When Jeff Guinn was reporting on his 2019 book, Tramps, he learned that his main subjects, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, enjoyed spending time in Fort Myers, Florida. While there, they enjoyed visiting the complex created by Cyrus Teed, a late nineteenth-century religious thug who began calling himself simply “Koresh,” the Hebrew pronunciation of the name of the Persian king Cyrus, of which Teed called himself a new iteration. This Koresh, who had several hundred followers, insisted that he was the Lamb, the one who would open the Seven Seals of God named in the Bible and, along with his followers, take a prominent place in God’s new Kingdom. All this sounded familiar to Guinn. It sounded like the tone of another sidekick, David.

These sorts of previously unknown details could spur any author to write the next book, but for a writer infatuated with dangerous demagogues, they were impossible to ignore. The tragedy of David Koresh and his followers, an offshoot of the Davidians (an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists), has been recounted ad infinitum in other books and films. It is widely known that Koresh saw a holy war on the horizon pitting his believers against the outside world, and that Koresh was a polygamist who had sex with underage girls in an attempt to spread his seed for his post-apocalyptic kingdom. Documentaries and podcasts cover the 1993 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raid and the FBI siege of the Davidian compound outside of Waco. If Guinn was going to write about David’s branch, he needed something new. Theed’s revelation was certainly true. “We found strong evidence that David Koresh copied all of his major prophecies from an earlier Koresh who was active in Florida,” Guinn says from his home in Fort Worth.

Theed’s story appears at the beginning of Guinn’s new book. Waco: David Koresh, Branch David and Legacy of Rage (Simon & Schuster, January 24), dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the blockade. Guinn, whose previous books include Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson and Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the People’s Templealways finds new information. He spent 25 years, many of them as an investigative journalist, in Fort Worth Star-Telegram, using your gift to find people who are rarely or never interviewed and get them to tell their stories. “He always seems to find someone who knew something but never talked to the press,” says Robert Bender, editor of Guinn at Simon & Schuster. “It goes back to his personality. He is someone you are comfortable with and you have an innate trust in him and you are willing to sit down and talk to him. He’s a very personable guy.”

Nice guy with dark interests. Per Waco, Guinn spoke to disgruntled former ATF agents who never commented on the disastrous, poorly planned February 28, 1993 raid that ended in the deaths of four agents and six members of David’s branch. He found an FBI analyst who was on the ground nearly two months later during the FBI siege and ensuing hell that killed 76 of Koresh’s followers. And he talked to the surviving members of Koresh’s pack, who still believe what their leader told them. “You have to remember that all these people feel they are being unfairly persecuted,” Guinn says. “If any of these people – and they keep in touch with each other – are like, ‘Hey, this guy may not agree with us, but at least he will tell our version of the story as we see it. “then you get to talk to other people.”

The result is a panoramic view of a horrifying sequence of events. Leaders naturally disagree on important details, and the fog of war tends to obscure them. But here’s the short version: The ATF, believing that Koresh and his followers were converting a large number of semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons (true) and manufacturing drugs (false), carried out the raid, although it now seems obvious that they have lost all elements of surprise. It ended badly. Nearly two months later, the FBI, dissatisfied with negotiations that had gone nowhere, threw gas canisters at the Davidian compound, which soon burned down in front of the world on TV.

Guinn details all of this from a variety of perspectives. But it goes much deeper. As in his other cult studies, he asks the reader to consider the nature of faith. As Guinn reveals, the Waco conflict was actually a battle between two universes: one based on secular law and order; the other created his own belief system based on Koresh’s claims of piety and his insistence that war with the forces of Babylon (the world outside the complex) is not only inevitable but desirable. Both sides barely tried to understand each other; the book makes it clear that the federal agencies had no idea how willing the Davidians were to die.

“The followers of Koresh – and it took me almost two years to figure it out after talking to survivors over and over again – everything they did in their lives, from getting up in the morning to they ate and the clothes they wore were based on what they thought God wanted them to be,” Guinn says. “They still believe to this day that the original ATF raid and FBI siege were a violation of their religious freedom.” Guinn doesn’t think Koresh is a con man (unlike, say, Charles Manson). Koresh fully believed in what he was selling.

Guinn doesn’t always write about charismatic cult leaders. His other items range from Santa (Autobiography of Santa Claus) in the Texas Rangers (War on the border). But when it gets dark, its purpose is to separate myth from fact, conspiracy from careful explanation. He wants people to understand. Speaking about Charles Manson, he shows how a group of aimless Californian children can fall under the influence of an intoxicating swindler. Along with Jim Jones, he shows how the social reformer used his pulpit to fight racism before arrogance and drugs led him to mass murder.

Guinn sees two similarities in the figures of his unholy trinity and in other cult leaders. First, they insist that the leader is the only person who can hold back the forces of evil (or, as a recent presidential candidate put it, “only I can fix this”). Another consistent message is that outsiders are evil (for example, the media is the enemy of the people). Such traits are hardly limited to maniacs. “Every politician engages in demagoguery to some degree,” Guinn says. “Choose me or the country goes to hell.”

Guinn recently called Katherine Schroeder, a surviving member of David’s chapter who remains a true believer. He wanted to tell her about Cyrus Theed’s findings, prepare her for the revelations of the book. She was open and helpful when he interviewed her earlier; he thought he owed her a favor. “I knew it would be a blow to her, but I respected her so much that I wanted to tell her myself so she could ask any questions she might have for me,” Guinn says. “And we really parted on good terms after talking. One of the things that happens when you write these books is that even if you don’t agree with someone’s point of view, you can appreciate them as people.”