by Alice Bolin
The Weavers were drawn to North Idaho from Iowa in 1983 by a mix of conspiracy theories and creative scriptural and literary interpretation, convinced that God was sending Vicki Weaver messages in biblical passages, Ayn Rand novels, and stories by H. G. Wells. They believed they must wait out the Great Tribulation on a lonely mountaintop, avoiding interference from the “Zionist Occupied Government.” They were hardly alone in finding the Northwest the ideal place to hide and wait. Jess Walter writes in his 1995 nonfiction account, Ruby Ridge, that North Idaho “always attracted people whose only common trait was the overwhelming desire to just get away.”
As Walter notes, in the sixties and seventies, many of those getting away to the Northwest were from the opposite end of the political spectrum as the Weavers: “hippies, draft dodgers, and an entire back-to-the-land movement.” Nevertheless, as the stories of every species of Idaho recluse make clear, to many people, isolation seems to be the Inland Northwest’s primary characteristic and its only selling point. And when right-wing separatists like the Weavers started overrunning the region in the early eighties—“a blurring continuum,” as Walter describes them, “of home schoolers, Christian survivalists, apocalyptics, John Birchers, Posse Comitatus members, constitutionalists, tax protesters, Identity Christians, and Neo-Nazis”—the hills weren’t going to say anything against them.
Walter started his career as a newspaper reporter for The Spokesman-Review, the region’s only major newspaper, and he describes Ruby Ridge as his “Truman Capote moment.” The paper broke the story, and he and other Spokesman-Review reporters were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the standoff. From there, Walter charted an unusual literary trajectory, starting with Ruby Ridge, then cowriting O. J. Simpson prosecutor Chris Darden’s memoir and putting out a few thrillers before crossing over into respectability with a string of four acclaimed literary novels.
Throughout Walter’s work, the town of Spokane, Washington, where he has lived his entire life, looms large. Spokane is an unglamorous blue-collar city with a population of 200,000 on the eastern edge of Washington, ninety-five miles away from Ruby Ridge. “A poor, isolated city,” Walter says, “that peaked in the 1920s.” Walter developed the inferiority complex common to many people from weird working-class towns whose ambitions stretch beyond their neighborhoods. “I wanted to be a literary novelist,” he said of his early career. “And I thought, You can’t get there from where I am. You can’t get there from Spokane.”
My parents used to tell me that about North Idaho, joking that the region’s motto should be “You can’t get there from here.” But they meant it literally. Idaho is one of the only states without a north-south interstate highway, and its only north-south route, the treacherous U.S. Route 95, was famously described in 1970 by Idaho governor Cecil Andrus as “the goat trail.” My main memories of Highway 95 were eleven-hour bus trips to Pocatello with my high school choir, where I was trapped, listening to the mom chaperones talk about Weight Watchers as the bus inched its way down narrow, wooded canyons. When we were going to Boise, a comparatively breezy five-hour trip, it often made more sense to drive south by going west, making use of the interstates in Washington and Oregon. “There are no roads!” my dad would yell. You can’t get there from here.
So when Walter told the literary magazine Willow Springs, “I think Spokane is one of the most isolated cities of its size in the United States, and that its isolation casts a lot of different shadows,” the geographical fades into the emotional and back again. Its isolation gives Spokane what Walter calls a “lab quality”: “as if you could have any kind of experiment here you wanted.” This extends from fiction—that any kind of character or story set in Spokane could be believable—to the real-life hippie and neo-Nazi experimenters who also saw the Inland Northwest as a blank slate.
Maybe the lab quality is why northwestern true crime stories, Ruby Ridge and so many others, tend to be bizarre and bombastic. Late in 1983, long before the standoff at Ruby Ridge, a group of Aryan Nations members met in a barn in eastern Washington and swore an oath to “deliver our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race.” Calling themselves the Brüder Schweigen (“Silent Brotherhood”) or simply the Order, the men waged a terrorist campaign that started with robbing a Spokane bank, escalating to bombing a Boise synagogue and killing a Jewish radio host in Denver. Along the way they robbed banks and armored cars, stealing millions of dollars. The remoteness of the region drew these antisocial figures and enabled their crime spree, as they could plan in secret and scatter into the western wilderness after the deeds were done.
Washington State was also home to several of the twentieth century’s notorious serial killers, including Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. Walter reported on four serial killers in his time at The Spokesman-Review. One reason for this pattern is the relative wildness of even the state’s most developed areas. “It allows a killer to move from an urban area to a rural area in a fairly short period of time,” criminologist Steve Egger told The Seattle Times. “You have pockets of wilderness, lots and lots of pockets, where bodies can be dumped, and where they would be very difficult to find.” Experts are eager to insist that the prevalence of serial killers in the region is a myth, that the northwestern states rank among the lowest in murder rates. But that is not what these sensational stories broadcast to the world. And if the world perceives the Northwest as a region in the grips of extremists and psychopaths, what does that mean for everyone else who happens to be born there?
