David began with a dramatic passage from the Book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, plunging immediately into the midst of what I could see was a running stream of inspiration. And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.… The woman was struggling with the pain of childbirth, David went on, when a great red dragon with seven crowned heads and ten horns threatened to devour her. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. The holy child, David asserted, would “prevail in the final battle between Good and Evil at the end of time.”
The text David intoned was like a comic book, all lurid colors and sharply defined heroes and villains. Its vivid simplicity entranced me, but I was more impressed by another phenomenon: the shuddering bolts of thunder that rattled the windows out of a clear sky each time he emphasized a phrase or word.
My skin crawled. Rationally, I knew that the Texan plain was given to abrupt, sky-cracking thunderstorms. But the timing was awesome, as if David were literally conjuring up these heavenly responses. Stealing glances at the people around me, I saw that they were as startled as I was by this sound and light show. Some were hugging their neighbors and muttering, “Whoa, there! Whoa!” David himself smiled from time to time, as if simultaneously discounting the lightning’s literalness while accepting it as his due.
“That was somethin’ else,” Jaime said as we filtered out of the chapel. I could see that he was shaken. “Each time I begin to doubt David, something like this happens to wow me.”
Being impressionable, dramatic events always impressed me, until my more sober mind sifted out the grit. But seeing David in action for the first time made me begin to take him more seriously as a religious figure.
The next day David took me for a drive in his ’68 Camaro with the 400-plus-c.c. turbocharged engine. He talked about his life, how, as he put, “I always saw things differently from other people.” This remark resonated with me; I also considered myself to be the odd man out in any group. As a child, he heard voices, he told me, and I immediately thought “psycho,” then rejected this glib diagnosis as obscuring more than it explained.
“No one understood me; I knew I was on a special path,” he said. He tried to tell me that he was given some kind of insight, but his description of this experience was too vague and oblique for me to grasp. In truth, I wasn’t really getting it, and I could see his mouth draw down when I countered with, “Yeah, no one’s really understood me, either.” Yet I appreciated his straightforward manner, his soft-sell approach, the opposite of Steve’s driven style. David was more laid-back, he was modest, he spoke from the heart and didn’t try to overwhelm me.
Sometimes, late at night, after a long day of Bible study, we stayed in the cafeteria after the others left and jammed a little to cool out. Sheer exhaustion put us into a deep daze, kind of peaceful, way beyond tiredness, David easy on the strings, me barely tapping the skins, moving together in a shared zone that was like a trance.
Between licks, David talked about his life, reverting to a working-class Texan twang. He told me his original name was Vernon Howell, that his mother, Bonnie, was only fourteen or fifteen when he was born in 1959, ten years before me. His father, Bobby, split when he was a baby, after nicknaming him “Sputnik.” “Because I was so rackety and restless, just like you, Thibodeau,” he added with a grin.
Bonnie moved from Houston to Dallas and got hitched to a shady guy named Roy Haldeman, known as Rocky, who often beat young Vernon so bad “he made me fly like a kite.” David was slightly dyslexic, couldn’t keep up in school, and the other kids, with typical cruelty, dubbed him “Mr. Retardo.” He tended to stutter when stressed, which didn’t help him in the classroom, and he was painfully skinny. I was given a hard time in school because I was too fat, but it came to the same thing: being an object of fun and derision.
“I failed the first grade twice and failed the second grade, too,” David said, a kind of pained pride still vibrating in his voice. In third grade he was sent to a “special” school for backward kids. The first day, at recess, he said, the children in the regular classes shouted, “Here come the retards!”
“I just stopped dead in my tracks, like the sun went down, instant night. When my mom came to pick me up after school I bust out howling, ‘I’m a retard!’ She tried to reassure me that I just had a ‘learning disability,’ but the polite phrase didn’t snow me. I was a retard, plain and simple. In a year of special school I finally learned the alphabet and some reading, but writing was a bummer. Words like ‘angel’ came out ‘angle,’ and such.”
