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

by Jess Walter

  “Call Kenneth Fadeley.”

  He looked like the biggest accountant at the firm, the guy leading the company softball team in homers. Bald and thick, with ruddy skin and glasses, Fadeley hadn’t seen Randy Weaver since the meeting when Randy accused him of being a snitch. Fadeley had been at home last August when he heard about the shoot-out and Degan’s death from an ATF agent who called him. Fadeley had set the telephone down and started crying.

  Now, on April 19, the fourth day of the trial, Fadeley settled into the witness chair and began laying out his undercover work, the Aryan Nations World Congresses, the meetings with Kumnick and Weaver.

  He described one of the last meetings, during which Randy seemed agitated. “He felt he was being prepared to do something dangerous for the white cause,” Fadeley said. “He would give 110 percent to whatever it was he felt he was being prepared to do, and it was dangerous and something he had to do.” Fadeley did everything the prosecution wanted, put Randy at the Aryan Nations, placed him in context with a breed of criminals and racists. It was strong, compelling testimony that perfectly set up the tapes.

  Jurors put on wireless headphones and listened to recordings of Fadeley’s telephone call to the Weavers’ house, the meeting at Connies, where Weaver sold him the shotguns, and the final meeting in Fadeley’s car. They heard racist small talk and Randy’s demand for $300 for a double barrel gun and listened to him say, “I heard you were bad.” For hours, they listened to scratchy, fuzzy meetings between the white separatist and the informant—the poor quality of the tapes just adding to the sense of shady, criminal behavior. The language was profane and racist and Fadeley was such a good witness, he apologized to the jury for his part in it.

  On one taped telephone conversation, Vicki Weaver answered the telephone. Hearing her voice at the defense table, Randy began crying.

  Still, the prosecution’s case was as good as it was going to get. They had the strong testimony of Cooper, two credible FBI agents talking about evidence, and now Kenneth Fadeley, exposing Randy’s racism and gun dealing. Putting an informant on the stand was usually problematic for the prosecution, because informants often had a criminal record themselves and were getting some sort of deal for their testimony. But Fadeley was different. Whatever reason he had for going undercover—thrills? moral indignation? money?—he was no criminal. He seemed unshakable.

  At the end of the fifth day of the trial, Lodge instructed the jurors to ignore a news event that was playing itself out 2,000 miles away, in Waco, Texas. There, a poorly executed ATF raid two months earlier had dissolved into a gun battle that left ten people dead and sparked a standoff between David Koresh’s apocalyptic Branch Davidian church and federal officials. Richard Rogers and his Hostage Rescue Team had responded and spent the next fifty days trying to negotiate a settlement. But that afternoon, on April 19, 1992, the FBI sent tanks to open holes in the walls of the Branch Davidian compound for tear gas, and a fire—probably set by the people inside—erupted, killing eighty people. Jurors were to ignore that case, Lodge said, and not to connect anything that was happening in Waco with the case before them.

  Little did he know those two cases would be linked forever and would help fuel a movement that would eventually lead to the bombing of a federal building and the deaths of 168 more people in the name of conspiracy.

  CHUCK PETERSON WAS SCARED to death. Kent Spence told him that if the cross-examination of Fadeley went bad, the whole case might be lost. “If they can’t believe us about the initial stuff,” Kent said, “they’ll never believe us when we ask them to disregard a marshal.”

  Gerry Spence had given Peterson a quick lesson in his trial methodology: creating a story and telling that story with every witness, with every question. “Every time you stand up, you tell the story again.” Now, the old master was ready to turn Peterson loose on one of the most important witnesses in the case.

  “You know,” Spence said, “I’ve never done this before.”

  Oh shit, Peterson thought. I’m going to die out there. Initially, Spence was going to cross-examine all the witnesses, but Peterson had worked hard and had prepared for Fadeley, and so Gerry had offered him a crack at the informant. But now, clearly, Spence was having second thoughts. Peterson had done plenty of cross-examinations, but never in place of the best attorney in the world.

