On February 28, 1993, seventy-six ATF agents pulled up to a property outside Waco, Texas, in cattle trailers. Fifty-one days later, the building was gone and seventy-six people were dead inside it. Twenty of them were children.

This is the story of Vernon Wayne Howell, the ninth-grade dropout from Houston who memorized the Bible, renamed himself David Koresh, and convinced over a hundred people to follow him into an armed standoff with the federal government. It's also the story of what the ATF and FBI did, what they chose not to do, and why the question of who actually lit that fire has never fully been answered.

We're covering all of it: the abuse, the arsenal, the fifty-one days of negotiations that might have worked, the decisions that guaranteed they didn't, and the ripple effect that reached Oklahoma City exactly two years later ...