SIXTEEN

“VICKI WOULD’VE WANTED those girls to die up there.” Vicki’s sister, Julie Brown, wasn’t quite sure she’d heard right. “I’m sorry?”

One of Vicki’s friends explained that the Weaver girls weren’t afraid to give up their lives for the white race, that Vicki had become a martyr and a hero, and that she would want the girls to do the same. Julie and her family had reluctantly come down to the roadblock from their motel that day, hoping to get some news, but now—surrounded by angry racists and crazy mystics like this woman—Julie wanted the hell out of there. These people were nuts. Earlier, Julie had just about lost it when she saw some of Vicki’s friends selling her letters to reporters. They said they were raising money for the Randy Weaver defense fund, but Julie was suspicious.

The crowd had swelled to more than one hundred. By the second Sunday, sightseers from Washington and Montana drove slowly past, craning their necks to see all the protesters and the armed federal officers. Campfire smoke and dust filled the air as the self-styled patriots and white separatists shuffled around the roadblock, some happy there had been no more violence, others disappointed that the great race war hadn’t started yet.

Wayne Jones, the security chief for the Aryan Nations, who had vouched for Randy’s character at his arraignment, didn’t think Weaver would give up peacefully. “He made it very clear to me that he was going to take it all the way to the end,” Jones told a reporter. Randy was “a man of honor and a man of his word, and I fully expect him to do what he has said he will.”

Other people were sorry the standoff was dragging to a close because the protest was going so well. Seemingly, everyone had come. Richard Butler and other Aryan Nations leaders showed up for a while. The wives of Order members Gary Yarbrough and Robert Mathews were there, agreeing that Randy was doing what their husbands would do. Both said they’d met the Weavers at Aryan Nations meetings, and Jeannie Yarbrough said she’d been up to the cabin. The Trochmanns were there, too, the family Randy was supposed to spy on, the men who would later form the Militia of Montana. Carolyn Trochmann, Vicki’s midwife, flipped sixteen slices of French toast over the barrel cookstove for the patriots and skinheads who rested underneath the campsite’s blue tarp. She cried as she described Elisheba’s birth and said she was proud of Vicki and Randy and the stand they’d made. She wished she could have joined them on the mountain.

Skinheads crouched on rocks in the middle of Ruby Creek and shaved their heads with disposable razors, while a photographer took their pictures and snipers watched from the woods. One of the skinheads said he heard a language he couldn’t understand, proof that United Nations soldiers had been called in to quell the uprising and institute the New World Order. “I think it was Belgian,” he said.

Other rumors surfaced, some more likely than UN soldiers speaking a nonexistent language. The creeks had been poisoned with phosphorus, people said. Farm animals and pets were being slaughtered by federal agents. Helicopters were planning to dump diesel fuel on the cabin. They didn’t just discuss the plots, they raved about them, looking wildly over their own shoulders and talking out of one side of their mouths, until at one point, a man rushed to the roadblock and, quickly losing his calm, began insisting that they disperse immediately because he had intelligence indicating the feds were going to provoke a gun battle to kill Bo Gritz. “Obviously, the feds aren’t telling us everything,” one camouflaged man said. “We know. And we know they know we know.”

White patriots linked arms and sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” as skinheads gave the Nazi salute behind them. A Jewish father’s rights advocate from Seattle, who was also an anarchist, tried to convince one of the skinheads that they had much in common in their hatred of government, but the nineteen-year-old skinhead refused to acknowledge the Jew, who was the spawn of Satan. “You don’t exist to me,” the skinhead said. He talked instead about the band he was trying to form, which would play folk music, “kind of like Joan Baez, except racist.” Skinhead groupies flirted with the young men from Las Vegas (“I’m in my third year of German”) while Vietnam vets stood in cadres of five or six and waited for orders from Bo Gritz, or anyone for that matter. Moderate people showed up at the roadblock, too, saying their eyes had been opened by the case. Satellite news trucks hummed as reporters from Inside Edition, USA Today, People magazine, and the New York Times covered the carnival.