Walter’s experience covering northwestern serial killers for The Spokesman-Review inspired his first novel, the 2001 crime thriller Over Tumbled Graves. As Walter explains about the book’s origins, he was disturbed by the post–Hannibal Lecter temptation to make the serial killer an attractively terrifying villain, “not only dangerous and twisted, but super-intelligent, possibly even supernatural. They had to be the most interesting characters in the book and it was even better if they were people with wit and style and aplomb.”
His interactions with real-life psychopaths revealed them to be anything but charming geniuses: they were instead “the kind of broken, weak-minded loser who preys on women on the fringe of society.” Over Tumbled Graves consciously takes on the American obsession with serial killers and the industry that’s sprung up around mythologizing murderers, and it stresses a truth that mystery novelists and true crime writers don’t want to acknowledge: that serial killers are, “in some important and horrifying way, smaller than life.” This revelation of how dumb and small evil really is makes Over Tumbled Graves a brutal, brilliant, and underrated novel, which should be considered among all of Walter’s later, more “literary” output.
The book’s serial killer is hunting Spokane’s prostitutes, and his first victim is found in the city’s Riverfront Park, her decomposing body described in awful detail: “her leathery skin hung in place, shrink-wrapped around the bone, flesh drying away”; her “small head, already shrinking in on itself,” with “lips pulled tight around her teeth, as if she had eaten something sour.” As he uncovers her, the wry and weary Detective Alan Dupree thinks ruefully to himself, subtitling the novel he has found himself in, “The things men do to women.”
Dupree is sensitive and iconoclastic, upsetting his colleagues in the Spokane Police Department with his strange sense of humor and cosmic theories of criminology. At times he speaks in koans that could have inspired True Detective’s investigator sage, Rust Cohle: Dupree ruminates that “We’re all fixed points on a circle.” Of course, the figure of the philosopher detective—Dupree’s colleagues call him “Officer Philosopher”—is an archetype that can be traced back to Sherlock Holmes and earlier. By initially placing a character like Dupree at the forefront of the investigation, privileging his thoughts and theories, Walter fakes his audience out. In a novel about what men do to women, no man can be completely absolved.
Dupree still falls prey to what he calls “the humiliating excitement of a mur
der investigation.” He views crime as a natural phenomenon, like a weather pattern, which comes and goes in streaks like seasons, and the serial killer as a pure “bad guy” whose habits are too dark and powerful to be conceived of: “the criminal equivalent of a black hole.” As we come to see, although this perspective is attractive in the telling of crime stories, it mystifies the killer in ways that are not only counterproductive but also insidious.
The real protagonist of Over Tumbled Graves is Detective Caroline Mabry, who trained with Dupree and who has conducted a long, rarely spoken of emotional love affair with him. Her unfulfilled love and the death of her mother leave Caroline set apart and set adrift, characteristics that become her greatest asset. Caroline is in a fog of grief and guilt, unable to see more than the evidence in front of her, which prevents her from forming any grand theories of the case: the mistake all of the male investigators, including Dupree, fall victim to.
The FBI profilers working with the department intellectualize the case most repulsively. They are obsessed with serial killers’ MOs, finding patterns of behavior that illuminate the killers’ backgrounds and psychology. As former FBI profiler Curtis Blanton tells Caroline, “With these guys, it all goes back to fantasy.” He is adamant that inhabiting that fantasy, the sexual and control-based kicks killers get from killing, is how the police can understand and solve these crimes. The most disturbing thing about Blanton’s belief in understanding “the fantasy” is how he frames it as something that comes naturally to male investigators, as if the monstrous desire to brutalize women lies dormant in all men—as if it’s actually a power that men possess, terrible but formidable. Caroline sees that this affirmation of the killer’s inner life will eventually blame the victim. The Spokane Police Department’s prime suspect had a girlfriend who was murdered while working as a prostitute, which leads both profilers to an “excitation/retaliation model”: “Ultimately, both profilers wrote, Ryan blamed his girlfriend for her own death and for his killing spree. She made him do it.”
“I’ve never met a woman who contributed much to these kinds of cases,” Blanton tells Caroline about female investigators. “Fortunately for them, they don’t have the capacity for understanding this type of killer, for understanding the fantasy.” As the book goes on, Caroline begins to question why anyone would want to. “If she couldn’t imagine the fantasy, what could she imagine?” Walter writes. “The victim. The fear.” This is when we begin to see that Over Tumbled Graves is a different kind of serial killer novel: one that is blessedly more interested in the victims’ state of mind than the killer’s. In the novel’s climactic final scene, a victim calls out for help and Caroline “[thinks] the woman’s voice might be her own.”
By rejecting popular criminal myths, Over Tumbled Graves insists that serial killers’ minds are not singular. They’re a dime a dozen. When Caroline reviews her notes from interviews she’s conducted with prostitutes, “words leaped from the pages: ‘bit’ and ‘punched’ and ‘knifed’ and ‘choked’ and ‘bruised,’ stories of gang rape at knifepoint, of violations with beer bottles and guns.” She concludes that “it might be easier to eliminate the white men in pickup trucks who didn’t scare these hookers.” This sounds like an exaggeration, but it is eerily echoed in The Spokesman-Review’s July 2001 series “The Trail to a Serial Killer” about the real-life murderer Robert Yates, who killed at least thirteen women working as prostitutes in Spokane between 1996 and 1998, and who would seem to be Walter’s direct inspiration for Over Tumbled Graves. The paper describes how “passersby pelt prostitutes with BBs, pennies, tomatoes, bottles, bleach. Johns smack them, cut them, rob them, handcuff them, gang rape them, leave them miles from town.” One of the prostitutes whom Yates murdered had previously been stuffed in a sleeping bag by an angry john and thrown in the Spokane River. After investigating prostitutes’ experiences, the police on the Yates case figured, astoundingly, that “there [were] several dozen men capable of committing these kinds of murders.”
