Koresh, page 16
The deputies approached George and attempted to detain him. He struggled. One of the deputies grabbed a small gun from his hand. “He was coming to finish me off,” Vernon thought. He was happy the cops were there.
The deputies came charging up to Vernon and the others. “Get on the fucking ground!” they yelled. Vernon got down on all fours. The gravel stung his palms and dug into his knees through his jeans.
In Waco in summertime, the red ants come out. It was only a minute or two before a pack of them swarmed onto Vernon, climbing over his hands, stinging him. Their bites left little white blisters. He could feel the ants crawling up his legs, too, chomping as they went. Then they got into his private parts, just eating him to pieces. All the while the deputies had him down on the ground like a roped calf.
More cars pulled up. One of the cops got out, looking just like a sergeant at a Marine boot camp. The guy was screaming his head off. “What in the hell is going on here? What in the goddamn hell is this? This kind of shit don’t happen in America!”
He walked over to one of the Mighty Men. The cop reached down and pulled an earplug out of the man’s ear and bent down to the guy’s ear. “Did. You. Hear. Me?” he shouted. Vernon heard another deputy off to his side. “Just go ahead and move one inch, I’ll blow your goddamn head off.”
Vernon kept calm, but inside he was choking with rage. George was the corpse abuser. George was the first one to fire. George had speed freaks working at Mount Carmel. He and the Mighty Men, they were the good guys! True blue American heroes, that’s how Vernon saw it.
Why did men always show their false faces to Vernon? It was a theme of his life.
The kindness he’d been shown earlier, the country neighborliness that sparked Dickerson to warn him about George, they were nowhere to be found. Vernon had thought he had a solid relationship with the sheriff and his men. But they were treating his men like common white trash.
George was questioned and released, while the cops loaded Vernon and the Mighty Men into their patrol cars and drove to the jail. Dickerson showed up. Vernon immediately felt better. He called out to him, “Mr. Dickerson!” The cop who’d been shouting about how this is America turned and shoved him. “Shut up,” he hissed.
Dickerson walked by Vernon, saying nothing.
They lined the Davidians up for fingerprinting, Vernon told the cop at the desk that he was a musician. The cop grabbed his right hand and bent his fingers down on the paper form until the knuckles went white. It was almost as if he wanted to snap them.
Vernon tried to be respectful.
“Sir, excuse me? Please?”
“What?” the cop said.
“Could you be just a little more gentle?”
The cop looked at Vernon kind of funny, like “Huh. Ain’t you tough enough?”
Vernon was put into a cell.
The inmates were surprisingly friendly. Vernon heard later that the news had reported that eight Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorists had assaulted Mount Carmel. So the guys in the jail thought Vernon and the others were Middle Eastern killers. They treated him better than the deputies did.
But the incident disturbed Vernon. In his heart, he felt a grievous injury. The contempt that the sheriff and his men had shown him—he’d rather they’d shot him, almost. Humiliation in private was one thing. But to be shown up in front of his men, it was hurtful to him.
The next few days soured his mood further. Being told when and what to eat, when to sleep, taking orders from the COs, was tough. Vernon felt like a needy child. He yearned to be in control of things, and in the Waco jail, he controlled nothing but his own vengeful thoughts.
In due time, he and the others were charged with the attempted murder of George Roden.
20
Coker
THE DAVIDIANS HIRED a local attorney, forty-two-year-old Gary J. Coker, Jr. to represent them. An assistant DA, El-Hadi T. Shabazz, was assigned as prosecutor.
Coker had grown up in Waco. When he was a boy, his father had owned some property about half a mile from Mount Carmel. Coker used to hear about the people living there, the ones who were waiting on the end of the world. He thought they were harmless.
The judge set bail at $100,000 for each of the defendants. Coker thought that was outrageous. He went before the court and told the judge that George had been annoying the Waco legal community for years with his spicy briefs and general craziness. He reminded them about the time George tried to get Mount Carmel declared a giant monastery to get tax-free status. The whole seventy-seven acres, not just the little chapel. In Coker’s judgment, the guy was loonier than Daffy Duck.
