Mystery Hidden in Waco’s Rubble Confronts Medical Sleuths : Branch Davidian: Investigation shifts from the moonscape of the compound to the cool sterility of the morgue.

FT. WORTH, Tex. — He has tried ventilation, and he has tried deodorant, but Dr. Nizam Peerwani cannot rid his office of the smell of death.

The odor, putrid even beneath a sweet citrus mask, is a reminder of the work before him. As chief Tarrant County medical examiner, Peerwani is overseeing autopsies on the bodies removed from the ashes of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco.

The investigation into the cult’s final days--and the crimes its members allegedly committed--has shifted from the moonscape of the Davidians’ ruined compound near Waco to the cool sterility of Peerwani’s morgue in a modern, boxy building just south of downtown Ft. Worth.

Soon it will shift again, this time to the FBI laboratory in Washington. A separate arson investigation is being conducted in another, undisclosed lab.

In these laboratories, dozens, if not hundreds, of scientists and investigators are working together on a vast and intricate detective story. With scalpels and dental tools, computers and gas chromatographs, videotapes and DNA tests, they are conducting one of the largest and most sophisticated criminal investigations ever.

The goal might seem hopeless--to reconstruct, from a heap of ash and rubble, crucial elements of the cult’s 51-day standoff and its fiery conclusion. And many people believe they will fail.

“Even before the fire, this was going to be a forensics nightmare,” observed Dick DeGuerin, a Houston attorney whose client, cult leader David Koresh, died during or just before the April 19 fire.

“But now, with everything burned to the ground, it’s a nightmare times 10. I mean, you had two, three and sometimes four floors collapsing on each other. How are you going to determine what was there?”

Still, the investigators--pathologists and anthropologists, dentists and chemists, among others--are already making remarkable progress. They are quickly learning the crude outlines of what, and who, was where. From that, they hope to eventually learn what happened, and how.

“I’d say it’s a challenging task, certainly,” said John Hicks, assistant director of the FBI’s Laboratory Division. Still, he added, “I’d say we’ll be able to answer a lot of questions.”

Some will never be answered. Particularly when it comes to evidence implicating the surviving Davidians in the Feb. 28 shootout that began the siege, the government’s task is something akin to searching for needles in the open prairie.

In fact, it may be worse than that, considering that the needles in this case are bullets, and the government has filled five-gallon paint cans with 1 million of them. Now, the task is to find out which ones were fired, by which guns, held by whom, when and where.

“I don’t think any agency has the manpower to study all that, to be frank with you,” Peerwani said. Even Hicks, whose FBI lab seemingly accomplished the impossible in the World Trade Center bombing case, conceded that the odds are daunting.

The investigators set out to answer these questions:

* Who shot and killed four agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, as well as five members of the Branch Davidians, on Feb. 28? This appears entirely unresolved.

* Did the Branch Davidians have illegal weapons? The ATF says yes.

* Who set the fire that destroyed the cult’s commune on April 19? An independent fire investigator says the cultists did; surviving cultists say the government did.

* What caused the deaths of the cult members inside: fire or firearms? Apparently both.

* Exactly who died? The autopsies are determining this.

Lawyers for the surviving cultists dispute some of the government’s preliminary conclusions, particularly the arson charge. But only the government has access to the site, so it has been able to marshal the greater weight of evidence, at least for now.

Dick Kettler, a lawyer who represents survivor Renos Avraam, said he hoped the autopsies would be helpful to his case. But he conceded that he is in no position to evaluate the government’s evidence yet.

The information developed by investigators in the past several weeks paints a slightly different picture of the Davidians’ final hours from that sketched by the FBI immediately after the fire.

The fire broke out shortly after noon, and, with stunning speed and ferocity, consumed the rickety compound. For several hours before, the FBI had been punching holes in the compound walls with a tank outfitted with a battering ram, and pumping tear gas inside.

In the confusion afterward, it was assumed that Koresh had taken shelter in the cult’s bunker, or perhaps in his bedroom, and that the 17 children in the compound were in their second-floor quarters. That scenario became all the more horrifying when survivors said the FBI’s armored vehicle had collapsed a stairway, stranding those on the second floor.

