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

by Jess Walter

  “Please,” Kevin asked more quietly. No, Randy said.

  Sara watched Kevin through hot, blurred eyes. He was the bravest boy she knew. She prayed and read the Bible but wished her mother was there to help them understand Yahweh’s will. It was up to Sara now. She knew her mom would want her to help take care of the family.

  They whispered a little about what they would do, and especially about how they might get their story out. It all seemed useless now. Curled up on the wood floor, with rain slapping against the sheet metal roof and agents of Babylon crawling all over the hill, there seemed no point.

  “They’re gonna kill us all and cover it up,” Sara said. It was like she was in a trance, unable to sleep but not quite awake, alert but dreamy. It was dark as a cave inside the cabin, and the only noises were the constant weeping and Kevin’s gravelly moans. Sara watched the doors and windows and waited for the Apocalypse that she’d known was coming for as long as she could remember. It was worse than her parents had ever told her, worse than any nightmares. Sara would look across the floor at her mother and the fear would quickly give way to anger, and she vowed that when they finally came, she was going to take one of the bastards with her if she could.

  Every thirty minutes, the telephone rang in their yard, a stupid, jangling trick to get them outside for more sniper practice. They would tense up and watch the door where Vicki’d been shot until it stopped ringing.

  Randy’s wound was bad Sunday night, too. He was afraid that he was going to die before morning and that he wouldn’t even be there to save his daughters. He knew damn well they were all gonna die. Likely, the government agents were waiting for morning to storm the house. They heard noises beneath the cabin—agents setting bombs? listening devices? gas canisters?—and Randy pounded on the floor and yelled until the noises stopped.

  Nobody slept except Kevin, who drifted in and out of consciousness when he wasn’t coughing up dark blood. The baby woke up crying in the middle of the night, looking for Vicki’s milk. “Mama,” she said in between wails. “Mama.”

  That started everyone crying again. Randy patted Elisheba on the back and gently cried himself. “I know, baby. I know, baby. Your mama’s gone.”

  FOURTEEN

  SHOOT ME!” the man yelled at federal agents. Wild-haired and leaning, a can of Budweiser in his thick, laborer hands, the mechanic walked from the old highway toward the Ruby Creek bridge, glaring across the police tape at federal officers with machine guns. “If you don’t shoot me tonight, I’m going to come back and shoot you tomorrow! I’m a Vietnam vet and I’m on Randy’s side, just like all these other people out here.”

  It was 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning, the bars were closed, and cars trolled up and back on the old Naples highway, along the wide curve, their headlights tracing the line of trees and the faces of tired federal officers, who stood on the bridge, behind a yellow police tape that suddenly didn’t seem quite as authoritative. The Vietnam vet wandered away from the tape and toward Bill Morlin, the reporter who’d broken the Weaver story five months earlier. Morlin had never covered a story quite like this. The government kept them three miles away from the cabin and—going on the third day of the standoff—hadn’t even held a press conference yet. The reporters and photographers slept in their cars, at the roadblock, expecting shooting to break out any minute between the angry mountain people and the flak-jacketed federal officers. This was as tense as he’d seen the roadblock, and Morlin carefully approached the drunk veteran, who said the standoff was the fault of the government, which sent Weaver to Vietnam and then ignored him when he came back. The Idaho woods were full of Vietnam vets like Randy, he said, guys who couldn’t cope with the real world.

  “You put a strand of ivy on the wall, then come back twenty years later and it’s covering the whole wall,” he said. “So you don’t have to ask why there are men like Randy up there.”

  The mechanic said he’d met secretly with a group of other veterans, and they would retaliate if the government killed Randy and Vicki. First, they would destroy microwave and telephone communication facilities on Blacktail Mountain, near Sandpoint and at a place called “the pit” near Naples. Then the federal agents would be caught on that mountain with no way of getting help from the outside, and they’d be easy targets for the mechanic and his army of one hundred vets, who weren’t going to let a brother from Vietnam hang like that. The protesters listened to his little press conference and nodded in agreement; they had no idea that Randy Weaver had never been to Vietnam.

