The Waco cult siege still stirs up huge interest even after 25 years
THE curious keep coming. They turn on to a gravel road 10 miles east of Waco, Texas, and pass through a black gate leading to a rural complex where David Koresh – leader of an apocalyptic religious sect known as the Branch Davidians – and 75 followers died in a firestorm on April 19, 1993.
That came after six Branch Davidians and four federal agents earlier were killed amid a flurry of gunfire in the government’s initial February 28, 1993, raid on the 77-acre Mount Carmel property.
“I was just really curious about seeing this memorial and seeing what’s out here,” said Eric Williams, a Seattle film producer who made it a point to visit the site during a leisure trip to Texas.
Nearby, a woman snapped a picture of a monument listing the names of Koresh and the other 81 Branch Davidians – including 18 children ages 10 or younger – who lost their lives in the 51-day federal stand-off that ended in a nationally televised inferno.
Twenty-five years after the siege, interest in what happened outside Waco – and who was to blame – remains immense.
Evidence of that can be seen in the spate of recent US television specials coinciding with the anniversary from ABC’S Truth and Lies: Waco to the Paramount Network’s six-part miniseries Waco to the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary Waco: The Longest Siege.
The Waco Tribune-herald, the local newspaper that launched a seven-part investigative series The Sinful Messiah on Koresh and his followers and their bizarre beliefs the day before the February 28, 1993, raid, has published the articles online for the first time.
“I think people would like for it to go away, but I don’t think it has,” said Bill Pitts, a long-serving professor of religion at Baylor University in Waco.
He said that just a few weeks ago, when he took a group of church history students to Britain, he stepped into a cab and the driver asked them where they were from.
“And he said, ‘Oh, I remember that,’ and he went on with the story of the Waco tragedy,” Pitts said.
“It’s definitely faded,” Chelsa Brindley Ressetar, director of advancement for a college-prep school in Waco, said of her hometown’s association with the Branch Davidians.
“I don’t think you can brand a city based on an event that happened outside the town. I don’t think that was fair,” added Ressetar.
Some dubbed Koresh, real name Vernon Howell, the “wacko from Waco,” a term the Rev George Johnson remembers hearing when he’d travel out of town after the siege.
“At some point, people realised how silly that was,” said Johnson, who served 25 years as senior pastor of Waco’s St Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church and is now the presiding elder for the denomination’s district that includes central Texas.
Still, many out-of-towners flock to the Branch Davidian site.
On a recent weekend, pastor Charles Pace said he counted 100 cars that came through the gate.
A sign near the entrance requests $5 donations from each car to maintain the property, of which Pace serves as trustee.
“They (the visitors) need closure because they can’t believe what the government did, but they also can’t believe that David Koresh claimed to be God,” said Pace, a Branch Davidian who greets visitors at a small church on the Mount Carmel site and teaches that the fire was God’s judgment on Koresh’s “apostate leadership”.
Pace said he confronted Koresh about his blasphemous claims in 1984.
But Koresh refused to repent, said Pace, who was leading a small house church in Gadsden, Alabama, at the time of the 1993 siege. Pace said he returned to the Mount Carmel site in 1997 and later renamed the church “The Branch, The Lord Our Righteousness” after what he describes as “the purification that took place”.
He said he lives on the property with his wife, daughter, son-in-law and youngest son.
Asked how many people attend the church constructed years after the fire, Pace replied: “I don’t have a number because it’s basically a cyberchurch. I put studies online, and people will look at them. Some will write to me and ask questions, and I will give them answers or make another study. I don’t know what the number is. That’s all up to the Holy Ghost.”
The few Branch Davidians who survived the fire and still live in the Waco area – including Clive Doyle and Sheila Martin – do not associate with Pace.
Texas Monthly recently reported that those survivors even now believe that Koresh “was not a crazed cult leader, or a delusional narcissist, or even merely a gifted interpreter of scripture, but a genuine prophet of God.” At the time of the initial raid, 123 people – including 43 children – were inside the multi-storey building where Koresh lived with followers, including many wives and children he was accused of physically and sexually abusing.
The concerns of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, the ATF, were based on allegations the group – a distant offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church – possessed illegal firearms materials and was possibly converting AR-15 semiautomatic rifles into machine guns.
Shortly after 9am that day, an 80-vehicle convoy raced up to the property and halted in front as agents stormed the centre. After the initial gun battle, a tense siege began.
Almost two months later, on April 19, federal agents injected tear gas into the building to force Koresh to surrender. But at about noon, fire broke out in several places.
A later inquiry concluded the sect had probably started the blaze, though survivors blamed the government.
They can’t believe David Koresh claimed to be God