Mary’s approach and tenacity appealed to me, and I gave her my first interview. On camera I was passionate but fumbling, trying to find my feet as an advocate for my community, attempting to appear to be a rational person, not the gun-toting, Bible-thumping weirdo the public had been led to expect from the Davidian tag. I understood I had to present a personality people could trust and identify with, someone able to leap over the wall of demonization erected by weeks of federal and media propaganda. I also avoided the trap of “Bible babble,” knowing any mention of Scripture would immediately turn the audience off. I was just David Thibodeau, a young guy from Bangor, speaking from the heart.
That interview was one of the very few experiences I had with the media in which my words weren’t edited and twisted from their original meaning.
It was a stipulation of my release from detention that I had to go directly to Bangor, and on May 5, a week after I left prison, two weeks after the fire, I landed in Maine. My family met me at the airport, including my two grandmothers, my father, and Uncle Bob. In the background were several reporters from local newspapers eager to talk to me, but my mother and I shoved them aside. We’d had enough public exposure for a while, and neither she nor I wanted to destroy the feeling that Bangor was a haven for us, a place to lick our wounds and slowly put our lives back together.
A few days earlier the Maine Sunday Telegram had published my disgusting, fat-faced senior-yearbook photo, alongside the “I want shiny cars, dirty money, and lots of rock and roll” quote. The former director of my Bangor High band remembered that, at five-foot-seven and two hundred pounds, I was always busting out of my marching-band uniform. The Sunday Telegram encapsulated my odyssey in one neat paragraph. “To many, David Thibodeau will long be known as one of the ‘Waco wackos.’ But to the people who knew him as he grew up in Portland, South Portland and Bangor, David Thibodeau was just a regular kid who liked heavy-metal music and dreamed of drumming his way to rock ’n’ roll fame.”
My grandmothers welcomed me home with plenty of food and no questions. My dad, on the other hand, came right at me.
I hadn’t spent time alone with my father for years, and he insisted on taking me for a six-hour ride around the countryside. “Why the Bible? Why not Buddha?” he asked me, over and over. Ever since he’d been kicked out of the seminary for smoking, Christianity for him was anathema.
He could, just barely, accept that people had religious impulses—but the Bible, no way. To him, the Old and New Testaments were instruments used to distort impressionable minds. I tried to explain that since, unlike him, I’d never had much exposure to the Bible, its text was as exotic to me as anything Buddha might have said. At times he seemed to be blaming himself for somehow making me vulnerable to a David Koresh, for the absence of a real male role model in my youth. “I’m sorry this happened to you!” he blurted one time, then shut his lips down tight.
“Why the Bible?” The question was also on Balenda’s lips. Since she had talked to David on the phone and met people like Julie Martinez, I hoped she’d be more open-minded, and I tried to explain the Seals. “Davey, it’s driving me crazy—I can’t take it!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands to her ears after a moment or two. “That’s David Koresh talking; you sound like a puppet. Why does he still have such a powerful hold over you?”
Her response saddened me. I tried to explain that I was bound to David’s teachings, not the man himself, though he’d been my friend. She shook her head impatiently, and I stopped talking. “Look, Mom, we love and respect each other, so let’s leave it at that,” I said finally. “I really don’t need you to understand.”
“But I want to understand,” she retorted, clearly distressed. “I’m puzzled, you know. Maybe a little jealous—”
I laughed fondly; we hugged each other and let it go at that.
Although I never wanted to see Waco again, I was obliged to return there a few weeks later to testify before the federal grand jury investigating the Mount Carmel events.
Coming back to Texas so soon was bad enough, but the grand jury itself was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. As soon as I saw that collection of Wacoans walk into the large room in the courthouse, I knew our goose was cooked. Adding to the tension was the fact that I was ignorant about the judicial system and didn’t realize, until it was too late, that my attorney would not be allowed in the room. I was present only as a material witness, but I felt the other dozen or so members of our community who were paraded before the jury were damned. From the way the jurors’ eyes slid right over us without contact, I could see, by and large, that they shared the mind-sets of the FBI and ATF.
