Waco: American Apocalypse (2023) s01e02 Episode Script

1
No shouting questions!
When it comes to question-and-answer time,
raise your hand until you're recognized.
C controller coming out.
My name is Jeff Jamar,
and I'm the Special Agent in Charge
of FBI operations here in Waco.
We're here because David Koresh
and his followers killed four ATF agents.
Following this tragic incident,
the ATF requested FBI support.
The area is a crime scene.
The goal is to resolve this situation
with no further bloodshed.
A total of 18 children and two women
have been released through negotiations.
Koresh indicated that 20 children,
47 women, and 43 men inside.
We're ready to answer questions.
Can you give me more details?
After 1:30, you're waiting for him,
finally make contact, what does he say?
He says God told him to wait.
We now know
that this is not going to turn out well.
This man has total control
over everybody in there.
The only will that exists
is is that of one person.
God speaks to me.
I have a message to present.
You may not believe that.
If you don't believe that,
then believe this:
Two thousand years ago, hey,
who believed in Christ's doctrine?
The man had to die.
No one would believe what he had to say.
Once the command element realizes
that David Koresh is not gonna walk out
we knew we were gonna have
to contain the crime scene,
and make sure that we could protect
from people coming out.
So how do you do that?
The ATF had launched
their early investigation
from a ranch-style farmhouse that was
directly across from Mount Carmel.
We called it Sierra One,
but that's just the front of the building.
You still have the entire perimeter
of the building
and no idea what's going on out there.
So we found, through surveillance,
there was a garage
at the back of the building.
And we put together a plan
to assault and secure that garage.
The problem is,
you've got to go by the building that
just shot the living shit out of the ATF.
How you gonna do that?
We brought in Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
But we knew they had .50-caliber weapons
that could penetrate
the Bradley Fighting Vehicles,
and a hot .50-cal round going through
the skin is gonna flatten that thing out,
and it's gonna be a milkshake.
So, we steamed down the road,
turned right, drove down the driveway,
went around to the back of the building
- We've got night vision.
- Yeah, I understand.
And the thing of it is
that there's guys coming from the barn,
climbing up from the back of the property,
getting closer and closer.
Now,
we're keeping those guys away. And
No, you're not.
You are not keeping them away.
We're not stupid.
This is really early hours.
I don't even have
any FBI negotiators with me yet,
and I'm hearing that
there's tactical movement out there,
and I don't know if it's ATF, the FBI.
I've got no channel
coming in to the negotiations.
There's frustration in my voice
because I'm really inhibited
from knowing what's going on.
So why are they still coming?
I I'm sending
another message to them.
- They're telling me they're not there.
- No.
They are here. They're lying to you.
I was really worried about them
coming in with guns and killing people.
I really thought that
that was going to happen.
If they had entered the building,
we would all commit suicide.
There was an actual grenade handed to me,
because I was the one woman
that could have pulled that pin
and killed the four or five women
in the room that I was in.
It wasn't a matter of
how is this affecting me
as a person? Because
I'm not a person. I'm God's tool.
You need to get with those guys
and tell them to pull back.
Okay. We'll And the word's
going out right as we speak to do that.
Uh, somebody's going to send a message in.
I'm writing it down.
The hatch opens, I get out,
I run, spin around carrying an AR-15.
And I look over, and I see a guy in black
come over a mound of dirt.
He had a gun.
I just remember thinking,
"That guy's gonna come and kill me."
My team hits the cars,
and we're moving car to car,
clearing car to car,
expecting, you know,
this big gun fight to break out.
And it didn't.
So, within a very short period of time,
we, the Hostage Rescue Team,
now had a perimeter.
Sierra One at the front
Sierra Two at the back.
We have moved in.
We've taken that turf,
and we're not leaving.
Hostage Rescue Team had no desire
to make anybody in there happy.
They don't have a lot of patience.
They're action-oriented.
Their desire was to get this resolved
and get it resolved now.
From the very beginning,
after Hostage Rescue Team came in,
they and the negotiators, you know,
had very different views
of what was going on here.
The negotiators wanted to, you know,
cool down the temperatures,
to back off,
to develop relationships
with people inside the compound,
to establish trust.