Gritz was cheered at the roadblock Monday morning, but he knew that even if the FBI hadn’t raided the cabin overnight, it was going to be tough getting Randy out. Bo decided to enlist the help of some of the Las Vegas skinheads, whom Randy had met at an Aryan Nations meeting. He knew Randy respected them and thought they’d been unfairly characterized by the TV station he picked up on his radio. Bo agreed they’d shown remarkable restraint and done a good job keeping the crowd from getting violent. He grabbed a few of the skinheads and asked them to sign a note that Jack McLamb had penned, pleading with Randy to take his battle to the courts now. Not everyone agreed that Randy should give up, and Bo could only find two skinheads to sign the note. Then Gritz and McLamb trudged up the hill once more, knowing time was running out.

MONDAY MORNING, Fred Lanceley consulted his best source of intelligence to see if the cabin had been raided. In his Sandpoint motel, he turned on CNN, which reported the standoff was still going. He called the command post and Gene Glenn told him to get up there, they had decided overnight to try another shot at negotiations.

Lanceley met Bo at the command post. As they’d done the previous two days, the agents placed small transmitters on McLamb and Gritz—Bo’s in the pocket of his faux military shirt, behind his sunglasses, so that if Randy patted him down, he would feel only the glasses. The FBI agents made it clear they were running out of time, that this was likely the last chance for negotiations. They set up Operation Alaska, a plan for Gritz and McLamb to subdue the family if the negotiations broke down or they thought they were in trouble. They would wait until the baby took her nap, then McLamb would grab Sara and Rachel and pull them to the floor and Gritz would jump on Randy. He’d say “Alaska” into his transmitter, and the FBI assault teams would burst in and—hopefully—there would be no violence. Of course, there were no guarantees. Gritz thought the plan was a very good one. Some FBI agents were upset by how cooperative Gritz was up here and how critical of the government he was once he got to the roadblock.

At 10:00 A.M., Gritz and McLamb walked toward the house, but before they could reach the door, Randy called out. “Bo, we’re not going to talk anymore. There’s nothing against you, but … we have prayed all night and we have asked Yahweh and we will stay here. They can kill us if they have to.”

“That’s right,” Sara called. “Bo, we’re just going to stay here.” They would surrender, Randy and Sara said, but not until September 9, which they’d used Bible passages to calculate was the Feast of Trumpets, an important religious holiday for the Weavers. It was the same holiday, nine years earlier, which they’d believed was Yahweh’s deadline for finding a cabin.

Gritz told them that federal agents would never wait that long. He pleaded with Randy, got angry with him, and finally, shoved the note signed by the skinheads through the crack in the door. Randy read the note, seemed pleased, and opened the door to talk about it.

Bo had begun to view Sara as the real leader of the family, and he set to work trying to convince her to surrender. She was firm. The lives of Vicki and Sam had to be worth another nine days, she and Randy said. Bo explained that the government needed to get inside the cabin because it wanted to get the evidence. They were spending a million dollars a day on the standoff, Gritz said, and the FBI was becoming impatient. If they didn’t surrender that day, the FBI would raid the cabin, and the girls might very well be injured or killed. Randy agreed with Bo that he should give up to keep his kids from being hurt. But Sara still said no. The ZOG agents had already tried to murder the whole family. Why should she believe now that it was safe?

Gritz and McLamb promised to shield the family. Bo said he would handcuff himself to Randy and wouldn’t leave his side until he was safely off the mountain. They promised to make sure an investigation was conducted on the case and that Randy got a good attorney. They promised the girls they could return on September 9. Still, Sara said no. So Randy talked to her. Gritz may have believed Sara was the one he had to negotiate with, but she insisted her father was really in charge. He told her that if there was anything he could do to keep anyone else in his family from being hurt, he was going to do it. He told her he was going to surrender to protect them. Finally, about 12:15 P.M., after eleven days, Sara went along with her father’s wishes and gave up. If that was the way Yahweh wanted her to die, then so be it.

THEY PACKED A FEW THINGS into small cloth bags and looked around the cabin once more. Rachel took off her holster with its .38-caliber snub-nose pistol, and Sara unstrapped her 9-mm. Randy took off his gun belt and then remembered something. He removed his Aryan Nations belt buckle and handed it to Gritz. “I don’t want them to get this,” he said. They changed Elisheba’s diaper, took a deep breath, and stepped toward the door.

Randy came out first, cradling Elisheba in his good arm, holding Bo’s hand with his other hand. Behind them came McLamb, holding hands with Rachel and Sara. Some of the FBI agents had such a low opinion of Randy, they bet that he was holding the baby as protection.

