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

by Jess Walter

  The most serious punishment was handed out to Gene Glenn, the Special Agent-in-Charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office and the on-scene commander at Ruby Ridge. Glenn was censured, suspended for fifteen days, removed from his position, and reassigned to Washington, D.C. Freeh ruled that Glenn was ultimately responsible for both the rules of engagement and the failure to cooperate with prosecutors in the case.

  Lon Horiuchi received no punishment and continued to work with the Hostage Rescue Team. Freeh said the sniper acted “in defense of other law enforcement officers … to protect the lives of those agents.”

  In Iowa, Vicki Weaver’s family was stunned. That was it? Letters of censure? Fifteen-day suspensions? How could the FBI say the rules of engagement had nothing to do with Vicki’s death? Randy, Sara, and Kevin were running for cover toward the cabin when Horiuchi fired and killed Vicki Weaver. How was that “in defense of other law enforcement officers?” The FBI seemed to be clinging to its conceit that Horiuchi was protecting a helicopter, and yet the charge that the family threatened a helicopter had been dropped long ago. At best, Horiuchi fired into a cabin filled with children. At worst, he followed illegal orders and intentionally shot and killed Vicki Weaver in an attempt to break up the family.

  Gerry Spence called Freeh’s actions a hand slap and a cover-up. A few months later, Larry Potts was promoted to deputy director.

  For more than a year, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno had been promising to release a 542-page Justice Department critique of the case, the result of an exhaustive probe by five lawyers and nineteen FBI investigators.

  Among other findings, the report found that Kevin Harris and Randy and Sara Weaver were running for cover when Horiuchi fired his second shot and weren’t endangering the helicopter at all. That shot “violated the Constitution,” according to the report. It recommended that the case be turned over to the Justice Department and evaluated for possible criminal prosecution.

  But by the spring of 1995, no charges had been filed and the report was still under wraps and FBI officials were working hard to discredit it. Finally, it was leaked to a couple of newspapers, and one of them, Legal Times, posted the report on the Internet.

  Chief among its many criticisms was the sloppy way in which the rules of engagement were modified in Idaho and the stunning lack of leadership back in D.C.

  “The Rules of Engagement were in effect … from the 22nd of August until the 26th of August, and yet, inexplicably, no one at headquarters admits to having been aware of what the Rules were or having read them,” the report read.

  But Justice Department officials publicly rejected the finding that the second shot was unconstitutional. As they continued to look at the possibility of charges against agents, they concentrated on the sloppy series of reviews afterward and not on the actions of agents at Ruby Ridge. And when the report was finally made public, Justice Department officials distanced themselves from its findings, dismissing it as a preliminary, out-of-date document.

  SARA WEAVER WALKED ONSTAGE at the Des Moines Art Center during the 1994 Annual Poetry Festival. She stepped up to the microphone and introduced herself before reading one of her poems, titled “Remembering.”

  “My name is Sara Weaver,” she said. “Two years ago, my mother and brother were murdered. Today is my brother’s birthday. He would’ve been sixteen. I wrote this poem for my mother…. I guess the reason I titled it ‘Remembering’ is because I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.”

  After Randy Weaver was released from jail, Rachel and Elisheba lived with him in a modest house in Grand Junction. Sara stayed in Des Moines to finish her senior year of high school. She visited her dad on weekends, but during the week she wrote poetry, worked at the movie theater, got good grades, and did her best to be a happy high school student.

  Randy didn’t want to go back to Ruby Ridge, but Sara and Rachel returned to get a few things—like their mom’s rugs and quilts. The first time she went back, Sara just sat on the big rock outcropping near the door and sobbed.

  In the spring of 1994, Sara graduated from high school. During her last quarter she got Bs in algebra and art, and As in advanced composition, physical education, and government.