The judge reduced the bail. The father of one of the guys, Paul Fatta, put up the bail money for Vernon and Paul and they were released.
Vernon pushed to get the others out. The shooting had kicked up a fuss in the national media. Maury Povich even mentioned it on his show. Vernon thought he might be able to capitalize on the press. He went into the studio and knocked out a song he’d written, “Mad Man in Waco.” It was about George. He made some forty-five records and cassette versions.
There’s a mad man living in Waco
Praying to the Prince of Hell
Please, please, won’t you listen? . . .
It’s not what it appears to be
We didn’t want to hurt anybody
Just set our people free
The song didn’t sell. The other six men stayed in jail.
As Coker prepared for the trial, Vernon would come by his office. He seemed to want to be friends.
“Well, I’ve decided we can drink beer,” Vernon said at one point. “Do you want to come down and have a beer in my car?”
Coker declined. He thought it was a little strange.
“You want to look at my Camaro?” Vernon asked.
“Um, no, that’s okay,” Coker said.
Rebuffed, Vernon began dispensing some biblical advice. He told Coker to study the Psalms and to pay close attention to the Book of Revelation. Coker was nonplussed.
Five months after the raid, jury selection was set to start. The day before, the Waco Tribune ran a full-color picture of George Roden being escorted down the courthouse steps by the sheriff and a US marshal. He was being held on contempt of court charges. In the photo, George was wearing an orange jumpsuit with “McLennan Sheriff’s Office” written across it.
Coker had an idea. He cut the picture out of the paper and fastened it to a clipboard. When he got up to question the potential jury members, he held the picture up. “Does anyone know this man?” He displayed it for thirty or forty seconds, then had the jury candidates pass it around. Coker wanted the men and women to see George as a criminal and potentially dangerous.
The jury was picked: nine white men and women, and three Black.
To prepare for the trial, Coker drove out to Mount Carmel, to get an idea of how the gunfight had played out. He looked at the shooting angles and thought about bullet trajectories, even studied the tree that George had hid behind. He was putting things together in his head.
At one point, the lawyer spotted an old wooden shed with a busted door. He poked his head inside and saw a large metal coffin leaning up against one wall.
“What is . . . Is that the casket?” he asked the Davidians who were with him.
“Yes.”
“Why is it there?”
“Well, we moved it here after George.”
Coker felt another brainstorm coming on. “Do you think you could get that casket up?” he said. “Would y’all have any religious scruples about bringing that casket and we’ll introduce it into evidence?” He wanted the jurors to know that Anna Hughes was a real person and that George had robbed her of eternal rest.
The Davidians agreed to try. Very obedient, straight-ahead people, Coker thought. Vernon even opened the casket up and tied a pink bow around the skeleton’s neck to make it look pretty.
Coker went back to his office and began researching whether he could bring a casket into a courtroom. He found nothing to stop him. People had brought Oldsmobiles in. Why not a coffin?
The Davidians put the casket in a van and drove it to Waco’s turn-of-the-century courthouse. On the third floor, where the trial was to take place, Coker argued with the judge about bringing it in.
“Judge, she was the closest non-eyewitness to the whole event,” Coker said. “She was in her casket . . . only twenty or thirty feet away from all the shooting . . .” It was preposterous, but Coker was determined to have the coffin sitting in front of the jury box.
As Coker made his case, the Davidians slid the casket out of their truck and carried it up the courthouse steps. It was so big it wouldn’t go through the front doors. Somehow, they managed to grapple the coffin up to the second floor, but that’s as far as they could get it.
As the proceedings dragged on, Anna Hughes’s remains lay in the rotunda of the Waco courthouse, under the great dome that capped the building. The local newspaper, the Waco Tribune-Herald, published an editorial, “Pitiful Display at Courthouse,” decrying the stunt, but the coffin remained. The jurors filed by it every day on their way to the courtroom.
