TWENTY

WELL, HOW DO I look?”

She looked beautiful, of course, an olive green dress cinched in the back, her long black hair pulled up, except for two ringlets that were spun with baby’s breath and hung down either side of her face. She looked like Vicki. Julie and Keith Brown felt a tug as if this were their own daughter getting ready for the junior prom.

Sara Weaver was going to the prom. Julie still couldn’t believe it. That was how far these girls had come, how hard they’d worked to adjust. The difference had struck Julie earlier that day, as she watched her niece at the florist, looking for a boutonniere to pin on her date. Suddenly, she spotted him across the flower shop, looking at corsages, and she ducked, laughing and hiding in the greenhouse until he was gone.

Now, thirty minutes before he came to pick her up, Sara was still fidgety in that charming, teenage way. She preened in the mirror until her girlfriend showed up and decided Sara’s dress was all wrong, raced home, and came back with another one—short, black, and sheer. Sara fired back up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom, changed, and came back into the living room. “Well?”

Julie and Keith sat back on the couch with the thoughts of any anxious parents before a date (Will she have fun? Is she ready? Is he nice?). Yeah, that dress looked even better. A few minutes later, her date showed up, and Sara Weaver left for the prom.

It hadn’t always gone so well. Sara and Rachel arrived in Iowa angry and bitter. For the first month, they lived in Fort Dodge, on the farm with Grandpa David and Grandma Jeane. But the Jordison house was so small, and the girls needed so much attention, it just didn’t work out. Randy’s family helped out, but Sara and Rachel were miserable in the flat heartland, restless so far from their father. Sara stayed up late most nights, talking to supporters on the telephone and wishing she could do something, anything to help her father. Rachel looked for mountains to hike and trout streams to fish, but her first trip to the Des Moines River only produced a sucker, an unclean and unholy animal if ever there was one. In October, Sara dragged her younger sisters to Colorado to live near the mountains with Randy’s nephew. All through their tough transition, Julie and Keith watched the girls from a distance and knew they belonged in Des Moines, with them. But Sara, especially, was so full of anger, they weren’t going to force the issue. Even Randy wanted the girls to live with Keith and Julie. But Sara and Rachel knew what awaited them at the Browns’ house in Des Moines. School.

They weren’t in Colorado a week before Sara called Keith, who was at the recording studio he managed. They were uncomfortable with Randy’s nephew and his wife, and they wanted to come home, Sara confided. “Can you come get us?”

The girls were quiet on the way back to Iowa, and Keith told them it was time to decide where they were going to live.

Rachel, who had just turned eleven, looked up at her uncle. “I kind of want to live with you and Aunt Julie.”

“Well, if you live with us, you have to go to school,” Keith said.

Rachel’s eyes flared. “But if you go to school, you’ll get AIDS.”

This is not going to be easy, Keith thought.

At the Browns’ house, set back from a suburban street just outside Des Moines, Julie hugged the girls and said they could stay, but they had to follow a strict routine.

“That’s what I want,” Sara said.

Julie and Keith talked about it privately and wondered if it would be fair on their own two girls—Emily, who was fourteen, and Kelsey, who was four. Keith was hesitant at first and pointed out there was a chance Randy would spend the rest of his life in prison and they would have the girls forever.

Almost immediately, the girls convinced him it was the right thing. Perhaps he expected angry, raving Aryan children. Instead, they were just girls, looking for someplace to belong. Keith could see how hard the girls were working to adjust to Iowa and how little their upbringing had prepared them for civilization.

The girls were in Des Moines only a few weeks when Keith took them to a nearby mall and watched Rachel ride the escalator up and down three times. She’d never seen one before. Another time, he went to an army/navy surplus store, and Sara walked along the aisles, impressing the store owner by naming all the guns.

After resenting their arrival at first, Keith now wished he could make them feel more welcome. So, he joked, the family would no longer be the Browns or Weavers. They were “the Beavers.” It stuck.

The girls started school in November, horrified at first about what might happen to them, and ready to run at the first sign of brainwashing.

“I’m not going to learn anything there,” Sara insisted. The first few afternoons, she came home frustrated, saying she had nothing in common with the people she was meeting. She still wouldn’t see a psychologist or a counselor, and so Keith and Julie encouraged her to deal with it her own way—through poetry. She wrote simple, rhyming verse, stark poems about the mountains and about missing her brother and mom.