  After the standoff, federal agents had taken her dog, Buddy, to the pound, but some friends rescued him and cared for him until Sara could get her own house in 1994. The Weaver girls had about $24,000 left from the donations sent by supporters and Sara used some of the money to buy a tidy, one-story house near her father’s place in Grand Junction. She paid $8,000 for the house, put a park bench in the front yard, hung flowers, and planted a huge garden in the back. She got into recycling, contemplated going to college, and talked to her dad about writing a book.

  With the Weaver girls gone, Keith Brown sold the station wagon and bought a convertible Camaro. He and Julie resumed their lives, but worried that Sara, Rachel, and Elisheba would have no one to provide an alternative to their separatist beliefs. Still, whenever they saw the girls, they seemed to be happy and well adjusted. Rachel got As at the grade school in Grand Junction, and she called one day to have Keith and Julie mail her certificate from a drug awareness program she’d completed.

  Sara began dating a boy named David, a former skinhead who had protested during the standoff. He worked on construction sites and—his hair grown out—he moved to Iowa in 1994 and asked Sara to marry him. Keith was worried about what it meant, but Julie pointed out that David was very friendly and very good to Sara. Whatever his views were, he kept them to himself.

  Keith and Julie found themselves debating tolerance, of all things—trying to be tolerant of someone whose views weren’t, loving someone without agreeing with them. Julie said that she’d already lost her sister because of the walls that are put up between people. She vowed not to lose her niece that way.

  Julie decided that people like Randy and Vicki need to be tied to the world somehow, connected by family or friends who keep them safely away from the edge.

  After the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it seemed to Julie Brown that the whole country was living her dilemma: how to keep people on the fringe tethered to society. Releasing the truth about Ruby Ridge would be a start, she thought.

  Julie and Sara stayed close. David made Sara happy but she still seemed torn between two places, the world she’d grown up in and the world she lived in now. In the end, Julie stopped worrying about Sara’s beliefs and just hoped she would find someplace in between where she could be happy.

  She drew encouragement from a copy of Sara’s graduation photo that hung in their house. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” Sara wrote alongside the picture. “Love Always and Forever, Sara Beaver.”

  GENE GLENN REFUSED to be the scapegoat for Ruby Ridge. In the spring of 1995, he wrote a letter to Justice Department officials, charging that the FBI’s investigation was unfair and was designed to protect top officials like Larry Potts. He insisted that on August 22, 1992, Potts approved the rules of engagement during a telephone conversation.

  In May 1995, another Justice Department investigation had begun, this time into the alleged FBI cover-up of who actually approved the modified rules. After reportedly failing a lie detector test, E. Michael Kahoe was suspended for shredding an internal FBI postconfrontation critique on the case.

  With the publicity from the Branch Davidian siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the U.S. Senate announced that it would hold hearings on Waco and Ruby Ridge. Under heat from the Justice Department, Louis Freeh asked Potts to step down as the FBI’s number-two official and he was reassigned to a position training young agents. Freeh stopped short of saying that Potts had done anything wrong, blaming his demotion on the publicity from the Weaver case.

  In August 1995, Potts, Danny Coulson, and two other FBI officials were suspended while a criminal investigation was launched into allegations that they tried to cover up their roles in approving the rules of engagement. Two years later both Potts and Cou
lson had left the bureau when the Justice Department said there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them.

  For years, the FBI had maintained that fine balance, punishing its agents for minor mistakes, but insisting those mistakes had—in essence—nothing to do with the death of Vicki Weaver. FBI officials continued to insist that Lon Horiuchi hadn’t been following the modified rules of engagement when he fired his two shots and therefore, any misconduct stemming from the drafting of the rules was beside the point.

  The unreleased Justice Department report concluded, however, that the shot that killed Vicki Weaver was unconstitutional and that it was directly related to the modified rules. “We cannot fault Horiuchi alone for these actions,” the report concluded. “We are persuaded that his judgment to shoot … was influenced by the special Rules of Engagement, which he had no role in creating but which he was instructed to follow.”

