BOISE, IDAHO, IS where flat farmland bumps up against rumpled foothills, like a shirt half-ironed. It is the state capital—sophisticated by Idaho standards—a small city of about 125,000 people, who, like the terrain, seem at the juncture of two very different places. They are the wealthiest people in Idaho, the civil folk of the Great Basin region: government workers, corporate heads, and potato farmers, largely Mormon, like their cousins to the south and east in Utah. But they are Idahoans, too, and though Boise is squarely in the southern part of the state, its residents have a touch of the mountainous Panhandle in them, a bit of the West.
For them, the three-month Randy Weaver trial played out like a baseball season—highlights at 5:00 p.m., box scores the next morning in the paper. They began encouraging Nevin and Peterson at the grocery store, and there were Spence sightings all over town. Boise is the law and order of a wild state, and many people still hoped they buried those neo-Nazis. But in Idaho, where antigovernment sentiments were more than a political fad, the details of the Weaver case turned many people away from the federal government. “Hey,” a bank executive said to Spence one day. “You guys are doing a good job.”
The city is bisected by the polite Boise River and a walking-and-bicycling green belt, on which bankers jog to work and housewives bike with babies. Downtown, the choices for crossing the river are wide and patriotic—Capitol or Americana streets. Past the Egyptian Theater on Main Street, through a surprisingly funky downtown, the one-ways veer around the Capitol building to a one-hundred-year-old neighborhood, and on the edge of downtown, a seven-story glass rectangle where the rhythm of a long trial had settled, and it wasn’t uncommon to see a fuzzy-haired skinhead in a black T-shirt sharing a cigarette with a deputy marshal in a dark blue blazer.
Upstairs, on the sixth floor, prosecutors worked the second week of the trial on Randy Weaver’s original gun charge. Herb Byerly, the courtly southern ATF agent, testified about Randy Weaver’s violation of the law and tried to clean up the mess Fadeley had accidentally left, saying that he had never promised the informant a bonus if Weaver was convicted, and that Fadeley was going to get his money whether or not there was a conviction. More ATF agents followed—Lance Hart and Barbara Anderson testifying about the broken camper, the ruse they used to arrest Weaver. The government’s case was alive again.
The only thing the defense could do was hammer at Byerly about the money and his decision not to tape some meetings, and to show that Hart and Anderson’s ruse had made the Weavers even more suspicious.
The failure-to-appear charge was next. Prosecutors called as a witness Stephen Ayers, the young part-time magistrate who had presided over Randy Weaver’s court appearance after his arrest. His testimony was damaging to Weaver, especially a tape recording of Randy promising to show up in court and promising to get rid of his guns. But Ayers’s mistake came out on Peterson’s cross-examination: his suggestion that Randy might lose his land to the government to pay for his court-appointed attorney if he lost his case.
“So you agree that you misstated that law?” Peterson asked.
“In that instance, it appears I did.”
Next came the officials who were in charge of Randy Weaver’s case after his release. They testified that Randy’s court date was changed from February 19 to February 20. His probation officer, Karl Richins, said he accidentally wrote Weaver a letter in which he said his trial was set for March 20.
When a court official showed him the mistake—more than a month after he’d mailed the letter—Richins felt sick to his stomach. “I realized what I’d done, and I was very worried.” The image of a bungling bureaucracy began to emerge, in which Randy Weaver was given two court dates, February 19 and March 20, neither of which was right. On February 20, Weaver’s real court date, the judge called the case without a defendant.
The jury understood that Weaver could have shown up any of those days and it would have been okay. Clearly, he wasn’t going to show up, no matter what day his hearing was. But the mistakes further wounded the prosecution, and to some jurors, Randy’s distrust of the government was making more sense.
Next, prosecutors presented Vicki Weaver’s letters to the government—the “Queen of Babylon” letters. The U.S. attorney, Maurice Ellsworth, testified about the strange letters, which were full of confrontational language that cut away at Spence’s claim that the Weavers were “ideal people.”
Spence took his turn at Ellsworth, the conservative-suited bureaucrat who seemed eager to spar with the anti-establishment Spence, in his suede cowboy jacket.
“We’ve never met, have we?” Spence asked.
“Yes…. We met in Judge Williams’s chambers at the commencement of this case.”
“Oh, yes.” Spence looked down his nose where his glasses had slid. “You didn’t look so official.”
“Apparently,” Ellsworth said, “you are a more memorable character than I am.”
“Thank you very much.”
“That wasn’t necessarily a compliment,” Ellsworth said.
