by Jess Walter
“They’ll kill him in prison,” Vicki said. And then the family would lose the cabin, the government would take the kids away, and Satan would have won.
Rodney tried to convince them to give up, reading passages from the Bible that he hoped would convince Randy and Vicki that he might get a fair trial.
The kids interrupted occasionally, tossing in some point from history or Scripture. Rodney was especially impressed with twelve-year-old Samuel, who knew the names of all the presidents, had memorized encyclopedias, the Constitution, and much of the Bible. He seemed to know the date of every event in Western history from the Roman Empire to the present.
They talked philosophy. Randy was quite a speaker, Willey thought, but this was where Vicki really shone. She said the Babylonian system had taken over America, through infiltrators who seeped into every level of government, through the Masons, the Jewish Defense League, the Illuminati, and the Trilateral Commission. Vicki and Randy spoke about how the Zionists were in control and were trying to get their tentacles into every part of American life, to create their One World Government. Most of it was familiar to Rodney. For the last decade, he had been a regular every Sunday at Richard Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian, on the Aryan Nations compound. But many of the Weavers’ beliefs differed from the Aryan teachings. The Weavers relied more on the Old Testament and on messages from God—personal visions and biblical insights that governed their lives more than any doctrine.
They talked all the way around the situation, piling on more and more evidence of the ZOG conspiracy and the slim chance that Randy would get a fair trial. They cried and pleaded in prayer, and finally the whole family talked about it in a sort of informal polling, making sure they all agreed with the stand Randy had taken.
With the sun coming up, Randy said he would not talk to Richard Butler, Everett Hofmeister, or Jack Cluff. He saw what they did to his friend Proctor James Baker, and Randy wasn’t going to go through that. If the marshals came for him, he would fight to protect himself and his family.
Rodney Willey left that morning exhausted but impressed with the family’s resolve and intelligence. He was still worried about them, but—in the back of his mind—he wondered if they might not be right.
The next day, when Vicki wrote to her mom, she just said friends had been up. She also wrote she was having trouble with Judy Grider and that she and her husband weren’t going to run their errands or pick up their mail anymore. “She is capable of any lie to deceive you, so don’t believe any phone call you may receive from her as of the past two weeks,” Vicki wrote. “All of my letters have had to pass through her hands & I could never write my suspicions to you.”
Once again, the Weavers felt they had been betrayed by close friends. Vicki wrote a curt letter to the Griders, who had been seen talking to federal agents and whom the Weavers suspected of trying to steal their money.
“We appreciate what you have done for us in the past, but things have changed and we have made other arrangements,” Vicki wrote. “For your own safety, please do not come to visit anymore unless we contact you first. Thanks. The Weavers.”
TEN
DAVE HUNT DROVE BACK to Naples in October 1991, hoping to finally end this thing before it gathered any more momentum. He and the marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, had mailed a letter to Weaver in August, urging him to give up. In late September, seven SOG deputies had returned to North Idaho to talk about a direct approach on the cabin. But Hunt hadn’t given up negotiating and, despite the pressure from Evans and others, wasn’t ready to go tactical yet, so he sent the SOG team home. Still, the persistent enforcement deputy was becoming discouraged. Jack Cluff and Ron Evans had driven up the mountain, pretending they were looking for land. Weaver’s kids had come out first, and when Randy finally came out, he stood back, shielded by his armed kids, and told Cluff and Evans to move along. It made the marshals sick. Hunt had this awful feeling Randy was taunting him, sending down these ridiculous letters that left no room for negotiation and that pointed them ever closer to a confrontation.
In October, Hunt and Mays found out someone else was picking up the Weavers’ mail, a thirty-seven-year-old family friend named Alan Jeppesen. The marshals drove to Jeppesen’s house in Naples and talked to him in his driveway. They listened to his constitutionalist rhetoric for a while, and then Hunt asked the same question he’d asked Grider.
“Can’t I just walk right up the mountain and arrest him?”
“I wouldn’t,” said Jeppesen. But he promised to tell Randy that Hunt wanted to meet with him face-to-face, talk about his beliefs, and see what it might take to end the stalemate peacefully.
