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

by Jess Walter

They checked in at the meadow, expecting to brief the Hostage Rescue Team about what they would find up at the cabin and what kind of people the Weavers were. Instead, the FBI agents ignored them as they went about the business of preparing for their mission. It was cold and rainy, and the marshals felt out of place, so they drove back to their condominium late in the afternoon. There, they talked about Billy Degan’s death and made flight plans to be in Boston for his funeral on Wednesday.

  They sat out on the condo’s balcony and stared out over the cool mountain lake they’d talked about fishing once the mission was all finished. This country was the most beautiful Dave Hunt had ever seen, the kind of place where black bears wandered out of the forest and sunned themselves in parking lots, where dense, unspoiled forests lapped up against ski hills and resort towns, so that from their condo balcony, seen through exhaustion and sadness, the Selkirk Mountains seemed like some tempting borderland between civilization and all that was dark and wild.

  HOMICIDE MEADOW WAS A COLD, drizzling, muddy mess on Saturday afternoon. Federal agents and state police propped up green army tents in the middle of the field while a cold mist soaked them like grocery store produce. Cars and trucks carved the wet field into deep ruts amid the only traffic jam ever in these parts—police cars, moving trucks, Jeeps, motor homes, telephone company trucks, and every other kind of vehicle lined up in the meadow, unloading men and supplies. At the far end of the pastureland, the Hostage Rescue Team set up its tactical headquarters, a sealed, solid-walled, modern white tent with some sort of generator for heat and air-conditioning that made the other federal agents, in their damp, drafty army tents, stare at it longingly.

  In the trailer that served as the overall command center, the top FBI agent, Gene Glenn, was wrestling with logistics that were as muddy as the terrain. By mid-afternoon, they’d established a perimeter all the way around the knoll, but—twenty-eight hours after the gunfight—they still had no one close enough to watch the cabin. Glenn had the armored personnel carriers he needed, and the hostage negotiator was ready to go up there and demand the Weavers surrender, but the state officers wouldn’t turn over the keys without authorization from their commander, who was out of town. And Glenn wasn’t going to have civilian guardsmen driving the APCs up the mountain to face the Weavers and whatever white supremacists might have joined them, with whatever arsenal Randy Weaver had assembled.

  Across the trailer, the marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, was working the telephones when Glenn pointed at him.

  “Hey, you know the governor?”

  “Sure,” Johnson said.

  “Can you help us out?”

  Johnson called the governor’s office and, once he’d reached him, handed the phone to the state officer who had the keys to the APCs.

  “Yes, sir, Governor. Thank you, sir.” They had the APCs. But there was no communications system between the two gunless tanks, and so they still couldn’t move out.

  In the meantime, Gene Glenn, Richard Rogers, and the other FBI agents were trying to finalize the rules of engagement so they could send the snipers onto the hills around the Weaver cabin. The interviews with Roderick, Cooper, and the other deputies had presented them with new information—specifically, Vicki Weaver apparently hadn’t been involved in the original gunfight. There would be no arrest warrant for her, and so, once again, the rules were revised. They wrote the new rules on a large pad in the command post.

  One of Rogers’s assistants showed him the rules and he told the assistant to scratch out what he’d written and to include “and should” after the verb can. It was the final, critical evolution of verbs: from could to can and should.

  “If any adult in the compound is observed with weapons after the surrender announcement is made,” Rogers read to his assistant, who would brief the HRT, “deadly force can and should be used to neutralize this individual. If any adult male is observed with a weapon prior to the announcement, deadly force can and should be employed if a shot can be taken without endangering the children. If compromised by any dog, the dog can be taken out.” For the children, he wrote, “Any subjects other than Randy, Vicki and Kevin, presenting threat of death or grievous bodily harm, FBI rules of deadly force apply.”