I remembered that my father, worried about my weight problem, had sent me to a counselor specializing in “eating disorders.” But that strategy didn’t take, any more than Vernon’s “special” schooling. Oddballs like us just had to take our chances.
“I could understand machines, like cars, engines, radios, anything I could put my hands on and take apart to see how they worked,” David told me. “But reading and writing was a foreign language. It’s still a bit of a problem for me,” he admitted, with a hint of shame. He was totally self-taught, and it showed in his misuse of “convicted” for “convinced,” “bizarrity” for “bizarre,” and “globular” for “global.”
The experience of being a bright child who couldn’t express himself still caused him pain. Such hurts run deep, I knew, from my own hard time in school. I’d hung in till I graduated, but Vernon had dropped out in the eleventh grade, unable to bear the constant humiliation. My heart went out to that lonely, lost kid desperate to make a place for himself in the hard scheme of things.
His family life was no fun either, he said sardonically. Apart from his maternal grandpa, who took him fishing and hunting on weekends, his relatives were heavy. “At my thirteenth birthday party my mom beat me black and blue in front of everybody. My stepdad was a cruel, cold man and my half-brother, Roger, ended up in the slammer on burglary and drug charges. My cousins tried to rape me so I started pumping iron, toughening my body, to defend myself. For sheer survival I became a fitness freak.
“I was lousy at school, but I was good with guns, four-ten shotguns and twenty-two rifles, bagging rabbits, doves, and squirrels around the lake. Like every Texan kid of my background, a gun was a friend and protector, as loyal and obedient to my wishes as my dog, Jet Fuel.” His other friend was music. He found a guitar in an old barn, took some lessons, and picked up the local country-and-western style of singing and playing. He put together some garage bands, just as I had, but his partners often got sucked into the Dallas drug culture. Our common experience of finding refuge in music made me feel very close to David in these intimate moments of quiet talk. Like me, he’d been a kid with an intense inner world; a dreamer whose life was lived within the boundaries of his very private soul. For him and for me, music, our most personal avenue of self-expression, was also the main means of communicating our deepest feelings. Paradoxically, performance made the private world bearable in public.
But young Vernon had a powerful extra dimension: a natural gift for the spiritual. His mother was raised in the Adventist Church, and his maternal grandmother, Earline, often took him to worship in the local congregation—“a bunch of folks dyed, fried, and tied to the side,” he joked, mocking their conventional propriety. “But I was fascinated by the service, and even by the hokey evangelists I watched on TV and heard on the radio. I learned huge swatches of Scripture by heart and bored other kids at school with Bible lectures. I was thrilled by holy writ and knew that the great book was a puzzle of the truth I just had to decode in my very own way.
“One time I played hooky from school and went to the church to put the question to the Man Himself. On my knees, I prayed: ‘Dear Father, I know I’m stupid, but please talk to me ’cause I want to serve you.’ A while later I heard His word in my heart, as if we were discussing things directly.”
Vernon’s conversations w
ith the Lord intensified when he was eighteen. While working as a nonunion carpenter in an oilfield, he met Linda Campion, a girl he’d once hung out with, in a North Dallas arcade. He had a bankroll in his jeans and owned a new pickup, and for the first time in his life his self-confidence was high. “I was shy, still a virgin, kind of straitlaced on account of my church life, and she was beautiful. At first, I didn’t want nothing to do with her, she was too gorgeous, a real temptation. Lustful thoughts.…,” he murmured, a strange look on his face, wistful, yearning, and sad. “She had the beauty to make good men fall,” he added primly.
Despite his scruples, he ended up making love to Linda.
“She was jailbait, just sixteen, but you know how humanity is,” he shrugged ruefully. After the second time they made love, he tried to escape temptation by moving away. But escape wasn’t that easy. One night she called to tell him she was pregnant.