The next day, Hunt and Mays met with Jeppesen again, and he gave the marshals a letter written by Vicki and Randy on a single sheet torn from a notebook. The rantings were starting to get predictable: “The U.S. Government lied to me—why should I believe anything its servants have to say…. Your lawless One World Beast courts are doomed. We will stay here separated from you….”
So Hunt tried the Griders once more.
“Bill,” he said, “can you help me figure out how to do this without anyone getting hurt?” He offered Grider $5,000 to bring Randy down.
“Keep your money,” Grider said. Randy had accused him of being a snitch, and the short-fused Grider said he’d just kill Weaver. “I’ll call you and tell you where the body is.”
It just got stranger and stranger. Hunt knew he had to get past this circular, religious language and macho survivalist paranoia to find out what was really bugging Randy. He wrote a letter promising that the government wouldn’t interfere with Vicki’s custody of the children; that Randy’s friend Alan Jeppesen would be able to stay with him while he was arrested; and that the government wouldn’t take Randy’s property in place of the $10,000 bond.
He knew he couldn’t send the letter without running it past his boss, Evans, and the assistant U.S. attorney, Ron Howen. So he faxed them the letter, along with five other negotiating points he thought might end the logjam, points like the following: that Randy be given his choice of jails while he waited for trial, and that his family be given liberal visitation rights.
“Dear Mr. Weaver,” Hunt’s letter began. “I was hoping that you would be willing to discuss with me how we might come to some reasonable solution to this matter.”
While Hunt waited for permission to mail the letter, Jeppesen brought down another letter written by Vicki Weaver, this time addressed to Hunt and Mays. It listed six questions:
Why couldn’t government informants be cross-examined?
Why did the magistrate tell them they were going to lose their land if they lost their case?
Why was there a concerted effort to set up former Green Berets?
Why was the government trying to disarm law-abiding citizens?
Why were there no more constitutional local sheriffs?
Why was there no arrest warrant or search warrant in Randy’s case?
Hunt hadn’t heard back from Howen about the negotiating points in his own letter, so he wrote another letter, answered the six questions as best he could (“I can’t answer number three because I don’t know of any concerted effort to set up for prison or murder all Green Berets”) and assured Randy that if he surrendered, he’d be treated fairly.
On October 17, he saw Jeppesen one last time.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you anymore,” Alan said. He gave Hunt another letter from Vicki: “My husband was set up for a fall because of his religious and political beliefs. There is nothing to discuss. He doesn’t have to prove he is innocent nor refute your slander. Mrs. Vicki Weaver.”
“Can’t I still meet Randy face-to-face?” Hunt asked.
“No,” Jeppesen said. “He won’t meet with you.”
So the marshals drove back to Boise. This case was really starting to unnerve Dave Hunt. He’d never encountered someone so unreasonable. Then, the day he got back to Boise, he got Howen’s official response to his pro
posed letter. They weren’t allowed to negotiate with someone who had an attorney and—even though Randy wouldn’t meet with his—a lawyer had been appointed. “I cannot authorize further negotiations or discussions along this line with the defendant or his agent,” Howen wrote.
The U.S. attorney’s office had scuttled the marshals’ one best chance to negotiate an end to the case.
Okay, neither side wanted to negotiate. That’s it, Hunt told Evans. “Let’s let him sit up there another winter.” Maybe the Weavers would tire of their primitive existence. The weather was turning, and Vicki was about to have a baby. They couldn’t stay up there forever.
THERE WAS NO WAY Vicki Weaver was going to have her twins in a hospital. There was too much risk of catching AIDS, even at a small hospital like the one in Sandpoint. Besides, Randy’s army training included delivering babies, and Vicki was in touch with a midwife who had studied to be an emergency medical technician and who was going to try to be there when the babies were born.
Alan Jeppesen was doing a fine job with the groceries. The Weavers had always paid the Griders for that job, but Alan only asked that Vicki knit him wool socks. It took Vicki forty-two hours curled up with yarn and needles under the kerosene lamp just to knit three pairs, but Alan told her that when he showed them to an elderly woman he knew, she mistook the socks for machine-made. Once a week, Jeppesen brought milk, eggs, butter, bread, cereal, bananas, and a package of hamburger. He delivered mail and often bought a half-gallon of ice cream for the kids.
