by Jess Walter
Jackie gave the family the care package, and they were especially grateful for the milk. Kevin slurped the apple juice down and asked for one of Jackie’s cigarettes. Jackie and the girls cried and hugged each other, but the family told her there was no chance any of them would get out alive. Rachel wouldn’t let go of Jackie’s waist. She and Sara told Jackie to ask their grandparents, David and Jeane, not to be mad at them.
Gritz continued his negotiations from outside the cabin, asking if he could take Vicki’s body out. Randy said no, not during their Sabbath. Their Sabbath was from 6:00 p.m. Friday to 6:00 p.m. Saturday.
“My daughters aren’t ready for that,” Randy said.
Jackie didn’t see the body that first trip into the cabin. When she got ready to leave the cabin, Sara had something for her. She ran into the other room and came back with a feminine napkin. Sara had folded the six-page, handwritten note into the napkin, and now she pointed at the note, without saying anything, because she knew the agents were taping their conversations. Randy whispered that Jackie should give copies to three reporters whom she trusted and keep the original. Jackie nodded, lifted her skirt, and put the napkin in her underwear. An FBI agent patted Jackie down lightly and then let her go. When she got down the hill, an exhausted Jackie grabbed her husband, pulled him to the side, lifted her skirt, pulled out the napkin, handed it to him, and said, “Here, copy this.”
THE NEXT STEP was getting Kevin out of the cabin. “Bo, you tell Kevin and Randall that the best thing for Randall is for Kevin not to die,” Lanceley said before they started negotiations Sunday morning, August 30. “If Kevin dies in there, without appropriate medical aid, who knows what the government will try to put on him. Maybe the government will try to get Randall for killing Kevin because he didn’t allow Kevin to come out.”
“Good,” Gritz said. “Kevin coming out is the best thing for Randall.” Bo hoped that when it was just him and the girls, Randy would start to realize coming out was best for the kids. That morning, they attached a body wire to Gritz, and an FBI physician stood near the rock outcropping, yelling out questions for Bo to ask about Kevin’s wound. Gritz stood outside the cabin walls and relayed the messages back and forth. “The doctor says that sounds pretty serious.”
Kevin’s condition had improved, but Gritz and Jack McLamb told the family that young guys who get shot often get better for a while and then deteriorate quickly and die. The family didn’t know whether to believe them.
“I’m not going to throw Kevin out,” Randy said.
“You’re not throwing him out,” Bo said. “Listen, if I were the jury, and you allowed Kevin Harris to die in that cabin, I would fry you because you can save Kevin’s life right now.”
“Bo,” Randy said, “the girls say they don’t want him to go.”
“Damn, Randall. You are the head of that family. You are the man. Make those decisions.”
A little after noon, Randy opened the door and let Bo and Jack McLamb come inside.
Sara was still the holdout. She shielded her father, watching Bo and Jack suspiciously. She heard Bo say that Randy might be charged if Kevin died, and she also understood them to say that if Kevin left the cabin, no charges would be brought against her dad. Even so, Sara figured that as soon as Kevin walked out that door, they were going to finish him off. It made no sense. Why would they try to kill him in cold blood a week ago and then let him waltz out of the cabin? Maybe they’d wait until he was at the hospital, but they were going to kill him.
But Kevin didn’t want Randy charged with another murder, so he gathered his strength and stood up. McLamb—who was a quieter, more thoughtful Bo Gritz—promised to stay by Kevin’s side all the way to the hospital. Kevin walked through the back door and onto the porch overlooking the long, green valley. He grew tired and sat down on the steps, then stood and continued walking, McLamb helping him. Sara was impressed. Still keeping an eye on Bo Gritz, she watched Kevin walk out of the cabin and decided he was one of the toughest boys she’d ever seen.
