Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family
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He said that dropping the case would bring “long-awaited closure.” And then he revoked the titles of the special prosecutors.
Yagman and Clark were stunned. This had become more than just a case about whether Lon Horiuchi acted recklessly. This was about whether federal agents could act with impunity, whether they were above the law. And now, after three years of appeals and narrow decisions, when they were that close to getting such an important case into a courtroom or perhaps to the Supreme Court, how could the new prosecutor just drop it?
But there were signs that it wasn’t over yet. Benson was under investigation by the Idaho State Attorney General’s Office over unrelated allegations that he falsified documents. There was no statute of limitations on homicide in Idaho, and with the Ninth Circuit Court’s latest ruling, it was conceivable that a new prosecutor in Boundary County could reinstate the charges, or file even more serious charges.
It had been nine years since federal agents first ventured into Boundary County—and still they weren’t out of the woods.
Throughout the 1990s, the spark ignited at Ruby Ridge burned across America, from Waco to Oklahoma City to Washington, D.C.—changing the landscape and the law. By the summer of 2001, the standoff at Ruby Ridge had come to mean far more than those eleven days in August.
EPILOGUE
TIMOTHY MCVEIGH SPENT his last hours in a nine-by-fourteen-foot jail cell in Terre Haute, Indiana, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream and writing letters to friends.
For six years his story had remained coldly consistent: on April 19, 1995, he had parked a truck loaded with a fertilizer bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, hiked a couple of blocks, and waited for it to blow up. To the end, he said that he killed 168 people to get back at the government for Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Like The Order in the 1980s, McVeigh also was inspired—at least in part—by The Turner Diaries, the racist novel in which a white revolution is sparked by the truck bombing of a federal building. But if McVeigh hoped for a war, he was his own worst enemy. His crude act of terrorism effectively ended the subtle inroads that patriot groups had made into the mainstream, and left the radical right where it had been ten years earlier,—isolated from the rest of America by its own hatred, ignorance, and paranoia.
The more McVeigh explained what he’d done—calling the nineteen children he killed “collateral damage”—the less sympathy people had for his cause. “What the U.S. government did at Waco and at Ruby Ridge was dirty,” McVeigh said. “And I gave dirty back to them at Oklahoma City.”
But Americans didn’t want dirty back. Demanding that the government obey the law was far different from declaring war on it. Throughout the country, the anger fueled by Waco and Ruby Ridge was doused by the horror of Oklahoma City. In 1996, the Southern Poverty Law Center counted 856 patriot groups in the United States. Four years later, as McVeigh waited on death row, there were fewer than 200.
On June 10, 2001, Timothy McVeigh was strapped to a gurney, a gray sheet pulled tight around his chest. A mixture of chemicals was pumped into his body, sedating him, collapsing his lungs, and, finally, stopping his heart. He offered no apology, no last words.
History rarely pauses long enough to provide a clean ending, and yet, in the late spring of 2001, Timothy McVeigh’s execution seemed to mark the final chapter in a dark American tale. But it wasn’t a story of revolution, as McVeigh and others had hoped. It was the story of a gradual shift in American culture and politics whose beginning could be traced to Ruby Ridge.
It was the story of more accountability for agencies steeped in cold war secrecy and institutional arrogance.
In May 2001, Louis Freeh announced he was stepping down as director of the FBI, leaving behind an agency whose power had been clipped, an agency mired in a nine-year losing streak of bumbling and corruption, beginning with Ruby Ridge and ending with the eleventh-hour revelation that more than 4,000 pages of documents had been withheld during McVeigh’s trial. The new director would inherit an agency that congressional critics were vowing to overhaul.
And even though the manslaughter charge against Lon Horiuchi had been dropped, the Ninth Circuit Court ruling stood as a potential landmark; no longer was a federal agent automatically free from state prosecution just because he was doing his job.
The spring of 2001 was also a story about lessons learned from Ruby Ridge.
At the end of May, sheriff’s deputies near Sagle, Idaho—just twenty-five miles from the Weaver’s old cabin—-found themselves in a familiar position.