And to the Hostage Rescue Team,
David Koresh and his followers
were a bunch of criminals and murderers
who had just killed four federal agents,
and we need to haul their asses
out of there and bring them to justice.
I would tell the on-scene commander,
Jeff Jamar,
"This is what we wanna do
as a negotiation team."
Then separate from me,
he would hear of
a more aggressive approach,
a simultaneous approach,
from the Hostage Rescue Team,
and he would say, "Yeah, go ahead."
Never, I don't think,
fully appreciating the inconsistencies
and the mixed signals that sent.
The FBI agents working as negotiators
and members of the Hostage Rescue Team,
we had the exact same mission.
But if your business is to go into
a building at four o'clock in the morning
and kill the bad guys,
and save the good guys,
and risk your life in doing it,
that's a different mindset
than somebody who's gonna sit in a room
and try to talk a bad guy out.
Our goal was always
saving as many lives as you can,
whenever you can.
In this stage of the incident,
we had to separate ourselves
from the tactical people.
- We gotta separate us from them.
- From them.
Make "good guy, bad guy."
Don't let what's happening out there
come in between what we're doing here.
Somehow, you have to walk
that high wire of saying, you know,
"They have a different approach,
but you can talk to us."
"We're making good progress."
- Thanks so much, John.
- Take care.
I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Good night. Bye.
Good job, John.
He's ill.
I really believe he's ill.
David David's down.
He's down. That's a good sign.
A good, good sign.
Early in the first several days
of the situation,
David Koresh had been wounded,
and you could hear it in his voice.
And he sent us a video
where he showed us the bullet hole.
This is David Koresh.
Steve Schneider filming.
David, anything you'd like to say?
First of all, I'd like to, uh,
thank the, uh, negotiators that
we've been discussing with on the phone.
Wanna see one of the holes here?
Here's one of them.
That look nice?
This one went out right here.
- Oh, it's leaking.
- Is that leaking?
It's bleeding.
- Is this bleeding again?
- Yeah.
So, we're gonna send this tape out now.
And I'm leaking in the back here.
I gotta get this taken care of.
Anyway, God bless,
and we'll sign off, Steve.
David knew he was dying.
He was shot in the hand and in the side,
and he was 33 years old.
So, there were a lot of similarities
between him and Christ.
We were silently rooting for him
to die from his his wound.
Because, number one, if he died,
or, number two, he came out
to get medical assistance, game over.
Got a little bit more information on this.
Um, this doctor feels,
after viewing videotape
He advised that
he has a deep-seated infection.
We tried to implant in his mind that,
you know,
"You're gonna get blood poisoning and die.
You need to come out for medical help."
Once the infection
gets into the bloodstream,
it will go into every major vital organ,
including the brain.
If Koresh had died,
this whole standoff would be over,
'cause there's only one single man
who controlled this whole situation,
that was David Koresh.
Was Mr. Koresh wounded?
If so, how seriously?
The media had the same problems
that the cops did.
Nothing like this
had ever happened before.
And this was also
For the media, this was a big damn story.
By the time we arrived,
we probably have
a thousand members of the media.
Within two or three days,
we now have 2,000.
My job was was not to determine
what tactics were going to be used,
but try to explain to the public
what we were doing
and why we were doing it,
because we knew
everything that we're going to be doing
is going to be scrutinized
under a magnifying glass.
Yes, back here.
Who is negotiating on the other side?
Are you also talking with other followers?
And if so, who?
Do you believe that Mr. Koresh
is capable of rational decisions?
Or are you just going
to wait and wait and wait?
We are in charge,
and we can turn up
the screws again if we want to.
Hundreds of reporters
and photographers
from all over the country,
and all over the world,
have gathered around the Mount Carmel
compound of the Branch Davidians.
Cult members involved in Sunday's
bloody shootout with federal agents
are still holed up inside their compound.
I sit down to television,
and it's real clear.
The name David Koresh is mentioned.
Oh dear. This is where my son is living.
Clear.
He knows I'm here.
- How does he know?
- He knows me.
Dave Thibodeau knows his mom's here
because that's the kind of friend
he's got in his mother.
David's mother came from
Bangor, Maine to find her 24-year-old son
I remember thinking,
"My mom's gonna be down here."
I remember thinking, "I wish she wouldn't.
