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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Waco, Texas. You might know if it's historic bridges or the Dr. Pepper Museum, but if you are a news-watching person in 1993, the word Waco probably makes you think of this.

Dave: Right now. We just don't know. Despite his pledge to surrender over seven hours ago, still, no break reported tonight outside of Waco. Cult leader, David Koresh apparently remains holed up in his heavily armed fortress, and we assume that negotiations with law officers continue. Our reporter, Alan Hinberger, is there covering any and all elements, and he joins us now live. Alan, what do we know is the latest?

Alan Hinberger: Well, I'll tell you what Dave. What we know is that it's dark outside that compound and that there is no official word as to what is going on inside. Now, about 90 minutes ago a Dallas radio station, KRLD declared that the siege was over, and they did that because of the visual that they were seeing. Streams of cars coming out from near that compound. However, they have backed off that idea that the siege was over, and in fact, the siege appears to be headed towards day four.

Alison Stewart: Waco was the site of Mount Carmel, a religious compound established by a cult that had splintered off from Christian Seventh-Day Adventists. By the time ATF agents began their 51-day standoff against the residents of Mount Carmel, that compound was full of heavily armed people who believed in the coming of biblical end times, giving lip service to holiness and purity, while accepting the criminally sinful behavior of its leader, David Koresh.

Koresh was a pedophile and a polygamist who convinced his followers that he was a prophet, the final prophet before the apocalypse, which gave him a lot of power to, "Save them from the hellfire" he promised was on the way as long as they treated him like the savior he said he was. The government standoff against Waco has been cited by domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, as the justification for his infamous bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and the threads of Koresh's approach can be seen in some of today's violent right-wing extremist groups.

The standoff in 1993 is widely seen as also a failure for law enforcement. Last month marked the 30th anniversary of the incident, and a new book features fresh information and interviews with key witnesses to the rise of David Koresh. Joining me now is Stephan Talty, author of Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco. The Center-Right blog, the Bulwark says that the book, "Does a fine job of shining light on the mechanisms of cult control as practiced by a sadistic bully." Stephan, welcome to the show.

Stephan Talty: Great to be here.

Alison Stewart: The events between the government and the Branch Davidians at Waco are well known. The word Waco is shorthand for a certain brand of cultism and religious zealotry and domestic terror, frankly. Also for a less than stellar law enforcement plan. What was missing from the narrative around those events that made you want to fill in some gaps and ask some more questions?

Stephan Talty: I think a lot of people focused on the 51 Days of the Siege, and I watched it on CNN. I was living in Brooklyn at the time. The camera was about two miles away. We didn't get to see the faces in the window. We didn't really know the biographies of the people in there, especially David Koresh. I had no idea who this guy was. When it ended, and it ended in, of course, a spectacular and confusing fashion, my question was, "What did I just watch?" I just didn't understand what had happened. I wanted to go down to Texas and look at the 33 years of David Koresh's life before Waco and just get into his origin story if you will.

Alison Stewart: Throughout the book you write what the AP calls immersive fiction where you're narrating what's going on, bringing us into what might have been going on in David Koresh's life, and has he developed and has that situation developed, and I asked you to pick out a passage to illustrate that. Would you kindly read it?

Stephan Talty: Sure. This is when David is about 18. His name is Vernon Howell. At that time, it's his given name. His first love has just broken up with him and he's in despair. He is sitting in a pickup truck. That's the background. The girlfriend's name is Linda. I just wanted to set that up, but here we go.

"You've loved her for about a year, and now she's turned her back on you. The voice said, 'She's rejected you.' A fresh set of pictures flitted through his mind. All the times in his life he felt the same presence close to him protecting him. Don't you know that for 19 years I've loved you, and for 19 years you turned your back on me and rejected me? The voice said. Vernon saw that Linda had only done to him what he'd done to God. He felt he was looking back on half of his life, but now he could comprehend each event down to its smallest detail. A wave of love passed through him. As he laid there, pinned the seat of his pickup, God told him he would give Linda to him in good time. Vernon was overjoyed."

Alison Stewart: My guest Stephan Talty, he was reading from his book, Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco. He was born in 1959 in Houston, as you said, Vernon Howell. Before we talk about the details of his life, what did the world look like when he was growing up and where he was growing up?