School immediately improved for Sara. She got As on her first report card and was student-of-the-month in February. She made quick friends—a slew of nonconformist, mostly liberal students who took her to poetry readings at Java Joe’s, a downtown brick coffeehouse with eighteen-foot ceilings, burlap coffee bags hanging from the walls, and a single stool on a small stage where one night Sara stood up and read her poetry.

She was amazed at the first movie she saw—The Last of the Mohicans. It was incredible! She got a job at the Cineplex in the nearby mall and went to movies whenever she had the chance. Posters of actors Brad Pitt and Brandon Lee hung in her bedroom, where she listened to tapes of Aerosmith and Nirvana. Her favorite movie was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, about a quirky young man who falls in love with a girl passing through his small town. The boy wants to go off with her, but he can’t leave because he is saddled with a mentally retarded brother and his horribly obese mother. Sara even got to meet the author of Gilbert Grape at a writing conference. She began to think that’s what she wanted to be—a writer.

Rachel was getting Bs at her elementary school and making plenty of new friends, but she seemed easily betrayed, coming home from school sometimes and proclaiming yesterday’s best friend “stupid.” Raised without much of anything, she hoarded candy and toys in her room and looked hurt every time she had to share something. She did talk to a school counselor, eating lunch in the counselor’s office every day and refusing to go to the cafeteria. She wouldn’t say why she hated the cafeteria so much.

That spring, Julie figured it out. She and Rachel were on the campus of Drake University one day when they wandered over to the cafeteria. Julie could see that Rachel was too terrified to eat there. It was the noise. Rachel had never heard anything like the echo of assembly-line eating, the clang of trays and silverware in a school cafeteria. To a girl who’d eaten every meal at the kitchen table or on a rock overlooking the forest, it was deafening.

Elisheba was a darling, active baby, with blondish hair and big eyes that tried to take in the world. Vicki had held her during every meal, and so she was a clinger, hanging on to Julie’s hip. She took to calling Julie “Mama” almost from the beginning and cried whenever her aunt tried to leave the room.

“No,” Julie said tenderly. “It’s Aunt Julie.”

By spring, the Browns were amazed by all the girls’ progress and tired from their own effort. There were plenty of fights—over eating, cleaning their rooms, and the inevitable arguments over white separatism. Sara made it clear from the beginning that they wouldn’t change their core beliefs, and Julie and Keith said that was fine. Conspiracy newspapers and newsletters came to the house, and Sara pored over the Bible at night and talked on the telephone with skinheads, especially David “Spider” Cooper, who’d gotten to know Sara after she came down from the cabin.

As she and Keith debated how to handle Sara’s friendship with David, Julie thought often of Vicki, and she vowed not to drive Sara off the same edge where Vicki had gone. Gingerly, she and Keith tried to show Sara their lifestyle but were careful not to infringe on her beliefs. Whenever it was possible, they showed the girls that some of what Vicki had taught them simply wasn’t true. Through the girls, they found out just how far Vicki’s beliefs had gone—alongside the dark fear of hospitals, schools, and churches was an all-encompassing theory of the world that included not just Yahweh and the Queen of Babylon, Jews, niggers and Aryans, but also space aliens and angels.

The Weaver story died down in the mainstream media, but right-wing newspapers kept writing about it, and money came in from all over the country. Crumpled twenty-five-dollar money orders arrived in the mail alongside scribbled checks for ten bucks. Bo Gritz alone raised thousand of dollars for the girls. He and Jack McLamb stayed in touch—Bo calling once just to try talking Keith and Julie out of putting the girls in public school. Every time the shy McLamb saw the girls, he gave them a hug and pressed a fifty-dollar bill into their hands, even though the family knew he wasn’t well-off himself. So much money came in to the trust fund and Randy’s defense fund (a total of $55,000 over two years), the Browns hired an attorney to manage the girls’ portion, only allowing them to spend some of it on trips to see their father and other expenses related to the case. Sara wrote a thank-you note (“May our creator bless you”) for each donation, until that became overwhelming and then she just wrote “Thank you” on the checks themselves, figuring they’d be sent back to the people who donated.