They’d arrested a woman named JoAnn McGuckin and charged her with endangering her six children, but when they approached her rundown house to talk to the children—aged eight to sixteen—the kids let loose two dozen dogs and refused to come out. Almost reflexively, the impasse brought out the same old media spouting the same old clichés about Idaho (a house with no running water called a compound). And it brought out the aging and increasingly irrelevant leaders of the patriot movement as well, spouting their own clichés about government tyranny.
But the deputies would have none of it. They sat patiently and informally outside the house, promising to avoid “another Ruby Ridge.” Even JoAnn McGuckin wanted no part of the old-style standoff.
“You are welcome to make your political ideas known, of course,” she wrote to protesters, but “not in my name. I cannot honor your cause.” After five days, her kids came out peacefully and the protesters drifted away.
And finally, in the spring of 2001, there was an ending to the story.
As McVeigh waited to die and deputies waited for the McGuckin children to give up, in Hayden Lake, Idaho, a wrecking crew punched a hole in the swastika painted atop the Aryan Nations compound.
In 1998, Aryan Nations security guards had chased a woman and her son, forced them off the road, and put guns to their heads. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Butler and the Aryan Nations on behalf of the woman and her son, and in the fall of 2000, an Idaho jury awarded them $6.2 million.
In poor health and down to his last dozen followers, Butler declared bankruptcy and was turned out of his Aryan Nations compound, which was then sold for $250,000 to a human-rights group from Massachusetts. As the compound was razed, lawyers and federal agents—some of whom had battled Butler’s group for the better part of two decades—toured the grounds, poking their heads into vacant buildings and watchtowers and looking at the swastikas carved into trees.
As they watched, construction crews did what two decades of federal investigations, informants, and wiretaps couldn’t do. One by one the buildings from Richard Butler’s compound were destroyed, along with the group that had sparked so many hateful criminals and so much fear and had set about an improbable chain of events that eventually led to the tragedy on Ruby Ridge.
Seventy miles to the north, on that rocky knob where right and wrong had been so bent and distorted, all was quiet. The cabin had come down in 1997, collapsed beneath a load of heavy spring snow. It had taken fourteen years, but the harsh realities of North Idaho had finally gotten the best of Randy and Vicki Weaver’s dream.
Vicki Jordison, about age twelve, with her younger sister, Julie, and her brother, Lanny. Vicki was very capable and mature for her age.
Vicki Jordison on the night of her senior prom. She had rarely dated in high school.
Randy “Pete” Weaver and Vicki Jordison’s wedding photo. They were married in November 1971 at the First Congregationalist Church in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Vicki wanted to be a housewife. Randy wanted to be an FBI agent.
Sisters Julie Brown (LEFT) and Vicki Weaver (RIGHT) watch Sara and Samuel teeter-totter in Fort Dodge, Iowa, about 1981. Brown and the rest of her family tried to talk the Weavers out of running away to Idaho.
(LEFT TO RIGHT) Samuel, Sara, and Rachel Weaver in 1982, a year before the family left for the mountains. This was one of the last photos Randy and Vicki allowed before they began believing that photography was agains
t God’s wishes.
David Jordison with his grandchildren (LEFT TO RIGHT) Sara, Rachel, and Sammy. Each summer, Vicki’s parents visited Ruby Ridge, bringing supplies and helping set up the cabin.
The Weaver cabin in the mountains of North Idaho in the summer of 1984, when it was completed. The cabin was built by Vicki and Randy with two-by-fours, plywood, and scraps from a nearby sawmill.
Vicki Weaver sweeps the rock steps just off the porch of the cabin while her daughter Rachel watches, photographed in the mid-1980s.
The Weaver family in May 1989. Later that year, federal agents taped Randy selling a sawed-off shotgun to a federal informant. The lettering on Randy’s shirt reads: “Just say ‘NO’ to ZOG”—the Zionist Occupied Government.
Sara, Samuel, and Rachel photographed in May 1989, outside the house their family rented. Friends and relatives thought the family’s fear and distrust of the government lessened when they lived at the bottom of the mountain.