Stephan Talty: He spent a lot of his formative years near Dallas, and Dallas at the time was the Mecca of right-wing, fusion of religion and politics. He would've heard preachers on the radio talking about how the American government was, aligning itself with Satan, aligning itself with communism. The newspapers were super conservative, and so he grew up in an atmosphere where he heard conspiracy theories about the federal government about Satan coming next week. This was something that he marinated in and he really refined and perfected it later on in his teachings.

Alison Stewart: His original name was Vernon Howell. That's where he was born. He and his mom, Bonnie, had a very tumultuous life, especially during his first few years. What were some of the first lessons about people that he learned about the world?

Stephan Talty: It's interesting, the women in his life loved him. They thought he was adorable, polite, intelligent, but the men in his life rejected, humiliated, and punished him, basically. They didn't think he was manly enough. He wasn't a true Texan. Vernon grew up with this very big ego. He had a grandiose idea of the part he was going to play in the world, but he kept feeling rejection.

His father left him, his stepfather beat him. His grandfather didn't even want him named after him. It's an overworked word, but he was a narcissist and he had this grandiose feeling that he was going to be God's special child, and he didn't get that acclaim and an exaltation that he felt he deserved.

Alison Stewart: There are some indications that as young man, he had perhaps some underlying mental health issues. What's an example?

Stephan Talty: He at one point wrote some suicidal notes, poems. He took his pickup truck, which is a sacred object in Texas, and he burnt it which to me was a rejection of the life he was leading. He was lost. He felt that he didn't fit in in Texas. He lashed out, and the interesting thing is that he always rejected any kind of therapy. At one time, he did go see a doctor and they prescribed him some sedatives, but he found he couldn't speak in the same way. He couldn't transfix his listeners, and that was really the key to his power, so he gave that up. He never got treatment for the mental illness that really ran in his family.

Alison Stewart: When did he begin to look to faith to be his scaffolding, to be what he decided to rely on?

Stephan Talty: A lot of the FBI at the time of the siege talked about David being a conman and not really being someone interested in the scriptures, and that was untrue. David was very early on, five, six years old, he would spend hours kneeling by his bed and praying. He would listen to the preachers, the really famous southern Texas preachers on the radio.

He would go to the neighbors' Baptist masses and listen to the lectures. He was really walking the walk. He really did want to have a life with Christ, and I have to say early on he was a good guy. He helped out drug addicts. He counseled people who had been sexually abused as he had been, and he really did selfless things. It was much later on that his attitude really changed.

Alison Stewart: You're suggesting that he had genuine beliefs at some point in his life.

Stephan Talty: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did it come that belief system, which he believed to be Christian, turn into something else? When did that start?

Stephan Talty: It really started when he got to Waco. The Branch Davidians had been around really for decades and they taught that the end of the world was right around the corner. There was also a thread of conspiracy theories, more political conspiracy theories among his followers. David wasn't initially a conspiracy theorist, but some of his top lieutenants really were, and so that infiltrated his view of the world, but it was also this idea that the government was going to come after him for things that the Bible allowed him to do. Sleeping with young girls or having multiple wives, it was really his law-breaking that brought the secular world into his focus because he felt they were going to do what they eventually did, which is raid his home and try to arrest him.

Alison Stewart: I want to just do a sidebar here about the Branch Davidians, about 15 years before he's even born. A group splinters off from the Seventh-Day Adventists to found the Branch Davidians and the folks involved in that schism wind up playing a big role in the development of what would become David Koresh's cult. Who are the Branch Davidians? Let's start there. Before Vernon Howell, David Koresh comes along.

Stephan Talty: As you said, they split off from the Seventh-Day Adventists. To your eye or my eye, the differences might seem very small, very scriptural, and theological. Both groups believed they had the keys to the end of the world, how Christ was going to come back, who was going to be allied with him, and who was going to be allied with Satan. The Branch Davidians had these charts.

They had these telltale signs that the world was about to end. They believed there was going to be a war in Israel between Israel and the Arabs, and America was going to come in on the Israeli side and eventually be part of the anti-Christ force. All this legend and theology which is hinted at in Revelation, but was really the focus of the Branch Davidians, and it really became David's focus as well.

Alison Stewart: How did the Branch Davidians establish a community at Mount Carmel?

Stephan Talty: It's interesting. They were looking for something in the center of the world. They saw themselves as the future soldiers of Christ, judges of Christ. They wanted something central. Waco, if you look at the continental US is pretty close to the center of the country. That was really a geographical accident. They built a community there that was apart from the city. It's 30 miles outside the downtown. They wanted to be apart from the corruptions and the sins of the city.

