The FBI has evidence that a Branch Davidian member fatally shot cult leader David Koresh after seeing him trying to flee the sect’s burning compound and apparently deciding that the self-proclaimed messiah was a fraud, FBI Agent Bob Ricks said.
Steve Schneider “had given up everything that he owned to this man,” said Ricks, who was the FBI’s chief spokesman and one of the bureau’s three commanders in Waco during the cult’s 51-day siege this year.
“In the end, we think [Schneider) probably realized he was dealing with a fraud,” Ricks said.
Ricks made the comments in an Aug. 25 speech to a Tulsa, Okla., civic group. His speech offered the first public suggestion by any official involved in the siege or investigation that Koresh’s death on April 19 was not a suicide or part of a suicide pact.
Ricks’ account supports the contention of FBI siege commanders and senior FBI officials that Koresh was a fraudulent sociopath unlikely to commit suicide. The account also reflects most of the other key psychological theories that FBI agents emphasized during the siege.
Survivors of the standoff and attorneys who represented Koresh and Schneider, who was Koresh’s lieutenant during the siege, have said the sect members would not have willingly caused their own deaths or the deaths of other Branch Davidians.
An FBI spokesman in Oklahoma said Ricks, who heads the bureau’s Oklahoma City office, declined to be interviewed.
Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani, who performed autopsies on the two men’s bodies and on more than 80 others recovered after the April 19 fire, said Koresh’s body was too badly burned to determine whether the single gunshot to his forehead was self-inflicted.
But he said “it is possible” that the cult leader was killed by a vengeful Schneider, who also died of a gunshot and whose body was found next to Koresh’s.
Although it is impossible to tell whether the two were killed by the same gun, Peerwani said that Koresh was unarmed and that Schneider’s body had a rifle next to it.
“The FBI has something we don’t have: There were listening devices in there,” Peerwani said. “I can’t rule it out.”
Several officials outside the FBI but familiar with the Branch Davidian investigation were surprised at the detail with which Ricks described Koresh’s death.
“I’ve never heard that,” one said on Friday. “It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but I’ve never heard that.”