Booking photo of Randy Weaver from initial gun charges, January 17, 1991. After his release, he returned to the cabin and refused to show up for trial, waiting for the government to come for him.
The remote cabin atop Ruby Ridge, a forested knob in North Idaho, near the Canadian border. Photo taken in March 1992, six months before the standoff began. Spokesman-Review/Shawn Jacobson
The Weaver cabin and compound, March 1992. Spokesman-Review/Shawn Jacobson
U.S. Marshals Service surveillance photo on August 21, 1992, the day of the initial shoot-out, shows Samuel Weaver (LEFT) pointing a gun in the air, Kevin Harris (CENTER) with the dog Striker at his feet, and Sara Weaver (RIGHT). COURT FILE, u.s. v. WEAVER
Kevin Harris on the morning of the shooting, with Striker. COURT FILE, U.S. v. WEAVER
Vicki Weaver paces in the yard while waiting her turn in the outhouse at the Weavers’ cabin, August 21, 1992, about an hour before the shoot-out. COURT FILE, U.S. v. WEAVER
After the shoot-out began, as many as 300 state and federal agents quickly moved into a meadow about a mile from the Weavers’ cabin, where they set up a command post and tent city nicknamed “Federal Way.” Spokesman-Review/Colin Mulvany
William Degan, one of the most highly decorated members of the U.S. Marshals Service, flew to Idaho in August 1992 as part of a team that was supposed to eventually apprehend Randy Weaver. WBZ-TV, BOSTON
FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Gene Glenn (LEFT) and U.S. Marshal for Idaho Mike Johnson meet with reporters early in the siege. Later, Glenn complained that he had been made the fall guy for federal mistakes at Ruby Ridge. His letter to the U.S. Justice Department sparked a new probe into allegations of a cover-up that reached the number-two official in the FBI. Spokesman-Review/Jesse Tinsley
Protesters yell “Baby killer!” at federal agents who drive past the roadblock up toward the Weaver cabin. By the end of the week, as many as one hundred people—neighbors, skinheads, angry constitutionalists, and neo-Nazis had gathered at the bridge over Ruby Creek. Spokesman-Review/Jesse Tinsley
Five neo-Nazi skinheads are arrested August 25, 1992, the fifth day of the standoff, in a Jeep filled with guns on a back road near the Weaver cabin. Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms received a tip that the men were going to help Weaver. The charges against them were eventually dropped. Spokesman-Review/Colin Mulvany
Bill Grider, a onetime friend of the Weavers, restrains his wife on the sixth day of the siege as the couple yells at neighbors who have cooperated with federal authorities. Spokesman-Review/Jesse Tinsley
Idaho state police and federal agents stand at the roadblock at the bridge over Ruby Creek and videotape protesters. Spokesman-Review/Colin Mulvany
Third-party presidential candidate and retired Green Beret Lt. Col. James “Bo” Gritz talks to a gathering of reporters and protesters about the negotiations in the cabin. Gritz and retired Phoenix police officer Jack McLamb negotiated a peaceful settlement to the standoff after eleven days. Spokesman-Review/Anne
The inside of the cabin, following the standoff and investigation by federal agents. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
Some of the guns taken out of the Weaver cabin by federal agents. Later, six rifles, two shotguns, six pistols, and thousands of rounds of ammunition were admitted into evidence in the trial of Weaver and Kevin Harris. JESS WALTER
Randy Weaver’s defense attorneys, Gerry Spence, Kent Spence, and Chuck Peterson, answer questions about the case outside the federal building in Boise. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
Kevin Harris’s defense attorneys, David Nevin and Ellison Matthews, enter court during the trial, which began in April 1993. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