Alison Stewart: What initially drew Vernon David Koresh to that community?

Stephan Talty: He was looking for what he called New Light. He wanted something that really spoke to today. He'd gone to Seventh-Day Adventist churches. He knew the Baptist, he knew the Pentecostals, but he felt it was old history. He wanted some fresh news about when is the world going to end?

What's my position going to be when Christ comes back? He was looking for a living prophet. That's one thing the Branch Davidians do. Their leader is always someone who is a prophet, who can tell what is about to happen. He went down there, listened to this living prophet, and I think inside of him, he was saying, "I can do better than that. I have a stronger connection with God."

Alison Stewart: You tell a story of two girls, Debbie Kendrick, and Rachel Jones, who are there when David Koresh first arrives, and they are girls. How does he meet them? What is their reaction to him? Why did you want us to know this part of this story?

Stephan Talty: Both of those girls had suffered sexual abuse in the Branch Davidians Complex. They both felt that they were objects to the adults because the adults were really focused on the end times. Christ could arrive tomorrow so they didn't really concern themselves that much with the upbringing of their children. When David arrived five minutes later, he spotted them and he asked to speak to them, and they'd already met men like David Koresh, pedophiles basically. They had this instinct that David wasn't there just to preach the gospel. He wanted to control and eventually abuse them. That's exactly what they did. Really, the children were the first to have this premonition about who David Koresh really was.

Alison Stewart: At the beginning of his time there, he has a reputation of being pretty obnoxious. [chuckles] You're right that if you told any of the followers that he's rise up to lead the group, they would've laughed. The quote here is like saying, your dorm janitor was going to become the college president. What were the stepping stones he used to get to his side?

Stephan Talty: He was just a handyman, a Mr. Fix-it, he was really at the bottom of the totem pole as you said. What transformed him was Bible studies. David Koresh was brilliant in a room. If you put him in there and you gave him an hour, he could do amazing things. He could take one section of the Bible and relate it to another in ways that you never thought of.

He made connections between different figures in the Bible. He really seemed, especially because he had first appeared as kind of like a bomb figure like a hobo suddenly transformed the people there began talking about God is really working on David. The results were so clear that this inarticulate unconfident person had become really a glorious preacher. It was all done through his voice. It was all done through this hypnotic way of speaking that he had.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Stephan Talty. The name of his book is Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco. We'll have more with Stephan after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Stephan Talty. The name of his book is Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy of Waco. Believe it or not, that standup happened 30 years ago. I should ask this upfront, when did Vernon Howell become David Koresh?

Stephan Talty: I think he felt that Vernon Howell was a redneck name for the next messiah. Of course, David had biblical roots, and Koresh, he told one of the investigators that Koresh is the sound that you make at the end of your life. The death rattle that escapes your throat. He wanted to be the god of life and death. Koresh encompassed both of those.

Alison Stewart: How did he become the uncontested leader of Mount Carmel? Because there was a leader. They already had a structure in place.

Stephan Talty: They did. They had a woman in her 60s who was the widow of the former leader in charge of the group. She had been there for years and she was really a feminist. She's taught that the Holy Spirit was a female presence. She really became almost world-famous hobnobbing to the Philippines, to Europe, talking about this new idea of a feminist church.

David, since this, he sensed how to get to her. She was lonely and he began a romance with her, believe it or not, and she fell in love with him. He basically seduced her and then displaced her. He faked this feminist theology. He preached it but didn't really practice it. Slowly he out-lectured her during the Bible studies. He was a far more dynamic speaker, and he just won over converse.

Alison Stewart: When did the guns come into the picture? Because what we're talking about as a cult, we're talking about religious faith fervor. How do firearms enter this conversation?

Stephan Talty: One of the competitors for the throne was a guy named George Rodin, who camped out at Waco at Mount Carmel and refused to give it up. David went out there with some of his guys. They were armed and tried to get him off the property. There was a shootout. David was arrested and he actually won the trial. He pleaded innocence and self-defense, and the jury let him go. After that, he'd seen how close he had been to being captured and put away in jail. He hated that feeling intensely. He needed to be in control, and if he was going to jail, he would not be.

After that, the buildup really began. It became almost a paramilitary scene at Waco. He would have obstacle courses and training and gun lessons for the kids and the women and the men. He began preaching that Babylon was really the American government, that the final battle between light and dark was going to come in Waco. He not only brought in the guns, but he brought in the theology that backed up the guns.