Once, a check for $800 arrived in the mail from the Ku Klux Klan. At Julie’s urging, the old leftist Keith Brown—his hair still reaching his collar—was learning to be tolerant of intolerant beliefs. But even handling a donation from the KKK was more than he could stomach.

“We’re sending it back!” he told Sara, who didn’t argue.

“If you send it back,” Julie reasoned, “they’ll just use it to burn a cross or something.” They thought about sending it to the United Negro College Fund but didn’t know how the group would feel about getting a check from the KKK. The Browns didn’t spend any of the donated money on themselves, but in this case, they made an exception. They were moving into a bigger house, so they decided to use the money to hire a moving truck. Keith took some solace in knowing that the KKK had paid to move an old sixties liberal and his family across town.

There were Asian families in the Brown’s new neighborhood and people of all sorts of ethnic and racial backgrounds who performed at Keith’s studio. One of Rachel’s close friends was an Asian girl from the neighborhood. The girls seemed tolerant of everyone, and race was rarely an issue.

Anger and fear, however, were never far from the surface.

That spring, Sara couldn’t take her eyes off the television as she watched accounts of the ATF raid and the FBI siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. They were doing it again! Her heart was in her throat as she watched the horrible video of the compound burning down, and she raged about the murderous government. For the first time in months, Keith and Julie saw the same angry young woman who’d first come to Iowa.

“How do I know you’re even really my uncle?” Rachel asked one day, during an argument over whether or not Rachel had to mind Keith. It really seemed to worry Rachel, and she asked Julie the same question while she had her arms full of Elisheba and was trying to cook dinner after a long day at work.

Randy helped convince her. He called often from jail and was always supportive of Keith and Julie. He’d tell the girls to mind if they were being troublesome and he deferred to the Browns on decisions like school.

The girls were becoming more and more relaxed, less and less political. The radical-right newspapers usually went into the garbage unopened now, and Sara was more eager to talk about gardening or movies than she was religion or race.

When a sidewalk was poured next to the Browns’ new house, Keith and Julie sent the kids out to scratch their names in the cement. Of course, Sara’d never done that before, and she didn’t trace small initials in some corner of the sidewalk. Her aunt and uncle smiled when they saw that she’d written in huge, block letters: “The Beavers.”

SHE WAS THE PERFECT WITNESS. That was Gerry Spence’s side of the argument as he debated Chuck Peterson over the Sara question: Should they put her on the stand? In a way, the question mirrored the larger question of whether they should put on a defense at all.

Peterson had interviewed Sara Weaver way back in October, and her story had been so compelling and had rung so true, it helped erase any doubts he had about Randy. But putting Sara on the stand was just too dangerous, especially when the case was already going their way. Why take a chance?

But she had such a great story to tell, Spence argued. And if anyone knew great stories, it was Gerry Spence. Who could look that cute young girl in the eye and think she was telling anything but God’s own truth?

Over the Memorial Day weekend—while David Nevin interviewed the Idaho state policeman who’d been dropped in their laps—Peterson and his wife flew to Spence’s house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a town alone in beauty and Western trendiness: the London Fog and Ralph Lauren outlets not far from Spence’s garrison-style office—with its garish eagle sculpture screaming from the roof.

The girls flew to Wyoming, too, just a couple of weeks after the prom.

They’d been to Spence’s sprawling mansion—like a lodge with its exposed timbers and stone fireplaces—and were uncomfortable being in what was essentially a huge cabin. During their first visit, they were still offended by images, and every wall seemed to hold a ceremonial mask or one of Spence’s vivid paintings. The creepiest one was a self-portrait of Spence without a shirt on, spread out Christ-like, his flesh being torn by birds. Every television in the house was tuned to CNN, and the girls weren’t allowed to change the channel. Finally, they were led into a high-ceilinged room with huge rocks built into the walls and a big television where they were allowed to watch a movie. Spence called it the media room. But the media room was kind of spooky itself, like a cave. Rachel entertained herself by trying to catch a mouse that was squeaking in the basement.

