Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family by Jess Walter
Alarmed by Evans’s constant concern about the Weaver case, Hunt kept detailed notes, and after his first trip to northern Idaho a portrait of Randy Weaver emerged:
He was paranoid, maybe not clinically, but in practice. Friends said he saw deputy marshals behind every tree and connected unrelated incidents as part of an ongoing plot to defame and maybe even kill him. Whenever Randy did settle down, his wife seemed eager to stir him up into his irrational fears again.
He was not in control. Vicki was. Randy wasn’t even clear on the doctrine he followed, according to Hunt’s interviews. During Bible study sessions, Randy would get so worked up, he’d lose his place and have to catch Vicki’s eye. “Where do we believe on that now?” She’d set him straight, and he’d go off again. From the beginning, Hunt figured that if he could get to Randy when Vicki wasn’t around, he could begin real negotiations. Without his wife, Randy would fold like an empty shirt.
He was very sociable. He seemed like the kind of guy who only wanted to hop in his pickup truck, drive to a buddy’s house, sit on his porch, and bitch about the government. More than anything, Randy seemed to want to be a preacher, to have a following of people who agreed with his views. After all, this was a guy who—just a couple of years earlier—had run for public office. He didn’t seem suited to isolation.
They were overestimating his military training and the danger that might pose. Randy had never been in Vietnam, although he didn’t seem to mind people thinking he had been. And he was no explosives expert, just an army grunt with some Special Forces training, which—despite the wild rumors—didn’t teach you to make bombs out of household items like soap and matches. Hunt completely discounted the theory that Randy booby-trapped his mountain.
He was lazy and quite possibly a coward. He hadn’t held a job for a long time, and even some of Randy’s relatives said he was “as lazy as they come.” Vicki, who had grown up on a farm, seemed better equipped for the privation and solitude of Ruby Ridge. But one thing about Randy bothered Hunt more than anything else: his cowardice, the fact that he didn’t hesitate to place his children right in the middle of this danger.
Something else struck Hunt about the Weavers. He’d done a little work on The Order and Order II cases, and he recognized three elements to this kind of people: racial, antigovernment, and religious beliefs. Randy and Vicki Weaver were especially dangerous, because to them, it was almost all about religion. And Hunt knew that when someone thinks they’ve been ordered by God to do something, they’re going to do it.
“Let’s go work some other cases,” Hunt told his boss, Ron Evans, after a couple of months with the Weaver case. There was no hope for negotiations right now. Randy was so paranoid and his wife so controlling, he wasn’t going anywhere. He was parked on that mountain, daring the government to make a move. “Then fine,” Hunt said. “Let him sit up there. I don’t care.” Maybe if they gave it some time, the Weavers would calm down, and they could figure out a way to start negotiations without the kids right in the middle. Hunt had his own kids. He thought of the family on that craggy point, with no running water—too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter—no company, all jammed into a plywood cabin. He wanted to pound a sign into the base of Ruby Ridge: “U.S. Penitentiary, North Idaho.”
VICKI WAS PREGNANT. In Iowa, her family couldn’t believe it. Randy gets in trouble with the law, and Vicki gets pregnant? It made no sense. It was insane. The first part of the pregnancy was awful. Vicki was anemic and so nauseous in the morning, Sara and Rachel had to climb the narrow stairs to the sleeping loft and serve her meals in bed. But Vicki couldn’t stay down and even when she was sick she worked, starting an inventory of her maternity clothes. She’d saved her nursing bras and had three jumpers and plenty of skirts, and she decided to put a panel in another skirt and make a couple of cotton dresses. “Good thing big shirts were popular for a while,” she said.
Her parents sent care packages—a curling iron for Sara, belts for the family, mixed nuts for the kids, and pantyhose for Vicki. She wrote them back a short, nervous letter (“I don’t really want to put anything on paper”) and told them not to bother sending checks, because they couldn’t leave the mountain to cash them.