“Then I withdraw the ‘thank-you.’”
Spence and Ellsworth went back and forth over the letters: Ellsworth saying how worried he was by the letters, Spence arguing that it was a First Amendment issue. “If I were to call you the Queen of Babylon, it might insult you a little bit, maybe, [after all] you don’t look like a queen.”
“It would not be my favorite address,” Ellsworth answered.
“But you would recognize that I, as a citizen of the United States, have a right to call you the Queen of Babylon if I want to, true?”
“Sure,” he answered.
“The Constitution guarantees it, doesn’t it?”
“With some limitation.” Ellsworth said the letters were so threatening, he’d called the deputy U.S. marshals to assess the danger of whoever had written them.
Spence went over the language in the letters, much of it biblical. “Do you believe … we should have a threat assessment of the Bible?” he asked Ellsworth.
“No.”
On April 23, the ninth day of the trial, Judge Lodge took a week break to go to a conference, and so the case was postponed until May 3. In just nine days of testimony, Spence had tested Lodge, himself an old cowboy. Lodge tried to keep order as Spence argued incessantly with prosecutors, pushed the limits of courtroom behavior, and requested three mistrials. Toward the end of the second week, he was contrite though, offering at one point to stipulate that Vicki Weaver had written the “Queen of Babylon” letters without the usual firing back and forth of arguments and briefs and clustering around the judge’s desk.
“Judge,” Spence said, “I am here because I want to earn and get from you some brownie points, because I might need them later. Do you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean,” Lodge said.
“Maybe the record should reflect that I should get some of those points,” Lindquist joked, “for giving Mr. Spence the opportunity to ask for those points.”
Lindquist and Howen needed them far more than Spence. By that time, the prosecution wasn’t just fighting the defense team. It was also battling a cover-up.
FROM THE BEGINNING, FBI officials realized Vicki Weaver’s death could cause them problems. Early reports that the family had shot at a helicopter slowed the demand for an explanation of the shooting, but now, with Howen’s broad indictment, the decisions that eventually led to Vicki Weaver’s death would be dragged into the open.
There was little doubt that Howen’s broad indictment put the FBI in a difficult situation. When prosecutors came looking for evidence, the FBI at first refused to release a handful of documents. Among those objecting to the release was E. Michael Kahoe, the FBI official who was inexplicably put in charge of a review of the shooting, even though he had been involved in the early discussions of the rules of engagement, which stated deadly force could be used against any armed adult. Two years later, Kahoe would be suspended from his job and accused of shredding a document that showed that his boss, Larry Potts, approved the unusual rules. Also objecting to the release was the official under Potts, Danny Coulson, the man who had developed the Hostage Rescue Team. Coulson had been at FBI headquarters when the operations plan—with the rules of engagement—was faxed there. He said he never saw the rules.
When prosecutors asked for that operations plan, Coulson said it had never been approved, so it shouldn’t be released to defense attorneys. He said it would disclose HRT secrets. Potts—who, at the least, had approved the idea of changing the rules of engagement after Rogers left Washington, D.C.—was named in another memo ordering that the documents were “not to be released.” Since the standoff, Potts had been promoted to the number-two position in the FBI.
Strangely, other Weaver documents simply weren’t there. A Justice Department probe would later question why there were no notes or records of early discussions about the rules of engagement, a very unlikely scenario in the paper-heavy FBI. By that time, the foot-dragging wasn’t over the rules themselves (there would be no way to keep those out of the trial) but who at the FBI approved them. Even people in other law enforcement agencies began to whisper about the FBI’s actions and the question became Nixonian—who knew about the rules of engagement and when did they know it?
Justice Department officials who tried to help the prosecutors get past the FBI’s roadblocks noted the “Bureau’s intransigence appears to emanate from Larry Potts’s level or above.”
HOWEN AND LINDQUIST WERE STUCK trying to defend the FBI’s actions in court—without the FBI’s cooperation. In September, less than a month after the standoff, Lindquist had flown to Quantico, Virginia, to meet with Richard Rogers and to discuss the actions of the Hostage Rescue Team. When Rogers said he couldn’t have the operations plan, Lindquist, the former Marine, said he’d get a court order if necessary. Rogers let him read the plan but not copy it.
