by Jess Walter
SEVENTY HOURS. Fred Lanceley arrived at the command post at 7:47 a.m. on Monday and found out that—just twenty minutes earlier—Randy Weaver had yelled something. He was cussing and screaming, the other negotiator said, and possibly even preaching. Much of it was unintelligible, but one thing was clear. He wanted the robot moved. Damn. Lanceley had missed his chance.
“Randy, I’m sorry I missed what you had to say,” Lanceley said. “Please, tell me what you wanted to talk about?” The negotiator pleaded with Weaver to talk, to say anything, but he got no response. “We just don’t understand, Randall. We’ve done everything you asked us to do. We’ve cooperated the best we know how. We backed the robot off when you said back off.”
Frustrated, Lanceley resumed his usual speech about how the Weavers should pick up the telephone. He warned them when helicopters and APCs moved around the cabin and just tried to keep the family calm. Besides being a negotiator, Lanceley believed he understood human nature. He had a bachelor’s degree in psychology, master’s degrees in business and criminal justice, and was almost done with his psychology doctorate. The marshals’ intelligence reports had included a psychiatrist’s evaluation of Vicki that indicated she was the backbone of the family and would do anything—perhaps even murder her own children and then kill herself—to keep the family from being broken up. So Lanceley tried Vicki again, spending several hours trying to reach her.
“Vicki, how’s the baby?” Lanceley mispronounced Elisheba’s name. “I share your concern about Elizabeth. I need to know if there’s anything that can be done for the baby. Milk? Diapers? Food? If you need anything, all you have to do is call out, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Nothing.
This was becoming one of the most frustrating cases he’d ever worked. That night, he broke into some deep conversations about death and about having the courage to face adversity, hoping to make Randy see how serious this had become and to sober him up and make him take some responsibility for his kids’ safety.
Nothing.
WAYNE MANIS TOOLED ALONG the old Naples highway and looked for the turnoff to Ruby Ridge. The friendly FBI agent from Coeur d’Alene had been off the white supremacist beat ever since he’d helped break The Order in the mid-1980s. But like every other federal agent in the West (and many from the East), he’d been called to help cordon off Ruby Ridge. Manis would’ve come sooner, but he was on another remote mountain in north-central Idaho, twelve hours away, trying to build a horse corral at a hunting camp in a driving snowstorm. He and another agent had driven back to Coeur d’Alene on Sunday, got the message about the Weaver case, and immediately set out for Boundary County. Now, Monday morning, Manis eased through Naples and into the foothills of the Selkirk Mountains. In the back of Manis’s red Jeep was a 9-mm machine gun—the same gun he’d used in the siege of Order leader Robert Mathews’s home on Whidbey Island.
Manis rounded the corner near Ruby Creek and couldn’t believe what he saw. There were cars and pickup trucks everywhere—perhaps eighty vehicles, lined up along this little country road for nearly a mile. And the scene at the roadblock itself was even more stupefying.
Along the left bank of the road, a few feet before the Ruby Creek bridge, huge, white satellite news trucks hummed, their big dish antennae pointed away from the mountain. There were two dozen reporters and photographers working the roadblock, with their own portable outhouse. On the other bank of the dirt road, fifty protesters held signs—”Government Lies/Patriot Dies” and “Death to ZOG”—and yelled at the trucks and cars that were allowed through the roadblock. To Manis, the people looked dirty, like homeless stragglers just shouting and raising hell. He’d never seen such a concentration of angry racists.
They yelled at him as he drove through the roadblock, “Leave them alone!” Manis shook his head as he passed dozens of federal and state agents in bulletproof Kevlar vests and jungle hats.
As he rattled up the hill toward the command post, Manis expected to find a sedate mountain operation, with perhaps a half-dozen officers standing around in a field. Instead, he found a military camp. The road broke through the woods and into a meadow, where a Red Cross van was serving chow and hundreds of cars and trucks were parked on one end, covering a section of the meadow as big as a football field. Huge military-style tents, stuffed full of army cots, were set up everywhere. A barn had been converted into a staff office, a place for meetings and briefings and even a steno pool with secretaries, typists, and computers. Across an old horse trail from the barn was the command post, a forty-foot travel trailer with an awning coming out of it.
