Out of the Ashes: Author Jeff Guinn on Waco and Its Devastating Legacy

[00:00:00] Content Warning This episode contains detailed descriptions of sexual abuse and death, including the death of children. Many of us remember what happened at Waco in 1993. In February of that year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms led a raid on the Texas compound of the Branch Davidians,

[00:00:23] a religious group led by a man known as David Koresh. Things went very wrong very quickly. The raid turned into a standoff that lasted for weeks. On April 19, 1993, the situation came to the worst possible end. The Davidian compound went up in flames.

[00:00:46] 76 people died in that blaze, including many children. Those are the facts, but they don't tell the whole story. It is important to remember that the men and women who chose to follow Koresh were not outright nuts and outcasts.

[00:01:03] They were ordinary people like you and me, who found something of meaning in the Davidian faith. And the government agents were not evil monsters intent on causing harm to the followers of a fringe religion.

[00:01:15] They were ordinary people too, people who were only trying to enforce the laws they had sworn to uphold. Yet these two groups found themselves on opposite sides of an armed conflict.

[00:01:27] We cannot think of anyone who better understands the story of how things reached that point than author Jeff Gwynne. Jeff is a terrific writer. You may have read his wonderful books on Charles Manson and Jim Jones.

[00:01:43] His latest book, Waco, is just out in paperback, and it tells the story with compassion and insight. We highly recommend it.

[00:01:53] Jeff was kind enough to speak with us about the tragedy of Waco and why he feels the story of what happened in those 51 days back in 1993 helped create the world we live in today. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist. And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.

[00:02:12] And this is The Murder Sheet. We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet. And this is Out of the Ashes, author Jeff Gwynne on Waco and its devastating legacy.

[00:03:15] So to start off with Jeff, can you tell us a bit about your background and what got you interested in the story of Waco? By background, I've been in journalism or was in journalism for a long time, about 150 years it seemed.

[00:03:30] And a lot of that time I worked as an investigative journalist for my newspaper. It was during that time that I realized when something large happens, it doesn't happen in a vacuum.

[00:03:47] There's always causes and a lot of times newspapers can just tell you what happened but don't have the space to tell you why and how. When I started writing books about American history, I thought this is what I would like to do.

[00:04:03] I would pick major events that still have repercussions decades later and try to show not only what happened but why and how, particularly how it still affects us today. And for that reason, Waco was a perfect addition to the books that I've written so far.

[00:04:28] The things that happened there 31 years ago now are still making part of today's headlines. And until we understand better what happened in Waco, how can we really understand the effect of it all these years later? You're talking about history and the broader sweep of history.

[00:04:49] And of course, you opened with your book with this great quote from Perlstein talking about how history does not have storybook simplicity. So what do you think it is about us that makes us yearn for that sort of simplicity in history?

[00:05:07] I think that human beings have always hoped for some kind of simplicity regarding events that they don't understand that are so complicated.

[00:05:21] So it isn't anything new, but the more we get into advanced communication, particularly social media, where so many people are throwing out the ideas and this is true, no, this is true. You're making that up. No, you're exaggerating that.

[00:05:39] It becomes more and more necessary just to function in daily life to think we've got some basic grasp on why bad things happen. Of course, Rick Kerlstein, who is, I think, one of the great modern historians and political commentators gets it quite right.

[00:06:00] Nothing happens in and of itself. Everything is connected and it's frightening. And in a sense, when I write these books, I'm doing it to clarify things for myself.

[00:06:15] You might be able to read the Waco book in two or three nights if you give yourself a couple hours each night.

[00:06:23] But for me, it was three years of doing nothing else but devoting myself to it, traveling the country, searching archives, trying to get interviews with people who had never talked before.

[00:06:37] The average person, the average reader doesn't have that advantage, which is another reason I'm so insistent that we can't have this garbage about alternative facts. Basically, what we ought to be doing always and what I always try to do in my books is here are the facts.

[00:06:59] Readers can make up their own minds who the good guys or the bad guys are. That's not my job.

[00:07:05] But damn it. If I'm writing a book about history with my name on it, I want readers to at least think that so far as it was possible for me, I found out everything and tried to explain it in plain language.

[00:07:21] Really well said. I wanted to ask before we go forward, can you give us an overview of what happened in Waco just briefly? And then we're going to drill down into some of the more details of that historic event. Certainly. In the 1930s, a religious group.

[00:07:42] We don't use the word cult, which is just sort of a grab bag for crazy people, but a religious group moved to Waco, Texas with the understanding that their mission given to them by God was to prepare the way,

[00:08:01] convince people to live strictly by everything in the Bible because judgment day, the end times was coming. When that happened, only a very few people of whom God approved would survive to bring in the next great godly era. Everyone else would be lost.

[00:08:25] They picked Waco because land was cheap and they needed a lot of room for the hundred and forty four thousand that the Bible said would be spared.

[00:08:36] As their group settled in Waco and grew, there were a series of leaders or profits, they believed who kept finding new meanings in the Bible,

[00:08:48] new tasks for them to complete until finally one leader, the last one, Vernon Wayne Howell, who later took the name David Koresh for reasons I'm sure we'll discuss, explained that now their mission had changed. They were no longer going to prepare the way.

[00:09:08] They were going to precipitate the events that would bring about the end times. And that meant the branch Davidians fighting to the death, the forces of Babylon, who Koresh said was the American government. They would have to die.

[00:09:27] There would have to be other deaths, but this would precipitate these final events, all of which was foretold in the Bible. Because the branch Davidians in their preparation broke secular laws, not just in terms of having guns that were illegal for various reasons,

[00:09:50] but Koresh himself committing all sorts of sexual crimes with underage children. At some point, the government to them Babylon was going to come and there was going to be a battle. And starting February 28th, 1993 and ending April 19th, 51 days later, that did in fact come to pass.

[00:10:18] So you mentioned this a bit, these branch Davidians, what exactly did they believe? To get the whole story, we have to look back a little bit to the 1840s in America, where in the Northeast there was a movement. They called themselves the Millerites that Jesus was returning.

[00:10:43] There was going to be a great conflagration and sometime around 1843 or 1844. That was the end times. And it got quite a following, couple hundred thousand people.

[00:10:57] When it didn't happen the way William Miller had prophesized, some of the people who believed him simply decided, well, he had misinterpreted some of the things in the Bible. And they formed another faith, another church called the Seventh Day Adventists.

[00:11:18] And the idea of the Seventh Day Adventists was they were going to be the pure believers. They were going to be the ones above all others who followed everything in the Bible.

[00:11:30] And this meant when God was ready and they still thought it might be any time that they didn't put a date on it.

[00:11:38] That they would be the ones who had prepared the way, who had convinced enough people, mostly other Seventh Day Adventists to live the way God wanted them to be spared.

