Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Michele took on some wifely duties, like darning my clothes, sewing on buttons, sending me a few bucks for spending money when I was away from Mount Carmel. She also wrote to my mother and my grandmother, like a real daughter-in-law. Obviously, she wanted to reinforce the fiction that we were really married, but I think she also enjoyed the idea of having a set of conventional in-laws. My mom and Gloria responded warmly, sending presents of clothes and toys for my new stepchildren. Surprisingly, they never asked who the kids’ actual father was, and I never told them.

  “Serenity is eager to meet you!” Michele wrote to Balenda, soon after our union. “She fell in love with the doll right away. We named it Dave’s favorite name, ‘Sasha.’ Also the outfit fits just right, with a little room to grow. That’s my kind of style. Dave really appreciated the shirts you sent. He’s gonna need a whole new wardrobe after he loses all his extra weight. His pants already fall off of him! I’m looking forward to meeting you. Your daughter-in-law, Michele and Serenity.”

  To Gloria, Michele wrote: “So how does it feel to be a great grandmother? You’ll love her [Serenity]. She’s a smart one, and also big for her age. Dave and I are very happy together. I have to keep him out of mischief. You know how he is, I’m sure. ‘Party Animal’ hah! hah! No, I’m just kidding, he’s a great husband.”

  Whatever David’s reasons were in marrying me to Michele, it was a shrewd move. Somehow being a husband, even in name only, settled me. I felt a responsibility to live up to the title, and my raging hormones cooled considerably.

  8

  ON RAPE, ABUSE, AND GUNS

  My link with Michele provoked me to discover more about her relationship with David and also about his sexual connection with underage girls in general. This was a tough nut to crack, for no one wanted to discuss the matter openly, not even Steve, and I had to gradually ferret out some facts for myself.

  As I came to understand it, the history of David’s involvement with these girls began in 1985, after he returned from Jerusalem. He claimed that the vision he received on Mount Zion included a command to have a child with Michele, his wife’s eleven-year-old sister.

  Far from welcoming this imperative, David told me, both he and Rachel were shaken and upset. “I was happy with Rachel,” he told me, when I finally got up the courage to challenge him about this issue. “Honestly, all I ever wanted was a traditional wife and family. But the voice said, ‘Take Michele as a wife,’ and I felt I had to do it, though I truly didn’t want to.”

  Rachel was devastated, David said. “Why wouldn’t she be? Michele was her little sister! She was very close to her, protected her.…” He paused, and a sad expression seized his face as he remembered old pain, the possible disruption of his marriage. At the time, his firstborn son, Cyrus, was a baby, and he was just consolidating his position as Lois Roden’s successor.

  For more than a year the couple struggled with the issue. David felt he had to be true to his vision, even though it could ruin his relationship with Rachel and possibly lead him into conflict with the authorities. The ugly term “statutory rape” hovered in the air. Although Michele’s parents, Perry and Mary Belle Jones, accepted that the girl had been singled out to bear a child for God, as David put it, their sense of being honored by this divine choice was undercut by a natural concern for their barely nubile daughter. They were concerned, too, that Rachel and Michele might follow their brothers and sisters and abandon the community they’d grown up in.

  Perry told me that his younger daughter had been happy to become David’s wife, but I heard from some of the women that Michele had been very distressed by the prospect of losing her virginity to David at such a tender age. When I asked her about it, she just smiled serenely. In effect, I gathered, Michele’s feelings were secondary to the theological issue: the implication of David’s God-given command to generate an inner circle of children who would form the group of “Elders” surrounding the Merkabah, the heavenly chariot or throne.

  David’s situation with Michele was discussed over and over during study sessions. His followers knew he could not deny his vision, which amounted to a huge stumbling block placed in his path. There were those who suspected David’s motives, I was told; after all, as one man whispered, “David has a thing for young girls. His first woman, Linda, was jailbait.” But in general people were sympathetic, even insistent: David had to do what he was told.