Manis stared all around the meadow. This was about the same size as the contingent of federal officers that had battled The Order on Whidbey Island.
“IT APPEARS as if Samuel Weaver was killed during the initial exchange of gunfire, but that can’t be definitely stated until the autopsy is completed,” said Gene Glenn, the special agent-in-charge of the Weaver operation. In a field on the federal side of the Ruby Creek bridge on Monday, newspaper, television, and magazine reporters from around the country fanned out in front of Glenn and Mike Johnson, who conducted the first press conference since the shoot-out began. Glenn said they’d just discovered the body the night before. He said nothing about Lon Horiuchi’s two shots.
“Samuel’s death is a tragedy, as is the death of Deputy Degan. I emphasize we are taking and will take every reasonable precaution to avoid further loss of life or injury,” said Glenn, his gray, earnest face cocked sideways and his hound dog eyes turned down at the corners. “However, it must be understood that Harris and Weaver have been charged with serious crimes and they pose an immediate threat, not only to law enforcement officers, but to the community as well.”
Johnson would go one step further. “What bullet killed Samuel Weaver is still under investigation. It’s a possibility shots came from Harris’s weapon.”
VICKI’S PARENTS, DAVID AND JEANE, and her brother, Lanny, had made it to North Idaho by Sunday night at 8:00 p.m., 1,500 miles in twenty-four straight hours of driving. The next morning, they’d driven to Bonners Ferry, where they met with the county prosecutor, Randall Day, who told them to go back to Sandpoint to wait for instructions from the FBI.
The Jordisons found a motel across from the parking lot where Randy had last met with Kenneth Fadeley. They checked into a second-floor room and waited for the FBI to show up. In the afternoon, an agent finally did show up, a friendly middle-aged man with a deep Texas accent who asked them to make an audiotape for the agents to play on top of the mountain to coax the family down. On the tape, they all pleaded with Randy and Vicki at least to protect the children, and they said the Weavers wouldn’t get their story out unless they surrendered.
The FBI agents visited their motel room several times, asking questions about the cabin. Once, an agent wanted David Jordison to draw him a map showing where all the furniture was located. Julie Brown, who flew out to be with her family in Idaho, couldn’t believe what they were asking. “What if you use this map to raid them and something happens to someone in the family? How will my dad live with that?”
They needed the map, the FBI agent explained, to figure out where the booby traps were.
“Aw, you fools,” David said. “They have a baby. Are they going to booby trap their house with a baby running around inside?” Another time, FBI agents warned the Jordison family that they believed Vicki had shaved her own head and had become suicidal.
After the agent left on Monday, the Jordisons turned on the television news. Once again, the Weaver story led the local news, as a somber anchor said fourteen-year-old Samuel Weaver had been killed.
David Jordison sat down on the bed. He couldn’t believe it. He thought about the mountain streams he and Sammy used to fish, the four-inch trout he’d find, the trails they’d go on, and the birch walking sticks Sammy was always bringing him. My God, he thought, they killed a little boy. David had never thought too much about government before, but now he was baffled.
Maybe Vicki was on to something. After all, the FBI had just been in their room. Why hadn’t they told him Sammy was dead?
In Jefferson, Iowa, Randy Weaver’s mother, Wilma, answered the telephone and a reporter asked for her reaction to Samuel’s death. She set the phone down and told Randy’s father, Clarence, that, apparently, Samuel had been killed. Slowed by old age, Randy’s parents had never visited Idaho, and they hadn’t seen Samuel in nine years. Wilma returned to the line and asked why no one from the government had called to tell them. Of their sixteen grandchildren, said the elderly woman, Samuel was the only one who would’ve had their last name.
“I was just writing him a letter to tell him that and tell him how proud I was of him,” said Wilma Weaver. “I guess I won’t mail it.”
THEY HANDED OUT extra plastic handcuffs, and the camouflaged agents at the roadblock strapped them to their belt loops and turned to face the crowd. Half-a-dozen agents bolstered the presence at the highway and officers who had leaned casually against the aluminum railings of the Ruby Creek bridge now stood at attention, watching the crowd with darting eyes.
