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

by Jess Walter

  “That’s far enough.” Ten feet away, Sukenik would later testify, Randy Weaver appeared with a Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. Bill Grider stepped out from behind a berm with a long pistol holstered on his hip and then Vicki Weaver came out, her own revolver sheathed on her waist.

  They were fanned out in front of him, Sukenik testified. In his short career as a bailiff and court security officer, Ron Sukenik had never been on this end of a gun before and he tried to stay calm. He spoke to Randy, who lowered the gun to the ground.

  “I’m not here to see you,” Sukenik said. “I’m here to see Bill.”

  Randy began preaching about the IRS being an illegal entity, a tool of the federal government and the Jews. As Randy spoke, Sukenik allowed himself a deep breath. From the sheriff’s car, one of the deputies engaged Weaver in conversation about his beliefs, and he turned his attention away from Sukenik long enough for the bailiff to explain to Vicki what he was doing up there and to pass the papers along.

  Vicki walked over, took the papers, and gave them to Bill. “They’re throwing you out of your house,” she said simply.

  “I gotta go,” Sukenik said. He and the deputies backed away slowly and left. A few days later, Sheriff Whittaker saw Grider in Bonners Ferry and told him if he didn’t move out, Whittaker was going to move him out. So Bill and Judy moved down the hill and once again the Weavers were alone.

  AGREEN FOREST SERVICE PICKUP TRUCK bounced and rattled along Randy Weaver’s driveway and stopped in a cloud of dust below his house. The first thing the two men saw as they approached the house was a Confederate flag, stirring in the light breeze above the cabin. It was a clear, sunny afternoon, June 12, 1990—just five days after Ron Sukenik’s eviction of the Griders.

  Sara, who was thirteen, came running out first, her black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her long skirt clean and neat. She looked like any teenage girl except for the World War II gun belt slung around her waist and the semiautomatic pistol sticking out of the covered holster. “What do you want?” She was polite but businesslike.

  Ten-year-old Sammy came out next, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with a hunting knife holstered to his hip and a short, butch haircut.

  Herb Byerly leaned out to talk to the kids. Even after twenty-two years with the ATF, it was unnerving to see children walking around with guns. Byerly could see Randy Weaver’s truck wasn’t there, and so he and the other agent, Steve Gunderson, figured Randy wasn’t home. “Hi,” Byerly said. He asked what road they were on. “We’re from the Forest Service. Have you seen another crew up here?”

  “No,” Sara said, “I haven’t.”

  Byerly and Gunderson took another look around, then backed up, drove down the ridge and onto the old highway, where they spotted Randy’s red flatbed truck outside one of the rooms at the Deep Creek Inn. Byerly recognized it from the meetings with Fadeley in Sandpoint, and so the ATF agents parked across the street and waited for Randy to come out.

  Since Fadeley’s cover had been blown, the ATF needed someone else who could tell them what was happening with the Aryan Nations, and especially the separatists in Montana who were under investigation. Randy seemed like a perfect candidate. He was ex-military and had run for sheriff in Boundary County, so they figured he might, at least, have some respect for law enforcement. He had the trust of the Aryan Nations without any ties to them and, clearly, he didn’t agree completely with their views.

  Byerly and Gunderson waited until they saw a woman come out of the motel to smoke a cigarette. Then they drove through the gravel parking lot and across the street, rolled down their windows, and asked the woman if Randy Weaver was inside. Byerly said they wanted to talk to him privately. The woman figured them for local Forest Service employees and went back inside.

  Randy came out in a black leather jacket decorated with two Nazi SS lightning bolts, a dress shirt, jeans, and an Aryan belt buckle that caught Byerly’s attention. Randy walked up to the truck, smiling, and stood near the open window. Vicki stood well behind him on the porch, watching, just out of earshot.

  The agents introduced themselves, and Randy stepped back. “Don’t say anything,” Byerly said. “Let me finish what I have to say.” He told Randy they had evidence that he’d manufactured and sold sawed-off shotguns. He offered to play a cassette tape of the gun buy and showed Randy Polaroid photographs of the guns. He said they’d presented the case to the U.S. attorney’s office and—while they didn’t have a warrant yet—there was a good chance it would go to a grand jury and Randy would be indicted on federal weapons violations. But there was something he could do.