At a news conference shortly after the fire, FBI spokesman Bob Ricks said Koresh “indicated that the children had been secured in the bunkers,” but that this had been “one final lie on David’s part.”

As it turned out, it was no lie: Most of the children were found huddled in the concrete bunker, enveloped in the protective embraces of their mothers.

Both the FBI and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said they had counted on the mothers’ protective instincts to lead the children to safety.

The instincts apparently were there. They just didn’t make any difference.

Koresh, meanwhile, was not in the bunker or in his bedroom. Peerwani’s team found him in the compound’s communications room, from which the cult’s leaders had conducted telephone negotiations with the FBI. The bodies of his top lieutenants, Steven Schneider and Douglas Wayne Martin, were found near Koresh.

It isn’t clear what the three were doing, and it may never be known. One possibility is that they were trying to repair their telephone, which Schneider had thrown out the front door in anger earlier in the morning. Later, a cultist was seen dashing out to retrieve it.

The government has branded Koresh a liar, and he certainly appears to have broken his word several times during negotiations with the FBI. But the government may have been wrong when it accused him of exaggerating the number of people in the compound. The most recent estimates are that the death toll from the fire was about 86, which corresponds to Koresh’s figures.

The government appears to have been right, however, when it said the Branch Davidians had illegal weapons. The ATF, in an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, says the firearms collected after the fire included fully automatic weapons, which are illegal.

There were hundreds of weapons littering the compound, which also contained a staggering amount of ammunition.

“You can’t imagine--I’ve never been to a crime scene like that in my life,” said Peerwani, the chief coroner in Ft. Worth for 14 years. “The bodies in the bunker were not buried in rubble or soil and dirt. They were buried in ammunition. Shells--expended shells and live rounds and live hand grenades--all around the bodies and beneath the bodies.”

And the end of the siege, apparently, was even more violent than its beginning.

Of the first 78 autopsies, 22 revealed gunshot wounds. Most of the shooting took place above the bunker, where the cult had its observation tower, and in front of the bunker, where the men had their sleeping quarters.

Among the shooting victims was Koresh, who had one bullet through his forehead. Peerwani is certain the bullet killed the cult leader. What he doesn’t know yet is who fired it--Koresh or someone else. Schneider, who was nearby, also appeared to have a gunshot wound. Did he shoot Koresh, or vice versa? Did one or both commit suicide? Did Martin shoot them?

These things may yet be known. Burn patterns, for instance, can tell how far a bullet traveled before hitting someone.

To the experts, the bodies--some with the delicate consistency of dried leaves--offer a wealth of information.

From a skeleton, anthropologists can determine a person’s gender, race and approximate age. With X-rays culled from doctors all over the world, they have been able to match the skeletons with pre-death profiles of cult members. Dentists have been doing the same.

The toughest challenge facing Peerwani and his staff is identifying the remains of the children, many of whom had never had an X-ray.

“We are using the time-honored technique of sorting them out based on what they were wearing,” Peerwani said. “Some of the clothing is discernible, and some of the shoes are discernible. Some of them are wearing their personal jewelry items. We recovered one child still holding a baby bottle, and it had the baby’s name on it.”

Photographs of these personal effects are being catalogued in a computer database. At the same time, technicians are poring over a videotape the Davidians had made of the children, capturing freeze-frame images of each child and creating a computer database of those.

When the two catalogues are done, the investigators will try to match them.

“But,” Peerwani warned, “that’s still a presumptive identification. . . . The question may be that, since they were living as a commune, what guarantee is there that the clothes were not interchanged, the shoes were not interchanged, and things like that?

“And of course we don’t have that guarantee. Nobody can give us that guarantee. The parents who clothed them that morning are obviously dead. . . . So we may have to go to DNA.”

DNA testing is complicated, time-consuming and expensive. But it will tell conclusively who the children’s parents were. Then, with anthropologists assessing the approximate age of each child, each identity should fall into place.

“So, it’s an exciting, brave new world we’re living in, isn’t it?” Peerwani asked.