One morning that weekend, Spence knocked on the door to one of the guest rooms and told Peterson to get up, they had work to do. It was 5:00 a.m. For the first three hours, they kicked around ideas for closing arguments, and then they began debating whether to put Sara on the stand. They were winning, Spence argued. She would be the knockout. They could get a very compelling story in front of the jury without having their client testify. And if the prosecutors got tough with her, it would look as if they were picking on a kid. She was attractive and smart, and most of all, she was telling the truth. The truth. Spence liked that. Big deal, Peterson said. They had nothing to gain and everything to lose.

In the afternoon, they got Nevin on the phone and asked his opinion. The attorneys had all become so good at arguing with one another and playing devil’s advocate, it was hard to know if everyone believed the side they were spinning. But Nevin finally agreed with Spence. They should put her on.

“You guys are nuts,” Peterson said. “Bring her up here and let me cross-examine her for ten minutes.”

They brought Sara up to the second-floor office, and Spence told her he wanted to hear her testimony. Sara laid out the whole terrible story—from hearing the dog bark to seeing her mother dead—just like Spence said she would. It was an unnerving story to be sure, and she wore honorably and sadly the pain her family had been put through.

Then Peterson took over, playing the part of prosecutor. “You wore a swastika as part of your everyday existence, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“You think a swastika is a pretty good thing to wear, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you steal a pipe from your neighbors?”

“Yes.”

“Did you think it was okay to march in front of the Raus’ house and call their kids niggers?”

“Yes.”

After a few minutes of riddling her with harsh questions, Peterson turned to Spence. “I’m not even Gerry Spence, and I can do this,” Peterson said. “Don’t you think Howen or Lindquist can do this?”

In the mock witness chair, Sara wiped at her tears. Julie Brown took her out of the room, and the lawyers were quiet after she was gone. They didn’t have to say anything. They could never put her on the stand. She was just too damn honest.

“I HEARD A SHOT to my left,” Arthur Roderick testified. “I knew it was a heavy caliber weapon…. The dog just stopped. He froze to look back where the sound was coming from.”

“What happened next?” Lindquist asked.

“I shot the dog.”

“Why did you shoot the dog?” the prosecutor asked.

“A couple of reasons.” Roderick said the dog had looked back at him, like it might attack. “But mainly, that dog had just led Kevin Harris and Samuel Weaver a half-mile … to right where we were at. I was afraid if we did get into the woods and we continued down that trail, that dog would keep alerting and lead them right to us.”

If anyone could pull off that story, David Nevin figured, it was Arthur Roderick. During his second stint in the witness chair, Roderick maintained the mystique of a law officer, square-jawed, handsome, intelligent, the kind of guy who inspired calm: “I’m glad he’s out there protecting me.”

He answered defense attorneys with such disdain, it fired from his dark eyes and dripped from his Boston accent. “That’s what I said, Counselah.”

But by May 24, Nevin was in full battle mode, reacting to whatever the government threw up there. He’s lying, Nevin thought. That’s all. He’s just lying. Nevin’s job was to prick holes in Roderick’s testimony, and no matter how small the holes were, Spence would try to crawl right through them. And so Nevin asked Roderick if he realized the first shot he’d heard was the beginning of a firefight.

“Yes.”

“And you paused at that time to shoot the dog?” Nevin asked, enough disbelief to show the jury something he’d contemplated during his trip to Randy Weaver’s cabin: Who would pause to shoot a retreating dog in the middle of a gunfight?

There comes a time when every attorney has piled the bricks as high as they’ll go and just has to ask, “Is this a house?” So, after subtly tracing around the question, Nevin got right to it—again and again. If he could show that Roderick shot the dog first, then the rest of Kevin’s story fell into place—Sammy yelling “You shot my dog, you son of a bitch,” and opening fire on Roderick; Degan firing to protect Roderick, and Kevin firing to protect Sammy. Self-defense.

“In fact, sir,” Nevin said, “you shot the dog first, didn’t you?”

“No. You have heard my testimony.” Roderick was steady and calm, condescending. “No, I did not shoot the dog first.”

Nevin asked about the Idaho state policeman’s interview with Roderick, in which Roderick told him he shot the dog.

“I just started telling him what happened, which road was here, which road was there, and I said, ‘Watch out, there’s a dead dog up the trail there,’ and then he asked me a question, ‘How did Degan get shot?’ And I told him.”