[00:11:51] They even had a pretty straight idea of one angel marking the foreheads of those who would be saved and another five angels basically slaughtering everybody else. It's kind of a bloody belief, but that's what it was.

[00:12:09] In Los Angeles in the 1920s, a Seventh Day Adventist named Victor Houtiff, who in his day job was a washing machine salesman, came to the conclusion that the Seventh Day Adventists themselves were in peril.

[00:12:27] That they assumed they already knew everything and that made them better than everybody else. He tried to convince church elders that we have to reestablish our dedication. We have to try harder. We have to do all these things and they didn't agree with him.

[00:12:48] He broke off and with a group of followers bought some land in Waco, Texas. He picked Waco for two reasons. Land was dirt cheap and if you'd ever spent much time in Waco, you'd understand why. And that it was a religious place.

[00:13:06] In Texas, it was thought to be almost extremist in terms of conservative religion and that he and his people would be allowed to believe what they wanted in prepares they wanted.

[00:13:18] So that's how the Branch Davidians, the name coming from a couple of the people who followed Houtiff in the Bible. Jesus says, I am the branch. You are the vines. Davidian because when Jesus returns, he will sit on the throne of David.

[00:13:39] The Branch Davidians are set up in Waco and with the advent of David Koresh for the first time believing that no, we're not preparing the way only. We are actually going to do what the book of Revelation says will bring in the end times.

[00:13:58] And that is the battle with Babylon that involves people dying, them especially and them coming back to lead the army of Jesus. That would defeat Babylon and bring in the new thousand year kingdom of God. And if that sounds far fetched, it is also true.

[00:14:19] And I spent four years pouring over the Bible trying to find some loophole. If you are among those people who take every word in the Bible literally and there are these people and it's their right in America,

[00:14:35] then you might very well believe when someone shows up saying he's the lamb in the book of Revelation and all these things are going to happen, that you have to do what he says because you believe in God and you're doing what God wants. That's what happened.

[00:14:53] That's what set everything up. Yeah, Koresh seems to be obviously the critical element here. Who is this guy? How did he rise to a position of power and influence within the branch Davidian so he could make claims like that?

[00:15:09] Let's first look at the belief of the branch Davidians and the Seventh-day Adventists before them. That God sometimes uses human beings as messengers or prophets. This was imbued in the Seventh-day Adventist belief and all of the branch Davidians believe that. There are occasionally prophets.

[00:15:32] David Koresh originally Vernon Wayne Howe comes to Mount Harmel, the 77-acre hard scrabble place where the branch Davidians live outside Waco. Because he's a Seventh-day Adventist disillusioned with that group. He wants somehow to see that the Bible speaks to events happening today.

[00:15:58] The leader of the group at the time is Lois Rodin, a woman in her early sixties who claims that God has spoken through her on some occasions, particularly when he sent an angel, a female angel to her.

[00:16:16] So she would understand the Holy Ghost is female, which means God considers men and women to be equal. Vernon was a sorry, sad sort of case talking to the people who were there branch Davidians when he arrived. They all thought boy, he's a scruffy loser. He's 19.

[00:16:41] He's practically inarticulate. The only two things he can talk about at all at any length are how he's going to be a rockstar someday and he's a sinner because he masturbates too much. This is not a promising combination under any circumstances. But Lois Rodin saw something in him.

[00:17:05] Lois had a son named George who was to put it charitably, crazy as all get out. And he assumed he was going to take over the group when his mother passed. She didn't want that.

[00:17:18] She was hoping there would be someone who might be able to be trained by her to take over instead. And she picked Vernon. They became lovers because the Bible talks about how someone will approach the prophetess and impregnate her. That didn't happen.

[00:17:38] But again, here's Lois and Vernon doing what they interpret the Bible wants them to do. She trains him. She even takes him to Israel on a fact finding tour with her. And one day when he's about in his mid twenties, she tells everyone else at Mount Carmel.

[00:17:58] Vernon has something he should talk about. And Vernon, this inarticulate guy delivers a brilliant Bible study on the subject of the serpent. How you've got the serpent in the Garden of Eden and God punishes the serpent.

[00:18:18] And yet sometimes the Bible says it's okay to be a serpent for God. And here's the scripture to prove it. And the people listening to him. And remember, these are lifelong students of the Bible are hanging on every word because it makes sense to them.

[00:18:40] Vernon becomes seen as the obvious successor, the Lois. There are problems he clashes with her son. Lois dies from breast cancer. There's various confusions. But finally Vernon ends up sort of banished for a while to a little place. Palestine, Texas. Gee, talk about coincidence.

[00:19:04] He goes on a trip to Israel. And when he comes back, he has news for the people who were following him. While in Israel, he's raised up to heaven by seven angels. He describes everything in the straight out of the Bible. And he learns three things.

[00:19:25] First, he is the new Cyrus of the Old Testament. Cyrus was a Persian king. In about 600 years before the birth of Jesus, Cyrus and his Persians defeated the Babylonians in Babylon. Babylon had overtaken Jerusalem and had many Israelis and slavery.

[00:19:47] Cyrus freed them with his own money, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. And for that the Bible, and it is in the Bible, describes him as a Messiah. The only Gentile ever described that way in the Bible. So now you're not Vernon Wayne Howe, you are Cyrus.

[00:20:07] And in Hebrew, which is the religion we follow. Cyrus is pronounced or Resh. Your name is now Cres. Your first name is David because Christ is going to sit on the throne of David when he returns.

[00:20:27] And here's the second part in Revelation, the end time start when someone identified as the lamb opens the seven seals on the great book of heaven. And the Bible tells us only the lamb can do this. Only that one special God touched person and you are the lamb.

[00:20:50] The third thing. It's not just opening the seals. You and your followers have to be the first army of God against Babylon. You have to battle them. You have to die.

[00:21:06] But you'll only be dead a little while because then you will be changed and come back at the head of God's army. And you'll defeat the Babylonians. And you'll be the warriors of Christ. And when the new wonderful world begins, you'll be the leaders.

[00:21:25] And for anyone who hears that and shakes his or her head and I promise you, I shook my head a lot of times. If you read the book of Revelation and you believe every word, then you do believe God is going to send the lamb.

[00:21:46] And here is someone who obviously knows every bit of it. And the branch Davidians with David Koresh agreed. And that meant at some point there would have to be some conflict.

[00:22:04] Any prophet who swears, I see this God told me it's going to happen has to deliver at some point. We know after the fact that the conflict started when ATF made raid on Mount Carmel, February 28th, 1993. But its real origin was this.

[00:22:31] When David Koresh came back from Israel and explained this to his followers, he was committing them to a great armed battle. Where people must die to fulfill the book of Revelation.

[00:22:51] If the ATF had not come for David Koresh, it is also true he was training his followers in the use of weapons. There was already some talk of what they might have to do, including going out into the community and starting the violence. If it came to that.

