Koresh, page 8
The Davidians, like the Adventists and the other faiths that had grown out of the Millerite movement of the 1840s, were focused on Revelation. Their desire was to be joined with Christ in their lifetimes. And as the Book clearly stated, that required the end of the world.
After Houteff’s death in 1955, the Rodens lobbied to have Ben appointed the new leader of the Davidians. Lois and Ben and their followers traveled to the compound near Waco and attempted to persuade the Davidians that Ben was the true messenger. By nightfall, they realized they’d failed. Houteff’s wife, Florence, was named the group’s leader.
The Rodens walked out to their cars and arranged them so they faced away from the compound. They believed that God was going to spark an inferno and the meeting place would erupt in flames unless the believers signed Mount Carmel over.
The fire never arrived, but that didn’t dampen the Rodens’ spirits. Lois and the others started their cars and headed out the driveway. Instead of taking the road away from the compound, however, the lead car turned and began executing a circle. The others followed, until they had formed into a convoy of automobiles speeding around the compound, dust swirling behind their rear wheels. As they drove, they called out to the Davidians that they were re-creating Joshua’s encirclement of Jericho before it fell.
Lois reminded many of a pioneer woman, with her cotton dresses, sharp eyes, and straight-across mouth. It was a face built for stoicism, but in her eyes there was kindness, too.
She would give folksy, old-timey Bible studies, similar to those you might have heard in a well-worn revival tent fifty or a hundred years before. The years in Texas had flavored her speech. She’d say “Pen-T-cost” for “Pentecost” and “the 19 and 30” when she meant 1930.
A typical Lois Bible study went like this:
LOIS: But what do you think this morning? Are we going to take the Reformation to its completion? Can I have an amen? I like to hear it loud and strong.
CONGREGATION: Amen.
LOIS: All right, let’s get on with it. And let’s go back to truth, because that’s the only way we’re gonna do it . . . The same thing is gonna happen today that happened in the Dark Ages, if we don’t get busy. It shows we’re not up on our job, that’s what it shows me.
And I’m sorry that I haven’t taken care of my responsibilities any better ’n I have. I’ve gotten sidetracked and discouraged and this, that, and the other. But God is encouraging me now to go ahead and help finish the work. How ’bout you folks?
All right, let’s get on. [Pointing to a chart] Help me children, what do these four beasts represent?
In 1955, Ben Roden founded a rival sect to the one he’d hoped to lead, and he called it the Branch Davidians. “Branch” referred to an anointed one foretold in the Book of Zechariah: Listen, High Priest Joshua, you and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch.
“Davidians” was a continuation of Victor Houteff’s teaching. It reflected the group’s belief that they were descended from the ancient, Jewish House of King David.
In 1962, Florence Houteff disbanded the Mount Carmel congregation and the property went into receivership. The Rodens filed multiple lawsuits to gain control of the compound and finally succeeded. They christened the place New Mount Carmel.
One night in 1977, Lois was up late, studying the Bible. She was reading Revelation 18, which speaks of a mighty angel that comes to earth and lightens the whole land with the glory of God.
Time passed. Two o’clock struck.
Just then, Lois looked up through her window and spotted a shimmering presence hovering in the ink-black sky. As she peered at it, she realized it was a female angel. Behind the angel’s wings were arrayed countless other spirit-beings, radiant in silver.
The vision was clearly of the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Holy Trinity. God was showing Lois in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit was a woman.
Lois did what Vernon refused to do and checked her vision against the Word. The Bible stated that God had made humans in his own image. Humans were both male and female, Lois reasoned, so God, too, had to be both male and female. This was the core of her vision. “My work is to bring forth the femininity of God in the Bible,” Lois told her flock. She called her new teachings the Living Waters message.
But Lois went a little further. She argued that Eve was a “higher act of creation” than Adam because Adam was made out of dust, while Eve took shape from flesh and blood. In her Bible studies, Lois even changed the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer to “Our Mother, who art in Heaven . . .”