It took only a few minutes for the word to spread that Sammy Weaver was dead.
A pretty, college-aged woman with red hair stepped forward from a mess of yelling men in cowboy boots and baseball caps. She held up a sign that read “FBI—Rot in Hell.” The shouts and taunts started in again, and the crowd pressed toward the roadblock, leaning across the tape and screaming phrases as familiar as the chorus to a song: “Baby killer! Baby killer!”
When a reporter asked about the dead marshal, Vicki’s friend Jackie Brown spit through her tears, “I hope they get a dozen more.” They had murdered Sammy. But at least, Jackie said, Vicki and the girls were okay.
Construction crews waiting to get past the roadblock were taunted by protesters who didn’t think they should be helping the feds. “Shame on you! Shame on you!” yelled a woman in a T-shirt that read “Leave ME Alone.”
One man with a goatee held a “Death to ZOG” sign high over his head and preached at the driver of a semitruck waiting to haul railroad ties up the hill: “How much do you have to be paid to compromise your people? … How many dead patriots will you bury? How many will you put dirt in their faces and watch them and their families cry as you sat by and you drove the truck? You drove the truck! Walk away! Wipe the blood off your hands now! Stand up and be a man! Don’t fight for a system of tyrants!”
The driver, unlike the television crews, ignored the man.
By Tuesday, the protesters had covered their campsite with a blue tarp and were cooking cheese sandwiches and bacon over a barrel stove. Foot traffic flowed from the Swiss innkeeper Lorenz Caduff’s nearby Deep Creek Inn, which quickly became home base for protesters and reporters alike.
“Sir,” a skinhead asked, “are we allowed to come in here?”
Lorenz said anyone was welcome in his restaurant. “I have a Korean housekeeper, and there’s a black reporter here. If you are polite and nice, you can come in.”
The Swiss chef served up scrambled eggs and roast beef sandwiches and listened to the conversation, shocked when he heard that government agents had shot a little boy in the back. He just couldn’t understand it. He sent his own wife and kids to Sandpoint, to keep them out of trouble. “They have killed a boy? Why is this?”
At night, the protesters gathered around the television crews filming live shots and warmed themselves in the bright lights, listening to the tired TV reporters to make sure the “Jews Media” reported the story correctly. People continued to show up at the roadblock: white separatists joined by Randy’s neighbors, bikers, woodsmen, grandparents, and Vietnam vets like the guy in a Jack Daniel’s T-shirt that very nearly stretched all the way over his substantial beer gut.
Television lights glinted off the shaved domes of about a dozen skinheads—two separate troops from Las Vegas and Portland who had called their various sponsors and been advised to report for battle in the great race war in North Idaho. Fresh off their success in a race riot in Denver, the Vegas skinheads—resplendent in their classic storm trooper jackets and slick-shiny heads—jumped right into the fray, launching glowers and derisive cheers of “Baby killer” at federal agents. One of the Vegas skinheads claimed to have hidden their guns in the woods.
The Portland skinheads kept more to themselves until Tuesday afternoon, when five of them piled into a Jeep Cherokee and drove back toward Naples, then turned down a back road that led to the canyon behind Ruby Ridge. As the Jeep moved toward the back side of Randy’s cabin, a helicopter appeared over the tree line and hovered above the skinheads. They turned down another dirt road and state police and ATF cars raced up behind them, lights flashing. The Jeep stopped and Lance Hart—the ATF agent who’d arrested Randy Weaver—warned the young men to step out of the Jeep one at a time.
“Get on the ground!” The agents pushed the young men to the ground, handcuffed them, and searched them. They found a carload of guns and ammunition, and a sign that read, “Whites Must Arm.” One of the skinheads wet his pants while they were being stopped. Federal agents had been watching them since the day before, when they’d gone to a gun shop, bought rifles and ammunition, and asked how to get to Randy Weaver’s cabin. They were taken into custody and charged with possession of a concealed weapon, a charge that was later dropped.
