by Jess Walter
With a partner, they bought the thirty-acre Deep Creek Inn for $210,000 cash. For six weeks, business was good and they knew nothing about the Aryan Nations or constitutionalists or Randy Weaver. They were in heaven. But then, the ambulance pulled into their parking lot, and the standoff started.
Lorenz had sent Wasiliki away during the trouble, but when she returned, Lorenz was different. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Nervous and shifty-eyed, he made vague references to being in trouble, being under investigation. A few crank telephone calls chided him for supporting the Weavers, and Lorenz began to worry that he was in trouble because of a trust fund he’d agreed to start for the Weaver girls. He’d only volunteered because he had the only safe in the area, he explained to Wasiliki. He didn’t condone those beliefs! He just felt sorry for a family, that’s all. She tried to convince him there was nothing to worry about. But Lorenz was haunted by images of tanks rolling past his inn and couldn’t sleep at night, worrying that he had done something to bring the government after him. Then he stopped talking about it completely. If he talked about it, he feared, the government would kill him.
In October, two months after the standoff, Lorenz was so troubled that Wasiliki took him to visit friends at a nearby lake. And there he just snapped. He ran down the rural road, hiding in the bushes while his wife and friends looked for him. Then, the peaceful chef ran up to a house and dove through a picture window into a stranger’s living room, stood up, and began strangling a woman in the house, screaming that they were coming to get him. The woman’s husband hit Lorenz on the head with a baseball bat, and he collapsed. When he woke up, he ran away again and hid in a field until the police finally found him, curled up and whimpering.
He was taken to the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Spokane, but when they asked him what was bothering him, Lorenz wouldn’t talk. He sobbed and pulled at his hair and said he was frightened because he’d never done anything violent before. He whispered to Wasiliki that if he told the doctors he was troubled by the Weaver standoff, they would kill him. The next time she came to visit him, she almost didn’t recognize him. In just two weeks, his hair and beard had turned completely gray. He stared blankly at her.
“Lorenz,” she cried. “Don’t you know me?”
Then, there was some recognition. “Yeah. You are Wasiliki. Go away, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I came to move you to a different place,” Wasiliki said.
“This place is hell,” he said.
“I know.”
He did better at the hospital in Coeur d’Alene, and in November, he came home for a little while. By then, they had more than $6,500 in doctor’s bills, and there were still unpaid bills from the standoff. Business was dying at the Deep Creek. Lorenz thought they were being boycotted because he had sent food up to the Weavers and started a trust fund for the girls. He seemed okay for a day or so, and then he began crying and fretting again, saying the government knew that he had provided food and shelter to the protesters. They would surely come and kill him for that. He seemed on the verge of snapping again, so Wasiliki sent him north to be with some friends in Canada. He had another nervous breakdown in Canada and beat his friend with his fists and a stick. After he saw what he’d done, Lorenz ran to a hospital and tried to turn himself in, saying he was worried he was going to hurt someone else. They didn’t have a psychiatric ward at the little country hospital, so they called Wasiliki and she bought an airline ticket for Lorenz to fly home.
At the airport, he screamed and cried and wouldn’t get on the plane. His friend decided to drive Lorenz back to northern Idaho, but a half-hour from the border, Lorenz begged his friend to stop. He grabbed his Bible and stepped out of the pickup onto the side of the road. A cattle truck was barreling down the highway, and Lorenz walked in front of it and was killed. Authorities couldn’t say whether it was suicide or an accident, but Wasiliki insisted her husband would never kill himself. She said he was probably trying to cross the road to look for a telephone to call her.
Even so, she always considered her husband another victim of the standoff. “Deep Creek was Lorenz’s dream,” she said. “I will never meet such a wonderful man.” Wasiliki sold the inn later that year and moved back to Greece, where she was born. Back in the Northwest, folks read about the bus station shooting and about Lorenz’s death and wondered when the world would start making sense again, when the violence would end, when the storm would finally pass.
