Cults: David Koresh and The Branch Davidians: Part One: The House of David

hello everybody and welcome back to my channel so this is the first video in our cult series this month and today and in the following videos we are going to be talking about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians now this was a tough one I didn't really know what I was getting into I didn't know how much I was biting off when I started research on this cult or this group of people there's a lot of implications and there's gonna be a lot of things that we discussed during these videos that may offend or upset people or that you may disagree with and that's what happens when you start talking about religion and government and human relationships in general so just understand that I'm only telling you what I've researched personally myself I was raised Catholic I went to a Catholic school it's the only religion I've known and I think most of us unless we're scholars or we purposely went to college to study different religions we only really know the religion that we were raised and the religion our parents taught us and I really do want you to keep that in mind as well not only in order to be respectful to other people in the comments but to be respectful towards the people we're talking about in the videos you may not agree with them what they do may seem wrong to you but understand that everybody has reasons for why they do things and I don't personally believe that any human being is 100 percent good or 100 percent evil so be respectful to each other in the comments section I always encourage an intelligent discourse in the comment section I want us to be able to learn from each other I want us to be able to learn from each other's different viewpoints and different experiences in life and it's always possible that you can change somebody's mind by telling them your point of view but please understand that this is just to talk and discuss and we're not trying to convert anybody or we're not trying to convince anybody that what they believe in is stupid or wrong 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want to because there's so many like documentaries you're gonna put in your queue and just kind of star so you can watch later and you're not gonna be able to get through all of them in that month and you're gonna really just want to continue watching and like I said in the last video I think that Magellan TV whether it's a quarterly or an annual subscription would be a great Christmas gift for the person that's incredibly hard to buy for including like your dad or your mom because we don't know what they want and they usually buy whatever they want on their own what do we get them so let's get started in the video thank you again so much to Magellan TV and thank you guys for watching the sponsor as always on April 19th 1993 armored trucks and FBI agents surrounded a compound occupy by a religious group and their leader in the desert of Waco Texas they shouted warnings inside the compound that they were going to be pumping tear gas in they told the people hiding inside to come out they stressed to them that this wasn't an attack they just needed them to come out where they were coming in within no time these trucks were punching holes into the walls there was rubble everywhere people everywhere complete chaos the men women and children inside this compound ran around reaching for gas masks or wet rags to place over their faces in the faces of their children as the tear gas rushed from room to room and the sounds of a building being pulled to the ground echoed around them and then the fires started in three separate places in the compound when all was said and done 80 of the people inside the compound had perished twenty-five of them were children under the age of 13 this isn't a story about a cult this isn't a story about religion this isn't even a story about David Koresh this is a story about all of those things as well as the role of the US government in what happened at Mount Carmel that day this is a story about all the people who are a part of this tragedy their lives before their lives after and yes it includes David Koresh and it includes the cult conversation but I found in my research that there's so much more to this so if you're looking for a Wikipedia recitation of who David Koresh was who the Branch Davidians were and what happened this isn't the video for you but if you're ready for an in-depth look a deep dive into all the pieces of the puzzle and how they fit together to ultimately lead to what happened grab yourself a snack pour yourself another cup of coffee and settle in because this is a wild ride the Branch Davidians were a religious group and they sprung from the Seventh day Adventists who sprung from the Millerites and if this sounds complicated it is but it's also very interesting and also possibly really important to understanding why all of this happened and as always to understand what happened at the end we have to go back to the beginning and in this case we're going way back we're going back to the 1800s William Miller was born on February 15th 1782 in Pittsfield Massachusetts his father was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and when he was four his family moved to a rural area in New York and he was home-schooled until the age of 9 in 1803 he married a girl named Lucy and moved with her to her hometown pulled me Vermont here he became a farmer and he held some public office such as constable and justice of the peace but he also met some people who caused him to change the way he thought he'd been born baptized and raised as a Baptist but in Poultney he met a group of people who called themselves deists which translated from Latin pretty much means goddess --tz-- those who practice deism believed in God but they only believed in what they can see in nature as evidence of his existence or presence they felt that people needed to be enlightened read more learn more and start viewing religion and God with logic instead of emotion they were and still are heavily nature-based and they believed that people can improve and redeem themselves William thought that these were good people moral people and they introduced him to the works of Voltaire Thomas Paine and David Hume now these were all writers and philosophers who were active during the Age of Enlightenment when people were stepping outside their boxes and trying to figure things out for themselves instead of just blindly believing and following what their government or Church told them and these were the words that William Miller devoured before breaking away from the Baptist religion and becoming a deist himself but then the war of 1812 happened and Miller marched into battle only to see so many men die but he was able to walk away without a scratch this made him feel in his heart that there was someone up there watching over and protecting him after the war he moved back home to New York with his family and found himself plagued by questions of death and the afterlife a pretty common theme to be running through your head after being at war and watching your friends die he started reading the Bible every day cover to cover searching for answers as to what happens when you die and what is it all for and he came to a conclusion Christ would return to Earth and all those who believed and led good lives would be saved and the rest would be punished even better due to all his time with the Bible he knew when that was going to happen it's reported that he figured out when that would be by 1818 but he continued to study and double-check his mathematical calculations to make sure it was correct before publicly stating his findings in 1823 his following grew at its peak Miller ISM had over 100,000 people who were picking up what Miller was putting down and he finally gave a time period that the second coming would be happening between March 21st 1843 and March 21st 1844 that's a big time period so if you believe this you would have to believe that the end of the world as we know it would be happening sometime in that 365 day period how do you prepare how do you wake up every day feeling that it could be your last day on the earth this goes way beyond the Cable Guy giving you a window of 12 hours of one he'll show up at your house to fix your cable right he tells you I'll be there sometime between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and you're expected to stay at your house all day long and wait for him to show up why why but this goes way beyond that right you're telling people who believe in what you're what you're preaching that sometime in this year it's all going to be over that the world as you know it is going to be gone but you're not telling them when in the year it will happen it could happen tomorrow it could happen three months from now it could happen 364 days from now and you never really know exactly when to prepare but prepare people dead I believe that this would have been emotionally stressful at first for the Millerites but William Miller told them he didn't know for sure he couldn't give them a specific date he just knew it would be sometime in that year and that year came and went without an apocalypse obviously because here we are so Miller went back to the drawing board and he altered some of his equations and he came back with a new date but nothing happened then either finally a specific date was given October 22nd 1844 and thousands of Millerites gathered together they looked up at the sky and they waited they waited for something to happen they waited for Jesus to come down from the clouds and save them all most waited all day long but again nothing happened and this was the last straw for a lot of Miller's followers they abandoned him and his beliefs and he lost a great deal of his credibility and to this day that time period is still referred to as the great disappointment now enter Ellen G white Alan was born on November 26th 1827 in Gorham Maine to a Methodist family she had a twin sister named Elizabeth and her father was a farmer at the age of nine she suffered an injury to her face after being hit with a rock and when she was 12 her family became Millerites she remembered being a young girl listening to William Miller preach and feeling terrified of being lost eternally of not being saved she spent months praying and crying as a result of this fear but she also remembered finding a great deal of peace and happiness when she was baptized into Miller's church Ellen claimed to have visions direct from God himself and over the course of her life she would have over 200 visions and dreams in which she received messages from God which she would then talk about with other people and published in books one of her