Vernon was staggered. “Me, Mr. Retardo, going to be a daddy! I blurted out a lie, that it was impossible, because I was ‘sterile’—a word I’d heard in a movie or something. She hung up on me and that seemed to be that. But that holy voice in my heart reminded me that, according to Scripture, since I’d been with her, had entered her body with mine, we were married in His eyes. I went back to Dallas intending to marry her, but she told me she’d had an abortion. I was shaken, reckoning she must hate me. But to my amazement she said she was still drawn to me, because I was different, didn’t smoke dope like the other guys she knew, never hit the six-packs. ‘You don’t have to do what everybody else does to have a good time,’ she said.”
Vernon moved in with Linda and her family. The girl’s father thought his daughter, who was still in school, was too young to marry. For religious reasons—as Vernon interpreted them—they didn’t use condoms, and a few months later she was pregnant a second time. In a fit of rage, her father kicked him out of the house and forbade him to see Linda again. Troubled and confused, Vernon bedded down in his truck, praying that God would help him understand why he wasn’t allowed to bond with the woman he loved, a marriage he’d thought ordained by heaven.
“One night, in the midst of my pain, I was enshrouded by the ‘presence.’ I was shaking, scared out of my wits. I was looking up at the sky, seeing those bright stars in the black night, with nowhere to run. There’s this voice in my head, not words but a speaking image. ‘You’re really hurt, aren’t you? You love her and she’s turned her back on you, rejected you.’ In my mind I ran a review of all the strange experiences I’d had in my young life.
“God said to me, ‘Don’t you know that for nineteen years I’ve loved you and for nineteen years you’ve turned your back and rejected me?’ And all of a sudden, everything is like, bang!—how I’d forgotten the purpose of my life, to be true to His word. It was a marvelous moment of self-affirmation. Best of all, God said he would give my first love back to me in time.”
His voice trailed off, and I thought he’d forgotten I was there. “But He never did,” he went on. “I lost contact with her and our child, my firstborn.”
For a few years after that he drifted, obsessed with his lost first love. “I came to God because of her,” he said, tears in his eyes. “I couldn’t make sense of the failure of our connection. It wrenched my gut. I had to find my way back to my true fate. It was waiting for me, I knew, out there, somewhere,” he said, giving me one of his sappy, appealing grins.
During the late 1970s, while living with his aunt in Dallas and working in the construction industry, Vernon had another startling spiritual experience. One evening he was on his knees, saying his prayers before bed, desperate and in tears because nothing seemed to be going right for him. Suddenly, he had the sensation he was rising up an elevator shaft.
“My vision was limited, like I was seeing things through a dark-tinted welder’s mask,” he said. “I saw a gigantic wall, like the front of a skyscraper. On this wall was a huge inscription cut into the stonework: ‘THE LAW.’ And there was an even bigger wall beyond that with another inscription: ‘PROPEHCY.’ The light was so intense it would have blinded me if not for the tinted glass shielding my eyes. I saw God the Father with a book in one hand. His other hand was held out to me, and I took hold of it.”
David paused to catch his breath. “When I came down to earth, I ran to the kitchen and asked my aunt: ‘Why aren’t there any more prophets?’ She told me she’d heard somewhere that there was one in Waco, at a place called Mount Carmel. ‘Take me there, now!’ I cried, but she didn’t.”
David shrugged and was silent for a while, recalling what must have been an amazing moment. By the way he told it, straight and simple, I knew he was recounting something very real. To me, it sounded like an acid trip, yet I knew he’d always hated drugs. Listening to him, watching the play of expression in his eyes, I was fascinated by a mind that took such extraordinary journeys.
Though this vision was staggering, it didn’t really connect him to anything, David explained. In 1981, when he was twenty-two—around my age at the time we were speaking—he was still floating, looking for a place to settle, waiting for great things to happen. Unlike me, he had a powerful spiritual push, a strong hand at his back urging him onward. His need to know was focused, whereas mine was fuzzy. Then and now, it was this sincere and passionate concentration that gave David his rare force, his influence over those who, like me, didn’t know how much they needed to know.
“Anyway,” he said, “I finally made my own way to Mount Carmel.”