  “Look” Spence said. “I’m going to be there, and we’re going to get through it. Now, you’re going to say, ‘You lie for a living?’ Right? And you’re gonna say, ‘That’s how you make your money?’ Right? And ‘You like to lie?’ Right?”

  Peterson hadn’t thought of any of those questions. “Wait, I’m here to help you,” Peterson said. “You don’t have to let me cross.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got to do this.”

  Peterson started slowly. He called the informant Magisono. “Excuse me, it’s Fadeley, isn’t it?” It seemed Fadeley had several names. And there were other things that Fadeley said that weren’t true. He wasn’t a biker, was he?

  No, Fadeley answered.

  “So that was a lie?” Peterson asked. Then he asked if Fadeley really was a gun dealer.

  No, Fadeley answered. That was another part of his cover.

  “That would have also been a lie?” Each time Fadeley admitted lying, Peterson turned and scratched another red hash mark on the standing chart. It wasn’t long before Peterson had counted thirty-one lies.

  Then he turned to Fadeley’s undercover work at the Aryan Nations, where he’d talked to guys like Randy and Frank Kumnick and had written down license plate numbers in the parking lot.

  “I used to live there in Coeur d’Alene,” Peterson said. “There’s a little Free Methodist Church down the road not too far there from Hayden Lake. Did you stop there and get all the license plates, too?”

  “No, sir.”

  Peterson asked about the Catholic church, then the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the Quakers, and the Lutherans. “Those people were not considered by you worthy of taking their license plates. They weren’t a danger, were they?”

  He asked questions about how poor Randy was and how often he said he was just trying to feed his family. Then he asked why only certain meetings were taped. Why, for instance, wasn’t the actual meeting taped in which Randy offered to sell sawed-off shotguns? Fadeley said he didn’t know before the meeting that Randy was going to suggest that.

  But Peterson asked if it was because the informant didn’t want any evidence of entrapment. There were several meetings without tapes or notes, Peterson pointed out.

  “Didn’t ATF tell you, ‘Don’t record those initial conversations when You’re talking to this guy about the money and getting him to do the deal? You don’t record those because then there’d be evidence of entrapment that could be used against us.’”

  “That’s wrong,” Fadeley answered.

  They talked about the October 11 meeting, in which Randy and Fadeley both pointed at the barrel of the shotgun that Randy was going to saw. Fadeley said that when he pointed, he was only making sure he understood where Weaver had pointed. But Peterson suggested he was showing Randy exactly where to cut the gun off.

  And then they started talking about money.

  Peterson asked how much Fadeley would get paid for the case.

  Fadeley said he didn’t know.

  “It certainly would have something to do with the number of lies you told throughout the case, wouldn’t it?”

  “I was told I’d be paid case by case,” Fadeley said later. He got expenses, and “after we concluded a case, there may be a monetary settlement possible.”

  “And you would assume that … you would have to get him convicted, right?”

  “If he was guilty,” Fadeley answered.

  “Well, if you don’t get a conviction, you don’t get any money, right?”

  Fadeley considered it. “I would assume so.”

  “And that’s not just your assumption, sir,” Peterson practically leaped over
the podium. “If Randy Weaver gets acquitted of this gun case, you don’t get paid, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  A bonus for a conviction? Suddenly, the perfect witness, the unshakable informant, had a reason to lie. When Peterson turned around, Spence and Nevin were grinning at him.

  NINETEEN

  BOISE, IDAHO, IS where flat farmland bumps up against rumpled foothills, like a shirt half-ironed. It is the state capital—sophisticated by Idaho standards—a small city of about 125,000 people, who, like the terrain, seem at the juncture of two very different places. They are the wealthiest people in Idaho, the civil folk of the Great Basin region: government workers, corporate heads, and potato farmers, largely Mormon, like their cousins to the south and east in Utah. But they are Idahoans, too, and though Boise is squarely in the southern part of the state, its residents have a touch of the mountainous Panhandle in them, a bit of the West.

