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

by Jess Walter

  Instead, they brought in the guns on a handcart that creaked under the weight and then laid them out on the floor: six pistols, six rifles, and two shotguns. There were 4,500 rounds of ammunition. Two of the 30.06 rifles were loaded with armor-piercing bullets.

  But this was an Idaho jury and most of the twelve were comfortable with the guns as they were passed through the jury box. Earlier, during the questioning of thirty-six potential jurors, one of the questions had been, “Do you own guns?” Nearly every hand had gone up.

  Next, prosecutors played the surveillance videos of the Weaver family, hoping to show how they responded with guns to strangers and were almost always armed. With 120 hours of video, the judge allowed each side to choose some representative moments to play for the jury—the prosecution’s tape showing armed children running out to the rocks and Randy walking around with a rifle, the defense tape showing kids riding their bikes and playing with dogs. When both sides agreed to two minor points—including fast-forwarding the tape past Randy Weaver urinating in the woods—the judge was shocked.

  “We’re getting off to an awful good start here,” he said. “It really worries me, two agreements in a row.”

  The videotapes were shot from almost a mile away, and the people seemed ridiculously small, living their lives out on that rocky knob, tying up the dog, checking the springhouse, running around with guns. Arthur Roderick narrated the tapes—”I think that’s Sara down in the lower right-hand corner; no, I think it’s Rachel.” They played two hours of tapes, and Kevin Harris couldn’t take his eyes off the pictures of the ridge. Randy wouldn’t watch at all, until the end, and even then, he turned his head away whenever Vicki or Sam was on screen.

  The attorneys watched the jury to see how they reacted to ten-year-old Rachel carrying rifles under both arms. Some of them seemed bothered. Roderick testified about how often the Weavers were seen on camera with guns, for instance, Sam—thirteen when the video was shot—carried a gun 84 percent of the time.

  Spence stood up to cross-examine Roderick. “What percentage of the time did this little boy go out and shoot his BB gun?”

  “I don’t know,” Roderick answered.

  “What percentage of the time did Old Yeller wag his tail?”

  “I have no idea,” the witness said.

  The guns and videotapes seemed effective, and Roderick’s early testimony was strong. He was handsome and competent, a contrast to the bumbling of government workers who had come before. Even the defense attorneys agreed: this was a guy you wanted to believe. From the beginning, they had seen him as one of the most dangerous witnesses against them. But every day they became more confident. As the trial entered its seventh week, the defense lawyers were even ready for Art Roderick.

  AN UNMISTAKABLE GLOW seeps from a trial lawyer whose case is going his way. The Weaver defense team watched witness after witness stand up and bolster their claim that the Weavers were pretty decent people set up by the government. They couldn’t have put on a much better defense than the prosecution’s case so far. As Nevin and Peterson grilled government witnesses and drew out testimony that further eroded the case against Weaver and Harris, Gerry Spence leaned forward on his big paws and bellowed, “Good! Good!” loud enough for the jury to hear, as if God himself were doing color commentary on the trial. The lawyers waited eagerly for their own turn at the government’s weak case, like kids standing in line to beat the candy out of the piñata.

  Most days, the defense team had lunch delivered to the courthouse, where they laughed, joked, and eagerly suggested new strategies, since everything else seemed to work so well. Their personalities complemented one another perfectly: the reasoned, intelligent Nevin, the bulldog Peterson, and the grand old master, Spence, who lavished compliments on his unknown counterparts, once handing Matthews a note that read, “You saved my ass,” after his short, to-the-point cross-examination picked up a thread that Spence had missed in hours of wide-ranging questioning. Having worked with lawyers from all over the country, Spence said he’d take that group over any other. His son, an accomplished blues player, whipped out his harmonica and rifted during meetings as the attorneys eagerly asked, “Who’s next? Who’s next?” They read the witness list and jokingly fought over the chance to point out this witness’s inconsistent grand jury testimony or the existence of a certain report by that witness. During recesses, they did their best Ricky Ricardo impersonations, substituting Lucy’s name with that of the next witness. “Roderick? You got some e’splainin’ to do.”