ABOVE: Randy Weaver’s attorney, Gerry Spence, questions deputy U.S. Marshal Dave Hunt, while Judge Edward Lodge looks on. Hunt spent almost eighteen months trying to get Weaver down from his cabin and was on the team that got into a gun battle with Weaver and his family. ZELLA STRICKLAND
RIGHT: Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper. Behind him is the door to the Weavers’ cabin. ZELLA STRICKLAND
Ken Fadeley, the ATF informant. ZELLA STRICKLAND
Sara and Rachel Weaver leave the courthouse with Vicki Weaver’s brother-in-law, Keith Brown, and sister, Julie Brown, on June 15, 1993. The defense rested its case without calling Sara Weaver or any other witnesses. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
Kevin Harris talks to reporters after being set free by the jury that found him not guilty of murder after a nineteen-day deliberation, the longest in Idaho history. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
The day after the standoff ended, sniper Lon Horiuchi sketched on a hotel notepad what he saw just before he fired at Kevin Harris and killed Vicki Weaver. It clearly shows two heads in the window, even though he claimed that he couldn’t see through the window. The judge fined the FBI for not turning this over to the defense until late in the trial. COURT FILE, U.S. v. WEAVER
The sign at the base of the Weavers’ property. The words are taken from the King James Version of the Old Testament, the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 45, verse 23: “I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” The Weavers believed Jesus should be called by his Hebrew name, Yashua, and God by his, Yahweh. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
Gerry Spence autographs a book while his son, Kent, looks on, the day Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris are acquitted of murder and conspiracy. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
On December 17, 1993, Randy Weaver was released from jail after serving sixteen months for failing to appear in court. He moved back to Iowa with his three daughters. Spokesman-Review/Blair Kooistra
INDEX
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Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau (ATF), 71–90, 100–113, 115, 297–301, 308, 325
congressional investigation of, 384–85
entrapment by, 72–73, 80, 256, 288,
300–301, 317, 357, 365–66
FBI vs., 71–72, 308, 309
Randy Weaver arrested by, 123–27, 128, 147,
153
Randy Weaver under surveillance by,
120–21, 136–37, 140
at Ruby Ridge standoff, 9, 221–22
Anderson, Barbara, 123, 124–25, 303
Anderton, Gerry, 357, 358
Andrus, Cecil, 235
Armageddon, 28, 33, 52, 91, 93
Aryan Nations, 4, 110–15
ATF investigation of, 101–2, 111–13, 299,
308
FBI investigation of, 66–72, 113–15
prosecution of, 72–74, 79, 113–15, 276, 278
Randy Weaver’s association with, 2, 65, 70,
74–75, 80, 95–96, 97, 98–100, 105, 115,
118, 125, 127, 139, 141, 182, 228, 246–47,
248, 250, 256, 279, 287,
298, 312
violent activities of, 67–74, 84, 85, 400
world congresses of, 65, 68, 74–75, 76, 77,
97, 98, 99–100, 110, 111, 114, 298
Ayers, Stephen, 125–26, 303
Baker, Katy, 110–11, 113–14, 136, 139
Baker, Proctor James, 110–15, 141, 276
Bangerter, Johnny, 222, 255–56
Barry, Dave, 359
Beam, Louis, 257
“Beast, The,” 40, 43, 96, 121, 144, 153, 224, 229
Benson, Brad, 396–97
Berg, Alan, 67
Bible, 16, 34–35, 46–47, 61, 70, 98–99, 132–33, 140
apocrypha of, 58–59
images forbidden by, 38–39, 260
New Testament of, 16, 29, 37–38, 39, 54–55,
Old Testament of, 5, 28–29, 36, 37, 39, 46,
52, 58, 59, 111, 128, 131, 141, 151
prophecies based on, 28–29, 35, 43, 51,
54–55, 87, 128, 151, 304
Bontadelli, Jeanne, 273, 280
Boundary County Human Rights Task Force, 95–96, 97
Branch Davidian sect, 2, 299, 325, 334, 374, 390
Brasher, Shannon, 35–36, 44, 45–46, 313–14
Brewer, Anita, 361, 362, 363, 366
Briggs, Arthur, 52, 54, 110
Brown, Jackie, 136, 139, 188, 220, 239, 240–42, 243, 254, 255, 373
Brown, Julie Jordison, 25–26, 27, 254–55, 259–62, 321–26, 349, 376, 377, 382–83