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

by Jess Walter

  That summer, Sammy especially enjoyed his grandparents’ visit and couldn’t wait for them to return the next year, so he could “show Grandpa around my mountain again.” Samuel led the smiling, bowlegged David up to mountain streams, where the nine-year-old proudly fished for four-and five-inch brook trout. Sam would jerk them out of the water, slip ‘em off the hook and slit ‘em up the belly, clean them with his thumb, and then they’d go back and panfry them for dinner. When David asked for a walking stick, Sam ran into the draw near their house and brought back a light, smooth birch limb, then another and another, until David had six to choose from. It became a game for all the kids, finding the best, smoothest, lightest, strongest stick for the aging but energetic Grandpa David.

  When he wasn’t walking with the boy, David always found work to do around the cabin, like helping Vicki rig up her washing machine, a gas-powered monster from the 1920s, with a kick start and an engine that looked like it could run a helicopter. With nothing to cook on but the woodstove, the house heated up like a toaster, and so David built Vicki a screen door and hung it up so they could leave the door open without feeding half the flies in Idaho. He fixed the plumbing, set up the water system and—as he’d done to his own house forty years earlier—soldered a sidearm onto the woodstove to heat water for a shower. David was the kind of guy who couldn’t be still. Besides, anything was better than sitting around, listening to Randy and Frank Kumnick talk. Randy had gotten a construction job nearby, working on a log cabin that was being built. But too often, it seemed to David, he sat around smoking and talking with Kumnick about all these wild ideas that David didn’t really want to hear about.

  David Jordison never much cared for Kumnick. He would get to talking about this conspiracy or that plan and he was just the kind of guy to get Randy all riled up and into trouble. On the drive back to Iowa, he told Jeane: “Pete should stay away from that guy.”

  After David and Jeane left that summer of 1987, the family got ready for the barter fair, one of the kids’ favorite events, a gathering of every social stratum in the woods: the loggers, the second-generation hippies, and the other Christian survivalists. That year, Sara sold cookies and popcorn balls.

  The three Weaver children were doing well, David and Jeane thought. Those first years, Vicki kept pretty strict hours for their school, starting it in the morning and not releasing them until the afternoon. Although Randy and Vicki said the kids didn’t need anything but home schooling, they told all three children that, if they really wanted to, any of them could go into town and brave the Beast’s public school for a while.

  “All you got to do is learn to read, write, arithmetic through maybe the eighth grade,” Randy told them. “And then you can make it on your own.” He didn’t guess any of his kids would make it in public school, though, because they were being taught to question authority the way he did, and he figured they’d just get kicked out for arguing with the teacher.

  None of the kids wanted to go to public school anyway. They were happy where they were.

  The children also became more involved spiritually, although Sara said her parents didn’t push her into the beliefs. “Don’t take my word for things,” her father would say. “Look into it yourself.” They never felt brainwashed or trained in any way, Sara said. They were just a family.

  And they were pretty happy, enjoying the world more and obsessing less about its end. Vicki had even taken a job refinishing antique furniture. It had been one of her many talents growing up, and now she dove back into refinishing and completed three good pieces in just a few weeks for a local refinisher. “Maybe when the kids are raised, I’ll have my own shop,” Vicki wrote her mother in November 1987.

  IN THE FALL OF 1987, after Vicki’s date for Armageddon passed, the Weavers looked hard for a place to house-sit, to get off the mountain for the winter. Eventually they found a place, but they had to rent it, a cute red house with a river rock foundation, just off the highway, with a telephone and a satellite dish. They were living in civilization. The family seemed to be emerging from their paranoia, and Vicki’s parents hoped they had come out of the darkness. The Weavers even agreed to pose for pictures, and back in Iowa, Vicki’s sister and brother couldn’t believe how much the kids had grown. Sara was almost as tall and pretty as her mother, Sam was a little man, and Rachel was growing up even cuter than they’d remembered her.