“WE DON’T SAY THAT WORD HERE,” Julie Brown said gently. She realized Rachel hadn’t meant anything by the word nigger. These girls had simply been raised that way. But for lifelong liberals like Keith and Julie Brown, it was heartbreaking to hear such talk from a ten-year-old. Rachel seemed uncomfortable, too, maybe embarrassed, and she wrinkled up her face and turned back to the rodeo in front of them. “Look at that black on that horse?” she tried. Julie smiled at her. The last thing they wanted to do, she said, was change the girls. But Keith and Julie had decided that Sara and Rachel would respect the Brown’s rules when they were visiting. “I just want to show them some other choices,” Julie said.
At the Dayton Rodeo, on Labor Day weekend—just days after they’d left their cabin—Sara and Rachel watched the horse- and bull-riding and were spun around on some carnival rides, but there was little joy in their faces. They were clearly distracted, especially Sara, squinting into the sun, in a black T-shirt and a baseball cap. She still insisted that they not be photographed—because of their mother’s admonition about images—but when they weren’t looking, Keith clicked off a few frames.
The girls split their time between Randy’s sisters and Vicki’s parents, spending most of it with David and Jeane, in the one-story house they’d moved next to the old farmhouse, where Lanny now lived. It was a small, grandmother’s house, full of collectible spoons, tiny dolls, and fifty years of photographs. As soon as Rachel and Sara moved in, they stripped the pictures off the walls and the knickknacks off their dressers in their bedrooms. Such images, Sara said, were pagan and disrespectful to Yahweh.
Besides the usual cooking and cleaning and volunteering at the local hospital, now Jeane had to take care of three tough, headstrong girls.
“These are turkey, aren’t they?” Rachel asked as they sat down to a dinner of barbecued hot dogs one day. They still refused to eat unclean meat.
“Yes, they’re turkey,” Jeane said patiently.
“Don’t feed them pork,” Sara called from the hallway, where she was on the telephone with a supporter.
“I won’t, Sara,” Jeane said.
Neither girl would go to Vicki and Sammy’s memorial service, which was held at the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints in Fort Dodge. Churches were pagan, they said. But, finally, one of Randy’s nieces talked the girls into at least standing outside the church and greeting well-wishers.
Sara refused to go to school and wouldn’t allow Rachel to go either. Jeane’s sister brought over some schoolbooks, and they watched a little public television, but Sara didn’t want them to be brainwashed. Neighbors donated care packages of clothes and toys for the girls, and some days, Rachel would change in and out of her new clothes two or three times.
Sara told her story over and over again, to relatives and supporters who called or stopped by. Rachel wouldn’t talk about what she’d seen. She was more interested in television and Nintendo.
Rachel and Sara watched videotaped news programs that showed the lines of federal officers, and Sara yelled at the television. “You bastards! Which one of you shot my mother?” At night, she stayed up, sometimes until 3:00 a.m., talking on the telephone to supporters, friends, and the Las Vegas skinheads, who played Peter Pan’s Lost Boys to her Wendy.
Often, they called to get advice. Once, when they were sure federal agents had surrounded their house and were going to come in shooting, Sara calmed them down and told them that wasn’t how the federal agents would do it. She especially liked the soulful one named David.
El
isheba was a whirlwind, and Jeane raced around behind her, putting pictures back up, cleaning up spilled Cheerios, and trying to keep the little girl from tearing off her diaper. Elisheba was nervous around strangers, especially men. But when Julie Brown came over, Elisheba took one look at the long black hair and the Jordison family face and attached herself to her aunt’s leg. She stared at Julie with huge eyes, as if she recognized her. And then she heard Julie’s voice—Vicki’s voice—and the ten-month-old baby smiled and looked up, confused. She clung to her aunt’s leg as Julie tried to leave.
Strapped with their own grief and questions, David, Jeane, and the rest of the Jordison family struggled with the girls those first weeks. They were drained by their own burgeoning distrust of the government and by the unimaginable sorrow and anger of these two girls. Lanny watched Rachel move around the farm and was amazed. She had watched her mother’s face blown off, had been splashed with her blood, and she was stone quiet about it. “I can’t believe she doesn’t have nightmares,” he said.