In October, prosecutors and defense attorneys in the Weaver case agreed to a fairly open discovery policy—the amount of material they would share with opposing lawyers—and FBI officials were angry again. Howen and Lindquist requested reams of reports and other information from the FBI, much of which they were required to share with the defense team. Prosecutors received most of the material, but there were some documents the FBI at first refused to give up:
When asked for that marshals’ critique, an FBI agent said that he’d rather see a mistrial than give the report to defense attorneys in discovery. Lindquist tried to explain there would be trouble if they didn’t turn it over at that time and it showed up later as part of some Freedom of Information Act request for documents. The agent said the document had come from someone’s desk and was not in any official file that would ever be made public. Lindquist was stunned. Was the FBI agent implying they were going to destroy the critique? He “strongly advised against that.”
By early 1993, Howen and Lindquist were getting pressure from defense attorneys, who were asking for every shred of paper having anything to do with the case. But the FBI still held back. Howen wrote to the FBI and listed some of the documents they still hadn’t received. “In other words,” he wrote, “we want access to everything.”
Under greater Justice Department pressure, the FBI finally agreed, as long as its officials could black out sensitive information. Prosecutors were never allowed to see the entire FBI files, and it was weeks still before the controversial documents arrived in Boise, the last one on April 12, 1993, one day before the trial started.
Howen was pinched in the middle, buried by requests for documents from the defense—some of which he figured were designed just to keep him busy—and stalled by defensive FBI officials.
There also were problems with the FBI laboratory, which neglected some of Howen’s requests for help and moved slowly on others. Blood samples were allowed to spoil, and some of Howen’s requests for technical assistance were refused or simply ignored. He asked for an expert to reconstruct the shooting at the Y and was told “there’s no such thing,” and so he had to find his own expert.
If that weren’t enough, Howen was fighting the FBI over who would help prosecutors with their investigation. Upset by the FBI’s lack of cooperation, Howen and Lindquist asked the marshals service and the ATF to help with interviews and evidence gathering. FBI officials were outraged. They were the investigative agency. It was improper for the marshals service to investigate the death of one of its own.
When a Boise FBI agent complained about the other agencies’ involvement, Lindquist told him, “You guys can’t work with anyone.” Howen and Lindquist got the entire team together, two people from each agency, for a series of chilly meetings, but the problems only got worse. Howen and Lindquist wanted interviews in Iowa and the local FBI agents volunteered to call agents in Iowa, to conduct the interviews. Howen wanted local agents to go, and so he sent deputy marshals, in part because they didn’t have to “produce paper.” FBI agents were required to make written 302 reports of every interview. If those interviews could be done without creating documents, it was one less thing the government would have to turn over to the defense. When FBI agents heard the deputy marshals were conducting interviews, they were furious again.
Howen and the local FBI had been at odds for three years, since Howen refused to prosecute a local sheriff after an exhaustive FBI investigation of corruption. One agent called Howen “very pompous and condescending.” The U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI also had a relationship that was strained at times.
On the Weaver case, those agencies could barely work together. In the spring, an FBI agent questioned the key prosecution theory that Degan hadn’t fired before he was shot. (After all, seven shells from his gun were spread over a twenty-two-foot span at the Y, showing Degan was probably moving for cover when he fired, almost impossible if he’d been shot in the chest.) One of the marshals said he didn’t need to hear that and stormed out of the room.
By the spring of 1993—even before the trial—each government agency blamed the others for the Weaver fiasco. FBI agents faulted ATF for investigating the Aryan Nations, which was clearly FBI turf. They blamed the U.S. Marshals Service for the sloppy operations that preceded the gunfight and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for its broad indictment. But people in those agencies believed the biggest mistake had been made by the FBI, killing Vicki Weaver. In the middle of all that, Ron Howen was trying to prepare a case.
By the time the trial arrived, some of the principal law officers involved in the Weaver case had already contacted private attorneys to protect themselves against prosecution or civil suits. And while two men stood trial for murder, the agencies continued to snipe at one another behind the scenes and to cover their own mistakes. A case that had soured because of impersonal bureaucracy, miscommunication, and competing agencies now stank beyond recognition. In Boise, there was so much mistrust, the FBI agents and deputy marshals kept their hotels secret from one another, afraid the other agents might find out where they were staying.
DAVE HUNT FROWNED for two solid days as he went over everything he’d done to try to resolve this case peacefully. After the week break, Hunt’s sincere testimony about his efforts to settle the case provided exactly what the government’s case needed: someone with common sense and humanity.
It was clear the case had worn on Hunt. He was the only member of the six-man team who hadn’t gotten any time off, and during his testimony he looked tired. While the other deputy marshals had returned to their home states, away from the Weaver case, Hunt had worked nonstop on it since the shoot-out, gathering evidence and compiling documents in a three-ring binder that quickly became two binders and then three.