The change set off an earthquake among the Davidians. Some of the believers thought Lois had lost her mind. Feminists were on the march in the late seventies, but some Davidians rebelled against joining them. Did Lois want to make their sect into an outpost for Women’s Lib? Who was she trying to be, Betty Friedan?
Nearly half her flock, almost all of them men, walked away. They hated the new teaching, thought it was blasphemy. Clive Doyle, an Australian who was in charge of the Davidians’ publishing arm, refused to print Lois’s pamphlets announcing the new truth. He feared Lois was going to send the Davidians to hell by teaching false doctrine.
Anonymous quotes from people inside Mount Carmel began appearing in major newspapers. “Women preaching is like a dog walking on two legs,” said one of her followers. “It’s interesting, but it’s not right.”
But Lois was steadfast. When her husband Ben died in 1978, she succeeded him as the new prophet and the leader of the Davidians.
A new era began for the Branch, with an activist bent and a global reach. Lois launched not one but two magazines, In Her Image and SHEkinah. She traveled the world, meeting celebrities and politicians. She called famous preachers her friends: Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell. She even traveled to the Philippines to confer with Ferdinand Marcos.
Besides the Living Waters message, however, Lois had little or nothing to add to Branch Davidian theology. Every Bible study, she taught what she’d always taught: the same lessons, the same passages, the familiar “seven-year prophecy chart” that predicted things to come. These charts had been around since the forties and many of the group members knew them by heart.
To her followers, even the ones who loved and respected her, it often felt like the same day was repeating itself endlessly. Some people at Mount Carmel wouldn’t speak to another person for a week at a time. If you didn’t work in Waco and have news from the outside, what was there to say? Days piled on top of days in the wait for the end of the world. Most Davidians felt they should have left the earth years ago.
In the dust and the cold of Waco, it seemed like the clocks had stopped.
After the vision of the female Holy Spirit, Lois did have one other announcement: Something very important would happen in four years. Then three years after that, there would be another big development. She drilled those dates into the Davidians: 1981, 1984. Momentous events would arrive in each.
The Davidians wondered: Was it the arrival of the messiah at last? Was the end of the world approaching? They wished mightily for both.
11
The Davidians
IN 1981, WHEN he first came to Mount Carmel, Vernon found a drab community plunked down in the middle of ranch country on the Central Texas plain, about twelve miles from downtown Waco. On the land, there was a scattering of homes, a chapel, a weedy graveyard surrounded by rusted wire, an Ad (for Administration) building, and little else. The community had shrunk over the years of Lois’s leadership to about thirty men, women, and children living on the compound. Worldwide, there were another one hundred twenty members in countries such as England and Australia.
The drive took him about two hours. The compound sat among green fields and small hillocks dotted with underbrush. There wasn’t a lot out here, miles from mostly anything. You’d spot horses and some cattle as you passed by the big farms, with swing gates on the driveways leading up to sprawling houses. Vernon turned off Double EE Ranch Road and headed down a long driveway toward a cluster of buildings.
As Vernon pulled into Mount Carmel, Debbie Kendrick and her friend Rachel Jones, daughter of Perry Jones, one of Lois’s key followers, were standing on the porch of the Ad building. They saw a dark-haired guy drive by in his pickup truck. Debbie and Rachel were dressed in skirts because it was a holy day. Maybe the Sabbath or the new moon, Debbie could never remember afterward.
Debbie had always felt sorry for Rachel, living in the Joneses’ house. She’d had such a tough life, tougher than Debbie’s in a way. Rachel was so starved for affection. At one point, she’d started fancying herself in love with her brother. The infatuation went on for a long time. In Debbie’s opinion, the Jones kids couldn’t have told you what love was if you gave them a million dollars.
Debbie and Rachel watched as the pickup truck came down the driveway and headed toward the Jones house. They didn’t think much about the man inside.