On the porch, standing in the sunlight for the first time in ten days, Sara waited to be shot dead. It didn’t happen. The whole family was crying as they walked down the steps and along the rocky path to the driveway, and that’s when some of the fear fled from Sara. She saw snipers and camouflaged agents hiding behind rocks and trees, staring at the family from all over the knoll, and she knew one of them had murdered her mother. She wondered what they would do to her father now.

“All this, for one family,” she said as they walked down the driveway, tears streaming down her cheeks, agents peeking out from everywhere. Several armored personnel carriers sat at the base of the driveway, and Sara glared at the agents she saw, hoping they were ashamed for declaring war on a peaceful man and his little family, on people who just wanted to be left alone. There were dozens of people at the base of the driveway and even more in the meadow down below. One of the agents—a tall, older man with gray hair and a potbelly—bent over and asked Sara if there were any booby traps in the house. “Is there anything else up there?” he asked. “Because we don’t want anyone else to die.”

“You’re worried, aren’t you?” Sara snapped. She shook her head. “There’s nothing else up there.”

When the family was gone, FBI agents came down from the hills to look at the cabin. Lon Horiuchi walked all the way around it and stared for a long time at the door where he had fired and at the window where Vicki Weaver apparently had been standing when his bullet tore through her face.

Down the ridge, in Homicide Meadow, Wayne Manis waited outside a medical tent next to the HRT building. Gene Glenn stood near him, somber and tired, glad it was finally coming to an end. He’d asked Manis to be in charge of Randy Weaver once he reached the command post. A caravan of military vehicles came down the road and into the clearing and opened their doors. Randy Weaver stepped out—scrawny and pale, wearing a drab olive T-shirt and faded jeans, his shaven hair grown out into rough stubble. Bo Gritz got out with him, but the FBI led Randy away.

They put Randy on a stretcher and carried him into the medical tent, where Manis ran alcohol swabs over his fingers, then dropped the swabs into an evidence bag and sealed it. Randy was exhausted and quiet.

They loaded him in another rig and drove him to the Raus’ barn, which had been turned into the field office, where his daughters now stood, waiting to say good-bye.

With his hands cuffed in front of him, Randy leaned forward in the car, an agent on each side of him, said good-bye to his girls, and told them not to worry. Rachel cried, but Sara tried not to, firing angry looks at the agents, pissed off that Bo had already abandoned her father. She told the FBI agents, “If anything happens to him, you’re going to pay.”

Nearby, Dave Hunt watched quietly. He’d come back to the mountain after Degan’s funeral, and now, finally, it was all over. They brought Randy Weaver within about ten feet of him, and Hunt stared at Weaver’s gaunt, blank face. For eighteen months, he tried to get that man off that mountain, did everything he could think of to meet with him face-to-face. Now, here was Randy Weaver, right there in front of him. All this trouble and death because of one little man. It seemed to Hunt this was what Weaver wanted all along, to be some kind of hero or martyr, to be some kind of Aryan legend, to sacrifice everything for some half-baked ideals that he didn’t even really comprehend. I hope you’re happy, he thought, as they led Randy away. I hope you’re satisfied.

They drove 200 yards east, to a dark marshals service helicopter. They loaded Randy in with Mike Johnson, two armed deputies, and Wayne Manis. Randy was secured by waist chains shackled to his wrists and ankles. The flight to Sandpoint took only fifteen minutes, and then they landed next to a private Learjet, quickly loaded Randy aboard, and were off again after only five minutes on the ground. On the flight to Boise, Manis sat next to Weaver, who was almost catatonic. Mike Johnson had just one question for Weaver. “Did you ever leave the mountain?” Weaver said no. Johnson—ever the politician—leaned back and told Manis there would be photographers in Boise. If he wanted, Manis could stand on one side of Weaver while Johnson stood on the other.

“That’s okay,” the FBI agent said.

A few years earlier, Manis had been featured in The Silent Brotherhood, a book about The Order that had become required reading for some white separatists. When Wayne introduced himself, Weaver said he recognized the name. For the first time since coming down from the mountain, Randy seemed mildly interested in something. “I’ve known about you for a long time,” Randy said. “I’ve read about you.”

“THE GLORY GOES TO God Almighty,” said Bo Gritz, framed against an impossibly blue sky and an American flag unfurled by his supporters. “And if the media doesn’t use that, then you’re everything Randy said you were.”

Bo said he’d awakened at two-thirty Monday morning with a vision that the surrender would take place at noon. “I was maybe fifteen minutes off, and it may be that my watch needs to be readjusted.