“Didn’t you tell Captain Neal that you shot the dog first?”

“No,” Roderick said. “I didn’t say that I shot the dog first…. I don’t know how many times I’ve got to answer this question.”

Of course, television lawyers are the only ones who ever break a witness with a direct question like that, but as Nevin sat down, he hoped he’d given the jury enough doubts about Roderick’s story. Because Roderick himself wasn’t about to crack.

Spence took a shot, but it quickly dissolved into an Abbott and Costello routine between a Boston cop and a country lawyer.

“You told the ladies and gentlemen of the jury that you came sneaking out there in the middle of the night—”

“I did not say anything about sneaking,” Roderick said.

Glasses hung from a masking-taped strap around Spence’s neck, and he set them on the bridge of his nose and looked down at the witness. “You did sneak, didn’t you?”

“What do you call sneaking? You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“Sneak,” Spence said, shuffling for a dictionary, “to go stealthily or furtively.”

“Are you asking me what I said or what you said? I did not say I was sneaking. You said I’m sneaking.”

“Now don’t get excited.”

“I’m not getting excited. I’m just explaining to you what your question was.”

“You asked me, didn’t you?” Spence tried. “Or have you forgotten? You asked me what I meant by sneak.”

“Correct, but I did not say that.”

“I didn’t ask you that,” Spence said.

“Yes, you did.”

Spence chased the witness for a couple of hours like that, hurdling Lindquist’s constant objections.

“I’m ready to go home,” Spence said finally.

They had one more shot at Roderick the next day. He and Cooper had drawn diagrams of their positions at the Y, supposedly independent of each other. But when Nevin copied one of the drawings onto a seventy-five-cent transparency, then lined the two drawings up, they were nearly identical. “It must have been magic” that they drew the exact same thing independently, Spence said to Roderick on the twenty-fifth day of testimony.

Art Roderick was tired of watching his story picked over by these lawyers, who made him lay out his story over and over in different ways and then tried to find inconsistencies between the different versions. “The truth is the truth,” he said finally.

Spence paused long enough for jurors to think about every discrepancy in the government’s case so far. “Yes,” he said finally, and then he paused some more, in case anyone had missed it. In his deepest, most solemn voice, he finished. “It is.”

Frank Norris was the last deputy marshal to testify and the defense’s best chance to prove Roderick and Cooper were wrong. Throughout the trial, defense attorneys had been building toward Norris’s testimony, trying to paint him as an outsider among a group of old friends.

Howen led Norris through the direct testimony, again tripping his own land mine rather than leave it for the defense. What was the first shot he heard that day, Howen asked.

Norris knew it was coming. All the other deputy marshals had testified that it was a heavy-caliber shot, but they all sounded alike to Norris, and he had told the same story since the first day. He told it again now. “I thought it sounded like a two-twenty-three.”

Ellie Matthews took just a few minutes for his cross-examination, establishing that Norris told FBI agents it was the “distinctive sound of a two-twenty-three,” the guns the marshals and Samuel Weaver were carrying, and not the 30.06 that Kevin Harris used to kill Degan.

Spence was next. “So what you heard would be consistent with Mr. Roderick shooting the dog, followed by two shots, also of a two-twenty-three, consistent with Sammy, when he hollered, ‘You son of a bitch! You killed my dog!’ and fired two shots at Mr. Roderick. That’s all consistent with what you heard, isn’t it?”

Howen objected. But Spence knew the jury had gotten it. He asked only a couple of dozen more questions, managing to squeeze the words “distinctive sound of a two-twenty-three” into five of them. When he was done, Spence said, “Thank you, Mr. Norris.” And he meant it.

COULD IT GET WORSE? Each time it seemed Ron Howen made some progress, the muscular prosecutor was forced to apologize for evidence problems or for a witness he’d forgotten. On May 25, he had especially sour news. A bullet the government wanted to enter into evidence had apparently been picked up by an FBI agent below Ruby Ridge, then placed back in about the same place later, and photographed.