Hunt testified about the meetings with Bill Grider and Alan Jeppesen and the letters back and forth, the frustration painted on his face. Just like earlier in the trial, the letters were powerful reminders of the Weavers’ beliefs and Hunt’s tireless efforts showed that the marshals service had tried to resolve the case peacefully. The jury seemed genuinely sorry for the sad, loping deputy marshal.
When his turn came, Spence handled the witness differently than he had others. He questioned him gently, asking if he’d been troubled since the case ended.
“It’s been a difficult case. There’s been some problems, yes.”
Spence asked if Hunt wanted “from the depths of your heart, to settle this without bloodshed?”
“I had promised the people in North Idaho that there wouldn’t be a confrontation, and I wasn’t going to allow it.”
Spence asked if he had spent nights lying awake.
“That’s correct.”
Wasn’t he torn up, wondering if he should have done something differently?
And, Spence asked reassuringly, “you did everything to the best of your ability?”
“That is correct. Even more than has been brought out.”
“There’s only so much you can do, isn’t that right, Officer?”
“Yes,” Hunt said.
Then Spence got to the point. Hunt needed cooperation from both sides, so that when Ron Howen refused to allow Hunt to negotiate with Weaver, it didn’t help matters, did it?
“It required flexibility from both sides.” Hunt said he got enough cooperation from the government but not from Randy Weaver.
By the end of Hunt’s second day on the stand, Spence’s gentleness was turning to sarcasm.
“Well, it must have been quite a thing for you to see this man … a man of his principles, holed up on that mountain, wanting to be alone, while the streets of this country were crowded with dope dealers and thugs and murderers. Wasn’t that quite an interesting dilemma for you?”
“Objection.”
For the next few minutes, that was the answer to most of Spence’s questions, but he didn’t seem to mind and he just continued asking questions that, coincidentally, showed the jury his view of the case.
Later, Hunt described a meeting in which Bill Grider threatened to kill Randy and another meeting where Grider and his son had shaved their heads.
“You said you saw that Mr. Grider had short hair?” Spence asked.
“Yes.”
“And his son had short hair?”
“I believe I said a shaved head or very close cropped.”
Spence looked down at the prosecution table next to the podium where he stood. “So we can understand how close, would it be any shorter or closer than Mr. Lindquist’s?”
Lindquist—who was bald—nearly smiled. “As long as the record can reflect my hereditary situation.”
“Shorter than Lindquist’s?” Spence asked again.
“No.” Hunt said it was stubble, about a quarter of an inch.
“Now you recognize that Michael Jordan for example and George Foreman and Telly Savalas all have shaved heads?”
“I guess I can recognize that.”
“You didn’t suggest that they open a risk-assessment file on Michael Jordan, did you?”
Lindquist objected.
Spence withdrew that question. “How about Mr. Lindquist?”
Lindquist objected.
“Has Mr. Weaver ever said anything to you?” Spence asked.
From the witness chair, Dave Hunt looked at Randy Weaver sitting at the defense table, and he remembered that day in August, running down the hill toward Degan, with gunfire crashing all around him. “He shot at me,” Hunt said.
“Well,” the attorney rumbled, leaning back at the podium and reveling in another Spence moment. “We’ll see about that later.”
AS SOON AS THE GOVERNMENT had proved its conspiracy charge, prosecutors could begin to put on more evidence of the Weavers’ beliefs and their statements about starting an armed confrontation with federal officers. On May 3, nine days into the trial, prosecutors offered to the judge that many of the overt acts of the conspiracy had been proved. Lindquist made his argument in front of Lodge. “The record is now replete with overt acts at the hands of Vicki Weaver that mark her participation in the conspiracy as far as the failure to appear and the efforts of Vicki Weaver and Randy Weaver to oppose the marshals service and law enforcement generally, to bring him to justice.”
“As you know,” Spence said, “prosecutors never file a case any more without including a count for conspiracy.” He argued that the letters were written by Vicki Weaver and not Randy, and that they were protected free speech. One was even a letter to her cousin.
So far, except for Cooper’s testimony, Kevin Harris’s name had only come up a few times, and with so many letters floating around, Kevin was only named in one exhibit—a phone number in Randy’s wallet. Nevin had watched most of the first three weeks of trial, popping up every once in a while to remind the jury that they were seeing no evidence connected to Harris. Now he asked the judge to rule that the prosecution hadn’t proved conspiracy against Harris.
