Chapter 1: What was the background of the Waco Siege?
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Chapter 2: Who were the Branch Davidians and what did they believe?
But really, like, overall... There just wasn't any huge reckoning over it. And there should have been because it was an American tragedy, even if in some ways the Branch Davidian group were, you know, at least partially responsible for their part, too. Sure.
Yeah, like I hope that comes across in this episode because I know we're going to get a little probably riled up here and there about like how it was handled. But I'll go ahead and just say my takeaway at the beginning.
You know, you can't you can't hole up and be a pedophile in a house and you can't illegally like collect and sell and modify guns into machine guns and sell those like no one's disputing that stuff. Right. I think the issue is the way this all went down in the end when it could have probably gone down with the loss of zero lives, much less the loss of, what was it, 86 people total?
Yeah, including 20 kids.
Yeah, so that's sort of the issue at hand for me personally.
Yeah, I think that hits it on the nose.
Well, let's talk about the Branch Davidians, eh? Yeah, let's. Because I, up until... Two days ago, I thought that Davidians came from David Koresh. I thought they got that name from him as their leader, just because I didn't know a ton about it, aside from kind of following it as it happened when I was in college on the news.
But the Branch Davidians, they got that name because in 1955, a guy named Benjamin Rodin started a branch, a new sect of Seventh-day Adventists, a Davidian sect, which had, you know, to do with the monarchy of Israel under King David. It had nothing to do with David Koresh's David.
Right. He retrofitted his name. He was actually born Vernon Wayne Howell. And he's like, you know, I could probably get a lot further trying to become the leader of this sect if I change my name to the same name as the name of the sect.
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Chapter 3: What led to the ATF's raid on the Waco compound?
So it had been around a long, long time. It's about 13 miles northeast of Waco, Texas. And so they had been around for a long, long time. And in 55 is when that official split came. And then 59 was when. And I think that's why they were like, hey, don't predict the second comings, because when they don't happen, you end up looking kind of dumb. Exactly. And that happened in 1955.
The second coming did not happen. And so they ended up there with that last group, like you said, about 100 people. Koresh had been around since he was in his early 20s. He got off to a kind of a rocky start there because he had had an affair with Lois Roden, who I guess was Benjamin Roden's wife. Yes. If the math checks out, she was in her 60s and he was in his 20s.
And he got into a squabble with her son about who was going to become leader and ended up shooting him. And like he was arrested and everything. And it was a hung jury. So he never he never had to serve time for that shooting.
Right. So he took over. After that, he was pretty much the undisputed leader. One of the first things he did was he married a 14-year-old member of the church, and her parents consented and said, yeah, sure, be married to our 14-year-old daughter who you're 10 years older then, which made it legal in Texas at the time. That was, you know, sign number one.
But if you rewind a little bit before he showed up at the Branch Davidian compound, he had actually been de-fellowshipped, is what it's called, where the Adventists kick you out. Because he had seduced, which I think means that he sexually assaulted and actually successfully sexually assaulted a 15-year-old daughter of one of the church's elders.
Right.
Yeah. You know, he had a pretty rough upbringing before that. Like you said, he was born in Houston. He was reportedly had suffered sexual abuse of his own at the hands of older boys. He had dyslexia and did not do well in school. I think he failed first grade a couple of times and was a dropout by the time he was in middle school. And yeah, so, you know, that was his sort of rough childhood.
For sure. And over the years, he kind of got into guns. He really got into the Bible. That was one of the things that I think people were drawn to about him at the Branch of the Divinity sect was he knew what he was talking about. He was also very charismatic, and he could essentially run Bible studies that ranā you know, 10, 12 hours at a length and people weren't getting fatigued.
Like they were still just jazzed the whole time. So he definitely knew what he was talking about. He wasn't just making stuff up off the top of his head. Like he very much understood the book of Revelations in particular.
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Chapter 4: What were the initial outcomes of the ATF raid?
I think he had 17 in the end. Then he moved on to the married women and separated the couples out and said, all right, You can no longer be with your husband. I'm the only one here. I'm the only male here who is allowed to have intercourse. All the other guys have to remain celibate. And they all went along with it. And, you know, this included taking children up, girls.
There was this one woman, Kathy Schroeder, who was very disturbing because she still believes all this stuff. But she was interviewed. who said that like they were all trying to stay awake, all the girls at the end of these marathon Bible studies, even though they were exhausted. So he would pick them to go back to his room and have sex with them.
And she also, it was really hard to watch, but she still to this day was like, they weren't children. We weren't children. Sure, some of them were as young as 10, but they were adults in our culture. Yeah.
Man, you know how the world found out about that too, Chuck?
About which part?
Well, about him sexually abusing minors, children. It was a current affairs show. Well, first, the Waco Tribune-Herald did a series of articles on it. So that caught the local attention. But a current affairs show called A Current Affair, the Australian version back in 1992, went and interviewed David Koresh. And this is before anybody knew who David Koresh was.
So they had a lot of foresight and they went and investigated it because this is a I mean, obviously, it's a really big deal that there's a. Yeah. Essentially what everyone thought of at the time and still do in a lot of ways. A cult leader who is sexually abusing the children of his sect. That's definitely worth investigating. That's not what the ATF investigated him for, though.
No, they're the ATF. They don't dabble in that kind of stuff. What they do dabble in is guns and firearms. And that is what got them. You know, I mentioned early on they were illegally collecting and buying and selling and retrofitting, basically making machine guns and then selling those illegally at gun shows. And so that's what caught their attention.
