ON THE FIRST SUNDAY of December 1990, dark, bloated storm clouds crashed into the Selkirk Mountains and left fifteen inches of snow on the granite and softwood of Ruby Ridge. On top, the snow slid off the Weaver cabin’s metal roof and piled three feet against the doors, isolating the family as perfectly as they could ever hope. The wind riffed through the plywood walls, while the kids huddled around the woodstove, reading action books beneath kerosene lamps, playing Scrabble and Parcheesi, and trying to learn chess from their father. Vicki read Scripture, wrote letters, and mended rips in the family’s snowsuits, until, after the storm, she and Randy broke a trail through the snow from the ridge top to the meadow below and rode snowmobiles to the county road, where their pickup truck was parked. They drove the truck to the store, filled their backpacks with milk and a few other groceries, drove back to the base of the mountain, climbed aboard the snowmobiles and rode back to the top of the hill. Such trips to the grocery store were day-long events, during which the kids took care of the dogs and other chores and waited with their holstered pistols until Randy and Vicki returned. Even after the snow passed two feet, the couple went into the woods most days, trying to find a cord or two of dry firewood to sell. But their chain saw wasn’t working very well, and the tough winter slowed them down considerably. They had a few older customers, but during a North Idaho winter, trees are about the only thing in ready supply, so most folks cut their own wood. Vicki got word of a couple of refinishing jobs waiting for her in the spring, but one of the furniture shops was going out of business because some government agency had ruled that the chemicals used to strip the furniture in the shop’s big tank were too dangerous. “Our wonderful tyranny in action again,” Vicki wrote. The Weavers were doing so badly they considered selling the flatbed truck, probably their last possession of any value.
Two more snowstorms battered the ridge until, on January 17, the weather cleared a bit, and Vicki and Randy started up the snowmobiles and rode them down the hill, past the Raus’ house. Just below the meadow, they switched to the pickup and continued down the snow-packed road until they reached the bridge leading to the old highway. A pickup truck and camper was broken down on the bridge, wedged sideways just on the other side of Ruby Creek. A blond, shaggy-haired guy was bent over the truck’s open hood, his head buried in the engine, while his mousy wife stood next to him, shivering in jeans, a shirt, and no coat.
Seven years in Boundary County hadn’t shaken the Iowa from Randy and Vicki, and they stopped the truck before the bridge. Randy opened his door and hopped out. The young woman walked toward Vicki’s side of the truck, and so Vicki opened the door and stepped out into the snow to greet her. “What’s the matter with your truck?”
“Oh, it’s broke down,” the woman said. “We were trying to get it off the road and you were the first people who came along.”
Randy kept walking toward the open-hooded pickup. From behind, he could see the guy—early thirties, scraggly jeans, flannel, surfer hair—still messing around under the hood. “Ya broken down?” Randy asked. Fifteen feet from the truck, Randy slowed, and the long-haired guy spun around in the snow and jammed a 9-mm pistol toward Randy’s face. “Federal agent, you’re under arrest!”
The county sheriff, Bruce Whittaker, jumped out of the back of the camper with three ATF agents, including Herb Byerly. From the woods, agent Steve Gunderson, in full snow camouflage, kept the scope of his AR-15 trained on Randy Weaver’s chest.
“Get on the ground!” yelled Lance Hart.
Vicki was the responsibility of agent Barbara Anderson. “Turn around!” yelled the petite woman with no coat. “Get down!” Vicki turned to run away, but Anderson ran a few steps, pushed her, and Vicki fell face first into the snowbank.
There was yelling and confusion as Hart wrestled Randy to the snow-crusted ground, put the gun against his stomach, and waited for the other agents to help subdue Randy. A short newspaper story about the arrest said Randy “offered no resistance,” and he wasn’t charged with resisting arrest.
