Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family Read online

  RUBY RIDGE

  The Truth and Tragedy of

  the Randy Weaver Family

  JESS WALTER

  Previously published under the title Every Knee Shall Bow

  Contents

  Title Page

  Map

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Jess Walter

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  RUBY CREEK IS A STONE-BEDDED scratch along the base of a rocky knob called Ruby Ridge, in that part of North Idaho aimed like a rifle barrel at Canada, the part of Idaho known as the Panhandle. The ridge isn’t much different from the mountains around it. “No Trespassing” signs are nailed to the trees, in whose gaps flicker the suggestion of cabins and trailers, connected by driveways that disappear into the woods like smoke. Beneath Ruby Ridge, one unsure lane leaves the old highway. A road at first, it crosses the dark creek and becomes a narrow swipe of dirt, switching back every few hundred feet along imposing root-veined banks. The path climbs easily for a couple of miles until it becomes nothing more than two tracks, which cut through a mile of woods so dense they choke off the midday sun. Take the right fork and the path breaks through the forest into a brief meadow and opens to a steep, wooded field that climbs impossibly and spills out finally on a rock-strewn knob with a predawn view of everything: a 120-degree, 40-mile window on Idaho, Montana, and Canada. On this point, 3,100 feet above sea level, the sky is close and cloudless. The sun bakes the forest floor and the crowns of ponderosa pines until nightfall, when the tired heat slips away and the deep chill of granite bedrock refills the forest. Cold gusts run like liquid off these wooded peaks, merging into wind-whipped rivers of air that can tip the plume from a cabin woodstove and defy common sense by dragging smoke downhill.

  On this point nine years ago stood a simple cabin, a ramshackle construction of weathered plywood, sawmill waste, and two-by-fours, wedged into the hillside among an outcrop of boulders. Hinged windows were set into the cabin walls seemingly at random, like afterthoughts. A stovepipe chimney rose from the peak of a corrugated steel roof, which was rusted in places and dipped at the corners. There was no electricity up here. No phone. You could survey forever and not find a piece of ground flat enough for a home on this ridge, and so the cabin was built on stilts like the legs of a sitting dog—longer in front to reach out over the shoulder of this cliff and level the house. There was a scattering of outbuildings, too, including “a birthing shed”—a guest house built like a tiny barn, used by the religious mother of this family as a retreat when she was menstruating, when she believed she was unclean.

  That woman has been dead for years. Her family has moved away and their cabin is gone. The yard has grown over and the point is empty. Standing alone on this craggy bluff in thick Idaho forest, it is difficult to imagine how important this place has become, to conjure the events that took place here: the frightened prophecies, gunfire, and death; the Green Berets, FBI snipers, and angry skinheads; the trial, lawsuits, and congressional hearings, the horrible legacies of Waco and Oklahoma City. When images do come, they are twisted and tragic—as perplexing as your first view of smoke racing downhill.

  RANDY WEAVER WAS A THIN, hollow-eyed woodcutter who decided one summer to drive down from his cabin to a summer meeting of the Aryan Nations—an organization whose followers believe Jews are the children of Satan and that white America should have its own homeland.

  The seventy-mile drive forever changed his life. Weaver and his family, in turn, unwittingly changed the way many Americans view their freedoms, their values, and their government. The Weavers’ road led to an Old West gunfight, three deaths, and the invasion of a remote county in North Idaho by an army of state and federal agents. It channeled America’s deepest insecurities and drew thousands of people into a whorl of fear and stubbornness, mistakes and misjudgments, lies and a cover-up that continues to shake the top levels of the FBI.

  The same road cuts through Waco, Texas, where in 1993, seventy-nine people—including twenty-two children—were killed in a gunfight and standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian religious sect.

  Those two places—Waco and Ruby Ridge—were forever linked on April 19, 1995, when a bomb tore in half the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, 19 of them children. Before he was put to death, a disillusioned Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh said he planted the bomb to avenge the deaths at Waco and Ruby Ridge. In the 2001 book American Terrorist, McVeigh told authors Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck that he “did it for the larger good.”

