by Jess Walter
Amazingly, they found almost forty pieces of evidence, many of which two crack teams of FBI agents had somehow missed when they searched the hillside in 1992 and again in 1993. Among the items that Sprungl noted were bullets and shell casings, which he packed up and sent to Luke Haag, the Phoenix forensic and ballistics expert who had testified for the government during the Weaver-Harris trial.
In October 1996, the former head of the FBI’s violent crime unit, E. Michael Kahoe, pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice for shredding the FBI’s internal postconfrontation critique. He was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison and fined $4,000. But even as Kahoe went to prison, the furor over federal agents’ handling of Ruby Ridge and Waco was beginning to fade.
And so there was little fanfare in August 1997 when the Justice Department announced that no more criminal charges would be filed against federal agents for their role in the Ruby Ridge tragedy. Kahoe would remain the only agent charged. After five years and tens of millions of dollars, the federal investigation was over.
But it was far from over in Boundary County. On August 21, 1997, a week after the Justice Department announced it was finished with the case, five years to the day after the initial shoot-out, Boundary County Prosecutor Denise Woodbury filed state charges.
The first charge—involuntary manslaughter against Lon Horiuchi—wasn’t a big surprise. Throughout Idaho, people had called for charges against the FBI sniper. But the second charge—first-degree murder against Kevin Harris—was a shock.
Sheriff Sprungl, for one, had come to doubt Harris’s version of events, saying it didn’t fit his reading of the evidence. At the least, he said, some attempt needed to be made to finally sort through the stories about what happened at the Y and how William Degan was killed.
When Harris turned himself in to the sheriff in Republic, Washington, a crowd of one hundred supporters gathered to protest the new charges against him. They said Harris had become an upstanding member of their community—a well-liked welder who worked hard and took good care of his family.
Harris was released on $5,000 bond and showed up in Bonners Ferry for his first hearing. Among the twenty supporters who came to court was Randy Weaver, upset that his friend had been charged again and angry that Horiuchi was charged only with involuntary manslaughter.
At Harris’s hearing, David Nevin seemed amazed to be still arguing his client’s innocence. He said this was a clear case of double jeopardy. A Boise jury had already heard the evidence in Harris’s federal trial and decided that he’d acted in self-defense. A 133-year-old Idaho law barred the state from trying anyone who’d already been convicted or acquitted in “another state, territory or country.”
“We’ve been through this trial by fire already,” Nevin said.
Woodbury argued that the old law was meant to prevent prosecutions that had already taken place in other countries, not the United States.
But the magistrate in the case sided with Nevin and said it made no sense for the court to value the prosecutions of other countries more than its own. In October, charges against Kevin Harris were dropped.
For Greg Sprungl, the decision was a disappointment. He’d looked forward to getting both sides back in a courtroom and trying to untangle, once and for all, what happened that day in the woods between the Weavers and the marshals.
But if the question of who shot first would remain clouded, the hard work two years earlier by Sprungl and his team of volunteers did clear up one question that had been hanging in the air since the Senate subcommittee hearings.
Among the bullets and casings found by Sprungl’s volunteers were four of the five slugs—one had been found earlier by the FBI—fired from Deputy Marshal Larry Cooper’s rifle during the shoot-out. According to the ballistics expert, Luke Haag, one of Cooper’s slugs still contained trace material from Samuel Weaver’s clothing.
“We found the bullet that killed Sammy Weaver in the general area where deputy Cooper said he had fired,” Sprungl said in October 1997, two years after Cooper had suggested that Weaver shot his own son in the back.
“It’s a bullet from Cooper’s gun,” Sprungl said, “and it’s conclusive.”
THAT LEFT LON HORIUCHI. Five years after the standoff, the only FBI agent to fire his weapon at Ruby Ridge was now the lightning rod for all that had gone wrong in the case and a poster boy for the widespread contention that federal law enforcement was out of control.