They meandered over to Debbie’s house and sat on the floor in the living room playing a Bible board game, because that’s all you were allowed to do on a holy day. You had to wear a long dress or a skirt along with your best pantyhose, and you could only do holy things. Go for walks and play Bible games and listen to sermons and sing.
While they were playing, the phone rang. It was Perry. He said there was a new guy at Mount Carmel and he wanted to talk to them. Vernon had spotted them at the Ad building and told Perry he wanted to speak to “those two young girls” on the porch.
He’d been on the compound all of five minutes and first thing he wanted to do was meet two twelve-year-olds. Debbie turned to Rachel and said, “Okay, so he’s a pervert.”
Debbie felt her stomach starting to cramp. Three years before, her father had begun sexually abusing her, the first time when she was in the bath. Things like that weren’t supposed to happen at Mount Carmel, which Lois always told them was a place for the most special people on earth. But they did happen, often. In her time at the compound, Debbie had seen more ugliness than she cared to remember: animals abused, children neglected or sexually exploited, despair and violence. Ben Roden had even stolen her bicycle once (her father had stolen it back). A thought rolled into Debbie’s brain when she heard Lois’s remark. What do you mean we’re so special? What do you mean these are God’s people? If these are God’s people, I think I’d rather know the devil’s.
Did any decent, wholesome person ever wander into Mount Carmel, Debbie wondered. It was like the place sent out a signal on bizarro frequencies only.
Vernon wasn’t much to look at. A stumblebum with torn clothes and greaser hair, which hung down to his shoulders. It was uncombed and you could tell he hadn’t washed it in a long time. He had this big smile on his face, smarmy as anything.
Nothing much happened that day. Vernon only stayed a few hours. When he got ready to leave, Clive Doyle put together a package of literature for him to take home with him.
All through that year, 1981, Vernon would show up at meetings—essentially Bible studies where Lois interpreted the Scriptures and prodded the Davidians to be more pious. You never knew when he was going to appear and when he left you never knew if he was coming back.
He ate very little to nothing at all; some herbal tea, most days, and that was it. He told the others this was meant to purge his sins. The weight dropped off him, and he’d been pretty lean to begin with. You could actually see the bones through his skin.
He’d smoke, too. One cigarette after the other. Lois didn’t like it. She told him to quit.
Every time Vernon left, Lois would chase him down. She’d find him in whatever random town he was living in and haul him back. Lois was concerned about him. She’d say, “Vernon, are you smoking again?”
Vernon was struck by that. How did she know? Vernon thought she was using her prophet skills to know if he was back on the cigarettes.
But others thought, “Duh, Vernon, she just smelled the smoke on your clothes.” Vernon always seemed to find a biblical reason for things when a simpler one would have done.
Vernon took off again and again, as if he was afraid to commit to the life at Mount Carmel. He would go and sin in other towns. Once he headed off to Keene, Texas. This time, it wasn’t cigarettes but food. Vernon decided to go on a carrot cake binge—if he was going to hell, he was gonna go ahead and eat all the carrot cake he could find.
Finally, Lois decided to put him to work. As he was a musician, it was decided that Debbie and Rachel would take guitar lessons from him. Perhaps that would give him a reason to stick around.
But when he arrived for the first session, all Vernon wanted to talk about was sex. “Well, what have you done with boys,” he said to the girls. “Rachel, Debbie, have you kissed a boy? Oh, you have? Did you use tongue? Did you let him touch you? Well, I sure hope you haven’t let any boy touch you!”
Every lesson, he would get more and more detailed. Vernon said the grossest things. “What does it make you feel like when boys touch you? What does it feel like, down there? Does it make your nipples tingle?”
Obviously, Vernon had no idea Debbie had been through all this before with her father. He was real excited. He thought he was blowing her young mind with his questions.
After a few guitar lessons, Vernon started bringing himself into the picture. “Have you ever thought about marrying me?” he asked Debbie and Rachel. “When you get married, would you want to share your husband?” He even asked if the two would get mad if he made love to both of them at the same time.