books steps to Christ has been published in over 140 languages and is still widely read today her first vision came to her soon after the great disappointment when there were a lot of people fed up with Miller and looking for something else to believe in and those who ended up following L&G white truly believed she had the biblical gift of prophecy when she was 18 she married a man who was also a millwright and he believed that her visions were true and genuine together they had four sons one died when he was just an infant and one died of pneumonia when he was 16 years old Alan G White was extremely respected by her peers and from her visions and teachings seventh-day Adventism arose well what do seventh-day adventists believe and practice what are their core beliefs that make up their religion now I obviously didn't know so I went directly to the source when it defines buddy who was a seventh-day Adventist because there are many people today who are still seventh-day Adventist and I wanted to find out from that person what their beliefs are what their religion is all about because I do believe if you want to know about a religion you need to actually talk to somebody who practices that religion one of the most important things to understand about seventh-day Adventism is the Bible is is the Word of God essentially secondly the concept of having a three Co eternal or co-equal persons in the Godhead is very important so you've got the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit they have different roles but they have the same goal which is the happiness and the salvation of the human race and the entire universe so God would be an architect to the master architect the designer of everything Jesus is an agent of God essentially he's there to see and make sure that God's plan and design gets carried out and the Holy Spirit acts on jesus's direction and helps to create the universe the third important thing in seventh-day Adventism is they don't believe that they're saved by their X on earth they believe that the only way you can be saved is by grace and faith and salvation is a gift from God and from Jesus Jesus sacrificed himself so that we would be saved from original sin so the seventh-day Adventist believe that Adam and Eve obviously they messed up they took the Apple from Satan and and they they had original sin and then Jesus came and he was the second Adam and he came to essentially live the life that Adam should have lived and redeemed all humankind from their original sin now just because a seventh-day adventists don't believe that they get to heaven by doing the right thing or following the law or the commandments they still do because grace is good and the gift that was given to them by Jesus and God the sacrifice that was made it's good enough to infiltrate inside of them and make them want to do good and be good and do the right thing and this was a big breaking point hundreds of years ago during the Reformation when Catholics and Protestants had some issues with each other and they basically were at war forever some might say they still are Catholics believe that what you do here on earth is directly related to what happens to you after your death so basically there's somebody up there that's keeping a tally of all the good things you're doing and all the bad things you're doing and at the end of your life they're going to weigh your good deeds and your bad deeds and if you have enough good deeds and less bad deeds you'll go to heaven but if the bad things you did on earth were more plentiful than the good things you'll go to hell seventh-day adventists don't believe that they believe that they've already been saved but they do good on earth because that's what their their Savior God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit that's what they want them to do another thing about seventh-day adventists and I do believe that this is how they probably got their name seventh-day adventists they believe that the Sabbath is on the seventh day but they believe that the seventh day is on Saturday so whereas Catholics have their Sabbath or their day of rest on Sunday seventh day adventists have it on Saturday and there is biblical support in the book of Genesis for why they believe the Sabbath is on Saturday but it is something that sets them apart in Judaism the Sabbath is also on a Saturday but seventh-day Adventist believe that's this Sabbath is on a Saturday thing goes way back before Judaism was even a thing seventh-day adventists also believed in the end days they believed that Jesus will come back to the earth and save those who have been loyal and devout followers of his so pretty much he's gonna come back to earth and he's gonna judge everybody and those who have done what they're supposed to and have followed him at his word will be brought up into the clouds with him and given eternal life they also believe that the things happening in the world are signs of the coming apocalypse so crime corruption poverty natural disasters disease pollution climate change things like that those aren't things that are going to end us they're just signs that Jesus is coming back the Seventh day Adventists don't believe that the world is going to end when a meteor hits it they don't believe that the sun's just gonna get too hot and you know destroy everything around it they believe that these are all signs that Jesus is coming back and will take his believers his loyal believers back up with him to heaven seventh-day adventists also practice very healthy lifestyles now they don't believe that they are going to eat or exercise their way into heaven that's something that they often say they're not eating you're exercising their way into heaven but they do believe that their bodies are temples given to them and created by God so they want to remain as healthy as possible and in fact those that practice seventh-day Adventism and follow the the vegetarian or plant-based diets that was outlined in the book of Genesis actually lives seven to ten years longer than their non-practicing counterparts now this isn't a tenant this isn't mandatory they don't have to be vegetarian some seventh-day Adventists are not vegetarian but a lot of them are and they also don't drink alcohol they don't do drugs they don't believe in smoking cigarettes just you know a clean and healthy lifestyle lastly I want to talk about another important belief of the seventh-day adventists and they believe in the presence of good and evil forces in the world as was written in Revelations 12,000 zuv years ago there was an intergalactic battle between God and his forces and Satan and his horses lucifer was a beautiful angel that was created by God but one day he became a jealous of God's power and God's way and he tried to take his crown and his throne from him he tried to usurp him essentially so God casts Lucifer and his followers out of the heavens and then he gave the people on earth freewill and a choice to decide who they wanted to follow whose words they wanted to live by Satan's or gods now obviously this was an outline of seventh-day Adventism in a very simplistic way because I didn't have all day to talk about and I couldn't talk about for the whole video there's a lot of depth to it there's many more facets and if you are interested then you know go ahead and and check it out look online there's some really good YouTube videos actually of people who are talking about their religion and you can research that yourself but you have a general understanding of what these people believed in and believed in to this day they believe that in October of 1844 at the time of the great disappointment Jesus left the first heavenly kingdom and he went to a second heavenly kingdom and there he started judging all the lives of people on earth and when he's done judging these people he will return bringing with him the apocalypse this brings us to Victor how - Victor how tif was born on March 2nd 1855 in today's Bulgaria and he was baptized into the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1907 he had his brothers emigrated to the United States and he lived in Illinois where he found work at hotels and grocery stores in 1919 he joined the seventh-day Adventist Church and in the 20s he moved to California to be closer to the bigger and more popular seventh-day Adventist communities in Los Angeles he worked as a Maytag salesman and he began teaching at Sabbath school at one of the local churches he voraciously read the Bible and the teachings of Ellen White and his sermons became very popular attracting many people to come and hear him talk but he began to decipher and translate the Bible in his own way contrary in many ways to the general teachings of the church Annie faced resistance eventually starting his own church where anyone who wanted to be taught by him could do so without any issues he and his followers were eventually kicked out of the traditional seventh-day Adventist Church but Victor how TIFF wasn't shy about continuing to voice his opinion then in general the church had gone away from the principles that created the religion they were becoming more concerned with earthly possessions they were losing that spiritual tie to God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and although how TIFF was a big fan of lng white and her teachings he didn't consider himself a prophet as she considered herself a prophet instead he stressed that he'd been sent there by God to reform the church and bring it back to its old glory long story short Victor how - didn't get the support that he wanted from the seventh-day Adventist Church so in 1935 he broke off and he found a plot of land in the Texas desert about two miles away from the City of Waco at first this was a place meant to house his publication a newsletter called that the Shepherd's rod that continued his teachings and was sent out to thousands of people he called this location Mount Carmel named after the biblical mountain in Israel he and his followers called themselves Davidians and for short they called themselves the rods paying homage to a book how have had written called the Shepherd's rod there was a main church an administration building a school and homes but it was a simple place that was designed to be self-sustaining the Davidians believed that contact with the modern world was detrimental so their goal was to find a place where they could teach their own children grow their own food and not be disturbed by the outside world until the second coming of Christ by the 1940s they had running water electricity and they were even able to sustain themselves during the Great Depression due to the extra crops that they had grown in sold at local farmers markets in 1935 they'd started out with a hundred