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

by Jess Walter

  Fadeley realized he could be losing three years of work here, and he scrambled. “I would like to know who the fuck told you that. He’s lying through his teeth ‘cause I’m not a badge, and if I was a badge, then I suppose I’d be wired, and you’re welcome to check me for a wire.” After the close call with Kumnick two years before, the ATF wasn’t wiring Fadeley anymore. Instead, the tape was fixed to the underside of the dashboard, and it continued to run as the informant tried to convince Randy he was okay.

  “Whoever told you that was a fucking liar,” the ruddy-faced informant continued ranting. “Why, go back to Frank. Frank did some business with me. You see Frank walkin’ the fuckin’ street.

  “If you want to believe someone else that is walking around paranoid that I’m a … fuckin’ pig, it’s been nice doin’ business with you,” Fadeley said. “Have a nice life. In the long run, it all pays the same, and you figure how many conferences I’ve been to. I’ve been to your house! Stupid Frank sittin’ there in your Jeep or whatever the hell that was, with a goddamn stud finder and a gun on my head…. I mean, let’s get real. Dismiss those ideas right there.”

  Fadeley’s tirade seemed to work, and Randy muttered that maybe he was wrong. “You know, I didn’t really believe this guy, but I don’t want to take chances, you know. When somebody says something like that, it makes you think.”

  Randy tried to make Fadeley feel better by admitting he’d been mistaken for a cop before, too. “Didn’t it bother you, knowin’ that I ran for sheriff?” he asked.

  “You lost, didn’t ya?” Fadeley asked.

  They both laughed.

  “You only got twenty-five votes, didn’t ya?”

  “I got more than that.”

  Fadeley put an end to the subject. “Will you do me a favor? You get ahold of whoever this clown is in Spokane, and you tell him to shove it up his ass, and tell him it’ll be a good idea for him to do it. Because if I find out who he is, I’m gonna shove it up his ass for him.”

  They talked again about whether this meeting had been set up for the Montana trip or as a way to exchange more guns.

  “I wish you had brought some money,” Randy said. “I came down here to make a living…. And I’m sorry, you know, I couldn’t go to Montana. I gotta get home. I got somethin’ goin’ on up there and, uh, the next time that I tell you I’ll go with ya, you know, I’ll make sure I’ll go with you. No bullshit about it.”

  And then Randy got out of the car.

  “All right,” Fadeley said.

  “Thanks,” said Randy.

  Fadeley watched him climb into his pickup and drive off. As he turned his car around and headed off to meet Herb Byerly, he wondered just how much Randy Weaver really knew.

  ONCE AGAIN, Randy and Vicki had new best friends. Bill Grider was a six-foot-three-inch ironworker, parcel-service driver, and softball player from Detroit who, a few years earlier, had followed his wife, Judy, and adolescent son, Eric, to Moscow, Idaho, a town at the edge of the state’s flat farmland, 120 miles south of Sandpoint. “I was running for my life when I left Detroit, physically and spiritually,” said Judy Grider, whose vibrato speech was a thick soup of Bible references. In Moscow, the Griders opened a cleaning-and-maintenance business for apartment buildings, but Bill hated Moscow, which was also home to the University of Idaho and people who were too liberal, pretentious, and artsy.

  So, in June of 1989, Bill and Eric went north, looking for a place to fish and—eventually—to live. They were fishing the Kootenai River, a cold, rock-bottomed ribbon of clear water, when they met Randy and Sam, who were fishing the same stretch of river. When he heard Randy’s views of the Bible, Bill couldn’t wait to tell his wife. Like he figured, when Judy met Vicki Weaver and heard her views about the Identity religion, something clicked into place, and Judy Grider realized the Father—whose name she was learning was Yahweh—was stirring her to action.

  “We’ve always been into the Scriptures, always searched for truth,” Judy said later. “I didn’t know Identity. I didn’t know there was such a thing until I got to Idaho. I was excited when I heard about it. It made more sense. It just all sort of fit together.”

  Bill had been raised a Presbyterian, Judy an Episcopalian. But when they moved to Naples in late 1989, they became Identity followers and the Weavers’ closest friends.

