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

by Jess Walter

  Randy came out first, cradling Elisheba in his good arm, holding Bo’s hand with his other hand. Behind them came McLamb, holding hands with Rachel and Sara. Some of the FBI agents had such a low opinion of Randy, they bet that he was holding the baby as protection.

  On the porch, standing in the sunlight for the first time in ten days, Sara waited to be shot dead. It didn’t happen. The whole family was crying as they walked down the steps and along the rocky path to the driveway, and that’s when some of the fear fled from Sara. She saw snipers and camouflaged agents hiding behind rocks and trees, staring at the family from all over the knoll, and she knew one of them had murdered her mother. She wondered what they would do to her father now.

  “All this, for one family,” she said as they walked down the driveway, tears streaming down her cheeks, agents peeking out from everywhere. Several armored personnel carriers sat at the base of the driveway, and Sara glared at the agents she saw, hoping they were ashamed for declaring war on a peaceful man and his little family, on people who just wanted to be left alone. There were dozens of people at the base of the driveway and even more in the meadow down below. One of the agents—a tall, older man with gray hair and a potbelly—bent over and asked Sara if there were any booby traps in the house. “Is there anything else up there?” he asked. “Because we don’t want anyone else to die.”

  “You’re worried, aren’t you?” Sara snapped. She shook her head. “There’s nothing else up there.”

  When the family was gone, FBI agents came down from the hills to look at the cabin. Lon Horiuchi walked all the way around it and stared for a long time at the door where he had fired and at the window where Vicki Weaver apparently had been standing when his bullet tore through her face.

  Down the ridge, in Homicide Meadow, Wayne Manis waited outside a medical tent next to the HRT building. Gene Glenn stood near him, somber and tired, glad it was finally coming to an end. He’d asked Manis to be in charge of Randy Weaver once he reached the command post. A caravan of military vehicles came down the road and into the clearing and opened their doors. Randy Weaver stepped out—scrawny and pale, wearing a drab olive T-shirt and faded jeans, his shaven hair grown out into rough stubble. Bo Gritz got out with him, but the FBI led Randy away.

  They put Randy on a stretcher and carried him into the medical tent, where Manis ran alcohol swabs over his fingers, then dropped the swabs into an evidence bag and sealed it. Randy was exhausted and quiet.

  They loaded him in another rig and drove him to the Raus’ barn, which had been turned into the field office, where his daughters now stood, waiting to say good-bye.

  With his hands cuffed in front of him, Randy leaned forward in the car, an agent on each side of him, said good-bye to his girls, and told them not to worry. Rachel cried, but Sara tried not to, firing angry looks at the agents, pissed off that Bo had already abandoned her father. She told the FBI agents, “If anything happens to him, you’re going to pay.”

  Nearby, Dave Hunt watched quietly. He’d come back to the mountain after Degan’s funeral, and now, finally, it was all over. They brought Randy Weaver within about ten feet of him, and Hunt stared at Weaver’s gaunt, blank face. For eighteen months, he tried to get that man off that mountain, did everything he could think of to meet with him face-to-face. Now, here was Randy Weaver, right there in front of him. All this trouble and death because of one little man. It seemed to Hunt this was what Weaver wanted all along, to be some kind of hero or martyr, to be some kind of Aryan legend, to sacrifice everything for some half-baked ideals that he didn’t even really comprehend. I hope you’re happy, he thought, as they led Randy away. I hope you’re satisfied.

  They drove 200 yards east, to a dark marshals service helicopter. They loaded Randy in with Mike Johnson, two armed deputies, and Wayne Manis. Randy was secured by waist chains shackled to his wrists and ankles. The flight to Sandpoint took only fifteen minutes, and then they landed next to a private Learjet, quickly loaded Randy aboard, and were off again after only five minutes on the ground. On the flight to Boise, Manis sat next to Weaver, who was almost catatonic. Mike Johnson had just one question for Weaver. “Did you ever leave the mountain?” Weaver said no. Johnson—ever the politician—leaned back and told Manis there would be photographers in Boise. If he wanted, Manis could stand on one side of Weaver while Johnson stood on the other.