and eighty nine acres and about thirty seven followers but by 1940 the compound had expanded to take up 375 acres and their numbers had grown not hugely but they doubled themselves they were about 64 people living there in 1940 and this isn't huge numbers you know there's a thousands of people flocking to Texas to follow Victor how to we have 64 people who believed a certain thing and wanted to be left alone to believe that and raise their children to believe the same but then how to have made a millerite sized mistake he predicted that the Second Coming would be happening within a year and when that didn't happen it cast a shadow of doubt over everything that he said when Victor how to have died in 1955 the population at Mount Carmel was about 90 and it had been a 90 and remained steady at 90 for five years the fact that he was even able to die caused dissent in his group he had told his followers that those who believed and lived by the word of the Shepherd's rod would live eternally in the Davidic Kingdom on earth after his death his young widow Florence how tough took over and she decided that their current compound where they were currently living was too close to Waco Florence to the compound to a new location 10 miles east of the city and I guess that Florence had not learned her lesson from her husband or from Miller because she also set a date for the end times April 22nd 1959 thousands of believers traveled to the remote compound on that date to bear witness but of course nothing happened after her failed prophecy Florence admitted she'd been wronged and she eventually pretty much just gave up enclosed Mount Carmel down in 1962 but in the years between 1959 and 1962 something else had been brewing after the failed prophecy small groups had been breaking off and creating their own religions one of these was led by a man named Ben Roden Ben and his wife Lois had been followers of Victor how tough but when he died Ben began trying to lure people away from Florence telling them to get off the dead rod and move to the living branch therefore his faction was called the Branch Davidians Ben Roden was born on january 5th 1902 in Oklahoma to a Jewish family he went to college to become a teacher and he did teach for a little while but then he started working on the oil fields which eventually brought him to Odessa Texas On February 12 1937 he married a woman named Lois and it seems that this is when he converted from Judaism to Christianity by the 1940s the Rodin's were active members in the seventh-day Adventist Church in Kilgore Texas some believe they joined the church because of the parallels to the Jewish faith others think that Lois or her family were already seventh-day Adventists either way eventually they went back to Odessa where Ben became the head elder at the local church there this seems to be when they became aware of the splinter group living at Mount Carmel and the couple visited the compound several times while Victor how TIFF was alive they even went there on that fateful day in April of 1959 to witness nothing happening and to see the disappointment on the faces of their peers Ben realized there was a need here and he could fill it they needed a stronger leader with real purpose and real prophecy and it was Ben Roden Ben claims that one evening while he was laying in bed mulling over all of these things in his head God appeared to him God picked him up physically and lifted him in the air and then ordered him to write a letter after been finished writing the letter he told God these aren't my words I can't sign my name to them so God told him then sign it the branch ben wrote and proclaimed that the judgment had passed from the dead to the living on October 20th 1955 when Victor how TIFF had died and he told his followers that they needed to strive for a pure life and once they reached a level of moral maturity Christ would return in 1977 Ben's wife Lois became co-president of the church and when Ben died the next year she took over entirely the year after Ben Rodin's death Lois's leadership was challenged by another member her own son George Rowton by this point the group had found a way to reconvene at Mount Carmel and George no longer was a child but a grown man and he felt he was a better choice as his father's successor and no one really took George Rowton seriously Ben had shown trust in his wife Louis before he died making her co-president of the church and everyone viewed George Rowton as an overgrown child a huge hulking man who was prone to temper tantrums and fits Louis Roden did a lot of good and positive things for her group she believed in femininity in the religion that the Holy Spirit was a feminine entity and she taught this and she wrote books about this but then one day a skinny scruffy lost young man showed up on her doorstep and he was looking for something what was he looking for answers to metaphysical questions a place to belong we don't know but what he found was a spot as Louis Rodin's right-hand men this man's name was Vernon Howell or as you now know him David Koresh what Louis was preaching and talking about really connected to him he really was interested in the idea of the Holy Spirit being a feminine entity he really liked the positivity and the communal aspect of Mount Carmel but we've gone too far and we need to go back and look at the childhood of this man Vernon Howell who eventually would change his name at crash Vernon Howell was born in 1959 in Houston Texas to a 14 year old mother named Bonnie Clark her baby's father Bobby Howell disappeared soon after she gave birth but Bonnie quickly moved on and married her new husband however was abusive and by her own words often beat his two-year-old stepson so it's not a great start for young Vernon when he was four his mother left him with her parents and moved to Dallas while she was there she married a man named Roy Halderman or rocky for short he was a union carpenter and he also owned and operated a lounge that was allegedly frequented by women who charged for their time and company now later in life Koresh would pull a Charles Manson and claim that his mother was a prostitute when asked about this Bonnie Howell said you know I had a lot of male friends who had a lot of money but what I did is not have anybody's business so I kind of liked that about her she's like why do you care why does that matter as grandparents did the best that they could with the child they'd been handed his grandfather would take him hunting and fishing on the weekends in true Texas manly man form the family was a member of the seventh-day Adventist Church and his grandmother would often take him to church and unlike the other small children who fidgeted and wanted to get out of the pews as soon as possible Vernon Howell was enraptured by what the preacher was saying and he also liked the Bible even though he couldn't read well because as much as he was interested in passionate about religion Vernon Howell struggled academically he failed the first grade twice and the second grade once by this time his mother Bonnie had reclaimed him and had brought him to Dallas to live with her and her new husband Roy Vernon Howell described Roy Halderman as being a cold and unfeeling man who believed in spanking children and he claims that he was beaten by his stepfather and his mother on several occasions even though both his mother and Roy alderman have denied this wholeheartedly it's worth mentioning that a lot of what we know about Vernon Howells childhood comes directly from him so how much of it is true we can't really be sure however it's worth noting as well that in the future Vernon Howell became David Koresh and took over Mount Carmel he did invite his stepfather and his mother and his younger half-brother to come and stay at the compound with him and his family there so I'm not sure how bad the relationship was if it was as bad as he said it was or if Roy was just a strict disciplinarian either way it didn't seem to affect the relationship that they had later in life and before David Koresh or Vernon Howell died he called his mother and he left her a voicemail by the time third-grade rolled around Vernon was a struggling with reading and writing so he was placed in a special education class where the student-teacher ratio was more conducive to one-on-one teaching and this actually did really help him to learn to read and write some although he did suffer from dyslexia so he would a struggle with these skills for the rest of his life and of course kids are mean kids are [ __ ] sometimes we can all admit that and once he was transferred to a different class his peers began taunting him giving him the nickname mr. [ __ ] oh this plagued him with sadness and confusion and when his mother picked him up from school he cried to her about how he wasn't smart about how he was different and she told him you know you're you're not stupid you're not different you just have an illness or a condition that prevents you from learning the same as the other kids and that's why you're in that special class but the feelings and the opinions of his peers at that time were more important to him than what he thought was his mother just trying to comfort him and it was true that most people who lived in his town considered him to be a half-wit now I do want to be clear here the term half-wit the nickname mr. [ __ ] oh these are not my terms these are not things that I say these are things that happened to David crusher Vernon Howell in his childhood these are things that he told others these are things that are written in books about him so I know some of you struggle with using historically correct terms when talking about something that happened in history because they're not acceptable today and I just want to be clear those words are not acceptable today nor were they ever acceptable however they were used and I really think it's important to show you how this young boy was feeling in order to understand his eventual feelings of other Ness and of being an outsider but I know I'm still gonna get canceled anyways so I guess I'll just get used to it see guys if we water down history or if we start rewriting history or ignoring certain parts of history because they make us uncomfortable or they're not something that would happen today they will become something that happens tomorrow because if you want to forget so therefore your children forget nobody ever learns the following generations are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past when it comes to the retelling of history the intention of being politically correct is very detrimental that's all I'll say about it even though it seemed as if Vernon didn't have the best childhood as he grew up he pretty much kept himself