[00:23:12] And Kathy Schroeder, who is a survivor of all this, who was there at the time, put it very plainly. Koresh started teaching if you are willing to be killed for God, you have to be willing to kill for God too.

[00:23:31] The branch Davidians were the ones whose agenda required death. No one else involved had that. It's pretty chilling. Given all that, what was life like on this compound for the branch Davidians living their ordinary life as they're getting prepared for this seemingly inevitable conflict?

[00:23:55] One thing that's always pervaded around this story is the idea that children were being sexually abused on the compound. In your research, was there any truth to that? Absolutely. Not just sexually abused, but beaten beyond any reasonable doubt. And yet the hardest thing for me to understand.

[00:24:20] I mean, I'm seeing all these things that were done. I see people believing things that even most people of faith would find too far fetched.

[00:24:36] And yet to this day, I've written books about Charles Manson and the Manson family, Jim Jones and People's Temple and David Koresh and the branch Davidians.

[00:24:49] With the former followers of Manson and Jones, they absolutely now cannot understand why they did what they did, how they could have believed. They kick themselves. Every surviving branch Davidian I spoke with who had not turned from David Koresh in life still believes in him to this day.

[00:25:17] Everything they did in their lives at Mount Carmel was based on their belief in his interpretation of the Bible, that everything they did was holy because God had told David to teach them these things. The lives themselves were hard beyond belief.

[00:25:46] They lived in one big sort of balsa wood fire trap, the only running water in the kitchen, the only air conditioning in the Texas summers a window unit and David Koresh's bedroom. Flumbing was a bucket and a hose. Curious.

[00:26:09] Meals were whatever could be scrounged or bought the only two staples were bananas and popcorn. The way children were raised was through David Koresh's interpretation of the Bible. And we've all heard the spare the rod scripture. Children from six months old would be punished physically.

[00:26:39] Now there was a way of doing this. A parent or an adult's hand never directly struck a child. They used wooden spoons. There's some difference in memory. Some of them say there was just one universal spoon.

[00:26:57] Others say well every family had a spoon, but a child would be beaten on the buttocks with a spoon. Sometimes to the point of bruising, possibly bleeding. But that was what God demanded. The way they looked at it until a child turned 12 roughly or reached puberty.

[00:27:24] The matter of the child's soul was the responsibility of the parents. If the child did not obey every biblical stricture just like the parents did, then the child was going to hell and it was the parent's fault. You were beating your children to save them further.

[00:27:49] That when you're 12 years old or hit puberty, that's the point when a child becomes responsible for his or her own soul. And as Kathy Schroeder said to me, not blinking. Well if a girl is responsible for her soul, why can't she have sex?

[00:28:10] David Koresh ruled, said that this was a message from God that he had to have multiple wives. Because Revelation talks about 24 elders who helped rule the earth and these 24 elders were going to be his children.

[00:28:28] And that meant at Mount Carmel every woman, every post-pubescent woman was his wife. No other man at Mount Carmel, but David Koresh could have sex. By not having sex the men would then have more energy to devote to following the rules of the Bible.

[00:28:54] But David Koresh took not only what we would consider adult women, he went so far as to have initial sexual relations even with a 10-year-old. And in every case he would say that these, and we can't say women because we're talking in some cases children,

[00:29:18] this was a great honor for them. If they got pregnant they would be having a baby for God. And again we all shake our heads right? How could anyone believe this? And yet people did and were not talking about stupid people, were not talking just billable people.

[00:29:39] Among his followers was a Harvard trained lawyer, a public school administrator. These were people who were certainly intelligent, had been reading the Bible all their lives and thought they'd finally met a prophet who could help them understand every nuanced.

[00:30:03] And so if it was your 12-year-old daughter that David decided was going to be his new bride, you rejoiced for her. God had selected her. She was like Mary, the mother of Jesus. And again none of this is exaggeration and that's what makes it even scarier to me.

[00:30:29] Yeah it's all very chilling and upsetting to think about how people could come to accept things such as that. And yet as the surviving branch divinians reiterated to me over and over, in America isn't freedom of religion guaranteed? To this day they feel they did absolutely nothing wrong.

[00:30:57] That the first raid by ATF and then what happened later with the FBI was in fact an infringement on their religious freedom. They were not the bad guys. The people from the government were and we're talking about intelligent folks

[00:31:17] who live in normal American neighborhoods now might be your next door neighbor. Yeah, if we get closer to the ATF raid itself, I'd like to talk a little bit about context because as you pointed out at the beginning of our discussion, everything is related.

[00:31:40] And back in the early 90s there was another incident at Ruby Ridge and named Randy Weaver. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that perhaps may have informed some people's attitudes and such during this whole affair?

[00:31:56] Sure, but to understand Ruby Ridge again as we did with who were the branch divinians, we have to go back just a little bit further. 1862 the first government division is created to make sure people pay their taxes on imported alcohol and tobacco.

[00:32:19] That's the beginning of the ATF, alcohol, tobacco and firearms. They are and have been the watchdogs for America for all laws and rules regarding alcohol, tobacco and guns. And they have been all this time the most unpopular government agency ever. And there's a basic reason for that.

[00:32:45] A wonderful novelist named T. Jefferson Parker wrote a novel involving ATF and he said the reason Americans mostly don't like ATF is almost all Americans in one form or another like alcohol, tobacco or firearms.

[00:33:05] And they simply see these guys as the blackheaded villains who are trying to keep you from enjoying your rights as an American. Further, the National Rifle Association made ATF their whipping boy.

[00:33:19] And every time there's been a Democratic administration, ATF has flooded its members mailboxes with postcards warning that the government is coming to take all your guns away.

[00:33:33] ATF agents find that disturbingly stupid in that they claim all of them and I only got to meet about 40 or so, but it was true of everyone. Own guns themselves. They're hunters. They're almost all veterans of the military or police or the border patrol.

[00:33:59] They're not coming to take people's guns away. They point out they're just trying to make sure that the gun laws are followed and it's like any other law. If you break the law driving too much, you lose your license. You continually break the law with guns.

[00:34:14] You lose your right to have guns. But that doesn't mean it's just a blanket we're going to get your stuff, but an awful lot of people believe it. And in particular, it is believed by those people who are what we call conspiracists theories.

[00:34:32] They believe that the government in one way or another is out to oppress rather than protect. And this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. People want a good simple explanation for complicated things.

[00:34:49] So if you're somebody who has like 20 guns, including a couple, maybe you didn't register, but so what? The Constitution says you get to have all the guns you want. Then you're not going to see the ATF as a group that's just saying, look, these are the laws.

[00:35:06] We all have to abide by them. Don't do this or do that. They see people coming to say, but we don't care. Americans don't have all the rights they're supposed to have and we're going to get you sucker.