At the roadblock, some of the Vegas skinheads were defensive and pointed out that they had weapons, too, and they would use them if it became necessary.
“We are here to let people know that those people behind the yellow line are our enemies,” said Johnny Bangerter, a twenty-three-year-old skinhead who looked like an angry Curly from The Three Stooges and who was the second cousin of the governor of Utah. “Every federal institution and government is our enemy because of its action of killing a child in cold blood. We are ready to fight, and it could be a bloody one. This is going to be a second revolution in America.”
NINETY-SIX HOURS. Given enough time, people will find a rhythm for everything. The APCs moved up and down the ridge, running over the gunshot body of Striker—which no one had bothered to move—twenty-seven times. There were reports that a federal officer had put up a sign that read: “Camp Vicki.” By Tuesday, Lon Horiuchi and the FBI snipers and assaulters—working in twelve-hour shifts—crouched more comfortably on the hillsides around the cabin, the tension gradually displaced by boredom. They were still alert but were no longer running only on adrenaline. Chickens milled around the yard, while the family’s remaining dogs, which had long since given up barking at the military vehicles, wandered down to assault team agents who stood next to wilting flower gardens and who scratched the dogs’ ears and petted them. In the coming days, agents closer to the cabin began noticing a rancid smell coming from the house. Some of the more experienced agents knew what it was. There was someone dead inside the cabin.
Fred Lanceley showed up for work that morning and decided to lighten it up a bit.
“Randall. This is Fred. Good morning. I thought you might like to know that we are taking care of your dog, the one with the mismatched eyes. The last time I saw him, he was eating a big plate of spaghetti. We are calling him J.R., because he looks like one of the guys that works with me. Let me know if Elizabeth needs anything. Over the next few days, I hope to demonstrate to you, to Mrs. Weaver, to Kevin, that despite all that’s happened, everything is being done to insure that this situation ends without further violence.”
The weather had cleared for good, and the FBI agents snuck glances at the incredible view, the glacial valley played out before them in soft greens and browns, roads and houses small-scaled by all that was undeveloped. It was a startling view, a reminder that in some places, civilization is still subject to the flow of wilderness.
Down below, FBI agents had begun investigating the scene at the Y and were surprised to discover seven shell casings from Degan’s gun spread along twenty-two feet, meaning not only did he fire his weapon, but he may have been movi
ng when he did it. Along with Samuel Weaver’s death, it was another indication to FBI investigators that the marshals’ initial version of the shoot-out was not the whole truth. It also appeared the family wasn’t as dangerous as they’d first believed. They still hadn’t fired out of the cabin. The rules of engagement—which, until this point, would’ve allowed the snipers to kill Kevin and Randy again if they saw them—were changed back to the normal rules.
To Lanceley, the clear, warm Tuesday morning—five days since the shoot-out—seemed like a good time to talk about religion. Their intelligence showed that Randy fancied himself quite a preacher, and so Lanceley probed that for a while, like a dentist looking for a cavity.
“Randall, I’m from Virginia, and until a few days ago, I had never heard of your religious beliefs and convictions, and even today all I know is the government’s version of what they say are your religious beliefs. I would like to hear from you, you know, what’s going on here. What’s happening? I just don’t understand. Randall, these people aren’t going away. It may take a few days to demonstrate that to you, but tell me what’s happening. Let’s discuss the problem and see if you and I and Vicki and Kevin can work it out.”
Nothing.
EVERY TIME THE ZOG AGENTS mentioned Vicki’s name, it was clear to the family what they were trying to do. They knew damn well they’d killed Vicki, and they were just showing the rest of the family how the standoff was going to end and making it clear that no one was getting out alive.
“Did you sleep well last night, Vicki?”
Always that coy, smart-ass tone. And every time they said her name, every eye in the cabin went to the blanketed body beneath the kitchen table, lying graceless in her own blood on the wooden floor.
Randy had screamed at the door on Sunday that Vicki was dead, and ever since then, the feds had turned that against the family, using their own grief to try to destroy them. Randy wasn’t going to give them any more information. He was done communicating.