Walter has said that Over Tumbled Graves was informed by the Yates murders but wasn’t based on them; it was released two weeks before Yates was even arrested. Walter maintains that he had plenty of other inspiration—including several serial killers he covered while working at The Spokesman-Review—saying, “It’s horrifying to realize how many men have been stalking women in Spokane.” This is, of course, the practical problem. As Blanton tells Caroline, “There’s very good reason I don’t see many women investigators on cases like this. It’s not natural.” Then why is it natural for male investigators? At times in the novel, the equivalence of male officer to predator seems one-to-one. Caroline notes that her male colleagues seem to prefer unidentified victims, “far more comfortable with a body that had no connection to a living person”—just as murderers do. There is something enlightening here about our understanding of the abstraction “crime” encompassing both the process of committing a crime and the process of solving it. If these stories—of Over Tumbled Graves, Robert Yates, Ruby Ridge, and all the other northwestern sociopaths—have one thing in common, every step of the way, it’s men. Men are the problem.
Ruby Ridge is seen as a case where extremes tragically met and combusted: the Weavers’ extreme lifestyle and ideology and the U.S. government’s extremes of arrogance, disorganization, and violence. So much about the standoff is still clouded in ambiguity: who shot first, what kind of force the FBI authorized, and whom the sniper who shot Vicki Weaver was aiming at. As Walter writes, “Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on hearings and investigations that failed to resolve the most basic questions about the standoff.” But what seems clear is a lesson here about escalation: the difficulty of denying a challenge, the temptation of responding not as we are but as we, always monstrously, wish to see ourselves.
In a judgment in the ten-million-dollar civil suit Kevin Harris, Randy Weaver’s friend who was injured in the standoff, lodged against the government, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals condemned the FBI’s actions as “a wholly unwarranted return to a lawless and arbitrary Wild West school of law enforcement.” It may be that the agents and officials involved in the Ruby Ridge case were seduced by its untamed setting, envisioning themselves as the only defenders of justice on the vast, lonesome range. And Weaver was just as susceptible to these Wild West archetypes. When news broke that the fugitive Weaver had refused to leave his mountaintop cabin, the family received attention from the national media and letters of support from around the country, dangerously inflating Randy’s view of his own importance. One news crew told the Weavers that Randy was becoming “a Wild West hero, like his boyhood hero, Jesse James.”
It’s no surprise that Weaver chose to believe this version of himself over the truth: that he was, as a report from the U.S. marshals said, “lazy and quite possibly a coward,” putting his family in danger to protect himself. But it’s also the version that the government ultimately bought into, with the FBI warning their agents that Weaver was dangerous and highly skilled, a former Green Beret. It’s another case of destructive masculinity requiring both one’s self and one’s enemy to be larger than life. These icons of masculinity are so exaggerated in the American West—the outlaw, the sheriff, the cowboy, the Indian—because there was so much irony and uncertainty and fear to outweigh in the conquest of the continent, so much cruelty and greed to conceal. It’s like a scene in Sherman Alexie’s novel Indian Killer, when a white farmer explains that he’s justified in shooting American Indians who are harvesting camas root on his land. “This land has been in our family for over a hundred years,” he tells his son. “And those Indians are stealing from us.”
Alexie’s novel also illustrates how Wild West narratives seep painfully into modern life. Indian Killer tells the story of John Smith, an American Indian boy who is adopted by white parents in Seattle. John’s identity is fraught from the beginning, as he fantasizes about his birth mother and the life he would have had with her on the reservation, not knowing which tribe’s reser
vation to imagine. This alienation is both compounded and mirrored by John’s worsening mental illness; he hears voices and often has visions of the Indian priest who baptized him. Most of the novel centers on the story of a serial killer who is preying on white men in Seattle. His melodramatic MO, scalping his victims and leaving eagle feathers as a signature, earns him the nickname Indian Killer.
The initial obvious solution to the book’s mystery is that the Indian Killer is one facet of John’s troubled personality. Without a native culture of his own, John’s cultural expression is exaggeratedly eclectic and shallow: his apartment is “decorated with brightly lit posters of fancy dancers . . . A laguna pot, a miniature rug, a Navajo rug stapled to the wall. A gigantic dreamcatcher, which was supposed to entrap nightmares, was suspended over the bed.” It is believable that John would have resorted to such a sensational and stereotypical performance—the bloodthirsty brave scalping white settlers—for his rage. John is a blank slate, the generic Indian, whose confused identity is a model for how white texts and imposed stereotypes have shaped American Indian self-image.