  FORTY-SIX HOURS AFTER THE SHOOT-OUT with deputy marshals, a secret microphone built into the telephone picked up the whining of a dog. The tiny mike also transmitted muffled voices and footsteps inside the cabin that Sunday morning. But when FBI negotiators at the base camp in Homicide Meadow rang the telephone in Randy Weaver’s yard, they got no response and presumed the family still wouldn’t leave the cabin to pick up the phone.

  They had to presume because, strangely, the cabin was left unattended by the FBI from 8:00 p.m. Saturday to mid-morning on Sunday. Finally, at 10:00 a.m., Lon Horiuchi and the other snipers got back into position on Ruby Ridge, nestling behind rocks and trees on the hillside overlooking the cabin again. The APCs rumbled back up the ridge, too, stopped on the driveway below the cabin, popped open their hatch doors, and released fourteen camouflaged agents, who crept with machine guns along the hillside just below the cabin, checking for mines or other booby traps. They secured the springhouse and the other distant outbuildings and found cover in case shots came from the house or the woods behind them. While Horiuchi and the other snipers kept a close eye on the cabin from 200 yards away, the assault teams closed the perimeter and surrounded the point from forty or so yards away, on downslopes below the cabin’s line of sight. They also kept watch on the woods behind them, in case any of Weaver’s supporters made it past the other lines of law officers on lower points of the ridge.

  When the assault teams were in place, the lead APC groaned up the rest of the driveway, around islands of boulders and card-house outbuildings, finally parking thirty feet from the front door of the cabin, on the side that opened into the kitchen, the side without the spectacular view, the side where Vicki Weaver had been standing when she was killed.

  The hatch opened again, and this time, HRT Commander Richard Rogers spoke through the loudspeaker.

  “This is the FBI,” Rogers said. “We have a warrant for the arrest of Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver. Come out with your hands up, unarmed. You will not be hurt. We want to take you into custody and put you into the legal processes of our system.”

  No answer.

  Rogers said they needed to set up some sort of communication with the FBI, to find a way to end the standoff.

  Every fifteen minutes, the FBI agents rang the telephone. “Pick up the phone, Randy,” said the hostage negotiator, Fred Lanceley, who took over the megaphone from Rogers. “We aren’t going to hurt you. It’s just a telephone.” Lanceley knew from his briefings that when Randy heard the dogs bark, he sent his children out to see what it was. He hoped Randy might do the same when the phone rang. “You can send out one of the children. It’s safe, Randy.”

  The assault agents could hear muffled voices and a baby crying, but there was no answer to the negotiator. Lanceley tried Vicki Weaver again.

  They rang the telephone in the yard thirty-four times, about every fifteen minutes, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The curtains didn’t even rustle. Finally, in the afternoon, a van drove up to the base of the bumpy dirt driveway and stopped well below the cabin, its back doors thrown open so a ramp could be lowered to the ground. Inside the van, a technician punched commands into the remote-control computer and then the robot walked out.

  It didn’t walk so much as roll, on rubber tracks like those of a bulldozer. It was a modified bomb disposal robot, like a big, rolling trashcan or R2-D2 from the movie Star Wars—a silver barrel with mechanical arms coming out of the top and sides and loaded with every manner of hardw
are: cameras, floodlights, microphone, amplifier, and receiver.

  One arm ended in a single-barrel shotgun.

  DAVE HUNT HATED EVERY MINUTE of this waiting. The rain had stopped, the high clouds were in the process of burning off, and it was incredible how quickly the mud turned to dust. Hunt’s chest and head throbbed with a cold that had fed off his exhaustion and two days of drizzle. Hunt watched camouflaged FBI agents with their M-16 rifles getting ready to go into the woods and saw FBI officials walk right past himself, Roderick, and Cooper as if they were invisible, as if they’d screwed up and were of no help now that the FBI was here to bail them out. Finally, the three deputy marshals walked over to the Hostage Rescue Team command post, stuck their heads into the tent, and listened as the agents were briefed by HRT officials. It was tough for Hunt to listen as they went over the information he’d spent eighteen months gathering—”Vicki Weaver is the spiritual strength”—and some intelligence—”there might be booby traps and explosives”—that he’d long ago dismissed. They treated Randy Weaver as if he’d had some special guerrilla training in the army, like some stereotypical Green Beret who built bombs out of nothing and had flashbacks of Vietnam.

