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

by Jess Walter

  For the next two hours, with Randy and Vicki smiling at the incredible opportunities available to them, the family watched a film strip about Amway detergents, cleaning supplies, and other products. Vicki and Randy explained they were going to make a living selling them.

  My God, Julie thought, they want us to buy that stuff. It wasn’t until an hour into the film that she understood she was mistaken. No, they want us to sell that stuff. She’d never seen Randy so animated and Vicki seemed to feed his zeal with her mastery of Amway products. They were a perfect team, Vicki’s studious knowledge and Randy’s tireless energy. Julie wondered if they were going to have to listen to the pitch every time they got together from then on.

  “It’s good for the environment,” Vicki offered. But Randy did most of the talking, in his fast sales voice, squaring out how much they could make in a year, in five, in ten. “It’s really a wonderful opportunity.”

  They presented Amway to all their friends and talked some, like Randy’s high school and army buddy, John Milligan, into selling it. But the Weavers’ interest faded quickly when they started making money elsewhere.

  Randy went to school for only two quarters in 1972 before dropping out and applying for a high-paying job at a John Deere tractor factory in Waterloo, the industrial town that butts up against Cedar Falls in eastern Iowa. He got the job. Vicki was still working as a secretary, and they seemed happy and well off. It was the kind of life Julie had begun imagining for herself.

  She and the wrestler, Jeff, were engaged to be married. But in 1973, while they were camping at a nearby lake, Jeff drowned. Julie was in shock when her parents showed up and drove her back to Fort Dodge, where Randy and Vicki were waiting. Julie slumped down on the couch and stared off, catatonic. Then, the television news came on and announced what had happened and she broke down, sobbing and thrashing around.

  Vicki sat down on the couch and held her sister, rocking her back and forth. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” After years of watching Vicki’s devastation over her awful love life, the family now turned its attention to Julie, and it was Vicki who was able to get through to her. Despite all the competition, all the petty squabbling and posturing, Julie realized that her sister was the only one who could have comforted her then.

  EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE FRIENDS, Julie Jordison hadn’t voted for Keith Brown when he ran for school president of Fort Dodge High in 1968. Keith was a radical. In fact, in Fort Dodge, he was the radical. He was from a bigger city—Omaha, Nebraska—and played in a rock band. He wasn’t too happy when his family moved to Fort Dodge, smack dab in the middle of boring farm country, smack dab in the middle of Iowa.

  On National Moratorium Day in 1969, when people across the country demonstrated against the Vietnam War, Keith was the only student in Fort Dodge High School to wear a black armband. It lasted through class pictures, until some football players held him down and tore it off his arm.

  He and Julie Jordison were as different as any kids in the school. Her whole family was straight and square. She was a good-looking cheerleader and wasn’t about to date the Abbie Hoffman of Fort Dodge.

  After high school and after Jeff died, Julie’s friend talked her into going to hear Keith’s latest group, a four-piece cover band called Locust. She didn’t recognize him when she saw him: wavy brown hair almost as long as hers and a bushy walrus mustache: Julie felt strange being there, and they tried to leave before he saw her. But on the way out, she bumped into him, and Keith leaned close in the noisy bar and asked if she’d go out with him. They began dating, fell in love, and were married the next year.

  Keith’s band played Beatles and Cream songs in a circuit of taverns that took them through Cedar Falls occasionally. Once, while the band’s roadies were setting up at a college bar called The Circle, Keith looked up to see this beautiful woman walk through the door. She was wearing a tight, fitted leather coat with stitching on the wide lapels, skintight bell-bottom jeans, and high-heeled boots. Her hair was curly, black, and long, and the guys in the band stopped tuning and watched her move through the bar.