I don't wanna be the face of this thing."
I called the FBI, and I said,
"My son's in there,
and I need to know if he's okay."
"And I need to know if I can talk to him."
That agent said to me,
"We don't have any protocol
for family involvement
in a situation like this."
"Maybe in the future."
I said, "My son may not have a future."
My instinct told me right off
that I needed to work the press
because the feds
aren't gonna let me talk to my kid.
These people speaking today,
Bob A. Ricks, R-I-C-K-S with FBI.
And then here I am at a press conference.
My hand went up, and he chose me.
Have you considered at all
offering David Koresh the option of saying
whether or not he would like to speak
to other familiar voices from the outside?
We explored many alternatives,
and, uh, the answer is no.
We have no outside individuals involved
in the negotiation process at this time.
The first thing you're gonna do
is make sure that you cut off
their contact with the outside world.
It's very important for us
to control the communications.
When they picked up the phone,
they could only get us.
We're the source
of resolving the conflict for them.
And we also don't want them to be able
to call out to, say, a loved one
and give them their verbal
last will and testament.
We felt very cut off from the world,
because the FBI controlled everything.
They say
they've talked to members.
They want to stay on their own free will,
willing to die for David Koresh.
Does that sound like the son you know?
That last summer,
before he left Los Angeles
to go out to Waco, Texas,
we took a long walk, and he was
trying to tell me about David Koresh.
"But, Mom, they're into the Bible."
And that kind of halted me.
- I said, "David, that's not who we are."
- Do you meet Koresh?
I never meet David Koresh.
We talk on the phone a number of times.
I said, "David, do you feel that
you've been sent here by God?"
And he said, "Yes."
And I said, "Are you a prophet?
Do you feel that you're a prophet?"
And he said, "Yes, I'm a prophet."
And then I asked the pinnacle question:
"Are you the Messiah?"
And he said, "Yes, I am."
When I hang up the phone, I'm on alert.
Dave's in trouble.
This guy thinks he's the Second Coming.
We're trying to learn
everything we can about,
not only David Koresh,
but his followers.
We had people
calling former family members,
following up on leads,
former Davidians
who no longer were part of the cult.
John has something to add to the briefing.
Would you go ahead, corporal?
First girlfriend of David,
Linda Marie Campion, who's on the line,
said before 1979, he was a long-haired,
fun-loving, guitar-playing guy.
He smoked pot once in a while.
Didn't seek any confrontations
with law enforcement.
In 1979, he had a nervous breakdown.
Tremors, convulsions of extremities,
under a lot of stress spiritually,
and he started having
visual and audio hallucinations,
primarily at night.
And these hallucinations
were thinking he was talking to God.
David Koresh
was the child of a teen mom.
His stepfather was a convict, a thief.
The story was that he was subject
to sexual abuse by older boys.
And so,
after he dropped out in middle school,
a lady who had befriended him
was talking to him one day,
and he was asking where he could find
people who could help open the Bible up.
And the lady said, "Well, you know,
there's this group of people over in Waco,
where they had been since the '30s,
called the Branch Davidian."
And when he came,
people who were there at Mount Carmel
said, you know, he was this sort of
goofy guy.
He was a carpenter.
He wasn't very bright.
He wasn't very attractive.
And this is the way we eat over here,
with our fingers.
And you need to come over and join us.
We have literal food and spiritual food.
But he got very close
to a woman named Lois Roden.
She was the leader of the group.
Lois was 67,
and Koresh was a young man.
He seduced Lois Roden,
even though there was probably
50 years' difference in their age.
She eventually passed away,
and then there became a battle between
her son and David Koresh for leadership.
Koresh gathered up
some of his male followers,
all in camo, with guns.
They got into a gunfight with George Roden
inside the compound.
And it went I went,
"Bang, bang, bang, bang."
Not pointed at George.
You see? "Bang, bang, bang, bang."
That didn't scare him neither.
George, he got wounded slightly,
and the sheriff's department was called
and arrested Koresh and his followers.
Charged them with attempted murder.
A jury actually, um,
hung on whether to convict,
and so there was no retrial.
And then David took over.
They've come from all over the world,
ordered to the headquarters
of a bizarre religious cult in Texas.