  In the fall of 1995 (just days after this book was first released) the Senate Judiciary Committee opened hearings on the debacle at Ruby Ridge. For the first time officials from the various agencies were called to explain their roles. Senators reacted with disbelief as they pored over photographs and reports, hoisted guns, and examined the bullet hole in the glass of the actual cabin door—brought to the hearing room by FBI agents.

  Appearing before the panel in a denim shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, Randy Weaver gave dramatic testimony before the government he’d once vowed to fight. With Spence sitting mostly silent behind him, Weaver repeated his claim that federal agents set him up, purposefully killed his son and wife, and then covered up their crimes.

  “If I had it to do over again, knowing what I know now,” Randy Weaver said in a prepared statement, “I would come down the mountain for the court appearance…. I would not let my fears and the fears of my family keep me from coming down. But my wrongs did not cause federal agents to commit crimes…. I have been accountable for my choices…. But no federal agent has been brought to justice for the killings of Sam and Vicki Weaver.”

  Framed by the cracked glass of the cabin door through which her mother was shot, Sara Weaver angrily and tearfully testified about the standoff. She insisted that the curtains on the cabin door were open and that Lon Horiuchi must’ve seen Vicki before he fired.

  The ATF informant, Ken Fadeley, testified from behind a screen with his voice altered—for his protection, he said, so he could continue his undercover work. Several senators expressed disbelief over Fadeley’s claim that Weaver had initiated the gun deal. The ATF was also roundly criticized for targeting Weaver and for falsely reporting to the U.S. Marshals Service that Weaver had a criminal record, was a suspect in a bank robbery, and was a former Green Beret who may have booby-trapped his property.

  “The concern for [Weaver’s] potential for violence seems to have been blown out of proportion,” read the subcommittee’s final report. “We find this disturbing, and a potential contributing factor to the tragic events that occurred at Ruby Ridge….”

  The Marshals Service was also criticized by the subcommittee for being sloppy with information, for waiting too long to brief the FBI about the initial shoot-out, and for failing to do a proper review of its role in the case out of a “desire to avoid creating discoverable documents that might be used by the defense in the Weaver/Harris trial….”

  The most surprising moment of the hearings came when deputy U.S. marshals Cooper and Roderick testified. First they expressed indignation and disbelief that Weaver was being treated like a victim and that Bill Degan was being forgotten. And then they dropped a bomb—suggesting for the first time publicly that Randy Weaver had shot his own son in the back during the gunfight. It was a shocking allegation. Even though the bullet hadn’t been found, the evidence indicated that the shot that killed Sam Weaver had come from Cooper’s gun. Even prosecutors in Weaver’s trial hadn’t been so bold as to suggest that Weaver shot his own son.

  While some senators expressed doubt and even outrage over this eleventh-hour allegation, it diverted attention and seemed to take a bit of the steam out of the subcommittee’s criticism of the Marshals Service. A few months after the hearings, the deputy marshals assigned to the Weaver case were given the service’s highest honor.

  AS EXPECTED, THE FBI had the most to explain during the Senate subcommittee hearings, and, as expected, its agents were the least forthcoming. Horiuchi and Richard Rogers were still under investigation and refused to testify, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Among the agents who did testify, Potts and Coulson blamed the rules of engagement on Glenn and Rogers, who in turn blamed Potts and Coulson.

  Frustrated senators admitted they couldn’t “conclude on this record who (if anyone) at headquarters approved the … Rules of Engagement.” But their final report decried the modified rules as “virtual shoot-on-sight orders” and blasted the agents’ “determination to lay blame for what occurred on others” as “a deficiency in leadership.”

  Among the other criticisms of the FBI were inaccurate interview forms, sloppy crime scene investigation and lab work, and a complete failure to cooperate during the trial of Weaver and Harris. “This was not a case of innocent mistake or even excusable negligence,” the subcommittee reported; “rather the FBI willfully and repeatedly failed to abide by discovery rules and irreparably damaged the government’s presentation of evidence at the criminal trial.”