The first day of pretrial motions, the courtroom filled with Davidians and other spectators. It seemed like all of Vernon’s supporters were sitting in the benches: women in long cotton dresses, many of them carrying babies on their arms, along with young children and unsmiling men.
The bailiff came into the courtroom. “All rise, please,” he said. Everybody stood. The judge took his chair and said, “Okay, you may be seated.” Most of the crowd sat down on the benches.
But the Davidians remained standing. Their eyes were on Vernon.
Vernon was still. After a few seconds, he raised his hand, held it there for a second, then dropped it.
“Be seated,” he said.
All the Davidians sat down in unison.
The trial began. In his opening statement, Shabazz proposed that the Davidians hadn’t gone to Mount Carmel to photograph the skeleton of Anna Hughes at all. They’d gone there to kill.
“How do we know they were trying to murder George Roden?” he asked. “The evidence will show there were 14 to 18 bullet holes in the tree that were so deep that they could not be dug out. The evidence will show that if you had removed that tree, George Roden would not be here today.”
Shabazz introduced pieces of the arsenal the Mighty Men had been carrying that day: five Ruger .223 caliber semiautomatic ranch rifles, which were as powerful as an M-16; two .22 caliber rifles; and two 12-gauge shotguns with almost 400 rounds of ammunition. In addition, he said, the police confiscated three more rifles, an additional 2,500 rounds of .223 caliber ammunition, and several boxes of .22 caliber cartridges and shotgun shells.
It was a shit ton of firepower, even for Central Texas.
When it was the defense’s turn, Coker called George Roden. The defense lawyer asked him about rumors that had been circulating in Waco. Were any of them true, he asked.
George acknowledged they were. He did own half the state of Israel, and he had a deed to prove it. He could put a curse on his enemies, causing God to introduce AIDS and herpes into their bloodstreams. When asked if he was the messiah, George didn’t deny it.
“George, who is it that you lead?” Coker asked.
“All.”
Coker frowned. “There wasn’t a single Branch Davidian out there when you were rounded up . . . and put in jail. You didn’t lead anybody.”
George considered this. “Well, they’re all my followers,” he said, “even though they don’t admit it.”
As the trial progressed, the questions began to annoy George. He took the extraordinary step of complaining to the judge in a letter. “If you think you’re God,” he wrote, “then God would have taken the poor into account. But you sons of bitches have your goddam clique to take care of, don’t you? You can’t afford to allow the poor to get any benefit or you might lose your ass in the process. You fucking son of bitches.”
After a week of testimony, final arguments arrived. Shabazz told the jury the raid was “a dangerous paramilitary operation.” Vernon and the other men took the law into their own hands and nearly killed their target in the process. “Today it’s George Roden . . . who is it going to be tomorrow?”
When Shabazz finished, Coker framed his argument: Vernon and the Davidians were the victims of a mad person. “These people aren’t used to fighting. They may be unusual, they may be different in their beliefs, but at least they’re peaceful and don’t mean to harm anybody.” George was the villain here.
After Shabazz and Coker had spoken, the judge told the jury they could take a break before deliberating. They declined.
When the bailiffs announced the verdict was in, the defendants, lawyers, and spectators filed back into the courtroom. The judge read the verdict for the seven other men first, keeping Vernon for last. The jury found the first defendant not guilty. The courtroom was quiet. The judge moved on to the other names.
The Mighty Men were all declared not guilty. Vernon’s turn was next. The judge announced a hung jury. He polled the jurors and the nine white jurors had voted “Not guilty” and the three Black jurors had voted “Guilty.”
It was a clear win for the Davidians. They were free to go. Some of the jurors even sought Vernon out and hugged him. He responded by inviting everyone out for ice cream.
The jury foreman spoke to reporters. “A lot of jurors commented that they felt frightened of [Roden]. They didn’t feel his testimony was honest. They just didn’t have any faith in what he said.” Clearly, Coker’s strategy had worked. For his part, Shabazz expressed disgust with the jury’s decision. “It was a Black man trying to prosecute seven white men in a Southern town called Waco,” he told reporters.