  The problem was finally resolved dramatically. One night Rachel had a powerful dream in which it came to her that David might be destroyed, even die, if he refused the divine command. In early 1987, twelve-year-old Michele became David’s lover. Their daughter, Serenity, was born two years later.

  With Michele’s induction, the doors to the House of David were opened wide. The House of David, it seemed, would require the virginities of several young girls. During that same year, 1987, David took as his wives Clive Doyle’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Karen, seventeen-year-old Robyn Bunds, and twenty-year-old Dana Okimoto. (Dana left the community later, and her sons, Sky and Scooter, are two of only three of David’s children to survive the destruction of Mount Carmel; the other is Robyn’s son, Shaun.) In 1988, David married Nicole Gent, then nineteen. In 1989, he took thirteen-year-old Aisha Gyarfas into his household; her daughter, Startle, was born in 1992. All of these children were born at Mount Carmel, delivered by a visiting midwife. None of the babies had birth certificates since, as David claimed, they belonged to God, not the state.

  As far as I could discover, most of the women David chose were very happy to join the House of David. As Robyn Bunds later explained it: “He’s perfect, and he’s going to father your children. What more can you ask for?”

  (The Bunds family had a complex history with David. When Robyn’s brother, David Bunds, and his wife were expelled from Mount Carmel in June 1990 for violating dietary rules, they persuaded Robyn to defect. Her departure was followed by a custody battle with David over their son, Shaun, which Robyn won. She claimed that David abused the baby, spanking him until he drew blood. Her father, Donald Bunds, had been one of David’s earliest supporters; he bought the Pomona and La Verne houses for David, and gave him another $10,000 to buy a van.)

  Robyn’s mother, Jeannine, also went to bed with David. “He wouldn’t do it unless you wanted it,” she said. “It wasn’t about sex, but he was a very appealing, sexual person. I wanted to be in the House of David.” In 1991, Jeannine left Mount Carmel when she found she was unable to become pregnant by David. Another of David’s women told me, “It’s considered an honor to have a baby for God. You know, not every woman is worthy of Koresh’s loins.”

  The one doubtful addition to this list of supposedly willing underage consorts was Sherri Jewell’s daughter, Kiri. During the 1995 congressional committee hearings, Kiri told a dramatic—one might say melodramatic—tale of being sexually assaulted, but not penetrated, by David in a Texas motel when she was a mere ten years of age. However, her story was not believed by her grandmother, Ruth Mosher, who said that Kiri was living with her in Anaheim, California, when the girl claimed she was molested. It was subsequently revealed, too, that Kiri’s aunt had helped her compose her congressional testimony. Kiri’s mother, Sherri, who died in the fire, was a much-medaled aerobics instructor and triathlon competitor. “Kiri was the apple of her eye,” Sherri’s mother, Ruth Mosher, recalls, “and there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her child. So it’s difficult for me to accept that Sherri would willingly allow Koresh to molest her daughter.”

  Kiri was the focus of a bitter 1992 custody battle between her mother and her father, in which Marc Breault testified that David planned to rape Kiri. (Breault was the source of several other lurid tidbits about the House of David. Despite these shocking allegations, neither Kiri nor her father, Donald Jewell, ever pressed charges against David. And a separate Department of Justice investigation in 1992 concluded that Kiri’s story, told to Texas Department of Child Protective Services social worker Joyce Sparks, was insufficient
probable cause for an indictment.)