But during the struggle, Hart testified later, Randy had slapped at the agent’s gun and then had reached for his own coat pocket. When another agent got there, he reached in Randy’s pocket and pulled out a.22-caliber pistol. They read Randy his rights and handcuffed him. Byerly ran to where Vicki lay on the ground, and they cuffed her hands behind her back, too, grabbed her by the arms, and stood her up. She was mumbling something that Herb couldn’t quite make out—the steam slipping from her lips—until he realized it was chanting, some sort of prayer in a language he’d never heard before. Barb Anderson ran her hands all over Vicki, who stared off haughtily—horrified and angry to be slammed into the snow and then body searched by the agents of Babylon. There was nothing on Vicki. Back in the truck, her purse contained a small .38-caliber handgun, which the sheriff gave back to her as soon as everything calmed down. They took the cuffs off Vicki. But the agents pushed Randy into a car, and as Hart walked by, Randy nodded at him. “That was good,” he said. “But you’ll never fool me again.”
Vicki cried as they drove her husband away.
When it was over, Byerly thanked Anderson and Hart, a former navy pilot who had been an ATF agent since 1986, when he’d begun growing his hair out. By 1991, it was long enough for a dishwater ponytail, and Lance had become a specialist in undercover operations. Young and muscular, with stooped shoulders and surfer looks, Hart met the most important requirement for undercover work—no matter how long you stared at him, he just didn’t look like a cop.
The ATF had arrived the day before, and Byerly had given Ruth Rau a two-way radio, telling her to call when Randy came down the mountain. That morning, Hart and Anderson had waited with the others in Naples until Ruth Rau called and said the Weavers were coming. And then they moved in. Byerly felt good that they’d arrested such a dangerous, stubborn man without any bloodshed.
It was a good ruse, but it didn’t do much for Randy and Vicki Weaver’s distrust of the government.
In Coeur d’Alene that afternoon, Randy stood in front of the booking camera, tight-mouthed and stunned. He refused to sign his name. That night, when he complained about the conditions in his jail cell, one of the jailers said, “Wait until you get to prison.”
SHACKLED AT THE WRISTS AND ANKLES and wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, Randy Weaver walked in small, chain-rattling steps down a hallway with Byerly on one side and Barbara Anderson on the other. They escorted him into a long, narrow courtroom on the second floor of the federal building in downtown Coeur d’Alene—one of the buildings damaged five years earlier by the bombings of The Order II. At the end of the off-white room, in front of windows overlooking shimmering Lake Coeur d’Alene, an attorney and part-time magistrate named Stephen Ayers waited to hear the case. Since there was no federal judge in Coeur d’Alene, it was the magistrate’s responsibility to try first appearances and misdemeanors for federal prisoners in Coeur d’Alene.
Anderson left for a moment and came back with coffee for the three of them. Randy held his Styrofoam cup with both hands, because, with his wrists cuffed, it was the only way he could drink it.
The charges were read, and Ayers entered a not-guilty plea for Randy, who leaned over the railing and talked with his wife and with Wayne Jones, the security chief from the Aryan Nations, who was there to vouch for Randy’s character.
After only one night in jail, Randy—like many federal prisoners—didn’t have an attorney yet. But what upset Byerly was the fact that the U.S. attorney from Boise, Ron Howen, had declined to fly up for the arraignment. Byerly had called Howen—the U.S. attorney’s expert on white separatists—and told him about the arrest. He told the prosecutor that Randy and his kids were armed and that, if the government didn’t request Randy be held until the trial, there was a good chance he would jump bail. But federal attorneys didn’t travel to Coeur d’Alene often, and Howen didn’t think they had grounds to keep Randy in jail. So the first appearance continued without an attorney for either side.
Ayers set a $10,000 unsecured bond for Randy’s release, meaning he’d have to pay the bond only if he didn’t show up for court or if he violated the terms of his release. Ayers added the conditions that Randy find a job if he didn’t already have one, that his travel be restricted to northern Idaho, and that he check in with probation officers constantly. He was to give up all firearms or destructive devices and stay away from alcohol and drugs.
Ayers asked Randy if he had a preference about an attorney, and when Randy said he’d like Everett Hofmeister, the magistrate said he’d do his best to appoint him.
“Yeah,” Randy said, “in fact, if I can’t have him appointed, we will try to hire him. My wife might even have to hock her ring.”
“All right,” Ayers said. “Well, you need to understand that … if you’re found guilty of this charge, you will probably be required to reimburse the government for the cost.” Ayers later admitted he had made a mistake.
