Waco Compound Draws Curious -- Koresh Tragedy Develops An Afterlife

WACO, Texas - The satellite trucks and the reporters are long gone, and the bold headlines are history. But few people have forgotten what used to be on this quiet plain outside Waco.

Not Bryce Rawlinson, a retired neighbor who bicycles up to the old Branch Davidian compound every day, chats with the security guards and pets Junkyard, the sad-eyed dog that once belonged to David Koresh.

Not John Ellis, a protester who sits by the locked gate in the 103-degree heat, selling those memorable pictures of the compound shimmering in the distance, some with the final flames, some without.

And certainly not Sheila Martin, a survivor who lives, for now, like a half-dozen other survivors, in a neat, empty room at the Brittney Hotel.

Martin's four oldest children perished in the fire that ended Koresh's 51-day standoff against federal agents April 19.

The fire also left Martin a widow. She is resigned in the knowledge that people always will wonder why Wayne, her husband, a reserved lawyer educated at Harvard, felt such deep loyalty for Koresh.

"Nobody understands," said Martin, 46. "I think people seemed to feel somehow or other that, because my husband was intelligent, he shouldn't believe what he believed. It wasn't about David. It was about what he taught us. If we, the people who came out of this alive, if we had not had this training, if all we saw was David Koresh, I could not be sitting here talking. I would lose my mind."

HAUNTING AFTERLIFE

Some tragedies, some huge media events, have a long, strange afterlife. Who could imagine that each week hundreds of sightseers - bus loads of gospel singers, Methodist and Lutheran ministers, prosperous couples with video cameras and once an entire women's basketball team - would seek out this spot on the central Texas plains, peer through the chain-link fence, trudge quietly around the perimeter? What are they hoping to find?

There is little to see. Bulldozers worked over the area in mid-May. A fence surrounds the three-acre core, marking an area quarantined by the state health department. As if the fence were a memorial to the Branch Davidian dead, people have left flowers threaded through its links.

David Pareya, a McLennan County justice of the peace, said no one knows how many people died in the fire. Many of the corpses remain unidentified and unburied. The best guess, he said, is at least 80 deaths.

A few items tug at the heart - a baby's crib, damaged but still white, propped against the fence, and a child's small bicycle, blackened and partly melted, lying broken on its side.

JUST TAKING A LOOK

The significance was not lost on Doug and Lesley Young as they wandered over the site. They had seen it on television so many times, beginning Feb. 28, when four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and six Branch Davidians died in a shootout after a failed raid; continuing through the standoff, and ending when a fire swiftly turned the compound into a tomb.

"We just wanted to see what it was like," said Leslie Young, 25, a teacher, who recently moved here with her husband from Odessa, Texas. "It kind of haunts you."

The Youngs could get back into their car, stop at the Dairy Queen for a milkshake as they had planned and try to put the spookiness of the scene out of their minds. But Sheila Martin and other Branch Davidians who wait and pray at the Brittney Hotel cannot escape their memories.

It has been said the Brittney is not exactly the Ritz. But for many weeks, it has been the most accommodating of havens for Martin and the others.

Although a dozen Branch Davidians are in the county jail on murder and weapons charges, others such as Martin are considered material witnesses. They are free to move about Waco but not to leave town. Catherine Matteson, 77, the oldest Koresh follower to walk out of the compound alive, also lives in the Brittney.

SALVATION AT BRITTNEY

During these days in limbo, their salvation, they said, has been the Brittney's owner, Mark Domangue, who with his wife, Wyliene, and two small daughters have welcomed the dispossessed men and women with open arms and free lodging. Domangue, 32, feels strongly that the constitutional rights of the Branch Davidians were violated and has posted bond for several group members.

"Well, they're people," said Domangue, who attends a local Baptist church. "I never saw them as cultists. I saw them as people."

He said he has conducted his own investigation into what happened at the compound. "I like to know the truth about things. I'm not a nosy person, but I like to know what happened. I'm not anti-government either, but from that very first press conference they held, they had four different versions of what went on during the siege.

"And then the stories changed again from time to time. It really disappointed me that the government could get away with that. Well, they get away with it all the time, but nobody knows the magnitude."

Domangue does not believe the government's conclusion that Koresh and his followers died in a mass suicide. Too much does not add up, he said. Of course, Sheila Martin does not believe that account, either. Wayne would not kill himself, she said. David would not kill himself.

Now other people - still curious, still troubled, still unsatisfied and seeking answers - try to get as close as they can to her former home.

A retired city employee, Rawlinson, 66, chatted with Norma Vollintine, one of two private security guards always on duty. She has adopted Junkyard the dog and brings him food. As daylight faded, silhouettes of several couples drawn to the site shone black in the distance. One group approached, video camera in tow.

"I gotta say it's kind of spooky out here," said Scott Thomas, 31, as he and his wife, July, and their small daughter studied the ruins. "A lot of poor souls out here who didn't want to die."