  Since Rogers had arrived in Idaho with Potts’s approval to revise the rules of engagement, there had been little discussion of whether they were appropriate. But it was still up to Gene Glenn to finalize and enact the rules. About 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Glenn got off the telephone with Potts and said that the FBI official had approved the modified rules of engagement. He still had to fax the total operations plan to FBI headquarters and to the U.S. Marshals Service. But FBI agents and marshals officials disagreed on the plan, which a marshal said would “get our men killed.” The FBI agents remarked that they didn’t hear any better suggestions coming from the marshals. Finally, they came up with an operational plan: surround the cabin with snipers, who would be able to shoot Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris if they came out of the cabin armed. Bring in armored vehicles and demand the family’s surrender. If they didn’t surrender by Sunday, destroy the outbuildings by ramming them with the armored vehicles. They also considered ramming the house and firing tear gas inside but decided the tear gas might be lethal to Elisheba.

  At 2:40 p.m., Glenn faxed the operational plan to headquarters, including the rules of engagement. After thirty-some hours on duty, Potts said later, he had gone home, and the deputy assistant director, Danny Coulson, read over the first page of the draft plan. Amazingly, Coulson claimed that he never saw the second page of the fax—which contained the altered rules of engagement—possibly because he was so upset by the first page. In his 1999 autobiography, No Heroes, Coulson wrote that when he saw the plan his first thought was: “These dumb shits.”

  The plan called for the Hostage Rescue Team to surround the cabin. Then two armored personnel carriers would lumber up to the cabin and a loudspeaker would be used to order the family to surrender. If the Weavers didn’t come out after two days, the APCs would flatten the outbuildings and tear gas would be fired into the house.

  As Coulson wrote years later, “What I had in my hand didn’t resemble anything that the HRT or any law enforcement agency should do. It was a military assault plan…. What the plan boiled down to was this: We’d gas the place and rip it up until everybody inside was too hysterical to think straight, and then HRT operators would go into close-quarter battle with women and children.”

  Coulson told Glenn to back up and rework the operational plan with a better option for negotiations. Fred Lanceley worked out some plans for negotiations, and Glenn faxed back the negotiations addendum and Coulson approved it. Later, no one at FBI headquarters would admit seeing the modified rules of engagement, even though they’d been faxed to the office as part of the total operations plan. When Justice Department investigators tried to find out who approved the rules, they found no record of Potts’s or Coulson’s discussion of the rules, a “lack of documentation” that was “significant and serious.” Meanwhile, in Idaho, the FBI believed it had permission to shoot any adult who came out of the Weaver cabin with a gun. Problem was, most of the time nobody left that cabin without a gun.

  IN FORT DODGE, IOWA, David and Jeane Jordison frantically dialed the phone numbers for Dave Hunt, the sheriff, and the other law enforcement officers they’d met and talked with over the last eighteen months. They couldn’t get any people, let alone any information. All they knew was the bizarre military talk they heard from officials on the television news: that the Weavers lived in “a compound” or “a fortress”; that the children were armed and dangerous; that the dead marshal was “a hero” who had been ambushed by the family; that federal officers had surrounded the cabin and might be planning to raid it.

  None of it made sense to David Jordison. It was no fortress. He’d built better barns than that old plywood mess. And the kids? Dangerous? They were just kids. It almost sounded like they were trying to find enough reasons to go up there with their
guns blazing and raid the house, to get some retribution for the death of the marshal. That’s why Vicki’s dad especially wanted to find Dave Hunt, to see if Hunt could arrange for him to somehow talk to Randy and Vicki. David Jordison had just talked to Hunt on the telephone about a week before. “Don’t worry,” Hunt had said. The marshals were committed to arresting Randy peacefully, Hunt had insisted, and they wouldn’t do anything drastic. “We won’t do anything before your visit.”

  That’s what made it so unbearable. It was only a few days before David and Jeane’s annual trek to the mountains. They were so excited to finally see little Elisheba. Lanny was even coming this time, planning to see his sister for the first time since she left Iowa nine years earlier. The truck was half loaded with the things from Vicki’s winter list, along with five or six boxes of clothes, a wonderful batch of tomatoes, some flour, sugar, and soybeans. Best of all, David had found another gas-powered washing machine to replace Vicki’s old one—a 1920s roller washer with a kick start and an engine that he had painstakingly restored. Growing up in the Depression on a farm without electricity and other conveniences himself, David knew how much Vicki would appreciate the new washer, and he was looking so forward to seeing the look on her face when he surprised her with it.