  There were pleasant surprises every day. When Tony Perez, Arthur Roderick’s boss at the U.S. Marshals Service headquarters, testified about Operation Northern Exposure, Peterson asked him if there was a plan to take care of the dogs.

  Perez answered yes. He explained that part of their discussions of the dangers of the mission involved “taking the dogs out of the equation.”

  So, Peterson asked again, there was a plan to take out the dogs?

  “The plan?” Perez asked. “Yes.”

  Lindquist tried to make it clear that when Perez said “take out” he meant to take the dogs out of the equation, not to necessarily kill Striker. “With regard to the terminology ‘take out,’ did you use that terminology with regard to the children?”

  “Yes,” Perez said, “I did. It’s even in my notes.”

  “Did you mean take the children out, meaning to kill the children?”

  “Absolutely not,” Perez said. But the damage was done. There was a plan to do something with Striker. And it wasn’t likely they were going to find the dog a new home.

  As the defense team worked on its theories of the case, there emerged a sort of continuum of what they each believed. On one end was the government acting malevolently, intentionally setting Randy Weaver up from the beginning because of his beliefs, then intentionally provoking the gunfight, then intentionally killing Vicki Weaver because they knew she was the strength of the family. On the other end of the continuum was the government screwing up. It also started with an ATF setup, but then said the marshals accidentally got into a gunfight after Roderick shot the dog and the FBI sniper took a poorly advised shot at Kevin Harris and never saw Vicki Weaver. In between were other possibilities, like the idea that Horiuchi saw Vicki Weaver but didn’t kill her on purpose.

  Vicki’s death especially divided the defense attorneys, some of whom thought it was an accident. Spence said it was intentional and argued that the jury had to believe that, but Peterson thought they would be outraged enough by the rules of engagement and by an FBI sniper who fired wildly toward a cabin filled with children. Spence listened to suggestions from all the lawyers, and even though he was clearly the boss, it was a fairly democratic system.

  Working with Spence sparked creativity in the other defense attorneys. It was like watching someone juggle, Nevin said. When he was done, you didn’t completely know how to do it, but you sure wanted to try. Many of Spence’s methods were similar to ideas the younger defense attorneys already used. Still, they studied how he drew attention away from his client to himself. He came into court in his suede Western coats (the open pockets stuffed full of pens and notes to himself), bolo ties, cowboy boots, and a ten-gallon Stetson hat that he ceremoniously set on the defense table every day. With his plain but powerful speech, he fairly cried out to the jury: “Look at me! I’m real, just like you are!” When he lost his belt, Spence cinched his pants up for days with cheap suspenders and then told the court when he’d finally bought a belt. Juries didn’t want to see some smooth lawyer, he reasoned; they wanted to see themselves.

  The other defense attorneys adopted some of Spence’s strict trial regimen, exercising every day and getting plenty of sleep. They even tried some of his patented bean stew, the main staple of his trial diet. The beans gave Spence a resounding flatulence, which he shared with the deputy marshals who sat behind the defense table—Spence spinning in his chair, leaning back with that half-grin, “Sorry.” Even that was part of his persona. R
eal people fart.

  Other lawyers might have great rapport with the judge or the other attorneys or the witnesses, but Spence was a jury man, always had been. Most times, his questions weren’t as much to the witness as they were to the jury: “Didn’t you hear that little boy say the last words that he spoke in his life, in a little high child’s voice—” He usually got 75 percent of the descriptive question in before he was interrupted by the objecting prosecutors.

  Spence worked behind the scenes to make sure he was getting himself across to the jury in the best possible light. “Judge,” he offered one day. “May I have a second? … Judge, I feel pretty bad about a feeling I have that the jury thinks I’m dragging my feet or somehow delaying this trial. And Judge, the jury gets that impression. You jump on me—I’m sure I have it coming—but I was just feeling bad.”

