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

by Jess Walter

  Cyril pushed quickly for a vote. But a couple of jurors stopped him. Dorothy Mitchell knew they weren’t ready for a test yet. They had to put all the confusing information into some sort of context. And if the prosecution wasn’t going to teach this material, then perhaps she would have to.

  FIRST CAME the illegal shotgun charge. Arguments began almost immediately, and three camps emerged. Cyril had his law-and-order team: retired judge’s secretary Ruth Sigloh, sixty-two; a housewife named Eunice Helterbran, sixty-seven; and Karen Flynn, a pregnant, thirty-one-year-old accountant with an MBA. They saw the government’s mistakes, but they weren’t ready to forgive Weaver and Harris just because Gerry Spence said so. Still, Hatfield was worried. They weren’t the strongest team. Sigloh, sitting at the edge of the jury box near some scary antigovernment people, had suffered a stress attack during the trial and was on medication. Helterbran had an arrhythmia and was on medication to still the pounding of her heart, and Flynn was about six months pregnant. Hatfield had high blood pressure made worse by this awful sequestration. He hadn’t felt so cooped up since he was a Marine on Guadalcanal, waiting in the dark during bombing blackouts.

  That first week, there were only two jurors who stayed out of the arguments, Mary Flenor, a fifty-two-year-old supermarket inventory auditor, and Leonhard Fischer, a sixty-seven-year-old semiretired businessman.

  Six jurors leaned toward not-guilty verdicts. They were led by the Dorothys: Mitchell, the forty-five-year-old teacher, and the quieter Hoffman, a sixty-year-old college tutor. Janet Schmierer, forty-seven, assembled disk drives at Hewlett-Packard, and Frank Rost, sixty-eight, was a retired farmer and a carpenter. Gerry Anderton, seventy, was a retired heavy equipment shop manager whose libertarian beliefs fit squarely with Weaver’s distrust of government.

  Finally, there was forty-three-year-old John Harris Weaver—Jack—whose youngest brother had been murdered years before. The burly pressman had to be drawn out, but he eventually let it be known he, too, believed the government had not proved its case. While other jurors were surprised the defense rested, Weaver had been more shocked when the prosecution ended its case. He’d been expecting Howen and Lindquist to bring forth their star witness, someone who’d make the whole case clear and credible. This case wasn’t about a band of conspirators, he thought. It was about a screwed-up family.

  Those jurors slowly coalesced into a team eager to teach the government it couldn’t shove people around just because they believed differently. The acquittal coalition began redefining the arguments as debates on government wrongdoing.

  “The government is not on trial here,” Hatfield said, trying to keep jurors focused on the narrow questions in the jury instructions.

  They started with the gun charge. Discussions formed, dissolved, and re-formed around the two tables, the men hoisting the guns over and over and sneaking out to smoke, the women trying to order the debate. On an easel chart, the accountant, Karen Flynn, called on members of the jury to help her list the pros and cons, illegal gun charge versus entrapment. “Your side and my side,” she called it, looking at Gerry Anderton.

  Anderton jumped on her choice of words. “Listen here, sweet pea. It’s not your side and my side, it’s our side,” he lectured.

  Flynn was taken aback and started crying.

  They got nowhere on the gun charge, and by the third day, Friday, June 18, the discussions of the failure-to-appear charge—Dave Hunt’s dogged pursuit of a peaceful solution versus Randy’s very real distrust of government—had begun to drag as well. One juror was feeling ill and was asleep by early afternoon. The other jurors took a break to read their notes and review the evidence. They worked Saturday but ended the short first week without a formal vote. A couple of informal straw polls made it clear this was going to take some time.

  Dorothy Mitchell began making charts of the facts they could agree on, relying heavily on long recitations from the notes kept by Mary Flenor, the inventory auditor. They studied physical evidence and argued over interpretation. Whenever someone tried to speed things up, the methodical Schmierer insisted on replaying all the evidence. By the end of the first week of deliberations, everyone was angry.

  Hoffman motioned Hatfield aside during a break and said she’d heard a rumor that Cyril told an alternate juror that he was going to send Weaver and Harris to prison. She accused him of being prejudiced.