Mount Carmel was blamed for giving Waco a bad name. During and after the siege the locals had plainly shown their sympathy for the feds. On the way in from the airport I’d seen large billboards trumpeting the ATF’s gratitude for the Wacoans support of “law and order.” In the wake of the tragedy, the Waco Red Cross had refused to give people like Sheila Martin and her kids old clothes and furniture, claiming they’d participated in acts of civil disorder and therefore weren’t eligible for humanitarian help.
The prosecutors grilled me for two solid hours in front of the grand jury, trying to get me to incriminate others and, possibly, myself. I was well aware that Jaime, Renos, and Graeme Craddock, for example, were damned out of their own mouths, so I had to keep my wits about me. It was obvious that both prosecutors and jurors thought I was an outright liar.
They tried to nail me with abrupt questions like, “Did you have a firearm?” and “Did you start the fire?” Every time I opened my mouth I felt I was lying because I knew I wasn’t being believed. At the end of those two hours I staggered out of that courtroom feeling mentally raped.
For a while after that, I was so unnerved I almost convinced myself that I was a liar. I wasn’t even sure my own attorney trusted me. “They didn’t believe me,” I exclaimed when I saw Gary. “I told the truth, but they didn’t want to hear!” Driving down the street in the big Cadillac Gary had rented, I told him it had been a bad experience, and he immediately changed the subject, as if he didn’t want to discuss the veracity of my testimony.
On a deeper level, I felt I hadn’t told the true story to the jury because it was too hard to tell.
The “facts” were tricky enough, like who fired the first shots and who set fire to the building. But these issues were easy compared to the wider political and spiritual elements clouding the air. It slowly dawned on me that I might never be able to be a full and true witness to those events. Instead, I might have to select and compose a narrative that would strike people as honest and coherent; a narrative parallel to the whole truth—whatever that was.
The grand jury handed up indictments against eleven of our people. All of them faced serious conspiracy charges. Totally harmless characters like Clive Doyle, Ruth Riddle, and half-blind, almost deaf Bob Kendrick. Jaime Castillo, Renos Avraam, Livingston Fagan, Brad Branch, Kevin Whitecliff, and Norman Allison were also indicted. Even Paul Fatta, who was in Austin when the ATF attacked, was charged. In order to escape the blatant hostility of Wacoans toward our community, the defendants’ attorneys insisted that the trial be moved elsewhere, like San Antonio.
After the grand jury process, I felt impelled to visit the Mount Carmel ruins—with great reluctance. The site was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence; a “Keep Out: This Area Is Quarantined” notice hung on the gate. What I could see was devastated and devastating. “Oh my God, I’m back in hell,” I said out loud, and hurried away. After the grand jury debacle, I didn’t want to have anything more to do with the place they called Waco.
Back in Bangor, I gave my first press conference, flanked by Balenda and Uncle Bob. Though I was reluctant to speak out so soon, being still unsure of my public role, I felt I had to respond to the made-for-TV movie In the Line of Duty: Ambush at Waco, recently shown on NBC. I denounced the movie and pleaded for people to keep their minds open. I deflected personal questions, l
ike why I stayed in Mount Carmel during the siege, fearing my answers might be skewed to represent me as having been brainwashed.
“A lot of people would say to me that David Koresh was guilty of mind control, and I could see why people could say that,” I told the press. It was a question that had to be confronted, given the demonization of our community and its leader. I tried to soften the image of a manipulative messiah that had been put out there, accepting that there could be an element of group thinking in any closed society. But my brain hadn’t been controlled by anyone, I emphasized. “I’m not that kind of guy. Hell, I’m a Mainer, and no one screws with my stubborn head!”
I felt awkward during the press conference, but afterward people told me that I’d handled myself well in a tricky situation. Maybe I can play this witness role after all, I thought, and not make a fool of myself or let my dead friends down. I hoped, too, that my speaking out would allow the folks in my hometown to live with what I’d done. “We’re really proud of you. You’ve shown us Mainers to be thoughtful,” a guy said to me in a bar, which made me feel good.