out of trouble he struggled with reading so he managed to memorize large portions of the Bible and he would preach to his friends and his family which kind of made them think he was a little strange and it didn't really earn him a lot of friends but he found an old guitar in a barn one day and he took a couple of lessons and then he taught himself how to play and he was actually pretty good on the guitar and he was a pretty good singer as well he also loved getting into things and seeing how they worked and what made them work bonny his mother remembers throwing a Tupperware party so she could earn enough points to buy him a radio that he wanted only to walk into his room later and find the radio completely in separate parts on his bed and when she asked him what the heck is this he said I just wanted to see how it worked what makes it work and then he put it back together and I think that this comes from him being dyslexic and struggling with reading and writing he couldn't figure out how things happened by reading a book about them so he had to be hands-on and he had to get into things himself and open them up so he could understand what they consisted of he couldn't read well or write well but he was not stupid his brain just worked in a different way and while his younger half-brother was being arrested and serving time for burglary and drug offenses Vernon was taking apart car engines and playing country music in garage bands one day he skipped school and he went to a church once there he got down on his knees and prayed he said dear father I know I'm stupid well please talk to me because I want to serve you he then heard God's voice talking to him in his heart not in words but in picture form as if he was standing right there in front of the young boy Vernon Howell also became interested in health and fitness and he began working out he claimed that his cousins had tried to sexually abuse him therefore he needed to kind of pump the iron and get stronger so he could defend himself once again there's no proof of this there's nobody else who backs that up but it was what he said and it might suggest or lead to evidence of why he did certain things later in life like most other teenagers in Texas he was interested in guns he owned guns and he was pretty good with them when he was 18 he met his first love it was at an arcade in Dallas and her name was Linda Campion he knew her like they'd been acquainted but they'd never been close or hung out and she approached him and asked him for a ride home but he hesitated he was working as a non-union carpenter at that point he was getting paid very well he had money in his pocket there was a new pickup truck sitting outside a normal teenage boy would have been chomping at the bit to escort this pretty young girl home in his new truck and show off what he had but Vernon had some reservations he said Linda was beautiful too beautiful the kind of girl that gets a good man in trouble because of his religion he didn't believe in premarital sex but he knew he was attracted to her so there was a battle going on inside of him but he took her home that night they chatted he dropped her off all was well nothing happened so he's like okay I'm good I can handle this I am strong enough I am moral enough we're all sad but when he saw her the second time her parents were sleeping she invited him in one thing led to the other you catch my drift now Vernon was 18 years old and Linda was 16 in fact when he remembered her later in life he referred to her as jailbait and he left her house that day feeling very hypocritical and disappointed in himself here he was preaching the Word of God to his friends and his family and he couldn't even follow it himself so in order to remove the temptation of Linda from his general area he left he left Dallas he moved in with a friend of his in Tyler and for two months he had no contact with Linda until one day she called him out of the blue and told him that she was pregnant and he said the first thing that came to his mind which was can't possibly be mine because I'm sterile and she got upset understandably and hung up after he was giving this some thought he realized that this wasn't really the right thing to do either he had created a child and since he and Linda had been sexually active together in God's eyes they were husband and wife and now they were gonna have a baby so he needed to do the right thing and he needed to go to her and take care of his responsibilities but when he got there she told him that she'd gotten rid of the baby but still the two of them realized and recognized the attraction that was between them initially and they fell into it again and for some reason even though Linda's parents were a little hesitant about the 18 year old man that was in a relationship with their 16 year old daughter they let him move in with her and sleep in the same bed so Vernon's over here like she is my wife you know we've had sex we still have sex we sleep in the same bad her parents are all about it so we're doing nothing wrong but obviously within no time Linda was pregnant again and her dad wasn't happy about this even though I'm confused as to what Linda's dad thought was going to happen so he kicked Vernon out and he told him under no circumstances was he ever to have any contact with Linda or her child again so for about a week Vernon slept in his pickup truck and he was confused upset hurt he couldn't understand what was happening in God's eyes Linda was his wife and the child that she was carrying belonged to them so what right did her father have to tell him that he couldn't be with his wife and child according to Vernon as he sat there wrapped in his own sadness God appeared to him and said you're really hurt aren't you you've loved her for about a year and now she's turned her back on you and now she's rejected you don't you know that for 19 years I've loved you and for 19 years you've turned your back on me and rejected me I guess the point of this vision was to tell Vernon if you love something let it go if it comes back it's yours if it doesn't it never was but in the end God told Vernon Howell that if he lived the right way and he did the right thing that he would return his first loved him so here Vernon Howell is he's 19 and he he believed in the everything happens for a reason thought process that Linda had been put in his life to bring him back to his true path and set him back on you know his purpose in life even though at first it seemed as if she'd made him stray from his beliefs in the end it had only made his faith stronger now when he was living with his aunt in Dallas for a little while he was younger this was before Linda he claims that he was on his knees praying at night and he had a vision from God and this would have been his first prophetic vision of sorts and what happened was God lifted him up almost as if he was in an elevator and he went high up into the air he claims God showed him two walls the first it was a big wall and it said the word law on it and behind it was an even a bigger wall and that wall said the word prophecy on it and then God was there himself in one hand he held the Bible and the other he held out to Vernon himself so he went and he asked his aunt who was also a seventh-day Adventist why are there no more prophets where are all the prophets and she told him that she heard there were prophets still and they were staying at a compound in Waco Texas he told her take me there now but of course she's like no kid I'm making breakfast sit down and eat your eggs and go to school you crazy kid right that's how I imagined it happened but he made the prom to himself that he would get there and he kept that promise but first he went to Los Angeles California because he wanted to become a big and famous rock star and here's where people draw parallels to Charles Manson and I would like to to state my my opinion here Vernon Howell David crush maybe didn't do the best things maybe was a horrible cult leader but he was not Charles Manson there's similarities there's some similarities in the childhood there's obviously similarities in their musical ability or their belief in their musical ability but that's pretty much as far as it goes in fact David Koresh was a much better musician than Charles Manson could ever be he could play the guitar pretty well he had a nice voice but when he became just one of the money a random face in the hordes of hopeful rock stars journeying to the Hollywood sign to make it big he couldn't stand out and soon he realized that his big break wasn't coming so he headed back to Texas and he sought out Louis Roden and her followers years earlier he'd been baptized into his mother's church but according to Shirley Burton of the seventh-day Adventist world headquarters he had been disfellowshipped due to bizarre beliefs and lifestyles so he most likely felt connected to this group of outsiders who had also been disowned by the church at first he just wanted to see what these people and their theology was all about but he soon became very close to Louis Roden very close if you know what I mean Louis was a woman in her 60s Vernon was newly twenty-one but many people saw him sneak into her quarters late at night and later he confessed that they had been lovers and they were hoping for a miracle conception as was the case of Sarah who bore Abraham a son when she was 90 if God was willing to intervene anything was possible now George Rowton Louis his son he'd been watching Vernon very closely since he arrived at Mount Carmel and he saw that the way people responded to Vernon was definitely not the way that they responded to George Vernon was a young man he was in good shape he was fairly attractive and he had this charismatic way about him he could make people feel at ease immediately as if you'd known him forever and George was just this really awkward big guy that people kind of steered clear of George claimed that he didn't like how close Vernon and his mother were getting George claimed that he was afraid Vernon was going to take advantage of his older mother but in the end I really believe that George was just worried about the competition for who would lead the group when Louis finally died since he had failed to take leadership from her when his father died George had essentially just been counting the days until his mother died when he could step in as the next natural choice but now this guy this new guy had shown up and Louis was intently listening to his interpretation of the Bible and letting him speak during church services George knew that Vernon Howell was a potential powerful challenger he was sick of being shoved to the side so he went to the police and he told them that Vernon had taken advantage of Louis