[00:35:21] So the ATF is already battling a bad image that frankly they don't deserve. Things come to a head in terms of the American public, particularly the conspiracy minded American public. In the fall of 1992, the ATF causes the arrest in Idaho of a man named Randy Weaver.

[00:35:50] Weaver was suspected of being part of several white power groups and of sending threatening letters to kill among others, Ronald Reagan and the Pope. He's already being watched anyway. And there's an undercover agent working in his area of Idaho for the ATF.

[00:36:15] And this undercover agent is supposedly selling illegal guns, shotguns that have had their barrels cut much shorter than they're supposed to. The shorter the barrel of the shotgun, the wider the spread of the buckshot when it's fired, much more lethal.

[00:36:36] So in America by gun law, you have to have a certain length of barrel on your shotgun. So he's going around making it known the undercover agent that hey, I'm selling some shotguns that are really sawed off. Don't tell anybody.

[00:36:52] And Randy Weaver bought a couple and was arrested and was brought into court and officially charged with the purchase and possession of illegal firearms. And he was told he was bonded out, but given a trial date. He never showed up.

[00:37:14] Weaver and his wife and his children lived in a little isolated cabin out in the boonies and in Idaho, there's a lot of boonies to live in.

[00:37:28] He did this because he genuinely believed that the government was oppressing everybody and he wanted to get as far away from that as he could. We agree or disagree. This was his belief and his wife's.

[00:37:45] It was decided by law enforcement that they would simply have a raid and arrest him. And a couple of U.S. marshals went out into the area near the cabin so they could kind of plan. Okay, how are we going to do this thing?

[00:38:01] But they came upon Weaver's teenage son and an adult friend of the family and there was gunfire. And a marshal and the teenage boy were killed. The adult wounded got back to the cabin and the government set up a siege around the cabin. It involved the marshals.

[00:38:24] It involved the local police. It involved ATF and the FBI. In theory, the siege is going to last until these people come out and surrender themselves. At some point, a sniper, an FBI sniper fired into the cabin and killed Weaver's wife.

[00:38:56] It was later established that Weaver and those inside the cabin had not fired. Now clearly this was a terrible error on behalf of the FBI, the government. That shouldn't happen. Absolutely should not have happened. And it should have been investigated and the person who pulled the trigger.

[00:39:26] Again, the law is there. However, when Weaver and the others inside came out, they were arrested. Weaver had to serve time for his original charge. But when he was released, he and his daughter sued the government and got a $3.1 million settlement. It was a screw up.

[00:39:50] It was deadly. And by God, it should have been investigated. It should have been reported widely and it was. But there's this new other thing happening in America. And that's the advent of the first 24 hour cable news. Seeing in for the first time.

[00:40:13] If you're of a mind to you can watch events unfolding right there. In real time. You don't have to wait till you see something in the newspaper. You can just see something and decide what it is right there in front of your eyes.

[00:40:31] ATF got a lot of the blame for it. The FBI works very hard for its public image. There's TV shows about brave FBI agents. NRA, as you can imagine is making hay with this and its favorite whipping boy agency. ATF was part of it.

[00:40:53] So ATF is getting a lot of terrible publicity hacked on to an already bad public reputation. And it gets worse for them for ATF. First of all in January 1993 60 minutes, which on regular TV is being released.

[00:41:10] New's hour has a big program about women and ATF being completely mistreated. The women agents and their male boss is not doing anything about it. Again, that's terrible. And it's substantiated and ATF does what any government agency would do. Oh well, not that we're saying anything like that.

[00:41:32] But we will never allow anything like this to happen again. Big strike against ATF and another problem. In March, there are going to be hearings about their annual budget, which is always too limited anyway. In these budget hearings traditionally Republican congressmen and senators attack ATF.

[00:41:53] It's a God they're terrible. We should just disband them. And it's the Democratic, the liberal senators who are going to say no, all they're doing is they're enforcing the law. We need them. But Democratic senators supposedly and almost always.

[00:42:13] Are talking about the rights of women and how we have to protect women in the workplace. So now here's a situation where ATF could go in to their budget hearings and be in trouble with both sides. What can we do?

[00:42:27] Well, as it turns out, we are not going to be able to protect women in the workplace. To their budget hearings and be in trouble with both sides. What can we do?

[00:42:40] Well, as it turns out, back in June 1992 ATF had started investigating these rumors that heard about the branch Davidians in Waco. And in the course of their investigation, which took seven months, they not only talked to former branch Davidians,

[00:43:04] they talked to gun dealers, they talked to local law enforcement, they talked to the branch Davidians neighbor. And they came up with a rock solid case on a couple of things. Now, sexual abuse of children or physical beating of children is beyond ATF's purview.

[00:43:23] But branch Davidians were illegally converting semi-automatic weapons to automatic. It's not illegal to do that if you report what you've done, you get licensed to do it and you pay taxes on it. Branch Davidians hadn't had it.

[00:43:44] So you've got these people, these very strange people living up on a hill outside Waco. With what apparently are hundreds and hundreds of illegal weapons. And you've got their former members talking about how this guy in charge, this David Koresh,

[00:44:03] is talking about how we may have to take these guns and maybe go out and kill people. And even worse, some of these former branch Davidians say, do you remember Jonestown and People's Temple? 900 people dying. These people, you know, in Mount Carmel they talk about committing group suicide.

[00:44:26] How bad would that look? So ATF perfectly within the boundary of the law. Completely in some ways having researched the whole thing and having obviously concluded there are illegal guns in the hands of people who may do dangerous things with them. They're going to go get them.

[00:44:50] But here's the big mistake ATF made. They never ever tried in any way to learn what the religious beliefs were of this group. They were about to raid. They thought Manson, Jim Jones, just one more weird ass cult. They're crazy. They're stupid.

[00:45:15] Why should we bother knowing what ridiculous things they might believe? Well, the ridiculous thing they might believe and what played directly into the hands of David Koresh was here's Babylon. Here are the forces of Babylon. What we are doing is holy. God wants us to do something.

[00:45:41] What we are doing is holy. God wants us to do this. Secular law doesn't matter and they're going to show up with their guns. They're coming after us. This is what I said was going to happen. This is going to be the final battle.

[00:46:01] So ATF's going in thinking, oh, they're going to see us. You know, we're going to have our uniforms on. Frankly, they expected the branch of Indians to be scared shitless. They did not realize for the branch Davidians this was thrilling. This was it.

[00:46:22] They were going to start what God wanted them to start. They were going to die and yet be reborn. This was proof David had been right all the time. Absolute tragedy guaranteed. Absolutely.

[00:46:38] Can you speak to how this raid lost the element of surprise and then turned into a standoff? You know, looking back on any tragedy, you can always see, well, if just someone right here at this moment had done this or someone else had said that, that's true anytime.

[00:46:59] But in when we're talking about Waco and Mount Carmel, it's painful. To see how obvious it was that something shouldn't happen. Throughout its planning for the raid, ATF counted on one thing, the element of surprise.