Debbie gave him a dead look. Took her mind somewhere else and pretended he hadn’t said anything. Soon enough, he turned all his attention to Rachel. And that girl wanted love so badly that she listened.
Debbie never told anyone about Vernon’s questions. Her own mother didn’t care if her father raped her, so why would she do anything about Vernon being a perv? In fact, Debbie didn’t trust any of the adults enough to let them know what was happening. The kids at Mount Carmel were nonhumans to the grown-ups, without rights or emotions to be protected. “We’re their little lumps of clay,” Debbie thought. “To be molded and do with as they wish.”
The Davidians were that rare Christian sect in 1980s America that was led by a woman. And Lois was taking the flock in a direction where female members would be valued equally to men. But the Davidians still placed men above women. In Mount Carmel, Vernon had found a place that would feed his desire to manipulate women. To possess them wholly.
That next year, 1982, Vernon quit his construction job and moved to Mount Carmel permanently. Some Davidians believed that Lois had given him an ultimatum—stay or leave forever—but no one really knew.
It quickly became clear that Vernon believed he had all the answers. He was never embarrassed to get into people’s business and tell them how they were displeasing God. He even marched into Lois’s house one time and went through her fridge and shelves and cupboards, tossing out things because they were forbidden. Then he marched on down to Perry Jones’s house and did the same.
Things got so bad with Vernon’s pestering that even Lois tired of him. She moved him into a tiny room in a house across from Debbie’s family with no furniture and one light bulb. It looked like a prison cell.
Then, in the blink of an eye, Vernon would reverse course. “I’m lost,” he’d say. “I’m a sinner and I don’t know what to do about it.” The earth was going to open up and swallow him because he was too evil to even be. He became overwrought, crying with almost everyone at one point or another.
Debbie’s bedroom window overlooked Vernon’s. In the evening when he came home, he’d enter the room and flick the light switch on. He’d move to the end of his bed and fling his arms out, then throw himself across the bed, his whole body flailing wildly. All the time he’d be crying out so loudly it was like he was being whipped. Debbie watched the scene unfold, open-mouthed.
The shouting got louder until it seemed Vernon was practically going into convulsions. This happened every single night.
Some of the other Davidians were impressed by his outbursts. “Vernon is really suffering,” they said. “Boy, that Vernon sure does want to find a way to God.”
As for Debbie, she thought Vernon was putting on a show. He could have always pulled the curtains and kept his nightly suffering to himself, couldn’t he?
The praying and the crying out caught Lois’s attention. Often, at night, she came to the door of his room and pleaded with him to eat something. Vernon usually refused, saying this or that food was forbidden and he couldn’t partake.
Lois stayed at the door. She’d say, “Oh, will you at least then drink this tea? It will fortify you.” And Vernon would relent, open the door. Maybe they’d talk a bit. No one thought much of it.
Vernon spread his misery around. One time that year, they went down to see Harriet. It was Lois, Vernon, and the six young girls that lived at Mount Carmel at the time, including Debbie. They were trying to convince Harriet to come to Waco and join the group, so the trip was meant to show her how normal they all were. And just to have fun.
And it was fun. Lois was good with kids, a real down-home grandma. But Vernon tried to screw everything up with his holiness thing. He’d tell Lois that taking the girls for ice cream and movies was frivolous. He wanted them to stay home and pray.
“But Vernon,” Lois said. “We’re meant to enjoy life.”
Vernon just shook his head. He didn’t seem to get that.
Vernon spent most of his days studying, trying to master the extremely complex Branch Davidian theology. It took him months to get up to speed.
Among the Davidians, everything a prophet said, everything a follower believed, had to be justified through scripture. You couldn’t just say, “I believe this because I feel it in my heart.” You had to back up your interpretation with chapter and verse and be prepared to defend it. If you didn’t know your Ellen White and you tried to claim to be a prophet, you’d get laughed out of the room. A lot of the more scholarly types at Mount Carmel could quote passage after passage of the classic texts the faith was built on.