Kevin Harris came up quite often during the summer and fall of 1991, helped Randy cut tamarack trees for the winter firewood supply, and helped Vicki can vegetables and fruit. She was working hard through the late months of pregnancy and writing a running letter to her parents that she mailed whenever Kevin or Alan went down the hill. David and Jeane were planning to visit, hoping to catch the birth of Vicki’s twins. Each summer, Vicki sent them a winter list of things the family needed, and that year she included cracked corn, canned goods, a food grinder, toothpaste, men’s underwear, and shoes for the whole family.
David and Jeane left for Idaho in early October, intent on bringing Vicki down the mountain temporarily, so she could at least be close to a hospital. On the way, they met with ATF agent Steve Gunderson in the Kmart parking lot in Coeur d’ Alene. They told Gunderson the same thing they’d told Hunt, the sheriff, and everyone else. Gunderson—one of the agents who had offered Randy the chance to be an informant—felt bad for Vicki’s parents, who were clearly caught between forces they couldn’t control: their family and the laws of the U.S. government.
“We’ll pass along what you say,” Jeane Jordison said, “but they don’t listen to us on religious and legal matters. And when all is said and done, that is our daughter and our son-in-law, and we love them and we’re going to support them.”
David and Jeane brought a truckful of supplies and helped out with the canning and work on the cabin, but by the time they had to leave, Vicki still hadn’t had the baby. They had no luck convincing her to leave Randy. Jeane tried once more to talk sense with Vicki and asked if the family wasn’t causing some of its own trouble.
“You know why I have trouble and other folks don’t?” Vicki wrote her mom. “I understand these things—most people never study or read and have their heads ruled by the ‘electronic toilet.’ They aren’t dangerous to the tyranny in place. We are—we speak out against it. If we had ‘free speech’ protected by the Constitution—then why wouldn’t we be left alone? Why do you suppose I live where I do? Certainly not to bother anyone else with what I understand. That should be obvious to anyone.”
David and Jeane left Idaho the second week of October. On the twenty-third, Vicki went into labor, and the next morning Randy delivered a healthy baby girl in the birthing shed. She had soft, reddish-blond hair and deep blue eyes, and by the time the midwife showed up, the baby was quiet and alert. There was no twin, just a blood clot that Vicki had mistaken for another baby. The midwife, Carolyn Trochmann—married to one of the men from Noxon, Montana, whom Randy was supposed to spy on—said Vicki and the baby looked fine. It was a morning as peaceful as any she’d ever seen.
Choosing the right name was crucial to Randy and Vicki. Since 1978, they’d talked about living on a mountain top with biblically named children. The last two both had “el” in their names, which Vicki had discovered was a more proper name for God. Samuel meant “lamb of El” and Rachel meant “gift of El.” Rachel’s middle name had been Marie, until Vicki discovered that was a Catholic derivation and therefore pagan. Vicki changed it to Miriam. For the new baby, Vicki and Randy chose a name that translated to “El is my savior.” There was no birth certificate, only Vicki’s careful entry in her Bible:
Elisheba Anne Weaver, Born Oct. 24, 1991, Roman, 11:15 A.M., 7th month, 15 day Hebrew, Feast of Tabernacles. On a mountain, Ruby Creek Canyon, Naples, Idaho.