Among them, Australian followers
of a man who claims to be the son of God.
We were able to secure
and look at this piece of video footage,
filmed by A Current Affair,
which was an Australian news show
that sent this TV crew to film Koresh.
Vernon,
or David Koresh, as he prefers,
claims to have one wife, Rachel,
who was 14 when he married her.
One wife.
In the late '80s,
Koresh's teaching evolved.
He introduced
what he called the New Light.
He had married a teenage daughter
of a longtime member,
and his revelation was that
he was supposed to have other wives.
And, at first, took single girls.
And then the revelation evolved,
and he was supposed to dissolve
all the marriages of all of his followers
and take their wives.
You separated couples?
I have separated couples.
- You have?
- You better believe I have.
When David annulled the marriages
where people had been married a long time,
my dad went along with it.
I want to know what truth is.
And I'm searching for it.
And if he happens to be the vehicle
that shows me, I thank God for him.
And my mom just didn't agree with it,
so she packed up her stuff
in the middle of the night and left.
After she left
I wasn't allowed to be around my dad.
I couldn't eat with him.
I couldn't go outside and
play like a normal kid, with your father.
Basically, after my mom left
David Koresh was like my mom and my dad.
Who would allow their wives
to have sex with David Koresh,
and be prohibited from having sex
with their own wives?
That that's insanity.
Every single one of us
was married to David,
because David was our Christ,
giving us the truths from God.
They believed that David Koresh
was the key to their eternal salvation.
I remember
the Bible studies went all night long,
and women would stay up
in the hopes of being the one
that he would take to bed with him.
Okay, I have to admit
that I would stay up late,
go to these Bible studies,
and hope that he would pick me,
because I wanted
my own personal experience.
And, finally,
David decided to take me to his room.
The room was special.
The bed took up four-fifths of the room.
That's all it was.
And
Oh my gosh
I'm going to be, for the first time
with God alone
through David.
I remember him picking me up,
scooping me up
with his hand behind my back,
and moving me around on the bed.
The whole time we were having sex,
it was a Bible study.
He did it for me.
Not for himself.
He did it to give me
that one little bit of tenderness
with my God.
Perhaps the most shocking allegation
is that he had sex with underage girls.
There's no doubt that David Koresh
had sex with young kids,
some as young as 10.
- And how old are you, Lisa?
- Thirteen.
Thirteen. And who is next to you?
I'm Abby.
- And how old are you, Abby?
- I'm 11.
You're 11.
I remember, like,
talking to the other girls
that were 10 to maybe 13?
They would giggle and laugh about,
you know, being one of his wives one day,
and having his kids
How much it was an honor.
But not me.
He was hard on me about everything,
down to the spankings.
With a really big paddle.
He would take me in his room.
He would make me lay over his lap.
If I tensed up,
he would put the paddle to my butt,
and he'd be like, "Okay."
And then he'd pull it back again.
And he wouldn't hit me,
until I was not ready for it.
And that was almost every day.
A lot of people have told me
that he was trying to groom me.
People think that a man having sex
with a bunch of under aged girls
is a crime.
And in conventional wisdom,
that could probably be very well true.
However,
these weren't under aged girls,
because you come of age at 12.
So, all of these girls
were adults in our belief system.
We knew there was
an awful lot of kids in there.
Our goal was always
to get the kids out of harm's way.
I think David felt that
letting some kids walk out
would go a long way in building trust.
Is Heather coming out?
- Yeah, we'll send her out.
- Okay. What is she wearing?
Uh, what's she wearing?
- Oh, it's a red coat.
- It's a red coat?
And a red hood.
- And she's got blond hair.
- Right.
Okay.
They got me that morning
and took me down the stairs.
You could see holes everywhere
through the walls.
And my dad was sitting
right beside the stairs,
in a chair, and he had been shot.
And my dad told me,
"If you get scared or upset,
just think about me."
I heard David say,
"Well, it's almost time."
You have
your coat on and everything?
Well, you don't look very happy.
What's wrong? You wanna put a smile on?
Okay. You want a hug?
Hug?
Okay. Well, she wants a hug.
Let me Let me, um
Okay, we're gonna send her out.
Let me go ahead
and let you off the line real quick.
Okay.