[00:47:20] They had been told by former branch Davidians that David Koresh kept all the guns locked in a room upstairs at Mount Carmel. Only he had the key.

[00:47:34] And that further, all the branch Davidian men after breakfast and some Bible study would be going outside to work on a project so that if ATF was quick enough, they could break down the doors, get between the men and the guns. And from there it's easy.

[00:47:54] The problem was that was no longer the case. The people ATF was talking to had been gone from Mount Carmel for at least a year. Now David Koresh had assigned guns to all the different members, adult members.

[00:48:11] And they kept these guns in their rooms with many clips of ammunition in preparation for defending themselves whenever Babel on attack. And Mount Carmel's on the top of the hill. There's windows in every direction and someone with powerful automatic weaponry behind each window.

[00:48:36] Top of the hill, there's no cover on the hill. The ATF agents if the branch Davidians know they are coming are going to get slaughtered. But of course ATF's convinced branch of Indians will never know they're coming.

[00:48:52] Well, they did everything pretty much possible to make sure that the word got out. They'd rented all kinds of motel rooms and Waco. They had ATF officials going around town the day before in their windbreakers with the ATF signs on the back.

[00:49:09] They called a local ambulance company just in case anybody gets hurt. We need to have some ambulances available. The woman who took the call at the ambulance service was the girlfriend of a TV cameraman from one of the local TV stations.

[00:49:25] The Waco paper, which by the way was running at that very time a seven part investigative series on some of the things happening up at Mount Carmel involving child abuse and sexual abuse.

[00:49:41] One of its reporters got a tip from somebody in the sheriff's department that it was going to happen. So the night before, yes ATF agents are gathering to be told, okay, we're going to do this. We're going to do that.

[00:49:54] And TV crews and newspaper reporters are also having their briefings. Then of course the final thing. There are two ATF agents in charge of this raid. They are the senior agent in charge and the assistant senior agent in charge of the Houston division.

[00:50:18] Because Waco's in their region, they're going to be the ones in charge. They have promised ATF officials and Treasury Department officials in Washington because ATF is part of the treasury. We will call this thing off if we lose the element of surprise. They guaranteed it.

[00:50:39] So come that fateful Sunday morning. The ATF agents are gathering little town hall outside Waco putting on their gear. They're getting ready to go.

[00:50:55] 76 agents will get in too long cattle bars and the cattle cars will take the backcountry roads and then go up the driveway at Mount Carmel. In this part of Texas, you know, you see cattle cars all the time.

[00:51:10] If the branched of any men who are working outside happen to look up and see the cattle cars in their driveway, they're just going to think somebody took a wrong turn. And the ATF agents and trained, they were going to get four out of the cattle cars.

[00:51:28] Two groups were going to drive right through the front door. One control the ground floor. One go upstairs control there.

[00:51:36] A third group was going to take ladders go around the side, climb up the ladders and break through the windows of the gun room where they knew all the guns would be locked.

[00:51:47] An ATF agent working undercover has sort of insinuated himself, the branched of Indians and he comes to visit them that morning just before eight o'clock. The raid scheduled for about 1045.

[00:52:02] This undercover agents job is to say hi to everybody and make sure the morning routine is going as usual. If it isn't, he's supposed to report back to his commanders they know and the raid will be called off.

[00:52:17] He gets there and he brings with him a copy of the morning's paper, the Waco paper that's got more stuff about the branched of Indians in it. And he shows it to David Koresh and he said, you know, asks him some questions about it. It's kind of normal.

[00:52:34] David, you know, okay, starts talking about what's in the story why it's not true. Then Koresh decides, you know, we need a couple more copies of this so, you know, other people can read it here.

[00:52:49] And he asked David Jones, one of his followers who was a mailman in his day job, which you drive out and get some more copies of the paper. Jones gets in his car, which is outside the building has got US post office on the side of it.

[00:53:06] And he's going to drive down one of the side roads to a service station where they've got one of those newspaper machines and get some more copies.

[00:53:13] He's out there, right along road and he sees a TV cameraman in his van standing by the side of the road looking bewildered stops says to the TV guy, you know, can I help you?

[00:53:26] And the TV guy said, oh, thank God, I'm trying to find this place, you know, where there's going to be this raid. It's the branched of Indians and ATFs coming right now. And, you know, I don't even know where I'm supposed to be.

[00:53:40] I'm supposed to be filming the whole thing. And David Jones does two things. First he says to the TV guy, well, if you look back over there, you'll see the roof of a big place.

[00:53:50] That's Mount Carmel and he gets back in his car drives back to Mount Carmel and he informs the people there that ATF is coming. The undercover cop makes his excuses. Before he does, David Koresh says to him, they're not going to get me.

[00:54:19] The undercover cop goes to an undercover house nearby and says, look, we got to call it off. They know we're coming. He gets on the phone, the one of the two ATF guys in charge and said, you know, they know we're coming. We can't do this.

[00:54:36] We got to call it off and he is asked, did you see any guns? Well, no, he didn't. But they know we're coming and of course the guns are all in the rooms. And this guy is ATF official. And his boss, the number one guy confer.

[00:55:00] And well, if they haven't got their guns out yet and they're all locked some locker room, we can still go right now. Real surprising. And that's what they do. But the surprise is not on the branch divisions and gunfire erupts from every corner of Mount Carmel.

[00:55:25] And the ATF agents have no cover whatsoever. And for two and a half hours, think about this, who and a half hours at the virtually point blank range. These people are attempting to annihilate each other. The branch divisions have the more powerful guns. They've got automatic weapons.

[00:55:58] ATF didn't bring automatic weapons. They thought this was going to be such a cakewalk that could have low powered guns. They didn't want to take the chance of a straight child being hit. And at the end of it all, there's dead wounded on both sides.

[00:56:15] It's a ceasefire is called ATF Stagger's way. On the outside, the FBI comes in to take over the whole thing. Inside Mount Carmel, a couple things are happening. First of all, David Koresh has absolute proof as far as his followers are concerned.

[00:56:36] He was telling the truth and six of them have died. And several are badly wounded, including David Koresh. But see, this is what it says in the book of Revelation. They're going to be coming back. We got to get ready.

[00:56:59] A 51 day standoff follows with the FBI surrounding everything. Trying to tell them to come out. There are some false starts and stops. But the FBI has something in common with ATF. They never bother trying to learn what these people inside there believe. They just do not.

[00:57:23] Which means at some point, since David Koresh keeps telling the FBI, well, maybe I said we were going to come out, but God talked to me and said we couldn't yet.

[00:57:37] That anything else Koresh might say in terms of I think God wants this or that they're going to dismiss as Bible Babel. The FBI ignores information from a couple of religious experts that Koresh isn't even the first guy claiming to be Koresh.