The judge ruled that, so far, he saw no conspiracy by anyone.
HUNT’S BOSS, RON EVANS, testified about the drive he and Deputy Marshal Jack Cluff took up Ruby Ridge, where they saw Sara with a pistol and Samuel with a knife and Randy yelled at them to leave.
Spence asked if he remembered Sara’s gun, and Evans said he would “never forget it.” Then he asked Evans if he remembered saying in his grand jury testimony that he “did not see one with her.” Evans also had conflicting testimony about the dog, saying once he could see it nipping at his tires and the next time, that he couldn’t see its head. Which of these stories was the truth, Spence asked.
“I believe I was telling the truth in both instances.”
As the witnesses paraded through, the rancor increased between Spence and the prosecutors. At one point, Spence asked for a meeting away from the jury to complain about the government’s presentation of evidence, which he said was “kind of like a sideways lizard on about two legs.
“I want to cry and moan and that sort of thing for a little while, Judge, but it would be better for me to do it outside the presence of the jury,” Spence said.
“But probably not as effective,” Lodge shot back.
The government’s case shifted to a string of people who’d come in contact with the Weavers during their eighteen-month holdout in the cabin, witnesses who testified that Vicki or the children would meet them at the base of the driveway with guns and that the family talked often about Jewish conspiracies and the evil federal government.
“He said if they came to take him, he’d die fighting,” said George Torrence, one of Weaver’s neighbors.
But on cross-examination by Spence, Torrence said he’d been invited in for cookies and water and that the family seemed very tight-knit, clean, and well fed. They never actually pointed any guns at him, Torrence said. They were polite, and Striker wasn’t vicious, just noisy. He said Randy told him he didn’t like the German kind of Nazis, but that they had some pretty good ideas.
Next, prosecutors called Randy’s friend from the Aryan Nations, Rodney Willey, to testify about the family’s resolve to fight the government and the long vigil in which they’d all agreed not to surrender.
But Willey—the big, furry electronics worker—was a boon to the defense. He described Vicki in such warm terms, his nose turned red, and he started crying. She was sweet and lovable, he said, a woman in charge of day-to-day life. “She had the respect of the entire family; they never doubted her authority.
“Her fear was that the government would remove her children from her presence and distribute them in the welfare system and she would never see her family again. She said she couldn’t live with that.”
Spence drew Willey’s testimony out slowly and tenderly. Willey described Sam as a history buff who had memorized the Constitution and the names of all the presidents. He and Striker were like the boy and dog from the Disney movie Old Yeller, Willey said. And Sara! She was like a carbon copy of Vicki. “In the absence of Randy and Vicki, she could handle any situation.”
But his most compelling description was of Vicki and Randy together. “A love story,” Willey called it. “Every time I seen ‘em together, they were holding hands. They often embraced each other, and they never argued or fought.”
At the defense table, Kevin Harris wiped at his tears.
Howen tried to take back the momentum, asking about some of Sara’s poetry, which he implied was racist. And he reminded the jury that there was someone whose name hadn’t been mentioned for weeks. “You talked about a number of the family members here,” Howen said to Willey. “What can you say about William Degan?” Nothing, Willey said.
Bill Grider was next—one of the strangest and most hostile prosecution witnesses ever called in any trial. When the bailiff asked if he solemnly swore to tell the truth, Grider answered, “My yeas will be yeas and my nays will be nays.”
Howen started in on Grider, hoping to get him to confirm that Randy and Vicki were set on having a gun battle with federal officers. But he also hoped that by having Grider testify, the jury could understand what kind of people these separatists were, what kind of man Randy was. Grider glared at the prosecutor and seemed so unwilling to cooperate, he was nearly worthless as a witness. He said he loved Randy and never threatened to kill him. Most of his answers were so cockeyed, the jury didn’t know what to make of them.
Trying to establish Grider’s ties to the Aryan Nations, Howen asked if he had become associated with any groups in northern Idaho.
“Well, I played softball for Green’s Cleaners.”
Next were witnesses from Iowa—the old Bible Study members Shannon Brasher and Vaughn Trueman and the newspaper reporter who’d written the story about the “300-yard kill zone.” Brasher and Trueman seemed embarrassed to have to testify against their old friend, and they spoke warmly about Randy and Vicki. Yeah, they said, the Weavers believed the world was going to end.