  She set a large bag down on the counter, and when Keith finally saw her face, he realized it was his sister-in-law, Vicki. Randy came in then, his arms full of paper sacks, too. Inside were hamburgers for the band, the roadies, anyone who wanted them. Keith was impressed. He always thought of Randy and Vicki as too rigid and conservative to think much of his band. They didn’t even know any of the guys. In fact, they barely knew Keith, and yet here they were, springing for burgers for everyone. They drove off in Randy’s muscular Corvette, and Keith could tell that the rest of the band members were impressed. Keith had a weird sort of pride about his sister- and brother-in-law, weird because he was surprised to be so fond of people that serious, patriotic, and conservative.

  ON SUNDAYS, the Jordison kids and their spouses met at the farmhouse for dinner and conversation. They all arrived in the afternoon, Vicki and Randy, Julie and Keith, and Lanny with his wife, Melanie. David would come home from church, sit in front of the football game, and talk about what he’d heard at the RLDS Sunday School. Sometimes, Keith and Randy would go downstairs to smoke, and Lanny would join them for a game of cutthroat on the pool table. The conversation quickly turned to politics. Lanny and Randy were both conservative, and they tried to convince the liberal Keith of something or other, but he was unbendable, especially when talk swung around to the war in Vietnam. With the war winding down and Americans cynical and tired, Keith and Randy could find almost no common ground.

  “It’s the people back here with the signs and everything that are losing that war,” Randy said. He talked often about Vietnam, so passionately that Keith assumed he’d served over there, although he never came out and said so one way or the other.

  By that time, Randy was hauling in money from John Deere. And he was spending it. He was always driving new sports cars: the low-riding, burnt orange Corvette for a while, then a Triumph Roadster and a 240Z. He bought trucks and motorcycles and snowmobiles and fishing gear. Keith watched his brother-in-law with envy, wondering how a guy got a good-looking wife, a good job, and all those toys at the same time. Randy and Vicki had recently bought a house, too, a well-kept rancher in Cedar Falls, the kind of house Keith had begun imagining himself and Julie in.

  But Keith saw a side of the Weavers that worried him, too. They were idealistic and, in a way, naïve, throwing their substantial energies blindly into whatever they became interested in at the time, whether it be sports cars or Amway. Randy’s latest obsession was silver. It was the best investment around, he lectured Keith in the mid- and late-1970s. Soon the currency would be devalued, and precious metals would be the only salvation for people who wanted to survive the economic shock. As the price of silver began to climb, he gave silver medallions and coins as gifts and talked Lanny into investing heavily. The price of silver collapsed in the late 1970s, but by then the Weavers’ obsessive personalities had moved on to something else.

  After those Sunday meals, the women sat around the table drinking coffee, or they went shopping. Sara was born in the middle of March 1976, and that took up most of their conversation. Vicki was crazy about babies. She didn’t just talk about them, she gave lessons, instructing Julie on morning sickness, diaper rash and breast-feeding, in her careful, scholarly way, the same way she instructed Randy on Amway before he spread the word to everyone else.

  In families, years pass like that, on Sunday afternoons that blend together in a haze of barbecues, good-natured arguments, and baby diapers. They were the happiest times, from 1974 to 1978, when everyone was young and got along, and the only talk of Armageddon was from David, who lectured peacefully away in an empty living room, while his family went about the business of growing up.

  “YOU’VE GOT TO READ this book,” Vicki said. She and Julie were sitting around the farmhouse sometime in 1978 or so, watching little Sara play.

  Julie had heard that many times before from her sister—that she should read this book or th
at one. The last time, it had been some novel by Taylor Caldwell. But this one sounded different because among the things Vicki and Julie had in common was that they were both seekers, people who looked a little harder for truth than did most others.

  “It’s called The Late Great Planet Earth,” Vicki said. She told her sister that it answered a lot of questions that perhaps she hadn’t thought about.

  Written and published in 1970 by Hal Lindsey with C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth introduced thousands of people to the idea of Old Testament prophecy. In the middle of America’s born-again movement, Lindsey’s book applied the words of biblical prophets to the world of the 1970s and came to the conclusion that people were living in the “end time.” It was a huge bestseller.

