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From Wondry, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.

Today we wrap up our series on the tragedy in Waco, Texas. The story began in the early 1980s, with a man named Vernon Howell, who rose to power in a then little known religious group called the Branch Dividians. His leadership changed the group, and Howell, who eventually took the name David Caresh, and began to work with the new generation of the American Scandal.

Today we wrap up our series on the tragedy in Waco, Texas. The story began in the early 1980s, with a man named Vernon Howell, who rose to power in a then little known religious group called the Branch Dividians.

His leadership changed the group, and Howell, who eventually took the name David Caresh, and began teaching a dark vision of apocalypse.

Caresh directed his followers to begin firearms training, fortify their compound in a mass and arsenal. These activities caught the attention of federal authorities, and a series of charges were brought against the group, including allegations of weapons violations.

The investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms led to a shootout at Mount Carmel Center, the compound that Branch Dividians called home, 10 miles east of Waco, Texas.

The violence that day, with the start of a 51 day standoff that ended on April 19, 1993, on that morning, a fire broke out inside the compound, and killed 76 Branch Dividians, including Caresh and a number of children.

The fateful events at Waco have been the subject of countless articles, books, and movies, the inspiration for further violence, the subject of intense and partisan congressional investigations, and would forever change America's views about the rights of citizens and government's use of force.

Today I'm speaking with Eric Benson, senior editor at Texas Monthly.

In April of 2018, the 25th anniversary of the Waco siege, Benson wrote a series of articles for Texas Monthly that helped shed new light on the tragedy at Mount Carmel.

We talk today about how the public viewed the events at Waco at the time, and how the federal government has since been questioned about its role in the tragedy.

Eric Benson, welcome to American scandal.

Thanks, Lindsey.

It's been 27 years since the events at Waco. That's a fairly long time, and the nation was different then.

So could you give us an idea of where we were and how the public initially viewed the events at Waco?

I think for a few reasons it took the public a little bit of time to catch on to what was going on at the branch to Vittian compound.

That first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 had happened on February 26th, which was two days before the initial ATF raid on the branch to Vittian compound.

So most of the media attention and really the law enforcement, national law enforcement attention was on that major terrorist attack in New York City, and that first ATF raid made the news, but it was really just as it became clear that this was not going to be something that ended in a day that was going to involve a siege that it kind of became, you know, that became nightly news.

And of course you're dealing with a media environment where people have newspapers and they have the television news, you know, the worldwide web, just barely existed.

There was no social media.

So the kind of media that people had to find out about this event were much more limited.

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