And he cracked the door open,
and he pushed me out the door
and shut the door behind me.
I tripped in a pothole,
because I looked behind me,
and I fell, face down.
And then, all of a sudden, there's
guys surrounding me with all this
body armor.
Just I just remember
seeing all this black.
One grabbed this arm,
one grabbed this arm.
And then before I knew it,
I was sitting
in this
Army tank
with a group of men
surrounding me in there.
At 8:45 a.m. today,
Heather, nine years old, was released.
This brings the total of persons
released through negotiations
to 21 children and two women.
Because I wanted the kids
to be treated with tenderness,
we'd sit down
with the tactical people, say,
"Treat these kids like they're your own,
turn them over to the negotiators,
and negotiators
will bring them back here."
Some men take me up the stairs
and take me into this room,
and they have my bag
of everything I took out with me.
And all these men laughing,
and tearing apart my stuff.
Ripping it open with knives.
And I hear them saying
the adults probably sent us out with
bombs or grenades.
So now, every time a kid came out,
we'd have them call back in
and talk to their parents.
But this now gave us an opportunity,
with regards to those children's parents
who we were able to speak with,
to leave an impression with them about,
"We're good people."
Do you wanna hear
that last call with your dad?
Yeah.
- Hi, Daddy.
- Hi, Heather.
What you doing?
Just sitting in a chair.
- You're just sitting in a chair?
- Yeah.
How'd you like your little ride?
- It was fun. It was bumpy.
- It was fun.
God has many promises, Heather.
And always Always remember that.
You be a good girl, and
And, uh ask for all the good things.
Don't forget what you know.
I'll see you. Okay?
- Bye-bye.
- Bye. I love you.
Oh my God.
That was the last time
I heard his voice.
You wanna say hello to anybody
out there, of the kids that left?
Yeah.
Say hello. Wave to them.
Hi.
Tell them make sure that
they're taking good care of them.
This is little Crystal.
She's my little taco girl. Love Daddy?
Huh?
We live for one thing, and that's
the betterment of tomorrow's world,
and that's where our children come in at.
You people go and think what you want to,
but, uh, the proof is in the pudding.
You know,
our children know how to respect,
they know how to be mindful,
they know how to do right,
'cause they see it here.
I think the negotiation team,
uh, essentially, we looked at Koresh as
being a bit of a con man,
a manipulator, a narcissist.
But we think religion
just happened to be the vehicle
that he used to control people.
I think Gary Noesner believes that
he was nothing but a con man. I don't.
I believe not only was David lifted up
and told he was this person.
He may have had doubts, he was human.
But because of the nature
of the time that he had spent,
and what he had overcome
to rise to this level,
to be head of this group,
I believe he truly he truly believed
that he was the Second Coming.
John, I know you take us
for a bunch of idiots.
No, I'm taking this real seriously.
- I don't think serious enough.
- Why?
Because your actions
are just definitely provocative.
See, what you fail to understand, John
Yeah?
is that I'm not afraid to die.
Not at all.
Well, that's commendable.
You wanna pray to some people
this morning, David?
I think you guys
are the ones that better start praying.
I think so.
And we knew
that David Koresh had said,
"I've got .50-caliber weapons."
We knew that they could punch through
the cinder block and the sandbags
and the plates of steel
that we sat behind every day.
They were a significant risk
to our lives in Sierra Two.
And then, one day,
sitting there watching through my scope,
I look up
at a firing port on the building,
and the door to that firing port
falls down.
All of a sudden,
I see a Barrett .50-caliber rifle
pointed straight at me.
So, I got on the radio and I explained
what had happened to the command post.
The command post decided to give
that information to the negotiators.
I got a frantic phone call
in the negotiation room
from Dick Rogers, the head of HRT.
The Davidians were aiming
a .50-caliber sniper rifle at our people.
He said, "You tell them to get that
out of the window and not aimed at us,
or we're gonna take action."
We just got a report,
uh, from one of those guys around outside
that they, um, saw a weapon.
Believe me, they're seeing things.
I checked it out.
There was absolutely nothing.
- There's no .50-caliber?
- No such thing as a .50-caliber
or even a broomstick
sticking out anything out of that wall.
What do you think of that, John?
I watch the muzzle
come out of the building.