After Houteff’s death in 1955, the Rodens lobbied to have Ben appointed the new leader of the Davidians. Lois and Ben and their followers traveled to the compound near Waco and attempted to persuade the Davidians that Ben was the true messenger. By nightfall, they realized they’d failed. Houteff’s wife, Florence, was named the group’s leader.
The Rodens walked out to their cars and arranged them so they faced away from the compound. They believed that God was going to spark an inferno and the meeting place would erupt in flames unless the believers signed Mount Carmel over.
The fire never arrived, but that didn’t dampen the Rodens’ spirits. Lois and the others started their cars and headed out the driveway. Instead of taking the road away from the compound, however, the lead car turned and began executing a circle. The others followed, until they had formed into a convoy of automobiles speeding around the compound, dust swirling behind their rear wheels. As they drove, they called out to the Davidians that they were re-creating Joshua’s encirclement of Jericho before it fell.
Lois reminded many of a pioneer woman, with her cotton dresses, sharp eyes, and straight-across mouth. It was a face built for stoicism, but in her eyes there was kindness, too.
She would give folksy, old-timey Bible studies, similar to those you might have heard in a well-worn revival tent fifty or a hundred years before. The years in Texas had flavored her speech. She’d say “Pen-T-cost” for “Pentecost” and “the 19 and 30” when she meant 1930.
A typical Lois Bible study went like this:
LOIS: But what do you think this morning? Are we going to take the Reformation to its completion? Can I have an amen? I like to hear it loud and strong.
CONGREGATION: Amen.
LOIS: All right, let’s get on with it. And let’s go back to truth, because that’s the only way we’re gonna do it . . . The same thing is gonna happen today that happened in the Dark Ages, if we don’t get busy. It shows we’re not up on our job, that’s what it shows me.
And I’m sorry that I haven’t taken care of my responsibilities any better ’n I have. I’ve gotten sidetracked and discouraged and this, that, and the other. But God is encouraging me now to go ahead and help finish the work. How ’bout you folks?
All right, let’s get on. [Pointing to a chart] Help me children, what do these four beasts represent?
In 1955, Ben Roden founded a rival sect to the one he’d hoped to lead, and he called it the Branch Davidians. “Branch” referred to an anointed one foretold in the Book of Zechariah: Listen, High Priest Joshua, you and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch.
“Davidians” was a continuation of Victor Houteff’s teaching. It reflected the group’s belief that they were descended from the ancient, Jewish House of King David.
In 1962, Florence Houteff disbanded the Mount Carmel congregation and the property went into receivership. The Rodens filed multiple lawsuits to gain control of the compound and finally succeeded. They christened the place New Mount Carmel.
One night in 1977, Lois was up late, studying the Bible. She was reading Revelation 18, which speaks of a mighty angel that comes to earth and lightens the whole land with the glory of God.
Time passed. Two o’clock struck.
Just then, Lois looked up through her window and spotted a shimmering presence hovering in the ink-black sky. As she peered at it, she realized it was a female angel. Behind the angel’s wings were arrayed countless other spirit-beings, radiant in silver.
The vision was clearly of the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Holy Trinity. God was showing Lois in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit was a woman.
Lois did what Vernon refused to do and checked her vision against the Word. The Bible stated that God had made humans in his own image. Humans were both male and female, Lois reasoned, so God, too, had to be both male and female. This was the core of her vision. “My work is to bring forth the femininity of God in the Bible,” Lois told her flock. She called her new teachings the Living Waters message.
But Lois went a little further. She argued that Eve was a “higher act of creation” than Adam because Adam was made out of dust, while Eve took shape from flesh and blood. In her Bible studies, Lois even changed the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer to “Our Mother, who art in Heaven . . .”
