was a famous TV evangelist, a friend of the rich and famous, who spent
much of her time travelling around the world.
She was also a favourite of the feminist movement, since she had announced that God was female, and began the Lord’s Prayer “Our Mother,
who art in heaven”.

For a long time, she shared the general view of Vernon, and made him live in a small, unfurnished room to try to cure his conceit.
Her view began to change when, two years after his arrival, he
told her that the Lord (or Lady?) had revealed to him that he had been chosen to father her child, who would be the Chosen One.
When her son George – who expected to replace his mother as
president – found out about the affair, he did his best to eject the interloper.
His mother, convinced she was pregnant, defended Howell.
The power struggle ended abruptly when Howell
announced that God had ordered him to marry a fourteen-year-old named Rachel Jones – which he duly did, alienating Lois Roden (who did not give birth after all).
For a while, George was
placated.
Then his fury erupted again, and he opened fire with an Uzi sub-machine gun.
Fortunately, his aim was bad; but Vernon and his few faithful followers decided to leave Mount Carmel.

For the next two years, Vernon Howell and his small group of followers (about twenty-five) lived in the “wilderness” – that is, they set up camp at a place called Palestine,
and lived rough.
But while his followers coped with lack of running water and sanitation, Vernon was often off on “recruiting drives” – in California, in Israel, even in
Australia.
He was hurled bodily out of a Seventh Day Adventist church in San Diego when he interrupted the service to announce that he was the Messiah.
But although many potential converts began by
regarding him as a madman, some of them ended by being swayed by his burning conviction, or by his insistence that they would be damned unless they followed him.
The settlement at Palestine grew;
so did the number of his under-age mistresses.
When disciples had a teenage daughter, she usually became Vernon’s “wife”.

Back in Waco, George Roden – whose mother was now dead – was showing signs of the paranoia that tends to afflict religious fanatics.
He announced that he was God, and ended prayers
with “In the name of George B.
Roden, amen”.
And although Vernon and his followers were ninety miles away, in Palestine, Roden brooded constantly on unmasking “the
impostor”.

In 1987, he devised a bizarre challenge.
An eighty-five-year-old woman named Anna Hughes had died at Mount Carmel.
George dug up the body, installed it in the chapel, and challenged Vernon to a
contest: whichever could raise Anna Hughes from the dead was the true prophet of God.
George had the satisfaction of seeing Vernon decline the challenge and slink away.
But when Howell told his
lawyer what had happened, the lawyer was delighted; George Roden had laid himself open to the charge of abusing a corpse.
Vernon hastened to tell the police what had happened.

They were cautious, realizing that getting mixed up with the in-fighting of religious cranks could be a challenging experience.
They explained that they would need a photograph of the corpse.
Vernon agreed to supply one.
But since that meant that he would have to enter Mount Carmel by stealth, he decided that he might as well make the best of the opportunity, and try to evict George.
He
and his followers bought weapons.
On 3 November 1987, he and a team of disciple “Mighty Man Commandos” wriggled through the undergrowth at Mount Carmel towards the chapel, rifles slung
on their backs.
A dog spotted them and barked; George Roden rushed out with his Uzi and began to blaze away.
Vernon and his eight commandos blazed back, none of them succeeding in hitting anything.
The sound of firing brought the local police, and everyone was arrested – except one Mighty Man who managed to escape.

Vernon and one of the Mighty Men – who happened to be a millionaire – were released after paying $100,000 bail.
To George Roden’s fury, Vernon seized the opportunity to tell
his version of the incident on the local television news.
Roden now made his fatal mistake; he wrote letters to the Texas Supreme Court threatening to strike everybody down with Aids and herpes
unless they sentenced Vernon to life imprisonment.
Instead, George was sentenced to six months for contempt of court.
And when he appeared in court as a witness against Vernon and his Mighty Men,
and explained how he intended to raise Anna Hughes from the dead, the jury lost no time in acquitting Vernon and his commandos.

Fifteen months later, George Roden ceased to be a problem when he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.
The story of how this came about is an interesting demonstration of the
contagious nature of messianism.
One day in the summer of 1988, an ex-alcoholic named Dale Adair came to see Vernon Howell and Marc Breault, declaring that he wanted to get back to God.
Vernon
harangued him for three days, trying to convince him that he, Vernon, was the Messiah.
Suddenly Adair’s eyes glazed over, and he stared towards heaven.
“My God, my God.
After all these
years I understand.
I’m the Messiah.
I’m the David.
Now I know why I’ve suffered all these years.”
“Dale lost his sanity right before our eyes,” said Breault.
It
doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that Adair might not be the only one with delusions of divinity.

Against Howell’s advice, Adair hurried to George Roden to tell him that he was the Messiah, but Roden took the news badly, seizing an axe and splitting open Adair’s skull.
Roden was
convicted of murder, and since he owed thousands of dollars in taxes, Mount Carmel was put up for sale.
Vernon’s followers raised the money, and later that year, Vernon Howell – now
calling himself David Koresh (Koresh being a Hebrew transliteration of Cyrus, the name of the Persian king who allowed the Jews held captive in Babylon to return to Israel) – at last became
owner of the Waco compound.
From the time he had arrived there as Lois Roden’s lowest disciple, it had taken him eight years to gain total control of the sect.

Koresh spent the next four years ruling Mount Carmel like a king.
He took his pick of the women and rarely worked, other than his multi-hour sermons/harangues and occasional trips abroad to find
new converts.
But he made his disciples work from dawn to dusk at menial and even pointless tasks.
One was even heard to mutter: “Lord, I wish the Messiah wasn’t such a prick!”
Yet this general dissatisfaction never led to any significant revolt, until Breault’s flight.

When he realised Breault had left, Koresh called an emergency meeting and launched a manhunt.
But it was too late.
Breault was determined to bring about the downfall of his former
“master”.
He wrote letters to the police, to state authorities, to members of Congress.
His greatest coup was to organize the visit of an Australian television team to Waco.
Unaware
that Breault was behind it, Koresh allowed the team into the compound because he hoped for favourable coverage; but the programme – when it went out in April 1992 – left no one in any
doubt that Koresh was a child molester with a dangerous god-complex.

In May 1992, the Waco
Tribune Herald
began an investigation into the Branch Davidian sect.
One result of their revelations was the decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
to launch an investigation into the sect .
.
.

Now, over a decade since the ashes of the siege have settled, pointed questions remain – and not about the cult’s part in the tragedy.
For example, the question as to who fired first
during the original, botched ATF raid might have been settled by the compound’s metal front door.
The ATF claimed the cultists opened fire through the door at them.
Koresh, in telephone
negotiations during the siege, said the ATF had first fired through it when he refused to come out.
He pointed out that the bullet holes were all from the outside, coming inward.
This evidence
could not be checked after the fire, however, as the door mysteriously disappeared from the crime scene.