  For them, the three-month Randy Weaver trial played out like a baseball season—highlights at 5:00 p.m., box scores the next morning in the paper. They began encouraging Nevin and Peterson at the grocery store, and there were Spence sightings all over town. Boise is the law and order of a wild state, and many people still hoped they buried those neo-Nazis. But in Idaho, where antigovernment sentiments were more than a political fad, the details of the Weaver case turned many people away from the federal government. “Hey,” a bank executive said to Spence one day. “You guys are doing a good job.”

  The city is bisected by the polite Boise River and a walking-and-bicycling green belt, on which bankers jog to work and housewives bike with babies. Downtown, the choices for crossing the river are wide and patriotic—Capitol or Americana streets. Past the Egyptian Theater on Main Street, through a surprisingly funky downtown, the one-ways veer around the Capitol building to a one-hundred-year-old neighborhood, and on the edge of downtown, a seven-story glass rectangle where the rhythm of a long trial had settled, and it wasn’t uncommon to see a fuzzy-haired skinhead in a black T-shirt sharing a cigarette with a deputy marshal in a dark blue blazer.

  Upstairs, on the sixth floor, prosecutors worked the second week of the trial on Randy Weaver’s original gun charge. Herb Byerly, the courtly southern ATF agent, testified about Randy Weaver’s violation of the law and tried to clean up the mess Fadeley had accidentally left, saying that he had never promised the informant a bonus if Weaver was convicted, and that Fadeley was going to get his money whether or not there was a conviction. More ATF agents followed—Lance Hart and Barbara Anderson testifying about the broken camper, the ruse they used to arrest Weaver. The government’s case was alive again.

  The only thing the defense could do was hammer at Byerly about the money and his decision not to tape some meetings, and to show that Hart and Anderson’s ruse had made the Weavers even more suspicious.

  The failure-to-appear charge was next. Prosecutors called as a witness Stephen Ayers, the young part-time magistrate who had presided over Randy Weaver’s court appearance after his arrest. His testimony was damaging to Weaver, especially a tape recording of Randy promising to show up in court and promising to get rid of his guns. But Ayers’s mistake came out on Peterson’s cross-examination: his suggestion that Randy might lose his land to the government to pay for his court-appointed attorney if he lost his case.

  “So you agree that you misstated that law?” Peterson asked.

  “In that instance, it appears I did.”

  Next came the officials who were in charge of Randy Weaver’s case after his release. They testified that Randy’s court date was changed from February 19 to February 20. His probation officer, Karl Richins, said he accidentally wrote Weaver a letter in which he said his trial was set for March 20.

  When a court official showed him the mistake—more than a month after he’d mailed the letter—Richins felt sick to his stomach. “I realized what I’d done, and I was very worried.” The image of a bungling bureaucracy began to emerge, in which Randy Weaver was given two court dates, February 19 and March 20, neither of which was right. On February 20, Weaver’s real court date, the judge called the case without a defendant.

  The jury understood that Weaver could have shown up any of those days and it would have been okay. Clearly, he wasn’t going to show up, no matter what day his hearing was. But the mistakes further wounded the prosecution, and to some jurors, Randy’s distrust of the government was making more sense.

  Next, prosecutors presented Vicki Weaver’s letters to the government—the “Queen of Babylon” letters. The U.S. attorney, Maurice Ellsworth, testified about the strange letters, which were full of confrontational language that cut away at Spence’s claim that the Weavers were “ideal people.”

  Spence took his turn at Ellsworth, the conservative-suited bureaucrat who seemed eager to spar with the anti-establishment Spence, in his suede cowboy jacket.

  “We’ve never met, have we?” Spence asked.

  “Yes…. We met in Judge Williams’s chambers at the commencement of this case.”

  “Oh, yes.” Spence looked down his nose where his glasses had slid. “You didn’t look so official.”

  “Apparently,” Ellsworth said, “you are a more memorable character than I am.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “That wasn’t necessarily a compliment,” Ellsworth said.

  “Then I withdraw the ‘thank-you.’”

  Spence and Ellsworth went back and forth over the letters: Ellsworth saying how worried he was by the letters, Spence arguing that it was a First Amendment issue. “If I were to call you the Queen of Babylon, it might insult you a little bit, maybe, [after all] you don’t look like a queen.”