  How could a minor weapons case involving an itinerant woodcutter in the middle of nowhere spark a chain of events that would eventually lead to the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history?

  During the 1993 trial of Randy Weaver and his friend Kevin Harris, the brilliantly bombastic lawyer Gerry Spence argued that America needs people like Randy and Vicki Weaver to show us the line where our freedoms begin and end. In the Weaver case, that line fades in and out and switches back dizzyingly, like the old logging road that leads away from the top of Ruby Ridge.

  IN THE NINE YEARS since the standoff at Ruby Ridge and in the six years since this book first appeared, much has happened. Yet little has changed. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on hearings and investigations that failed to resolve the most basic questions about the standoff. Almost $3.5 million was paid out in settlements that settled nothing.

  Nine years later, the courts are still flip-flopping over whether a federal agent should be tried for his actions at Ruby Ridge. Investigators, lawyers, and federal officers are still debating who shot first. Top FBI officials are still denying that they approved the bureau’s unprecedented and illegal orders to shoot civilians without provocation.

  Nine years later, the sniper who killed Vicki Weaver still works for the FBI.

  The case continues to hum on Internet Web sites and scream from right-wing newspapers. The words Ruby Ridge are fixed at the bottom of every news story about the ten-year crisis of confidence and competence in the FBI. And every time a person holes up in a ramshackle house, every time a suspect refuses to come out, every time a person accuses the government of going too far, someone is likely to say, “We don’t want this to become another Ruby Ridge.”

  The Weaver case gave a name to that sometimes dangerous space between people and their government. It brought paranoia into the mainstream. For how can you convince people that their government isn’t out to get them when, on Ruby Ridge, the FBI gave itself permission to shoot its own citizens? How can you tell people to trust a government that covered up details of the case and assigned agents to investigate themselves?

  There is little wonder that for many it has become a symbol for government tyranny.

  But symbols are nothing more than half-truths and they fall short of explaining a place as hard and remote as Ruby Ridge. F
rom this jagged point, the Weaver case is not proof of broad government oppression and tyranny, but of human fallibility and inhuman bureaucracy, of competitive law enforcement agencies and blind stubbornness. The Randy Weaver case is a stop sign, a warning—not of the dangers of right-wing conspiracies or of government conspiracies—but of the danger of conspiracy thinking itself, by people and by governments.

  YOU CAN SEE FOR MILES in both directions from the point on Ruby Ridge. From here, the paths of the Weaver family and the federal government seem inevitable, trucks barreling toward each another on a one-lane road.

  The government’s route to Ruby Ridge was a twenty-year drift toward militaristic law enforcement, in which quiet agents in suits gave way to federal SWAT teams competing for funding, in which unchecked arrogance and zeal allowed federal agents to act as if their ends justified their means.

  For the Weavers, the trail to this place cuts right through our own backyards, through patriotism, the military, fundamentalist Christianity, and eventually paranoia. Randy and Vicki’s story is a map of disenfranchisement. They were seduced by conspiracy and a religion called Christian Identity, by beliefs steeped in racism and fear of government oppression, beliefs that helped bring about the very thing they feared.

  Ultimately, you come to the Weaver story along the same trail Randy and Vicki took, from the heart of Christian Iowa to the deep woods of North Idaho. There is much to ponder along the way—the accountability of government and the danger of paranoia, the villainy of coincidence and the desperate need to decide, every day all over again, where society’s lines will be drawn. Up a twisting, rutted dirt road, past gnarled pine trees and scrub grass, you come finally to a sign at the edge of the old Weaver property. Two sets of unbending law clashed on the mountain, two incompatible views of the world, outlined by defiant red letters painted on a plywood sign: “Every knee shall bow to Yahshua Messiah.”