  For more than a year, Hunt had been telling people that Randy had never served in Vietnam. He had some demolition training, but he was really just an equipment operator, a ‘dozer driver, not some kind of killing machine. Hunt knew Randy was dangerous all right—not because of his ability to build booby traps and bombs—but because of his unbending beliefs.

  Hunt’s surveillance photos hung on the walls of the off-white HRT tent, so the FBI agents could familiarize themselves with the terrain, the cabin, and the targets. The pictures sparked something else in Hunt, a feeling of incompleteness. He was, above all, an enforcement deputy, the guy charged with bringing in the fugitive. And his fugitive was still up there. For eighteen months, he’d imagined the conversation he’d have with Randy Weaver—”We need to get this thing straightened out before it gets out of control …”—and that Randy would walk down the hill with him peacefully. Now, one of the marshals was dead and Hunt was stuck here, watching FBI agents with machine guns getting ready to crawl into the woods to bring in his fugitive.

  Outside the tent, the flow of men and materials continued into Homicide Meadow. Two Huey helicopters landed in the meadow, which was close to bursting with green tents and military vehicles. It might seem like overkill to someone on the outside, but Hunt knew how difficult it would be to cordon off this entire mountain, especially against armed people who knew where every logging road connected with every cattle trail, people who might find a way through the brush and timber to the Weaver cabin.

  They paced outside the command post trailer for a while, watching all the activity. Hunt just wanted off the mountain. He wanted to go home to his wife and get some sleep, instead of pacing around this hot, dusty field, kept in the dark about what was going on. Finally, sick of the wait, Hunt, Roderick, and Cooper left Homicide Meadow to catch a flight to Boston for Billy Degan’s funeral.

  FIFTY-FOUR HOURS. Fred Lanceley wrote out the things he wanted to say to the Weavers and ran them past the other two negotiators. At the van where they controlled the robot, Lanceley and the head of the HRT, Richard Rogers, talked about where to proceed next. They spent most of Sunday negotiating through the robot’s loudspeaker (“Don’t worry about the robot. Randall? Why won’t you talk to us? Why won’t you let us talk to Vicki?”), and there hadn’t been so much as a peep from the cabin.

  “Yeah, I think we can wait this guy out,” Lanceley told Richard Rogers. “But I think it’s going to take a long time.”

  Sunday evening, Rogers decided to create some space for the armored personnel carriers to move and to clear the line of sight for the snipers and assault team members. He told the agents to start by moving the birthing shed, and so they drove an APC over to the small, barnlike building to push it out of the way. But just before the APC rolled over it, Rogers stopped the agents and sent a handful of assault team agents to make sure the shed was empty. It had dawned on him that, the night before, one of the family members could have hidden in the shed and planned to ambush the FBI agents around the cabin. Camouflaged HRT assault team members crawled and dashed serpentine-style over to the little building, slammed up against the sides, burst through the door, and poked their machine guns inside, red-laser targets knifing through the darkness.

  Flashlights lit the eight-by-fourteen shed, which was like the attic in an old house that had been turned into a bedroom—a small, self-contained living quarters lined with dark insulation. Just inside the door were cupboards on the right side, bumping into an elevated bed and a nightstand with a plant in a wide-based jar. Bags of clothes and old tennis shoes were piled against the other wall. On the bed was something big, wrapped in a clean white sheet. After checking for booby traps, the agents got closer, unraveled the sheet, and found a boy, stripped naked, his body cleaned and wrapped in a green sheet. He was a little boy, not even five feet tall, seventy or eighty pounds, with a T-shirt tan. He was uncircumcised. There were bruises on his knees and shins, like someone who runs through the woods a lot.

  “I have found the body of a young white male,” an agent said over his radio.