They had to confront their feelings about Randy. At first, the Jordisons blamed Randy as well as the government for what happened. But now, they began to see troubling questions: What were six marshals doing in the woods that day? Why would they shoot the dog during a gunfight? Why did they shoot Sammy in the back, when he was running away? Why did they need so many agents to settle the standoff?
Vicki’s death troubled them the most. Why would they fire at the family before giving them a chance to surrender? They reasoned that an expert sniper couldn’t miss twice—one shot grazing Randy, the other accidentally hitting Vicki? So, if it wasn’t an accident … they couldn’t handle the next thought. Government leaks to the press said that Kevin, Randy, and maybe even Sara had fired at a helicopter, but Sara said that wasn’t at all true. The Jordisons began to picture FBI snipers crouched on hillsides, aiming at Vicki’s head while she stood in the doorway, and—POW! Sara claimed that Randy had been yelling for days that Vicki was dead, and the family knew the government had listening devices under the cabin. And yet, Gene Glenn had pretended to be choked up when he told them—a week into the standoff—”I have some good news and some bad news.” Had they just been conned by some great actor? The Jordisons were a patriotic family, but that was stretched and finally broken by the horrible feeling that their government had murdered little Sam and their beloved Vicki and now was covering it up.
Even Julie and Keith Brown, the liberals in the family, began to see the case differently. They still believed Randy’s and Vicki’s paranoia brought on some of the problems, but their own faith in the government bled away completely. And their discomfort with Randy’s beliefs paled before their anger at federal law enforcement.
And then, there was Sara. She sulked and stared out over the ruffled soybean fields, leaning against the barn her mother had roofed twenty years before. No one in the family could reach her. She refused to see a counselor or a psychologist and wouldn’t allow Rachel to see one either. She boiled with anger until Julie worried that Sara would run away and join the skinheads in some battle against the government. With Vicki gone, Julie and Keith began to think that Randy might be a calming influence on Sara and that she might be lost without him. They worried that Sara would explode if her father was convicted of murder. Julie came to the conclusion the only thing that might save Sara from the same fate as Vicki would be for her fear and anger to subside and for their world to return to some kind of normality. She needed to trust that there was some fairness and justice out there. And the only way Julie could see that happening was if Randy got off.
In the fall of 1992, there wasn’t much chance of that.
SEVENTEEN
THOSE GUYS ARE GOING to get the big needle, David Nevin figured. Lethal injection. Nevin read the August 31, 1992, newspaper accounts of Randy Weaver’s and Kevin Harris’s ambush of federal officers and their standoff in a fortified cabin on the top of a castlelike point. A lawyer would have to be a masochist to represent a militant neo-Nazi who killed a federal agent and then held 300 government agents at bay for eleven days.
“I’ll need a day to think about it,” Nevin told the federal judge, Mikel Williams, who had called to ask Nevin to serve as Kevin Harris’s court-appointed attorney. The next day, Nevin agreed to take the case.
He flew to Spokane and drove with another lawyer to the hospital where Kevin was staying, made his way through an army of marshals guarding the door, and slid into the hospital room where Harris was spiderwebbed with tubes, recuperating from surgery on his bullet wounds. He was bloated from the intravenous feeding and was so pale, it looked as if he’d already served twenty years.
“I’m David Nevin,” he said. He told Kevin that he’d been appointed to represent him, and Harris looked up at him wearily. At first glance, David Nevin was thin and aristocratic, with graying, wavy hair that—it became apparent as you talked to him—had probably been quite long at one time.
“Hi,” Kevin whispered. “I have a lawyer. You don’t have to worry about it.”
But the lawyer who’d promised to represent him wasn’t really qualified, and so Harris’s parents, Barb and Brian Pierce, auditioned Nevin, asking if he’d ever represented someone charged with killing a law enforcement officer before. Nevin said no, but he assured them he would be up to the task.