  ONE

  SARA WEAVER SNAPPED AWAKE, felt for her rifle, and hoped she’d at least get the chance to shoot one of the bastards before they killed her. She had no idea whether it was day or night. The Bible was open on the floor where she’d left it and she quickly found her place and resumed her prayers to Yahweh, the stern and unbending God of the Old Testament. If she’d slept at all, it was only for a few minutes; that’s all she allowed herself. Had it been three days, now? Four? A noise brought her eyes up to the windows, covered with the denim curtains that she and her mother had hung to keep the enemy from seeing them. Still, a few shards of unnatural light cut through the room and lit the cabin like constant dusk. Sara looked across the beamed living room at her friend Kevin Harris, who’d been like a brother to her for half of her sixteen years. He was still coughing blood. Sara’d given him herbs, tea, and cayenne pepper. She’d dressed and cleaned his gunshot chest and arm, but he was still too pale and had lost too much blood. He would probably die.

  Her father was in better shape, awake, but staring off toward the kitchen. His gunshot wound was healing, but he seemed distant and tired, and Sara was afraid that he blamed himself for what had happened. It wasn’t his fault. She knew he just wanted to protect the family. But there was no way she was going to let him feel so bad that he would surrender to the Beast. Her ten-year-old sister Rachel was asleep at last, curled up on the floor next to her. Sara was glad for that. The baby was asleep too and had finally stopped crying “Mama.”

  The voice startled Sara as it blew through the cabin like a December gust. There had been so many noises: tanks and trucks and helicopters echoing through the canyon. But it was the steady voice of the negotiator that was making her crazy—so calm on that PA system somewhere outside the cabin. “Pick up the phone,” he kept saying, as if they were insane. “We’ve thrown a phone onto the porch. Pick it up.” He sounded Mexican to her. Wouldn’t that just figure; the Babylonian One World Government sends a Mexican to talk a white separatist out of his cabin. They will do anything to break us, she thought. Yesterday, he had called himself Fred. A Mexican negotiator named Fred talking on a PA system every fifteen minutes, trying to get them to step outside. The FBI had made it perfectly clear what happened when the family stepped outside. Agents blasted away at them. It was ridiculous and horrifying at the same time. Rachel stirred as the one-sided conversation began again, and she cried as the cruel, taunting words settled on the cabin.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Weaver,” the voice called. “We had pancakes this morning. And what did you have for breakfast? Why don’t you send the children out for some pancakes, Mrs. Weaver.”

  Why were they doing this? Sara stared at her mother’s body covered with an old army blanket and pushed underneath the kitchen table. Soon, Sara would have to crawl through her mother’s blood to the cupboards to get canned apricots and tuna fish to feed their family. As the voice tormented them, Sara’s anger fled, and she prayed for her mother’s strength. Her mom had practically built this cabin, pieced together the walls from mill scraps, made the quilts they were huddled upon on the floor, canned the food that was keeping them alive, and shaped the cupboards where Sara had to get the food.

  She couldn’t let her dad go in there. If he moved in front of a window, they’d kill him, finish what they’d started outside the cabin. Sara sat up, her long, black hair in a ponytail, her eyes tender and puffy from crying, her lips drawn tight. It had been so long since she’d spoken in more than a whisper, and now she wanted to scream. She knew she should go to the kitchen, but she didn’t want to get off the floor.

  Beneath her—where an open basement was framed with thick timbers—Sara listened for the agents of Babylon, who had crawled under the cabin with their goddamn listening devices, trying to get any edge. She thought she heard their muffled whispers and wondered for a moment if they were really there. She wished she could yell at them or pound on the floor or something. She was just too tired. Too tired to crawl through the blood into the kitchen. Too tired to shield her dad when he stood in front of the windows. Too tired to rock the baby to sleep, to tend to Kevin’s wound. For the first time, her fatigue seemed stronger than her anger, and she wished Yashua the Messiah would just come and end this suffering.