VICKI WAS NEXT. BO started talking about her as soon as Kevin had left the cabin. He told Randy that Vicki’s body was evidence and could prove that she was purposely killed by the FBI. Jackie Brown had pointed out that having a dead body in the cabin wasn’t healthy and that Vicki wouldn’t have stood for it. By late afternoon, Randy and Sara decided Bo and Jackie were right. Gritz left and came back with Jackie and a blue, felt body bag, which he set on the floor. Randy and Bo pulled back the army blanket, and Jackie saw a bloodless, crushed version of her friend, still wearing a striped sweater and denim skirt, a bandana, and knee socks. Bo knelt down and took the holster and pistol off Vicki and set them on the table. Even though FBI agents reported smelling a dead body inside the cabin, Bo and Jackie insisted there was no stench and no rigor mortis. Blood and fluids filled Vicki’s chest as Bo lifted her. Randy sobbed as he helped ease his wife into the bag.
Jackie and Bo carried the body to the back door and down the stairs as the girls wailed. “Please,” Sara said, “don’t let Mama’s body touch the ground.” Bo staggered down the rickety steps and finally just threw Vicki over his shoulder. They left the body on a cot next to the back porch, and Jackie walked down the hill and asked for some paper towels and water. Two FBI agents filled a couple of buckets from the spring and handed her a roll of paper towels and three white bath towels. Back in the cabin, Sara wanted to help, but Jackie—in her most motherly voice—said no, she couldn’t. She dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor and cried as she mopped up her friend’s blood. It was the worst moment of her life.
Lanceley couldn’t believe it. He was impressed with the negotiating of Bo Gritz and, especially, Jack McLamb, whose quiet charm was a nice balance to Bo’s bluster. Lanceley was glad they were making progress, but now things were moving so quickly, the FBI was making mistakes. Bo, Jackie, and Jack McLamb were being allowed to go in and out of the cabin without being searched, and now Jackie was cleaning up the blood, which would be evidence later. He shook his head as she tossed the bloody towels over the high porch onto the ground.
It looked as if the family was ready to come out, and so Gritz and McLamb turned the negotiations toward finally ending the standoff. The back door was left open and natural light filled the cabin for the first time in more than a week. Then, Randy peeked out the front window and saw the robot for the first time.
“There’s a shotgun on that robot!”
Bo looked out the window. “Yeah, there sure is.”
The family became scared again. For days, the feds had been saying that the robot would bring the phone, that there was nothing wrong with the robot, and yet there it was, right in front of them, a shotgun. They weren’t leaving.
Jackie accompanied Vicki’s body down the road to the meadow, where FBI agents checked her fingers to see if she’d fired a gun before she was killed. Jackie also brought the girls’ pet parakeets. At the roadblock, she collapsed on a friend’s shoulder and cried.
Gene Glenn led the reporters back up the hill again for another press conference. “I can’t overemphasize how pleased we are,” he said. “We’re optimistic that there will be further progress.”
But, at the cabin, Bo was demoralized. The family wanted to die. He’d seen similar reactions in Vietnam—a kind of survivor’s guilt, so strong it made rational people almost eager to be killed. Vicki and Sammy had been shot to death, and Bo figured that Sara, especially, believed she would somehow desecrate their memory by leaving the cabin alive. And once you gird yourself up to die, it can be difficult to back down from that decision. At the base of the driveway, Bo talked to FBI agents who told him that if the standoff wasn’t settled soon, they were going to raid the house.
Over Bo’s wiretap and the microphone under the cabin, Lanceley had heard Sara talk her father out of surrendering. It occurred to him that she had taken her mother’s place as the matriarch of the family. “There isn’t much of a man in there,” Gritz told him. By Sunday afternoon, Lanceley heard
the Hostage Rescue Team preparing for a direct assault, and his morale fell to its lowest point. Ten days. Two hundred forty hours. The FBI wasn’t going to wait any longer. The negotiations had failed.
Lanceley tried not to let Gritz see his concern, though. “Let’s you and I sit down now and work out our game plan for tomorrow,” he said.
But Bo knew. “Negotiations are out,” he said. “Tactics are in.”
That night, Fred Lanceley drove to Sandpoint to sleep in a bed and take a hot shower. He hoped they could raid the cabin without anyone else getting hurt, but he wondered if that were possible. Whatever happened, he knew that by morning, it would be over.
SIXTEEN
“VICKI WOULD’VE WANTED those girls to die up there.” Vicki’s sister, Julie Brown, wasn’t quite sure she’d heard right. “I’m sorry?”