sexually George also went around the compound telling everyone that Vernon Howell had been sent by the devil to cause issues in their community now remember what I said even though the Branch Davidians branched off from seventh-day Adventism they're still going to carry the beliefs of the seventh-day Adventist Church and they believed that there was evil and good forces in the world and that they were there battling so there's always something evil or someone evil being sent to challenge you and to trick you George Rowton wanted everybody to think that Satan had sent Fernand Howell to test their faith now it obviously didn't take Vernon long to realize that there was some tension at Mount Carmel I mean George Rowton was putting up pictures of his face with like the words the devil or Satan on it all over the compound so he realized that there were some issues so he left Mount Carmel so they formed a splinter group off of the splinter group life in Palestine wasn't great the compound at Mount Carmel hadn't been an example of modern luxury but in the desert Vernon and his followers essentially lived in these small boxes constructed out of plywood a nineteen point nine acres of land and he stayed there for several years regrouping and gathering more people to him and planning his return to Mount Carmel but before leaving Mount Carmel sadly in Palestine Vernon took a wife he married a young girl whose family lived there On January 18 1984 her name was Rachel Jones she was 14 at the time of their marriage making her husband 15 years older than she was and also she was 14 so basically a child but he married her with permission from her parents given happily and when he left Mount Carmel so did Rachel and her older brother David Jones and her younger sister Michelle and her father perry Jones they were all now followers of Vernon Howell and he was family to them Louis Roden wasn't happy about her former Protege leaving the fold she really did 1 Vernon to take over after she died she didn't even trust her own son and she made many trips back and forth between Mount Carmel and Palestine trying to bring them back together and bring the outliers or the splinter group of back to the commune but in November of 1986 Louis died and her son George finally got what he wanted and he took over the crew at Mount Carmel and renamed it Rodan Ville road in Ville I mean it's just a bad name road in town would have been better the village of Roden but Road in Ville it's just it's bad but there weren't many people left to rule over by the time George took over because people kind of saw the writing on the wall as Louis was getting sick and they knew that when she died George was the only option and he was gonna step in and nobody really wanted to be around for that so in the past months people had slowly been leaving Mount Carmel and where were they going they were seeking out Vernon Howell and his followers in Palestine and George javi asleep wasn't happy about this he thought he needed to do something to win the back something big to prove that he was the one the the chosen one by God so he basically put a proposition to Vernon a contest if you will he said whoever can raise someone from the dead will be the rightful leader so let's dig up some bodies and you know make them alive again and and then whoever can do that will take over and there won't be any more questions about it and Vernon Howell was like that doesn't sound like a really good plan and George got right to work on this and he dug up a woman who was buried in the community's graveyard and she'd been dead for 20 years she was a one-armed woman named Anna he'd dug her up and then he was like okay I've got my body do you have yours but instead of taking the bait Vernon Howell was like this is crazy even for me so he goes through the local police and he asks them hey isn't it like illegal to dysentery corpse I just I was wondering asking for a friend now obviously Vernon Howell had a motive in this and the motive was to get back to mountain Carmel and take over you know his followers especially the Jones family who had been at Mount Carmel for a while and it was kind of weird they they considered home they wanted to leave these boxes in the desert that they were living in and they wanted to go back home and Vernon knew in order to keep people happy he had to give them what he wanted and he had to bring them back home so he really wanted the police to just go in and arrest George Rowton so that Vernon could be like okay guys let's go I got your home back he didn't care about Ana getting dug up it's not as if he was like outraged by the idea or worried about her immortal soul he just he had a motive for why he went to the police in order to turn George in and that motive was purely selfish in my opinion the police were interested but this was Texas this was the 80s and Mount Carmel was a religious community and the authorities in Texas weren't just gonna go charging onto a protected religious communities land making accusations without more proof so they said well we need like photographic proof of this if you can get that we can help you out now Sam Jones was David Jones's brother Rachael Jones's brother and obviously Vernon Howells brother-in-law he still lived at Mount Carmel with George Rowton for whatever reason I'm not sure why he stayed maybe he's just a creature of heaven but he was essentially asked by David Jones and Vernon Howell to take pictures of poor old Ana and her body so that they could prove this to the police and they gave my camera to do this and he went in and he took pictures of her casket which was draped with an Israel flag and he gave those to Vernon David Jones who brought them to the sheriff's and the sheriff's was like this is a picture of a casket this could be anybody's casket this could be an empty casket we need real proof pictures of flesh and bone so get that for us and you got a deal but by that time Sam Jones and George Rowton had gotten into a fight which I hear it was pretty common with George Rowton he would just kind of get into fights with people and salmon had enough and he left so that meant if Vernon Howell was gonna get these pictures to give to the police he would somehow need to get into the compound himself and take them himself or somebody else that he trusted and it seemed that even the local police knew that a mission to infiltrate Mount Carmel would be dangerous for Vernon his followers because as he left the police station that day he was warned to be careful that there was some shady and dangerous characters sitting over there at Mount Carmel and George Rowton was known to be packing they spent the next 30 days preparing they purchased some shotguns and some small caliber rifles from Kmart they dressed in deer hunter coveralls they painted their faces to camouflage themselves and each of the eight men that were enlisted for this mission were given a weapon and a flashlight it was November 2nd 1987 it was after midnight and it was dark Vernon and his 8 soldiers jumped out of their vehicle and they ran to the compound and one of them who had a camera and was specifically given the mission to get into wherever Ana was and get a picture of her body he ran ahead while the others kind of spread out to you know protect his his back and watch out for him but when they got to the chapel where her body had been previously the body had been moved then the dog started to bark alerting George to his visitors and he emerged from his cabin holding a machine gun so they withdrew but they camped outside of the compound and the next morning they tried to go in again and this turned into a shootout because by this time George was prepared he knew they're probably gonna make another attempt so he got all his people whoever was left gave them guns he had a gun and they all just start shooting at each other and some people were injured including George I think he had like got shot in the hand or something nothing serious and everyone was arrested right including David Jones who worked for like the government he was a u.s. postal service worker and all the police officers who showed up were confused and felt awkward when they had to arrest him this guy but they knew from town who lived in Waco he was like delivering the mail and here he is in the desert participating in some Wild West gun standoff they did not know what to make of that the news reported that a group of terrorists had attacked the Mount Carmel compound because apparently Jorge had told the police that Vernon and his group were members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and that they had attacked him in some sort of Jihad Vernon and his buddies were each charged with attempted murder and even though they were bailed out David Jones was suspended until his trial which happened in April of 1988 it didn't look good for them until George Rowton took the stand straight faced and solemn George told the court that he had tried to resurrect Ana the one-armed woman who had been dead for 20 years he also said that sometimes when he was leading his congregation in prayer he would end the prayer with in the name of George beer Odin amen Vernon and his soldiers were acquitted their attorney explained the reason for their acquittal was because our witnesses are nice people with no criminal record who don't believe they're Jesus Christ and one-armed Ana was that the only thing that was dug up at Mount Carmel during that time it turns out that nobody had been paying the taxes there for 19 years and George was embroiled in more legal battles that he didn't have the reason or logic to handle while George was distracted Vernon and his followers paid the back taxes on Mount Carmel and retook the compound where they found poor Ana in her coffin in the mechanics shed the place was falling down and it was in disrepair but for many of them it had been the only home that they'd ever known so they got right to it repairing things putting things back together and hopefully they reburied Ana but we are not done with George Rowton in 1989 he killed his roommate a man named Wayman Adel Adair with an axe claiming that he'd been working as a spy for Vernon Howell he was found not guilty by reason of mental insanity and he was sent to a state mental hospital but in 1993 he walked out of this hospital and went missing for ten days before being returned again in 1995 seven months after the Texas Department of Mental Health claimed rodent was not dangerous he escaped again and was picked up outside the Israeli consulate in New York City he had requested a visa to travel to Israel and it had been denied so he made a scene claiming that he had to go because he was Jewish and the Palestine Liberation Organization had sent hitmen to kill him