  When David and Jeane visited in 1988 and 1989, while the Weavers lived in the house at the bottom of the hill, they had the best times they could remember. Jeane took all the kids into town for some shopping, and they hit a few garage sales, looking for the denim skirts that all the Weaver girls wore. Later, they drove up a road that rivaled their own mountain driveway for inaccessibility, until they came to an open field and a wall of huckleberry bushes. They all piled out and began picking huckleberries. The kids found a small lake to swim and fish in while the adults picked buckets full of the bright purple berries. Tourists had discovered the Northwest’s huckleberry pies, and so when they took the huckleberries to the local fruit stand, the grocer gave them an incredible deal, trading a few gallons for a pickup load of apples, plums, and peaches. Vicki and Jeane stayed up all night canning.

  It was around that time that David helped Randy and Vicki build an eight-by-fourteen movable outbuilding about the size of a bedroom and shaped like a tiny barn. Vicki said they would use it for a guest house, a place for people to sleep when they visited the mountain. The house was also used as a retreat for Vicki when she was menstruating. God had shown her that she was unclean during her periods and that she should separate herself from the family and pray until the time had passed. In Iowa, when Julie heard about the menstruation shed, it reminded her of the baths Vicki used to take in Cedar Falls. She wondered if, deep down, the shed was just a way for Vicki to get away from the family and get some rest.

  Nothing came of the Secret Service investigation; the Wohalis moved; and even the problems with the Kinnisons were turning out okay. Terry and his wife had filed a $9,000 lien against Randy and Vicki, trying to collect the money they claimed to have put in and the work they’d done on the barn. But the Weavers hired Everett Hofmeister, a Coeur d’Alene attorney who represented, among other people, Richard Butler, the leader of the Aryan Nations. With Hofmeister as their attorney, the Weavers countersued.

  Terry Kinnison and his family had moved to Alaska, and he wrote the court a half dozen times asking them just to drop the whole thing.

  “I do not have the money to pay any more attorneys,” Kinnison wrote.

  I did not [do] one thing wrong. I am guilty of nothing. I do not wish nor have ever wished to fight anyone…. I can no longer take the stress of all this. So just give the Weavers the lien. But Sir, I will not pay the man or any one individual involved any amount of money. I will not. I have given all I will give. So give them the lien papers and let it go…. And may the God of Abraham rebuke them for what they have done.

  Unfortunately for Kinnison, the God of Abraham didn’t decide the case, and since Kinnison didn’t show up for court, Randy and his family were awarded $1,000 in damages and another $1,100 in costs and attorneys’ fees. Eventually, the money was garnished from a small land settlement that was still going to the Kinnisons.

  Even though their racism was progressing and Randy had become interested in the Aryan Nations, it seemed to the Jordisons that Randy and Vicki had come through some long, dangerous time. Now, Vicki’s family thought, as long as Randy stays out of trouble, everything will be okay.

  RANDY WAS IN TOWN AGAIN, and he was ready to talk. There was no Sambo’s in Naples, Idaho, so he did the best he could, hanging out with friends at their houses or at the restaurant at the Deep Creek Inn. He went to a couple more gatherings at the Aryan Nations, became friendly with some of the members, bought a belt buckle there, and talked about the movement with Frank Kumnick and others.

  Randy had also begun to talk about fixing the messed-up system. He’d been in conversations where
guys like Frank said that revolution was the way to repair things, but he and Vicki took a more biblical approach, figuring God would let them know if violence was needed. Yet Randy was also living in the world again, and so he and Vicki began asking God whether one man—Randy—couldn’t try to fix the world, at least the part of it in Boundary County. So he went to a few public meetings, including one held by the state game department where Weaver reportedly stood up and said that if he couldn’t shoot grizzly bears, and one of his kids got mauled by a bear, he might come back and shoot the people at the meeting.

  In 1987, Boundary County formed a Human Rights Task Force like the one in Kootenai County, after white separatist Robert Miles suggested he might move his 2,000-member Mountain Church from Cohoctah, Michigan, to Bonners Ferry. At one meeting, after the group showed a Canadian documentary about the Aryan Nations, a gully-cheeked man stood up and addressed the task force. Randy Weaver said the film was all wrong. He’d been to the Aryan Nations, and the people here were misunderstanding their message. He said Jews were running the world’s economic system, and groups like the Aryan Nations were only trying to help America get back on its feet. The Human Rights Task Force, Randy said, was denying whites their civil rights. It was a classic Randy speech.