Shabazz’s words held a good deal of truth to them. The trial had indeed shifted along racial lines. But it wasn’t as simple as the prosecutor imagined.
Weeks later, Vernon was at an auto paint and body shop outside Waco. He was talking cars with the owner, just shooting the breeze. After a while, a Black guy walked into the shop.
Vernon got to talking to him. “Is your name Vernon?” the man asked after a few minutes. “Vernon Howell?” It was one of the jurors.
“Man, let me tell you something,” the juror said. “They were after you.”
The guy went on to explain what had happened with the jury. During the trial, someone—he didn’t say who—had come to him and one of the other Black jurors and said that Vernon was into drugs. The night he went out to Mount Carmel, this person explained, it was really to do a drug deal. And Vernon and George got into a shootout because George was manufacturing speed at the compound and for some reason Vernon was mad about it.
The religious stuff? It was just a cover. The truth was that Vernon and his boys were just low-down meth dealers.
The Black jurors had believed it. They wanted to convict all the Davidians.
The man went on to explain that he and the other Black juror made their intentions clear to the white jurors, who told them, “Okay, let’s make a deal. If you let the other seven off, we’ll give you Vernon. Once the others are acquitted, we’ll all vote guilty on Vernon.”
That was the offer. Seven Davidians would go free and Vernon would be convicted for attempted murder. The Black jurors agreed.
So, the Black jurors went ahead and voted “not guilty” on the seven Davidians. But when it came time to vote on Vernon, the white jurors, who were secretly pro-Vernon, reneged on their deal and went with “not guilty.” It was a setup, the man explained. The white jurors had never intended to convict Vernon.
The guy apologized to Vernon. He’d come to understand the stuff about Vernon being a drug dealer was a lie. Vernon was struck by the story. What had happened in the courtroom, he believed, was rotten to the core.
Months later, Larry Coker ran into one of the white jurors. “We tricked them,” the guy said, meaning the Black jurors. He told the same story the guy in the auto shop had told Vernon. They’d gotten Vernon and the others off. The guy thought it was hilarious.
Race had infiltrated the trial; it was the screen through which at least some of the jurors perceived the Davidians. The unnamed Black person who’d tried to prejudice the jurors against Vernon and the others saw them as a bunch of dangerous, heavily armed white men who were about to get away with attempted murder. (If they’d been Black, one must imagine this person thinking, would they have even made it off the compound alive?) The white jurors, on the other hand, saw a band of devoted Christians who, though a bit weird, deserved the benefit of the doubt. The whites prevailed.
Vernon had hoped his Godliness would sway the jury. But his skin had helped him the most.
After the verdict, Shabazz tried to get the Davidians’ guns destroyed. He quoted a sheriff’s deputy, who said that the Mighty Men had enough “weapons and ammunition to hold off the entire McLennan County Sheriff’s Department, the police department, and the local National Guard.”
Vernon protested. He wanted all his weapons back. The sheriff’s department couldn’t have as much as one bullet.
Coker tried to bring him around. “Vernon,” he said, “why don’t you just let me have one of those .223s?” It was for a souvenir. And it would take one gun out of the compound.
“No, no, no. We might need those,” Vernon said. He refused to give up anything.
The judge ruled in Vernon’s favor. Soon after, a group of Branch Davidian men backed a truck up to the county sheriff’s department. They stood and smiled as deputies loaded rifle after rifle into the back.
The ordeal was finished. Vernon had gotten off. The system, it appeared, had worked.
But Vernon didn’t see it that way. He made it clear to Coker and anyone who’d listen that he believed he’d gotten a raw deal. American justice was corrupt. The judge didn’t let him tell the jury about his beliefs. He couldn’t show how he was theologically the rightful owner of Mount Carmel. All they wanted was the secular story, which to Vernon wasn’t the full truth.