The change set off an earthquake among the Davidians. Some of the believers thought Lois had lost her mind. Feminists were on the march in the late seventies, but some Davidians rebelled against joining them. Did Lois want to make their sect into an outpost for Women’s Lib? Who was she trying to be, Betty Friedan?
Nearly half her flock, almost all of them men, walked away. They hated the new teaching, thought it was blasphemy. Clive Doyle, an Australian who was in charge of the Davidians’ publishing arm, refused to print Lois’s pamphlets announcing the new truth. He feared Lois was going to send the Davidians to hell by teaching false doctrine.
Anonymous quotes from people inside Mount Carmel began appearing in major newspapers. “Women preaching is like a dog walking on two legs,” said one of her followers. “It’s interesting, but it’s not right.”
But Lois was steadfast. When her husband Ben died in 1978, she succeeded him as the new prophet and the leader of the Davidians.
A new era began for the Branch, with an activist bent and a global reach. Lois launched not one but two magazines, In Her Image and SHEkinah. She traveled the world, meeting celebrities and politicians. She called famous preachers her friends: Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell. She even traveled to the Philippines to confer with Ferdinand Marcos.
Besides the Living Waters message, however, Lois had little or nothing to add to Branch Davidian theology. Every Bible study, she taught what she’d always taught: the same lessons, the same passages, the familiar “seven-year prophecy chart” that predicted things to come. These charts had been around since the forties and many of the group members knew them by heart.
To her followers, even the ones who loved and respected her, it often felt like the same day was repeating itself endlessly. Some people at Mount Carmel wouldn’t speak to another person for a week at a time. If you didn’t work in Waco and have news from the outside, what was there to say? Days piled on top of days in the wait for the end of the world. Most Davidians felt they should have left the earth years ago.
In the dust and the cold of Waco, it seemed like the clocks had stopped.
After the vision of the female Holy Spirit, Lois did have one other announcement: Something very important would happen in four years. Then three years after that, there would be another big development. She drilled those dates into the Davidians: 1981, 1984. Momentous events would arrive in each.
The Davidians wondered: Was it the arrival of the messiah at last? Was the end of the world approaching? They wished mightily for both.
11
The Davidians
IN 1981, WHEN he first came to Mount Carmel, Vernon found a drab community plunked down in the middle of ranch country on the Central Texas plain, about twelve miles from downtown Waco. On the land, there was a scattering of homes, a chapel, a weedy graveyard surrounded by rusted wire, an Ad (for Administration) building, and little else. The community had shrunk over the years of Lois’s leadership to about thirty men, women, and children living on the compound. Worldwide, there were another one hundred twenty members in countries such as England and Australia.
The drive took him about two hours. The compound sat among green fields and small hillocks dotted with underbrush. There wasn’t a lot out here, miles from mostly anything. You’d spot horses and some cattle as you passed by the big farms, with swing gates on the driveways leading up to sprawling houses. Vernon turned off Double EE Ranch Road and headed down a long driveway toward a cluster of buildings.
As Vernon pulled into Mount Carmel, Debbie Kendrick and her friend Rachel Jones, daughter of Perry Jones, one of Lois’s key followers, were standing on the porch of the Ad building. They saw a dark-haired guy drive by in his pickup truck. Debbie and Rachel were dressed in skirts because it was a holy day. Maybe the Sabbath or the new moon, Debbie could never remember afterward.
Debbie had always felt sorry for Rachel, living in the Joneses’ house. She’d had such a tough life, tougher than Debbie’s in a way. Rachel was so starved for affection. At one point, she’d started fancying herself in love with her brother. The infatuation went on for a long time. In Debbie’s opinion, the Jones kids couldn’t have told you what love was if you gave them a million dollars.
Debbie and Rachel watched as the pickup truck came down the driveway and headed toward the Jones house. They didn’t think much about the man inside.
They meandered over to Debbie’s house and sat on the floor in the living room playing a Bible board game, because that’s all you were allowed to do on a holy day. You had to wear a long dress or a skirt along with your best pantyhose, and you could only do holy things. Go for walks and play Bible games and listen to sermons and sing.