Spence and Nevin had been ridiculing the bullet—they called it the “magic bullet”—from the beginning. It was in almost-pristine condition, unlike the other bullets recovered from the scene of the shoot-out, which had slammed into trees or rocks, bending and twisting the bullets. It was an important piece of evidence because it matched Sara’s.223 rifle, and the government might have tried to show that it proved other family members fired at the Y. But at least two searches of the crime scene with a metal detector had failed to turn up the bullet, and it wasn’t found until the last day of the standoff. Defense attorneys argued from the beginning that it was planted. Now, they said, there was proof.

“I have been raising all kinds of unprecedented Cain in this case about the magic bullet,” Spence railed. “Today we are told that the photos [of the bullet] we were given were reconstructed photos!”

More evidence came in doubt that afternoon, when an FBI agent testified that he’d mapped the scene without using triangulation—the standard method of marking evidence by measuring the distance from two fixed points. Because of the thick brush, the FBI agent had measured the distance from only one tree or one rock and could only really fix evidence from one direction.

Spence asked for precise distances between shell casings at the Y. The FBI agent said he could only give estimates.

“Nobody knows today where anything was?” Spence asked.

“Generally,” the agent said, “that’s the way it was.”

Other FBI agents testified that evidence was lost or misplaced. They were all minor errors that might have gone unnoticed in any other case, but this wasn’t any other case. In some ways, it had become The People vs. the U.S. Government. And the most critical testimony in that case was still coming. The first part had asked: Was Randy a gun dealer and neo-Nazi; the second: Who shot first; and now the trial moved into its final question: Why was Vicki Weaver killed.

DUKE SMITH KNEW. The associate director for operations in the U.S. Marshals Service, Smith had been on the jet with the FBI’s Richard Rogers when the rules of engagement were devised and was in the helicopter that Lon Horiuchi said he was protecting when he shot Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris and killed Vicki.

Matthews blistered Smith as much as his laid-back personality would allow. “Isn’t it true, Mr. Smith, that the so-called rules of engagement were primarily established because the United States marshal was dead?”

“No, sir.”

“There was no ongoing firefight, was there, when you arrived in Idaho?”

“That seems to be the case,” Smith said.

The rules established that lethal force should be used against any adult with a weapon. Matthews pointed out that the marshals’ own statistics showed the Weavers almost never left the cabin without guns. “Weren’t you aware that your actions virtually guaranteed snipers shooting somebody on that hill?”

Smith said the rules were just guidelines.

Spence took his turn at the piñata. “You made the rules of engagement before you even talked to the men that were there. Isn’t that true?”

“That’s true.”

Spence asked his questions incredulously, with a how-could-you-be-so-stupid tone that burned guys like Smith, who weren’t used to having their authority questioned. “After a year and a half of no confrontations, no injuries, nobody pointing a gun at anybody,” Spence asked, “didn’t you want to know at the time you were making your rules of engagement what had happened to precipitate a sudden explosion like this?”

Smith’s biggest blow to the prosecution was his description of his ride in the helicopter, which Horiuchi said he heard just before he began firing. Smith traced on a model their low path, which took the helicopter south and west of the cabin, most likely out of rifle range and with only a quick glimpse of the cabin itself. Horiuchi had testified the helicopter was behind him, north of the cabin. If Smith was right, then Horiuchi was protecting a helicopter that wasn’t there.

The defense attorneys asked if the helicopter had been assaulted or hindered in any way (the exact wording of the charge against Weaver and Harris). Smith had to admit that no, in his opinion, it hadn’t been. In fact, he admitted, it wasn’t even there.

“Did the helicopter you were riding in ever come behind those snipers over here?” Matthews asked.

“I don’t believe so.”

RICHARD ROGERS FINISHED the first half of his testimony, and David Nevin leaned toward a couple of reporters and said, “I don’t know about you guys, but if there’s a fire, I’m following him out of here.”

The commander of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, Rogers was also the author of the rules of engagement. He was tough and sculpted in a perfectly fitted blue suit, an Irish-looking guy aging better than most of his contemporaries, with thinning hair but a gaze that looked like it could bore holes in younger agents. He answered every question with confidence, a twenty-two-year FBI agent who knew he was in the right.

Lindquist asked him if the modified rules of engagement were a mandate for snipers to shoot any armed adult.

“Absolutely not,” Rogers said. “It’s giving them the tools to be able to protect themselves.”