  Lodge agreed that he wanted the trial to speed up. “I think the government is going to have to be more selective on their witnesses, which are wasting a lot of time. There is a tiny bit of relevance, but the defense, in my opinion, is getting ten times more out of these witnesses than the government.”

  “Judge, I agree with that,” Spence said, rocking back on the heels of his cowboy boots. “I want to tell a story. When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher would punish other people and punish me even though I—”

  Lodge cut him off and said they needed to keep moving. That’s interesting, he said, “but it has nothing to do with the case.”

  The judge was right. Despite the defense team’s glee, the most important part of the case was still to come—the shoot-out, the standoff, and Vicki Weaver’s death. Even with everything that had gone wrong, prosecutors still had time to convince the jury that Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver were cold, premeditated murderers.

  But while the defense team was celebrating, Lindquist and Howen were grimly overworked—still wrestling with the uncooperative FBI and with defense lawyers whose rhetoric was twisting their case beyond recognition. As the trial progressed, the FBI agents began to notice that Howen just seemed to stare off into space at times. Even Lindquist began to worry about him. He was working all the time, and for the first time Lindquist could remember, Ron Howen was making mistakes.

  WITH THE JURY OUT of the room, David Nevin addressed Judge Lodge. “Late yesterday afternoon, after the court concluded, the prosecuting attorney Mr. Howen came and provided me something that I think is—to call it important would be an understatement. It is pivotal. I think in many ways, the whole case turns on this information.”

  Howen had failed to tell the defense attorneys about a witness he interviewed weeks earlier, a member of the Idaho State Police Critical Response Team named David Neal, one of the men who climbed Ruby Ridge and brought down the deputy marshals and Degan’s body. As they reached the marshals that night, Neal said, the first thing Roderick told him was, “I shot the dog.”

  Howen said later he didn’t think Roderick meant he shot the dog first. But he took notes of the Neal interview and decided to call him as a witness anyway, to get it all out in the open. But later, he decided not to call Neal, and he forgot to tell the defense about him until now, a month into the trial and the day before Roderick was supposed to testify about the gunfight.

  Nevin said he called Neal the night before, as soon as Howen told him about the interview. “It was Captain Neal’s distinct impression that Mr. Roderick told him that the first shooting which occurred, the first gunfire which occurred at the Y, was Mr. Roderick shooting the yellow dog Striker.”

  Not surprisingly, Spence was even more outraged by the breach in discovery. “If Mr. Roderick fired the first shot and killed the dog, the fact that the boy returned the fire and then was absolutely massacred by Cooper and Degan, shot in the back as he ran home, establishes what [Randy Weaver] stated from the very beginning.”

  The defense attorneys asked for a day off from testimony to go interview Neal further. At the same meeting, they said that Howen had also just given them an FBI report of an interview with Cooper in which he claimed to have seen Kevin Harris running down the road after firing at him. During his testimony a month before, Cooper had said it was Sam Weaver running down the road. Spence said they could have challenged his testimony with the FBI report. He said the writing was different in that report and another one that had been provided to the defense, and Spence suggested Cooper had written one of the reports himself.

  “So what I’m trying to say is, we’re being ambushed,” Spence said. He called it “an obvious effort of the prosecution to cover up what we have claimed from the beginning was the murder of two people, and that cover-up is beginning to fall apart.”

  Howen said an FBI agent had just found the notes in his drawer a couple of days before and that he had just received them. “I wish, Judge, that I had known about these notes. I did not know.” He offered to turn over his own notes from the Neal interview—which he wasn’t required to do—and to call Neal and help set up an interview for the defense.

  Lindquist stepped in. “If Mr. Howen were any less of a man of integrity than he is, counsel would have never heard about the oral statement of Mr. Neal, yet they now know about it.”

  Judge Lodge was angry at Spence for accusing a cover-up without any proof, but he expected that out of Spence. What he couldn’t understand was a good prosecutor like Howen failing to turn over material that was clearly covered by discovery rules.

  “One thing we have always been proud of in Idaho is the camaraderie between the lawyers and the ethics of the lawyers,” Lodge said. “The court is very disturbed by what has happened here.

