The siege at David Koresh's Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas lasted for 51 days
and showed the world just how badly the FBI could mess something up.
And with Paramount's Waco now on Netflix, a new generation is learning about the tragedy.
Here's why the siege was worse than you think.
Every leader has to rise to power, but before David Koresh rose to become the leader of
the Branch Davidians, it was George Roden who ruled the cult.
According to the New York Times, Koresh wasn't especially fond of Roden, who he saw as squatting
on his property, so he got a bunch of friends together and they invaded the sect commando-style,
dressed in camouflage military uniforms and carrying military-style weapons.
There was a gun battle, Roden was shot in the hand, and Koresh was able to seize control
of the cult.
So how exactly does something like that happen without consequences?
Well, there was a trial, but none of the eight attackers was convicted of a crime.
David Koresh claimed he'd been aiming at a tree, not at Roden, and the jury believed
him, or at least enough of the jury to result in a deadlock.
In fact, the jury believed Koresh so much that a few of them actually hugged him at
the end of the trial.
Now that's charisma.
"They felt compelled to hug him after the trial was over, when the verdict was announced.
I've never seen that before, and I've not seen it since."
And even though authorities found enough guns on the compound to, quote, "hold off the entire...Sheriff's
Department," no one was convicted of a felony, so Koresh and his cronies got to keep their
guns.
So why didn't the assistant district attorney decide to try David Koresh a second time?
He never really said, but he did once complain that he'd been, quote, "a black man trying
to prosecute seven white men in a Southern town called Waco."
David Koresh was just one of many, uh, colorful characters who ruled the Branch Davidians.
First there was Victor Houteff, who established the Waco group in 1935.
Then there was his wife Florence, who predicted that April 22, 1959 would mark the dawn of
the "new messianic age."
When that doomsday didn't happen, the movement split into several factions, one of which
was led by a man named Ben Roden.
Ben was smart enough to tell everyone that Christ's return would depend on all of them
being "morally mature," which pretty much absolved him of the responsibility for being
right about dates.
When Ben Roden died, his wife Lois took over.
When Lois died, her son George took over.
In 1993, the Washington Post reported that one of the factors leading to the standoff
between George Roden and David Koresh was the question of which one of them was able
to successfully raise a 20-year-old corpse from the dead.
Spoiler alert: neither one of them could.
Even before that, George had been a less-than-upstanding citizen.
He was sentenced to six months for asking God - in a legal motion - to inflict AIDS
and herpes on judges.
Two years after the gunfight with David, George murdered one of his supporters with an ax,
evidently because the man was yet another rival claiming to be the true messiah.
Cult leaders have all sorts of sordid techniques they use to control their subjects and brainwash
them into doing crazy things.
David Koresh, too, subjected his followers to some messed-up stuff, like 19-hour-long
sermons.
He also verbally abused his followers, and his sermons could be terrifying.
Grace Adams, who joined the cult in 1990 after traveling all the way from New Zealand, told
CBS News that she watched him preach while wielding a boat paddle, which he would strike
against the stage.
Koresh often separated parents from their children, which is a special kind of torture.
He wanted the kids to put him first, so he'd remove children from the care of their mothers
if he felt the mother/child bond was too strong.
David Koresh also told his followers that the world outside the compound was full of
bad people.
When he thought they were misbehaving, the punishment was severe.
Grace Adams says she was locked in a 10-by-8 foot room for four months and fed from a bowl
on the floor.
Koresh finally let her go, but only when he discovered that her visa had expired.
Can't have immigration knocking on the compound door.
Eventually, most cult leaders decide that polygamy is cool, but only for them, because
that just goes along with the whole being worshiped by other human beings thing they're
doing.
According to CBS News, David Koresh's revelation came in 1989, and was called "The New Light,"
which sounds lovely and holy and everything but was really just a pretty name for his
self-professed right to be the only dude on the compound who was allowed to become a dad.
Also, his relationships with his many wives didn't have to be consensual.
That was okay, though, as far as Koresh was concerned, because any woman who got to know
him in the biblical sense of the word got to have a golden ticket to heaven, so it was
a win-win.
So yeah, David Koresh basically dissolved all the marriages on the compound and claimed
all the women as his own.
This didn't just include the adult women, either.
Koresh had a number of teenage "wives" and some who were even younger than that.
In 2003, one woman claimed she'd married Koresh when she was 10.
But sure, go on about how Koresh was totally innocent of wrongdoing.
Every childhood has its ups and downs, but if you were a kid on the Branch Davidian compound,
it was mostly downs.
Joann Vaega was just six when she escaped the Branch Davidians.
She told ABC News,
"That fear, that nothing you can do is going to be good enough.
You're raised with just fear.
Everywhere is fear."
The kids existed under constant threat of a wooden paddle called "The Helper."