  In the van, Fred Lanceley heard the radio transmission and was stunned. My God, he thought, Weaver is killing his own kids.

  “Randy, we found the body of a young man,” Lanceley said over the robot’s amplifier. He asked what arrangements Randy wanted to make with the body. “I understand you have strong religious convictions,” Lanceley said, “and I don’t want to violate them. Please communicate your wishes to me by just speaking up.”

  Nothing.

  They wrapped the body back up, put it in the APC, and drove it to another shed, farther away from the cabin, where a deputy coroner looked at the boy and determined he’d been shot in the arm and the back. And then they took Samuel Weaver away.

  Sunday night, the spotlights came on with a “thunk,” like the closing of a door, and lit the front of the house eerily, like a Christmas Nativity scene in front of a church. They were the only electric lights for almost a mile in any direction.

  “YOU KILLED my fucking wife!” Randy yelled at the door. Glaring white light painted the cabin walls, seeped through seams in the curtains, holes in the walls, and cracks in the doors, like flashlights probing the dim cabin.

  On the floor, Sara couldn’t stomach the idea of them having Sammy. The whole family had cried when the voice talked about moving Sammy’s body. They were going to take his body away, cover up the fact that he’d been shot in the back by the marshals, and probably try to pin Sammy’s death on Randy or Kevin.

  Sara felt the spirit of Yashua, the one the pagans call Jesus, the Messiah of Saxon Israel, moving in her and giving her strength. Huddled on the floor with what was left of her family, she hoped the cowards would try to storm the house, so she could at least get a shot at one of them. More likely, they would use tear gas to lure the whole family outside and then gun them down. But she was prepared for that, too. When it happened, she would put Elisheba someplace safe, check her gun, then burst out the door and start firing at anything that moved.

  “Mama, Mama.” Elisheba sobbed. She wanted to be nursed again, and she fussed over the milk, water, and apricots that Sara and Rachel tried to feed her.

  Sara was busy—the way Vicki would have been. She got almost all the food out of the kitchen, changed Kevin’s bandages, cleaned his pus-filled chest and arm, and dumped the last of the hydrogen peroxide on the wound, which fizzed again with infection. The rags putrefied quickly, and the stench of his arm and chest was getting to all of them, a horrible reminder that he probably wouldn’t live, and a glimpse of what was in store for the rest of them. Sara remembered her mother’s herbs, and when the hydrogen peroxide was gone, she used the herb goldenseal to help get rid of the infection.

  They were in the middle of their third night without any real sleep, jigsawed aro
und the living room in a pile of blankets, quilts, and sleeping bags, behind couches and chairs. They listened to a radio and talked in low whispers about what the feds would do next; they guessed a raid or tear gas or a firebomb. The thing they didn’t expect was the constant psychological warfare, which was—in many ways—worse than anything the feds could’ve done physically.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Weaver,” the negotiator called out. “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?” That had started the whole family sobbing.

  The spotlights were another cruel stroke, blurring the time between day and night and keeping the whole family from sleeping, until Sara’s head bobbed forward, and she snapped awake and wondered whether a few minutes had passed or a few hours, whether she’d heard something outside or something in a dream, whether she was alive or whether Yashua had finally taken her away. Everything ran together: the phone ringing every fifteen minutes, urging them to come out and die; the tanks tearing up the ground around their cabin and circling them like sharks; the constant, unnerving drone of Fred, the negotiator. Maybe they were trying to make the family snap so they’d come out of the cabin firing their guns and the ZOG agents could claim they were justified in killing them all. Or maybe it was just torture, making sure they suffered plenty before shooting them all in the back and then claiming that Randy had killed his own family.

  And now their latest trick was this robot they were always talking about. Don’t be afraid of the robot. The robot is just so we can talk to you better. Randy knew exactly what it was for—to punch a hole in the house and shoot gas in, to kill the family or drive them into the open where they could be plugged by the fucking snipers. Randy held his rifle up and said he was going to start shooting if the robot came any closer.

  “Back off!” Randy yelled. “You’d fucking better back off or it’s all over!