  “I want you to be fair,” Hoffman said. “If you’re not, I have a letter I’m going to send to the judge.”

  “Do you really think I said that?” Hatfield asked.

  “I have no reason to believe you didn’t,” she said.

  Cyril was losing control of the jury. The undecided jurors were swinging toward acquittal, and the conviction minority felt it was being interrupted and intimidated. Dorothy Mitchell led the small class of adults through the case, jabbing emphatically at the air with her pencil, unnerving jurors who feared she would throw it at them.

  Despite Mitchell’s junior-high-teacher work ethic and Cyril’s attempts to steer the discussion, they got off the point, arguing for hours one day over whether or not the Weavers would make good neighbors.

  “Randy Weaver hated the government,” Helterbran said.

  “That’s no crime, I hate the government,” said Gerry Anderton.

  “Yes, that’s obvious,” she said disapprovingly.

  At least he wasn’t like her, Anderton thundered, seeing government as “God Almighty and the bureaucrats that are doing all these things as the disciples!”

  Mitchell and Schmierer settled the jury on a painfully slow process. Baffled by the prosecution’s impressionistic tale, they started at the beginning and retold the evidence to each other in chronological order, pulling facts from memory, notes, and evidence, and assembling the story of the case in some logical form. It took more than eight days.

  The retelling proved invaluable for some, but a few of the younger jurors were frustrated by the pace. Their retired counterparts seemed to have nothing better to do than wallow in this case, extending their fifteen minutes of fame, eating free meals, and staying in trendy Boise, away from the blistering sage flats of their rural hometowns. They were forbidden from talking about the case while anyone was in the bathroom and—with the endless pots of coffee and elderly jurors—some days seemed wasted on the toilet.

  Hatfield, meanwhile, was annoyed with some of the acquittal forces, especially the two Dorothys and Janet Schmierer, who wouldn’t let them vote and were like Spence’s echoes in the jury room. They seemed to be convincing the moderates, Cyril realized. Still, he was sure he had the votes to prevent acquittal on the serious charges: murder, selling an illegal shotgun—the big stuff.

  AT THE END OF DELIBERATIONS each day, jurors rode an elevator to the courthouse basement where they were loaded into two Chevy Suburbans and seated against windows that were covered with heavy brown paper.

  A driver they’d nicknamed “Crash” after he dinged the other jury vehicle raced them back to the Red Lion Hotel. As they blazed through the parking lot, jurors peeking through slits between the paper caught glimpses of television cameras, neo-Nazi skinheads, and the odd-lot constitutionalists on hand to observe the trial.

  Like herd animals, they fell into eerily similar and fitful sleep patterns: nodding off right away and then waking up thinking about the case at 2:00 a.m. A few began to feel they were being spied on by the federal agencies curious about the outcome of the case, but they mentioned it only to friends on the jury, fearing they’d be misunderstood.

  Meals were late, causing real discomfort for old jurors with blood-sugar and blood-pressure problems. People got grouchy. Sports buffs got to watch the NBA final but were ordered away to dinner at the end of the exciting game. The Idaho Statesman newspaper was provided for jurors to read, but marshals had clipped out humorist Dave Barry’s column—a parody of a John Grisham legal thriller. Jurors laughed when they noticed their keepers had by accident left in an article about the Weaver case. In time
, the daily paper had so many articles cut out of it, they called it the “Doily Statesman.”

  The first few days of sequestration, the U.S. marshals guarding the jury couldn’t seem to make up their minds: first the jurors were permitted to open the drapes. Then they had to pull the shades. Then they were allowed to open the shades but were asked to pull the sheer drapes. Jack Weaver’s copy of Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games was taken away because it featured heroic action by the Hostage Rescue Team. Dorothy Hoffman’s anthology of American literature was confiscated, too. It included “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the story of the hanging of a Civil War spy.

  Music cassette players were banned because messages could be smuggled in on custom tapes, but CD players were permitted. Most TV was out-of-bounds, and movies were mostly out of the question, except lifeless choices brought in by the marshals, like High Road to China, a cheesy Tom Selleck adventure flick.