  “That’s okay,” the FBI agent said.

  A few years earlier, Manis had been featured in The Silent Brotherhood, a book about The Order that had become required reading for some white separatists. When Wayne introduced himself, Weaver said he recognized the name. For the first time since coming down from the mountain, Randy seemed mildly interested in something. “I’ve known about you for a long time,” Randy said. “I’ve read about you.”

  “THE GLORY GOES TO God Almighty,” said Bo Gritz, framed against an impossibly blue sky and an American flag unfurled by his supporters. “And if the media doesn’t use that, then you’re everything Randy said you were.”

  Bo said he’d awakened at two-thirty Monday morning with a vision that the surrender would take place at noon. “I was maybe fifteen minutes off, and it may be that my watch needs to be readjusted.

  “The government learned something here,” Gritz said. “The government learned there are times when common sense pays off. It doesn’t have to be in a book of procedure.” But he complimented the agents and, especially, Gene Glenn. “Everybody up there did his job,” Bo said.

  And then Bo thanked the skinheads for their letter, which he said helped resolve the standoff. “By the way,” he added. “Randy told me to give you guys a salute.” Bo raised his right arm in what looked like a Nazi Sieg Heil but what he claimed later was just a wave. “He said you’d know what that meant,” Bo said. There was no mistaking the salute he got in return.

  One young skinhead sat dejected on a stump. “It’s just not what we expected,” he said. “I wish he’d taken a few more out.”

  On the mountain, FBI agents crawled all over the cabin, gathering evidence. They looked for fingerprints and blood samples and measured the bullet hole in the door. They taped off the cabin and brought up a Humvee full of reporters, who were allowed to walk over the rocks outside the cabin but not let inside. The family’s arsenal was spread out on a white sheet on the ground—two shotguns, seven rifles, five pistols, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. FBI agents pointed to tins of armor-piercing bullets, which they said might have penetrated the APCs if the family had used them. Still, for an investigation that was based on trafficking in illegal weapons, it was clear that none of these guns was illegal.

  A relieved Gene Glenn answered questions from reporters about the standoff. “The key line is, there has been restraint,” he said. Glenn said Bo Gritz worked heroically to end the standoff, even though Glenn never got clearance from FBI director William Sessions to use him. “Maybe I should have,” he said, smiling, “but I didn’t.” When someone asked what he would say to the people of northern Idaho, Glenn became serious. “The message that I would like to say is, ‘We are very sorry.’… There are no winners in a situation with all this sadness.”

  When he was done, Glenn climbed one of the boulders and stared out over the disappearing hillside to the green-and-brown valley below, spread out before him like a deck of cards in God’s hands. He asked no one in particular, “How could there be so much evil in such a beautiful place?”

  THERE WAS A PARTY THAT NIGHT in the wood-paneled bar at the Deep Creek Inn. Print reporters hit their deadlines and TV guys finished their live stand-ups, and they met at the Deep Creek, where a few protesters and local cops had already gathered to toss a few back. The booze was a nice match for eleven days of fatigue and adrenaline, and thirty people got pretty drunk pretty fast. They told war stories, swapped ZOG jokes, and posed for pictures: the angry Bill Grider with a grin on his face and his arms around the reporters he’d been scowling at all week; one of the Las Vegas skinheads posing with a bl
ack reporter from Boston, their faces dissolved in laughter as they Nazi-saluted the camera.

  When Lorenz came to check on the rowdy bar, its occupants broke into applause. Everyone—reporters, cops, and protesters—was fond of the Swiss chef. They had listened to his earnest, bent-English questions about what was happening and smiled at his naïve beliefs about America and justice. They had eaten his food, used his telephone, and slept on his floor, often for free. Some of the bar and food tabs would never be paid, and when the phone bill came, Lorenz would find dozens of calls he couldn’t account for. The innkeeper looked out at a room full of people who had argued and debated for eleven days, now friendly with one another, as if it had all been some sort of insane play.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the bartender, a young newspaper reporter who had stepped in when the regular bartender was swamped by the fast-drinking crowd. Everyone raised their glasses. “To Lorenz, a man who really knows how to host a standoff.”