Horiuchi had also been at Waco with the Hostage Rescue Team, stationed in a bunker a hundred yards from the Branch Davidian compound. By the late 1990s he was at the center of that controversy, too, when critics alleged that Horiuchi and other snipers had fired at the Davidians. The FBI strongly denied the allegation. Meanwhile, death threats were being made against Horiuchi and wanted posters featuring his courtroom illustration or a silhouette of a federal agent were circulated in the radical right underground. Before he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh said that he considered assassinating two people: U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and Lon Horiuchi.
A former soldier, a father of six, and a conservative Catholic, Horiuchi was deeply affected by the death of Vicki Weaver and received counseling from an FBI psychologist, according to law enforcement sources. While Horiuchi remained on the Hostage Rescue Team, one of his colleagues noted that he spent much of his time preparing for court with a team of Justice Department lawyers.
In Bonners Ferry, there were only four lawyers listed in the Yellow Pages. The entire 1998 county budget was $8.6 million. Denise Woodbury could see she was in danger of being seriously outgunned, so she allowed the case to be funded by outside donations and appointed special prosecutors—a Los Angeles civil-rights lawyer and expert in police brutality cases named Stephen Yagman and former U.S. Attorney Ramsay Clark.
On December 16, 1997, pressed between two burly federal agents, Lon Horiuchi returned to North Idaho for a hearing to determine whether there was enough evidence to warrant the involuntary manslaughter charge. The FBI sniper was hustled into the Boundary County courthouse before it opened and taken out with a coat over his head so photographers wouldn’t be able to get his picture.
During the hearing, he sat impassively as first Randy and then Sara Weaver testified that Vicki had come outside just before the shooting and that it would have been easy for the sniper to see as she stood in the doorway that she was holding the baby. Randy described taking the baby away from his dead wife’s arms.
“I pulled her out and she had blood and jaw bone in her hair,” he said. He was positive that the sniper—who had once testified that he could hit a quarter from two hundred yards away—”had orders to take Vicki out.”
Horiuchi’s lawyer, Adam Hoffinger, argued that a curtain covered the window to the cabin door that day and that Vicki’s shooting was a simple, but tragic, mistake. “There hasn’t been any proof in any way that he was reckless,” he said.
However, on January 6, 1998, Magistrate Quentin Harden said that Horiuchi unlawfully killed Vicki Weaver without malice and ruled there was enough evidence to bind him over for trial. Woodbury, Yagman, and Clark had won the first round.
Horiuchi’s lawyers quickly requested that the case be moved to federal court, since he was acting as a federal agent at the time of the standoff. The case was moved to federal court in Boise, where Horiuchi’s lawyers immediately requested that the charges be dropped.
On May 14, 1998, Edward Lodge, the same judge who had presided over the Weaver case five years earlier, dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charges against the sniper, agreeing that since Horiuchi was acting within the scope of his job as an FBI agent, he was protected from state prosecution by what was called the “supremacy clause” of the U.S. Constitution.
IN AUGUST 1995, the government settled the civil lawsuit filed by the Weaver family, paying them $3.1 million to compensate for the loss of Vicki and Sam Weaver. Each of the Weaver daughters was paid $1 million and Randy received $
100,000. As part of the settlement, the Weavers dropped their claim and the government refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
In Iowa, Randy invested part of his $100,000 in a used-car lot that quickly went under. (“I’m not a businessman,” he confided to a reporter.) After two years in Iowa, Sara found herself longing for the mountains again, so she and David began searching the Pacific Northwest, looking for a cabin where they could live.
They bought a picturesque horse ranch near a small town in northwestern Montana. Sara and David were married, and eventually the rest of the family—Randy, Rachel, and Elisheba—joined them. They settled in quietly and stayed out of the news. Randy boarded horses and sold telephone subscriptions.
