She delighted her new husband by giving birth to a boy they named Roger. “My knight in shining armor,” she called Roy “Rocky” Haldeman, a burly navy vet, the sort of proprietor who could break up a bar fight or win one.īy the time they married in 1965, Roy was thirty-six. The owner liked the lively new girl with the auburn hair. “A lot of prostitutes hung around,” she recalled, “but they didn’t work out of there.” With its mirrored walls and green neon, the Jade Lounge seemed posh to her. After a brief marriage to an ex-con who beat her, she lied about her age and worked as a waitress at a nightclub on a tumbledown block of Houston’s Canal Street. She cleaned houses and offices for a realtor. She named him Vernon Wayne Howell and raised him while working two or three jobs at a time. “God had a plan for my life and Vernon’s life, which didn’t include Bobby.”īonnie gave her son his father’s name anyway. “Daddy signed the papers, but Bobby backed out,” she remembered. The age of consent was seventeen, but a fourteen-year-old Texan could marry with parental consent. Bonnie dropped out of eighth grade to have their baby. Bobby Howell was a high school senior, a good kisser with a pickup truck. His mother was fourteen years old.īonnie Clark told friends she was “sort of engaged” to the baby’s father. Vernon Howell, who would later take the name David Koresh, was born in Houston on a sweltering morning in August 1959. What he did, I think, was to make his followers feel that they had a great role to play in the coming apocalypse.”īook excerpt: ‘Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias I happen to believe that David Koresh was a monster. It was that he was able to make the Bible - the often confusing, often conflicting stories of the Bible - compelling to have great meaning to his followers,” Cook says. “The thing about Koresh was not really charisma. The Branch Davidians focused on the violence in the Book of Revelation and believed a final battle was coming with “Babylon,” the term members used to describe the FBI and ATF, Cook says.Īnd when government forces struck the compound, followers took the tanks rolling in as proof that their charismatic leader Koresh was right about the world ending before their eyes. Kevin Cook is the author of “Waco Rising.” (Pamela Marin)Īuthor Kevin Cook dives deep into the siege and what happened after in his new book, “ Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias.”
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