[00:57:52] That there's another one from Florida and maybe David Koresh is copying what this first one said, which it turned out he was, but it was too late. Maybe if we can get that information to his followers inside, they'll turn on him, but the FBI doesn't do that.

[00:58:04] Why? Doesn't matter with those people inside. I think they're all idiots. These things happen at the end of the 51 days. Then comes a God awful fiery conclusion, which for a series of stupid reasons gives ample ammunition.

[00:58:18] And I use that word specifically to conspiracy theorists then and ever afterward right up to now. What a conspiracy theorist is. What a conspiracy theorist is. What a conspiracy theorist is. What a conspiracy theorist is. It's happening right now.

[00:58:39] For something that's supposed to be religious, it was a most unholy mess, and it's happening all right there where anybody who wants to can watch the whole thing. So unnecessary. It infuriates me to this day to think about it.

[00:58:56] Tell us about that. Tell us about the end of the sand belt. It's so unnecessarily screwed up. unnecessarily screwed up, that we can never think about it without getting frustrated. Beginning on March 10th, over a week before things happen for the end, the FBI is considering

[00:59:24] putting in some kind of gas into Mount Carmel. Something that will be like tear gas, be irritating will force the people inside to come outside. The FBI's got the place ringed with tanks. They want to try coming out with their automatic weapons. We will pulverize

[00:59:44] them into a hamburger. If they come out from the gas with their hands up, okay, we'll arrest everybody. But there's a little problem. The FBI reports to the Justice Department the highest person in the Justice Department who's going to have to sign off on this if it's

[01:00:04] going to happen is the Attorney General. And at this moment in 1992, America has no Attorney General. The Clinton administration has just been sworn in, Clinton sworn in in January 20th, and the Senate is going through the process of approving or disapproving his nominees for

[01:00:29] various offices, including Attorney General. There is no one in charge at the Department of Justice to say to the FBI, well, okay, you know, you want to use this tear gas or whatever, go ahead,

[01:00:44] or no, that's a bad idea. That's impossible. We'll have to think of something else. And so it dithers. The FBI is under tremendous pressure. The media from the whole world is in Waco, Texas,

[01:01:00] every day saying, well, what's going on? Why isn't anything happening? So the FBI is trying to have a news conference every day except there's nothing to talk about really. They're still in there.

[01:01:12] We're still asking them to come out. So what they use the time for as much as they can is to denigrate the branched of Indians. The word cult is used a lot of the time.

[01:01:26] References to Charlie Manson and Jim Jones are thrown out there because the FBI doesn't have any biblical experts talking. They've got a phone line into Mount Carmel when they talk to Koresh, and he says things they don't understand his interpretation. For instance, at one point

[01:01:46] he explains to them, I am a Messiah. You know, I'm one of the people like in the Bible who has to do a great thing. The FBI reports in its news conference that he's claiming to be the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

[01:02:05] And so now a lot of the public thinks, oh my God, you got some idiot in there claiming is Jesus and stupid people who believe you. And Koresh said nothing of the kind. God knows what

[01:02:17] he was saying is weird enough, but now the FBI, since it has no context, is going to be giving its version. And the media soon decides that the FBI doesn't have anything useful to say. So

[01:02:33] what do you do when that happens? Well, you got to find something to write about, right? Okay. Well, here's our choices. In there, all the men are screwing innocent little girls, children are being beaten, or conversely if you prefer. Here's the government

[01:02:54] who's trying to murder innocent God-loving gun-owning Americans. There is no nuance. There is no, let's think about this and think about that. It's still very one-dimensional, and every day it gets worse. Finally, Janet Reno is sworn in,

[01:03:17] and the FBI goes to her with this plan. Let's get this over with. We'll put in the gas. Reno's cautious. She says that she'd like to know more. Has the FBI actually talked directly

[01:03:29] to the Army about this, for instance? The Army has had to use gas in different places. The FBI hasn't. Why don't you talk to them? There's a delay while that's happening. And all the while, the public is watching, demanding that something happen, and they're

[01:03:50] pretty much divided. Half of them say go in there and get those people, no matter what you have to do. The other half is these are innocent people. Why don't you get the

[01:03:59] hell away from them and let them worship God and own their guns? Finally, Reno approves a gas plan. However, she insists that she be guaranteed a couple of things. First of all, the gas goes in

[01:04:14] incrementally. You don't just pour all the gas in at once. And second, even though CS gas is supposed to be fairly safe, underlined fairly, it is possible that in great concentrations, it's combustible. She wants a guarantee that the gas canisters that are going to be fired into

[01:04:40] Mount Carmel will be noncombustible, nonmilitary. So there's no explosion which could cause the fire. And she's guaranteed both things are true. And so at 5.45 in the morning of April the 19th,

[01:05:00] it's still dark out. Phone rings inside Mount Carmel and it is the FBI notifying they have to come out because they're about to launch gas in there. The branched of Indians have had their

[01:05:16] electricity cut off for weeks. It's cold. It's in the 40s. Their only source of heat is Coleman lanterns, which as you know involve flames and inflammable stuff, rather flammable stuff. They've tried to block their leaky walls to keep the wind out with bales of hay,

[01:05:41] which is like kindling. And the canisters start coming. The FBI's actually put some listening devices in there. It sent in milk for the little kids and a few other things so they can actually hear

[01:05:55] some of the things that are being said. So far as the branched of Indians are concerned, about 10 days earlier, Koresh had said he was going to write out the meaning of the seven seals

[01:06:08] and the branched of Indians were going to celebrate Passover. Soon as that was done and he had written the seven seals that he could give out to be distributed to people everywhere, he and his followers would come out. But the FBI didn't believe that because Koresh

[01:06:23] had said they'd come out before and they hadn't. Well, the gas starts to float. Think of Mount Carmel inside as kind of a maze and instead of hedges we've got thin little walls. The branched of Indians built it themselves without a blueprint out of cheap materials.

[01:06:43] So everything's kind of confined and twisty and doesn't make a whole lot of sense under the best of circumstances. When the gas first gas gets in, it has its immediate effect. People's eyes are

[01:06:56] tearing. Their skin starts to burn. Koresh had prophesized that there might be a gas attack before ATF ever showed up and they bought a bunch of gas masks at Army surplus stores.