In 1998, Randy and Sara wrote and self-published a slender book of 170 pages, The Federal Siege at Ruby Ridge: In Our Own Words, almost half of which was the reprinted Senate subcommittee report. On the book’s cover was a silhouetted woman holding a child, red crosshairs on her head. “We didn’t hate anyone,” Randy wrote in the book. “We wanted to be left alone.”
At gun shows and at Y2K preparedness conventions, Randy set up a booth among the gun dealers and dried-food vendors and signed copies for people who paid $20 for the book. “Keep your powder dry—Randy Weaver,” he often wrote in the books.
He was friendly and open about what he’d gone through and was a popular attraction at gun shows, although he continued to distance himself from the more radical groups that held him up as a hero. He called the Aryan Nations “punks.”
David got a job as a deputy sheriff and he and Sara had a baby boy. They blended in with the friendly, independent people who lived in the mountains of Montana.
But while Sara worked hard to regain her privacy, Randy became more vocal. He offered to mediate the Freemen standoff in Montana and told a Washington Post reporter that he sympathized with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. “He was a soldier’s soldier.” Still, Weaver said that if McVeigh had come to him with his plans for Oklahoma City, “I would have told him to forget it.”
In 1999, Randy left his girls in Montana and moved back to Jefferson, Iowa. He bought a Harley-Davidson; married his girlfriend, a legal secretary with two kids; and set to work on another book, which he said would be titled “The Rise and Fall of the USSA.”
Back in the Northwest, Kevin Harris—still bothered by pain in the arm where he’d been shot—became a partner in a small metal manufacturing plant in the town of Republic, Washington. In March 2000, he moved his wife and two kids to a larger town, Moses Lake, where he worked as a plant technician for a company that supplied industrial gases to manufacturing plants.
Much to the chagrin of his attorneys, Harris had been left out of the federal settlement. Some officials suggested they’d never hand over money to someone who shot and killed a deputy U.S. marshal.
But Nevin kept pressing Harris’s $10 million civil suit, and in September 1997, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that Harris’s claim had merit. The court wrote that the modified rules of engagement were “a gross deviation from constitutional principles and a wholly unwarranted return to a lawless and arbitrary wild-West school of law enforcement.”
The case was appealed through various courts until finally, in June 2000, Harris’s right to sue was upheld for the last time. Three months later, in September 2000, Harris accepted a $380,000 settlement from the government.
An assistant attorney general said, “This settlement resolves this long-pending case in a way that is fair to the United States and all involved.”
AT FBI HEADQUARTERS, the case was anything but resolved.
Gene Glenn’s contention that he’d been made a scapegoat had opened a whole new vein of scandal that would eventually run to the top levels of the bureau.
Three agents from the Office of Professional Management were assigned to investigate Glenn’s complaint. They determined that indeed Glenn and others had been unfairly singled out for punishment, and that early FBI reviews of Ruby Ridge were designed to protect top officials.
After the OPR agents presented their findings, the Justice Department recommended further punishment for four high-level agents, including a letter of censure for FBI Director Louis Freeh for his support of the investigations that cleared his friend Larry Potts.
But in the last days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the recommendation was quietly dropped.
The three agents who had done the latest investigation told the Washington Post they were “outraged” that Freeh would remain unpunished. They complained that the FBI had long protected top officials at the expense of field agents.
In fact, the three OPR agents said they were retaliated against because of their investigation of Freeh and the others. One claimed that he and his wife were threatened. Another said his career stalled after he was assigned to the investigation.
Even as Louis Freeh prepared to leave office in the summer of 2001, the long shadow of Ruby Ridge followed him. The Justice Department’s inspector general announced that it would interview Freeh as part of an investigation into the allegations of retaliation and protection of top FBI officials.
Nine years after the last shot was fired, Ruby Ridge was still causing problems for every agent who came in contact with it. Agents talked about the case as if it were a hot virus. And it wasn’t just contained to Washington, D.C.
In Boundary County, the case of State of Idaho v. Lon Horiuchi was raising a profound legal question as it bounced from court to court.
