Shortly before he died, David Koresh was thinking about what would be left behind. If and when he ended up in the hands of the authorities, he knew that his guilt or innocence in court would likely depend on the physical evidence. “David trusted the Texas Rangers far more than he did the FBI. He wanted the Rangers to be in control of what they called the crime scene once we left. We felt they’d be impartial. We didn’t think the FBI would be impartial,” recalls David Thibodeau, the author of the recently released A Place Called Waco. Of course, Koresh never got to a courtroom. But the Rangers were entrusted with the crime scene soon after the fires burned out. And up until September, they were in control of all of the evidence collected from the scene of the fire. But the Rangers’ involvement, and the friction between their agency and federal law enforcement authorities, particularly the FBI, has become a major factor in the latest developments in the Waco story.
It was the Rangers who accompanied filmmaker Michael McNulty as he went through the storage lockers at Department of Public Safety headquarters, reviewing the evidence and eventually finding the pyrotechnic devices that helped reignite the controversy surrounding the events at Waco. And some of the most inflammatory statements about the devices and other evidence have come from DPS chairman James B. Francis Jr. In late July, Francis, who was appointed by Gov. George W. Bush, told The Dallas Morning News that the Department of Justice’s years-long efforts to prevent the public from seeing the evidence was “in effect a cover-up. It is not intended to be, but in effect it is. It is a complete stonewall.”
In August, after a former FBI agent told reporters that the FBI fired two military pyrotechnic tear gas grenades into the Davidian compound on the final day of the siege, Francis, who happens to be one of Bush’s key fundraisers and a recruiter for the fundraising group known as the Pioneers, told reporters that the revelation “goes a long way toward confirming why I say that some of the evidence that DPS has or had in its possession is problematical and needs to be evaluated by independent experts. A fair-minded person who looks at this evidence would see that there is a problem with some of the things that the federal government has said happened that day.”
The Rangers and the FBI are reluctant to discuss the friction between the law enforcement agencies. “There’s nothing to it,” said one FBI source. Mike Cox, a spokesman for the DPS, also refused to address the issue: “We work with the FBI every day all across the state of Texas. We are just responding to a subpoena from the House Government Reform Committee,” he said.
Whatever their public statements, it appears that the Rangers finally lost their patience with federal authorities. As the caretakers of 12 tons of evidence collected from Mt. Carmel, the Rangers were caught between members of the public, like McNulty, who wanted to look at the evidence, and the Department of Justice, which wanted to keep it away from critical eyes. When members of the public asked to see the evidence, the DOJ told them the evidence was being held by the DPS. When those same people went to the DPS, they were told they had to get approval from the DOJ.
After years of being stuck in the middle, the DPS decided it wanted out. Earlier this year, Francis asked U.S. District Judge Walter Smith of Waco, who is handling the civil lawsuit against the government, to take custody of the evidence. Smith agreed. But before the DPS turned over the evidence, it decided to do its own analysis of the materials it has held since 1993.
“The Rangers had their suspicions based on how they were dealt with,” says one source who has worked on the case for several years. “They were channeled, manipulated, mauled, and pinned to the mat. In the end, the Rangers found themselves in an untenable position once too often. They were upset, they were pissed off.”
The Rangers may be the most famous state law enforcement agency in the country. They are certainly one of the proudest. Formed in 1823, when Stephen F. Austin received permission from the Mexican government to employ a group of 10 volunteers to protect settlers on the Texas frontier, the group’s first job was to monitor the movements of Indian tribes. Since that time, the group has obtained nearly mythic status. Now numbering about 100 officers, the Rangers — whose work uniform includes cowboy boots and cowboy hats — are fiercely protective of their image and their law enforcement prowess. And several reports have underscored their unhappiness with federal law enforcement officials during the Waco siege.
In its 1996 report on the incident, the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight says the Rangers were kept out of negotiations with the Davidians — even though, the report says, the Davidians had “expressed their trust” in the Rangers. And the report points to testimony by Ranger Capt. David A. Byrnes (now retired), who commanded the more than 30 Rangers who were stationed at Mt. Carmel during the siege. According to the report, the Rangers “often had concerns about the conduct of the siege and attempted to express these concerns to [FBI tactical commander Jeffrey] Jamar. The Rangers were frustrated by a lack of communication with Jamar.”
Byrnes told the committee that whenever he went to see Jamar, “the door was already closed to where Mr. Jamar was. Several times I waited a half hour, 45 minutes, to see him and never saw him, and I finally quit going over there. We couldn’t even get a phone call through. It was total lack of communication.”
In a recent interview, Byrnes denied ongoing friction between the two law enforcement agencies. “I don’t think there’s any kind of a feud. If there is, I’m not aware of it. Any time you are working on something of that magnitude, there will be differences of opinion,” he said. But after talking further, Byrnes said many of the new disclosures are the result of the DOJ’s efforts to prevent citizens from seeing the evidence. “What really happened is that [there was a] constant parade of people wanting to see the evidence and getting bounced back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball. I can see where DPS would think that it would make them look bad.”
Although Byrnes minimizes the friction between the DPS and the FBI, the very first government report on the raid in Waco, done by the DOJ in 1993, provides a detailed discussion of the difficulties he and the Rangers were having. “Byrnes reported that the Rangers’ relationship with the FBI command post deteriorated rapidly. Numerous Rangers complained to him that SAC Jamar and others in the command post treated them rudely. The Rangers eventually pulled out of what they considered a hostile atmosphere.” Byrnes went on to tell the DOJ about “a specific event in which the FBI’s failure to cooperate may have impeded the search of the crime scene.” In the days after the initial assault on the compound, the FBI prevented the Rangers from examining the area around the corpse of Michael Schroeder, a Davidian who was killed in a gunfight with ATF agents on Feb. 28 on property adjoining Mt. Carmel. According to The Ashes of Waco, Dick J. Reavis’ definitive book on the Waco mess, Schroeder was hit with four gunshots to the torso and two to the head. His body lay in the same position for several days after he was killed. According to the federal report, “The Rangers asked to be allowed to complete the crime scene search by casting footprints and gathering other evidence” around Schroeder’s body. The report says that “Jamar refused the request and did not allow them back on the crime scene for ten days. By then, rain had severely eroded the footprints they had hoped to process. After this incident, the Rangers had little or no contact with the FBI.”
Finally, the 1993 report says that although the Rangers would be able to “participate in future criminal cases with the FBI, hard feelings would linger.” Today, it appears those hard feelings are very much in evidence. 
This article appears in November 12 • 1999.