  And so she prayed to Yahweh as her parents had taught, thanking Him for His blessings and asking for deliverance. Lying on the floor with what was left of her family, Sara Weaver looked across the long room at the bullet hole in the kitchen window and she prayed that they not be picked off one at a time anymore, that they be taken together to Paradise. She prayed that the evil agents of ZOG just get it over with. She prayed that they firebomb the house.

  ALONG THE DENIM CURTAINS, across a narrow gully on an adjacent hillside, the barrel of a bolt-action, high-powered rifle traced the breadth of the cabin, looking for any movement. Behind the gun, a compact, muscular sniper watched the windows through a magnified, ten-power scope. Nothing. Lon Horiuchi knelt camouflaged and still in the low underbrush and rocky ground, separated from the cabin by two hundred yards. He ran his scope along the house again, from the covered back deck, which leaned out over a steep hillside, along the plywood walls of the house. It had been two days since he’d fired any shots, two days since he’d seen the target flinch and he’d called into the radio that he thought he had hit one of them.

  There were ten other snipers on the hillside across from the cabin, another twenty agents crawling over the knob where the house itself sat. First light settled evenly on the grayish brown cabin and glinted off its small offset windows as the sniper watched for any movement.

  Behind him, the hill broke at a severe pitch, covered by clinging mountain grass and leaning timber, cut occasionally by a logging road or a plunging stream, down the slope a mile, to a meadow where deputy U.S. Marshal Dave Hunt paced and smoked, killing another Marlboro 100 with a few grave steps. He paused in the middle of a meadow packed with sagging army tents as though a dull green circus had come to town. A couple hundred camouflaged federal agents and state cops filed in and out of the tents, catching some sleep before
going back to the line or to the sniper positions. Any minute, Hunt expected more white separatists to break into the meadow from the woods and begin firing. It was like a war zone. Slope-shouldered and frowning, Hunt watched a handful of busy men across the meadow, FBI brass and investigators who climbed the steps to the trailer command post. None of them was interested in Dave Hunt’s opinion.

  It wasn’t right that he was on the outside now. He knew this case. He knew Randy Weaver and his family like no one else in law enforcement. For eighteen frustrating months, he’d butted up against their religious fervor, their government paranoia, and their unbridled stubbornness. He knew their beliefs and the language they used. He knew the weapons their children carried. He knew Randy was a coward and a straw man and that if they wanted to end this thing, they had to negotiate with his wife, Vicki. He knew that unless they convinced Vicki to give up the kids, this thing might only get worse.

  He watched trucks of all kinds—moving, army, pickups, and motor homes—beat the mountain field into dust. They broke through the forest one at a time on that narrow dirt road and began looking for parking in the perpendicular rows, which by now contained more than 100 vehicles: cars, trucks, Humvees, armored personnel carriers, and bulldozers lined the edges of the tent city. More agents were showing up all the time to secure the mountain and they reported here, to an encampment surrounded so completely by pine-covered ridges that it seemed entirely possible there was an enemy out there.

  Doubt broke constantly into Hunt’s thoughts. He’d done everything to bring Weaver in, hadn’t he? The second-guessing carved away at him until he slid another tan-filtered cigarette into his mouth, lit it, and began pacing again.

  He just wanted to get as far away from here as possible, to grab his wife and hold her. Soon, he and the other guys would be leaving for the funeral. The shoot-out flashed in his mind like someone flipping through snapshots: the Weaver men stroll down the hill with their rifles. The dog barks, cold at first, as if he’d just caught a whiff of something. The radio squawks, “I think the dog’s onto us.” And then nothing. For five awful minutes. Nothing. Then a gunshot. Two more. And then bursts of gunfire like a loud shuffling of cards. And Hunt runs panting through the woods. Near the bottom of the hill, another barrage of gunfire drops him to the ground and lands him back in Vietnam, the shots cracking over his head like a round of suppressive fire.