  “The court has felt during this trial that there has been a lot of pressure on counsel.” Lodge said that every morning there were new filings on his desk, as if the two sides were working all night. “The court wants both sides to take stock of what has happened here and make doubly sure that this does not happen the rest of the trial.”

  And with that, they broke for the Memorial Day weekend. But neither side got any rest. The prosecution had to try to resuscitate its case. And among other things, the defense had to resolve the Sara question.

  TWENTY

  WELL, HOW DO I look?”

  She looked beautiful, of course, an olive green dress cinched in the back, her long black hair pulled up, except for two ringlets that were spun with baby’s breath and hung down either side of her face. She looked like Vicki. Julie and Keith Brown felt a tug as if this were their own daughter getting ready for the junior prom.

  Sara Weaver was going to the prom. Julie still couldn’t believe it. That was how far these girls had come, how hard they’d worked to adjust. The difference had struck Julie earlier that day, as she watched her niece at the florist, looking for a boutonniere to pin on her date. Suddenly, she spotted him across the flower shop, looking at corsages, and she ducked, laughing and hiding in the greenhouse until he was gone.

  Now, thirty minutes before he came to pick her up, Sara was still fidgety in that charming, teenage way. She preened in the mirror until her girlfriend showed up and decided Sara’s dress was all wrong, raced home, and came back with another one—short, black, and sheer. Sara fired back up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom, changed, and came back into the living room. “Well?”

  Julie and Keith sat back on the couch with the thoughts of any anxious parents before a date (Will she have fun? Is she ready? Is he nice?). Yeah, that dress looked even better. A few minutes later, her date showed up, and Sara Weaver left for the prom.

  It hadn’t always gone so well. Sara and Rachel arrived in Iowa angry and bitter. For the first month, they lived in Fort Dodge, on the farm with Grandpa David and Grandma Jeane. But the Jordison house was so small, and the girls needed so much attention, it just didn’t work out. Randy’s family helped out, but Sara and Rachel were miserable in the flat heartland, restless so far from their father. Sara stayed up late most nights, talking to supporters on the telephone and wishing she could do something, anything to help her father. R
achel looked for mountains to hike and trout streams to fish, but her first trip to the Des Moines River only produced a sucker, an unclean and unholy animal if ever there was one. In October, Sara dragged her younger sisters to Colorado to live near the mountains with Randy’s nephew. All through their tough transition, Julie and Keith watched the girls from a distance and knew they belonged in Des Moines, with them. But Sara, especially, was so full of anger, they weren’t going to force the issue. Even Randy wanted the girls to live with Keith and Julie. But Sara and Rachel knew what awaited them at the Browns’ house in Des Moines. School.

  They weren’t in Colorado a week before Sara called Keith, who was at the recording studio he managed. They were uncomfortable with Randy’s nephew and his wife, and they wanted to come home, Sara confided. “Can you come get us?”

  The girls were quiet on the way back to Iowa, and Keith told them it was time to decide where they were going to live.

  Rachel, who had just turned eleven, looked up at her uncle. “I kind of want to live with you and Aunt Julie.”

  “Well, if you live with us, you have to go to school,” Keith said.

  Rachel’s eyes flared. “But if you go to school, you’ll get AIDS.”

  This is not going to be easy, Keith thought.

  At the Browns’ house, set back from a suburban street just outside Des Moines, Julie hugged the girls and said they could stay, but they had to follow a strict routine.

  “That’s what I want,” Sara said.

  Julie and Keith talked about it privately and wondered if it would be fair on their own two girls—Emily, who was fourteen, and Kelsey, who was four. Keith was hesitant at first and pointed out there was a chance Randy would spend the rest of his life in prison and they would have the girls forever.

  Almost immediately, the girls convinced him it was the right thing. Perhaps he expected angry, raving Aryan children. Instead, they were just girls, looking for someplace to belong. Keith could see how hard the girls were working to adjust to Iowa and how little their upbringing had prepared them for civilization.