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03/02/93
Law officers close in on cult Divided Davidian: Kin call Koresh loving; others say he's a bully
By Bill Minutaglio, Jeffrey Weiss / The Dallas Morning News
The family of Vernon Wayne Howell remembers a personable kid with a gift for resurrecting broken machinery.
Some former followers of David Koresh describe him as a disagreeable, profane bully. The Waco Tribune-Herald reports that he had sex with young girls in the name of God. And Mr. Koresh, 33 years old and the son of a carpenter, claims to be Jesus Christ returned.
Mr. Howell, the boy who knocked around Dallas and East Texas with a pooch named Jet Fuel, became Mr. Koresh, the cult leader now tied to the deaths of four federal agents.
Vernon Howell, born out of wedlock, didn't meet his father until he was 17, family members said. David Koresh, an identity born of his own religious convictions, is the self-acclaimed representative of God for more than 75 people.
Even his mother seemed confused by the contradictions Monday.
During an interview at her East Texas home in Chandler, Bonnie Haldeman alternated between calling her son Vernon, the name she gave him, and David, the name he legally chose in 1990.
"He is not a vicious person,' she said. "He's not the monster experts say he is. He loves children.'
His paternal grandmother blamed the government for starting the violence that may also have killed two of Mr. Koresh's followers and left 15 other federal agents wounded.
"I know they did. In my heart, I know they did,' Jean Holub said.
"Because he was a loving child, wanted to help everybody.'
She remembered the infant who lived with her.
"I kept him, rocked him, sang to him,' said Mrs. Holub, a
68-year-old former seamstress who lives in Houston.
But a former follower quoted as part of an investigation by the Waco newspaper offered a radically different view.
"He has totally changed,' said Robyn Bunds. "He was really nice. He was humble. He was very well-mannered. Over the years, though, he's lost a lot of those qualities. He's become this obnoxious, foul-mouth, pushy person because of the power he has over these people.'
Mr. Koresh's relatives spent Monday recounting childhood stories in a futile attempt to reconcile the person they knew with the carnage near Waco.
His mother spoke of how he memorized the New Testament when he was 12, about the same time he was struggling in grammar school to overcome a learning disability.
"He would come home and go out to the barn and pray for hours,' she said. "I've seen him sitting by his bed, on his knees for hours, crying and praying.'
His maternal grandmother, Erline Clark, tearfully spoke of the boy who lived with her as a toddler, then returned for a year in his teens.
Mrs. Clark, 68, also lives near Chandler. She said young Vernon called her Mama and was "never a trouble-starter.' His passion, then and now, was fishing, she said.
"Anywhere he lived, he fished,' she recalled. She pulled out a photo of the boy, his dog and a fishing rod.
Young Vernon, his mother and the man she married several years after Vernon was born lived in the Dallas area, near Chandler and in Tyler. He attended public and church schools but was firmly grounded in Seventh-day Adventist doctrine, his family said.
Mrs. Clark, a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, speculated Monday why her grandson twisted so far from what he once believed.
Passionate for religion
Mrs. Clark, who frequently paused to stab at her eyes with an already soaked tissue, said Mr. Koresh was passionate about religion by the time he was in his late teens.
He frequently asked questions at church in Tyler and often volunteered for different church programs. He grew frustrated at his not being invited to participate more often in Adventist activities in Tyler, she said.
He was pushed away by some members of the church after he developed a romantic attachment to the daughter of an Adventist minister, she said.
"It was mostly the coldness of the church he was in that affected him,' she said.
She was troubled by some of what Mr. Koresh had told her recently about his life. In their last extensive conversation before the siege, he told her that he had eight wives and 13 children. Even so, Mrs. Clark doubted published reports that her grandson had sex with young girls.
"Vernon may have had a few young wives, but he would never abuse any children,' she said.
She and other family members remember a young man who seemed to be able to fix anything he laid his hands on, an outgoing person who was highly energetic and even someone who always had a "good business sense about him.'
An aunt, Sharon Kidd, 30, of Tyler, said "the only mean thing that I ever saw him do was blow up a frog' with a firecracker. But she said young Vernon was a positive influence on his younger relatives.
"When we were growing up, he was very protective of us,' she said.
"He never did any drugs.'
But she acknowledged that he may have experimented with marijuana.
Through his late 20s, she said, he was so busy the family would see
him less and less and when they did hook up, "he would talk about Revelations and the end of the world.'
An uncle, Kenneth Clark, a 29-year-old carpenter, said he last saw Mr. Koresh two years ago when he helped him assemble 20 toy wagons for the children at the Waco compound. He remembers there being guns at the compound but said Mr. Koresh "was investing in guns to sell them for money.'
Mr. Koresh was born in Houston but moved frequently during his childhood. He spent several years bouncing around the Dallas area, compiling an erratic school record.
Dallas school records show that he enrolled at Alex Sanger Elementary in Dallas in the 1965-66 school year but did not receive a report card.
Garland school records show him in Garland schools for much of the eighth and ninth grades.
He spent the first 10 weeks of his sophomore year at Dallas Junior Academy, a school affiliated with the Dallas First Seventh-day Adventist Church. But he returned to Garland High School to finish out the year and spent parts of his junior and senior years in Garland public schools.
The district has no record of Mr. Koresh playing football for the school as reported by Mr. Koresh's stepfather.
"He was an average student,' said Garland spokesman Steve Knagg, who said confidentiality rules prohibited him from releasing the man's grades.
Mr. Koresh's family said the young man left school before graduating and started a search for religious truth that eventually led to Branch Davidian and Sunday's violence.
First, he searched out the father he had never met, said his father's mother, Mrs. Holub.
"He did that on his own,' she said. "He came to Houston and started calling Howells until one of them knew where I was, and he came to see me.'
She called his father, Bobby, who now lives near Liberty and has six other children, and they had a reunion that she still remembers fondly.
"Everybody hugged everybody,' she said.
But even then, the would-be prophet was deeply into religion, his
father recalled distastefully.
"I told him I didn't want to talk religion,' Mr. Howell told KHOU-TV (Channel 11) in Houston. "The time I'd seen him before, he preached at me the whole time.'
World traveler
Mr. Koresh spent the next few years traveling around the world, family members say. For a while, he was in California and Australia, where he lived with branches of his cult.
In 1987, he and seven of his followers were back in Waco, engaging in a shootout over the property now besieged by federal agents.
Mr. Koresh and his followers were charged with attempted murder and criminal conspiracy in the death of George Roden, a rival sect leader who then controlled the compound.
El-Hadi J. Shabazz was the McLennan County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case. Though none of the men were convicted, Mr. Shabazz said Monday that he could see where Mr. Koresh's religious approach was leading.
"It didn't take any special kind of prophecy to predict that just what's happening now was inevitable. You have a man who is considered the Messiah, who was the guru of this group, and who would do anything he asked them to do. Anything,' Mr. Shabazz said.
Mrs. Holub is mystified about that side of her grandson. She is a Jehovah's Witness, but her children are of various faiths, she said. Religious fanaticism did not come from her side of the family, she said.
But grandmother and grandson do share a strong religious world view. Mrs. Holub may not understand the details, but she knows who she blames for the evil that seems to have swallowed Mr. Koresh.
"The world's not like it was,' she said. "We're getting happenings every day because Satan is ruling this world.'
Staff writers Bruce Nichols in Houston, Lee Hancock in Waco and Melanie Lewis and Joe Garcia in Dallas and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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