While they were playing, the phone rang. It was Perry. He said there was a new guy at Mount Carmel and he wanted to talk to them. Vernon had spotted them at the Ad building and told Perry he wanted to speak to “those two young girls” on the porch.
He’d been on the compound all of five minutes and first thing he wanted to do was meet two twelve-year-olds. Debbie turned to Rachel and said, “Okay, so he’s a pervert.”
Debbie felt her stomach starting to cramp. Three years before, her father had begun sexually abusing her, the first time when she was in the bath. Things like that weren’t supposed to happen at Mount Carmel, which Lois always told them was a place for the most special people on earth. But they did happen, often. In her time at the compound, Debbie had seen more ugliness than she cared to remember: animals abused, children neglected or sexually exploited, despair and violence. Ben Roden had even stolen her bicycle once (her father had stolen it back). A thought rolled into Debbie’s brain when she heard Lois’s remark. What do you mean we’re so special? What do you mean these are God’s people? If these are God’s people, I think I’d rather know the devil’s.
Did any decent, wholesome person ever wander into Mount Carmel, Debbie wondered. It was like the place sent out a signal on bizarro frequencies only.
Vernon wasn’t much to look at. A stumblebum with torn clothes and greaser hair, which hung down to his shoulders. It was uncombed and you could tell he hadn’t washed it in a long time. He had this big smile on his face, smarmy as anything.
Nothing much happened that day. Vernon only stayed a few hours. When he got ready to leave, Clive Doyle put together a package of literature for him to take home with him.
All through that year, 1981, Vernon would show up at meetings—essentially Bible studies where Lois interpreted the Scriptures and prodded the Davidians to be more pious. You never knew when he was going to appear and when he left you never knew if he was coming back.
He ate very little to nothing at all; some herbal tea, most days, and that was it. He told the others this was meant to purge his sins. The weight dropped off him, and he’d been pretty lean to begin with. You could actually see the bones through his skin.
He’d smoke, too. One cigarette after the other. Lois didn’t like it. She told him to quit.
Every time Vernon left, Lois would chase him down. She’d find him in whatever random town he was living in and haul him back. Lois was concerned about him. She’d say, “Vernon, are you smoking again?”
Vernon was struck by that. How did she know? Vernon thought she was using her prophet skills to know if he was back on the cigarettes.
But others thought, “Duh, Vernon, she just smelled the smoke on your clothes.” Vernon always seemed to find a biblical reason for things when a simpler one would have done.
Vernon took off again and again, as if he was afraid to commit to the life at Mount Carmel. He would go and sin in other towns. Once he headed off to Keene, Texas. This time, it wasn’t cigarettes but food. Vernon decided to go on a carrot cake binge—if he was going to hell, he was gonna go ahead and eat all the carrot cake he could find.
Finally, Lois decided to put him to work. As he was a musician, it was decided that Debbie and Rachel would take guitar lessons from him. Perhaps that would give him a reason to stick around.
But when he arrived for the first session, all Vernon wanted to talk about was sex. “Well, what have you done with boys,” he said to the girls. “Rachel, Debbie, have you kissed a boy? Oh, you have? Did you use tongue? Did you let him touch you? Well, I sure hope you haven’t let any boy touch you!”
Every lesson, he would get more and more detailed. Vernon said the grossest things. “What does it make you feel like when boys touch you? What does it feel like, down there? Does it make your nipples tingle?”
Obviously, Vernon had no idea Debbie had been through all this before with her father. He was real excited. He thought he was blowing her young mind with his questions.
After a few guitar lessons, Vernon started bringing himself into the picture. “Have you ever thought about marrying me?” he asked Debbie and Rachel. “When you get married, would you want to share your husband?” He even asked if the two would get mad if he made love to both of them at the same time.
