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

by Jess Walter

  The U.S. marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, spoke first. A thirty-eight-year-old former coroner and county commissioner, Johnson was a gun collector and savvy local politician in Boise, Idaho. The boyish, stocky Republican appointee wasn’t liked by some of the lifers who worked under him, the career marshals who did the day-to-day work. But he was in his element in Washington, D.C, especially with Hudson, who was in the same general position he was—an ambitious, young politician in charge of lifetime civil servants. Johnson and Hudson had known each other for ten years, since the two men served together on a highway safety committee. Now, Mike Johnson went over each painstaking step that his deputies had taken to negotiate and investigate this case. They’d followed all the rules and had even called SOG teams out twice. And now, Johnson said, his chief deputies were requesting help from headquarters.

  After Johnson finished, the leader of the Special Operations Group told Henry Hudson how his members had gone out to Naples in June of 1991 and again that fall. He gave the SOG assessment and solution—several tactical assault plans that involved getting Weaver or other members of his family to respond to some noise, separating the family, and moving in to arrest Weaver. But this case was tricky, he acknowledged, and the tactical approach carried a high risk for Weaver’s family and the deputies. Still, the tactical option was the cheapest and quickest and SOG members specialized in pulling off such missions safely.

  Finally, Arthur Roderick spoke. Roderick was a former SOG member who had specialized in fugitive investigations and then had returned to the enforcement division to become one of its stars. Mediterranean handsome, he had a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, three years as an army MP, three years as a cop, and a reputation as one of the best young deputy marshals in the service. The last thing Roderick wanted to do was go into the woods after a fugitive hiding behind his armed children, but he knew the case was coming his way, so he had studied the problem.

  Roderick outlined his three-part plan. First, he and a hand-picked team of deputies would fly to Idaho and be briefed by Dave Hunt and the other deputies already working the case. They would see the area for themselves, do some preliminary interviews, perhaps take one more shot at negotiating through Weaver’s friend. Second, they would spend a few weeks on intensive surveillance, with deputies and with hidden, long-range cameras. That would fill the gaps in the case, like whether or not Weaver ever left his cabin. And third, after they knew when Weaver left the cabin or what kind of ruse he might fall for, they’d make the arrest.

  There was one other option. Hudson and Mike Johnson excused themselves and went into Hudson’s office. They called Maurice Ellsworth, the U.S. attorney for Idaho and asked him to publicly drop the charges against Weaver and, after the fugitive relaxed, convene a grand jury to secretly indict him. Ellsworth said no. It would be unethical.

  Back in the meeting, they spent a few minutes going over some of the tactical plans. One of them involved surrounding the Weaver cabin with thirty-three deputy marshals while Sara slept in the menstruation shed, then grabbing the family members one at a time as they came out to visit her. Another plan involved splitting the family into two groups by getting some of them to respond to a noise in the woods. In both cases, the marshals would use nonlethal weapons—beanbag guns, rubber bullets, stinger grenades—to subdue Weaver and, if necessary, his family.

  It took Hudson only a few minutes to dismiss the tactical ideas. The risk to Weaver’s family and to the deputies was too great. And so Roderick’s plan was approved, and he was told to begin immediately. He code-named it Operation Northern Exposure, after a popular television show filmed in the Northwest, featuring a mud-ugly town surrounded by beautiful wilderness and filled with strange people.

  At the end of the meeting, Hudson said that when a plan was ready, perhaps it should be shown to the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, to see if they had any suggestions. Some of the career marshals fought back scowls. In his first month as director of the marshals service, Hudson was underestimating the competition between the marshals and the FBI.

  The meeting ended, the men stood up, shook hands, small-talked, and made their way out of the conference room. One by one, they filed past a painting of a grizzled Old West marshal wearing a badge, bringing in one bad guy handcuffed to his wrist and another draped over his shoulder. If only it were that easy.