Then came former Idaho friends Terry Kinnison and Sam Wohali. Along with Ruth Rau, their testimony was more damaging—describing Weaver’s racist views and wild, confrontational behavior—but defense attorneys attacked their stories, too. The government had set up the Raus’ remote phone line for free. Kinnison, they pointed out, tried to get the FBI to investigate Weaver way back in 1985 and had a land dispute with him.
Another government witness was Mike Weland, the weekly newspaper reporter who’d interviewed the Weaver family. He described a spotless house and a friendly family. He said they weren’t really threatening, and that he was impressed by their closeness. Also a part-time police officer, Weland said he talked to the FBI after the standoff began and told them that Vicki Weaver was the strength of the family and that they needed to separate her and Randy to end the standoff. The next day, Vicki was killed.
Even with the trial going so well, Spence complained to Judge Lodge that the jury was being unfairly prejudiced by repetitive testimony about Weaver’s beliefs.
On May 18, after twenty days of testimony and constant bickering between the lawyers, the weary judge told Spence he was wrong: “To date, about seventy-five percent of the witnesses called by the government have been favorable to the defense.”
IT WASN’T RIGHT to hang all the Weaver’s guns on a Peg-Board, Spence argued. “It’s a trophy board: ‘Look at all the weapons we got from this poor jerk’s house, he must be an evil man.’”
Instead, they brought in the guns on a handcart that creaked under the weight and then laid them out on the floor: six pistols, six rifles, and two shotguns. There were 4,500 rounds of ammunition. Two of the 30.06 rifles were loaded with armor-piercing bullets.
But this was an Idaho jury and most of the twelve were comfortable with the guns as they were passed through the jury box. Earlier, during the questioning of thirty-six potential jurors, one of the questions had been, “Do you own guns?” Nearly every hand had gone up.
Next, prosecutors played the surveillance videos of the Weaver family, hoping to show how they responded with guns to strangers and were almost always armed. With 120 hours of video, the judge allowed each side to choose some representative moments to play for the jury—the prosecution’s tape showing armed children running out to the rocks and Randy walking around with a rifle, the defense tape showing kids riding their bikes and playing with dogs. When both sides agreed to two minor points—including fast-forwarding the tape past Randy Weaver urinating in the woods—the judge was shocked.
“We’re getting off to an awful good start here,” he said. “It really worries me, two agreements in a row.”
The videotapes were shot from almost a mile away, and the people seemed ridiculously small, living their lives out on that rocky knob, tying up the dog, checking the springhouse, running around with guns. Arthur Roderick narrated the tapes—”I think that’s Sara down in the lower right-hand corner; no, I think it’s Rachel.” They played two hours of tapes, and Kevin Harris couldn’t take his eyes off the pictures of the ridge. Randy wouldn’t watch at all, until the end, and even then, he turned his head away whenever Vicki or Sam was on screen.
The attorneys watched the jury to see how they reacted to ten-year-old Rachel carrying rifles under both arms. Some of them seemed bothered. Roderick testified about how often the Weavers were seen on camera with guns, for instance, Sam—thirteen when the video was shot—carried a gun 84 percent of the time.
Spence stood up to cross-examine Roderick. “What percentage of the time did this little boy go out and shoot his BB gun?”
“I don’t know,” Roderick answered.
“What percentage of the time did Old Yeller wag his tail?”
“I have no idea,” the witness said.
The guns and videotapes seemed effective, and Roderick’s early testimony was strong. He was handsome and competent, a contrast to the bumbling of government workers who had come before. Even the defense attorneys agreed: this was a guy you wanted to believe. From the beginning, they had seen him as one of the most dangerous witnesses against them. But every day they became more confident. As the trial entered its seventh week, the defense lawyers were even ready for Art Roderick.
AN UNMISTAKABLE GLOW seeps from a trial lawyer whose case is going his way. The Weaver defense team watched witness after witness stand up and bolster their claim that the Weavers were pretty decent people set up by the government. They couldn’t have put on a much better defense than the prosecution’s case so far. As Nevin and Peterson grilled government witnesses and drew out testimony that further eroded the case against Weaver and Harris, Gerry Spence leaned forward on his big paws and bellowed, “Good! Good!” loud enough for the jury to hear, as if God himself were doing color commentary on the trial. The lawyers waited eagerly for their own turn at the government’s weak case, like kids standing in line to beat the candy out of the piñata.
