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

by Jess Walter

  “He’s busy,” Vicki said. The guy laid out maps and documents from the title company on the hood of his vehicle and showed Vicki where he wanted to go, on the access road past their driveway into the woods behind the Weaver cabin. They went over the maps for about twenty minutes before Vicki said okay. As long as they put the barricade back up.

  The deputy marshals had long noted that the Weavers let some landowners and prospective buyers through the barricade and, occasionally, invited them in for cookies and water. Their plan had already taken shape when Roderick watched the Ford Explorer rattle up the rutted road.

  Mark Jurgensen was a deputy marshal from Washington State who could fit in with the people of North Idaho for several reasons: first, he had a great beard; second, he was an excellent carpenter who could pass as someone building his own cabin; and third, he had false teeth that he could pull out, making him look like a toothless mountain man. Phase III called for Mark Jurgensen to pose as a man who’d bought land behind the Weavers. Randy was such a social guy, he wouldn’t be able to resist a friendly, bearded, toothless guy hammering away just down the road. Eventually, his guard would drop and the deputy marshals would swoop in. Or so they hoped.

  RODERICK ESTIMATED THE EXPENSE in per diems, lodging, overtime, travel, and rental cars for a dozen deputies—$30,000 a month. Still, once they started the undercover mission, he was prepared to wait as long as Jurgensen needed to make the arrest. After more than a month in the field, Roderick flew back to Washington and met with his supervisor, Tony Perez. Phase II was complete, Roderick said. He was ready to start the third part of the plan.

  Perez told him that Henry Hudson wanted to hold off for a while.

  Hudson, the acting deputy director, had been described by the Washington Post as “a hard-liner’s hard-liner” who mowed through five years of dope dealers, corporate heads, and defense attorneys as a Virginia prosecutor. His biggest trophy had been the Pentagon procurement scandal, a web of bribery and fraud by military consultants and managers. “I offer no apologies whatsoever,” Hudson said about his tough reputation in 1991, when he left his position to work for a private law firm. Even then, he admitted he’d be back in government, perhaps in a run for Congress or as a state attorney general. Instead, his break came in 1992, when George Bush appointed Hudson to the top post in the marshals service. Now he was going before a Senate confirmation committee.

  Roderick was all ready to begin Phase III of Operation Northern Exposure when Perez took him aside and told him to hold off until after the confirmation hearings.

  “I’VE HAD ENOUGH!” Wayne Rau grumbled into the telephone. It was August 1992, and Rau was threatening to drive up with his father to Weaver’s cabin and settle this whole mess himself. On the other ends of the three-way conference call, Dave Hunt in Boise and Tony Perez in Washington, D.C., tried to calm him down. Rau explained that his water system, which ran creek water to their cabin, was missing, and he suspected the Weavers might have taken it. The marshals had just been sitting on their asses for eighteen months—five months since they came up with all the electronic gear. If they didn’t do something to get the Weaver family down, and if they didn’t do it fast, Rau said, he was going to sue the government.

  Finally, Perez calmed the tree farmer, offered to pay for the pipe, and promised that something was about to happen.

  Northern Exposure finally became operational again in early August, just a few days after Henry Hudson was confirmed as the full-time director of the marshals service. In a way, Roderick was glad for the delay. Maybe he’d lost some momentum, but he also hoped the three months had given the family some time to settle down after discovering the north ridge camera, which Roderick suspected had happened. Besides, the break had given Roderick time to get his plan into shape and get his teams assembled.

  The marshals service was a small, select organization—95 politically appointed marshals, one for each federal judicial district, and 2,400 deputies. Fewer than half of those deputies actually worked fugitive cases, and just a handful of those volunteered for SOG teams. There were four regional SOG teams, unlike the Hostage Rescue Team of the FBI, which was a full-time SWAT team. SOG members handled their regular marshals duties until some problem developed; then they reported together to the crisis scene. Roderick knew who was in the service, he knew who was in SOG, and he knew whom he wanted for the first part of this mission, scouting the mountain one more time and preparing for the ruse.

