Waco Cult Children Tell Of Sex, Paddlings -- Koresh Gave `Ready' Girls Plastic Stars Of David

NEW YORK - Children who left the Branch Davidian cult compound said David Koresh gave girls as young as 11 plastic Stars of David that signified they were ready to have sex with him.

Today's New York Times, quoting therapists working with surviving cult children, said Koresh also told youngsters to call their parents "dogs" and only he was to be referred to as their father.

The cult's compound in Waco, Texas, the therapists said, became "a misguided paramilitary community" in which sex, violence, fear, love and religion were all intertwined.

The Times quoted from the report of a team headed by Dr. Bruce Perry, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. The team interviewed 19 of the 21 surviving children of the cult, ages 4 to 11, who left the compound during the 52-day siege that began Feb. 28.

Perry said the children were reluctant to divulge the cult's secrets at first. "Over the course of two months, the kids became increasingly open about 11- and 12-year-old girls being David's wives," he said.

The Stars of David indicated that girls had "the light" and were ready to have sex with the cult leader. None of the girls who left said they actually had been sexually abused by Koresh.

Perry said several of the girls had marks on their buttocks that probably were caused by paddling. He said the children told of being struck with a paddle called "the helper" for offenses as minor as spilling milk.

Federal officials, including Attorney General Janet Reno, cited reports of child abuse as justification for the raid that began hours before a fire April 19 that destroyed the compound.

Many current cult members and their lawyers have insisted that such charges were baseless.

Some pictures that were drawn by the children were released yesterday.

In one, a little girl drew herself smiling under twinkling Stars of David. In another, a child, asked to draw what would happen to the cultists, showed a stairway leading from the compound to a heaven where a smiling sun or God peeks over a rainbow.

In one picture, a girl who was asked to draw where she lives depicted a house with bullet holes in the roof, beneath a rainbow heaven.

Perry said the children, interviewed before the fire, had made "many, many, many allusions to explosions."

"We'd ask them, `What do you think is going to happen?' " Perry said. "They'd say, `Everyone is going to die,' or, `We're going to blow you all up.' "

In related developments:

-- Investigators say they will have a difficult time determining if Koresh killed himself because all the skin was burned off his face and there was a massive skull fracture. Pathologists have reconstructed the skull and some of the facial tissue but they haven't determined the distance from which the shot was fired. -- The Treasury Depertment selected a three-member panel to review its internal investigation of the original assault on the compound.

Panel members are Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams, former chief Watergate prosecutor Henry Ruth Jr. and Edwin Guthman, a professor at the University of Southern California who won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1950 while working for The Seattle Times.