Debbie gave him a dead look. Took her mind somewhere else and pretended he hadn’t said anything. Soon enough, he turned all his attention to Rachel. And that girl wanted love so badly that she listened.
Debbie never told anyone about Vernon’s questions. Her own mother didn’t care if her father raped her, so why would she do anything about Vernon being a perv? In fact, Debbie didn’t trust any of the adults enough to let them know what was happening. The kids at Mount Carmel were nonhumans to the grown-ups, without rights or emotions to be protected. “We’re their little lumps of clay,” Debbie thought. “To be molded and do with as they wish.”
The Davidians were that rare Christian sect in 1980s America that was led by a woman. And Lois was taking the flock in a direction where female members would be valued equally to men. But the Davidians still placed men above women. In Mount Carmel, Vernon had found a place that would feed his desire to manipulate women. To possess them wholly.
That next year, 1982, Vernon quit his construction job and moved to Mount Carmel permanently. Some Davidians believed that Lois had given him an ultimatum—stay or leave forever—but no one really knew.
It quickly became clear that Vernon believed he had all the answers. He was never embarrassed to get into people’s business and tell them how they were displeasing God. He even marched into Lois’s house one time and went through her fridge and shelves and cupboards, tossing out things because they were forbidden. Then he marched on down to Perry Jones’s house and did the same.
Things got so bad with Vernon’s pestering that even Lois tired of him. She moved him into a tiny room in a house across from Debbie’s family with no furniture and one light bulb. It looked like a prison cell.
Then, in the blink of an eye, Vernon would reverse course. “I’m lost,” he’d say. “I’m a sinner and I don’t know what to do about it.” The earth was going to open up and swallow him because he was too evil to even be. He became overwrought, crying with almost everyone at one point or another.
Debbie’s bedroom window overlooked Vernon’s. In the evening when he came home, he’d enter the room and flick the light switch on. He’d move to the end of his bed and fling his arms out, then throw himself across the bed, his whole body flailing wildly. All the time he’d be crying out so loudly it was like he was being whipped. Debbie watched the scene unfold, open-mouthed.
The shouting got louder until it seemed Vernon was practically going into convulsions. This happened every single night.
Some of the other Davidians were impressed by his outbursts. “Vernon is really suffering,” they said. “Boy, that Vernon sure does want to find a way to God.”
As for Debbie, she thought Vernon was putting on a show. He could have always pulled the curtains and kept his nightly suffering to himself, couldn’t he?
The praying and the crying out caught Lois’s attention. Often, at night, she came to the door of his room and pleaded with him to eat something. Vernon usually refused, saying this or that food was forbidden and he couldn’t partake.
Lois stayed at the door. She’d say, “Oh, will you at least then drink this tea? It will fortify you.” And Vernon would relent, open the door. Maybe they’d talk a bit. No one thought much of it.
Vernon spread his misery around. One time that year, they went down to see Harriet. It was Lois, Vernon, and the six young girls that lived at Mount Carmel at the time, including Debbie. They were trying to convince Harriet to come to Waco and join the group, so the trip was meant to show her how normal they all were. And just to have fun.
And it was fun. Lois was good with kids, a real down-home grandma. But Vernon tried to screw everything up with his holiness thing. He’d tell Lois that taking the girls for ice cream and movies was frivolous. He wanted them to stay home and pray.
“But Vernon,” Lois said. “We’re meant to enjoy life.”
Vernon just shook his head. He didn’t seem to get that.
Vernon spent most of his days studying, trying to master the extremely complex Branch Davidian theology. It took him months to get up to speed.
Among the Davidians, everything a prophet said, everything a follower believed, had to be justified through scripture. You couldn’t just say, “I believe this because I feel it in my heart.” You had to back up your interpretation with chapter and verse and be prepared to defend it. If you didn’t know your Ellen White and you tried to claim to be a prophet, you’d get laughed out of the room. A lot of the more scholarly types at Mount Carmel could quote passage after passage of the classic texts the faith was built on.