  DAVE HUNT WASN’T SLEEPING. He stayed up too late at night, pacing and sucking down cigarettes, rehashing Vicki Weaver’s cryptic letters in his mind, and second-guessing whether he’d been right to proceed so cautiously. He talked with his wife and played with his two children in their rambling, modern house in the highlands of Boise, Idaho. Their house was perched almost as steeply as Randy Weaver’s, but it was in a neighborhood filled—not with pine trees, boulders, and mountain grasses—but with other nice homes, minivans, and tricycles. Again and again, Hunt read the case file and pored over Revelation, Deuteronomy, and other Bible books, looking for explanations to Weaver’s behavior, for clues about what he might do next, and for passages that might convince him to surrender. And although he was grateful for the help from headquarters, it ate at him to have one of his cases—one of his fugitives!—get so out of control.

  The day after meeting with the director in Washington, D.C., Mike Johnson made the marshals service’s final attempt at negotiating the case. The U.S. attorneys Howen and Ellsworth had made it clear they couldn’t negotiate the points Hunt had spelled out in his October letters. But Hudson told Johnson to try once more to negotiate and settle the thing. Johnson called Alan Jeppesen and passed the message along: they wanted to know what it would take to bring Randy in. A few days later, Johnson got his answer.

  “He said to stay off his mountain,” Randy’s friend said.

  On the last day of March, Arthur Roderick flew to Boise. If Hunt was concerned that he was losing control of the case, Roderick quickly put him at ease, deferring to his knowledge of the situation and the area and involving him in each step of the new plans. Roderick spent a couple of days going through Weaver’s case files and talking to Hunt, Mays, and Evans. Then he drove north and began gathering his team: Hunt and the other two local marshals and three guys from out of town, two of whom were electronics specialists and the third an emergency medical technician.

  The marshals looked for a place to set up a command post and finally settled on a town house-style condominium at the base of Schweitzer Basin, a fashionable ski resort finishing up its last week of the season. They moved twenty-five crates of equipment in—cameras, tapes, high-beam spotlights, night-vision goggles, and guns. Their chalet headquarters was perfectly situated, fifteen minutes from Sandpoint and forty minutes from Randy Weaver’s cabin. The deputies were struck by how beautiful the view was from their balcony, where they watched a black bear come by regularly to sun himself in the parking lot.

  They set up the advance command post in a vacant cabin on Wayne and Ruth Rau’s meadow and filled it with antennae, two closed-circuit televisions, taping equipment, radio equipment, and two generators. The technicians got the cameras ready to place in the woods and the out-of-town marshals did their best to stay low, so Weaver’s friends wouldn’t spot them. If they were discovered, they decided to pass themselves off as telephone workers or newspaper reporters. At night, using military illumination charts that let them know when the moon and stars would be the brightest, Roderick and his team hiked into the woods around the cabin and scouted for the best places to put the cameras. When they were ready, Roderick sent one of his deputies back to Washington with a message: Phase I of Operation Northern Exposure was complete.

  AFTER A PEACEFUL, MILD WINTER, the Weavers sensed the government was getting ready for something big. They were hyperalert and even began suspecting Alan Jeppesen of being an informant (“We think Alan is cooperating with the agents of the One World Beast Government”), and although Alan denied it, Vicki had Kevin Harris start picking up the mail. The $5,000 that Bill Grider was offered had inflated to $20,00
0 by the time the Weavers heard the story. After living for years on a few bucks from firewood, rug sales, and the charity of friends, Randy and Vicki wondered who could resist money like that? Guns always at their sides, the Weavers approached everyone who rattled up their driveway as a possible federal informant.

  After refusing to talk to Star, Geraldo Rivera, and the Los Angeles Times, the Weavers agreed to talk to Mike Weland, an unassuming, down-to-earth reporter for a tiny weekly in Bonners Ferry. Mutual friends brought Weland up, and the family talked with him for several hours. Sara and Rachel played and worked in the garden. Kevin, Randy, and Sammy wore sidearms and were nervous at first—especially the shaven Sammy Weaver, who glared at Weland early on. By the end of the interview, Sam was quoting Scripture and tickling Elisheba, who cooed with laughter on the couch in the bright, tidy living room.