It wasn’t much of a case, Nevin thought on the short flight back to Boise. It was a losing proposition on every side. As a court-appointed lawyer, Nevin would be working for forty to sixty dollars an hour, less per hour than his overhead. They were going to throw everything at this Harris kid; he was going to have to work eighty hours a week to match the full technical and legal might of the U.S. government. He’d be facing Ron Howen, who collected neo-Nazi convictions like other people collect stamps. He’d be representing an accused cop killer with racist beliefs, a combination that was poison to a jury, even an Idaho jury. There were a million reasons to turn down the case and one very good reason to take it: Gerry Spence.
Two days earlier, newspapers reported that Spence, the famed Wyoming defense attorney, was considering representing Weaver. Bo Gritz had called him during the standoff and Spence had agreed because Gritz told him it might bring Weaver down from the mountain. The Boise legal community buzzed with the chance to see perhaps the greatest trial lawyer in the country—a bombastic, entertaining, plainspoken storyteller who claimed never to have lost a criminal case. Nevin had read a couple of Spence’s books and had even attended one of Spence’s psychodrama workshops in Wyoming, where he gave an uncharacteristically flat demonstration of his trial methods.
Nevin loved the idea of working with Spence, and he firmly believed in the defense attorney’s responsibility to defend society’s worst, but something about the case squirreled with his conscience. He saw the need to challenge government and to keep it from abusing citizens and their rights. But, at the same time, he hadn’t gone into law to represent white-separatist cop killers.
Whites were certainly separate in the Shreveport, Louisiana, neighborhood where David Nevin grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. With his chin resting on his back fence, the young Nevin could see the “colored quarter,” blocks of two-room shanties—tin-roofed, board-frame homes with no paint, no lawn, and no running water. His divorced parents impressed upon Nevin the importance of the civil rights struggle and taught him equally that there was a dominant order in the South—a legacy of abusive power among the white majority—that was evil and immoral. So, alongside a fair hatred of racism, Nevin grew up believing that, often, the establishment is just dead wrong.
He was everydude in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a shaggy-haired, liberal, itinerant college student, checking in at the University of Connecticut, the University of Iowa, and finally, Colorado State University, where he graduated in 1974. He got a job in the woods of Colorado on a construction crew—hard, tiring work that made him realize there had to be a better life out there and that made him decide to go back to school for something better:
heavy equipment operator.
Or law school. Either one beat swinging a pick. Nevin did the obligatory aimless trip through Europe and then applied to law schools and, once accepted, flew from Luxemburg to Spokane, and from there hitchhiked to Moscow, home of the University of Idaho. He graduated from law school in 1978, moved to Boise, and eventually took a job in the public defender’s office. Like most PDs’ offices, Boise’s was horribly understaffed; at any given time, 150 cases crossed Nevin’s desk, with time to prepare only five of them. It was straight triage, like bringing one ambulance to the scene of a fifty-car accident every day.
Two weeks on the job in 1978, Nevin had his first criminal trial. He faced the toughest prosecutor in Boise—the plug-muscled, steely-eyed perfectionist Ron Howen, who unnerved Nevin with his nonchalant confidence. During jury selection, when Nevin asked a potential juror whether he could believe the defendant could be innocent, Howen snapped up in a voice so authoritative, it sounded like the law itself: “Your honor, I object. The issue before this jury is not innocence. It is guilt or not guilt.”
About the same age as Nevin, Howen was a no-nonsense logician who would sooner lose a finger than plea-bargain a case. He swung the law like a club, almost always going for the broadest charge and the stiftest sentence. Boise defense attorneys joked that Howen had the perfect formula for prosecution, four words: “No” to plea bargains, and “What happened next?” to witnesses.
Nevin’s client in that first case was a black man named Tommy Fort, who, in an effort to drive to Salt Lake City and see his girlfriend, had been arrested stealing five gallons of gas. Tommy had climbed the fence at a private fueling station, but the pump wouldn’t work. So he broke a window, got the keys, flipped on a pump and filled a beat-up, handheld, five-gallon tank. Howen charged Fort with burglary and grand theft, which Nevin thought was a little stiff for someone trying to pinch a few gallons of gas. It seemed to him like overprosecution.