“The government learned something here,” Gritz said. “The government learned there are times when common sense pays off. It doesn’t have to be in a book of procedure.” But he complimented the agents and, especially, Gene Glenn. “Everybody up there did his job,” Bo said.

And then Bo thanked the skinheads for their letter, which he said helped resolve the standoff. “By the way,” he added. “Randy told me to give you guys a salute.” Bo raised his right arm in what looked like a Nazi Sieg Heil but what he claimed later was just a wave. “He said you’d know what that meant,” Bo said. There was no mistaking the salute he got in return.

One young skinhead sat dejected on a stump. “It’s just not what we expected,” he said. “I wish he’d taken a few more out.”

On the mountain, FBI agents crawled all over the cabin, gathering evidence. They looked for fingerprints and blood samples and measured the bullet hole in the door. They taped off the cabin and brought up a Humvee full of reporters, who were allowed to walk over the rocks outside the cabin but not let inside. The family’s arsenal was spread out on a white sheet on the ground—two shotguns, seven rifles, five pistols, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. FBI agents pointed to tins of armor-piercing bullets, which they said might have penetrated the APCs if the family had used them. Still, for an investigation that was based on trafficking in illegal weapons, it was clear that none of these guns was illegal.

A relieved Gene Glenn answered questions from reporters about the standoff. “The key line is, there has been restraint,” he said. Glenn said Bo Gritz worked heroically to end the standoff, even though Glenn never got clearance from FBI director William Sessions to use him. “Maybe I should have,” he said, smiling, “but I didn’t.” When someone asked what he would say to the people of northern Idaho, Glenn became serious. “The message that I would like to say is, ‘We are very sorry.’… There are no winners in a situation with all this sadness.”

When he was done, Glenn climbed one of the boulders and stared out over the disappearing hillside to the green-and-brown valley below, spread out before him like a deck of cards in God’s hands. He asked no one in particular, “How could there be so much evil in such a beautiful place?”

THERE WAS A PARTY THAT NIGHT in the wood-paneled bar at the Deep Creek Inn. Print reporters hit their deadlines and TV guys finished their live stand-ups, and they met at the Deep Creek, where a few protesters and local cops had already gathered to toss a few back. The booze was a nice match for eleven days of fatigue and adrenaline, and thirty people got pretty drunk pretty fast. They told war stories, swapped ZOG jokes, and posed for pictures: the angry Bill Grider with a grin on his face and his arms around the reporters he’d been scowling at all week; one of the Las Vegas skinheads posing with a black reporter from Boston, their faces dissolved in laughter as they Nazi-saluted the camera.

When Lorenz came to check on the rowdy bar, its occupants broke into applause. Everyone—reporters, cops, and protesters—was fond of the Swiss chef. They had listened to his earnest, bent-English questions about what was happening and smiled at his naïve beliefs about America and justice. They had eaten his food, used his telephone, and slept on his floor, often for free. Some of the bar and food tabs would never be paid, and when the phone bill came, Lorenz would find dozens of calls he couldn’t account for. The innkeeper looked out at a room full of people who had argued and debated for eleven days, now friendly with one another, as if it had all been some sort of insane play.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the bartender, a young newspaper reporter who had stepped in when the regular bartender was swamped by the fast-drinking crowd. Everyone raised their glasses. “To Lorenz, a man who really knows how to host a standoff.”

Lorenz didn’t smile. He looked down, thought for a moment, and then spoke. He said his eyes were opened by the last eleven days and that the news reporters needed to realize how important their job was. They had to find some meaning in what had happened, some explanation. A few of the reporters almost sobered up. “I hope you will be responsible in telling this story,” Lorenz said. “And I hope you find the truth.”

RACHEL AND HER GRANDPA walked through the grocery store in Sandpoint, looking for snacks to take back to the motel. The ten-year-old only wanted chocolate doughnuts. After all she’d been through, David Jordison wasn’t going to say no. Rachel stayed close to her grandfather as they walked through the store’s bakery, past shoppers who paid them no attention. She hadn’t been away from the cabin, hadn’t been off the mountain, in eighteen months, and now she was in a crowded grocery store, all kinds of faces streaming by, a blur of strangers and strange-looking people who were pushing carts with gallons of milk, loaves of bread, batteries, cookies, and frozen foods. She clung to her grandpa and whispered, “I sure wish I had my gun.” That night, as she got ready to go to sleep in the motel, Rachel asked if anyone had a flashlight she could borrow in case she had to get up and go to the bathroom.