Ayers read the pretrial report, which concluded that Randy’s only real asset was his property, which was assessed at $20,500. “And you own that free and clear?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” Randy said. But he said the land was probably worth only half that. Now Randy was confused about the bond. “You’re telling me that you’re recommending that I could be released with this ten-thousand-dollar deal over here. I don’t understand, secured bond? I can’t get no ten thousand. I don’t understand.”
Ayers said Randy didn’t have to put up the money, but if he didn’t abide by the rules, then he forfeited his bond and the land could be sold to make up the $10,000. Again, Ayers was mistaken about how an unsecured bond worked.
What if he got pulled over for having dirt on his license plate, Randy asked. “Would I blow the whole ten grand there?” Randy asked. “Would they throw me in the slammer?”
Ayers said probably not.
Randy also was confused about the gun issue. “How far does that go? My kids own firearms.”
“You can discuss it with your attorney,” Ayers said, “but, you know, in my view, I think you’d probably be better off not having those things in your house. You’d better put them with somebody else.”
But what if he needed a gun for protection?
“Look, Mr. Weaver,” Ayers said, “even if you are in fear for your life, you cannot possess a firearm.”
“I’ll get rid of them,” Randy said. And then he promised to show up for court, and he signed the paperwork that indicated he would show up in Moscow, Idaho, a month later, for trial.
RANDY AND VICKI RAGED AND PRAYED all the way back to Ruby Ridge, gathered the children, then raged and prayed some more about what they should do. The treachery and deceit were almost more than the couple could bear. The lawless highwaymen of ZOG had no legal warrant, didn’t identify themselves, seized Randy’s legal gun, and usurped the power of the county sheriff. Vicki wasn’t charged with a crime at all, and yet they treated her like a gangster.
The vision that came from Yahweh coincided with the family opinion: they were to stay on the mountain forever. When it was settled, Vicki wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney’s office and then another one to “all my Saxon brothers and sisters in the Aryan Nations.” Vicki wrote that Israel was outnumbered millions to one and that they should never give up. “Don’t they realize that one with Yahweh is the majority? He shed His blood for us, can we expect to do any less.”
There was more proof of the One World Government’s plans when the notification of Randy’s trial date arrived from the U.S. attorney in Boise. Although Randy had been told to report to court on February 19, the notification listed the trial date as March 20—something they later tried to pass off as a simple mistake. Perhaps they were trying to confuse him or get him to show up on the wrong date, so they could throw the leg irons on him again and say he’d missed his trial date. Their lying treachery was so transparent.
Finally, Vicki wrote a letter to her mom, back in Iowa. She tried to reassure her, promising that the family was okay and that the arrest had been unlawful. The government had no intention of giving Randy a fair trial, Vicki wrote, and the Weavers were not going to obey such liars. “The conditions of his probation would be impossible not to violate,” Vicki wrote. “We are staying home. We have been shown to separate from lawlessness and warn our people of the coming troubles.” Vicki sealed the letter and sent it down the hill with Judy Grider.
In Fort Dodge, Jeane walked slowly away from her mailbox, planted along the straight rural road with a hundred others, like rows of short saplings. She carefully opened the envelope, pulled out the letter, and read Vicki’s clean cursive. Its tone was strange and—apart from the usual Yahweh and One World rantings—it was like a good-bye note.
“We have all loved you and pray that Yashua bless you for all the things you’ve done over the years to help us,” Vicki wrote on the last day of January 1991. “The past seven years have been trial and testing for me. I know what I need to do to take care of my family under hardships….
“I’ll keep writing as long as someone can come up. We have the peace that passeth understanding.”
IN THE FEBRUARY 7 MAILBAG at the U.S. attorney’s office, there were letters and packages addressed to most of the thirteen lawyers who worked in the office, but only one was addressed to the “Servant of Queen of Babylon.” Like he did with hundreds of other pieces of mail, the young clerk opened the envelope, glanced at the writing, stamped the letter with the date, and set it in one of the piles, this one for Maurice Ellsworth, the U.S. attorney for Idaho. The clerk walked into the bright offices on the third floor of the federal court building and slid the letter, along with the others, into the U.S. attorney’s mailbox. The U.S. attorney’s secretary came by, grabbed his mail, walked into the office, and set it on his desk. And that’s where Maurice Ellsworth found one of the strangest letters he’d ever seen. It was addressed to Ellsworth, who was listed as the Servant of the Queen of Babylon. The letter said the stink of lawless government had reached Yahweh and Yashua. “Whether we live or whether we die,” the letter read, “we will not bow to your evil commandments.”
It was dated February 3, 1991, mailed from a P.O. box in Naples, Idaho, and signed “Mrs. Vicki Weaver.”
The attachment that Ellsworth was supposed to pass up the chain of command was more alarming. There was more of the Yahweh Yashua stuff, a Bible quote from Jeremiah, and—this is what worried Maurice Ellsworth—a quote he soon found out was from Bob Mathews, the martyred leader of The Order. “A long forgotten wind is starting to blow. Do you hear the approaching thunder? It is that of the awakened Saxon. War is upon the land. The tyrant’s blood will flow.”
Ellsworth got strange antigovernment letters occasionally—with suggestions for Japanese trade or Russian foreign policy—but this was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Ellsworth picked up the telephone and called the supervisor of the U.S. Marshals Service in Boise, the agency charged with protecting federal buildings and employees, as well as arresting fugitives. A deputy marshal came to his office, and Ellsworth handed him the letters. He said they appeared threatening and he’d like to know what this was all about.
The marshals quickly found out Vicki Weaver was the wife of a guy who’d recently been arrested. They found out that Weaver had been a difficult arrest, that his kids were armed and even slept with their guns, and that Randy had vowed not to be arrested again. Weaver’s court date had been changed from February 19 to February 20. His attorney was notified and he tried to let his client know, but Randy wouldn’t answer his letters. So, on February 20, a failure-to-appear warrant went out for Randy Weaver, and the case was assigned to the U.S. Marshals Service, the agency charged with bringing in fugitives. In Boise, the chief deputy marshal, Ron Evans, sent a letter to his boss in Washington, D.C., writing that Randy Weaver had the potential to be “another Bob Mathews and his homestead another Whidbey Island standoff.”
DAVE HUNT WASN’T WORRIED. In fifteen years as a deputy U.S. marshal, Hunt had seen plenty of guys like Randy Weaver. How many times had he gone to a government auction where some guy’s life was sold out from under him, all because the dope decided to skip his trial date or not pay his taxes? Guys like that lost their whole lives over $600, over principles and ideologies that have no basis in reality, no logic. Hunt didn’t understand that blind devotion. He was a guy who was ruled by sense.
A former Marine with two tours as a guerrilla warfare trainer in Vietnam, Hunt had arrested more than 5,000 fugitives in his fifteen years as a deputy marshal. Yet he’d never fired his gun in the line of duty. He was world-weary and gruff, a guy who stooped and shambled along persistently and who could bring anyone in with enough reasoning and cajoling. His best weapon was his tenacity. He just wouldn’t give up. A big, gentle Baloo-looking guy, the other marshals saw him as the hardest ass in the service, simply because he wouldn’t give up.
At first, Hunt didn’t think Weaver was any more dangerous than any of the other tax protesters and government bashers in the West. But his boss, Chief Deputy Evans, had a bad feeling about the case from the minute he saw the Queen of Babylon letters. Evans had been the chief deputy in North Dakota in 1983, during the shoot-out and standoff with tax protester and Posse Comitatus member Gordon Kahl. Wanted on a simple probation violation, Kahl got into a gunfight on a rural highway near Medina, North Dakota, and two lawmen were killed. Three other officers were injured, along with Kahl’s son. The sixty-three-year-old Kahl fled to Arkansas where, four months later, lawmen found him hiding in a house near the Ozark Mountains. When the local sheriff walked into the house to arrest the fugitive, Kahl shot him. A federal agent outside the house also fired, again hitting the sheriff, who, before he died, managed to squeeze off a shot that killed Kahl. Agents outside didn’t know Kahl was dead, and so they fired tear gas inside, blistered the house with gunfire and, finally, dumped fuel into the house and burned it to the ground. The case made Kahl the first modern martyr among the radical right wing.