  Reporters sniffed around for any information about the jury, what counts they were debating, their health, even what they ate. The interest made the pregnant accountant, Karen Flynn, laugh. “We ought to send out for a twelve-pack of Moosehead beer and a gross of condoms, really yank their chain,” she said.

  During the long days of deliberation, jurors were taken to the courthouse roof for fresh-air breaks. Seven stories up, it looked down on the army fort built in Boise in the late 1800s, now preserved with lovely lawns and tall trees. Immediately behind were swaths of dry brown desert and foothills and peaks that hemmed in the Boise Basin.

  Jack Weaver wrote in his diary that he felt like a prisoner of war, he had so little contact with the outside world. Adding to their discomfort was the hazy reality of the case, which never seemed to leave their minds.

  By the end of the second week, two walls of the room were festooned with fact and time-line charts, the table was piled with candy wrappers, coffee flotsam, and other garbage, and the courtroom had been taken over, too, as a place to take breaks and to act out or pace off different parts of the case. With so many jurors still struggling to visualize the scene, Hatfield sent a note to the judge asking him to take the jury 450 miles north—to the mountains of North Idaho—to walk the trails and examine the scenes of the gunfights.

  Judge Lodge said no to the travel request, and the jury went back to work, taking its first vote on the tenth day of deliberations. It came out 8–4 against conviction on the failure-to-appear charge. They backed away, tackled the firearms charge again, tabled it, and then discussed the murder charge against Kevin Harris. Dorothy Mitchell suggested they act out the two versions of events. Jack Weaver got down on his knees and showed how difficult it would be for Degan to fire seven times after being shot. Others stood in for the marshals or the dog. Finally, they voted, agreeing that Harris wasn’t guilty of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or voluntary manslaughter. But jurors stuck on involuntary manslaughter. Still, they were making progress.

  The foreman, however, was running out of steam. Cyril had been on Valium earlier in the trial, which eased his stress. But now he was out of the drug and—without knowing it—he was suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder, reliving his terror from World War II in the incarceration of being sequestered. By Monday, June 28, he was jittery and anxious, fighting a nervous breakdown. During the morning fresh-air break on the roof of the courthouse, he told the jurors that the lunch break would be longer than usual. Back downstairs, Cyril called Eunice Helterbran aside. “Stick to it. Don’t let them do it,” he said to her. Then he told the others he was going to see about moving up an appointment with his doctor. He never came back.

  THEY HAD TO START OVER, Judge Lodge told the jury, as attorneys and spectators shook their heads. Kevin Harris’s mother began crying. Two weeks into deliberations, Lodge replaced the exhausted and sick Hatfield with an alternate, Anita Brewer. But, he said, she didn’t have the benefit of their earlier deliberations. “Therefore, you must go back and have a complete and full discussion of all evidence.”

  After a two-week absence, Ron Howen reappeared that day, June 29, in time to hear that the case had gotten to someone else. A fiercely private man, Howen refused to talk about where he’d been, but friends said he’d suffered from exhaustion. He listened unemotionally as Lodge sent the jury back to start over.

  Gerry Spence tried to be level about the loss of Hatfield, but it ate at him. “He’s been someone who’s been involved with this case with all his heart and soul,” Spence told reporters from under his felt Stetson.

  Earlier in the deliberations, the lawyers had been encouraged when a Spokane newspaper reporter tracked down an alternate juror who had asked to be dismissed from the case. “I felt like a little kid that finds out there is no Santa Claus,” said the dismissed juror, Gena Hagerman. She said she thought that the only way the shoot-out could have started was with Roderick killing the dog first and that she was outraged by the FBI’s actions. “I found out what the FBI and the marshal service is all about. I found out they were capable of doing things I thought were not possible.”

  Maybe they’d reached all the jurors, the defense team had gushed. But now, with Hatfield gone and the jury settled into its third week of deliberations, they began to fear a hung jury. Or worse.