Back at the motel, Elisheba toddled around in nothing but a diaper while Sara talked with Jackie and Tony Brown, with her cousin from Colorado, John Reynolds, with a couple of the nicer skinheads, and with her other relatives. Then she agreed to tell a reporter from the Spokesman-Review what had happened. In a motel room in Sandpoint, she started slowly, trying to get everything out. She was tight-lipped and tense, her eyes swollen from crying. She broke down a couple of times as she described how her brother had been shot, how her mother had been killed, how she’d crawled around Vicki’s dead body to get food and medicine for the people in the cabin. But mostly she was furious. She concentrated, trying to make sure she had the sequence of events right. She scolded herself when she started crying: “Get this out!” After three hours, with the interview ending, a workman banged against an outside wall, and sixteen-year-old Sara jumped, her eyes open wide, her fists clenched.

“Sara Waited in Fear for Feds to Finish Job,” the headline read. The subhead was, “‘I couldn’t watch them pick us off one at a time.’”

Exhausted, Julie Brown flew back to Iowa to be with her own family; then she tried to figure out how to get the girls back there and away from all the trouble. But Sara wouldn’t leave. She wanted to stay with Jackie and Tony Brown or with other friends near the mountain, to guard the cabin, so they could go back the next week in time for the Feast of the Trumpets. “I want to stay here,” she said, “around people who understand me.” And the younger girls couldn’t go either, said Sara. “I won’t let what’s left of this family be broken up.” Her grandparents were trying to talk them into coming to Iowa and going to public school. No way. Sara said their hearts were in the right place, but she would never go to school.

Julie Brown knew she had to get them out of Idaho. She thought of Vicki’s wild-eyed friend who had told her the girls should have died on the mountain. Although Jackie and Tony Brown weren’t like that woman, there was no way Julie was going to let the girls stay in Idaho. Even Vicki wouldn’t have allowed that. She called every few hours on September 1, and each time Sara would have some other excuse for not being ready to go. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said.

Julie had met a social worker while she was in Idaho, who told her the surprising news that the Weavers had received food stamps for a while, years earlier. It made Julie sad because she knew how much Vicki would’ve hated to do that. But it also reminded her that Vicki would do whatever was best for her family. That was what Julie had to do now. She called the social worker back and told her what the woman at the roadblock had said. Julie said she considered it a threat against the girls’ lives. The social worker agreed that the girls should go to Iowa as soon as possible.

Then, Julie called back to the motel and got on the phone with Sara. She told her there were threats on the girls’ lives, and she stretched the truth, saying the social worker had called her and promised to send the girls to a foster home if they stayed in Idaho.

“Right now, you have two choices,” Julie said, hoping to scare Sara into leaving Idaho. “You can stay there and be institutionalized or you can come back to Iowa.” It sparked Sara’s vision of orphanages and foster homes, passed along by her parents: such places would be infected with the AIDS virus, and the children would be brainwashed and fed psychedelic drugs until they cracked and were no longer dangerous to ZOG.

On September 2, Sara relented again, this time only for the good of her sisters. She said good-bye to her friends and to two of the skinheads she’d met at the Aryan summer congress years before, Johnny Bangerter and David Cooper—the handsome and intense-looking skinhead the others called Spider. At the Spokane airport, Sara refused to let her sisters out of her sight and began to change her mind about flying. It dawned on her relatives that the only aircraft these girls had ever seen were the planes and helicopters that buzzed over their cabin, taking photographs for the government or for tabloid television shows. In addition to everything else they had gone through, the girls were scared because they were about to fly for the first time in their lives.

ALL THAT WAS LEFT was the cleanup. With Weaver safely in jail, Wayne Manis returned to Homicide Meadow after everyone else had packed up the tents and gone home. He took down all the electrical equipment and got rid of all the classified garbage. After the investigators had gone, Manis visited the cabin once more. It gave him the creeps: the rock fortifications, the supply of beans and herbs and grains, which could have lasted a year, maybe two, maybe even more. He stood on the porch and realized it could have gone even worse. What would have happened if Sara had come out at some point firing her rifle. What could they have done?