  Vicki’s sister, Julie Brown, had always known the guns were going to cause Vicki problems. She had resigned herself to her sister’s beliefs, but she didn’t think there was any reason to give guns to children and to spend your life drilling for war. She’d worried Friday night and Saturday with the rest of the family, but by Saturday afternoon, her husband, Keith, talked her into going to a Ringo Starr concert at the Des Moines fairgrounds to get her mind off what was happening in Idaho.

  “There’s nothing we can do here, anyway,” Keith said.

  But as they were walking into the concert, Julie burst into tears.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll never see Vicki again.”

  “Oh, Julie,” Keith held her. “It’s probably all over by now.”

  But by nightfall on Saturday, David and Jeane Jordison still hadn’t heard anything. Jeane held Vicki’s most recent letter—dated August 16—

  which had just arrived a day before. There was no hint of trouble, just small talk about the weather (“We’ve all been miserable with the heat”) and Elisheba (“She’s got a tooth that’s coming through”) and not one word of antigovernment stuff.

  Hope you get this before you leave. We’ll be expecting you anytime the last week of August. Be prepared for dust…. Take care and don’t work too hard.

  Love,

  Vicki & all

  Finally, they just couldn’t take it anymore. Just before 8:00 p.m. central time—about the same time the snipers were moving into place around Vicki’s home 1,000 miles away—David, Jeane, and Lanny Jordison climbed in Lanny’s pickup truck and left for Idaho.

  IN TEN YEARS as an FBI agent, Lon Horiuchi had never heard rules of engagement like these. Back at headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, in one of the classrooms used for the HRT training, the FBI’s standard rules of engagement were framed and hung on a wall and members were expected to know the rules as well as their own phone numbers:

  Agents are not to use deadly force against any person except as necessary in self-defense or the defense of another when they have reason to believe they or another are in danger of death or grievous bodily harm. Whenever feasible, verbal warning should be given before deadly force is applied.

  Those rules were clear. An agent fired only in self-defense or in defense of another person. More important to a sniper, those rules allowed him to make his own decisions about how dangerous a situation was, Horiuchi thought. This time, it appeared that decision had already been made for him. A marshal had been shot and killed, and the Weaver family and Kevin Harris had shown they would shoot indiscriminately at federal officers.

  Horiuchi listened to the new rules: Any armed adult male can and should be neutralized. And once the family had been given the chance to surrender, that changed to any adult—male or female. That meant Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver could be shot immediately if they were armed, and later, Vicki Weaver could also be shot.

  Posted on the walls of the HRT tent were surveillance photographs of everyone in the family and the team members stared at the pictures and familiarized themselves with them.

  Later that weekend, other FBI agents from around the West who had been called to the scene were given the modified rules of engagement. Some were shocked. One Denver agent turned to another and muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Several felt the rules were inappropriate and planned to ignore them. Another agent later told federal investigators the rules amounted to: “If you see ‘em, shoot ‘em.”

  But it wasn’t Lon Horiuchi’s job to determine the morality of the orders he’d been given; it was his job to react by using his own judgment and the rules of engagement. He had waited all afternoon for vehicles to drive the snipers up to the ridge top and, by 5:00 p.m., when the APCs still weren’t ready to go, the snipers decided to go on foot.

  Horiuchi talked it over with the leader of the other sniper team. If Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris came out of the cabin with weapons, they would wait until both men were outside, and then they would shoot them. If they saw one target outside and fired, they’d never get the other one out of the house. The team leaders agreed.