  David Nevin wanted to hang himself. He was used to second-guessing—hell, it was practically a hobby—but this was ridiculous. He wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t eating. He and Chuck Peterson jogged in the mornings, and Spence came over for dinner and they all tried to reassure one another, but at times, Nevin was inconsolable. I should’ve put him on, he thought, I should have put Kevin on the stand.

  Almost every day, the lawyers checked in at the federal courthouse, walking past a violently bored pack of television and newspaper reporters, who—at one point—challenged some loitering skinheads to a game of football.

  The reporters cornered Spence any time he walked past, looking for some insight or humor to save what had become a repetitive story (“The jury deliberated for the eleventh day in the trial of …”). Spence had seen a lot of juries in forty years. Back in Wyoming, when he was young, he had been permitted by a judge to lie on the floor of a men’s room above the jury room, where he and the opposing lawyer could listen to jury deliberations. He said that lying on the floor of that men’s room in a suit was one of his better legal lessons, an understanding of juries that he carried to that day. The Weaver jury, he said, “looked brighter, less frayed, more together than expected.”

  THEY WERE LOSING IT. The jury had already spent more time sequestered than Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris had spent under siege on Ruby Ridge. And now, the judge was telling them to start over. Some of the jurors were beaten.

  Anita Brewer was a quick study. Still, it took a week to bring her up to speed.

  The eight women and four men elected Jack Weaver foreman. He was an unlikely choice, a quiet guy who spent the breaks during the early part of the trial withdrawn and reading a book. Jurors had to tease him into conversation. But earlier in deliberations, when Eunice Helterbran was accusing the others of being antigovernment, Jack Weaver had delivered a stirring speech.

  “While I respect her love of country,” he said, “we should not let patriotic fervor stand in the way of the truth. For her to say that I or anyone else is antigovernment is unfair. My brother was murdered. If anyone is dead-set against setting dangerous criminals free, it’s me. The Founding Fathers of our nation wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights with the idea that the citizens would be sensible enough to recognize the excesses of too much government power and gave us the tools so we could change or even abolish our form of government.”

  When he was elected, Jack Weaver joked that the only people he’d ever been in charge of were his kids. That might have been just the experience needed for this jury. He faced two stubborn coalitions that had moved from honest disagreement into angry dislike after weeks of debate, emotional outbreaks, and recriminations. Janet Schmierer had so angered both sides with her assertiveness
, they shouted her down when she tried to speak and all she could do was slip notes to one of the Dorothys.

  Most jurors were disgusted by the white-separatist beliefs of Weaver and Harris, and they all agreed the government had made mistakes. But the central disagreement remained the same. One side blamed the government, while a smaller group thought Weaver’s failure to appear in court caused the entire ordeal.

  Sometimes, Jack Weaver wished they could ignore the precise jury instructions and use common sense to deal with Randy Weaver. “If I could have convicted him of gross stupidity, I would have,” Jack Weaver wrote in the diary he kept during the trial.

  After Cyril left, Eunice Helterbran was the only holdout on the murder charge, still hoping to convict Kevin Harris of involuntary manslaughter. Seemingly shy and easily intimidated, the housewife wouldn’t budge. “I don’t want to send the message that it’s okay to shoot U.S. marshals,” she said. Others still wanted to convict Weaver of some of the more serious crimes, too.

  But Anita Brewer, a medical technician, changed the dynamic of the jury with her emphasis on scientific methods. In her job, any lab samples offered to a doctor had to be handled extra carefully. In this case, the government was trying to send two men to prison using evidence that had been lost, mishandled, and collected in a way that would not stand up to the rigors of a high school science class. Brewer’s reasoned approach contrasted sharply with the Spence rhetoric of some other jurors and made acquittal more attractive to the remaining members of the conviction coalition.

  JACK WEAVER INSISTED on verdicts. He would not let the jury hang and force another group of citizens to go through this hell. Finally, on July 2, after fifteen days of deliberations, they began voting. The first one was fairly easy; the outside world would make a laughingstock of any jury that ruled Randy Weaver was planning to appear in court. Jack Weaver asked jurors to ignore their emotions and concentrate on testimony and other evidence. The only question was: Is there reasonable doubt?