Evans saw the same potential for violence in this case. By February 6, a clerk had typed “very uncooperative” in Randy Weaver’s Marshals’ file and someone scribbled “crackpot” on the case file. By February 20, after Weaver’s initial court date passed, his description went out over the National Crime Information Computer as: “Aryan, carries firearms.” Evans and Hunt waged a friendly debate over how dangerous and how stubborn Weaver was. From the beginning, Hunt felt the pressure from Evans to bring in the tactical guys and go after Weaver—to rush the cabin. But the deliberate, hangdog Hunt proceeded the way he always did in such cases, learning the fugitive’s habits, tracing his family, figuring out where his money came from, trying to get inside his head.
He and the other deputy assigned to the case, Warren Mays, went over the case file and read the biblical passages that Vicki and Randy quoted in their letters. From his desk in the marshals office on the seventh floor of the federal building in Boise, Hunt looked out the window at Schaeffer Butte, which towered over Boise. Marshals duty in North Idaho was considered the worst assignment in the country because of cases just like this, stubborn antigovernment types whose failure to appear became more serious than the actual crime they’d committed. Such cases, once they started going badly, could pick up their own momentum, like a stone rolling downhill.
There wasn’t a lot of personal stuff on Hunt’s desk, a few family pictures and a photograph behind him, a picture of the bloody car door of a law officer who had gotten too excited during an arrest and had accidentally shot himself in the leg. It was a good reminder to proceed cautiously and a warning of how badly things could go.
NAPLES, IDAHO, LOOKED LIKE A TOWN that was in a constant state of evacuation. In March of 1991, it was essentially a dying railyard and lumber mill, a tattered school and a general store, all clinging to an old highway in a glacial valley—the town’s gaps filled by trailers and single-story houses in need of new paint. Down the road a piece, Budweiser was on tap at the North Woods Tavern, where the occupation of every third customer was “handyman”—some guy looking for work on a road crew or a dairy or a Christmas tree farm, anything to pay the property taxes while they finished the corral and got the roof on the log cabin. The town wasn’t incorporated; there might have been 300 people in a mile radius of the Naples General Store and five times that many with Naples addresses who lived on the veins of dirt that cut into the foothills and mountains around the town.
In early March 1991, Dave Hunt and Warren Mays drove up to Sandpoint and checked into Connies Motor Inn, the same place Weaver used to meet Kenneth Fadeley. The deputy marshals drove north on Highway 95, eased onto the old highway and into Naples. Their mission consisted of the patient drudgery of fugitive chasing: find the Weavers’ friends and ask what it would take to get them down. They spent five days in northern Idaho and talked to people who knew the family, to a gunshop owner who’d sold Randy some guns and to the people who ran the general store and post office—who told Hunt that the Griders had been picking up the Weavers’ mail.
They drove to Bonners Ferry and talked to the sheriff, Bruce Whittaker. When they were done interviewing him, Hunt asked if the sheriff could help them find Bill Grider.
“Yeah, that’s him over there.” Whittaker pointed across the street to a grocery store parking lot where Hunt saw an imposing, muscular guy, six feet three inches tall, with a bushy mustache, loading groceries in a battered green pickup truck.
Bill and Judy Grider were suspicious, but they listened.
Hunt said he was trying to solve the problem peacefully and would the Griders please take up a message. “Tell him he has to surrender to the courts. I don’t care how he does it. He can do it through Hofmeister, he can do it through the local sheriff if he has more faith in that, he can do it directly to the court, or he can surrender to me. I don’t care how he does it. I just want to get this thing resolved.”
Hunt and Mays met the Griders the next day at the house they were caretaking—the red house on the old highway that the Weavers had once lived in. Bill and Eric Grider had shaved their heads since the day before.
They were in mourning, Bill said.
Thirteen-year-old Eric wore a white T-shirt with a skull and “White Power” written on it. He pulled from his wallet a worn piece of Scripture—Jeremiah 7:29—and began reading: “Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places….”
Grider said he’d passed Hunt’s message along and he gave the marshal three letters from Weaver—handwritten copies of the two that had already been sent to the U.S. attorney and a third—with the same defiant, poetic language.
“You are servants of lawlessness and you enforce lawlessness. You are on the side of the One World Beastly Government,” the letter read.