Most days, the defense team had lunch delivered to the courthouse, where they laughed, joked, and eagerly suggested new strategies, since everything else seemed to work so well. Their personalities complemented one another perfectly: the reasoned, intelligent Nevin, the bulldog Peterson, and the grand old master, Spence, who lavished compliments on his unknown counterparts, once handing Matthews a note that read, “You saved my ass,” after his short, to-the-point cross-examination picked up a thread that Spence had missed in hours of wide-ranging questioning. Having worked with lawyers from all over the country, Spence said he’d take that group over any other. His son, an accomplished blues player, whipped out his harmonica and rifted during meetings as the attorneys eagerly asked, “Who’s next? Who’s next?” They read the witness list and jokingly fought over the chance to point out this witness’s inconsistent grand jury testimony or the existence of a certain report by that witness. During recesses, they did their best Ricky Ricardo impersonations, substituting Lucy’s name with that of the next witness. “Roderick? You got some e’splainin’ to do.”
There were pleasant surprises every day. When Tony Perez, Arthur Roderick’s boss at the U.S. Marshals Service headquarters, testified about Operation Northern Exposure, Peterson asked him if there was a plan to take care of the dogs.
Perez answered yes. He explained that part of their discussions of the dangers of the mission involved “taking the dogs out of the equation.”
So, Peterson asked again, there was a plan to take out the dogs?
“The plan?” Perez asked. “Yes.”
Lindquist tried to make it clear that when Perez said “take out” he meant to take the dogs out of the equation, not to necessarily kill Striker. “With regard to the terminology ‘take out,’ did you use that terminology with regard to the children?”
“Yes,” Perez said, “I did. It’s even in my notes.”
“Did you mean take the children out, meaning to kill the children?”
“Absolutely not,” Perez said. But the damage was done. There was a plan to do something with Striker. And it wasn’t likely they were going to find the dog a new home.
As the defense team worked on its theories of the case, there emerged a sort of continuum of what they each believed. On one end was the government acting malevolently, intentionally setting Randy Weaver up from the beginning because of his beliefs, then intentionally provoking the gunfight, then intentionally killing Vicki Weaver because they knew she was the strength of the family. On the other end of the continuum was the government screwing up. It also started with an ATF setup, but then said the marshals accidentally got into a gunfight after Roderick shot the dog and the FBI sniper took a poorly advised shot at Kevin Harris and never saw Vicki Weaver. In between were other possibilities, like the idea that Horiuchi saw Vicki Weaver but didn’t kill her on purpose.
Vicki’s death especially divided the defense attorneys, some of whom thought it was an accident. Spence said it was intentional and argued that the jury had to believe that, but Peterson thought they would be outraged enough by the rules of engagement and by an FBI sniper who fired wildly toward a cabin filled with children. Spence listened to suggestions from all the lawyers, and even though he was clearly the boss, it was a fairly democratic system.
Working with Spence sparked creativity in the other defense attorneys. It was like watching someone juggle, Nevin said. When he was done, you didn’t completely know how to do it, but you sure wanted to try. Many of Spence’s methods were similar to ideas the younger defense attorneys already used. Still, they studied how he drew attention away from his client to himself. He came into court in his suede Western coats (the open pockets stuffed full of pens and notes to himself), bolo ties, cowboy boots, and a ten-gallon Stetson hat that he ceremoniously set on the defense table every day. With his plain but powerful speech, he fairly cried out to the jury: “Look at me! I’m real, just like you are!” When he lost his belt, Spence cinched his pants up for days with cheap suspenders and then told the court when he’d finally bought a belt. Juries didn’t want to see some smooth lawyer, he reasoned; they wanted to see themselves.
The other defense attorneys adopted some of Spence’s strict trial regimen, exercising every day and getting plenty of sleep. They even tried some of his patented bean stew, the main staple of his trial diet. The beans gave Spence a resounding flatulence, which he shared with the deputy marshals who sat behind the defense table—Spence spinning in his chair, leaning back with that half-grin, “Sorry.” Even that was part of his persona. Real people fart.
Other lawyers might have great rapport with the judge or the other attorneys or the witnesses, but Spence was a jury man, always had been. Most times, his questions weren’t as much to the witness as they were to the jury: “Didn’t you hear that little boy say the last words that he spoke in his life, in a little high child’s voice—” He usually got 75 percent of the descriptive question in before he was interrupted by the objecting prosecutors.
Spence worked behind the scenes to make sure he was getting himself across to the jury in the best possible light. “Judge,” he offered one day. “May I have a second? … Judge, I feel pretty bad about a feeling I have that the jury thinks I’m dragging my feet or somehow delaying this trial. And Judge, the jury gets that impression. You jump on me—I’m sure I have it coming—but I was just feeling bad.”