  Lorenz didn’t smile. He looked down, thought for a moment, and then spoke. He said his eyes were opened by the last eleven days and that the news reporters needed to realize how important their job was. They had to find some meaning in what had happened, some explanation. A few of the reporters almost sobered up. “I hope you will be responsible in telling this story,” Lorenz said. “And I hope you find the truth.”

  RACHEL AND HER GRANDPA walked through the grocery store in Sandpoint, looking for snacks to take back to the motel. The ten-year-old only wanted chocolate doughnuts. After all she’d been through, David Jordison wasn’t going to say no. Rachel stayed close to her grandfather as they walked through the store’s bakery, past shoppers who paid them no attention. She hadn’t been away from the cabin, hadn’t been off the mountain, in eighteen months, and now she was in a crowded grocery store, all kinds of faces streaming by, a blur of strangers and strange-looking people who were pushing carts with gallons of milk, loaves of bread, batteries, cookies, and frozen foods. She clung to her grandpa and whispered, “I sure wish I had my gun.” That night, as she got ready to go to sleep in the motel, Rachel asked if anyone had a flashlight she could borrow in case she had to get up and go to the bathroom.

  Back at the motel, Elisheba toddled around in nothing but a diaper while Sara talked with Jackie and Tony Brown, with her cousin from Colorado, John Reynolds, with a couple of the nicer skinheads, and with her other relatives. Then she agreed to tell a reporter from the Spokesman-Review what had happened. In a motel room in Sandpoint, she started slowly, trying to get everything out. She was tight-lipped and tense, her eyes swollen from crying. She broke down a couple of times as she described how her brother had been shot, how her mother had been killed, how she’d crawled around Vicki’s dead body to get food and medicine for the people in the cabin. But mostly she was furious. She concentrated, trying to make sure she had the sequence of events right. She scolded herself when she started crying: “Get this out!” After three hours, with the interview ending, a workman banged against an outside wall, and sixteen-year-old Sara jumped, her eyes open wide, her fists clenched.

  “Sara Waited in Fear for Feds to Finish Job,” the headline read. The subhead was, “‘I couldn’t watch them pick us off one at a time.’”

  Exhausted, Julie Brown flew back to Iowa to be with her own family; then she tried to figure out how to get the girls back there and away from all the trouble. But Sara wouldn’t leave. She wanted to stay with Jackie and Tony Brown or with other friends near the mountain, to guard the cabin, so they could go back the next week in time for the Feast of the Trumpets. “I want to stay here,” she said, “around people who understand me.” And the younger girls couldn’t go either, said Sara. “I won’t let what’s left of this family be broken up.” Her grandparents were trying to talk them into coming to Iowa and going to public school. No way. Sara said their hearts were in the right place, but she would never go to school.

  Julie Brown knew she had to get them out of Idaho. She thought of Vicki’s wild-eyed friend who had told her the girls should have died on the mountain. Although Jackie and Tony Brown weren’t like that woman, there was no way Julie was going to let the girls stay in Idaho. Even Vicki wouldn’t have allowed that. She called every few hours on September 1, and each time Sara would have some other excuse for not being ready to go. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said.

  Julie had met a social worker while she was in Idaho, who told her the surprising news that the Weavers had received food stamps for a while, years earlier. It made Julie sad because she knew how much Vicki would’ve hated to do that. But it also reminded her that Vicki would do whatever was best for her family. That was what Julie had to do now. She called the social worker back and told her what the woman at the roadblock had said. Julie said she considered it a threat against the girls’ lives. The social worker agreed that the girls should go to Iowa as soon as possible.

  Then, Julie called back to the motel and got on the phone with Sara. She told her there were threats on the girls’ lives, and she stretched the truth, saying the social worker had called her and promised to send the girls to a foster home if they stayed in Idaho.

  “Right now, you have two choices,” Julie said, hoping to scare Sara into leaving Idaho. “You can stay there and be institutionalized or you can come back to Iowa.” It sparked Sara’s vision of orphanages and foster homes, passed along by her parents: such places would be infected with the AIDS virus, and the children would be brainwashed and fed psychedelic drugs until they cracked and were no longer dangerous to ZOG.