  With the 1989 New Light revelation, more women, several in their thirties and forties, were added to the House of David, including Judy Schneider, Sheila Martin, Nicole’s mother, Lisa Gent, and Robyn Bunds’s mother, Jeannine, Jaydean Wendell, Stan Sylvia’s wife, Lorraine, and Katherine Andrade. Between them these later women produced four children: Judy’s daughter, Mayanah, Katherine’s daughter, Chanel, Lorraine’s daughter, Hollywood, and Jaydean’s son, Patron. By April 1993, David had had sexual relations with a total of fifteen women, including Rachel Jones and Linda Campion, his “first love,” and had fathered seventeen children with eleven of them.*

  David did not take every woman who offered herself. I heard that he’d refused several, claiming they weren’t ready to enter the House of David. Others he accepted within a short time of their joining the community. It seemed that there had to be a certain quality of understanding on both sides for David to come knocking on a woman’s door; she had to really want to have a baby for God. I did notice, though, that most of David’s women were sexually appealing, so maybe his choices weren’t entirely spiritual. “After all,” he said jokingly, “shouldn’t God’s children be beautiful?”

  For a few years after the New Light, indeed, until the new building was finished, married couples still lived together, even though they weren’t having sexual relations.

  Scott Sonobe told me that he sometimes tried to cheat with Sita, his beautiful dark-haired wife, but she wouldn’t go along. It seemed the women enforced their husbands’ abstinence. In truth, the women were the moral backbone of the community.

  Frankly, I didn’t envy David his harem. I’d always had a hard time keeping up a relationship with one woman, let alone two or three who know about one another, let alone have them living together. If you’re the kind of man who can keep secrets, which I’m not, you might be able to handle several women at once, but only if you could preserve their ignorance. I was never able to have simultaneous affairs because I always tripped myself up. It blew me away that all these women accepted David’s setup. How does he keep these women from killing one another? I wondered.

  Maybe it was the loving way he took care of them. David was openly affectionate with all of them, very fond and caring. Naturally, the women competed for his attention, and he didn’t have enough time during the days, weeks, and months to keep all of them happy. Nevertheless, the wives seemed friendly among themselves, sharing the chores and the care of the kids. I never imagined such an arrangement was possible, especially in today’s America—with the possible exception of some Mormons.

  From time to time, David publicly discussed the challenge of having many wives. “You think it’s all butter and honey?” he’d ask. “Think again!” The women of the House of David had a good laugh at this, and that revealed more than anything their general camaraderie. During one study, however, Aisha Gyarfas openly stated that she was very upset because David wasn’t paying her enough attention. “I spend more time with you than any of the others,” David retorted, and I recognized the old male defensiveness in his tone.

  Occasionally, he’d fling out taunts at the men in the community. “I got all the women, aren’t you jealous?” We’d chuckle awkwardly, and David would sigh and say, “We’re all God’s guinea pigs here. My lot is to procreate, yours is to tolerate. I’d swap with you any day.” I came close to believing him.

  I was told by a psychiatrist who once questioned me about Mount Carmel that David’s sexual hierarchy had a powerful point. “When a group like yours fails to channel its sex drive into some specifically approved relationships—and I have seen a few ‘anything goes’ communes—the results are disastrous for the individual members and for the group’s viability,” he said. “As far as sex goes, nobody knows who’s who and what’s what.”

  The underlying issue, he pointed out, is that in a commune the group organizes itself as a family seeking the security and discipline of childhood supports and parental controls. “Communes give up the common liberties in exchange for security and group identity. Otherwise, you might as well enjoy the freedoms along with the anarchy of the mainstream culture.”

  On one occasion, David confided a subtler take on his sexual relationships, especially those with underage girls. “Something can be wrong yet still necessary and true,” he said. “Apart from the stumbling-block aspect—and this is one huge stumbling block, for me—being wrong can be a way to prove your faith. Sometimes it can even lead you to that faith.”

  He gave as an example the case of Woodrow Kendrick. Old Bob, as he was known, had slept with his own daughters in the previous Mount Carmel, before David had arrived. “I asked him, in a study, ‘Bob, how can someone like you be saved?’ Bob just stood there and took it, knowing he’d transgressed, that his actions revealed how sick he was, how sick humanity in general is. But the awareness of his sickness brought Bob to reconfirm his belief in a spiritual purpose. It was his stumbling block that he overcame.”