  Later, he said he’d been unimpressed with the task force. “The only thing they’re concerned with is white racists, that’s what bothers me,” he told a newspaper reporter. “They don’t show any movies on black racists…. There are lots of Indian racists in this county.”

  That spring, Randy figured out how he could change the system and maybe keep his family in food and clothes for good. He announced his candidacy for sheriff, running on the Republican ticket. He figured he was a good candidate; trained in Special Forces, he’d been involved in investigations in the army and had never had a criminal record. In fact, it seemed he’d been planning to run for quite a while. He told friends that one reason the family moved down off the mountain was so Randy could do a better job campaigning. But he didn’t have a lot of money, and so he handed out business cards with “Vote Weaver for Sheriff” written on them. On the other side was written “Get out of jail free.”

  He was like the college radical who runs for student body president, promising to abolish student government. Randy said Boundary County had turned into a business, feeding itself on the people by taxing and fining them until their needs were secondary to the Beast, to feeding and keeping the revenue-monster going. The philosophy of Randy’s campaign was a long-standing right-wing thought: that the sheriff was the only legitimate law in the county and the place to begin repairing the screwed-up government.

  But if Randy’s candidacy was right-wing dogma, it was also good-old-boy neighborliness. He promised to enforce only the laws the local people wanted, so that if locals voted to allow drunken driving, he’d enforce it that way. Seat belts and motorcycle helmets were stupid, he said.

  “I question whether they should pass any laws to protect the individual from themselves,” he told a newspaper reporter. “I believe in what I call Scriptural socialism: take care of your neighbor.”

  His candidacy got the attention of the Spokesman-Review from nearby Spokane, Washington, the largest newspaper in the area. And so one of its reporters, who was based in Sandpoint, called Weaver at the little house on the highway where he was living and interviewed him. But after a wide-ranging interview, Randy got mad and said that he’d assumed the reporter was just chatting with him and that he’d never given permission for an article to be written. The reporter said he’d identified himself at the beginning of the conversation and that, clearly, he was interviewing Randy for a story. Randy said the media adhered to the One World Government and would twist his words and make his candidacy some sort of race issue, when that wasn’t it at all. “If you want to make a racial issue out of this thing, they’re going to bring busloads of blacks here to prove a point,” he said. “The people up here don’t want that. I don’t want that.”

  Furious, Randy said that if his quotes were used in the story, he would call his attorney and sue the newspaper. The next day, the story ran on an inside page, under the headline “Boundary Sheriff Candidate Opposed to Mixed Marriages.”

  “I have been to the Aryan Nations World Congress to see what’s going on,” Randy was quoted as saying in the May 21 issue of the Spokesman-Review. “I’ve also been to the Boundary County Task Force on Human Rights. Both have good things.”

  Randy said he wasn’t a member of the Aryan Nations, but he shared their beliefs that the Constitution was being subverted and that interracial marriage was against God’s will. Still, he said, “some of my best friends are of other races.” He said he also shared the group’s belief in a white-dominated America and that the Constitution had to apply mainly to white people “when you consider that it was white folks that wrote the Constitution and some of those folks owned slaves.

  “I don’t believe in slavery,” Randy added, “but, religiously speaking, I don’t believe in mixing the races.”

  Sheriff in such a large, sparsely and strangely populated county was often a difficult job to fill. In 1983, the sheriff of Boundary County had gone to Alaska for a vacation and just never returned. His chief deputy assumed the job because there was no one else, and then, five years later, he quit, too. But in 1988, there were five people eager to jump into the spot, three Democrats and two Republicans. On the Democratic side was a part-time school bus driver, a bartender, and Boundary County’s first-ever bailiff. Running for the Republicans were Lonnie Ekstrom, the chief investigator for the sheriff’s office, and Randy Weaver.

  Ekstrom said Randy’s views of law enforcement were impossible. “He’s much more radical that he lets on,” Ekstrom said.

  In a county of 7,000 registered voters, 1,500 people voted—most of them for Democrats. Randy got 102 votes, which some folks took as a pretty good estimate of the number of white separatists and constitutionalists in their county. Randy lost the Republican primary to Ekstrom, who had 383 votes.