One of Vicki’s friends explained that the Weaver girls weren’t afraid to give up their lives for the white race, that Vicki had become a martyr and a hero, and that she would want the girls to do the same. Julie and her family had reluctantly come down to the roadblock from their motel that day, hoping to get some news, but now—surrounded by angry racists and crazy mystics like this woman—Julie wanted the hell out of there. These people were nuts. Earlier, Julie had just about lost it when she saw some of Vicki’s friends selling her letters to reporters. They said they were raising money for the Randy Weaver defense fund, but Julie was suspicious.
The crowd had swelled to more than one hundred. By the second Sunday, sightseers from Washington and Montana drove slowly past, craning their necks to see all the protesters and the armed federal officers. Campfire smoke and dust filled the air as the self-styled patriots and white separatists shuffled around the roadblock, some happy there had been no more violence, others disappointed that the great race war hadn’t started yet.
Wayne Jones, the security chief for the Aryan Nations, who had vouched for Randy’s character at his arraignment, didn’t think Weaver would give up peacefully. “He made it very clear to me that he was going to take it all the way to the end,” Jones told a reporter. Randy was “a man of honor and a man of his word, and I fully expect him to do what he has said he will.”
Other people were sorry the standoff was dragging to a close because the protest was going so well. Seemingly, everyone had come. Richard Butler and other Aryan Nations leaders showed up for a while. The wives of Order members Gary Yarbrough and Robert Mathews were there, agreeing that Randy was doing what their husbands would do. Both said they’d met the Weavers at Aryan Nations meetings, and Jeannie Yarbrough said she’d been up to the cabin. The Trochmanns were there, too, the family Randy was supposed to spy on, the men who would later form the Militia of Montana. Carolyn Trochmann, Vicki’s midwife, flipped sixteen slices of French toast over the barrel cookstove for the patriots and skinheads who rested underneath the campsite’s blue tarp. She cried as she described Elisheba’s birth and said she was proud of Vicki and Randy and the stand they’d made. She wished she could have joined them on the mountain.
Skinheads crouched on rocks in the middle of Ruby Creek and shaved their heads with disposable razors, while a photographer took their pictures and snipers watched from the woods. One of the skinheads said he heard a language he couldn’t understand, proof that United Nations soldiers had been called in to quell the uprising and institute the New World Order. “I think it was Belgian,” he said.
Other rumors surfaced, some more likely than UN soldiers speaking a nonexistent language. The creeks had been poisoned with phosphorus, people said. Farm animals and pets were being slaughtered by federal agents. Helicopters were planning to dump diesel fuel on the cabin. They didn’t just discuss the plots, they raved about them, looking wildly over their own shoulders and talking out of one side of their mouths, until at one point, a man rushed to the roadblock and, quickly losing his calm, began insisting that they disperse immediately because he had intelligence indicating the feds were going to provoke a gun battle to kill Bo Gritz. “Obviously, the feds aren’t telling us everything,” one camouflaged man said. “We know. And we know they know we know.”
White patriots linked arms and sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” as skinheads gave the Nazi salute behind them. A Jewish father’s rights advocate from Seattle, who was also an anarchist, tried to convince one of the skinheads that they had much in common in their hatred of government, but the nineteen-year-old skinhead refused to acknowledge the Jew, who was the spawn of Satan. “You don’t exist to me,” the skinhead said. He talked instead about the band he was trying to form, which would play folk music, “kind of like Joan Baez, except racist.” Skinhead groupies flirted with the young men from Las Vegas (“I’m in my third year of German”) while Vietnam vets stood in cadres of five or six and waited for orders from Bo Gritz, or anyone for that matter. Moderate people showed up at the roadblock, too, saying their eyes had been opened by the case. Satellite news trucks hummed as reporters from Inside Edition, USA Today, People magazine, and the New York Times covered the carnival.