[01:07:11] But here's a problem they don't fit on children's faces. And so the little kids are having this stuff just pour in their faces and their mothers soap towels in water and put them over the kids' faces,

[01:07:25] but that doesn't stop the gas. And so panic begins to set in. You've got children screaming and crying their mothers desperate. What comes next never has been agreed upon, never been figured out one way or the other. The FBI claims that the branched of Indians

[01:07:47] started shooting at them, shooting at their agents, shooting at the tanks. And the FBI promise was that we're only going to put gas in incrementally unless of course we're attacked in which case we're just going to saturate the place. The branched of Indians

[01:08:07] who survived and there would be nine who would live will later claim nobody ever shot from inside Mount Carmel. It was some of the FBI agents shooting in that everybody heard, but nobody

[01:08:21] knows for sure. All they do know is that the FBI had 400 canisters of CS gas. They started firing those canisters in, they claim. And I've seen all the records at 6.17 a.m. We know that by 9 o'clock

[01:08:40] the FBI is already reaching out to law enforcement agencies all in the region. They're running out of gas as anybody else have any gas canisters they can send. That's how thick the saturation was of CS gas inside that ramshackle firetrap. Well,

[01:09:02] the mothers and the children, the mothers trying to get their children anywhere within the walls of Mount Carmel is one room with concrete walls and ceiling. It actually had been sort of a storage place in an earlier incarnation of Mount Carmel that was there.

[01:09:22] But now it's the only sort of solid place there is and the branched of Indians use this concrete sort of pill blocked like place for storage, for some food, for a few guns and cases and cases

[01:09:38] and cases of ammunition. The mothers are shoving their children in there that they're diving in after them trying to protect them from the smoke with their own bodies. This is not exaggeration. This is all true. And that's when the FBI decides it's going to use the tanks and

[01:10:00] other motor vehicles that's got out there to start knocking in the walls of Mount Carmel, make the gas get in even easier. Already about 6.45, there was a brief radio conversation that unfortunately for the FBI was recorded. One of the guys in the tank, wobbing canisters of gas

[01:10:27] was at hit one corner of the building and because of the angle and everything, his non-combustive civilian canisters were bouncing off and he radioed in and asked for permission to use combustible military canisters, which was granted. And he fired either two or three. These those also bounced off.

[01:10:58] They never exploded. But right there is a record that even though the government had assured everybody no combustible stuff, some had been fired. The fact that they had nothing to do with what happened later doesn't matter. The FBI lied about something and this will be proven.

[01:11:26] Just before noon that day, the wind is still swirling. The gas has permeated everywhere. The tanks have knocked down walls including part of the roof and the walls of that concrete kill box. And these fell on the mothers and children inside and crushed many of them.

[01:11:51] Others were killed but they're pinned down, they can't move. And then somebody screams fire. Afterwards there's three variations of what might have happened and depending on who you are, you pick which you wanted to believe. The first was that the FBI deliberately set fire to Mount Carmel,

[01:12:16] to kill everybody, to wipe them out, to make an example of them. And to this day there's an awful lot of people who believe that. It absolutely could not be true. If everyone inside Mount Carmel

[01:12:32] died, it absolutely did nothing good for the FBI or the ATF. Their job is to enforce the law and do it without bloodshed if at all possible. All that could happen if the FBI set fire to the place

[01:12:50] was that agency and the ATF because they were the original people getting involved here. They're going to take all the blame. So the conspiracy theorists want to say, well certainly that's what happened. Certainly it did not. The second is that the branch Davidians accidentally

[01:13:10] started the fire. They've got their Coleman lanterns for warmth. There's clouds of combustible gas everywhere. People are panicking. Somebody kicks over one of the Coleman lanterns. There's a spark. And within 20 minutes the whole place burned. I mean it was, they believed

[01:13:30] the temperature internally got up to 3,000 degrees. Think about that. So it was an accident. Nobody meant it to happen, but it did. Third is the branch Davidians deliberately set the fire.

[01:13:46] They figured, you know, as soon as we die, God's going to translate us up to heaven and we're going to come back. And they'd done what had been required of them. So yeah, let's go ahead and do this.

[01:14:00] That could be true. Nine of them, nine, all adults escaped through breaks in the wall or windows or something. They got out, they had terrible burns. They were arrested. And the FBI

[01:14:18] kept saying to them, and again we've got documentation of this. Where are the children? We're trying to save the kids. Where were the kids put? And nobody knew. It took two days for everything,

[01:14:35] for the blaze to be over and the massive heat to subside so that people could start searching in the ruins. And the two lead people in the search besides Texas Rangers were an official from North Texas and a representative of the FBI, Ferris Rookstall,

[01:15:01] whom I interviewed. And they looked and the first few bodies they found were all adults. In one place they found David Koresh along with Steve Schneider who was sort of his number two. Only the upper half of Koresh's body was left. Most of Schneider's was left.

[01:15:23] But they both died from bullets to the head and the coroner from Tarrant County, Texas, decided that Schneider had had the gun he'd shot Koresh to keep him from suffering

[01:15:40] any more than he'd earned his gun on himself. There were a few more adult bodies. Where are the kids? After a couple days Rookstall and some of the Texas Rangers are getting to the remains of the

[01:15:56] area where the concrete pillbox had been. A couple of its walls are still standing, everything else is crumbled. They start digging and what they find is a lump of melted bullets. Think about that, everything melted. There had been metal framework inside the

[01:16:14] concrete walls that metal had melted and they're chipping away for about 12 hours, you know. And then Ferris Rookstall says, that's a little girl's sneaker and they dig down more. And there are the children, over 20 of them. There are their mothers. There were some that died directly,

[01:16:50] but for many more they're trapped and alive. And the temperature and the pressure builds up and the cranial fluids in their head boiled and they essentially exploded. Rookstall found one little girl's body, think she was about 10, see mostly intact. When he tried to pick it up,

[01:17:14] her body fell apart in his hands. He says to this day he can't stand the sight of children wearing sneakers. He cries when he talks about it. It was horrible. Directly after the event, one of the major newspapers took one of its national surveys and found that

[01:17:46] 70% of Americans approved of what the government agencies did that day. But then things started to come out. How those kids died, the fact that combustible canisters were used even if the FBI swore they wouldn't be. The fact that there was no proof, the branch

[01:18:08] dividends had been firing first at the FBI, but there's also no proof that the FBI fired first. Within a few more weeks, 50% of the country disapproved of what had happened. And it grew

[01:18:24] from there and it did not stop there. One of the things that people say is 1993 was a long time. I mean, a lot of people who hear about this weren't even born then. Probably somebody involved in this very conversation wasn't born then. So really, why doesn't matter?

[01:18:50] Evidently some people made some stupid mistakes, but that was a long time ago. Waco matters to us most right now because the events that are happening in real time. Criles that are about to get started today. So many terrible things happening now

[01:19:18] all the way back to what happened at Mount Carmel and of this there is no doubt. Gosh, that was incredibly powerful. When I was writing it, I was choking and crying.

[01:19:41] Yeah, I can understand why. I mean, how do you as an author, as a journalist and as kind of you're bearing witness to some of this? How do you handle that? I mean, this is an incredibly

[01:19:57] horrifying story. There's not really any heroes. It's just one bad thing after another. Even people who may be trying to help it kind of it doesn't work out. How do you as an author

[01:20:12] get through a book like this? I first remind myself that people who are involved in these things who survive them are being courageous talking to me about it. I have to even if I don't want to hear some of the things I'm hearing, I have to respect

[01:20:35] their courage in telling it. And I also have to remember that we all remember can remember the same thing different ways because one person sees this as deliberate murder by the government and the government sees it as deliberate suicide by religious fanatics.