Not all my experiences with the press were so encouraging, and the media were hard to avoid. Though I resisted calls from national networks, I saw the feds continue to twist the public mind on television so often I felt I had to respond. In quick succession I appeared on several shows such as ABC’s 20/20 and NBC’s Prime Time Live. All of them edited what I’d said to suit their own unsympathetic agendas, taking my quotes out of context to make me appear to confirm their slanted views.
To cap it all, National Enquirer concocted a story it untruthfully claimed to be gleaned from interviews with some of my relatives. In the article, a family member was quoted as saying I’d told them that some people in Mount Carmel had been shot by our own side while trying to leave the building during the siege and that I’d admitted that we’d spilled lighter fluid and lantern fluid to set the fire.
I immediately contacted Gary Richardson in Houston, and he said we should sue. In the end, National Enquirer settled our suit for $75,000. I wanted to go to court to publicly refute the rag’s ugly insinuations, but Gary advised against it on the grounds that his fees would eat up all we might gain.
I tried to shrug off the media’s persistent misrepresentations, but they got under my skin all the same, like those Texas chiggers. Once, I was goaded beyond endurance, when Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Ron Noble appeared on television and said: “Our report will show that the Davidians beat their kids and stabbed them to death in a final frenzy at the end.” Those old lies made me see red. I jumped out of my chair and started screaming hysterically, totally out of control. My Uncle Bob, who was with me, did an amazing thing. To calm me down, that quiet, serious man started screaming louder than I did. “I was in ’Nam—how can they keep lying!” he shouted at the top of his voice. His fury trumped mine, and I had to laugh.
Gradually, I chilled out in peaceful Bangor. To keep myself occupied, I got a job delivering Chinese food for Sing’s Restaurant. I lived with my Uncle Bob; it was calmer in his house. Balenda asked too many probing questions, and my grandmother Gloria didn’t know what to think. Bob, the one persistent male presence in my childhood, left me alone to sort things out. He gave me a room upstairs where I could sit around in the evenings, playing a keyboard, reading, thinking, mourning, writing songs, trying to get in touch with myself. Once, when a chopper flew over Bob’s house, I hit the floor, my heart beating wildly. Often I wandered around town, amazed that people were going about their business as usual.
In June, David’s remains were buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Tyler, Texas, by his mother, Bonnie Haldeman.
Only close family members were there, including his half-brother, Roger Howell, and David’s maternal grandmother, Earline Clark. “I didn’t get to see the body, and I’m not even positive that is David in there,” Bonnie said, standing by the coffin. Whatever was buried that day wasn’t David Koresh. Maybe it was the relic of Vernon Howell, “Mr. Retardo,” a dumb, abused kid who saw visions.
David’s absence was a huge hole in my life. I missed him a lot. He’d come to mean an enormous amount to me, as a person, friend, and spiritual mentor. Now I tried to figure out exactly what my experience at Mount Carmel meant to me and where it had left me.
I was troubled by the loss of my bedrock faith in America and its rule of law, in the essential decency and fair-mindedness of the American people, in their willingness to hear the truth and their ability to resist government and media manipulation. All that seemed to have been trampled underfoot at Mount Carmel. The feds had refused to take any real blame for what they’d done, and the American public had seemingly accepted their gross corruption of our moral and social inheritance.
As the months went by I felt an increasing disjunction between a self-assured public persona, which I knew I had to cultivate as a witness to the memory of my community, and the confused private man I was inside. For two and a half years I’d ridden on David’s energy, carried along by his certainties. Now, suddenly, I was thrown back on my own resources, whatever they were. All my life I’d wanted to be special, and for a while I was, sharing David’s spirit. Now I’d have to find a way to be special in my own right.
