For his predecessors at Mount Carmel, George Houteff and Ben and Lois Roden, the End Time was an event to be expected passively. You might predict it, always incorrectly as the Rodens had in 1959, suffering a disappointment; mostly you awaited heaven’s pleasure. But David saw himself as the Seventh Angel of Revelation. But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished. He had a ten-year plan, starting in 1985, the year of his Jerusalem vision. By 1995, the Seals would be fully revealed and the world would end.
If the working out of that mystery included the seduction of the innocent, who was David to deny it? David was a savvy guy. He knew he could’ve had other women, even unofficial wives, without breaking the law. When he reached out to underage girls like Michele and Aisha, he was surely aware he was crossing a line. But David’s role—his duty, maybe—was to create “eternal souls” with a range of women, including young girls. By this act, he chose to follow his own path, whatever the consequences. Maybe those very consequences were necessary to his perceived scriptural purpose.
To be honest, I’m still deeply troubled by these questions. The only rationale I can come up with is that David believed that his message to the world was meant to fail, that failure was its purpose. You can argue that, if David hadn’t provoked the authorities by committing statutory rape, he might have been allowed to continue delivering his message. You can say that what followed from this deliberate violation of the law was inevitable, so the feds can’t really be blamed for doing their duty. You can even say that even though the feds acted with extraordinary violence they were simply faithful to their nature, as David was faithful to his.
If the evidence for David’s guilt in the crime of statutory rape is unmistakable, then the charge of child abuse that was leveled against him and the community by various antagonists—in the sense of beating babies and otherwise mistreating the kids—was totally unfounded. This fact can’t be repeated too often, since in the end the children were cynically used as an excuse to destroy us.
As a consequence of the authorities’ total absence of sympathy for our religious view of life, they never grasped why we regarded the children, particularly David’s own, as special, the most sacred part of our community, our hope for the future of the world. “We don’t expect you to understand,” David said on a videotape we made of the kids during the siege, “but these children are serious business.” The feds, however, simply ignored or willfully failed to grasp this fact. Bob Ricks, head of the ATF’s Oklahoma City office, contemptuously told the press that “women and children to him [David] are expendable items.” As a result, the feds’ view of the children as hostages was totally out of whack.
The children of Mount Carmel were a vital part of our small society. They participated in all its communal activities, including the long study sessions. If they were tired during the studies, the mothers either rocked them to sleep in their laps or took them off to bed. Often, a child would sit in David’s lap while he was expounding Scripture, cuddling close while he stroked the kid’s hair or kissed his or her cheek. He was very touchy-feely with all the children, perhaps in reaction to his own lonely, unloved childhood. Sometimes, amid a fire and brimstone exposition, amid talk of lion-headed horses with snakes for tails, he’d pass around a bowl of popcorn to settle the young ones.
What amazed me was the way the kids could sit through a long study session without fidgeting. Their attention spans were far better than most children I’ve come across, certainly better than mine. They seemed to lack that restless agitation and neediness so common among the kids I’ve known on the outside.
The children lived with their mothers and were home-schooled in the cafeteria. (David did not trust the public school system, disliking its secular curriculum.) The adults and the older children, like the twelve-year-olds Audrey Martinez and Lisa Martin, gave the lessons, which combined Scripture and general subjects. The Bible was the core of their learning, and it’s not surprising that officials who examined the children who came out during the siege were impressed by their remarkable ability to grasp abstract concepts such as “infinity” and “humanity.”
Among themselves, the children formed their own little community. The older kids looked after the young ones, read stories to them, taught them the alphabet and arithmetic. Cyrus, David’s oldest son, who was barely six when I came to stay at Mount Carmel, was the natural leader, being the eldest and the crown prince, as it were. But the children were all brothers and sisters to one another, playing games and studying as equals. I seldom heard them cry.
