Alabama Man Sympathizes with Waco Cult

Except for Branch Davidian cult member Amo Bishop Roden hawking David Koresh souvenirs on the other side of Texas Farm Road 2491, John Ellis stands alone outside the gate which marks the road that leads to Mount Carmel's burnt remains.
Approximately four months ago, this 77-acre tract of land, located about 10 miles east of Waco, was a dramatically busier scene, with U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents, along with state and national military personnel and an enormous media contingent trying to wait out a 51-day siege of Koresh and his followers. They had been camped inside the compound he called Camp Apocalypse since the Feb. 28 raid that left four federal agents and several cultists dead.
The siege ended when more than 70 Branch Davidians died in the burning of the Mount Carmel compound April 19.
Now Ms. Roden, the former wife of George Roden, the Davidian leader who was ousted from the property after a 1987 shootout with Koresh, and Ellis, a 53-year-old pastor of a one-man Chilton County Seventh Day Adventist Church, are all that greet the tourists, sometimes as many as 1,000 a day, who visit the site that made Waco infamous.
For the past month, Ellis has been standing a 24-hour watch over the Branch Davidian legacy, while all surviving male cultists are in Texas jails, and a conspiracy of the government to hide the evidence of what he calls the "Waco holocaust."
Ellis was planting trees and pastoring in Plantersville, which is located near Selma. When Ellis heard a Branch Davidian survivor talking on public radio about the government's bulldozing of the Mount Carmel remains in May, he began buying advertisements in national newspapers denouncing the ATF's handling of the crisis. He moved to Waco in July and has been at his post since, even sleeping in his pickup truck.
Since the compound burned, bulldozers cleared the site and a water tower disappeared, along with more than $30,000 of the Branch Davidians' personal property, Ellis said. In addition to blaming the ATF for starting the fires April 19, cult survivors also charge that more than 20 more of Koresh's followers died than was reported. Those bodies, they say, are buried in an underground bus that was completely covered during the bulldozing.
"It's a big joke around here," Ellis said. "They've been constantly destroying the scene of the crime. Pretty soon, it's going to look like a cow pasture.
"The ATF signed contract with Loop 340 (a Waco construction company) and on May 12-13, two bulldozers go out with front-end loaders. The ATF told them to dig up all the dirt on top of the buried bus and cave in the buried bus.
"If you go down to the Brittany Hotel in Austin, you will find a bunch of ladies there who will tell you that at least 20 Davidians ran out of the fire and the government shot them dead as they ran out and they dumped the bodies in the underground bus."
The Waco Tribune-Herald, the newspaper which was on the receiving end of criticism from ATF officials for printing "The Sinful Messiah," a series about Koresh, directly before the invasion, confirmed the claims about the bulldozing of the property.
The paper did not confirm the conflicting death tolls. But Ellis does have two sets of compound floor plans. One has the 80-plus names of Davidian casualties that the FBI released. The other, which Ellis said was left by FBI agents at a Waco hospital several days after the tragic end of the siege, has 20 more names.
Ellis, who considers his Plantersville church a breakaway from the Adventists' as the Davidians consider themselves, despite the Adventists' protests otherwise, had been a cult sympathizer since the siege began.
Following the fire, Ellis created the "Widows and Orphans Fund - Waco Holocaust Survivors World Council of Seventh-Day Adventists."
Now, he greets the many gawking tourists of the Mount Carmel ruins with genuine Alabama hospitality, although he's a Wisconsin native.
EE Ranch Road, which leads from Farm Road 2491 to the compound remains, was closed after FBI tanks ripped holes in it during the siege and residents complained about the tourists afterward. Tourists park outside the gate and walk through a pathway by Ellis' post to continue down the mile to where Mount Carmel used to stand. EE Ranch Road is scheduled to be re-opened this month.
The Branch Davidian survivors want people to visit the remains of their compound. Directions to Mount Carmel are available at Waco's visitor center and The Texas Rangers Museum. The compound is located off of I-35 North near Lake Brazos. Tourists take the Lake Brazos exit, turn left on Orchard Lane and right on Loop 340, where white crosses have been placed in memory of the Mount Carmel dead.
Ellis speaks softly, but he also has some angry words at his disposal. Some of them are written on the sign at his post that solicits volunteers to serve as armed guards. The sign instructs guards to "not use deadly violence unless person destroying evidence uses deadly force first" or doesn't obey commands to leave evidence alone.
Tourists are given invitations to a weekly open debate on the issue of "an independent investigation into the Mount Carmel holocaust and bearing loaded arms to stop the massive destruction of evidence in burnt ruins."
The anger seeps through when Ellis is asked about one of the hottest topics in Waco recently - the prospects of a monument to the people who died in the Feb. 28 ATF raid and the April 19 burning of the compound. Public sentiment seems to favor a monument, although a source at the Tribune-Herald said it would have to be from a private contributor because the government has no such plans.
Like the cult survivors, Ellis wants a memorial, but only for the Branch Davidians who perished, not for the four agents killed in the raid.
"I'm afraid the government wants to make it into a monument to the four ATF killers," he said.