  Julie tracked down a copy of the book and, for the first time since they were teenagers, became worried about her sister. It wasn’t an inflammatory book, but its message seemed aimed right at idealistic seekers like Vicki and Randy, and she wondered what such beliefs might do coupled with their intensity. They were becoming more involved in their Baptist church and believed the world was an evil place, decaying before their eyes. Lindsey’s book didn’t just impart information; it was written almost like a long letter, directly to readers like Randy and Vicki, stopping occasionally to ask if they were getting it, if it was starting to come together.

  “In this book I am attempting to step aside and let the prophets speak,” Lindsey wrote. “If my readers care to listen, they are given the freedom to accept or reject the conclusions.”

  The book acknowledged that the world was a mess and said the solution was in seeking out biblical prophecy. “Bible prophecy can become a sure foundation upon which your faith can grow—and there is no need to shelve your intellect while finding this faith.” The book detailed the words of Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Micah, men who believed that God spoke directly to them and warned them of times to come. It ascribed modern definitions to Old and New Testament words: for instance, Gog, the evil empire spoken of in Ezekiel, was the Soviet Union and the ten horns of the beast from Revelation described the ten nations of the Common Market of Europe. The book showed how biblical prophecy could be used to predict an Arab-Israeli war that would trigger a nuclear holocaust between the United States and the Soviet Union, bringing about Armageddon. It was pretty familiar stuff for kids who grew up in the RLDS church, Julie thought. Still, Lindsey showed how everything was in place in the late twentieth century for the return of Jesus and, most frighteningly, the Rapture and the Great Tribulation, when true believers are snatched up by God, and the Earth is subjected to every manner of plague and violence. “What a way to live!” Lindsey wrote. “With optimism, with anticipation, with excitement. We should all be living like persons who don’t expect to be around much longer.”

  Other friends noticed the change in Randy and Vicki. At a gathering of classmates from Jefferson High School in 1978, they sat in a circle of friends, talking about everything they’d gone through, the turbulent sixties and seventies. Their lives had turned in a lot of directions: drug use, family life, careers. No one thought what the Weavers had to say was particularly strange, given the range of their class. Their classmates had been fodder for a very difficult time in history, when the world seemed to be ripped apart and hastily glued back together again. True, they were from Iowa, the wholesome core of America, but they were also Vietnam veterans, counterculturalists, born-agains.

  Still, no one from Jefferson High’s class of 1966 had any news like Randy and Vicki Weaver’s. They talked about living on a wooded mountaintop where there were no other people, but where they were in danger from the evil, false government, and the hordes of desperate people living below. They talked about the Great Tribulation, when Christians would be hunted down simply because of their beliefs, when those who stockpiled food would be the only safe ones. They talked about their children, each with a biblical name, who lived on the mountaintop with them.

  Where did all this come from, someone asked.

  “We’ve been having this vision,” Vicki began.

  THREE

  THE LAWN WOULD BE SHAGGY, the curtains pulled, and the clothes falling off the line when the neighbors would start to joke that maybe the Weavers had died in that house. Finally, someone would sneak over and find the television on, tuned to Jerry Falwell or The PTL Club, and the family in the living room, curled up on that beige and orange shag, poring over a bunch of mail-order books and an open Bible. The Weavers would finish the Bible lesson and burst outside, doing the lawn and laundry in a rush of Iowan good will and Christian warmth: “God bless you” to everyone who passed.

  Fourth in a row of five tidy houses, Randy and Vicki Weaver’s white and brick rancher was set back from a tree-lined avenue in Cedar Falls, Iowa. University Avenue was a busy strip of tire stores and pizza parlors that drifted in and out of residential neighborhoods and edged neat lawns. In 1973, the Weavers paid $26,000 for the best home on the block, impressive for a couple still sneaking up on thirty. Like an old-fashioned family, they “came-a-calling” on their new neighbors—Randy with his bushy brown hair and mustache, Vicki with her raven hair, parted in the middle and falling straight down to the middle of her back—both of them impressing everyone with their friendliness and manners. They drove the elderly people in the neighborhood to the store and back and helped them buy groceries. When little Sara was born in March of 1976, most everyone in the neighborhood agreed, she was the cutest and smartest baby, with her mama’s seriousness, her narrow, dark eyes, and jet-black hair.