They enjoyed the freedom of living in the country, to go roaming over the seventy-seven-acre property, riding the go-carts and mini-motorbikes David bought them. Every Sunday afternoon there were go-cart races for the little ones and bike races for the older boys on a track we made behind the Anthill, with swimming contests for all of us in the pool. Cyrus was responsible for keeping order among his small tribe, which he did with an easy authority learned from his doting dad.
When, as a treat, the kids accompanied an adult during a visit to town, they were quiet and self-contained and didn’t run wild around the stores, shouting and yelling for their parents to buy them toys and candy. We bought them ice cream and sometimes took them to see an animated film, and they delighted in such simple pleasures. I loved hanging out with the children, especially Michele’s Serenity and Julie’s sons, Isaiah and Joseph. We played cards and I showed them how to handle the drums, and sometimes we’d just run around playing tag, me the biggest kid of all.
Discipline was strict but fair. If the kids transgressed in some way, by playing close to a dangerous construction area, or if they stole, or started a fight, or acted rudely toward each other or an adult, or did anything that could get someone else hurt, the correction process was clearly set down. First, the child was asked why he or she had acted badly. If there was an acceptable reason, or if the offense was minor, he was let off with a speech about good behavior.
If spanking was ordered, by David or another adult, the child was taken into a little room and moderately swatted on the butt with a wooden paddle dubbed the “Helper.” The mothers themselves did most of the spanking; they were the prime maintainers of discipline. When it was over, the child’s parent rubbed his sore behind and sent him off to play, with an admonition to be good. Once, though, I saw David paddle Cyrus hard, being more severe with him because, as a leader, he was supposed to set an example. The boy took it bravely, scowling to hide his pain. He knew that, as David’s firstborn, more was expected of him.
The one absolute rule in all this was that punishment should never be administered in a passion. If David ever saw a parent spanking in anger or using harsh words to a child, he’d come down very hard on the adult. The purpose of paddling, he insisted, was to show a child how to behave, not as a release for grownups’ frustrations. Kids were never slapped in the face or given a casual smack over the ear. The whole chastisement was carried out coolly, with a kind of old-fashioned solemnity.
Dick DeGuerin, David’s attorney, made an interesting comment about Mount Carmel’s way of treating its kids when interviewed by Newsweek after the fire. “At what point does society have a right to step in and say you have to raise your family our way? It’s applying yuppie values to people who chose to live differently.”
Although I saw that the physical punishment of the children was fair, I must say the whole idea of spanking appalled me. I’d never been beaten as a child—my parents were adamantly opposed to it—so it was hard for me to watch a kid being paddled and see him or her squirm in pain, even though, mentally, I understood its purpose. Maybe spanking was one more of those Texan customs: “Spare the rod and spoil the child” and all that. However, I knew I’d never bring myself to strike a child of mine, even if it meant nurturing a brat.
The false issue of child abuse first surfaced at Mount Carmel because of David’s old nemesis, Marc Breault, and his fierce campaign to dis
credit his former mentor. Not long after his defection in 1989, Marc and other disaffected Davidians living in Australia hired a private investigator to go to Waco to try to stir up state and federal authorities, including the INS and the Internal Revenue Service. Those agencies were urged to take action about child abuse and other alleged offenses happening at Mount Carmel.
The investigator met with local and federal authorities, but none of them seemed particularly interested in Marc’s allegations, despite his lurid claim that it was “highly probable” that we would murder and sacrifice one of our children on Yom Kippur—a weird variation of the blood-libel stories once used to whip up pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe. U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston determined that no federal violations had occurred, and the local sheriff and state agencies felt the same way.
But hell hath no fury like a disappointed apostate, and Marc returned to the attack. The next year, Marc and his wife, Elizabeth, traveled to Waco to talk to Sheriff Gene Barber, without success. “Breault’s complaints, along with the others, stemmed from sour grapes,” Barber commented shrewdly to the local press. The lawman discovered Breault was known for “telling whoppers,” and he divined that his true contention boiled down to an objection to David’s supposed claim to be “the exclusive expositor of Scripture.”