4
EDGING TOWARD BELIEF
On the summer afternoon in 1981 when David first came to Mount Carmel he was a confused twenty-two-year-old beset by visions and still deeply hurt by the disappointment of his first love affair. Two years earlier he’d been baptized in his mother’s Seventh-day Adventist Church, but he’d soon come to feel that mainstream Adventism offered a corrupted doctrine that betrayed its original purpose—to prophesy and prepare for the End Time and the coming of a Messiah. From his aunt and others, he’d heard that Lois Roden had been given revelations, and his hungry soul was ready to serve her.
“I drove my flashy yellow Buick up to the front door and knocked,” David recalled. “Just a bonehead coming to see what was going on.” Perry Jones told me he remembered “a scruffy, wild-eyed kid with a straggly beard, looking for the light in a fog.”
At the time, Lois was in her sixties. Her son, George, was a big, hulking guy in his forties who hoped to take over the community when his mother died; but to most of the community he was known simply as Poor George, an overgrown boy plagued by twitches. “Sometimes he’d just spit in your face, or make the table jump and the soup fly by slamming down his fist for no reason,” David said. “He was a mess.”
Gradually, David replaced George as Lois’s heir, and George was furious. David was also Lois’s lover for a time. He said he hoped a miracle would occur; that the old prophetess, past her menopause, would conceive a son, just as the ninety-year-old Sarah had done for Abraham in Genesis. Accusing David of raping his mother, George denounced him as Lucifer.
Lois Roden had added a vital new idea to the Davidians: the revelation that the Holy Spirit was feminine. In her teaching, Shekinah, the ancient Hebrew term for the Bride of the Sabbath, the earthly presence of the divine spirit, was integrated within the traditional concept of the Messiah. Some of her followers found this hard to swallow, but others welcomed it as a deeper and more expansive insight into the divine nature. Lois renamed the community the Living Waters Branch, based on a holy Trinity in which the Spirit was feminine. Later, when David became the Davidian leader, he embraced the female aspect of divinity wholeheartedly.
“It floored me when I first heard this and grasped its implication,” he murmured. “That the womanly Shekinah was the Holy Spirit—female! And that her symbol, the downward triangle in the Star of David, was locked with the upward triangle of God’s male aspect.” For David, the divine character was as much female as male, a notion that connected directly
with the female presences of my own childhood, my loving grandmothers, my close ties to my mother.
In the spring of 1984, to ease the tense situation with George, David and the core of those who believed he was Lois’s true successor moved away, relocating to a smaller camp at Palestine, a hundred miles or so east of Waco. The Palestine place was primitive, hardly more than a bunch of old school buses, tents, and crude plywood shacks with outhouses whose buckets had to be emptied into the fields. But it was the first place where David was the undisputed leader of his community.
This gave David fresh confidence in his destiny. Just before leaving Mount Carmel, he married Rachel Jones, Perry Jones’s fourteen-year-old daughter. He had her parents’ blessing, and under Texas law the marriage was legal. Besides, there were biblical precedents, such as the young Virgin Mary wedding Joseph at an age younger than Rachel’s.
In 1986, after Lois died, George, isolated and increasingly crazy in the empty Mount Carmel, dug up the twenty-year-old cadaver of one his mother’s followers and challenged David to raise her from the dead. David refused the challenge with a laconic “Not today, George,” and reported George to the McLennan County sheriff.
“We got some pictures of the coffin draped in an Israeli flag, but the sheriff wanted a photo of the bones,” David told me. “So, on a cold day in November 1987, a bunch of us, armed with shotguns and rifles, snuck onto the property and tried to get a shot of the body, but it was gone. The dogs were yowling and George came out, firing his Uzi, so we hunkered down for the night. Next day we had a shootout with George and the deputies grabbed us. When we were in jail they played on the news that PLO terrorists had assaulted Mount Carmel!”
David and seven of his comrades were acquitted at the trial after the disturbed George took the stand and admitted that he himself had tried to resurrect the woman’s decayed corpse. George was banned from Mount Carmel, and David paid the huge backlog of taxes due on the property with the help of some of his wealthier disciples. In April 1988, he took over Mount Carmel, which had been badly neglected.
Waco Page 6