At the end of last year, Joel visited Dick Reavis, the author of The Ashes of Waco, at his home in North Carolina. Together they recorded an interview that lasted for several hours. A complete transcript will be available when our website goes up, and we will post excerpts here from time to time. In this installment, Reavis describes how he met Branch Davidians after the siege and how he came to write the book:
DR: After it burned, you could walk on the site. I was there within a week afterwards. My wife and I walked around it.
JM: After the Texas Rangers had done their investigation?
DR: I say within a week. It seems to me it was. At some point, it was put off limits for sanitary reasons, but there was a gap.
JM: Cause people were taking souvenirs?
DR: Yeah, people were doing that. My wife and I walked the grounds. You have to understand, she is a South American. We were walking through all this charred stuff. I’m trying to think why I was down there. I think I know, but anyway. I said, “What do you think of this?” I didn’t know what to think of it. She said, “I never thought I would get a chance to see what your country did to the Indians.” And I thought, “What the heck is this? What do the Indians got to do with this?” And she said, “The Indians had a different religion. They had different marriage customs. And they had guns. So, you wiped them out.” And I thought, “Oh my gosh! Revelation to me.” And I’ll tell you why I was down there. After this place burned, I looked for two or three days for the stories that would tell me the other side of the story, and I didn’t see a one. Meaning, the press didn’t interview the people who came out of jail. And I thought, “That ain’t right.” And then I got a call. I’m pretty sure it was from Jim Pace at Soldier of Fortune, who told me that all of the people who had gotten out of jail and all of the other assorted Koresh followers who had never been put in, or whatever, and the children, were all in one hotel in Waco. He called and told me that. And I said, “Well Jesus, they’ve been wanting me to do a story about this and I’ve been refusing cause I couldn’t get the other side.” Well I went to my editor and I said, “Let me check into that hotel for a week.” And it was probably at the end of that week that I brought my wife to Mt. Carmel. I went down there for a week or so… a week or ten days. Checked into the hotel. It was pretty obvious who the Koresh followers were. I’d seen some of them on TV as they were arrested. And they wouldn’t talk to me. And I said what am I going to do -- this happens to reporters. And I said: I’m gonna sit here in the lobby and see what I can learn. Sitting in the lobby, I heard one of them, Ruth Riddle, call her insurance company to file a claim on her car and they said, “What happened to your car?” Tanks ran over it. “Do you have a title?” No. It burned up in the fire. And I saw they didn’t have cars anymore. That’s why she was making the call. Taxis were showing up. Well, I had a car. I said, “If I just sit here in this lobby long enough, somebody’s gonna need a ride. And on the second or third day, somebody did. And the next thing you know, I was taxi service for the survivors. I didn’t charge them nothing. And while I drove them places, I asked them questions. They couldn’t refuse. Three or four days of that, and I had made friends with them.
JM: Did you tell them you were a reporter?
DR: Oh yeah. I told them I was a reporter. When I say they’re not talking, they might have talked to me if I had said I’m a member of the Seventh Day Adventist church at Podunk, Texas. But I told them up front I was a reporter. So they wouldn’t talk to me until they needed a ride. So that’s how I began to get into the story, was a taxi guy to them. Little by little, they’d start inviting me to lunch and stuff. There was a restaurant where they all went, cause they could eat cheap. One day at the restaurant, I said, “Look, ya’ll have seen me smoking and stuff and nobody yet has asked me when I’m gonna accept Jesus as my lord and savior. What kind of religious group are you?” And they said, “We don’t do those kind of things.” And I said, “Why not?” “Because it would take us more than 15 minutes to explain our religion.” Well I decided as long as 15 minutes never came, I’d be willing to talk to them and I began to hear things from them that contrasted greatly from what I had read in the press. And some of them were black and I began to think, “There’s a story here.” I went to my editor and I said, “Look. This is like the Kennedy assassination. It’s gonna take a year after it happens to figure out what happened. Put me on it.” He said talk to Lacey. Lacey said no. Lacey had to attend a conference of alternative weeklies in Austin and I went down there. I said, “Look. You gotta let me spend at least six months figuring out what happened.” And he said no, again. I mean, he said it to my face. And I said, “Why not?” And he said it’s not a Dallas story. And I said yeah well neither was the Kennedy assassination. And besides, in Dallas at that time, there was a great movement of gun rights, patriot, constitutionalism, militia people. They held monthly meetings at which six and eight hundred people showed up. And I had readers. Everything I had written about Waco, we got letters from. So it was a hot topic, just inside of Dallas, and then nationally it seemed to me of some import. He told me no and I said, “I’m going to have to write a book about this to get to the bottom of it. And if I write the book, I’m gonna have to quit my job.” So I wrote a letter to my agent, proposing a book. When I got the contract, I quit my job.
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Next we have the opening minutes of a video made by Failure Analysis Associates and commissioned by the National Rifle Associatation. The tape uses computer models to take the viewer through the various gas attacks that occurred on April 19. The physical origins and development of the fire are also covered, as well as the causes of death and distribution within the building of those who perished that day. Click on the link below.
Failure Analysis Excerpt
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