Word: koresh
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...Koresh eventually let 21 children -- none of them his own -- and two elderly women leave the compound, but he remained holed up inside with 90 adults and 17 children awaiting instructions from God. He claimed to be wounded, but he sounded remarkably fit as he broadcast his end-of-the-world message across the airwaves in exchange for a promise to surrender. Meanwhile, more than 200 law- enforcement officers surrounded the compound and waited, day after day, for Koresh to make good on that pledge...
...Waco cult is the product of an apocalyptic theology, refined over decades by a succession of zealous but nonviolent splinter groups, that was seized at last by a charismatic and combustible leader. The son of a single mother, Koresh was born Vernon Howell in Houston in 1959. Growing up in the Dallas area, he was an indifferent student but an avid reader of the Bible who prayed for hours and memorized long passages of Scripture. He also played guitar -- not badly by some reports -- using rock music as well as his magnetic preaching to recruit followers. Some of the spartan...
...Koresh dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Raised in the mainstream Seventh-day Adventist Church, he found comfort as a young man in the teachings of an obscure offshoot, the Branch Davidians, which was a mutation of an earlier Adventist splinter group. The Davidians trace their roots to Victor Houteff, a Bulgarian immigrant who was expelled from a Los Angeles Adventist church in 1929. Houteff had become obsessed with passages in the Book of Ezekiel in which an angel of God divides the faithful from the sinful before Jerusalem's fall to the Babylonians. Believing that passage...
With Roden out of the way, Howell became undisputed leader of the Branch Davidians in Waco, completing their transition from congregation to cult. He and a few select followers began recruiting new members on trips around the U.S., Britain and Australia. In 1990 he changed his name legally to Koresh, Hebrew for Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed the Jews to return to Israel after their captivity in Babylon. His apocalyptic theology converged with secular survivalism, with its programs for hunkering down amid stockpiles of food and ammo to endure a nuclear holocaust or social collapse...
...Koresh began to preach that his followers should ready themselves for a final battle with unbelievers. The Waco settlement, once a collection of old cottages scattered around 78 acres of scrub pasture and woods, was consolidated into a compact fort the size of a city block. Having equipped it with an underground bunker and an armory -- adjacent to the chapel -- cult members discussed renaming the place Ranch Apocalypse. Federal agents began tracking frequent shipments of firepower that they say amounted to 8,000 lbs. of ammunition and enough parts to assemble hundreds of automatic and semiautomatic weapons. Some time...