And, you know, they were collecting these guns and supposedly like more than like close to two million rounds of ammunition.
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Chapter 5: How did the FBI's negotiation attempts unfold during the siege?
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences of the siege for the Branch Davidians?
He showed up as a student and a follower and started attending Bible studies. And it was successful in that, like, he was never kicked out. But it was unsuccessful in that they knew that he was a federal agent almost from the outset.
Right.
And later on, I think during these negotiation talks, the FBI was like, well, if you knew he was undercover, why didn't you kick him out? And I don't remember who said it. One of them said, we liked him. Like, we saw at his core he was a good guy and we liked being around him. We came to like him. So why would we kick him out? Yeah. So it was really weird.
Like they were almost toying with the feds because they knew the feds were investigating them. And it was so clumsy that they didn't feel particularly threatened at this point. But the whole thing started in May 1992. And by February 1993, I guess the ATF was like, we have enough information that we're going to we're going to carry out a raid.
We're not just going to show up and ask them to come out. We're going to carry a hard hitting raid. Why did they do that, Chuck?
Well, I mean, they got a warrant. So they had enough information to at least get like a legal warrant to search everything. Their goal initially was to just get those illegal weapons, arrest David Koresh, who, by the way, and I think you found this, was that like he had a relationship with the local sheriff.
And at any point, the local sheriff could and I think did say like, hey, man, why don't you come in and like talk to us about what's going on? And that happened. So like none of this seemed to have been completely necessary. I think they also were the under the impression that like they were bunkered in and like he never left the compound.
But upon further investigation, they found that he kind of regularly would leave the compound and they probably could have lured him out. But they, you know, they were kind of bungling this from the beginning. So they planned a surprise attack. kind of raid warrant serving where they would force entry and they were like, we're going to catch them off guard.
They won't have time to arm themselves and it's going to go great.
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Chapter 7: How did the siege impact public perception of government authority?
It was just a blunder by the media because a cameraman named Jim Peeler and a reporter. He was he's all over this documentary. he stopped on the way out there because he was tipped off. They don't know who, maybe a sheriff's deputy or somebody tipped him off that this is going to be going down. So he wanted the scoop. So he couldn't find the compound.
And he stops a mail truck, a friendly mail carrier. It's like, hey, where's this Branch Davidian compound? I think there's a raid going on and I want to cover it. And that mail carrier was a Branch Davidian. So he hightailed it back there and was like, we're about to get raided, you guys.
Yeah. And so when he tells David Koresh this, we're about to get raided, Robert Rodriguez, the undercover student who had embedded himself as a follower who they knew was a Fed, he's standing right there talking to David Koresh when the mail carrier David Jones runs up and tells him they're about to get raided. So.
Knowing that the element of surprise has been blown, Robert Rodriguez runs back to the safe house to call his superiors, gets in touch with them, and apparently is like, the surprise is blown. We need to call off the raid. And I guess the superiors are like, oh, bad connection. I can't hear you. See you. We're going to go raid them now. And that's essentially what happened.
They carried on with the raid willingly. knowing full well that Koresh knew they were coming. And that apparently gave them a sense of urgency that hadn't even been there before.
And then on top of that, one of the reasons why they planned the raid in the first place, this big whiz-bang forced entry raid with like a tactical team going in, was that they were up for budget review, congressional budget review, and they wanted something splashy. to get the attention of Congress and be like, see, this is what you give us money for.
So they had every incentive to go in unnecessarily roughly.
Yeah, for sure. So on February 28th, there were 76 armed agents that came up from Fort Hood. They were obfuscated in cattle trucks. They had canvas thrown over the back of these trucks, hiding. Of course, Gresham and them knew they were coming anyway, so it's not like that mattered.
And at the very beginning of this thing, David Koresh comes to the front door and it's on video, like all the stuff you can watch happen. And eventually you were watching it in real time as it played out. But it's all over this documentary. Like Koresh comes to the front door and opens it and says, hey, man, there's a bunch of women and kids in here. You don't want to you don't want to do this.
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Chapter 8: What lasting effects did the Waco Siege have on American society?
And I think six Branch Davidians were killed in the exchange as well. A bunch more were wounded. David Koresh was wounded. And all of a sudden, this raid... had been so thoroughly botched that it became day one of a 51-day siege where the ATF and then eventually the FBI surrounded Mount Carmel and were trying to get the Branch Davidians to come out.
And the Branch Davidians were like, no, we're not coming out. You guys go away.
Yeah, and, you know, they also had the superior ground. I think one of the guys that was like, you know, when we pulled up on this place, we were all of a sudden a little shaken. He said it was full of windows. He said it was the high ground. And he said this is not the kind of like ā like we were immediately at the ā Oh, what do you call it when you're at a disadvantage? That's the worst.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like a siege of a castle up on a cliff. You're not in the best position unless you're in the castle.
Yeah. And it also had a tower. That's where Koresh's bedroom was.
Oh, yeah. It was also made almost entirely of like plywood, right? There was some concrete to it, but wasn't the most part, wasn't it wood?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was huge, but it was definitely one of those things that was kind of built by hand over many years. Yeah, for sure. I think it was a three-hour gun battle, and eventually there was a call from the inside to the outside where David Koresh gets on the phone with an Officer Lynch, and he says he's Officer Lynch, and Koresh says, that's kind of a funny name.
And then he says, this is David Koresh, the Notorious, and he said, what'd you guys do that for?
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