Alison Stewart: Once he is in charge and established as the leader at Mount Carmel, what was life like for people living there?

Stephan Talty: The tragedy of David Koresh is that he endured a tough violent childhood. Then he escaped it and then recreated it again at Waco. All the things from his childhood that he despised, the sexual abuse, the verbal humiliation, the control, he enhanced it and brought it to Waco and used it on his followers. He restricted their food, which is a classic technique among cults.

He wouldn't let them have jobs in town. He started to restrict their phone calls with family members. These are all classic cult techniques that David just knew about instinctually. I don't think he read on his predecessors. He just had a sense of how to control people, and to give them what they wanted. A lot of people were happy to be there, they felt that he was the next messiah, and they were eagerly looking forward to the end of the world, so David wasn't alone in believing these things were going to happen and happen fairly quickly.

Alison Stewart: You may have answered this, but I want to say it plainly, his morality around sex is really toxic. He assaults young girls, his preachings lead to situations where he's entitled to sleep with anyone he wants, including the wives of his followers. You write that's as much about his feeling entitled to sex and also a show of power over their husbands. Was there anyone that raised their hand and said, "What's going on here?"

Stephan Talty: There were. There were people who left the group, and who saw through David's biblical prophecies. David's prophecies always seemed to agree with what David wanted, and that's something that goes back to his childhood. I think he created a fantasy world that he could control in his own mind to escape the humiliations he found in his own childhood. Once he was at Waco and he enforced this regime, there were people who stood up to him and left.

There was a guy named Marc Brough, who's living in Australia who became a rival and challenged David and told his followers that he was a false god. That also drove this sort of paramilitary response because David felt he's being betrayed from inside the compound. They were going to call the government, they would call the senators, and it was going to be another Jonestown.

Alison Stewart: It's the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms that first gets the government interested in Mount Caramel. What was the ATF worried about? How did Mount Caramel get on its radar?

Stephan Talty: It was actually a UPS delivery guy who was bringing packages he knew were guns, and was uneasy about it. Then a grenade casing fell out of one of the packages, and he decided to call the sheriff, who called the ATF. Their investigation was focused on illegal arms, which Waco definitely had. The Branch Davidians were converting semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic weapons which were of course illegal.

The ATF began its investigation, but it was a horribly inept mission. They didn't do a good job on, really, any aspect. The surveillance teams missed the fact that David left the compound and went into town and had dinner. They could have easily arrested him had the surveillance been better. There was a series of missteps that led to the shootout and people dying on both sides.

Alison Stewart: From your reporting, is there something that you discovered that you think is important for people to understand about the siege or something that got left out of the narrative of the siege?

Stephan Talty: Well, I think people tend to focus on questions like who fired the first shot, which I don't think we'll ever know. I think it's irrelevant because that confrontation was going to happen. Both sides were really charging forward without any kind of brakes. I do think we have to talk about the conspiracy theories that grew up around it that have become so important in our politics today. For me the theories, mostly false, but they also cover up the fact that the ATF did things wrong, and got people killed, and covered it up.

They blamed the media, they blamed some of their own agents, they lied about the fact that David knew they were coming. Really, the conspiracy theories are giving cover to real malfeasance on the part of the government. It's not the fact that the government was innocent in this, or they did a good job, they did not, but the fact that they're not guilty of the more elaborate conspiracy theories kind of covers up what really happened.

Alison Stewart: Given our particular moment in history, where right-wing violence led to things like January 6th, what part of David Koresh's story do you think is prescient and is worth thinking about as we think about the safety of our country?

Stephan Talty: It's interesting that Donald Trump launched his campaign this year from Waco, almost as if it had become another Alamo or another Plymouth Rock. I find that very disturbing. Waco is unique in that it has no heroes. For 9/11, we found brave people who did brave things, the same for Pearl Harbor, but nobody comes out of Waco looking good. There are no positive lessons to be learned there. I think the fact that both Koresh, and Trump, and his lieutenants create a world in which what counts is what you believe, and reality is second-hand, it's less important.

David Koresh created a world that his followers not only believed but inhabited 24/7. They thought of everything they saw outside the windows as being part of David's prophecy. I think Trump has the same sort of technique with his own followers, that everything out there is an illusion, the only thing that is true is what I'm telling you, and that is dangerous.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco. I've been speaking with its author Stephan Talty. Stephan thank you for spending time with us.

Stephan Talty: I enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

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