[01:20:55] And both these people are intelligent and honorable and remembering it the best way they can. Yes, I get angry sometimes when I have to deal with these things. I'm horrified by them. I'm a parent, my God, you know. And in every case, every one of these

[01:21:16] books I write, I end up becoming friends with some of the people I interview. And sometimes these friends are on opposite sides and hate each other. With this book, something happened that's only happened to me with two other books. I've written 25.

[01:21:32] First with the Manson book, then with the Jim Jones-Jones Towne book, and then with this book. With each book I had a recurring nightmare and my poor wife suffered for the months

[01:21:44] that I was writing those parts of the book because these things would wake me up almost every night. The nightmare I had when I was writing Waco was that suddenly I was inside Mount Carmel,

[01:22:02] ATF's cattle cars were coming up the driveway. And I'm turning around and I'm trying to say to people I can't see but I know we're there, the Branch Davidians. Don't do this. They're not going to hurt you. I promise they're not coming to kill you.

[01:22:20] Let them in, talk to them. Otherwise you're going to die and no one will listen to me. And someone's pushing me out that front door just as the ATF agents are getting out of the vans, the cattle cars. And suddenly shooting starts and shooting starts from behind me

[01:22:42] and in front of me and I'm screaming at people, don't shoot, don't shoot, you're going to kill each other. And that's when I wake up and usually I was yelling. My wife would say, you're having your dream again. My job, just as your job, is to ask good

[01:23:03] questions and get people to tell you things in a way that other people can understand. And my job is to set aside my internal reactions to say these are the things we know and then the readers have to decide. With this book I've heard from people condemning me

[01:23:34] from both sides. All you did was write an excuse for these religious idiots. They deserve to die. You deserve to die. And then I get the nastier letters, threats, phone calls from people who say you're part of the plot with the government.

[01:23:57] How much did they pay you? These days programs like yours, I hope books like mine, are more important than they've ever been. So many people only want to hear facts that reinforce what they've already decided they wanted to believe. So many people, any of us, feel bewildered

[01:24:30] by the world and the things that happen in it these days. How could it come to this? How did we get to this? And we want so badly to believe there's some kind of answer. Programs like yours,

[01:24:48] I hope books like mine for people who whatever they're going to decide want to come to a conclusion based on the things we know not the things we hypothesize. So yeah, this book hurt me.

[01:25:05] It sure as hell didn't hurt me as much as the people who burned to death or the people who saw their fellow agents get shot down, butchered to this day they believe by idiots who were breaking the law. The middle ground is never comfortable,

[01:25:27] the one that's based on facts. But damn it, if we're ever, ever going to start understanding each other again, we first have to start by understanding what there is. Not what we think there might have been. Yeah, very well said. Sometimes it feels like the middle

[01:25:48] ground is like being halfway up the hill to not caramel. You just, you know, that's so good that as I do future interviews about the book, I'll probably use that line and people will say, isn't that incredible? The way he knows how to word things.

[01:26:03] You're welcome. You're making me cry. I mean, this has been such an incredible, like, this is like probably a stupid question, probably sounds very naive, but like, is there a way back from Waco? Do you see this as a permanent loss of something in our society,

[01:26:22] or can we come back from Waco eventually? We can come back if we look at how Waco got us here. What we have now in America is a proliferation of our militia groups who have decided that by God,

[01:26:41] we're going to be the arbiters of what's right and what isn't. We have politicians in both parties deliberately exaggerating the claims and beliefs of the other side. We have commentators who have built careers on creating controversy where what we needed was understanding.

[01:27:05] Alex Jones built his media empire on Mount Carmel. If you'll look at the prominent violent militia groups today, like the Proud Boys, their leaders now were the ones who cut their teeth

[01:27:26] on rage about Waco. Timothy McVeigh, two years to the day after the final fire, blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Did you know Timothy McVeigh was at Waco, selling anti-government bumper stickers? We've got a picture of that for God's sake.

[01:27:50] January 6, the insurrections. So many of those people there were part of the hate groups based on Waco and it was pointed out to me by one analyst that only 70 or 80 of all those hundreds of arrests

[01:28:10] and the different trials going on are members of hate groups. The other ones were ordinary citizens who got caught up in it. Well, okay, if we know and we do know, Waco is where so much of this

[01:28:29] began. For God's sake people cut through the crap and the rhetoric and look at the facts we know there will always be mistakes made by human beings in positions of authority, whether they claim to be the lamb of the Book of Revelation or the director of ATF's

[01:28:55] assault, whatever you want to call it on Mount Carmel. Human beings will make mistakes that is not indicative of some overall plot by thousands of people in the government. For Christ's sake, think about it. If there's a huge cover up of something like this,

[01:29:17] how many thousands of people have to be involved in the cover up? Wouldn't one or two of them sometime have to come forward just through a crisis of confidence? But do I think we can

[01:29:32] stop what's happening? Yes, I do. But it can only stop if the vast majority of us are willing to take a breath and not just ask ourselves, where are we now? But what caused us to get here

[01:29:46] and go back to the root of that? Is that going to happen? I hope it does. Is there anything we didn't ask you about, Jeff, that you wanted to mention or you think it's really important for folks to understand about this book or this story?

[01:30:08] I'd like to say something directly to those folks who either for a long time or even just up to this minute have decided that Waco is the perfect example of the American government simply deciding it will destroy anyone that won't inform that it attacks its citizens.

[01:30:33] There are three groups involved really in what happened. We have ATF, we have the FBI, we have the branched of Indians. For only one of those three groups, death was required as part of what happened and that was the branched of Indians. They said no,

[01:30:57] when I says ATF didn't screw up in lots of ways they did. So did the FBI. But after three years of studying it, of spending so much time with people who were there, my personal conclusion is that the tipping point was that there was a self-proclaimed

[01:31:20] prophet who told his followers that people had to die. Take that away and we don't have the rest of it. Please folks, whoever you are or whatever you think about Waco, look into the facts

[01:31:41] and I think this is the most critical one. We would like to thank Jeff for speaking with us. We really appreciate his time and insights. We'll also be including a link to his book in

[01:31:51] our show notes. We strongly recommend that you check it out. Thanks so much for listening to the Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail.com. If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime,

[01:32:12] please report it to the appropriate authorities. If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www.patreon.com. If you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests, you can do so at www.buymeacoffee.com. We very much appreciate any support.

[01:32:50] If you're looking to talk with other listeners about a case we've covered, you can join the Murder Sheet Discussion Group on Facebook. We mostly focus our time on research and reporting so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account

[01:33:06] but we ask for patience as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening.