1. Wandering Bonehead
Vernon Howell, who would later take the name David Koresh, was born in Houston on a sweltering morning in August 1959. His mother was fourteen years old.
Bonnie Clark told friends she was “sort of engaged” to the baby’s father. Bobby Howell was a high school senior, a good kisser with a pickup truck. Bonnie dropped out of eighth grade to have their baby. The age of consent was seventeen, but a fourteen-year-old Texan could marry with parental consent. “Daddy signed the papers, but Bobby backed out,” she remembered. “God had a plan for my life and Vernon’s life, which didn’t include Bobby.”
Bonnie gave her son his father’s name anyway. She named him Vernon Wayne Howell and raised him while working two or three jobs at a time. She waited tables. She worked in a nail salon. She cleaned houses and offices for a realtor. After a brief marriage to an ex-con who beat her, she lied about her age and worked as a waitress at a nightclub on a tumbledown block of Houston’s Canal Street. With its mirrored walls and green neon, the Jade Lounge seemed posh to her. “A lot of prostitutes hung around,” she recalled, “but they didn’t work out of there.”
The owner liked the lively new girl with the auburn hair. “My knight in shining armor,” she called Roy “Rocky” Haldeman, a burly navy vet, the sort of proprietor who could break up a bar fight or win one.
By the time they married in 1965, Roy was thirty-six. Bonnie was twenty and pregnant again. She delighted her new husband by giving birth to a boy they named Roger. Haldeman sold his share of the Jade Lounge and moved the four of them to a farm near Dallas.
He didn’t think much of his wife’s first kid. For one thing, five-year-old Vernon was so hyper that Bonnie called him “Sputnik.” For another, he stuttered. Worse yet, the boy was shaping up to be what his stepfather considered “a pussy.” He cried every time he got dropped off at day care. “Roy would tell him not to cry,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Be a man!’ Roy beat him on his butt and left it black and blue.” Thirty years later, Koresh described those beatings to an FBI negotiator. His stepfather spanked him so hard, he said, “he made me fly like a kite.”
School was no easier. The boy was dyslexic as well as hyperactive. Vernon flunked first grade twice. After that, a teacher told the eight-year-old he’d been assigned to special education, and for a moment he thought she meant he was special. Other kids disabused him of that notion by giving him a nickname: Mister Retardo. “When my mom picked me up after school that day,” he recalled, “I busted out howling, ‘I’m a retard!’”
His boyhood took a turn for the better on the day of a middle-school sports festival. Even the special-ed students were expected to compete in one event or another, so a coach entered Vernon in a cross-country race. “I didn’t know I could run fast,” he recalled of the day he won a blue ribbon. But Vernon and his half brother used to chase each other around Haldeman’s land. “We didn’t have bikes or expensive toys. We built up leg strength racing, so when I ran against them city boys, I ran ’em ragged.” He began to believe there might be something special about him, a touch of greatness.
He also had a God-given knack for shooting guns. Even Haldeman was impressed when his stepson drew a bead with a BB gun and hit squirrels between the eyes. As he grew his first whiskers, he developed other passions: for cars, girls, and, to Bonnie’s surprise, God. He owed his interest in religion to Bonnie’s mother, Erline Clark, a Seventh-day Adventist who took Vernon to Sabbath services in Tyler, Texas, and gave him his first Bible.
Seventh-day Adventists celebrate the Sabbath from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, the Old Testament way. They believe human history will end soon with the Second Coming of Jesus. Vernon preferred the rigor and drama of his grandma’s religion to the chaos in the Haldemans’ house, where his mother and stepfather drank, fought, and split up only to kiss and make up to the sound of grunts and thumps in the bedroom next to his. When they were on the outs they’d send him to stay with his grandma for months at a stretch. It took Vernon a while to make sense of the old-timey language in the Bible she gave him, but once he got the hang of the thees, thous, and shalts he was pleased to find all sorts of violence and sex in its onion-skin pages. By the age of twelve, despite his struggles in school, he could recite long biblical passages from memory.
Haldeman was a mean drunk who got meaner and drunker with age. Finally, Bonnie left him. Vernon claimed she slept with men for money after that, but she swore it wasn’t so cut-and-dried as that. According to her, she paid their bills with help from “some rich boyfriends.”
Vernon dropped out of the ninth grade with a grade-point average he once described as “you don’t want to know.” But he was good with his hands. He worked construction and made tax-free money fixing cars, motorcycles, lawn mowers, and power tools. Good old Vern could take a backfiring engine apart and put it back together so it purred. He did carpentry for friends “just like Jesus,” said Bonnie, who cosigned for a Chevy pickup truck Vernon called his “chariot.” She felt bad about partying her way through his youth to the point that she forgot much of it, and for letting her men beat him. Still she saw a silver lining in what she called the “whuppings” he endured as a child, including some she dispensed herself. “As far as disciplining children, he learned from all the wrong things I did,” Bonnie said years later, when she became more religious. “I think God caused certain circumstances in his childhood for him to understand humanity.”
She recalled “Mary,” her son’s first girlfriend, as a raven-haired temptress. The girl had dark hair all right, but her name was Linda. Sixteen-year-old Linda Campion was the one who introduced eighteen-year-old Vernon to sex. “My first love,” he called her years later. “I was shy, still a virgin, and she was jailbait. We had the most beautiful relationship of carnal spirituality” in the bed of his pickup.
He didn’t believe in using condoms. The Bible warns men not to spill their seed. The Bible said sex could make a man and woman “one flesh,” not one flesh and a little bit of rubber. So he said a doctor had told him he could never have children. He was “sterile,” he told Linda, a word he’d heard in a movie.
He was startled when she told him she was pregnant. But the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. “I was blown away at the thought that I’d have a child,” he said. “Me, Mister Retardo—going to have a baby!”
Instead, Linda’s father paid for an abortion.
Vernon stayed away from the Campions for a month, sleeping in his truck down the road from Linda’s house. Finally, Dick Campion took pity on him. A middle manager at Texas Instruments, Campion wanted his daughter to be happy. “Stay with us,” he told the boy, who moved into Linda’s room and into her bed. Vernon considered their sleeping arrangements “weird. In the mornings her dad would knock on the door. ‘Linda, time to go to school! Vern, are you going to work?’”
Soon Linda was pregnant again. This time her father welcomed the news, rattling on about love and family and a church wedding—until Vernon started to apologize for his role in her abortion. “I didn’t know about it till after,” he blurted. “Oh man, did I feel like a murderer.”
Dick Campion’s face turned red. He hadn’t known who was responsible for Linda’s first pregnancy. She had blamed another boy.
“So he kicked me out.”
Vernon wasn’t ready to move back in with his mother or his grandmother. He went back to sleeping in his truck, looking up at God’s constellations, “talking to the heavens.” Those conversations could be a joy on clear nights but weren’t so inspiring when it rained. “I ended up cussing God out.”
He spent three years working construction and doing odd jobs, living here and there, crashing at his grandma’s now and then. He got kicked out of the Seventh-day Adventist church in Tyler, Texas—“disfellowshipped”—for having sex with a church elder’s fifteen-year-old daughter. He smoked Camels, drank beers he liked to call “suds,” and learned to play a guitar his mother bought him. “I taught myself to play before anybody ever tuned that guitar. Once it got tuned, I had to learn all over again.” He loved Elvis Presley, the Mamas & the Papas, Johnny Cash, and later Uriah Heep and Foghat. Vernon pictured himself as a rock star, but at the age of twenty-one he was still a nobody with no place to call home. “A wandering bonehead,” in his own estimation.
His wandering led him to a religious commune a hundred miles south of Dallas. The Branch Davidians, a splinter group of Seventh-day Adventists, lived there. On a dog-day morning in 1981, Vernon Howell drove up to their retreat ten miles east of Waco. He parked outside the chapel and went looking for Sister Roden.
2A New Religion
Branch Davidians trace their roots to Victor Tasho Houteff, who dropped out of elementary school in his native Bulgaria and immigrated to America in 1907. Houteff never lost his thick Balkan accent, but he had plenty of good old American get-up-and-go. After settling in Rockford, Illinois, he worked his way from grocer’s assistant to grocer to hotelier, then rode the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad to Los Angeles. Soon Houteff joined the sales force for Maytag, a new company whose electric washing machines would help fill his pockets with commissions. He also joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose members celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day of their week, and expect Jesus’s second coming to be imminent.
Houteff railed against what he viewed as the weakness and worldliness of his fellow Adventists, who responded by kicking him out of their congregation. In 1935, at the age of fifty, he led three dozen followers to a tract of land near Waco, Texas, a medium-sized city on the muddy Brazos River. Like other Seventh-day Adventists, they believed that the end-times predicted in the book of Revelation, the Bible’s violent final chapter, would occur in their lifetimes. But the Davidians, as he named his followers, claiming they were true heirs to the biblical House of David, toed a stricter line than other Seventh-day Adventists. They lived communally and homeschooled their children. They avoided meat, tobacco, alcohol, dancing, and all music except hymns. Houteff dubbed their retreat “Mount Carmel” after the spot in Israel where the prophet Elijah was said to have performed a fiery miracle, calling flame from the sky to prove that Yahweh was truly God. As Davidians knew, the plain below Israel’s Mount Carmel was called Armageddon.
The balding, smiling Houteff claimed to be a modern prophet. He interpreted scripture in twice-daily lectures, explaining how his Davidians’ numbers would increase from 38 to 144,000, a number representing 12,000 for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, enough to lead them safely through the end-times. His message attracted hundreds of followers.
Two years after founding the sect, the fifty-two-year-old Houteff married Florence Hermanson, who is described in church records as his “helpmeet.” She was seventeen. Houteff answered critics who charged that he was “robbing the cradle” by referring them to Abraham, who was said to be eighty-six when he sired a child by Hagar, a slave girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter. “Abraham, the father of the faithful, certainly took to himself a wife much younger,” he declared. Florence would serve as her husband’s assistant for twenty years, taking down his sermons in shorthand and typing them up.
Houteff died of a heart attack in 1955. His widow took over his role the next day, claiming that his gift of prophecy had passed to her. To prove it, she announced that the apocalypse would come before 1960. In fact, she said, Jesus would return to earth in fire and glory on April 22, 1959.
More than nine hundred Davidians gathered outside Waco in the days leading up to that fateful Wednesday. Some had sold homes and businesses to move to Mount Carmel. On Tuesday night, the eve of the predicted Second Coming, they built campfires and shared what they expected to be their last earthly meals. But midnight passed with no sounding of trumpets, nothing but the howls of coyotes and chirping of crickets. Sister Houteff led prayers. Wednesday’s sun rose and set with no sign of the messiah. “Naming a date was Florence’s fatal error,” says Bill Pitts, a professor of religion at Baylor University who has spent decades studying the Davidians. “Hope faded, and the Davidians began to disperse.”
Some held firm in their faith, awaiting the Second Coming through the summer and fall of 1959, raising cows and bartering milk for food and fuel oil. Florence Houteff, their failed prophet, left Mount Carmel in disgrace and disappeared from church records. She would live until 2008, leaving little trace but a grave marker in Vancouver, Washington, that identifies her as Florence Eakin, wife of a Vancouver businessman.
The Davidian remnant looked for a leader. One candidate had a plausible claim to some gift of prophecy: he’d tried to tell them Florence was wrong about the End of Days, but did they listen?
Born in Choctaw territory in 1902, Benjamin Lloyd Roden was five years old when his family’s farm became part of the new state of Oklahoma. He grew up to be an oil field roughneck with the square jaw of a prizefighter. His family was Jewish, but Ben Roden was drawn to the evangelical Christianity sweeping the country in his youth. He married Montana-born Lois Scott, another religious searcher, in 1937. He was thirty-five; she was twenty. They attended a Seventh-day Adventist church in Kilgore, Texas, then joined the Davidians after moving to Waco. At that point, he began telling anyone who’d listen that Florence Houteff was a false prophet who didn’t know the Second Coming from Shinola. The others ignored him but began listening after his prediction came true. How did Ben Roden know their leader was wrong about the apocalypse? God told him in a dream, he said. He’d been sound asleep when a great wind pulled him out of bed by the cuffs of his pajamas and shook him around the bedroom until he had a vision of himself leading a multitude, a new branch of the Adventist faith.
His sermons drew new believers to Mount Carmel. The Branch Davidians, he called them. Roden assured his followers that the end-times were coming soon, but he would not commit to a date.
He and Lois went on to have six children. Their oldest, George, turned forty in 1978. Ben told church elders that if he were to die before the world ended, George would succeed him as their “God-appointed leader.” In a dream, God told him, “Let George do it,” as a giant Texas longhorn bestrode the Earth.
George Roden made an unlikely heir apparent. Standing six foot three and weighing some three hundred pounds, he marched around his parents’ seventy-seven acres in Tony Lama boots, jeans, and a black Stetson. He believed his dark mustache and goatee made him look intimidating. The .38 holstered on his hip helped, too. George had made a much-ridiculed run for president of the United States in 1976, vowing to bring law, order, and biblical prophecy to the White House. He collected enough signatures to qualify for a presidential primary that Jimmy Carter won with 419,272 votes. Alabama governor George Wallace finished second with 57,594, while 153 voters chose George Roden.
After Ben Roden died in 1978, George told the Branch Davidians, “I am your new prophet.” That put church elders in a quandary. They weren’t sure George was fit to lead his own life, much less a community of faith. When they said so, he cursed and spat at them. Some thought he might be possessed by demons. In fact, he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome and took a handful of medications to control his outbursts. Under stress he would twitch, bang his fist, and yelp obscenities. When the elders expressed doubts about following a preacher who might lace a sermon with “shitfuck” and “cuntpiss,” he insisted his medical condition had no bearing on his right of succession, which came directly from God. Who would dare dispute the God-given claim of Benjamin Roden’s firstborn son?
His mother would.
Lois Roden had watched and listened while the elders debated George’s claim. Now she stepped forward.
Lois had always been more than her husband’s helpmeet. In some ways her knowledge of scripture surpassed his. In 1977, the year before Ben died, Lois had made news by proclaiming that the Holy Spirit is female. That third member of the Holy Trinity had appeared to her in “a vision of a shimmering silver angel in feminine form.” In an era when TV and newspapers lavished attention on the Equal Rights Amendment and other signs of “women’s lib,” Lois Roden’s claim was newsworthy. The Dallas Times Herald ran her photo—a lean, unadorned woman in a black frock, with gray hair and oversized glasses that magnified her eyes, cradling a live white dove in her hands—under the headline “Holy Spirit Is a Woman.” The other two members of the Trinity might be male, Sister Roden said, but a hundred generations of scholars and worshippers had missed the plain fact that the biblical word for the Holy Spirit, “Shekinah” in Old Testament Hebrew, is a feminine term. The Jews had known that, she said—Kabbalah held many references to this mother-sister figure.
To spread this good news, she needed a pulpit. Lois urged the elders to set aside her husband’s succession plan and name her as their God-appointed leader.
“We searched our souls,” says Clive Doyle, a Seventh-day Adventist who had heard of the Rodens’ teachings and moved from his native Australia to join them. Doyle and the others looked on as George twitched and railed at his mother. “One interesting sidelight is how George cussed when his fits came on. He’d spit and call you the f-word, but something always kept him from taking the Lord’s name in vain.”
The elders acknowledged that Ben Roden had chosen George to be his successor. “We considered that,” Doyle says. “We considered everything. What it came down to was, George was insane.”
The elders took a vote. They named Lois the Branch Davidians’ new prophetess, setting off a war between the Rodens.
After George and several gun-toting followers occupied Mount Carmel, Lois petitioned a state court for a restraining order against him. Judge Bill Logue of Texas’s Nineteenth District Court granted it. George then sued his mother for stealing his prophetic birthright. The judge wasn’t sure what to make of that claim. Logue, who presided over many of the Rodens’ legal battles, called Branch Davidians “the most litigious bunch” he’d ever encountered. In private notes, he admitted preferring George’s broad shoulders and ten-gallon hat to his mother’s schoolmarmish appearance, describing Lois as “very homely. No makeup.” He cut off both sides’ testimony when it veered into religion. “They would go off the deep end of scripture,” the judge recalled. “These were not mainstream Protestants.”
Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Cook