Manis was angry, not just at the family, but at the system, too, which allowed law enforcement agencies to compete over criminals and informants. Not that he thought the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had done a bad job on the case. No, Manis had reviewed the bust and thought it was a clean case, not entrapment from his standpoint. And they’d arrested Weaver using a pretty slick ruse, with no bloodshed. But he didn’t understand why the ATF was trying to develop its own informant on the Aryan Nations in the first place. There should be one agency—the FBI—in charge of domestic terrorism. Otherwise, agents and informants were falling over each other, undercutting the other’s investigations. Hell, he wished the ATF had just come to him if they’d wanted intelligence on the Aryans or on Weaver. He probably would have told them Weaver wasn’t connected enough to worry about. That he wasn’t worth the effort. And then, standing on the empty knob, he tried to imagine the whole thing had never happened.

On September 3, three days after the standoff ended, Wayne Manis drove down the dirt road and turned onto the old highway, the last federal officer to leave Ruby Ridge.

A few protesters straggled at the roadblock for a day or so after that, and then even they left. But the flowers and wreaths remained for months, alongside a painting of Jesus standing behind a boy at the wheel of a ship. On the bullet-pocked dead-end sign marking the bridge, someone had duct-taped “Mother & Child” below the word “DEAD.”

The Weaver case continued to hang over the Inland Northwest like a still summer storm, building anger, not just among the radical right but in a broad swipe of people all over the political spectrum. The case continued to draw people to the Northwest. Weeks after the standoff, a group calling itself Citizens for Justice convened a meeting to demand an investigation of the government’s actions. One of the speakers at the meeting was Louis Beam, a former KKK leader who immediately announced his plans to move to Idaho, in part because of the support Randy Weaver had received.

A week after the standoff ended, a drifter from Texas walked into the bus depot in nearby Spokane. He had come to North Idaho to protest the siege but had arrived too late. Inside the bus station, he pulled out a handgun and fired three shots at two strangers—a black man and a white woman whom he’d been watching for a few minutes. The twenty-nine-year-old man was hit in the stomach and arm and the nineteen-year-old girl in the side. Both lived but were permanently disabled. When they arrested the drifter a day later, he said he was disappointed the standoff was over and had wandered around aimlessly for a few days. Then, God had told him to shoot the couple because black people weren’t supposed to mix with white people.

LORENZ AND WASILIKI CADUFF had met on a park bench in Switzerland in 1974, when he was a successful nineteen-year-old antiques shop owner and she was a sixteen-year-old salesclerk. They were married a year later. They visited the United States the first time in 1980 and loved the open spaces and the peace of the West. Switzerland, Wasiliki liked to say, was a country of people packed like chickens in a pen. Back in Switzerland, Lorenz got a master’s degree in management and opened his own restaurant. But after five years of eighteen-hour days in a drug-rich resort town, Lorenz and Wasiliki decided to take their three children and leave Switzerland for good.

With a partner, they bought the thirty-acre Deep Creek Inn for $210,000 cash. For six weeks, business was good and they knew nothing about the Aryan Nations or constitutionalists or Randy Weaver. They were in heaven. But then, the ambulance pulled into their parking lot, and the standoff started.

Lorenz had sent Wasiliki away during the trouble, but when she returned, Lorenz was different. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Nervous and shifty-eyed, he made vague references to being in trouble, being under investigation. A few crank telephone calls chided him for supporting the Weavers, and Lorenz began to worry that he was in trouble because of a trust fund he’d agreed to start for the Weaver girls. He’d only volunteered because he had the only safe in the area, he explained to Wasiliki. He didn’t condone those beliefs! He just felt sorry for a family, that’s all. She tried to convince him there was nothing to worry about. But Lorenz was haunted by images of tanks rolling past his inn and couldn’t sleep at night, worrying that he had done something to bring the government after him. Then he stopped talking about it completely. If he talked about it, he feared, the government would kill him.

In October, two months after the standoff, Lorenz was so troubled that Wasiliki took him to visit friends at a nearby lake. And there he just snapped. He ran down the rural road, hiding in the bushes while his wife and friends looked for him. Then, the peaceful chef ran up to a house and dove through a picture window into a stranger’s living room, stood up, and began strangling a woman in the house, screaming that they were coming to get him. The woman’s husband hit Lorenz on the head with a baseball bat, and he collapsed. When he woke up, he ran away again and hid in a field until the police finally found him, curled up and whimpering.