After such letters and the trouble with the law, Vicki’s parents couldn’t take it anymore. They had heard only Vicki’s side of Randy’s arrest, so they called the sheriff and got the other side. In April—four months before their regular visit—they wrote Vicki that they were coming out immediately to try to talk the family into coming down from the mountain, so that Randy could turn himself in and Vicki could have the baby in a hospital.
Vicki was outraged. Sometimes Bill Grider delivered the mail, and Vicki sent down notes to Judy with him. This one said her parents “had been in contact with [the sheriff] and are on their way out here. They say how nice he is and we can trust him. I’m furious!” Going to court, she said, would be “going to our own hanging.”
“I now have to contend with more unbelief and deception,” Vicki wrote. “Such is my job. I should be glad to be back to work. But I wish the Master would not tarry.”
When David and Jeane Jordison arrived, they were especially worried about Vicki, who had worked herself raw all winter and had been wiped out by the early part of her pregnancy. Her hands were calloused from constantly knitting wool socks and mending other clothes. They worked hard on the cabin that spring, fixing the pump that David had started the summer before. For the first time, the Weavers had running water.
But the Jordisons had no luck reasoning with Randy and Vicki. They were adamant. They were going nowhere. David and Jeane gave up and drove back to Iowa.
While the Jordisons and others urged Randy to give up to protect his family, he said that’s what he was doing. If he surrendered, they would run Vicki and the kids off the land, and they’d be homeless or worse. Vicki was prepared to stay on the mountain forever. Her parents gave her 200 pounds of potatoes, and Vicki had canned gallons and gallons of berries and fruit that year. She had an endless supply of eggs and several chickens to butcher. For years, Vicki had been buying and storing corn, wheat, beans, rice, and everything else for when they were permanently cut off from the world. She still had the dehydrated fruit, peanut powder, milk, yeast, and vegetables that she’d brought from Iowa, and she’d gotten new stuff, so that commercially packed survival foods lined the root cellar and the kitchen. She made every kind of herb tea and had dried and stored a variety of herbs, nettles, and greens. After all that work, she was furious when she heard rumors that she was starving or abusing her children or keeping them from seeking medical attention.
“I have been given the wisdom of also using and collecting wild herbs for medicine,” Vicki wrote her mom, encouraging her to ignore the rumors. “Don’t ever let the feds fool you into thinking they can starve us out.”
More groceries arrived with Vicki’s parents that April, with the Griders and with Kevin Harris, who brought sixty pounds of potatoes, one hundred pounds of flour, three gallons of cooking oil, forty boxes of macaroni and cheese, twenty-five pounds of sugar, four sacks of apples, ten pounds of oatmeal, six dozen eggs, and ten loaves of bread.
When the marshals didn’t come after Randy right away, the family went back to their normal lives, playing board games, target shooting, reading, and working in the gardens. Yahweh was testing them in many ways, though. For the third year in a row, the cabin was swarmed by stink bugs, spiders, and ants. The family smashed them and sprayed them and blocked their holes but still the insects came.
They had plenty of more welcome company that spring: Kevin, the Griders, Vicki’s friends Jackie Brown and Katy Baker, and some other Ruby Ridge neighbors. On April 23, they had a great birthday party for Samuel—his twelfth—with his favorite meal: roasted turkey hot dogs, chocolate cake, potato salad, chips, and dill pickles.
They also got an “intelligence letter” from someone named Simon, who wrote a melodramatic, staccato note filled with intrigue and One Worl
“In the name of Yahweh, I am just beginning to understand your letter of last summer,” the letter began.
Community has become aware of a considerable number of individual and family “plants” in the area, plus a high number of “agents.” … Electronic devices in place under satellite system in the area of border counties. The Federal Emergency Management Act signed by Bush in January. Constitution has been set aside by the stroke of a pen. The people have not been informed. This is High Treason. Much Bloodshed Anticipated….
Such information only made Vicki and Randy more confident that they were doing the right thing. “All is well and no threats,” Vicki wrote to her family. “This situation will be resolved some day. I’m not desperate, but peaceful … [but] I have no way of knowing for sure who is a friend and who is not. We live in a time of great deception.”