crazy George okay so that brings us back to Vernon Howell once a skinny kid who got pushed around by his stepfather pushed around by his mother pushed around by other kids at school a boy who had never felt smart or particularly good at anything but now he has his own little community and his own people and in the years that Vernon had lived in Palestine he traveled all over the world to different countries he went to Canada he went to England he went to Australia and he spent a lot of time in California as well and he recruited people essentially from these countries and these other places he'd go there and then go to locations that he knew young people hung out at bars coffee shops libraries college campuses and he recruits these people and he brings them back to Texas with him so between the exodus of the people leaving Mount Carmel after George took over and the people that Vernon was recruiting from all over the world his numbers had grown so at this point we can't really see anything that Vernon Howell is doing that's illegal in terms of the law sure he married a 14-year old girl but he did so with parental permission which was legal in Texas and still is so let's discuss this quickly so we're all on the same page a marriage where at least one of the people involved is under 18 is called a child marriage now marital age in the u.s. varies and is decided by each state currently there are 13 states in which there is no minimum age for marriage but in all states except for to a child marriage is allowed if parental consent is given which is a bunch of nonsense if you ask me because a 14 year old is a child and this child doesn't have control over their own life or decisions what if they don't want to marry this person what if it's the parents decision it's just a really slippery slope and I that marriage under the age of 18 needs to be outlawed altogether like it is in New Jersey and Delaware the only two states who have it right in my opinion but let's look at the historical basis for why these laws exist today back in the day way back in the day it was pretty normal to marry your daughter off as soon as she reached puberty which would indicate that she was ready to bear children and as you know historically that's what women were for they were meant to become wives and and have children and then care for those children in order to further the species and the bloodlines this continued throughout the Middle Ages with most girls being married by the time they were fifteen years old and according to Jewish law at this time a girl was considered an adult by the time they were 12 and a half so as you can see the belief is and would be deeply rooted in religion and history and may not seem out of the ordinary if you were raised to know that this was just how things were and it's not as if the marriage of Vernon and Rachel was out of the ordinary since taxes cease quite a few child marriages even in recent years every day more than 25,000 girls under the age of 18 are married worldwide that's one every three seconds and more than nine million a year it's more common in the Middle East South Asia and Africa but it happens in the US and other countries as well between the years 2000 and 2014 over forty thousand child marriages were registered in the state of Texas alone and during a study it was discovered that only roughly twenty percent of these child brides were living with their spouse the rest were residing with their parents if we go even further to understand why Rachel's parents would have allowed this we have to turned to the Bible which does show a precedents for child marriage according to the Bible when Mary the mother of Jesus was married to Joseph she was 12 and he was 90 Rebecca was Isaac's wife and if we look at the Bible it shows that she was married to him when she was 3 years old this is theorized due to calculations by a rabbi Solomon it Sakhi Isaac was 37 years old when Rebecca was born and he waited until she was fit for marital relations three years later I mean this stuff gets really and there's entire websites out there devoted to pointing out instances of the P word in the Bible but like I said this is this is religion and this is history I want to respect everybody's different religions and also I don't personally view the Bible as something that's literal I don't think people actually turned to pillars of salt things like that you know I think it's just used to illustrate something else but that's also where it becomes an issue because as you know seventh-day adventists they they do view the Bible as the Word of God not really open to interpretation unless it's by a prophet or a messiah so you have these prophets who come in and they interpret the Bible in their own way to further their own means and motives and they'll point to these occurrences and they'll say hey it's written in the Bible and the Bible is the Word of God right so it has to be the way so keep that in mind when you have a family or you are a family that's followed and been a part of a specific religion for as long as you can remember and you're born into that family while they are a part of this religion it's going to be all you know seventh-day Adventist believe the Bible is everything it's the literal word of God and in a way the people the prophets who came forward and used the Bible to convince people it was normal to marry a girl that was 14 it's a way of grooming I'm not defending it I'm not saying it's right clearly I don't believe that it is but at this point Vernon Howell was doing nothing to break the law he'd married Rachel when she was 14 but he'd done so with her parents permission and at that time in Texas it was allowed and today in Texas and many other states is still allowed but of course I do wonder if Rachel was on board with this at 14 probably not but maybe she too had just been a part of this belief system and you know this religion for so long that she went along with whatever she'd been taught and of course as a child you're going to grow up learning that you need to obey your and follow their rules and if they told her you're marrying this man he's the Prophet's you're gonna be you're gonna be so important in this community this is what we're meant for our family is gonna have purpose and is gonna be considered very highly in the eyes of God yes she probably would have almost felt privileged privileged to do it which like I said this is manipulation this is grooming child grooming is befriending and establishing an emotional connection with a child then sometimes the family to lower the child's inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse to establish a good relationship with a child and the child's family child groomers might do several things they might try to gain the child's or the parents trust by befriending them with the goal of easy access to the child a trusting relationship with the family means the child's parents are less likely to believe potential accusations child groomers might look for opportunities to have time alone with the child which can be done by offering to babysit the groomers may also invite the child for sleepovers for opportunistic bed-sharing they might give gifts or money to the child in exchange for contact or for no apparent reason our Kelly did it with his victims getting close to their parents telling their parents that he needed to be alone with the girls so he could make them into you know huge singers and pop stars so he had to be alone with them at the studio it's what predators have been doing since the beginning of time but this isn't the end this isn't where he stopped he married Rachel in 1984 and in 1986 while living in Palestine Vernon took two more spiritual wives now this is when he's 27 and he married fourteen-year-old Karen Doyle and 12 year-old Michelle Jones Rachel's own sister and his sister-in-law and she was 12 1986 remember was also the year that Lois died and there was a huge exodus from Mount Carmel to Palestine and the next year in 1987 he took a couple more wives seventeen-year-old Robin buns 16 year old Nicole Kent and 20 year old Dana Okamoto so now he has six wives five of them are under the age of 18 what was his how did he explain this to his followers according to Vernon Howell he was creating the house of David God had come to him before each and every marriage and had given him a direct order to take each and every one of these girls as his wife this was important because he was destined to father twenty four children who would become the 24 elders written about in the Book of Revelations in the end days these children would rule by his side in the celestial kingdom because he was able to pull in biblical passages that supported his actions his followers couldn't really challenge him he was the Prophet he was the Son of God incarnate and you have to understand these people truly believed in what he was saying they believed the apocalypse was coming and they wanted it too they searched for signs of the end of the world and if they saw these signs they were excited they were happy they were hopeful it wasn't a scary thing they wanted it because of the historical and Biblical incidences they were able to convince themselves that it was okay more than okay it was necessary for their journey to eternal life let's talk about Michelle Jones for a moment this was Rachel's twelve year old little sister and the same parents who gave the green light for the marriage between 14 year-old Michelle and Vernon also made the way for Vernon Howell to engage in sex with their twelve-year-old daughter but not at first at first everyone was kind of on the fence about it they were like this is going a little far Vernon pushed back he claimed he'd had a vision while on a trip to Israel that God had told him he needed to have a child with Michelle Jones and maybe the community would have put their foot down maybe the community as a whole would have said she's 12 this is this is a lot even for us but then Rachel jumps the life of the Prophet the wife of the Messiah she also had a dream where she received a vision from God and God told her that Vernon would die if he wasn't able to follow his path and follow God's message and maybe these people would have ignored one vision from God telling a 27 year old man to marry a twelve-year-old child but two visions from God couldn't ignore that and this has always bothered me because Rachel Jones was essentially responsible for everybody going along with this plan for a grown man to have sex with a little girl but that does show you how truly brainwashed in a way and manipulated the these people were the people that followed Vernon and did what he what he said they really believed what he was saying was coming from God so Vernon Howell