  By 5:30 p.m., eleven sniper/observers—some of the FBI’s top marksmen—were ready to move into position around the cabin. They followed one of the deputy U.S. marshals who had been on Art Roderick’s early teams during the first two stages of Northern Exposure. The snipers crept to the adjacent ridge north of the cabin, near where Dave Hunt and the other two marshals from the observation post had photographed the Weaver family the morning before. Because of the steep climb. Horiuchi carried a minimum of equipment—binoculars, a radio, and two guns: the sniper rifle and an M-14 assault rifle. He needed two guns because the FBI was afraid other white separatists might come up the mountain and help the Weavers. But Horiuchi knew the guns were for extreme situations. Mainly, their job was to watch the cabin, gather intelligence, and pass it on to the assault team; let them figure out how to get the people out of the cabin.

  The weather was cool and rainy, the clouds slung low over the Selkirk Mountains. The ground was slippery because of the rain, and they spent much energy breaking through brush. When the lowest clouds drifted away, Horiuchi could see snow at higher elevations on the surrounding peaks. He crawled the last 200 yards into position.

  The camouflaged snipers wedged themselves between trees and rocks, crouched in bunches of grass, and lay in brush along the hillside, two rising and falling football fields from the Weaver cabin. Lon Horiuchi had a very good spot, across a dip from the plywood home. He watched the cabin through his binoculars. He didn’t have to wait long. A low grumble from one of the armored personnel carriers in the meadow drifted up the hill, and once again, one of the Weavers’ dogs began to bark.

  THIRTEEN

  ALL THAT OVERCAST AND COLD SATURDAY MORNING, the Weaver family and Kevin Harris cursed and mourned and prayed to Yahweh. They debated what the ZOG devils might do next and guessed the reason they hadn’t attacked already was because they realized how badly they’d screwed up by killing Sammy. The family figured they would surround the cabin and contact them with a bullhorn, apologize for Sammy’s death, and try to get Randy and Kevin to come out. But there was no way they were going to turn Kevin over and have him framed for the shooting of the marshal. Kevin could never get a fair trial, and since he’d killed the marshal in self-defense, there was no reason for him to turn himself in.

  Randy cried because he felt so bad that he hadn’t been by Sammy’s side when the shooting broke out. Standing inside the beamed living room, Vicki sobbed and cursed in turn, repeating that they would not separate the family. Sara tried to be strong like her mother and remember what they had trained for, but it was difficult. Helicopters and
airplanes flew overhead, while the rumble of far-off trucks echoed off the walls of the ridge. There had been little sleep the night before. The family figured they had a day at the most before the agents moved in to surround them.

  Sara and Randy walked all around the cabin that morning, shutting in the chickens and feeding the dogs. They saw no one on the misty hillsides around the cabin. Sara and Vicki ran to the root cellar near the cabin, pulled back the door, and descended into the narrow gash in the ground where they kept their food. They grabbed jars of apricots and peaches, canned tuna fish and sardines, and walked back to the cabin. Afraid the feds would try to shut off their water supply, the family filled empty plastic milk jugs with water from the spring and stocked them in the house. They pulled the navy blue denim curtains and prayed that Yahweh would give them the strength to hold off the enemy. The guns were loaded: Sara’s and Rachel’s Mini-14 semiautomatic rifles; Vicki’s 9-mm semiautomatic pistol, which she wore on a holster; Kevin’s 30.06—the hunting rifle that had killed Bill Degan—and the Mini-14 of Sammy’s, which Randy now carried, along with his own holstered 9-mm. Tins of cheap Czechoslovakian ammunition filled corners of the cabin floor. They would just sit tight in the cabin—as a family—for as long as they could hold out.

  They would run across one of Sammy’s books, or his bicycle and someone would start crying again. All day, they prayed for help and salvation. For Sara, the day was a blur of frightened preparations until, just before 6:00 p.m., the dogs began barking again.

  Like always, Sara ran out of the house to check on the dogs before allowing her dad to come out. She didn’t see anything, and so she returned and got her dad and Kevin, who followed Sara out the door with rifles, into an afternoon weighted with low clouds. Randy said they wanted to check the north perimeter, and Kevin wanted to grab some flashlight batteries he’d left outside. They ran along the hard, rock-strewn ground, worn flat by nine years of foot traffic, bicycles, and dogs. As soon as they got to the rock outcropping, the dog stopped barking.