RON EVANS WAS RIGHT. After a few weeks, Dave Hunt realized the Randy Weaver case was going to be more difficult than he thought. He figured there were only a few solutions; a direct, tactical attack on the house, possibly with stun guns or rubber bullets; a ruse like the ATF had used; or steady surveillance until Randy separated himself from his family, when marshals could rush in and arrest him alone.
But Hunt didn’t agree with Evans’s other proposition, that they would have to use a tactical solution to get Randy out of the cabin. Hunt thought there was too much potential for injury to marshals and to the Weaver family. And he still held out hope for negotiating a settlement. He’d sent another message through Bill Grider and had gotten his first almost rational response. Randy would come down if the ATF admitted it was wrong and that it had set him up; if the government returned his pistol; and if the sheriff gave him a written apology for telling people that Randy was paranoid. Those conditions were impossible for Hunt to agree to, but at least he had Randy talking. Hunt also asked Grider to try to get the kids to come down, but he didn’t like the answer he got to that proposal.
“If the kids can’t live in peace on the mountain,” Bill said, “they don’t want to live.”
So, with the children still up there, Hunt dismissed the tactical approach. The ruse was a possibility, but Randy wasn’t likely to fall for something like that twice. Surveillance made sense, but—after looking at aerial photographs—Hunt estimated twelve marshals would be needed to watch the cabin from all angles at all hours, and he didn’t have that kind of manpower. They were stuck.
From the beginning, Ron Evans had wanted to bring in SOG, the Special Operations Group, a military-style elite marshals force used for raids and especially tough federal fugitives. The SOG marshals were in the best physical condition and had the best equipment: high-tech optics, surveillance cameras, portable computers, and guns—a dizzying arsenal of state-of-the-art weapons.
But Hunt resisted calling in SOG. He was an enforcement marshal, one of the guys responsible for the day-to-day, often boring, sometimes dangerous work of bringing in most fugitives. Enforcement deputies have always believed they were doing the purest marshal’s work and were mildly dismissive of the hot dogs who spent thousands of dollars to stake out some house and then bust down the door with an army of marshals. It wasn’t that he had any animosity for the intense, cocky SOG marshals—but Hunt wasn’t about to call in the cavalry until he had exhausted every peaceful, commonsense solution. Yet, as the case dragged on, Hunt knew the SOG guys could provide technical assistance on surveillance, and maybe even some fresh troops, so he made a formal request for their help.
Evans flew to Camp Beauregard, Louisiana, and met with the SOG commander, deputy commander, and several team members. They went over aerial photographs, reports on the Weavers’ beliefs, and photos of the family before coming up with a plan. SOG members would fly to northern Idaho and assess the situation. They planned to come around June 20, Vicki Weaver’s birthday, when they hoped Randy would wander far enough from the house for them to separate him from the rest of the family and arrest him. The SOG team handed the case file over to a psychologist, who produced an assessment of Randy and Vicki Weaver from the file. Vicki, the psychologist reported, wanted to keep the family together so much that she might even kill her children. His assessment of Randy concluded:
In my best professional judgement [sic], Mr. Randall [sic] would be an extreme threat to any police officer’s attempt to arrest him. Further, Mr. Randall has indoctrated [sic] his family into a belief system that the end of the world is near and that his family must fight the fences [sic] for evil that want to take over the world. I believe his family may fight to the death. If Mr. Randall is captured by your force, I feel the remaining members of his family will use all force necessary including deadly force to regain Mr. Randall’s freedom.
The first SOG team arrived June 17, and Hunt went up with them to Naples, but they didn’t need his help. They crept around in the woods for a couple of days and then flew back to Louisiana, promising to send Hunt their assessment of what it would take to end the stalemate.