Back in Australia, Marc approached producer Martin King of the National Nine Network, who sent a team to Waco to film a report for its A Current Affair series, in early 1992. The secret agenda of the TV program was, in Breault’s and King’s own words, to expose David “as a cruel, maniacal, child-molesting, pistol-packing religious zealot who brainwashed his devotees into believing he was the Messiah.”
When the tabloid-TV team arrived in Waco, it was clear from the producer’s attitude that he was preparing a hatchet job on Mount Carmel in general, and David in particular. David knew this, but he took a calculated risk that somehow the true character of the community would come through; that, despite the sneers we saw on the TV crew’s faces, we might have a chance to present our side of the story. Maybe David was just eager for any kind of media attention; or perhaps he hoped against hope that we wouldn’t been seen in too bad a light.
David tried to make the Australians welcome. He arranged musical entertainment and asked me to play the drums, but I kept out of the way, being less convinced that Martin King would ever allow anything good about us to come through in the final version. I was right, as it turned out; the documentary—if it can be called that—was utterly skewed in the editing. King sent us a tape, which appalled David. The one-hour “exposé,” broadcast only in Australia, accused David of beating children and forcing them to do punishing exercises, of depriving them of food and water, and of providing poor sanitary conditions.
“How could they lie like this?” David asked. This episode was our first experience of the way the media seemed prejudiced toward us, pursuing an agenda that had nothing to do with objectivity.
It’s interesting to note that, during his first year at Mount Carmel, before he rebelled against the New Light revelation, Marc made no objection to David having several wives or to his sexual connection with underage girls. At the time, he appeared to believe that polygamy was sanctioned by Scripture and that sex with minors was okay if the girl and her parents willingly consented. (Later, he claimed to have been upset in the spring of 1989 when he saw “little Aisha Gyarfas” going up the wooden stairs leading to David’s room and said to himself, “I hope she’s not doing what I think she is.”)
In fact, Marc was knocked out by David, at first. “The light became brighter and brighter until my mind could comprehend the Bible from cover to cover,” he later wrote in Inside the Cult, a book he coauthored with Martin King. “I was beginning to perceive in the way God perceives.” Marc “toyed with the idea of becoming a prophet” himself, and David encouraged him. Before Steve Schneider, Marc was Mount Carmel’s number-two man.
In October 1991, Marc phoned David Jewell, Kiri’s divorced father, to warn him that daughter Kiri, then living in Mount Carmel with her mother, was “in extreme danger” because she was about to become one of David’s “brides.” This call prompted Kiri’s father to sue for custody, and Marc flew to Michigan to give supportive testimony in Jewell’s custody hearing, characterizing David to the court as “power-hungry and abusive.”
Back in Waco after testifying at the Jewell custody hearing, Marc kept nagging the authorities, and in early 1992 a sheriff’s department official passed on his charges to the Texas Department of Child Protective Services.
Marc provided the officials with affidavits by former Davidians Ian and Allison Manning, who claimed that David spanked kids with a wooden paddle, sometimes brutally. Former Davidian Michele Tom alleged that David spanked her eight-month-old daughter for forty minutes because she would not sit still on his lap and had once threatened to kill a child if her mother gave her a pacifier. These statements may have been sincerely made, but they were totally at odds with my experience of David’s treatment of the children.
In February 1992, Child Protective Services social worker Joyce Sparks visited Mount Carmel accompanied by two state human services officials and two McLellan County deputies. Over the next nine weeks, Sparks made two more visits, and David also visited her office in Waco.
Sparks was a plump, blonde, sweet-faced woman, in her mid-thirties, I’d guess. She was very maternal and spoke to the children in a gentle, caring voice. After talking to the kids and looking over the accommodations, Sparks and the deputies sat out on lawn chairs with a bunch of us, chatting and drinking sodas. It was obvious that the deputies, in particular, were uneasy about poking their noses into our business. In Texas, a person’s right to privacy is basic.
