Killed at infamous cult siege
listeners who have said they had no idea that a lot of these people were just going about a fairly normal existence.
“To go to parts of the city I now live in, whether it’s Cheetham Hill, standing outside that house where some of these Bible sessions were taking place, or the old coroners court in the centre of Manchester, such an atmospheric building, to stand in there and think that this is where the relatives were shown the videos of the disaster that led to the deaths of their loved ones.
“Or to go to another part of Greater Manchester and get the experiences of the detective who led the inquiry at this end.
“It’s all very tangible stuff and it really underlines the fact that this is all something that happened in very local proximity to where I now live, which is kind of remarkable.” As Chris and Ciaran got to know the families of the victims, they felt an even greater sense of responsibility to do their stories justice. “It was very important to Ciaran and I to move away from these people being faceless numbers. Or nothing about them at all,” says Chris. “From the very beginning we tried to frame these people as individuals, and to try to tell our listeners as much as we possibly could about them and their lives before all this began. That’s the clear beginning of our story. “It was only when we started to meet some of those families that I started to feel an even greater responsibility to do that as well as we could, because some of these people we spoke to had never spoken on the record before. Ciaran and I felt we had a real Chris Warburton responsibility to put those people across as humanly as possible, and it is then up to people to make their own judgement.
“I still think a lot of (the families) can’t actually believe it. To lose a loved one in any circumstances when they are in their twenties or thirties, at a young age, as a lot of these people were, is obviously tragic and impossible to deal with, but when it’s something as surreal as that, an international news event, you would never, ever anticipate that. There was just disbelief. Repeatedly we had people saying ‘I felt helpless, my relative was going out there. I didn’t know what they were going to, they didn’t know what they were going to.’
“And then to see the raid, to see the siege playing out, for some of them the feeling that it was going to end in a tragic circumstance.
“To follow all of that and to live with that for 25 years and to try to make some sense of what happened is obviously an impossible challenge. There was so much raw emotion in the interviews we did. There were a lot of tears, a lot of raw grief 25 years on.
“We’ve tried to portray people as best we can, as ordinary people going about ordinary lives in the UK.
“Some people have said to us these people were there looking for answers, a lot of them were very religious people, and there were parts of their Christian experience that they didn’t have answers to.
“If you suddenly have a guy turning up, who has got this completely different world vibe about him, a bit of a rock star persona, and he’s saying that these very hard to reach parts of the Bible, that a lot of theologians don’t even touch, bits about the End Of Days prophecies, and he’s saying ‘I can unlock this, I’ve got it, I know it,’ that’s a very attractive message.”
Since the podcast was launched in the UK in November, Chris and Ciaran have been inundated with messages from people who had been surprised to learn about Manchester’s connection to Waco.
“We’re hoping people will come away with a slightly different understanding of what happened though that entire episode,” adds Chris. “To make them think that these were actually real people.
“This wasn’t some film that happened 25 years ago. This was real lives, with real-life consequences of what happened.
“It’s also understanding that for some people, these were real lives that might have been in your neighbourhood that were affected.”