  But for Randy and Vicki, something was missing. Sports cars, toys, and Amway didn’t give purpose to their lives. Society didn’t offer anything better. The antiwar movement had been idiotic and all the hippies and Yippies made a mockery of Randy and Vicki’s generation. And now the seventies? Neither Randy nor Vicki could condone such shallow, hedonistic lifestyles. Unhappy with what they saw around them, Randy and Vicki returned to their religious upbringing. Every Sunday, the Weavers drove their Oldsmobile east toward Waterloo and pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Cedarloo Baptist Church, on a hill between Waterloo and Cedar Falls, took their place in the pews, and listened to the minister. But there seemed to be no fire or passion, no sense of what was really happening in the world. They’d tried other churches and found congregations interested in what God had done 2,000 years ago, but no one paying attention to what God was doing right then.

  Certainly, churches weren’t addressing the crime in Cedar Falls, the drugs, or the sorry state of schools and government, not to mention the kind of danger that Hal Lindsey described. They would have to find the truth themselves. They began doing their own research, especially Vicki. She had quit work to raise Sara, and later Samuel, who was born in April 1978. When Sara started school, Randy and Vicki couldn’t believe the pagan things she was being taught. They refused to allow her to dress up for Halloween—Satan’s holiday—and decided they had to teach Sara at home. But that was illegal in Iowa.

  A booster shot of religion came with cable television and The PTL Club, the 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell. The small television in the kitchen was on all the time for a while, but most of Vicki’s free time was spent reading. She’s lose herself in the Cedar Falls public library, reading the science fiction her dad had introduced her to as a kid, the novels and self-help books friends recommended, biblical histories, political tracts, and obscure books that she discovered on her own. Like a painter, she pulled out colors and hues that fit with the philosophy she and Randy were discovering, and everywhere she looked there seemed to be something guiding them toward “the truth,” and, at the same time, pulling them closer together.

  She spent hours in the library, and when she found something that fit, she passed it along first to Randy, who might read the book himself and then spread it to everyone—the people at work, in the neighborhood, at the coffee shop where he hung out. They read books from fringe organizations and groups, picking through the
philosophies, taking what they agreed with and discarding the rest. Yet some of the books that influenced them came from the mainstream, such as Ayn Rand’s classic libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. Vicki found its struggle between the individual and the state prophetic and its action inspiring. The book shows a government so overbearing and immoral that creative people, led by a self-reliant protagonist, go on strike and move to the mountains.

  “‘You will win,’” the book’s protagonist cries from his mountain hideout, “‘when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:

  “‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine.’”

  Another time, she told friends to read some short stories by H. G. Wells. Most of Wells’s popular stories were about time travel, space, and hidden civilizations, the kinds of science fiction that had been passed on by her dad when she was young.

  But Wells was the author of some lesser known tales, too, several religious and prophetic short stories, such as “A Vision of Judgment,” in which a man is pulled from his grave and taken before God; “The Story of the Last Trump,” in which a handful of characters fails to see Judgment Day approaching; and the bizarre story, “A Dream of Armageddon.” In it, two men meet on a train and one begins to tell the other about his vivid dreams of the future. “‘Your dreams don’t mix with your memories?’ he asked abruptly. ‘You don’t find yourself in doubt; did this happen or did it not?’”

  In Wells’s story, the man dreams he is a great leader living with a woman in the future on a 1,000-foot cliff with a view in several directions. On his cliff, men come to him and tell him they are at war with him. “‘Why cannot you leave me alone,’” the dreamer asks. “‘I have done with these things. I have ceased to be anything but a private man.’”