married Michelle but wasn't a real and legal marriage obviously because that would make him a polygamist which was not legal and also he was already legally married to her sister so he couldn't get married twice but you know they said they were married and he began you know trying to have a child with her and she would go on to bear two of his children but we'll talk about that a little more later it is reported that when the young girls who lived in the community reached the age of puberty they were given a plastic Star of David to wear and this would signify that they were ready to become a part of the house of David and they were ready to bear the Prophet's children girls as young as 11 were given these stars and I'm gonna jump forward in the timeline for a moment to give you an idea of what this meant a young girl who lived with her mother as part of Vernon's group was given this plastic star when she was 11 and her father who was not a part of the group saw this and he knew he had to do something her name was Carrie dual and her mother had brought her to the isolated religious community when she was five or six and the story she tells will make your skin crawl she said she was 10 when she was first forced to sleep with Vernon Howell she would look up at the ceiling and wait for it to be over and then hide in the shower for an hour afterwards trying to wash the shame and confusion off her body and her soul her father David received a call from within the community in 1991 which warned him that his daughter was in danger and that Vernon wanted to take her as a wife so Carrie's father fought for custody of his daughter and he won and he was able to remove her from Mount Carmel but her mother remained and would later die in the raid Kerry also said that the children and Mount Carmel were disciplined viciously they were constantly told that they were in danger from the government that the end of the world was coming and they needed to be prepared for it then on August 5th 1989 a Vernon Howell was in Pomona California now he was staying there at a home that was owned by the Bunz family and this was one of his wives families so he was able to stay there anytime and people would gather there who were in California and listen to him preach and in the middle of this this preaching and you know communicating the Word of God he stops and he kind of [ __ ] his head to the side as if he's hearing something inside of his head one of his followers at the time a man named Mark Breaux was there when this happened and remembered that it seemed contrived and planned it didn't seem as if the idea just occurred to him it seemed as if he'd already come up with the idea and he was just looking for a good way to kind of like spring it on people when Vernon spoke he declared that he had received a vision from God about the new light Vernon claimed that he was the lamb mentioned in the Book of Revelations and that he was intended to open the seven seals and lead them all to salvation then on the spot he annulled all marriages between members of his group he told the men from that point forward they would be celibate but not to worry because they would be given their perfect mates in the heavenly kingdom they just needed to give their earthly wives to him the new light prophecy stated that Vernon Howell was entitled to at least 140 wives that all the women in the group now belonged to him even the wives of the current group members and he needed to have as many children as possible because time was running out he needed to have his 24 children he then turned to Mark Breaux who was sitting next to him and Mark and his wife Elizabeth had just joined up with Vernon three weeks prior to that and he said how's it feel mark knowing that I'm stuck with Elizabeth now and this was something he did another manipulative tactic in order to get his followers to do what he wanted to believe that this wasn't the life he had chosen or wanted but was just the path he'd been given by God he told them we're all God's guinea pigs here my lot is to procreate yours is to tolerate I'd swap with you any day and of course these men didn't initially want to just hand over their wives to another man some people left this was too much for them but those who stayed and voiced their concerns were made to feel selfish as if they were more concerned with their earthly desires rather than the greater good of humankind he told them that sexual desire was a sin and he was absorbing all of that sin for everybody he was taking one for the team he managed to make them feel as if by sleeping with their wives he was doing them a favor he was sacrificing for them he was saving them this is all probably sounding really crazy to you right now who would stay who would continue following this man who was abusing their children and sleeping with their wives those who stayed after the new light revelation they were the ones that truly believed Vernon Howell was a Messenger of God they truly believed the end days were coming and those who stayed and followed the messenger of God the Messiah the second coming of Christ they needed to follow him and then they would be they would be rewarded for their sacrifices by being given eternal life in the heavenly kingdom this would be a small sacrifice for a reward that would last forever if you aren't religious or you've never believed in anything at this fervent leave this may be hard to wrap your head around but look back through history and think about all the wars we've been through as a species for hundreds of years women have sent their husbands off to a battlefield parents have encouraged their children to enlist in the military during war times why there's a good chance they might not survive there's a good chance this person will never come back to you and if they do they won't be the same after the horrific things they witness having friends died in their arms after being handed a gun and told to kill other human beings that they personally don't have any issues with or ill intent towards why because we've been groomed and conditioned as a society to believe that this is our duty and that sacrifices sometimes have to be made for the greater good people do things all the time that don't make sense in the name of something bigger than themselves whether that be God or country and I'm not saying the military is a cult or the governments are called nuts I'm not seeing any of that my family has a long line of men who have been a part of the Marines or the army or the Navy and I do believe that you know sometimes you need this military force or an armed force to protect yourself but just think about it you know before there was a draft before there was any of that people wanted to go and fight for their country knowing they might die I mean before World War two ended there were families that had entire bloodlines died out because they would send all of their sons to war and they wouldn't come back so the family name would essentially die off and now there's there's a law for that to prevent that exact same thing but it just shows you how you know gung ho people are when they truly believe in something and the links that they will go to and the sacrifices that they'll make so let's get back to Vernon Howell returning triumphantly to Mount Carmel with his multiple wives and his growing number of converts he was not the same scrawny timid young man who had first walked onto that compound in 1981 that young man had been a seeker and maybe he'd been struggling with some issues but for the most part I think he truly believed in his relationship with God but since then he'd seen the power his convictions had over people and as someone who had felt powerless for so long who'd been teased and taunted thrown around by adults tossed to the side by a woman he loved his newfound power and influence changed him and to signify this change he literally changed his name from Vernon Howell to David Koresh which is what we will call him from now on even though they're literally 205 men named David in this story he pulled inspiration for his new name from two important figures in history and religion David came from King David of the Bible a man who the next Messiah would descend from and Koresh is the biblical name of Cyrus the Great a persian king who was also considered a messiah after freeing the jews from babylonian captivity two kings he named himself after two kings one of his wives Robin buns remember seeing this change in him she said in the beginning he was just a really good guy down-to-earth kind humble he could preach for hours it was true but he was so gauging and captivating that nobody really minded additionally he had this way of making the Bible seem relatable to people he put it to them in terms that they could connect back to their own lives when he wasn't preaching he was just one of the guys he would go into town with some of the other man and they would chat with the locals watch some live bands and they even invited these musicians back to Mount Carmel to have jam sessions with them this down-to-earth persona was how he would initially draw people in he was young he was good-looking and he had a way of listening more than he spoke his quiet strengths an intent way of keeping his attention on you when you spoke made people feel heard and important this attention he was giving to people was not just to make them feel valued it was also so that he could decipher what exactly it was that each person was looking for in life what their pressure points were what they needed to hear in order to believe that he had the answers they needed and he was very good at doing this but then new light happened they returned to Mount Carmel and he became David Koresh and I'm not saying that he hadn't deviated off the path of morality before this we know he did but regaining control of the compound and seeing how many people were looking to him for the answers it magnified things I imagine he might have thought to himself I can pretty much say anything do anything as long as I find a way to relate it back to the Bible these people will go along with it he told them if the Bible is true then I am Christ but so what look at 2000 years ago what was so great about being Christ a man nailed to a cross a man of sorrows acquainted with grief you know be in Christ ain't nothing he wanted them to believe that this was almost a burden that was placed on him but it didn't give him any special perks he divided the men and women into separate living quarters so they would only be together during mealtime and prayer this living arrangement was designed not only to keep them apart so there would be no hanky-panky because David Koresh was the only one who was allowed to have sex with these women but also