Lodge agreed that he wanted the trial to speed up. “I think the government is going to have to be more selective on their witnesses, which are wasting a lot of time. There is a tiny bit of relevance, but the defense, in my opinion, is getting ten times more out of these witnesses than the government.”
“Judge, I agree with that,” Spence said, rocking back on the heels of his cowboy boots. “I want to tell a story. When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher would punish other people and punish me even though I—”
Lodge cut him off and said they needed to keep moving. That’s interesting, he said, “but it has nothing to do with the case.”
The judge was right. Despite the defense team’s glee, the most important part of the case was still to come—the shoot-out, the standoff, and Vicki Weaver’s death. Even with everything that had gone wrong, prosecutors still had time to convince the jury that Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver were cold, premeditated murderers.
But while the defense team was celebrating, Lindquist and Howen were grimly overworked—still wrestling with the uncooperative FBI and with defense lawyers whose rhetoric was twisting their case beyond recognition. As the trial progressed, the FBI agents began to notice that Howen just seemed to stare off into space at times. Even Lindquist began to worry about him. He was working all the time, and for the first time Lindquist could remember, Ron Howen was making mistakes.
WITH THE JURY OUT of the room, David Nevin addressed Judge Lodge. “Late yesterday afternoon, after the court concluded, the prosecuting attorney Mr. Howen came and provided me something that I think is—to call it important would be an understatement. It is pivotal. I think in many ways, the whole case turns on this information.”
Howen had failed to tell the defense attorneys about a witness he interviewed weeks earlier, a member of the Idaho State Police Critical Response Team named David Neal, one of the men who climbed Ruby Ridge and brought down the deputy marshals and Degan’s body. As they reached the marshals that night, Neal said, the first thing Roderick told him was, “I shot the dog.”
Howen said later he didn’t think Roderick meant he shot the dog first. But he took notes of the Neal interview and decided to call him as a witness anyway, to get it all out in the open. But later, he decided not to call Neal, and he forgot to tell the defense about him until now, a month into the trial and the day before Roderick was supposed to testify about the gunfight.
Nevin said he called Neal the night before, as soon as Howen told him about the interview. “It was Captain Neal’s distinct impression that Mr. Roderick told him that the first shooting which occurred, the first gunfire which occurred at the Y, was Mr. Roderick shooting the yellow dog Striker.”
Not surprisingly, Spence was even more outraged by the breach in discovery. “If Mr. Roderick fired the first shot and killed the dog, the fact that the boy returned the fire and then was absolutely massacred by Cooper and Degan, shot in the back as he ran home, establishes what [Randy Weaver] stated from the very beginning.”
The defense attorneys asked for a day off from testimony to go interview Neal further. At the same meeting, they said that Howen had also just given them an FBI report of an interview with Cooper in which he claimed to have seen Kevin Harris running down the road after firing at him. During his testimony a month before, Cooper had said it was Sam Weaver running down the road. Spence said they could have challenged his testimony with the FBI report. He said the writing was different in that report and another one that had been provided to the defense, and Spence suggested Cooper had written one of the reports himself.
“So what I’m trying to say is, we’re being ambushed,” Spence said. He called it “an obvious effort of the prosecution to cover up what we have claimed from the beginning was the murder of two people, and that cover-up is beginning to fall apart.”
Howen said an FBI agent had just found the notes in his drawer a couple of days before and that he had just received them. “I wish, Judge, that I had known about these notes. I did not know.” He offered to turn over his own notes from the Neal interview—which he wasn’t required to do—and to call Neal and help set up an interview for the defense.
Lindquist stepped in. “If Mr. Howen were any less of a man of integrity than he is, counsel would have never heard about the oral statement of Mr. Neal, yet they now know about it.”
Judge Lodge was angry at Spence for accusing a cover-up without any proof, but he expected that out of Spence. What he couldn’t understand was a good prosecutor like Howen failing to turn over material that was clearly covered by discovery rules.
“One thing we have always been proud of in Idaho is the camaraderie between the lawyers and the ethics of the lawyers,” Lodge said. “The court is very disturbed by what has happened here.
“The court has felt during this trial that there has been a lot of pressure on counsel.” Lodge said that every morning there were new filings on his desk, as if the two sides were working all night. “The court wants both sides to take stock of what has happened here and make doubly sure that this does not happen the rest of the trial.”
And with that, they broke for the Memorial Day weekend. But neither side got any rest. The prosecution had to try to resuscitate its case. And among other things, the defense had to resolve the Sara question.