  In Washington, D.C., Roderick had the first team chosen. He and five other guys would take one more trip up the mountain, find the best places to hide snipers, and familiarize the marshals with the bluff. And then they would put the undercover agent in place. Dave Hunt, who knew the case and the area better than anyone, would be on the team. Roderick needed someone with medical training so he got Frank Norris, a seven-year veteran of the marshals service, a witness protection specialist from the East Coast, who was also a tactical EMT, specially trained to treat combat injuries. The electronics specialist on the mission would be Joe Thomas, a deputy based in Indiana. And, finally, Roderick requested one of the best marshals he knew: Larry Cooper. SOG, in the meantime, agreed to send another ace, Billy Degan.

  While Roderick put the team together, Dave Hunt and the deputy who was going undercover, Mark Jurgensen, worked out the details of his ruse. His new name was going to be Mark Jensen. They called the owner of some dry scabland behind Weavers’ place and paid him $2,700 to let “Jensen” pretend to buy the land and spend a few months building a cabin on it. He wrote letters back and forth with the landowner and backdated them for the deputy marshal to use as proof. He got a driver’s license and a dog license with the phony names, a credit card, and a gas card. He got a government pickup, registered it under his alias, got a parking ticket, and backdated it. By the middle of August, Mark Jensen was ready to go.

  He would have to be good because the Weavers were suspicious. “The feds keep sending informants up here as ‘friends’ trying to get us to show them the corner stakes of our property!” Vicki wrote to her mom earlier that spring. “They’ve tried that four times! Do they want to bury something to justify murdering everyone? It is very curious.”

  The Weavers’ response to strangers was automatic. The dog barked, and the family rushed out of the house. Randy usually covered the stranger from rocks above the driveway while Vicki or one of the kids went down to see who it was. For a year and a half, they met visitors that way.

  But once, in the summer of 1992, a friend of Vicki’s walked up the driveway without alerting the dogs. She thought about calling up to the cabin but finally decided just to walk all the way up. She walked past the rock outcroppings, came to the door, and knocked.

  Vicki opened the door, saw her friend, and started crying. She whispered, “Do you know how long it’s been since someone has knocked on my door?”

  COOP WALKED DOWN the short runway at the Spokane International Airport and smiled when he saw his best friend at the other end.

  Billy Degan was what a U.S. marshal was supposed to look like. Six feet three inches tall, lean, with easy blue eyes and wire-rim glasses, Degan had a face that could be friendly and tough at the same time. His close brown hair was barely a half-inch long and was starting to pull back in front like a retreating wave. At forty-two, Degan was still athletic, a ripened version of the muscular offensive end who’d set pass-receiving records twenty years earlier for the University of New Hampshire football team. He was quiet and thoughtful, stoic even, except around old friends like Cooper, who loved his dry sense of humor. He was one of four national commanders for the SOG team and the only one who was allowed to stay in his home office—Boston—after the SOG command was moved to Louisiana. That was the kind of deference with which Billy Degan was treated.

  It was a reunion of sorts in the optimistic, sixties-style terminal of the Spokane International Airport. Cooper—and to a lesser extent, Degan—had trained the young Art Roderick almost a decade earlier, and they tease
d him about how far he’d come since then. Cooper and Degan went even farther back, fourteen years, to the day they showed up separately at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and were given dorm rooms right next to each other. They graduated, reported to the service, and were given Special Operations Group training together; every time they traveled together, Billy and Coop shared a room. Of course, Roderick had joined SOG later, and the three men worked cases together now and then and met once a year for training at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana.

  Cooper, mustached and solidly built—like a grown-up high school shot-putter—had known about the Weaver case for some time. He’d seen some surveillance tapes and knew that other SOG members had come out to help the local deputies.

  But he’d paid little attention to the case until a few weeks before when he was paged out of a law enforcement seminar and told to call headquarters. Roderick had already explained the difficult assignment, and now he had a question for Cooper. Would he go?

  Cooper had been trying to get away from SOG. A few months earlier, his father had died and Cooper wanted to back away from his duties as an instructor and SOG team member to spend some time with his mother. But the case sounded important, and Cooper looked forward to working with Roderick and, especially, Bill Degan.