  I must confess that David’s relationships with young girls bothered me a lot, for several reasons. Firstly, I had a hard time believing that a girl of twelve or thirteen could really know what she was doing in agreeing to have sex with a man twice her age, especially in a closed community where sleeping with the leader was considered a supreme honor. Surely, it must be a scary and painful experience, and the social pressure must have been horribly confusing.

  For sure, all of the young girls I knew at Mount Carmel, particularly Michele, seemed perfectly at ease with being David’s lovers; all the same, it stuck in my craw. Perhaps this predilection for virgins was a consequence of David’s Texas upbringing. Girls ripen young there, and there seems to be a hokey and, to me, repellent cowboy obsession with ravished innocence.

  I was puzzled, too, by David’s decision to cross a line that would inevitably lead him into conflict with the civil authorities. Of all the charges leveled against him in the media and by government officials—including child abuse and gun stockpiling—the only case in which he grossly violated the law was the crime of statutory rape.

  Texas law is quite clear on this. The state’s age of consent is seventeen. Girls may marry at fourteen with parental permission, but they cannot legally consent to have sex outside marriage, with or without parental permission. If the parents do collude in allowing their daughter (or son) to become sexually active under this age, they are party to the criminal offense of endangering a child—placing a child at risk of physical or mental injury.

  If the underage girl has a baby, the criminal charge against her seducer is elevated to aggravated sexual assault. Sex with a girl under seventeen but over fourteen is a second-degree felony; sex with a girl under fourteen is a first-degree felony punishable by a prison sentence of five to ninety-nine years. In other words, David was guilty on multiple charges that could have sent him to prison for a very long time, perhaps for life. It doesn’t lessen the force of this to understand that proving such cases is often difficult, especially if the young woman won’t testify.

  “It is possible that the unusual nature of the sexual abuse claims, and the complex circumstances surrounding them, especially the isolated community lifestyle and parental consent within the clan, made the task of documenting these allegations difficult,” Houston Assistant District Attorney Bill Hawkins told me. “It is also possible that the psychological or emotional trauma associated with premature sexual activity was mitigated somewhat by their parents’ approval, or by the group’s culturally specific expectations about sexual activity for young girls.” Hawkins continued: “When it comes to charging someone you must have courtroom-quality proof. That’s why statutory rape laws are so rarely prosecuted.”

  Even so, David must have known he was moving into dangerous territory when he started sleeping with Michele, Karen, and Aisha. He was no otherworldly hero unaware of the mundane consequences of his actions. On the contrary, he operated very successfully in the everyday context, including dealing with people i
n official positions, such as the local sheriff and the representatives of various state agencies. He’d certainly dealt with the law when he’d beaten assault charges in the raid against George Roden in 1987.

  Furthermore, Mount Carmel had previously existed in relative peace with its host society for fifty years. Its members may have offended the locals with their seemingly odd beliefs, but they had never actually broken the law, with the sole exception of George Roden’s mad escapades.

  There’s nothing in the Seals that specifically commanded David to have sex with underage girls. It was his personal vision that impelled him, not a clear biblical example. God said to “take Michele,” and only David knew for sure if this order was motivated by his vision or by a devious lust. Depending on your point of view, you can consider David either a vile seducer or a man following the dictates of a divine message. In a sense, both perceptions are equally valid: One man’s prophet is another man’s philanderer, and many a self-proclaimed visionary has used his tongue for more than preaching. But the interesting thing is, why did David deliberately violate the law, knowing he was setting foot down a path that would inevitably provoke the authorities, especially in a place like Waco?

  If he’d been in a more liberal part of the United States, such as California, say, his actions might have passed unnoticed. But there he was, deep in the heart of Texas, locked solid into the Bible Belt, where his sexual practices were bound to cause trouble. If he didn’t understand that, he was an idiot. If he did understand it, he knew it would inexorably lead to a confrontation with Babylon in all its fury.

  Did he have a death wish? Was he inviting his own apocalypse? The answer is unclear, unless you understand David’s complex sense of his own purpose.