Meanwhile, I floated along, still too numb to come to grips with the shipwreck of my life. I’d lost my natural ease with women, their proximity and promise made me nervous, but I did renew an acquaintance with Paula, one of the sandwich girls I’d worked with at the Pizza Oven before I left for California. An art teacher in a high school, Paula was cheerful, whereas I was moody. She dubbed me “Snapper,” like a turtle, when I was grumpy with her, and we passed pleasant hours playing pool at the table Uncle Bob had in his house. She was a real breath of fresh air in my state of mental and emotional exhaustion, but clearly it wasn’t going to be simple finding my way back to my sexuality.
I also had to rediscover music. For almost two years, ever since I moved out of Cue Stick, the club back in Waco, I’d let my drumming lapse, except for an occasional jam session with David. I felt I was no longer a professional, that I was back to being the amateur I was before Los Angeles.
To get back in the groove, I started performing with a band I’d played with during the year after high school. We had a few gigs as a cover band playing other musicians’ songs, but it was rather desultory. Apart from a few stock routines, my sticks had lost their cunning, and that was a real downer. I felt I wasn’t fit for anything anymore, neither sex nor music nor the goddamm human race in general. To try to clear my mind, I bought a motorcycle and roamed the Maine countryside, speeding along country lanes through a green landscape that was, mercifully, utterly different from Texas. The question What do I do now? echoed in the wind whistling past my face.
But the real questions were What could I do now? What was I capable of? Did I really have the confidence and kick to go out there and start talking publicly about Mount Carmel? Become the advocate and witness I was meant to be?
The mere thought of it made my gut churn. It would be like trying to climb an Everest of prejudice and public indifference while weighted down by my own reluctance and inertia. And I was no athlete. Every bone in my body wanted to melt into a dreamy lassitude and float away on the stream of time. When I was really down on myself I felt like a total fuckup. For a few years I’d lifted myself up out of the trough of my weaknesses; now, again, I was nothing. I was, as David said of himself, an empty Dixie cup ready to be thrown away.
In September I got a call from Mark Domangue, the owner of the Brittany Hotel in Waco, about participating in an event with talk-show host Maury Povich. Mark and Povich were planning what they called a “Town Meeting” in Waco in early November, and they wanted Balenda and me to be on the panel.
Still scarred by my earlier encounters with the media, my first reaction was “no way.” But Mark assured me that Povich had promised to put a balanced program together, one that would allow us to present our point of view to a national audience. Sev
eral other members of our community had agreed to take part, he said, including Rita Riddle, Catherine Matteson, and Clive Doyle. Marc Breault would also be there, he added, and we could finally confront the man who’d lit the fuse that had blown up our house.
At the time, Balenda was in Greece, and so Povich offered to fly her to Waco for the show. “I fatuously believed it would be an opportunity for the survivors and the families of the people in Mount Carmel to express what we felt about it all,” she later recalled. We discussed the show on the phone, and she argued that we might have a chance to get our story out there. Povich was an honorable person, she said; but I reminded her about Donahue and Oprah Winfrey, two honorable people who’d done their best to paint us as dupes of David the Demon. Apart from anything else, I hated like hell the prospect of returning to Waco, to speak to an audience of Wacoans, to look at the same faces that had condemned me out of hand during the grand jury proceedings. I remembered all too vividly their cold looks and smug, down-home self-assurance about right and wrong, decency and indecency. To them, I’d hardly been more than a loathsome bug to be squashed underfoot. In the end we agreed on a compromise: We’d both go to Waco, but only she would sit on the panel; I’d stay in the audience.
As it turned out, neither Clive nor any of the others who were under indictment could take part in the panel before their trial, scheduled to begin in San Antonio in January. So Balenda and Mark Domangue became our point people, facing down Marc Breault and others. We agreed that they would concentrate on the way the feds had trampled our right to practice our religion, rather than try to counter the old accusations of child abuse, sexual misconduct, and gun stockpiling that had become the media’s stock in trade whenever Mount Carmel was discussed.
Returning to Waco once again was less unpleasant than I’d imagined. To me, now, the boring little town was just another place—not one I much wanted to be in but no longer the place of nightmares. Members of Povich’s staff explained that the “Town Meeting” would cover two one-hour episodes of the show but that both would be taped the same day.
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