  Gunderson, a former sheriff’s deputy in Montana, was good at these kinds of pitches to blue-collar and country folk and so he took over for his partner, trying, in a friendly but foreboding way, to lay out the different ways this case could go. He called it telling someone what their future held: “Number one, Herb has got a case here, and he thinks it’s prosecutable, and he thinks you can be found guilty. But here are all your options: You could cooperate. You could wait until you get arrested. You could go to a jury in North Idaho and you might be able to beat the case and you would never go to jail. But you’d have to go through the process of being initially arrested, getting initial appearance, getting bonded, and all that. That’s a big hassle. Or you could decide to work with us on it. Doesn’t mean you’d have to actually get somebody arrested for us. It just means you go out of your way to cooperate with us, and then you can evade all this other stuff that could occur.”

  “You can assist yourself,” Byerly finished, by providing information on other Aryan Nations members, particularly the group in Noxon. They wanted him to be a spy. Byerly wrote the ATF address and phone number, and “Herb” on a piece of paper and handed it to Randy. “Come alone, tomorrow, to the federal courthouse in Spokane at 11:00 a.m.”

  Randy had listened quietly, but when the agents were done, he said he wouldn’t be a snitch. “You can go to hell,” Randy said. He turned and began walking back to the motel. “Vicki, Vicki! Come on out here!” The agents drove away.

  At the time, Gunderson thought they’d played it just right. It was a reasonable offer, and even if Randy didn’t take it, he wasn’t going to fare that badly on a simple gun charge, not with a jury likely made up of gun-owning, antigovernment Idaho citizens. It’d be probation or a minimum security work release facility at the very most. It wasn’t until later that Gunderson realized Randy didn’t see it that way and that Gunderson was making a mistake treating Weaver the way he treated the normal criminals he dealt with. He’d never seen Randy’s expression on any of the gunrunners and drug dealers he usually busted. Those guys understood just how easy it would be to get out of this. Randy didn’t seem to get it. “Usually, I’m dealing with someone who knows, deep down inside, that he’s committed a crime,” Gunderson said. “But with Randy’s beliefs, I don’t think he felt he’d done anything wrong in the first place. He just looked at us with these vacant eyes…. It was going right over his head.” It would not be the last time federal agents would misjudge Randy Weaver.

  RANDY AND VICKI COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. It was just like Proctor James Baker, like Randy’s supposed threats to President Reagan! Why couldn’t they leave the Weaver family alone? He was being set up! Gus had come to him, had shown him where to cut the guns. They decided Frank Kumnick must be a snitch, too. Well, Randy would rather go to jail than be a snitch! The Weavers raced up to the cabin, gathered the children, and explained what had happened. Vicki cried, and they prayed that the Creator show them what to do in the face of such oppression and deceit. And then Yahweh guided them. About 10 p.m., Randy and Vicki assumed the familiar roles, Randy raging, Vicki writing. She addressed the letter to “Aryan Nations & all our brethren of the Anglo Saxon Race.” In it, Vicki explained how the ATF agents had approached Randy and had tried to make him a snitch and how she and Randy and the children were ready to stand for truth and freedom. She challenged “the Edomites” to bring on war. When they wer
e done, Bill Grider took the letter to the Aryan Nations compound.

  If we are not free to obey the laws of Yahweh, we may as well be dead!

  … We have decided to stay on this mountain, you could not drag our children away from us with chains. They are hard core and love the truth. Randy’s first thought was to let them arrest him to protect his children—but he is well aware that once they have him the Feds will send agents to search and destroy our home, looking for “evidence.” He knows his children—they won’t let that happen to their mother.

  Let Yah-Yashua’s perfect will be done. If it is our time, we’ll go home. If it is not, we will praise his Separated Name! Halleluyah!

  The conspiracy theories flew like snow in a November storm. The government was trying to separate the family and indoctrinate the children! The Raus and Tanners were trying to steal their land, just as Kinnison had tried! It was a plot to kill all the Green Berets! Frank Kumnick had been a plant, a government agent whose mission was to introduce Randy to the informant! The Jews, working through the Masons and the government, were finally making their move on those who knew Yah’s truth!