  The next morning, August 18, the deputies briefed the marshal in Spokane about what they were going to do. Cooper helped Degan with some of the SOG equipment, which he’d had on display for some Boy Scouts in Boston. Degan had it shipped to Spokane, and he and Cooper loaded it into the Jeep and a van they rented. They drove to the condo at Schweitzer and began unloading the equipment. There were a number of guns: an M-16 machine gun, a 9-mm machine gun with a silencer, a short shotgun, and a.308-caliber sniper rifle. Roderick brought other M-16s, and each of the marshals had his own pistol as well.

  On Wednesday, August 19, Hunt and Roderick left the condo to talk to some people around town and gather some final intelligence. Norris and Thomas practiced packing the heavy equipment up the ski hill and Cooper went shopping at the army/navy surplus store in Sandpoint. He bought two pairs of camouflage gloves, one for himself and one for Billy. Degan stayed at the condo alone. That night, they watched the surveillance video, talked about the mission, and sat out on the balcony of their condo, which looked out over the parking lot to a pristine mountain lake and the jagged Selkirks. On a similar peak, Randy Weaver waited.

  The next morning, August 20, five of the six deputies—all but Norris—drove west to a shooting range in Davenport, 100 miles away. They practiced firing the guns they’d brought and adjusted the sights, in case they’d been bumped during shipping. The hunters and local policemen had never seen some of the guns the marshals fired, and they whistled and shook their heads.

  Back at the condo, the deputies checked their equipment one more time and talked about the next day’s mission. Norris, the medic, asked Roderick if they wanted a medical helicopter on standby, in case something went wrong. Roderick said not to bother. After the evening briefing, Hunt walked to the balcony of the condo and looked north at the long ridge that ran east from the ski lodge toward giant Lake Pend Oreille. He and Roderick had talked for the last few months about chartering a boat once this was all over and fishing the lake for some hefty Kamloops rainbow trout. Behind him, the other marshals talked about the mission, but Hunt stood in the cool, dry summer air, the last traces of sun painted on the horizon. Roderick joined him on the balcony. Hunt had grown fond of Artie and appreciated the way he deferred to Hunt’s experience and knowledge of this case.

  “What do you think, Dave?” Roderick asked.

  “I don’t know, Artie. I got a bad feeling about this one.” He explained that the plan sounded good, there was just something….

  Roderick cut him off. “We’re just gonna go up there and take a quick look and then we’ll get out of there and go fishing.”

  ELEVEN

  BILLY DEGAN DRESSED QUICKLY in camouflage shirt and pants, pulled up his olive-colored socks, and laced his black military boots one rung from the top. They’d talked one more time the night before about wearing body armor, but it was going to be a scorcher that day, a long hot one under the relentless August sun. Besides, if things went badly, the vests they brought weren’t likely to stop the kinds of bullets Randy Weaver and his family would fire.

  This was the way Degan spent much of his adult life, waking up in some out-of-the-way place, putting on cammies, and heading out in the field, preparing to catch the worst of it. It was tough on his wife, Karen, and his two teenage boys, but it was just what he’d always done. A Marine from 1972 to 1975 and still a member of the Reserves, Degan had joined the marshals service in 1978 and immediately volunteered for the SOG team. He was singled out because of his military training and unflappable personality and was always called upon for the most dangerous and sensitive missions. After Hurricane Hugo in 1989, he led a SOG mission to St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands, quelling riots and keeping an eye on the local police, who were randomly looting homes and businesses. For his leadership, he was given the highest honor a deputy marshal could receive, the attorney general’s Distinguished Service Award. The next year, he was given the Marshals Service Director’s Special Achievement Award for rounding up fugitives during a drug crackdown in Washington, D.C.

  Degan knew that Coop was backing away from the Special Operations Group, backing slowly out of the life. Degan was nearing retirement, and it had to be tempting for him, too—spend more time with his wife in the neighborhood where he’d grown up, coach his kids’ hockey teams, throw down a couple of beers, and keep an eye on the neighbors’ houses when they went out of town. But for now, he was still in the middle of the life, and even though this wasn’t officially a SOG mission, it was one of the strangest and most challenging jobs he’d ever been on.