He was taken to the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Spokane, but when they asked him what was bothering him, Lorenz wouldn’t talk. He sobbed and pulled at his hair and said he was frightened because he’d never done anything violent before. He whispered to Wasiliki that if he told the doctors he was troubled by the Weaver standoff, they would kill him. The next time she came to visit him, she almost didn’t recognize him. In just two weeks, his hair and beard had turned completely gray. He stared blankly at her.

“Lorenz,” she cried. “Don’t you know me?”

Then, there was some recognition. “Yeah. You are Wasiliki. Go away, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I came to move you to a different place,” Wasiliki said.

“This place is hell,” he said.

“I know.”

He did better at the hospital in Coeur d’Alene, and in November, he came home for a little while. By then, they had more than $6,500 in doctor’s bills, and there were still unpaid bills from the standoff. Business was dying at the Deep Creek. Lorenz thought they were being boycotted because he had sent food up to the Weavers and started a trust fund for the girls. He seemed okay for a day or so, and then he began crying and fretting again, saying the government knew that he had provided food and shelter to the protesters. They would surely come and kill him for that. He seemed on the verge of snapping again, so Wasiliki sent him north to be with some friends in Canada. He had another nervous breakdown in Canada and beat his friend with his fists and a stick. After he saw what he’d done, Lorenz ran to a hospital and tried to turn himself in, saying he was worried he was going to hurt someone else. They didn’t have a psychiatric ward at the little country hospital, so they called Wasiliki and she bought an airline ticket for Lorenz to fly home.

At the airport, he screamed and cried and wouldn’t get on the plane. His friend decided to drive Lorenz back to northern Idaho, but a half-hour from the border, Lorenz begged his friend to stop. He grabbed his Bible and stepped out of the pickup onto the side of the road. A cattle truck was barreling down the highway, and Lorenz walked in front of it and was killed. Authorities couldn’t say whether it was suicide or an accident, but Wasiliki insisted her husband would never kill himself. She said he was probably trying to cross the road to look for a telephone to call her.

Even so, she always considered her husband another victim of the standoff. “Deep Creek was Lorenz’s dream,” she said. “I will never meet such a wonderful man.” Wasiliki sold the inn later that year and moved back to Greece, where she was born. Back in the Northwest, folks read about the bus station shooting and about Lorenz’s death and wondered when the world would start making sense again, when the violence would end, when the storm would finally pass.

“WE DON’T SAY THAT WORD HERE,” Julie Brown said gently. She realized Rachel hadn’t meant anything by the word nigger. These girls had simply been raised that way. But for lifelong liberals like Keith and Julie Brown, it was heartbreaking to hear such talk from a ten-year-old. Rachel seemed uncomfortable, too, maybe embarrassed, and she wrinkled up her face and turned back to the rodeo in front of them. “Look at that black on that horse?” she tried. Julie smiled at her. The last thing they wanted to do, she said, was change the girls. But Keith and Julie had decided that Sara and Rachel would respect the Brown’s rules when they were visiting. “I just want to show them some other choices,” Julie said.

At the Dayton Rodeo, on Labor Day weekend—just days after they’d left their cabin—Sara and Rachel watched the horse- and bull-riding and were spun around on some carnival rides, but there was little joy in their faces. They were clearly distracted, especially Sara, squinting into the sun, in a black T-shirt and a baseball cap. She still insisted that they not be photographed—because of their mother’s admonition about images—but when they weren’t looking, Keith clicked off a few frames.

The girls split their time between Randy’s sisters and Vicki’s parents, spending most of it with David and Jeane, in the one-story house they’d moved next to the old farmhouse, where Lanny now lived. It was a small, grandmother’s house, full of collectible spoons, tiny dolls, and fifty years of photographs. As soon as Rachel and Sara moved in, they stripped the pictures off the walls and the knickknacks off their dressers in their bedrooms. Such images, Sara said, were pagan and disrespectful to Yahweh.

Besides the usual cooking and cleaning and volunteering at the local hospital, now Jeane had to take care of three tough, headstrong girls.

“These are turkey, aren’t they?” Rachel asked as they sat down to a dinner of barbecued hot dogs one day. They still refused to eat unclean meat.

“Yes, they’re turkey,” Jeane said patiently.

“Don’t feed them pork,” Sara called from the hallway, where she was on the telephone with a supporter.

“I won’t, Sara,” Jeane said.