I watch the port close back up.
And from that point on,
we never knew
where the .50-caliber was again.
That was not good for us.
So, the tactical team
was really angry at the negotiators.
They blamed us.
We only did that
on the orders of your boss.
Did the negotiators do that
intentionally to hurt us? No.
Did it clearly demonstrate the danger
in a breakdown of communication
between those two elements?
Fuck yes.
What we had here
was a failure to communicate
between the negotiators and the HRT team,
and that plagued this operation
from start to finish.
Last night, David Koresh has made
such statements as,
"We are ready for war."
"Let's get it on."
"I'm going to give you
an opportunity to save yourself,
before you get blown away."
The next morning,
they get into a back-and-forth
where Koresh is threatening them
and saying, "I've got something that can
blow your Bradleys 50 feet in the air."
So, the FBI Hostage Rescue
responds by bringing in Abrams tanks
from down at Fort Hood.
You know, the biggest armored vehicle
that the United States military has.
We see all the tanks in a row.
They came down the hill
and started to set up
one by one in front of the building.
I couldn't fucking believe it.
There was a threat.
When you got over 200 weapons
that are pointed at you
and millions of rounds of ammunition
that they have at their disposal,
they are always posing a threat.
And they've already demonstrated
that they are a threat
by killing four ATF agents.
One day, Mr. Jamar came in,
he had just come from the front lines,
where he had seen
the new military Abrams tank
that we had borrowed from the military,
and, uh, he was really excited
about the capabilities of this tank.
He says, "That thing can start
at this end of the compound
and drive full speed"
And he moves his hand along.
"all the way to the other end,
without stopping."
And one of my negotiation team leaders
unfortunately said,
"Why the hell would they do that?"
He was sent home the next day.
Every step we take, we're taking,
is trying to be a logical step.
If you got somebody
who's threatening you with a .50-caliber,
you're gonna protect yourself.
Bringing these tanks
and stuff around here,
I tell you what,
being an American first
I'm the kind of guy
that I'll stand in front of a tank.
You can run over me,
but I'll be biting one of the tracks.
No one's gonna hurt me or my family.
'Cause that's American policy here.
- You hear the tanks outside?
- Yeah.
- Are you scared?
- No.
What's God gonna do
to our enemies?
Destroy them.
Destroy them.
They take me
to the Children's Home in Waco,
which is a Methodist home.
I felt safe because I was
with all the other children.
But they would record us all the time.
One of the young negotiators on our team
came up with the brilliant idea
to send in a video of the kids,
to reinforce to the moms particularly,
"Your kids aren't going anywhere."
"We're keeping your kids here for you,
Mom and Dad."
"They're here. They're your kids."
"Come out. Become a parent. They need you.
They love you. They want you out."
And we sent the tape in.
There was a woman inside
named Kathy Schroeder.
When we send the tape in,
Kathy sees her young son looking forlorn,
you know, out of place, unhappy.
I have no idea
what's gonna happen to Bryan.
He's by himself, and that upset me.
Because the father of her older kids
showed up in Waco and said,
"I've got joint custody.
These are my kids. I want them."
And he got them.
I feel very relieved.
Um, I'm very happy for the children,
and for my family.
But her son, Bryan,
was still being held
at the Child Protective Services.
- Kathy?
- Yes.
John. How are you?
You've probably seen the kids yourselves
I did.
I was over when the tape was made.
You know Bryan was laying
on the floor the whole time.
- Um
- Bryan's not feeling too good.
- Right.
- He misses his mother deeply,
and it's really affecting him a lot,
you know?
He's just gonna really be
hurting from it.
And she was worried about him.
But I thought we needed to twist that
to not just being worried about him,
but being responsible for him.
"And here's what Bryan needs."
"We're not talking about you, Kathy,
and what you need."
"This is what the little guy needs.
You're the only thing in his world."
I was in turmoil.
That made me rethink my entire
salvation plan.
It made it much more difficult for me to
do God's will.
It was important for us to get Kathy out.
Kathy Schroeder
is a very interesting character in this.
Koresh had a group of guys
called The Mighty Men,
who, I guess, were sort of his little army
within the larger compound.
And she was considered
one of the Mighty Men.