The “supremacy clause” kept states from interfering with federal agents whose assignments might differ from that state’s interests. For instance, it prohibited vindictive county sheriffs from harassing federal agents during the civil-rights cases in the South in the 1960s. But the clause had never been tested like this.
As the 1990s came to an end, a key question still hung in the air: was Lon Horiuchi immune from all state prosecution simply because he was working for the federal government?
The decision to dismiss the charges against Horiuchi was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco, and on June 14, 2000, in a 2–1 vote, the court upheld the ruling, saying that a state couldn’t prosecute an agent who acted “honestly and reasonably” as the sniper had done.
“Horiuchi does not have to show that his action was in fact necessary or in retrospect justifiable,” Judge William Shubb wrote for the majority, “only that he reasonably thought it to be.”
But Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote a stinging dissent. “The opinion waters down the constitutional standard for the use of deadly force by giving officers a license to kill even when there is no immediate threat to human life,” he wrote. “This has never been the law in this circuit, or anywhere else that I’m aware of, except in James Bond movies.”
Drawing encouragement from Kozinski’s dissent, the Boundary County special prosecutors, Yagman and Clark, petitioned the Ninth Circuit Court for another hearing with a full contingent of judges.
Government lawyers said prosecuting Horiuchi would send a chill throughout the federal government, and make it impossible for agents to do their jobs. “These federal law-enforcement officials are privileged to do what would otherwise be unlawful if done by a private citizen,” argued Solicitor General Seth Waxman. “It’s a fundamental function of our government.”
To some, the argument that Horiuchi was just doing his job echoed the defense of Nazis during the Nuremberg trials—that they were just soldiers “following orders.”
To others, the government’s eight-year line of reasoning sounded like something out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: Horiuchi’s orders were illegal, but the agents who drafted the orders shouldn’t be prosecuted because Horiuchi wasn’t actually following those orders when he shot Vicki Weaver, and Horiuchi shouldn’t be prosecuted because he was just following orders.
In October 2000, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case again, this time in front of eleven judges. On June 5, 2001, by a razor-thin 6–5 margin, t
he court ruled that Lon Horiuchi could indeed be prosecuted by the state of Idaho for his actions at Ruby Ridge.
Rarely had the Ninth Circuit Court been so divided. The dissenting judges called the decision a “grave disservice,” and said the court had no business “dissecting the mistakes” of Horiuchi.
But this time Judge Kozinski spoke for the majority. “When federal officers violate the Constitution, either through malice or excessive zeal, they can be held accountable for violating the state’s criminal laws.”
Tiny Boundary County had won. Almost nine years after Vicki Weaver was killed, the state of Idaho was free to prosecute the FBI agent who shot her. But then, a week after the Ninth Circuit Court decision, new Boundary County Prosecutor Brad Benson made a stunning announcement. He was dismissing the involuntary manslaughter charge against Lon Horiuchi.
In Boundary County, folks had grown tired of being known as the place where Randy Weaver had once lived. The county had grown by about 1,500 people, to almost 10,000. Bonners Ferry was turning into a quaint tourist town, busy with traffic from people driving down from Canada or coming to the new Indian casino.
Every time there was a new development in the case, reporters showed up to ask locals how they felt. More often than not, they heard that people in Boundary County were tired of the case and tired of their state being associated with the antigovernment movement.
In the 2000 general election, Sheriff Greg Sprungl lost his bid for reelection to one of his sergeants. Denise Woodbury didn’t even make it that far, losing in the Republican primary to local attorney Brett Benson, 841 votes to 710. One of the issues in the election was the continued prosecution of Lon Horiuchi, and while Woodbury insisted that no county money was being spent, there were more than enough voters who just wanted Ruby Ridge to go away.
Benson wasted no time dismissing the charges. In a news release, he said the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision was victory enough. Too much time had passed, Benson said, and they weren’t likely to get a conviction. Anyway, he said, the case had already been settled civilly.