BY THE SPRING OF 1992, Bill Morlin couldn’t wait to pitch this story: A white separatist gun dealer holed up on a mountain for a year with his wife and kids, stymieing federal agents, who flew over with airplanes and tried to figure out how to get him down. Morlin was the tireless federal courts reporter for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, an investigative specialist who, for twenty years, had broken many of the biggest stories in the Northwest and who had spent much of the last decade writing about Aryan cross burnings, pipe bombs, and bank robberies. He’d written a couple of small stories about Randy Weaver’s arrest and had filed Weaver away as one of the white separatists he needed to keep track of. That spring, he asked the district marshal what was happening with the Weaver case. He was given little information except a coy smile, the kind of look that was often the first tip Morlin got in a really good story. Remembering that the case had been an ATF bust, Morlin tried their office next and was given a little information and the same smile. He ping-ponged back and forth between the offices and played their competitiveness against each other. Finally, Morlin got enough for a story and went to his editors, but they weren’t sold on it. Morlin sulked briefly and then figured out how to convince them: It was the picture. He asked one of his federal sources for a copy of the aerial photos they had, then busted into the photo editor’s office, plopped down the picture, and said, “Look.” There was the cabin, its metal roof glinting in the sun, just a spot in the middle of a deeply forested ridge. You never saw such solitude. It was the perfect symbol of this guy’s separatism and the marshals’ dilemma. Days later, Morlin was in Naples, interviewing Weaver’s friends and trying to get up the mountain himself. The Weavers should talk to him, Morlin told Alan Jeppesen, because he was going to write a story anyway, and this would be a chance to get their side out.
Alan “has come up claiming the reporters want to talk with us,” Vicki wrote to her mother. “They won’t say what prompted their interest. We said we wouldn’t want to talk with them and they said well—they’d make up a story anyway!”
On March 8, Bill Morlin’s story ran on the front page of the Spokesman-Review, under the headline “Feds Have Fugitive ‘Under Our Nose.’”
Morlin’s lead read: “For more than a year, Randy Weaver and his family have been holed up on a North Idaho mountaintop, waiting for the federal government he despises to make the next move.”
In the story, Mike Johnson described Weaver’s cabin as “the closest thing to having a castle with a moat.” He said they hadn’t gone in because of Weaver’s kids. Some Naples residents were glad the marshals were taking their time and said in the story that Weaver wasn’t hurting anyone, that “his home is his jail.”
A Chicago Tribune reporter followed Morlin to North Idaho and his story was picked up by newspapers across the country. In Iowa, Randy’s niece cried when she saw the wire story. Suddenly, the Weavers were hot. Star magazine wanted to come up. The Los Angeles Times wanted to come up. Geraldo Rivera’s new television show, Now It Can Be Told, wanted to come up. The Weavers said no to all of them. So Star rented a helicopter and buzze
d the cabin. Geraldo’s crew rented a chopper, too, and it hovered around the house like a persistent wasp while Randy flashed his middle finger at them. The next day, the Weavers were listening to their radio when they heard a report that they’d fired guns at Rivera’s helicopter.
“The only thing I shot them was the bird.” Randy laughed. The crew later admitted they were probably mistaken.
“I guess they’ve decided to ‘try’ us with public opinion,” Vicki wrote. She said “Jewraldo” and his crew’s false report of gunfire were attempts by the government to make the Weavers look violent. “They may still do a hatchet job on us: white robes, burning crosses, swastikas, and skinhead street fights. What’s that got to do with ‘failure to appear for a frame-up’?” To Vicki, all the attention was just more proof that even if there were some good men in law enforcement, they were being forced to do the Beast’s bidding by the Zionist-Illuminati-One-World infiltrators.
“Well, you wanted to know if all the publicity is good or bad?” she wrote her mother. “It’s to put pressure on us & the feds who don’t think the ‘charge’ merits force…. I’ve always told you—they will start it—well they have and they’ll never give up.”
ON MARCH 27, 1992, fifteen people met in the narrow director’s conference room on the twelfth floor of the marshals’ headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking the Pentagon and Washington, D.C. The top officials in the U.S. Marshals Service sat down at the conference table, along with a public relations specialist who was there to answer questions about the sudden bad publicity this case was generating. One writer had even suggested that all criminals move to Idaho, where authorities were afraid to arrest them.
Also at the meeting were electronics, surveillance, and tactical experts, all there to figure out a plan finally to end this thing.
At the end of the table sat the marshals service’s acting director, Henry Hudson, who had been on the job only a couple of weeks and had already been blindsided, not only by a sticky case, but by the accompanying lousy publicity. A tough former prosecutor, Hudson listened as his top deputies explained how an Idaho woodsman could hide behind his kids for fourteen months and evade deputy marshals who knew exactly where he was.