Spence took the defense’s first crack at Rogers. “The people that get on these [hostage rescue] teams are people who know they are going to be trained to shoot other human beings, aren’t they?”

“Well, that’s certainly part of it.”

“And they know when they volunteer that they may have to kill a citizen?” Spence asked.

“Or a terrorist.”

“Now listen,” Spence said in the challenging voice he saved for people of authority. “We’re going to be here a long time. Just answer my question, and we’ll get along.” Spence explored his theory that the snipers had been ordered to kill Vicki Weaver. “Would you expect [your snipers] to hit somebody in the head every time at two hundred yards with a ten-power scope?

“If they’re not moving,” Rogers answered. But he insisted her death was an accident and that they didn’t know about it until almost a week later.

“Would there be any reason why, if Mr. Weaver was standing next to the front door of his home and screaming at the top of his lungs, that nobody could hear him cry out that his wife had been killed?”

“Well, sir, clearly it didn’t happen.”

Rogers was up again the next day and Spence dove right in, asking about federal agents’ fears of booby traps on Ruby Ridge. “If there were booby traps,” Spence said, “the children and the dog and the chickens and all the rest running around the yard must have a very good knowledge of where they are, so they [didn’t] step on them.”

The rules of engagement were next. “So you knew that under these rules of engagement, a true ambush had been set up by the federal government, isn’t that true?”

“Of course not,” Rogers answered.

“Did you use that rule of engagement at Waco?”

Finally, even the unflappable Rogers was fired up by Spence. He’d led the HRT’s response to the standoff with the Branch Davidians also, and at Spence’s mention of that case, Rogers flushed red. “Judge, you know, I resent the implication that man has made concerning Waco.” He spun back to Spence. “Are you aware of the fact that no shots were fired at Waco?”

Ellie Matthews asked if Rogers ever considered the laws of the state of Idaho.

“In what regard, sir?”

“In establishing your rules of engagement,” Matthews said.

“No, sir. I don’t operate under state law. I operate under federal law, which supersedes state law.” The answer went over like a bomb in a courtroom and a jury box filled with Idaho citizens.

“MR. LON HORIUCHI.”

The muscle came in first, four buffed, flat-topped FBI agents in boxy suits, eyes shifting immediately to the conspiracy theorists in the back rows of the courtroom. There were already a half-dozen deputy marshals inside, but with the trouble between the two agencies, no one was surprised the FBI provided its own security. The burly agents had been pacing the halls of the federal building since Rogers first testified, but they were even more visible with Horiuchi’s appearance. A neo-Nazi group had published a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster featuring Horiuchi, and the FBI was keeping him in a safe house in Boise during his testimony.

Spence objected to the FBI agents, saying the jury might interpret them as a sign that Randy and Kevin were dangerous. “They sit with Uzis under their arms…. Their presence is very, very conspicuous. They look mean. They don’t smile. They stand around the hallway so you can’t walk through the hallway.”

Kevin and Randy glared openly at Horiuchi as he sat down in the witness chair. Behind Horiuchi, agents set up the heavy, two-plank door from the Weaver cabin, with its little windows on top, covered by curtains, the bullet hole visible from anywhere in the courtroom. The crude door looked strange so far from Ruby Ridge, here in the middle of a courtroom in the middle of a city. Kevin and Randy fidgeted and bounced their knees as if they might leap over the defense table at any time. The FBI sniper never seemed to look at them.

Every inch a soldier, Lon Horiuchi said “sir” every time he answered a question. He testified evenly, without a hint of emotion, that he heard a helicopter and thought Kevin Harris was moving to a position to shoot at the helicopter. He said he was trying to kill Kevin Harris when he wounded Randy Weaver. He was also trying to kill Kevin Harris when he killed Vicki Weaver. Horiuchi pointed to a hole in the door’s curtain, which corresponded with the hole in the window as proof that the curtains were pulled and that Horiuchi couldn’t see Vicki Weaver when he fired.

“Did you intend to shoot her?” Lindquist asked.

“No, sir.”

A lot of guns had passed through the courtroom over the previous thirty days, but none like this one. Lon Horiuchi’s sniper rifle was camouflage-painted and bigger than anything they’d seen, with an extra-thick barrel and a huge scope on top, a bipod screwed to the bottom of the gun.