  More criticism was aimed at the agents who came along to review and investigate the FBI’s handling of the case after the fact. They took agents’ stories “at face value,” “avoided uncomfortable facts,” and demonstrated “a protective attitude” toward other agents. “The various Ruby Ridge reports reveal several instances of friends reviewing friends’ conduct and the subjects of the reviews later sitting on the promotion boards of the very agents who reviewed their conduct.”

  As for Horiuchi, the senators seemed convinced that “due to weather conditions and the late hour of day” he most likely hadn’t seen Vicki Weaver in the window before he fired his second shot.

  But the subcommittee was openly critical of the bureau’s claim that Horiuchi wasn’t following the modified rules of engagement when he opened fire at Ruby Ridge. Based on Horiuchi’s trial, grand jury testimony, and the testimony of snipers who hadn’t fired that day, the subcommittee found there was “reasonable basis to conclude that the Rules of Engagement, more than any fear for the safety of the helicopter, prompted Horiuchi to take the first shot.”

  And the second shot, according to their findings, “was unconstitutional. It was even inconsistent with the special Rules of Engagement,” since it put the Weaver children in jeopardy. “Horiuchi should have known that as he fired ‘blind’ through the cabin door, he was shooting into an area which could well have contained Vicki Weaver and her two younger daughters.”

  For his part, Freeh testified that if he’d been on the hill that day he wouldn’t have taken the second shot. He said it was a mistake, “for policy and for constitutional reasons.” But he continued to support Horiuchi and to stress the danger in second-guessing federal agents in such dangerous and confusing situations.

  He blamed the mistakes at Ruby Ridge on “one misstatement of fact exaggerated to another one, into a huge pile of information that was just dead wrong.” Freeh announced steps he’d undertaken to make sure that errors made at Ruby Ridge would never be repeated and that such aggressive rules of engagement would never be used again.

  In December 1995, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information released its report, which noted that Randy Weaver bore the initial responsibility for what happened, but that he “recognizes his mistake…. This country can tolerate mistakes made by people like Randy Weaver; but we cannot accept serious errors made by federal law enforcement agencies that needlessly result in human tragedy.”

  And that was it. Some Weaver supporters expressed relief that the standoff at Ruby Ridge had finally been exposed to
the light of public criticism. But others saw the hearings as little more than a show. Too many central questions remained unanswered and the federal officials most responsible for the debacle seemed to have escaped serious punishment.

  But the Randy Weaver case was far from over. A single line from the Senate subcommittee’s report signaled the direction in which the case was headed: “The shooting of Vicki Weaver as she held her baby daughter will haunt federal law enforcement for years to come.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ALMOST EVERY DAY for five weeks, they drove to the steep, wooded field to resume their search. Stakes were pounded into the ground and colored string was stretched between the stakes until a huge grid covered the area near the Y where the old logging roads connected and where deputy marshals first encountered Samuel Weaver and Kevin Harris in August 1992. The handful of volunteers then spread out with two metal detectors and several plastic bags and searched the hillside for missing evidence from the gunfight at Ruby Ridge.

  It was the fall of 1995, more than three years after the standoff and a month since the Senate Judiciary Committee had concluded its hearings on the Weaver case. Unlike that investigation, this search went on with no publicity and almost no funding. The team was made up of five volunteers, including Dave Hunt, the deputy marshal who had first tried to talk Randy Weaver into surrendering.

  Leading the search was Greg Sprungl, the quiet, easygoing former deputy and truck driver who had recently been elected sheriff of Boundary County and who had set about investigating the most notorious case in the history of his county.

  He read transcripts of interviews with Weaver and Harris and the government agents, went back over the available evidence, and spent hours on Ruby Ridge trying to visualize how events had unfolded. And for twenty-five days, Sprungl and his volunteers picked at the hillside where the shoot-out had taken place, until November, when the snow began to fly.