  That fall, Randy and Vicki and the kids moved back up to their cabin in a caravan of loaded pickup trucks that ground up the dusty road past Wayne and Ruth Rau’s place. Close friends of Steve Tanner, the Raus had heard about the dispute over $30,000 with Randy. They ignored the Weavers when Randy and Vicki drove past and waved. And the Rau children—who had always been good friends with Sammy and Sara—ignored the Weaver kids when they waved from the cabs of the overloaded pickup trucks.

  While they were living down the hill, the Weavers had allowed the Raus to run a pipe from their spring down to the meadow, but there wasn’t enough water for two families, and so when the Weavers got home, the Raus lost the use of the spring. Randy said the Raus tried to make a claim on the spring. The Raus said the Weavers just cut their pipe with no explanation. When the Raus’ dog disappeared, they blamed Randy, and when it showed up two days later, they never apologized. The antagonism seemed to have its own momentum, and soon the two families were at war.

  But the Weavers had an ally. The Griders had moved up to the meadow and squatted in an old house on Arthur Briggs’s land, near the trailer where the Weavers had first lived. Briggs didn’t live there anymore, and the land had been repossessed by the IRS, which had virtually no use for it. The Griders spent much of their time up the hill at the Weavers’ cabin, studying the Bible, yelling at the Raus, and target shooting with the family at cans and at a “Weaver for Sheriff’ sign.

  The Weavers who retreated back up to Ruby Ridge were more militant and frightened than the family that had moved down the hill eighteen months before. Randy’s yearly trips to Aryan congresses had deepened his racism and had made the family some severe friends—like Aryan Nations member Proctor James Baker and his wife, Katy—whose stories and experiences confirmed everything the Weavers had been saying about the government conspiracy. And, strangely, the family began to swear more often. Pagan words like Christian were the true profanities, the Weavers believed. Words like fuck, shit, and goddamn were simply the rough-hewn language of pioneers.

  Along with the Griders, the Weaver family’s Christian Identity beliefs became even more militant. Impressed by the skinheads’ commitment at the Aryan Nations Congress and moved by a Bible passage in Jeremiah in which warriors shaved their heads in mourning for Israel, Randy and Samuel Weaver and Bill and Eric Grider shaved their own heads.

  Sammy and Sara, along with Eric Grider and another boy from Naples, wore swastikas and marched with their guns in front of the Rau place, calling the Rau kids niggers and chanting, “What do we want? White power! When do we want it? Right now!” Whenever the Raus saw Randy, he was wearing a holstered pistol. The Weavers and Griders fired guns at night and dumped garbage on the road in front of the Raus’ house. The Raus told the sheriff, but when he questioned Weaver, Randy claimed the Raus were harassing him and had let the air out of his tires. It was another bottomless feud.

  For more than a year, the three families yelled back and forth and always seemed on the verge of a fight. The Raus accused the Weavers of stealing the pipes for their water supply, and later federal agents found the equipment at the Weaver house. But the constant gunfire was the worst for the Raus. They were afraid the Weavers were finally going to snap and kill them.

  Once, during a yelling match near the Rau property, Ruth found herself standing near Vicki, whom she always admired for being such a hard worker, whom she always suspected of being smarter and gentler than Randy.

  “What did we ever do to you?” Ruth asked suddenly.

  The acrimony disappeared from Vicki’s face, and Ruth found herself looking at a woman with—more than anything—deep fear and bruised feelings
. “You wouldn’t let your kids play with our kids.”

  KENNETH FADELEY WASN’T GOING TO STOP working Aryan cases just because Randy Weaver was suspicious. A few months after his last meeting with Randy, he met with two Aryan Nations members—a Montana Ku Klux Klansman and the group’s most colorful member—a 300-pound, former professional wrestler named Rico Valentino. An engaging mix of bravado and flamboyance, Rico had shown up suddenly in 1987 and had become an occasional bodyguard for Richard Butler and one of the biggest financial supporters of Aryan Nations. He wore dark sunglasses and a pound of jewelry, overtipped every waitress he met, and made a beef stew so tasty, it was said to be the chosen food of Aryan warriors. Fadeley had tagged Valentino as one of the more dangerous members of the Hayden Lake church, certainly a guy to watch. When he wasn’t flying around the country, promoting professional wrestling matches, Valentino was hanging around the Aryan Nations compound, flashing wads of bills and teaching martial arts and wrestling holds. So, that night in early 1990, Fadeley met Rico and the other man at a restaurant in the Spokane Valley and listened to see what kind of things they might be planning. After the meeting, as Valentino drove away, Fadeley wrote down his license plate number. But when he ran the plate, he found it odd that it was registered under a different name.

