That night,
Houston Chronicle reporter Kathy Fair—who would later serve as Rick Perry’s chief of staff under her married name, Kathy Walt—told
Nightline anchor Ted Koppel that, according to her ATF sources, “reporters for, I believe, the TV station, allegedly were hiding in the trees when federal agents arrived.” The sources, Fair continued, “have told me they think they were set up by at least one reporter” who had “tipped off the sect about [the raid].”
This early account would prove to be mostly untrue. No reporters were at Mount Carmel before the ATF arrived. No one was hiding in trees. And no one had deliberately tipped off the Branch Davidians. McLemore’s colleague Jim Peeler, a cameraman, had inadvertently aroused the suspicions of the Branch Davidians after getting lost on the way to Mount Carmel that morning and talking with a postman, who turned out to be Branch Davidian David Jones. But it was McLemore who caught the bulk of the early backlash. After Fair’s report and a follow-up segment on Dallas station WFAA, some viewers blamed McLemore for the catastrophic outcome of the raid. Suddenly, it wasn’t Higgins reaching out to KWTX to thank the station’s reporters, but viewers calling to demand that McLemore be fired. One, McLemore
told the Dallas Observer in 1998, had said, “The blood of these ATF agents is on McLemore’s hands.”
......
The end of the siege was the effective finale of McLemore’s journalism career. He was nominated for an Emmy for his coverage, but “that stigma never left me,” he says. A group of ATF agents and the families of the agents who died during the raid sued KWTX, the
Waco Tribune-Herald, and a Waco ambulance company for negligent actions that caused the deaths and injuries at Mount Carmel. (The case settled out of court for a reported $15 million.) In Waco, McLemore and his family felt unwelcome, with his wife, a receptionist at a bank, getting hounded at work by those who held the reporter partially responsible for the Branch Davidian tragedy. McLemore tried to get jobs in other markets, but he never got a call back from most stations, and others only agreed to meet with him in the hopes of getting a scoop. “I got job interviews in places, and I’d get there and sit down, and they’d say, ‘Hey, do you mind if we turn the camera on?’” McLemore remembers. “And then they’d start: ‘So, did you tip them off?’”
Life Partners, the life insurance policy purchasing firm, was “about the only place that I could get a job,” McLemore says. He
attempted to get damages for his tarnished reputation by suing Fair, the
Chronicle, and other news organizations for defamation, but he eventually lost the case when the Texas Supreme Court
ruled that he was a “limited purpose public figure” and thus had to prove that the reporters and stations had displayed “actual malice” in filing what turned out to be inaccurate stories. Eventually, his marriage broke up, and he left Waco for the ConocoPhillips job in Houston.
