For the survivors to join Koresh’s divine army they, too, would have to be dead before 6 August. Those of Koresh’s followers who were not consumed in the flames of Waco were to prepare for the event under the guidance of a Davidian by the code name of The Chosen Vessel.It was when Ken Newport began to find out who this might be that all communication was ended with a final e-mail: “We perceive now that you are not a seeker after the truth.”But Dr Newport continued to comb through what had already been made available to him The conclusions he was forced to disturbed him. Their massive documents on the Web revealed that a code-breaking of a combination of dates in Revelation and the prophetic book of Daniel suggested that Koresh would return on 6 August, at the head of 200 million horsemen (see Rev 9:16) to cleanse the earth and slaughter the rest of us. The cult members began to get wary when Dr Newport started to ask about their belief that Koresh is due to return from the dead in the near future.
Nor was it his questions about the awful events at Waco, at which the FBI acquitted themselves so poorly. (George was later sent to an asylum after drawing a third Davidian into a row over whether George or Koresh had been chosen by God to be the seventh and final angel named in the Bible; when the third man insisted it was neither of them but him, George chopped him up with an axe.)But it was none of this which prompted the Davidians’ letters and e-mails to Ken Newport suddenly to halt. A gun battle ensued and, though the police arrested everyone, no one was convicted – though George was given six months for contempt of court for threatening the judge with plagues and herpes. To settle the leadership issue, Ken Newport discovered, George Roden dug up the remains of an 85- year-old Davidian who had died some 20 years earlier, and challenged Koresh to a Resurrection Contest. But by then David Koresh was on the scene and things began to turn from the merely eccentric to the downright dangerous.
And after Victor’s wife and successor Florence gathered the movement’s 940 members together for another unsuccessful Doomsday on 22 April 1959, it split again, with Ben Roden and his wife Lois forming the Branch Davidians.In theory, the succession should have passed to their son George. A washing machine salesman called Victor Houteff led a breakaway called the Davidian Seventh Day Adventists. Among the several new groups which sprang from the disillusioned Millerites was the Seventh Day Adventists, whose recruits included one John Kellogg, who developed for his brethren a special vegetarian breakfast food called cornflakes.Yet it was a movement doomed to schism. It was then that his followers began the long process of coming to terms with what they dubbed The Great Disappointment. Slowly he began to piece together the story which has so unnerved him.The first piece in the jigsaw went back to 23 October 1844 – the day after the world didn’t end as William Miller had predicted.