  Two, three, four at a time, the Weavers’ friends trekked up the driveway and witnessed the family’s ever-deepening fear and their resolution not to be bullied.

  “If we are up here when they come, we will stick by you,” said Judy Grider, who had taken on Vicki’s prophetic tone, her stern, matriarchal leadership, and even her denim-skirt wardrobe. “They’ll encounter two families with the strength of Yahweh.”

  But there was another problem in the Weaver cabin. The money from Iowa was long gone and—whatever had happened with Tanner—that money was gone, too. The family was broke. Randy had made a few hundred bucks on the shotguns he bought and sold, but that business didn’t last long. They cut cords of wood for elderly people but, despite all that time in the woods, never came across a deer, and so Vicki worried that they wouldn’t have enough protein that winter. They sold off some of their possessions and picked up an occasional eighty-dollar check from their settlement with Terry Kinnison. But the family was worse off than it had ever been. And so, when they stopped paying their property taxes, it was partly because of politics, partly because they just couldn’t afford it anymore.

  The tax bill was piling up, Randy was under investigation for gun charges, and the family was out of money; they were backed as far as they could go. And they responded the way they always did when they felt the pressure of the world against them. They became even more radical. Now it was time to make a stand, time to reject the lawlessness of Babylon.

  Angry summer faded into fall and winter, and ATF agents contacted Wayne and Ruth Rau and asked for their help. In December, an indictment was handed down for Randy Weaver’s arrest on the gun charge, and a letter went out to the Weavers’ attorney. The Raus agreed to take a radio and contact the agents whenever they saw Randy and Vicki Weaver drive down the hill.

  On the ridge top, Randy was torn. “Maybe I should turn myself in, so nothing happens to the kids.” But Vicki was convinced that as soon as Randy left, the government would confiscate their land, send the children to AIDs-infested mental hospitals or foster homes, and—when the Great Tribulation began—the Weavers would be spread throughout the Beast’s institutions and prisons. They took a vote; none of the kids would allow their father to turn himself in. Sammy, especially, was unbendable. He would not have his mother subjected to the horror of losing their land.

  But by winter nothing had happened, and Randy and Vicki were still low on money. They set to work cutting firewood and selling it in town, rushing while they still had decent weather because the December storm clouds were moving in and each load could be their last.

  NINE

  ON THE FIRST SUNDAY of December 1990, dark, bloated storm clouds crashed into the Selkirk Mountains and left fifteen inches of snow on the granite and softwood of Ruby Ridge. On top, the snow slid off the Weaver cabin’s metal roof and piled three feet against the doors, isolating the family as perfectly as they could ever hope. The wind riffed through the plywood walls, while the kids huddled around the woodstove, reading action books beneath kerosene lamps, playing Scrabble and Parcheesi, and trying to learn chess from their father. Vicki read Scripture, wrote letters, and mended rips in the family’s snowsuits, until, after the storm, she and Randy broke a trail through the snow from the ridge top to the meadow below and rode snowmobiles to the county road, where their pickup truck was parked. They drove the truck to the store, filled their backpacks with milk and a few other groceries, drove back to the base of the mountain, climbed aboard the snowmobiles and rode back to the top of the hill. Such trips to the grocery store were day-long events, during which the kids took care of the dogs and other chores and waited with their holstered pistols until Randy and Vicki returned. Even after the snow passed two feet, the couple went into the woods most days, trying to find a cord or two of dry firewood to sell. But their chain saw wasn’t working very well, and the tough winter slowed them down considerably. They had a few older customers, but during a North Idaho winter, trees are about the only thing in ready supply, so most folks cut their own wood. Vicki got word of a couple of refinishing jobs waiting for her in the spring, but one of the furniture shops was going out of business because some government agency had ruled that the chemicals used to strip the furniture in the shop’s big tank were too dangerous. “Our wonderful tyranny in action again,” Vicki wrote. The Weavers were doing so badly they considered selling the flatbed truck, probably their last possession of any value.