  THERE WAS A DISPUTE between Randy Weaver and Steve Tanner over $30,000 that Tanner said belonged to him. It was one of those strange mountain deals that no one wanted to talk about above a whisper. But some people in the Naples area just knew what they saw—the Weavers suddenly renting this nice house on the highway, driving a new Ford Ranger pickup, quickly buying and selling other rigs.

  Tanner called his friends in the area—including the Raus, who lived below the Weavers’ cabin—and told them about the dispute. Once again, Randy and Vicki Weaver were at the center of a Boundary County feud.

  Some of their former friends theorized that, once the Weavers decided someone wasn’t one of God’s chosen, they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that person. Everyone was either on their side or was part of the great conspiracy. Their severe beliefs didn’t leave any room in the middle. People figured the Weavers were so desperate to provide for themselves and prepare for the Great Tribulation they could justify any action. Whatever the truth, the fact was that almost all the initial friends the Weavers had made when they came to Bonners Ferry were now enemies.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, the whole family was planning to go to the Aryan Nations World Congress. Ever since they’d arrived in Idaho, the Weavers had been drifting toward Christian Identity, the racist religion of the skinheads and the Aryan Nations. They called God “Yahweh” and Jesus “Yashua” (and later “Yahshua”) and eventually dropped the word Christian entirely from the description of their beliefs, saying they were Identity believers. If you looked up the word cretin in the dictionary, they pointed out, you’d find a reference to the word Christian. They’d picked up books and literature at the Aryan Nations before, and Randy and Vicki had found some things to help in their latest project—researching old Hebrew words (like Yahweh) and trying to find the holy words that had been replaced in the English language by pagan words. Humans, for instance, weren’t white people, they were hue (color), mans (people). Aryans wer
e the true people chosen by Yahweh. Sammy picked up his mother’s love for language and devoured the Bible, while Sara studied the way her mother prayed and understood that their religion was different from everyone else’s because of the way it was revealed directly to them by the Creator.

  Even though they agreed with many of the tenets of Richard Butler’s church, there were differences. For instance, the Weavers celebrated the sabbath from Friday at 6:00 p.m. to Saturday at 6:00 p.m., while the Aryans held a traditional Sunday celebration. There were other reasons Randy had resisted joining the group. He told friends that Aryan Nations was filled with ex-cons and others he didn’t want to associate with. Yet he liked going to the world congresses every summer, listening to the speakers and the philosophical debates, and keeping up with the bluster of the movement and tossing in his own opinions.

  The 1989 world congress continued in Richard Butler’s recent theme of trying to recruit younger people. The focus was on skinheads, the young soldiers who would step in to take over from the old men of the movement. Randy, Vicki, and the kids had brought a friend, a visitor from the Deere plant in Iowa, and they all camped at the edge of the Hayden Lake church compound. They stayed in tents and in the back of Randy’s pickup, barbecuing and drinking beer with other families and with some skinheads from Las Vegas whom they’d met.

  Later, the skinheads remembered being impressed by the Weavers. Here was a strong, God-fearing group of people who understood Scripture and were as tight as anyone they’d ever seen. But someone complained that Randy had given the young skinheads beer, the kind of thing the Reverend Richard Butler frowned on, especially since his compound was being watched so closely by law enforcement.

  Even though the Weavers were having a nice time camping, the congress itself wasn’t as dynamic as those of the past, certainly not like the star-studded gathering of 1986. The widow of Gordon Kahl—a North Dakota tax protester and Posse Comitatus member killed by federal agents after a shoot-out and standoff—was there, but otherwise it was the same old rhetoric by leaders who seemed more and more tired. The pressure from law enforcement finally seemed to be getting to Butler, and people talked among themselves of the need for new leadership. The best part, for Randy, was always seeing friends he’d met at earlier conferences. In fact, toward the end of the gathering, Randy looked up and saw one of the first guys he’d met, the biker Gus Magisono. Gus hadn’t been at the last Aryan Congress, but this year he had an important job. Butler had assigned him as the security officer for the widow Kahl.