  “It would not be my favorite address,” Ellsworth answered.

  “But you would recognize that I, as a citizen of the United States, have a right to call you the Queen of Babylon if I want to, true?”

  “Sure,” he answered.

  “The Constitution guarantees it, doesn’t it?”

  “With some limitation.” Ellsworth said the letters were so threatening, he’d called the deputy U.S. marshals to assess the danger of whoever had written them.

  Spence went over the language in the letters, much of it biblical. “Do you believe … we should have a threat assessment of the Bible?” he asked Ellsworth.

  “No.”

  On April 23, the ninth day of the trial, Judge Lodge took a week break to go to a conference, and so the case was postponed until May 3. In just nine days of testimony, Spence had tested Lodge, himself an old cowboy. Lodge tried to keep order as Spence argued incessantly with prosecutors, pushed the limits of courtroom behavior, and requested three mistrials. Toward the end of the second week, he was contrite though, offering at one point to stipulate that Vicki Weaver had written the “Queen of Babylon” letters without the usual firing back and forth of arguments and briefs and clustering around the judge’s desk.

  “Judge,” Spence said, “I am here because I want to earn and get from you some brownie points, because I might need them later. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” Lodge said.

  “Maybe the record should reflect that I should get some of those points,” Lindquist joked, “for giving Mr. Spence the opportunity to ask for those points.”

  Lindquist and Howen needed them far more than Spence. By that time, the prosecution wasn’t just fighting the defense team. It was also battling a cover-up.

  FROM THE BEGINNING, FBI officials realized Vicki Weaver’s death could cause them problems. Early reports that the family had shot at a helicopter slowed the demand for an explanation of the shooting, but now, with Howen’s broad indictment, the decisions that eventually led to Vicki Weaver’s death would be dragged into the open.

  There was little doubt that Howen’s broad indictment put the FBI in a difficult situation. When prosecutors came looking for evidence, the FBI at first refused to release a handful of documents. Among those objecting to the release was E.
Michael Kahoe, the FBI official who was inexplicably put in charge of a review of the shooting, even though he had been involved in the early discussions of the rules of engagement, which stated deadly force could be used against any armed adult. Two years later, Kahoe would be suspended from his job and accused of shredding a document that showed that his boss, Larry Potts, approved the unusual rules. Also objecting to the release was the official under Potts, Danny Coulson, the man who had developed the Hostage Rescue Team. Coulson had been at FBI headquarters when the operations plan—with the rules of engagement—was faxed there. He said he never saw the rules.

  When prosecutors asked for that operations plan, Coulson said it had never been approved, so it shouldn’t be released to defense attorneys. He said it would disclose HRT secrets. Potts—who, at the least, had approved the idea of changing the rules of engagement after Rogers left Washington, D.C.—was named in another memo ordering that the documents were “not to be released.” Since the standoff, Potts had been promoted to the number-two position in the FBI.

  Strangely, other Weaver documents simply weren’t there. A Justice Department probe would later question why there were no notes or records of early discussions about the rules of engagement, a very unlikely scenario in the paper-heavy FBI. By that time, the foot-dragging wasn’t over the rules themselves (there would be no way to keep those out of the trial) but who at the FBI approved them. Even people in other law enforcement agencies began to whisper about the FBI’s actions and the question became Nixonian—who knew about the rules of engagement and when did they know it?

  Justice Department officials who tried to help the prosecutors get past the FBI’s roadblocks noted the “Bureau’s intransigence appears to emanate from Larry Potts’s level or above.”

  HOWEN AND LINDQUIST WERE STUCK trying to defend the FBI’s actions in court—without the FBI’s cooperation. In September, less than a month after the standoff, Lindquist had flown to Quantico, Virginia, to meet with Richard Rogers and to discuss the actions of the Hostage Rescue Team. When Rogers said he couldn’t have the operations plan, Lindquist, the former Marine, said he’d get a court order if necessary. Rogers let him read the plan but not copy it.