Relating to the visitors in a relaxed, good-ol’-boy way, David joshed the deputies for giving him a hard time over the Roden affair. “You guys kinda screwed us over on that one,” he said amiably, and the lawmen gave aw-shucks grins. “Wanna go fishing down at the lake?” David offered. “Call us anytime. No hassles.” Later, one of the deputies remarked to a Waco Tribune-Herald reporter: “You know, the problem with those people out there is not that they’re weird. The problem is that they’re misunderstood.”
The Child Protective Services investigation was formally closed on April 30, 1992. “None of the allegations could be verified,” the official report stated. “The children denied being abused in any way by adults in the compound. They denied any knowledge of other children being abused. The adults consistently denied participation in or knowledge of any abuse to children. Examinations of children produced no indication of current or previous injuries.”
Sparks later claimed that she made an objection to her supervisor about the closing of the case, feeling it should be left open for the time being. However, in an April 1992 taped phone conversation between Sparks and David about her agency’s investigation of the community, the tone was very friendly.
I felt that Sparks’s concern was genuine, and I knew she was horrified when so many of our kids died. And there was a certain brutal logic to the thought she later voiced, that the children might still be alive today if they’d been officially removed from Mount Carmel, even though the abuse charges were unfounded.
Though the question of our treatment of the children might seem to have been resolved in early 1992, these false allegations surfaced as a blip on the radar screen of the ATF. A few months later the blip flared up, ignited by an issue actually within the ATF’s jurisdiction: guns.
The ATF’s original interest in us sprang from the child abuse charges. In late March 1992—while Sparks’s investigation was pending—neighbors told us they’d seen men dressed in SWAT gear practicing forced-entry assaults on an abandoned farmhouse nearby. In May, agents from the ATF’s New Orleans office set up a telephoto pole camera on a rise a few miles away to spy on us. Around the same time, we noticed a couple of men in white smocks, the kind medical personnel wear, at the ranch next door. They had beepers, and they drove
away in a hurry when two of our people tried to talk to them. Steve went to the Waco sheriff’s office to ask about these troubling actions, but a deputy assured us that we weren’t under any kind of surveillance, so far as he knew.
These incidents were ominous. Steve, for one, was troubled enough to phone Graeme Craddock in Australia to warn him that the prophecies about the End Time might soon be fulfilled and he ought to return to Mount Carmel.
The ATF really zeroed in as soon as June 1992, when a UPS driver discovered dummy grenades in a packet he was bringing to Mount Carmel. He told the Waco sheriff’s department, which promptly contacted the ATF. Examining shipping and sales records, the agency learned that ninety pounds of powdered aluminum and black gunpowder had previously been delivered to Mount Carmel. Aluminum and black gunpowder can be used to make illegal grenades; or they may be legally used to reload spent rifle cartridges. The ATF also found that David and Paul Fatta had bought devices capable of converting semiautomatic rifles to fully automatic. From this incident grew the allegation that we were stockpiling illegal weapons in preparation for an armed assault on the government.
Actually, our involvement with firearms had more to do with business than self-defense. The community operated a stall at gun shows (the Mag Bag, slang for an ammo vest) to buy and sell weapons and other gear. The Mag Bag offered a catalog of military gear, including gas masks, MREs, flak jackets, dummy grenades, and ammunition magazines. The women at Mount Carmel, many of whom were skilled seamstresses, sewed custom-cut hunting vests—some of them machoed-up with dummy grenades—for an outfit called “David Koresh Survival Wear,” a sexy name with more hype than substance. Paul Fatta was a shrewd businessman, and he had helped make the gun business into a good source of cash for the community. Paul and Mike Schroeder visited gun shows around the state, buying and selling weapons. Much of the time the stock of firearms used in these transactions never left the boxes they came in.
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