  Bill Degan put his Camel Club lighter and a pack of Kool cigarettes into his pants pocket, next to his remaining spending money, three one-hundred dollar bills, a ten, and three ones. At the sink, he filled his camouflage canteen with water. His digital watch showed 2:30 a.m.

  Degan stepped outside the condo, into thin, mountain air. The night sky was cloudless, the stars in the east just starting to fade before the suggestion of sunrise. The other deputies were coming out of the condo in the same standard-issue camouflage clothing and loading supplies into the two rigs. They loaded green canvas bags filled with cameras, film, batteries, medical equipment, night-vision goggles, ammunition, and all the machine guns. They left the sniper rifle behind.

  Cooper had slid a yellow T-shirt over his cammies, and the other guys followed suit, so that locals who saw them driving toward the cabin wouldn’t make them for federal agents. They tested their radios one more time, the tiny earpieces in place, mouthpieces in place, the sheriff—the switch and wire that keys the microphone—slung down their sleeves and bound with rubber bands to their wrists. Satisfied, they split up, climbed into the blue minivan and the white Jeep Cherokee, and started on their way, into the heavy darkness that precedes dawn. Roderick eased the white Jeep down the winding mountain road to the highway, the minivan following closely. At the highway, they turned north and drove through pastures and forest, strobed by the moonlit shadows of deep timber and steep hillsides. They left the van at Sheriff Whittaker’s house in Bonners Ferry, piled into the Cherokee and headed back through the foothills of the Selkirk Mountains. They crossed the Ruby Creek Bridge in the dark, their headlights catching the root-lined banks of the narrow dirt road.

  At the Raus’ house, still a mile from the Weaver cabin, the deputy marshals pulled off the road, slid their night-vision goggles over their camouflage masks, grabbed their machine guns, and started out on foot. Through his goggles, Degan’s first views of Ruby Ridge were glowing and eerie, like watching a black-and-white television through an aquarium. The wooded brush was thick, and the deputies stuck to the rough access road, following Roderick, who had been up the mountain two dozen times already and who best knew the mi
ssion and the bluff they were approaching.

  They walked quickly up the eroded dirt road, almost a mile below the Weaver cabin, until they came to a Y, where the trail split into two legs, one veering up a hillside across from the Weaver cabin, the other winding up Ruby Ridge and ending at the Weaver driveway. Roderick, Cooper, and Degan headed straight; Hunt led the other two camouflaged agents up the other trail, to watch the cabin from the other hillside. Roderick’s group walked under a canopy of fir and tamarack trees, into a field of waist-high weeds and a thinning forest. For the first time, they could see the crown of rocks behind which the cabin was built.

  Roderick pointed to one of the outcroppings, from where the family could see anything coming up the road or the driveway. “That’s where they respond to when a car approaches,” Roderick said. They crept around the wooded hillside, Roderick pointing out other areas: the fern field, the lower garden area, good places for watching the house, good spots for snipers. The sun was starting to come up and so they took off the night-vision goggles and backed down the hill again. At the Y where the two trails met, Roderick led Degan and Cooper on the trail toward the observation post, where the other three deputies were waiting for the family to come outside so they could photograph them. The sun was climbing in the sky—closing on 9 a.m.—but clouds were blowing in from the southwest, slipping over the Casçade Range and into nearby eastern Washington. As they walked, the deputy marshals talked into their microphones about spots with good vantages of the family, places where snipers could hide later. At the hillside surveillance post, they held up binoculars and spotter scopes to watch the family—like viewing a play from balcony seats a quarter mile away. Sam, a rifle in his hand, patrolled the compound, and later Kevin joined him. Hunt adjusted the enhancer on the 600-mm camera lens and fired off pictures that froze the family forever on their last peaceful morning: Sam and Kevin, rifles at their shoulders, talking in the clearing past the outhouse; Randy, who had shaved his hair off like a skinhead, walking with Striker; Rachel walking to the outhouse. Each family member had a code name that corresponded with smoke jumpers; that way, if anyone found the deputies’ radio channel, they might think they’d come across traffic from state firefighters. And so, when Vicki walked outside the cabin and started pacing—like some ghost in her long, white nightgown—Hunt fired off pictures and said into the radio that he saw “the assistant crew chief.”