  On September 2, Sara relented again, this time only for the good of her sisters. She said good-bye to her friends and to two of the skinheads she’d met at the Aryan summer congress years before, Johnny Bangerter and David Cooper—the handsome and intense-looking skinhead the others called Spider. At the Spokane airport, Sara refused to let her sisters out of her sight and began to change her mind about flying. It dawned on her relatives that the only aircraft these girls had ever seen were the planes and helicopters that buzzed over their cabin, taking photographs for the government or for tabloid television shows. In addition to everything else they had gone through, the girls were scared because they were about to fly for the first time in their lives.

  ALL THAT WAS LEFT was the cleanup. With Weaver safely in jail, Wayne Manis returned to Homicide Meadow after everyone else had packed up the tents and gone home. He took down all the electrical equipment and got rid of all the classified garbage. After the investigators had gone, Manis visited the cabin once more. It gave him the creeps: the rock fortifications, the supply of beans and herbs and grains, which could have lasted a year, maybe two, maybe even more. He stood on the porch and realized it could have gone even worse. What would have happened if Sara had come out at some point firing her rifle. What could they have done?

  Manis was angry, not just at the family, but at the system, too, which allowed law enforcement agencies to compete over criminals and informants. Not that he thought the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had done a bad job on the case. No, Manis had reviewed the bust and thought it was a clean case, not entrapment from his standpoint. And they’d arrested Weaver using a pretty slick ruse, with no bloodshed. But he didn’t understand why the ATF was trying to develop its own informant on the Aryan Nations in the first place. There should be one agency—the FBI—in charge of domestic terrorism. Otherwise, agents and informants were falling over each other, undercutting the other’s investigations. Hell, he wished the ATF had just come to him if they’d wanted intelligence on the Aryans or on Weaver. He probably would have told them Weaver wasn’t connected enough to worry about. That he wasn’t worth the effort. And then, standing on the empty knob, he tried to imagine the whole thing had never happened.

  On September 3, three days after the standoff ended, Wayne Manis drove down the dirt road and turned onto the old highway, the last federal officer to leave Ruby Ridge.

  A few protesters straggled at the roadblock for a day or so after
that, and then even they left. But the flowers and wreaths remained for months, alongside a painting of Jesus standing behind a boy at the wheel of a ship. On the bullet-pocked dead-end sign marking the bridge, someone had duct-taped “Mother & Child” below the word “DEAD.”

  The Weaver case continued to hang over the Inland Northwest like a still summer storm, building anger, not just among the radical right but in a broad swipe of people all over the political spectrum. The case continued to draw people to the Northwest. Weeks after the standoff, a group calling itself Citizens for Justice convened a meeting to demand an investigation of the government’s actions. One of the speakers at the meeting was Louis Beam, a former KKK leader who immediately announced his plans to move to Idaho, in part because of the support Randy Weaver had received.

  A week after the standoff ended, a drifter from Texas walked into the bus depot in nearby Spokane. He had come to North Idaho to protest the siege but had arrived too late. Inside the bus station, he pulled out a handgun and fired three shots at two strangers—a black man and a white woman whom he’d been watching for a few minutes. The twenty-nine-year-old man was hit in the stomach and arm and the nineteen-year-old girl in the side. Both lived but were permanently disabled. When they arrested the drifter a day later, he said he was disappointed the standoff was over and had wandered around aimlessly for a few days. Then, God had told him to shoot the couple because black people weren’t supposed to mix with white people.

  LORENZ AND WASILIKI CADUFF had met on a park bench in Switzerland in 1974, when he was a successful nineteen-year-old antiques shop owner and she was a sixteen-year-old salesclerk. They were married a year later. They visited the United States the first time in 1980 and loved the open spaces and the peace of the West. Switzerland, Wasiliki liked to say, was a country of people packed like chickens in a pen. Back in Switzerland, Lorenz got a master’s degree in management and opened his own restaurant. But after five years of eighteen-hour days in a drug-rich resort town, Lorenz and Wasiliki decided to take their three children and leave Switzerland for good.