Neither girl would go to Vicki and Sammy’s memorial service, which was held at the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints in Fort Dodge. Churches were pagan, they said. But, finally, one of Randy’s nieces talked the girls into at least standing outside the church and greeting well-wishers.

Sara refused to go to school and wouldn’t allow Rachel to go either. Jeane’s sister brought over some schoolbooks, and they watched a little public television, but Sara didn’t want them to be brainwashed. Neighbors donated care packages of clothes and toys for the girls, and some days, Rachel would change in and out of her new clothes two or three times.

Sara told her story over and over again, to relatives and supporters who called or stopped by. Rachel wouldn’t talk about what she’d seen. She was more interested in television and Nintendo.

Rachel and Sara watched videotaped news programs that showed the lines of federal officers, and Sara yelled at the television. “You bastards! Which one of you shot my mother?” At night, she stayed up, sometimes until 3:00 a.m., talking on the telephone to supporters, friends, and the Las Vegas skinheads, who played Peter Pan’s Lost Boys to her Wendy.

Often, they called to get advice. Once, when they were sure federal agents had surrounded their house and were going to come in shooting, Sara calmed them down and told them that wasn’t how the federal agents would do it. She especially liked the soulful one named David.

Elisheba was a whirlwind, and Jeane raced around behind her, putting pictures back up, cleaning up spilled Cheerios, and trying to keep the little girl from tearing off her diaper. Elisheba was nervous around strangers, especially men. But when Julie Brown came over, Elisheba took one look at the long black hair and the Jordison family face and attached herself to her aunt’s leg. She stared at Julie with huge eyes, as if she recognized her. And then she heard Julie’s voice—Vicki’s voice—and the ten-month-old baby smiled and looked up, confused. She clung to her aunt’s leg as Julie tried to leave.

Strapped with their own grief and questions, David, Jeane, and the rest of the Jordison family struggled with the girls those first weeks. They were drained by their own burgeoning distrust of the government and by the unimaginable sorrow and anger of these two girls. Lanny watched Rachel move around the farm and was amazed. She had watched her mother’s face blown off, had been splashed with her blood, and she was stone quiet about it. “I can’t believe she doesn’t have nightmares,” he said.

They had to confront their feelings about Randy. At first, the Jordisons blamed Randy as well as the government for what happened. But now, they began to see troubling questions: What were six marshals doing in the woods that day? Why would they shoot the dog during a gunfight? Why did they shoot Sammy in the back, when he was running away? Why did they need so many agents to settle the standoff?

Vicki’s death troubled them the most. Why would they fire at the family before giving them a chance to surrender? They reasoned that an expert sniper couldn’t miss twice—one shot grazing Randy, the other accidentally hitting Vicki? So, if it wasn’t an accident … they couldn’t handle the next thought. Government leaks to the press said that Kevin, Randy, and maybe even Sara had fired at a helicopter, but Sara said that wasn’t at all true. The Jordisons began to picture FBI snipers crouched on hillsides, aiming at Vicki’s head while she stood in the doorway, and—POW! Sara claimed that Randy had been yelling for days that Vicki was dead, and the family knew the government had listening devices under the cabin. And yet, Gene Glenn had pretended to be choked up when he told them—a week into the standoff—”I have some good news and some bad news.” Had they just been conned by some great actor? The Jordisons were a patriotic family, but that was stretched and finally broken by the horrible feeling that their government had murdered little Sam and their beloved Vicki and now was covering it up.

Even Julie and Keith Brown, the liberals in the family, began to see the case differently. They still believed Randy’s and Vicki’s paranoia brought on some of the problems, but their own faith in the government bled away completely. And their discomfort with Randy’s beliefs paled before their anger at federal law enforcement.

And then, there was Sara. She sulked and stared out over the ruffled soybean fields, leaning against the barn her mother had roofed twenty years before. No one in the family could reach her. She refused to see a counselor or a psychologist and wouldn’t allow Rachel to see one either. She boiled with anger until Julie worried that Sara would run away and join the skinheads in some battle against the government. With Vicki gone, Julie and Keith began to think that Randy might be a calming influence on Sara and that she might be lost without him. They worried that Sara would explode if her father was convicted of murder. Julie came to the conclusion the only thing that might save Sara from the same fate as Vicki would be for her fear and anger to subside and for their world to return to some kind of normality. She needed to trust that there was some fairness and justice out there. And the only way Julie could see that happening was if Randy got off.

In the fall of 1992, there wasn’t much chance of that.