  Two more snowstorms battered the ridge until, on January 17, the weather cleared a bit, and Vicki and Randy started up the snowmobiles and rode them down the hill, past the Raus’ house. Just below the meadow, they switched to the pickup and continued down the snow-packed road until they reached the bridge leading to the old highway. A pickup truck and camper was broken down on the bridge, wedged sideways just on the other side of Ruby Creek. A blond, shaggy-haired guy was bent over the truck’s open hood, his head buried in the engine, while his mousy wife stood next to him, shivering in jeans, a shirt, and no coat.

  Seven years in Boundary County hadn’t shaken the Iowa from Randy and Vicki, and they stopped the truck before the bridge. Randy opened his door and hopped out. The young woman walked toward Vicki’s side of the truck, and so Vicki opened the door and stepped out into the snow to greet her. “What’s the matter with your truck?”

  “Oh, it’s broke down,” the woman said. “We were trying to get it off the road and you were the first people who came along.”

  Randy kept walking toward the open-hooded pickup. From behind, he could see the guy—early thirties, scraggly jeans, flannel, surfer hair—still messing around under the hood. “Ya broken down?” Randy asked. Fifteen feet from the truck, Randy slowed, and the long-haired guy spun around in the snow and jammed a 9-mm pistol toward Randy’s face. “Federal agent, you’re under arrest!”

  The county sheriff, Bruce Whittaker, jumped out of the back of the camper with three ATF agents, including Herb Byerly. From the woods, agent Steve Gunderson, in full snow camouflage, kept the scope of his AR-15 trained on Randy Weaver’s chest.

  “Get on the ground!” yelled Lance Hart.

  Vicki was the responsibility of agent Barbara Anderson. “Turn around!” yelled the petite woman with no coat. “Get down!” Vicki turned to run away, but Anderson ran a few steps, pushed her, and Vicki fell face first into the snowbank.

  There was yelling and confusion as Hart wrestled Randy to the snow-crusted ground, put the gun against his stomach, and waited for the other agents to help subdue Randy. A short newspaper story about the arrest said Randy “offered no resistance,” and he wasn’t charged with resisting arrest.

  But during the struggle, Hart testified later, Randy had slapped at the agent’s gun and then had reached for his own coat pocket. When another agent got there, he reached in Randy’s pocket and pulled out a.22-caliber pistol. They read Randy
his rights and handcuffed him. Byerly ran to where Vicki lay on the ground, and they cuffed her hands behind her back, too, grabbed her by the arms, and stood her up. She was mumbling something that Herb couldn’t quite make out—the steam slipping from her lips—until he realized it was chanting, some sort of prayer in a language he’d never heard before. Barb Anderson ran her hands all over Vicki, who stared off haughtily—horrified and angry to be slammed into the snow and then body searched by the agents of Babylon. There was nothing on Vicki. Back in the truck, her purse contained a small .38-caliber handgun, which the sheriff gave back to her as soon as everything calmed down. They took the cuffs off Vicki. But the agents pushed Randy into a car, and as Hart walked by, Randy nodded at him. “That was good,” he said. “But you’ll never fool me again.”

  Vicki cried as they drove her husband away.

  When it was over, Byerly thanked Anderson and Hart, a former navy pilot who had been an ATF agent since 1986, when he’d begun growing his hair out. By 1991, it was long enough for a dishwater ponytail, and Lance had become a specialist in undercover operations. Young and muscular, with stooped shoulders and surfer looks, Hart met the most important requirement for undercover work—no matter how long you stared at him, he just didn’t look like a cop.

  The ATF had arrived the day before, and Byerly had given Ruth Rau a two-way radio, telling her to call when Randy came down the mountain. That morning, Hart and Anderson had waited with the others in Naples until Ruth Rau called and said the Weavers were coming. And then they moved in. Byerly felt good that they’d arrested such a dangerous, stubborn man without any bloodshed.

  It was a good ruse, but it didn’t do much for Randy and Vicki Weaver’s distrust of the government.

  In Coeur d’Alene that afternoon, Randy stood in front of the booking camera, tight-mouthed and stunned. He refused to sign his name. That night, when he complained about the conditions in his jail cell, one of the jailers said, “Wait until you get to prison.”