“Whether we live or whether we die, we will not obey your lawless government.”
That apparently was a no. Already tired of this case, Hunt knew this was no way to carry on a dialogue.
“Why shouldn’t I just go up there on the mountain and talk to him?” Hunt asked.
“That’s not a good idea,” Bill Grider said. “Randy’s ready to meet his Maker.” He told Hunt that Weaver’s kids were up there and that the whole family was pretty strong in their convictions and their belief that they were the target of a conspiracy. “Let me put it to you this way. If I was sitting on my property and somebody with a gun comes to do me harm, then I’ll probably shoot him.”
Hunt got along well with the Griders though, and he had the impression that he was building trust. He shared a beer with Bill, and young Eric was fascinated to hear the stories of Aryan heroes that Hunt had arrested or transferred, especially David Tate, the Order member who shot and killed a Missouri state trooper in 1985.
Hunt went back to Boise, filed his notes, and kept working the telephones, talking to anyone who knew the Weavers, anyone who had a suggestion about how to get them down. He even called Vicki’s parents in Iowa. They were very nice and tried to be helpful, but it was clear they had no control over Randy either.
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:
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 World conspiracies:
“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 them on to the marshals. Soon after the June visit, Rodney Willey got a call from the U.S. Marshals Service, asking if he’d pass on some messages to Weaver. He agreed and, on July 9, met with Weaver’s attorney, Everett Hofmeister, Richard Butler, the head of the Aryan Nations, and the deputy marshal from Moscow, Idaho, Jack Cluff.
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.
“They’ll kill him in prison,” Vicki said. And then the family would lose the cabin, the government would take the kids away, and Satan would have won.
Rodney tried to convince them to give up, reading passages from the Bible that he hoped would convince Randy and Vicki that he might get a fair trial.
The kids interrupted occasionally, tossing in some point from history or Scripture. Rodney was especially impressed with twelve-year-old Samuel, who knew the names of all the presidents, had memorized encyclopedias, the Constitution, and much of the Bible. He seemed to know the date of every event in Western history from the Roman Empire to the present.
They talked philosophy. Randy was quite a speaker, Willey thought, but this was where Vicki really shone. She said the Babylonian system had taken over America, through infiltrators who seeped into every level of government, through the Masons, the Jewish Defense League, the Illuminati, and the Trilateral Commission. Vicki and Randy spoke about how the Zionists were in control and were trying to get their tentacles into every part of American life, to create their One World Government. Most of it was familiar to Rodney. For the last decade, he had been a regular every Sunday at Richard Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian, on the Aryan Nations compound. But many of the Weavers’ beliefs differed from the Aryan teachings. The Weavers relied more on the Old Testament and on messages from God—personal visions and biblical insights that governed their lives more than any doctrine.
They talked all the way around the situation, piling on more and more evidence of the ZOG conspiracy and the slim chance that Randy would get a fair trial. They cried and pleaded in prayer, and finally the whole family talked about it in a sort of informal polling, making sure they all agreed with the stand Randy had taken.
With the sun coming up, Randy said he would not talk to Richard Butler, Everett Hofmeister, or Jack Cluff. He saw what they did to his friend Proctor James Baker, and Randy wasn’t going to go through that. If the marshals came for him, he would fight to protect himself and his family.
Rodney Willey left that morning exhausted but impressed with the family’s resolve and intelligence. He was still worried about them, but—in the back of his mind—he wondered if they might not be right.
The next day, when Vicki wrote to her mom, she just said friends had been up. She also wrote she was having trouble with Judy Grider and that she and her husband weren’t going to run their errands or pick up their mail anymore. “She is capable of any lie to deceive you, so don’t believe any phone call you may receive from her as of the past two weeks,” Vicki wrote. “All of my letters have had to pass through her hands & I could never write my suspicions to you.”
Once again, the Weavers felt they had been betrayed by close friends. Vicki wrote a curt letter to the Griders, who had been seen talking to federal agents and whom the Weavers suspected of trying to steal their money.
“We appreciate what you have done for us in the past, but things have changed and we have made other arrangements,” Vicki wrote. “For your own safety, please do not come to visit anymore unless we contact you first. Thanks. The Weavers.”