  “Our situation isn’t about shotguns,” Randy was quoted as saying in Weland’s story. “It’s about our beliefs. They want to shut our mouths.”

  “We’re not Aryans; we’re not Nazis,” Vicki said. “The reason we are here is to do our best to keep Yahweh’s laws. The people who came to this country came to escape religious persecution, but there’s nowhere left to escape our lawless rulers.”

  Randy said he didn’t stand a chance in court against paid informants, and Vicki said that even though Randy wanted to turn himself in to protect the family, she and the kids wouldn’t let him. Then he offered a sort of terms of surrender, saying the only way the situation would end would be for the ATF to return his .22 pistol and admit they’d set him up, and for the sheriff to apologize for calling him paranoid.

  “Right now, the only thing they can take away from us is our life,” Randy said in Weland’s story. “Even if we die, we win. We’ll die believing in Yahweh.”

  That spring, Vicki’s letters home were filled with stories of “agents Provocateur,” government informants, and at least one plot to steal her baby. “Needless to say,” Vicki wrote, “the April exploits of the feds all failed and I’ve got rid of or discovered 4 snitches because of it.”

  The media attention brought fan mail, too, seven letters in all, Vicki noted, “from as far away as New York City telling us not to give up, that lots of people know who controls our corrupt government.” When someone sent her a news clipping that quoted authorities saying that letters were flooding in from all over the country, Vicki figured the feds were holding more mail back. Even though they wanted to be separated from the world, Vicki and Randy were pleased when a news crew trying to get an interview told their friends that Randy was becoming a Wild West hero, like his boyhood hero, Jesse James. “The original publicity was to force the feds to get rid of us,” Vicki said. “I guess it backfired.”

  The Weavers trusted fewer and fewer of their friends and so Kevin, who had always been the solid, quiet big brother of the family, spent much of the spring and early summer on Ruby Ridge, riding his motorcycle down to fetch the mail and groceries. He was everything for the family: Randy’s friend, Sam’s buddy, older brother to Sara, Rachel, and Elisheba. He even baked bread and canned vegetables alongside Vicki.

  Even with all the intrigue, it was a nice spring for the Weavers. Sara had a suitor, the fifteen-year-old patriot son of Vicki’s midwife, whose family visited when they could. The rest of the time, Sara was busy with her gardens and the rugs she wove alongside Vicki. Kevin was building a log cabin in a forested gully below the Weavers’ house, and Sam was helping, both young men working from sunup to sundown and then falling in bed, exhausted. Sam was also playing with Striker, his big yellow Labrador mix, who had grown from a nervous puppy into a great watchdog, with a bark so deep it kept a lot of people from getting out of their cars. Just a year before, with Vicki’s aging father struggling to get up a hill, Sam had put a harness on Striker, gave the other end to David, and had the dog pull Sam’s grandfather up the hill. “His bark is bigger than his bite,” Sara wrote, “and he is really just a BIG lovable puppy.” Randy watched fourteen-year-old Sam proudly. Not even five feet tall—smaller than his dog—he was a little man, braver and stronger than many of the adults Randy knew.

  In a letter decorated with pictures of wrapped presents and people in party hats, Rachel wrote that she had baked Sara a birthday cake. She told her grandparents that she was taking care of the chickens. “I pick grass every other day for the chickens. Sara found the first flower of the year on the mountain.”

  Elisheba was sitting and scooting but not yet crawling. She was cutting some teeth and learning to say “Mom.” As always, Vicki was working, taking care of everyone and keeping them strong in their obedience to Yahweh’s law and their war against the lying One World Government.

  “Are you starting to get the picture yet? Do you begin to see the reasons for the course we have chosen?” Vicki wrote to her mother. “They hate having their deeds brought to light and want to destroy anyone who exposes them. That includes me and my children.

  “The quality of our lives is just as important—more important than the length of our lives. The past 14 months we have been a family; rich in love and experiences, stolen from the desires and intentions of our people. They want my family separated and destroyed. Not with my help!! Tomorrow is promised to no man.