  In March, Fadeley returned to the Aryan Nations compound and told its leaders he had been gone because he’d had a heart attack. The Aryans welcomed “Gus” back, and he quickly got involved in the preparations for a local skinhead conference. His assignment was to write an article for a brochure that would go out to the young men. His topic was commitment.

  Toward the end of March 1990, as Fadeley sat at a picnic table on Butler’s pastoral church grounds, the Aryan security chief, Steve Nelson, began walking toward him with a man named Proctor James Baker and another man. Baker held a video camera, and when they reached Fadeley, Nelson told him to say hi to everybody.

  They set the camera down, and Nelson sat facing Fadeley, Baker moved in behind him. These were two of the men ATF agents had suggested he watch—the severe, thirty-five-year-old Nelson and the fifty-seven-year-old Baker, guys Fadeley had identified as two of the most radical members of the group.

  “Gus,” Nelson said, “the license plate on your car doesn’t match your vehicle. How could that be?” Apparently, he wasn’t the only one writing down license numbers.

  “I’ve been driving a car that belongs to my dad,” Fadeley said. “I’ll have to ask.”

  “Gus, do you know who Kenneth Fadeley is?”

  Oh boy. They were all alone on the grounds of the Aryan Nations, and these guys were jamming him. With his peripheral vision, Fadeley tried to see what Baker was doing, but the older man had moved in behind him and so Fadeley stared straight into Nelson’s eyes.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know him.”

  “Well, is he a close relative or something like that.”

  “Something like that.”

  Nelson said they had two addresses for “Gus.” And then he read off Fadeley’s address and his dad’s address. The informant had never given either address out. Did they have a source in law enforcement? Had they been following him?

  “Are you a member of any law enforcement agency?” Baker asked.

  “No.”

  “Is your father in law enforcement?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a member of the Jewish Defense League?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t we have an address for you?”

  “You do. A post office box.”

  “No. I mean a residential address.”

  Fadeley, trying to stay calm, said he was staying with friends and that he didn’t need a bunch of Aryan Nations members ruining his friendships.

  “I need to be able to trust you, Gus,” Nelson said. “Right now, there are too many circumstances here for me to be able to do that. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  Given their other options, Fadeley didn’t think it was such a bad offer. As he walked off the compound toward his car, the informant figured that, as far as the Aryan Nations was concerned, Gus Magisono was officially dead. At the ATF, Byerly looked at the two cases that had come from the Fadeley operation—Kumnick and Weaver. They were beginning to realize Kumnick was all talk and wasn’t connected. But Weaver …

  IN MAY, just two months after kicking Fadeley out of the Aryan Nations compound, Steve Nelson, Proctor James Baker, and another man, twenty-nine-year-old Robert Winslow, were arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiring to blow up a gay disco in Seattle. Nelson and Winslow were on their way to Seattle when they were popped. Baker was at his house in Hayden Lake, with his wife, Katy, when FBI agents showed up and searched the house. An FBI informant had taped one hundred hours of conversations with the men, in which they talked about the plan and even set off a practice bomb, packing it into a coffee can filled with gravel and nails. After it detonated, spraying a field with fragments and embedding nails into trees, Baker said, “Think what that would do to a roomful of people.”

  At first, Richard Butler refused to believe that his close associate and bodyguard, the former wrestler Rico Valentino, was an FBI informant. He said Valentino had gone with Nelson and Winslow to Seattle to record an English version of “The Panzer March,” one of Hitler’s favorite songs. When the others were arrested and Valentino didn’t come back, Butler had to acknowledge that he had been duped again.