to keep them divided and separated so they wouldn't be able to talk anybody who'd been a couple or married before he'd annulled their marriages they may get together at when nobody's listening and whisper about how they don't really like this anymore about how they're not interested in staying or being a part of it anymore and because they feel bolstered by the other person feeling the same way they might leave he didn't want to lose converts he didn't wanna lose followers he didn't want to lose potential wives Jim Jones did this as well in Guyana but again I want to be very clear David crushes often been compared to Jim Jones and Charles Manson but I believe he was very different from both of them Jim Jones brought his followers to Guyana specifically so they'd be far away from anyone they knew or any place that that was familiar to them even if they wanted to leave they would have no place to go those who followed David crush could have left any time they wanted there was no gates or men with guns standing guard to keep them in the compound the City of Waco was pretty much right next door they were not physically kept there as was the case with Jonestown that's not ignoring the fact that they were being manipulated and in a way they were trapped by their own beliefs and the set of beliefs that Koresh had convinced them was their ticket to eternal life in the kingdom of God but if they never woken up one day and said this sucks I'm out no one would have stopped them physically at least back at Mount Carmel as the 80s faded into the 90s David Koresh became less Messiah less religious leader and more cult leader the people who followed him we're living in these really roughly built huts that usually didn't have electricity or running water but David Koresh lived in his own home with his own family and he had air-conditioning and he had running water and he had electricity they were directed to eat a vegetarian diet as the Bible told them to do and that's not uncommon as we already talked about for seventh-day Adventist but David Koresh was allowed to eat meat from time to time he was also known to drink beer when he went into town to the bars to watch the bands and nobody else was really allowed to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes or do anything like that and once again unlike Jim Jones and unlike Charles Manson David Koresh was really against drugs so he didn't take drugs he didn't take any uppers downers nothing he wasn't interested in it he was morally against any drug so he wasn't on drugs and you'll find that that was a big issue with Jim and with Charles Manson because as they became more and more under the influence of drugs they lost more and more of their minds and I think that's why they took the links that they did like Jim Jones took the links that he did to to bring people to Ghana and put you know soldiers at the exit so they couldn't leave and who knows if David Koresh had happened to get into drugs he may have become the same way robbing buns also recalled that there wasn't a peaceful acceptance amongst the girls who were his wives it was constant competition who was the chosen one who was the best wife who knew the most passages of the Bible who followed the holy path the best they were all waiting to see which of them would be chosen by God next to bear the Messiah and she eventually left in 1990 when David Koresh began sleeping with her own mother Jeannine Robin had already given birth to a child of David's a son named Shaun she didn't like sharing her husband to begin with but when he took her own mother too bad that was the last straw she said quote I've had his child he slept with my mother I can't think of anything weirder he doesn't even try to justify it it's against the Levitical law in the Bible did you know that it's against the Levitical law to have a woman and her mother or a woman and her sister he uses that law when it backs up something he has to say but when it doesn't he explains it away Jeannine Bunz Robyn's mother followed suit and left the group a few months after her daughter and grandson she was a nurse and she claimed that David crash had fathered at least 15 children with different women in the group and she herself had personally delivered seven of them but when Dineen left Mount Carmel it wasn't with hatred towards David Koresh she said quote even now I don't hate him even after all he's done to my family it's hard for me I've seen both sides of him he can be nice he cares about people or at least he seems to I do have feelings for Vernon sometimes they overwhelm me and this can give you an idea of how intense his pull was and his influence he didn't just manipulate and take advantage of young girls who hadn't found their voices yet or their independence yet this was a woman in her 50s who was well aware of the things he was doing and she still could not find it in her to be angry with him in fact she was still in love with him and still had these intense feelings for him I'm gonna give you a quick rundown of who David crushes alleged wives were and the children that they had so obviously there was his first and legal wife Rachel and they had two children together a son named Cyrus Howell and a daughter named star Howell Michelle Jones Rachel's sister also gave birth to two children that are thought to be David Koresh's serenity C Jones and Bobby Lane Koresh Judy Schneider aged 41 was another suspected wife of David Koresh's as well as the earthly wife of his right-hand man Steve Schneider they had a daughter together named my Anna who was 2 at the time of the standoff and she is believed to have been the daughter of David and Judy and we'll talk more about Steve and Judy in part 2 43 year-old sherry lynn Jewell mother of Carrie Jewell who had lost custody of her child but had stayed and become one of David's wives Nicole Elizabeth Kent a 23 year old Australian woman who was also one of his wives and gave birth to his son named Dale indigent we'll talk more about the guns in part 2 as well Ayesha Caiaphas a 17-year old who was one of David's wives and had a daughter she named a startled Sommers a child that's believed to be David's 40 year old Lori and Sylvia 46 year old margarita Joanne Vega and that's just a small list of somewhat provable relationships I've no doubt it goes much further and deeper and we will find that as we go on David crash didn't just marry and procreate with underage girls he was an equal-opportunity procreator he didn't care whether you were 15 or 50 as long as you were attractive and a lot of his followers said it seemed weird to them that God always sent down the message that David should pick the most beautiful and attractive and appealing women to be his wives and when he was asked about this he said well God wants me to have beautiful children duh don't you understand that I think it seems pretty clear and they were like awesome that makes sense thank you for clearing that up anyways I'm gonna end this video or this part of the video by talking about a man named David Thibodeau really briefly cuz we're gonna get into him a little bit more in-depth in part to the reason I want to bring up David Thibodeau right now is because you might wonder how David crash married all these people and got away with it because polygamy is illegal he used the other men in the group and legally married them to his spiritual wives so that if the government came or you know law enforcement ever was checking into it it would look as if these women were married to other men and were giving birth to these other men's kids and so they wouldn't be suspicious and David Thibodeau soon after he came and joined the Branch Davidians and lived at the Mount Carmel compound he was convinced by David Koresh to marry Michelle Jones Nicole Gant a woman who was also one of David crushes wives was legally married to Jeffrey little but David Koresh was the only one who was allowed to sleep with these women even though these other men were legally married to them so he basically was like you can have legal wives but you can't have sex with them only I could do it's just the whole it's the worst to me a source it's bad enough to say the marriages are annulled all your wives are mine but now just like assign wives to men but then say you can't actually like have this person as a wife it's literally just to protect me legally in case anybody comes here sniffing around and asking questions that's that's a bit just messed up so that's where we're gonna end part one next time we're gonna talk about how Koresh attractive and gained a loyal enough following to form an inner circle we're gonna talk about the people that made up that inner circle we're also going to discuss how the Branch Davidians came to be on law enforcement radar and how David crushes beliefs and practices and preachings evolved at that point and became very dangerous thank you guys so much for being here today I hope you really enjoyed this I know a lot of you out there loved the cult series and love these deep dives but I hope all of the you know beginning history and stuff wasn't too boring for you let me know in the comments what you think about history videos if I should do it on this channel or make another channel I want to know what you think about David Koresh I want to know what you think about his practices about his followers and why they allowed this to happen but of course as always be respectful to the people were talking about be respectful to others in the comments section who may not feel the same as you do you know I was always told never talk about religion or politics and here we are kind of talking about both in this series so it can it can get a little tense but please be aware that we're all just trying to understand each other and you know we all don't have this universal knowledge of everything so that's how we learn by talking to other people who have experienced and gone through different things in life and we gain knowledge that way so let's educate each other let's support each other but let's not belittle anybody or what they believe in thank you guys so much for being here remember to check the description box if you're interested in trying magellan tv-out and I will see you next time stay kind and stay beautiful [Music] [Music] [Music] tip it goes into this get a new Sony so you got to let it go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] ponies you don't know how deep it goes until it's getting you slowly so your dad's letting [Music]

Channel: Stephanie Harlowe

Views: 576,334

Rating: 4.8716865 out of 5

Keywords: stephanie harlowe, cults, david koresh, the branch davidians, waco, true crime

Id: wNWjIOT6KGY

Length: 89min 8sec (5348 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019