We took nothing for granted
and tried to orchestrate this
down to its fine points.
- Hi, Kathy. How are you?
- Okay.
- I spoke to you the other afternoon.
- Yes.
Yeah. How you doing?
My three-year-old son
is now alone.
I know.
He's not even
with his brothers and sister.
I know.
Although I'd rather be here,
in order to be with Bryan,
I guess I've got to come out.
- Kathy, I know how difficult
- And you realize I don't want to.
I know that very much.
The sooner we'd like
to get you out, the better.
Okay, yes. Don't don't rush me.
No, no. I didn't mean to rush you.
This is a really
- Tough decision.
- A tough thing for me to do.
So, if it's tomorrow,
don't don't think that I'm backing out.
No, I'm not.
I have this idea, I write it
on a note, and I hand it to John.
John looks up at me and kind of smiles,
and he reads it to her.
He said, "Kathy, what Bryan needs now
is a hug from his mommy."
and I know that Bryan
will wanna hug his mommy.
I know that's for sure,
that's a big guarantee.
It was like an arrow
going through the phone line
had struck her in the heart.
For you, it's a tough thing,
but for Bryan, it's the right thing.
I'll see you in a little bit.
- Thank you, John.
- Thank you very much.
- Thanks, Kathy.
- Mm-hmm.
Beautiful job, John. Beautiful.
- Yes!
- Good job.
Good, John.
- How do you feel?
- That is tough. Really feels good.
Way to go.
- I hope so. We can get her out.
- That was very nice. Very nice.
That's a huge nut.
We can get her out.
Don't think
there's any question she's coming out.
She's coming.
Is everyone ready?
An unidentified adult female
has just come out of the compound.
This was a huge success for us.
And we learned so much from Kathy,
uh, you know, about the conditions inside,
what people were thinking,
how much food they had, how much water.
These were things that we
had a desperate need
to want to know and understand,
and she was able
to fill a lot of the gaps we had.
There's my boy!
Here you go, Kathy.
Hi!
Who's this?
Look. Look. Look in there.
Can you make your war face?
Make your war face!
Good boy!
Bryan, look at me.
Who am I?
- Mommy.
- Mommy! Right!
Hug. Hug.
There.
You spend some time with him.
You haven't seen him in a while.
And then they said
that he needed to go eat,
and they took him away.
And then I didn't see him again.
They put me in an orange jumpsuit
and shipped me off to jail.
Kathy, did you do anything wrong?
Katherine Schroeder did knowingly,
willfully, and unlawfully,
conspire and agree
with persons known and unknown
to attempt to kill,
with malice aforethought,
several Special Agents
of the Bureau of ATF.
The ATF said that
anyone coming out will be charged
if the facts are substantiated.
I was quite upset, because
We protested as negotiators.
I said, "The people inside are watching
what happens to people that come out."
So, if they thought they were
gonna face serious charges,
that was not going
to encourage other people to come out.
I was angry.
I was very angry.
You know what? It pisses me off.
Anyone knows that
the government's not gonna lose, right?
They're gonna get whatever they want,
one way or another.
We didn't believe anything they said.
Would you like to come out?
Yeah, what for? So they can
put us all in jail and throw away the key?
We walk out there,
you'll handcuff us.
- Put us in solitary confinement.
- Not gonna
- Nobody will talk to us.
- Why say that?
Everyone will be arrested,
everybody will be jailed.
- David
- You're No, you listen to me.
- You are a damn liar!
- Not
- Well, you're wrong, David.
- You are a liar!
One night, I was on shift,
and it's two o'clock in the morning.
I'm sitting behind my rifle.
I'm doing my survey of the building,
and I'm looking at that window.
And I look off at something else.
And I look back, and it was David Koresh.
The David Koresh.
He's looking out the window,
and he's looking at me.
He doesn't know who I am.
He knows where I am.
He knows what I am.
And he knows I'm looking at him too.
And I'm leaning over my rifle,
and I'm looking through the scope.
It's 297 yards from the tip of my barrel
to the point of his nose.
And I knew that I could shoot
a dime at 300 yards.
The wind is still, elevation's flat,
the humidity is low. It's a simple shot.
If I pull the trigger,
the leader's dead.
The kids are safe.
They all come out. It's over.