To prepare for the battle at the end of the world, they were often made to fight each
other.
The boys would get up at 5:30 a.m. for "gym," which was really just military training.
In the early days of the siege, David Koresh allowed a few of the children to leave the
compound - not his own, though, because they were supposedly the sons and daughters of
the Messiah.
Most of the kids who were released spoke about their parents as if they were already dead,
and they seemed almost cool with it.
They told investigators things like, "Everyone is going to die," and "We're going to blow
you all up."
These kids were so brainwashed they claimed to love David Koresh, despite the horrible
things they'd experienced in the compound.
Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist who worked with the kids after their release, described it
like this:
"Fear is what it was.
They learned to substitute the word 'love' for 'fear.'"
No matter who you blame, no matter which side you sympathize with, there's no question the
government badly screwed up the Waco incident.
There are a lot of reasons why, but one of the biggest is because there were two teams
working to end the crisis - the FBI and the Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT- and they did
not agree on the best way to do things.
Now, disagreeing on the best way to do things is fine if you're sitting around a table in
a boardroom discussing the latest television commercial for your dumb product, but when
people's lives are at stake, those kinds of major disagreements can have tragic consequences.
According to PBS, the FBI favored a chill approach.
Tread lightly, be patient, spend lots of time talking to the people in the compound.
The HRT disagreed.
"Bringing these tanks and stuff around here, I tell you what.
No one's going to hurt me or my family."
So while the FBI was engaged in careful negotiation, the HRT was blasting loud music into the compound
and crushing Branch Davidian vehicles.
Which means negotiations came down to a battle of philosophies: "Hey, if you come out we'll
treat you well" vs. "Hey, if you don't come out we're going to drive you nuts with loud
music and destroy all your stuff."
With those kinds of mixed messages, it's not shocking that the Davidians were confused
and desperate and not really willing to negotiate with either team.
"I mean, these HRT guys.
What makes grown men act like that?"
One of the many things there's still a lot of disagreement about is who was at fault
for the fire that ultimately ended the standoff and killed 75 people.
According to ABC News, the survivors still say the FBI was responsible for the fires.
A Congressional investigation decided otherwise.
There were bugs inside the compound that captured the Branch Davidians saying things like "Start
the fire?" and "David said pour it, right?" - "it" supposedly being fuel for the fire.
So that does kind of seem like a smoking gun.
And aerial footage shows three fires starting in simultaneous locations within the compound.
Regardless of where and who set the fire, the results were catastrophic.
David Koresh sent the children with several women to a bunker located on the bottom level
of the compound, where they all perished.
Meanwhile, the people on the upper levels faced fire and tanks, which were being driven
through the walls of the compound.
One of the nine survivors escaped through a hole blasted through the wall by one of
the tanks, but it was too late for the people behind him.
He later recalled,
"I could hear some of the ones that were further back into the building behind me screaming.
I thought, 'Nobody's getting out of there now.'"
Of the 33 bodies found inside the bunker, 25 were children.
A medical examiner told Frontline in 1995,
"Most of them had died as a result of smoke inhalation or suffocation.
A couple of them had died as a result of blunt trauma due to collapsing debris...but there
were at least three kids who had been shot to death.
And one was stabbed to death."
Outside the bunker, people also died from smoke inhalation, but a few had much easier
deaths - including David Koresh himself and his right-hand man, Steve Schneider.
Both men were found inside the compound's "communication room."
Koresh died from a gunshot wound to the forehead; Schneider from a gunshot wound to the mouth.
No one is really sure who shot who.
Gunfire was heard coming from inside the compound during the fire, and this is where there's
still a lot of disagreement.
Federal agents claimed that the Davidians were killing each other, either to avoid the
horror of dying in a fire or because David Koresh had ordered the killing of those who
tried to escape.
Survivors still vehemently deny that either one of those scenarios is true.
Which basically just means that we're never going to know exactly what happened.
A lot of people were left broken after the events of Waco.
The kids who escaped the compound before its tragic conclusion grew up with the scars of
everything they'd experienced while they were inside.
And those who knew the victims didn't exactly move on, either.
David Koresh's mother Bonnie Haldeman told the press after his funeral,
"I don't think I will ever rest in my heart.
I didn't get to see the body, and I'm not even positive that [it] is David [in the grave]."
Haldeman's life ended tragically, just like her son's did.
In 2009, CBS News reported that she'd been found dead in her sister's home.
She was 64, but she hadn't died peacefully in her sleep or anything - she'd died from
stab wounds.
Worse, Beverly Clark, her younger sister, was accused of the murder.
Clark was arrested but found incompetent to stand trial, so she was moved to a medical
facility where she remained for nearly nine years.
Her case wasn't resolved until 2018, when attorneys finally agreed that she'd been insane
when she killed her sister.
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