All summer Hunt waited for their report. In the meantime, he worked other cases, took one more trip up to Naples, and sent other marshals up for background work. Hunt thought about posing as a surveyor to arrest Randy but figured he’d wait for the SOG assessment before he did anything. He thought about cutting off the Weavers’ water supply but didn’t want to do anything that could escalate the problem. Maybe, Hunt thought, I ought to just drive right up there and talk to him face-to-face. But he realized he’d avoided violence all those years by gathering as much information as he could before acting, and so Hunt decided to wait on this case until he could do some surveillance.
Finally, the SOG assessment arrived, and Hunt dove into it to find their recommendations on surveilling the cabin. There were none. The recommendation was to try to get Weaver away from the cabin and, when that didn’t work, to use armored vehicles to get him out. But even the SOG commander didn’t seem too thrilled about a tactical solution. He wrote that Weaver was dangerous and maybe suicidal and that there were likely booby traps and bombs set up all over the compound. The Weaver case, the SOG chief said, was the worst fugitive situation he’d seen in twenty-three years as a marshal.
MAY AND JUNE WERE AS PEACEFUL a time as the Weavers had ever spent on Ruby Ridge. In mid-June, while the SOG marshals watched the cabin with binoculars, the Weavers worked in their gardens. Vicki estimated she was about six months pregnant, and since she was past her morning sickness, she began preparing in earnest for the baby, collecting clothes and food. She planned to use cloth diapers, but Yahweh instructed her that she might want some disposable diapers on hand for the winter months, when it was more difficult to wash diapers because most of their water froze.
On June 20, Vicki’s birthday, Sara made her a German chocolate cake but rain clouds moved in and made it too wet to barbecue chicken. The heavy rains had fallen all spring and summer, rotting out half the green beans in Sara Weaver’s favorite garden.
Other friends visited and picked up mail at times, and Vicki wrote that Judy Grider didn’t like these other visitors. Among them was Jackie Brown, an owl-eyed waitress who had become close friends with Vicki and who ran errands for her. Jackie’s husband, Tony, liked Randy and enjoyed debating him—they didn’t agree politically—but he wouldn’t visit the cabin because he didn’t condone Randy’s stand. So Jackie came alone, once a week.
Katy Baker drove up that summer, too—a couple of times with Rodney Willey, the computer technician at Hewlett Packard who had met Randy at one of the Aryan Nations summer conferences. During one visit in June, they arrived in an orange van, loaded with food and some toys and books for the Weaver children. As always, the Weaver kids met the van with their guns and then allowed it to pass. They had a nice visit and chatted about gardening, fishing, and the marshals’ surveillance.
“Planes are flying over all the time,” Randy said during that visit.
Ruth Rau was taking down license plate numbers as they wound up the mountain road, then passing
Butler and Hofmeister gave Willey letters to pass on to Randy, urging him to come down and settle his case in court. Jack Cluff’s message was verbal.
Willey drove up to the cabin that same afternoon. This time, he was by himself. Again, the kids responded with guns and dogs but were happy to see it was Rodney. They showed him the deck the family had recently finished and talked about wood cutting and the weather. Then Rodney told them why he had come. Inside the cabin, he sat in the clean, cozy living room with the family and handed the letters to Randy, who opened them and read them aloud. Rodney passed along Jack Cluff’s message too, that he wanted to end this thing and avoid a confrontation. Cluff said he’d meet Randy anywhere, that he wouldn’t use handcuffs, and that he could probably get the failure-to-appear charge dropped. And Randy had a good chance of beating the gun charge, Cluff said, or at least getting off with only probation.
“But I’ve been set up,” Randy told Willey. “There’s no sense going through all the hassles because I’m innocent anyway.”
The visit turned into a vigil. Rodney sat up all night with the Weavers, from sunset to sunrise, praying and talking and going over everything that had happened to the Weaver family. Randy and Vicki held hands and told how the informant had asked Randy to make him some shotguns; how the ATF agents had approached him and said that if Randy didn’t spy for them, they would get him “one way or another”; how the feds arrested the couple, shoving Vicki down in the snow and searching her even though she’d done nothing; how the judge had said Randy would lose his land if he was convicted of the crime; how they’d sent the wrong court date to mess with his mind.