Gritz was cheered at the roadblock Monday morning, but he knew that even if the FBI hadn’t raided the cabin overnight, it was going to be tough getting Randy out. Bo decided to enlist the help of some of the Las Vegas skinheads, whom Randy had met at an Aryan Nations meeting. He knew Randy respected them and thought they’d been unfairly characterized by the TV station he picked up on his radio. Bo agreed they’d shown remarkable restraint and done a good job keeping the crowd from getting violent. He grabbed a few of the skinheads and asked them to sign a note that Jack McLamb had penned, pleading with Randy to take his battle to the courts now. Not everyone agreed that Randy should give up, and Bo could only find two skinheads to sign the note. Then Gritz and McLamb trudged up the hill once more, knowing time was running out.
MONDAY MORNING, Fred Lanceley consulted his best source of intelligence to see if the cabin had been raided. In his Sandpoint motel, he turned on CNN, which reported the standoff was still going. He called the command post and Gene Glenn told him to get up there, they had decided overnight to try another shot at negotiations.
Lanceley met Bo at the command post. As they’d done the previous two days, the agents placed small transmitters on McLamb and Gritz—Bo’s in the pocket of his faux military shirt, behind his sunglasses, so that if Randy patted him down, he would feel only the glasses. The FBI agents made it clear they were running out of time, that this was likely the last chance for negotiations. They set up Operation Alaska, a plan for Gritz and McLamb to subdue the family if the negotiations broke down or they thought they were in trouble. They would wait until the baby took her nap, then McLamb would grab Sara and Rachel and pull them to the floor and Gritz would jump on Randy. He’d say “Alaska” into his transmitter, and the FBI assault teams would burst in and—hopefully—there would be no violence. Of course, there were no guarantees. Gritz thought the plan was a very good one. Some FBI agents were upset by how cooperative Gritz was up here and how critical of the government he was once he got to the roadblock.
At 10:00 A.M., Gritz and McLamb walked toward the house, but before they could reach the door, Randy called out. “Bo, we’re not going to talk anymore. There’s nothing against you, but … we have prayed all night and we have asked Yahweh and we will stay here. They can kill us if they have to.”
“That’s right,” Sara called. “Bo, we’re just going to stay here.” They would surrender, Randy and Sara said, but not until September 9, which they’d used Bible passages to calculate was the Feast of Trumpets, an important religious holiday for the Weavers. It was the same holiday, nine years earlier, which they’d believed was Yahweh’s deadline for finding a cabin.
Gritz told them that federal agents would never wait that long. He pleaded with Randy, got angry with him, and finally, shoved the note signed by the skinheads through the crack in the door. Randy read the note, seemed pleased, and opened the door to talk about it.
Bo had begun to view Sara as the real l
eader of the family, and he set to work trying to convince her to surrender. She was firm. The lives of Vicki and Sam had to be worth another nine days, she and Randy said. Bo explained that the government needed to get inside the cabin because it wanted to get the evidence. They were spending a million dollars a day on the standoff, Gritz said, and the FBI was becoming impatient. If they didn’t surrender that day, the FBI would raid the cabin, and the girls might very well be injured or killed. Randy agreed with Bo that he should give up to keep his kids from being hurt. But Sara still said no. The ZOG agents had already tried to murder the whole family. Why should she believe now that it was safe?
Gritz and McLamb promised to shield the family. Bo said he would handcuff himself to Randy and wouldn’t leave his side until he was safely off the mountain. They promised to make sure an investigation was conducted on the case and that Randy got a good attorney. They promised the girls they could return on September 9. Still, Sara said no. So Randy talked to her. Gritz may have believed Sara was the one he had to negotiate with, but she insisted her father was really in charge. He told her that if there was anything he could do to keep anyone else in his family from being hurt, he was going to do it. He told her he was going to surrender to protect them. Finally, about 12:15 P.M., after eleven days, Sara went along with her father’s wishes and gave up. If that was the way Yahweh wanted her to die, then so be it.
THEY PACKED A FEW THINGS into small cloth bags and looked around the cabin once more. Rachel took off her holster with its .38-caliber snub-nose pistol, and Sara unstrapped her 9-mm. Randy took off his gun belt and then remembered something. He removed his Aryan Nations belt buckle and handed it to Gritz. “I don’t want them to get this,” he said. They changed Elisheba’s diaper, took a deep breath, and stepped toward the door.