  “We aren’t stupid, nor paranoid,” Vicki wrote. “Nobody has to worry about being shot or in danger unless they shoot at us or are aggressive at us.”

  THE RIDGE JUST WEST of Randy Weaver’s cabin was code-named “the lumberyard,” so that anyone listening to the marshals’ radio transmissions on Ruby Ridge would mistake the traffic for loggers. Phase II of Northern Exposure began in mid-April, when the first camera went up in “the lumberyard,” three-quarters of a mile from Randy Weaver’s cabin. For a week, Roderick’s team went out at night, wearing full camouflage and lugging hundreds of pounds of equipment—microwave transmitters, photo lenses, tripods, transmitting control boxes, batteries, and cable—into the woods and hills around Randy’s cabin. When the camera was in place, they covered its tripod with a camouflage tarp and, by April 20, it was beaming pictures of the Weavers—toting rifles, gardening, and urinating in the woods—back to the screens in the cabin on Homicide Meadow.

  Placing a camera on the north ridge—code-named “the sawmill”—was easier, and between April 20 and May 11, the deputy U.S. marshals taped 118 hours on sixty-seven separate videocassettes, some showing an empty mountaintop, others showing the Weaver family’s daily routine of chores, playing, and walking around with guns. Inside the little cabin on the Raus’ property, deputy marshals watched the tapes and took notes.

  Amazingly, it seemed Randy, Vicki, and the kids never left the knoll. Occasionally, Samuel would ride his bicycle down around the bottom of the driveway, but for the most part, the family—especially Randy—never went past the springhouse below their cabin, where the driveway intersected the old switchback road.

  There were visitors occasionally, people looking for land they’d bought, a local newspaper reporter trying to get an interview, some friends of the Weavers. By April 25, Kevin Harris was back at the cabin, rumbling up the driveway on a motorcycle, wearing a hat that looked like it belonged to a Greek fisherman, a pair of goggles, and a backpack containing the mail and groceries.

  The marshals tabulated how often the various family members carried weapons on the videotapes: Randy 72 percent of the time, Vicki 52 percent, Sara 38 percent, Rachel 31 percent, Kevin 66 percent. Samuel carried guns a shocking 84 percent of the time and was almost always carrying a sidearm at least. They seemed to have a pattern of patrolling the compound, and in the mornings, Rachel carried long rifles and ammunition out to some of the rock outcroppings, which apparently served as bunkers.

  Thirty times during those twenty-one days, marshals witnessed what they called “a response” from the family. The noise from a car would echo up to the ridge top, and the Weavers would run to a rock outcropping, hold their weapons, and watch the bottom of the driveway to see if someone was coming up. V
icki or Kevin and one of the kids would go to the driveway to see who it was while someone else covered them from above.

  In many ways, the tapes only confirmed what the deputy marshals feared. This was not going to be easy.

  The cameras worked well until May 2, when the west ridge camera picked up Kevin Harris and Sammy Weaver staring across to the camera on the north ridge, where deputy marshals were spiking anchoring pins into place for a solar battery charger. That night, after it had stopped beaming pictures, the north ridge camera was stolen. Later, deputies would find the camera burned and buried on the Weavers’ land.

  While the $110,000 remote-controlled video system was still being put in place, Roderick took about two dozen trips up the mountain, to make sure it was safe for his deputies to continue working. Once, Kevin Harris almost saw him, and when Roderick returned to his pickup truck, he found the air had been let out of the tires. Another time, April 23, he got within a few hundred yards of the Weaver cabin and found himself in the deep brush near the base of the Weavers’ driveway. Already that morning, Roderick had seen rain, snow, sleet, and sunshine, and he huddled in the brush beneath a thermal NASA blanket that was silver on one side and camouflage on the other. Just then, a Ford Explorer rumbled up the driveway and stopped at a rock-and-log barricade the Weavers had put out. Sam and Vicki came down the driveway, Sam with a pistol, Vicki with a rifle and sidearm.

  Roderick watched a man get out of the pickup, a logger from Oregon who’d bought some land up there and had been up the day before, when he’d talked to Randy. The man asked for Randy again.