  Valentino claimed to be a born-again Christian who went undercover to fight evil. He was paid $100,000 by the FBI for the three years he worked undercover and flashed the money around, tithing more than any other member and buying a 550-gallon water tank for use during the Aryan Nations World Congress. He paid to roof and floor a bunkhouse for visiting skinheads and bought two guitars for church services. He even paid $3,300 for the large metal “Aryan Nations” sign that covered the gate of the compound. He taught martial arts to skinheads and got to know every member of Butler’s groups.

  Defense attorneys for the bombers said Valentino had set up their clients, encouraging them to act out a macho, right-wing fantasy that they would never have tried if the informant hadn’t been coaxing them into it and tossing around his substantial cash. They argued that the informant had spent three years inside the Aryan Nations without finding anything, and so he was eager to set up someone. Baker’s attorney, Everett Hofmeister, wondered how his client could have been involved when he didn’t even drive to Seattle with the other men. The key physical evidence tying him to the bombing, a pipe bomb, was given to him by Valentino, Baker said. And a piece of pipe found in his house was going to be used to vent a fuel line in his new home, not for a bomb. Why, Baker had even allowed the FBI to search his house.

  But the prosecutor in the October 1990 case was Ron Howen, the assistant U.S. attorney from Order I, Order II, and the Bud Cutler trials—a guy who was making a career out of Aryan prosecutions. He brought expert witnesses who testified that one section of pipe in Baker’s house was capped on two ends, with a small hole drilled in it—perfect for making a bomb. Howen presented a detailed, steady case—thirty-eight witnesses over seven days—that focused on the men’s racist beliefs and on how those beliefs translated into criminal acts. On October 19, 1990, all three were convicted of possessing explosives and plotting to use another bomb in what they called a “kill zone” around the gay bar. The key witness was Rico Valentino.

  After running his phony license plate, Fadeley had figured Valentino for an informant. And he guessed Valentino had made him for an undercover operative as well. Their covers were mirror images of each other, Fadeley realized—big, flashy, tough-talking guys who had the money for the wild plans these guys talked about. Fadeley’s only question now was who had burned him. His money was on Valentino, either to prove his own value to the group or to keep ATF from the embarrassment of having an undercover informant involved in the bombing plot. But there was another person who could’ve blown his cover: Randy Weaver.

&nb
sp; ON RUBY RIDGE, the disco bombing case scared and angered Randy. All the other Aryans who had ended up in prison were just names to him, guys who might have been set up, but also really might have been criminals. But Randy knew Proctor James Baker. PJ was one of the guys from the summer conferences, an old auto mechanic, not a terrorist. They were at the Bakers’ house just before it was searched. The arrest especially hardened Vicki, who later wrote that it taught her a lesson.

  “Remember my friend whose husband was ‘framed’? … He spent two years in prison. He got home last December half a man. He physically doesn’t look well and half his memory is gone. ‘They’ gave him a drug to destroy his mind and told him it was heart medication. He called my friend, his wife, three times in one day and couldn’t remember talking to her. She asked him if he was taking any medication and if so the name of it. He gave her the name and she went to a druggist and asked what it was used for. It destroys the mind (memory) and what’s gone will never come back!!” Vicki said she would not let that happen to her husband.

  In the meantime, things had gotten so bad between the Weavers and the Raus that Wayne and Ruth were looking for some way to split the Griders and Weavers up. So when they saw that the IRS was selling the repossessed house that the Griders had been living in—rent free—they quickly bought it. They instructed their attorney to find someone to evict the Griders, and so he hired the county bailiff, a man named Ron Sukenik, who had spent fifteen of the previous sixteen years working in a restaurant.

  On June 7, 1990, about 6:00 p.m., Sukenik drove his four-wheel-drive Dodge Raider across the Ruby Creek Bridge, followed closely by two Boundary County sheriff’s cars with their lights on. They drove to the Griders’ house and stopped in the driveway. Sukenik stepped out and stared at a flag that he recognized as the Aryan Nations banner—a Z on its side with a sword through it. A red truck sat near the house with a plywood sign—”Yahweh is white power!”—leaning against it.