“This is the gun you shot Mrs. Weaver with and Mr. Weaver with and Mr. Harris with,” Gerry Spence asked, “isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

Spence was almost as professional as Horiuchi as he asked the sniper about every detail of the rifle, the orders he was given, and the kind of bullets he used. There was no playful banter with this witness, fewer loaded questions.

On Horiuchi’s second day on the stand, Spence asked him about the rules of engagement, specifically how they related to the dogs, which weren’t to be shot unless they threatened FBI agents. The Weavers, meanwhile, could be shot just by coming outside with weapons.

“From your standpoint, the dog had better rights than the human?”

Lindquist objected.

There were no doubts about Gerry Spence’s sincerity during his seething cross-examination, a string of knifing questions that left the row of reporters with dry mouths. Horiuchi sat upright, staring straight ahead, answering like a machine. Usually a blur of whispered comings and goings, the courtroom was still.

“You intended to kill both [Kevin and Randy], didn’t you?”

“Sir, if they came out all at one time, we were intending to take them all out at one time, versus waiting for one individual to come out and take him piecemeal. Our normal procedures are whenever you have more than one subject, you try to take them out one at a time.”

Spence laid out his own theory. The snipers knew that the armored personnel carriers would bring the Weavers out into the open. They had plenty of documentation from the marshals about what happened when the Weavers heard a vehicle on their road. The snipers got into position and waited for the family to come out, so they could gun them down. “You testified yesterday the reason you didn’t shoot them [at first] is because you hadn’t expected them to come into sight, that they surprised you?” Spence asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Spence cocked his head. “I take it that had you known they were going to be in that position, had you been ready, you would have shot at that point.”

“Probably not, sir.”

“Well, I’m confused. You tell me the reason you didn’t shoot is because they surprised you.”

The prosecution objected, but Spence was moving too quickly to argue the point.

“You saw somebody you identified as Kevin Harris?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You see him in the courtroom?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“That’s the man you were going to kill, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You wanted to kill him, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Spence had the six-foot-two-inch Harris and the five-foot-eight-inch Weaver stand up and he asked Horiuchi how he could mistake them. He asked if they were told that Vicki Weaver was more zealous than her husband. And then he asked about the second shot. “Just before you shot, you knew the door was open, didn’t you?”

“At that time, yes sir.”

“Didn’t you know that there was a possibility of someone being behind the door?” Spence asked.

“There may have been, yes, sir.”

“You shot twice and both times you made mistakes; is that correct?”

Lindquist objected and again, Spence moved on without much argument. He considered asking Horiuchi if he was sorry for what had happened, figuring he’d give some answer like, “Sir, I am not trained to feel sorry.” Then again, he might just say yes.

“You heard a woman screaming after your last shot?” Spence asked.

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“That screaming went on for thirty seconds?”

“About thirty seconds, yes, sir.”

“I want us to just take thirty seconds, now pretend in our mind’s eye that we can hear the screaming—” Spence was quiet and whether or not they wanted to, everyone in the courtroom watched the plodding second hand on the wall clock straight across from the jury, one, two…. With the door behind the sniper, a jagged hole in its window, the jury was as close as it would get to the horror of Rachel and Sara Weaver, who screamed and screamed until they were out of breath while their mother lay dead on the kitchen floor.

IN THE NEXT YEAR, FBI officials reviewing the case would decide no one needed to be fired or prosecuted, in part because Lon Horiuchi wasn’t actually following the modified rules of engagement. Since the firmly believed that a helicopter was in danger, FBI brass said, Horiuchi was in fact following the bureau’s standard rules—shooting to protect someone else.

Nevin proposed to the sniper that there was no threat to the helicopter and Horiuchi said yes, there was. “But you were waiting to kill them irrespective of a threat, weren’t you?” Nevin asked.

“Based on the rules, sir, we could.”

The defense attorneys challenged virtually every part of Horiuchi’s story, Nevin hauling the door out, standing behind it where Kevin would have to have been to be struck in the arm and chest by the gunshot. Earlier, Horiuchi said he’d seen Kevin flinch. Nevin wondered how Horiuchi could have seen anyone flinch behind the door if the curtains were indeed drawn.

“Mr. Horiuchi, I’m going to put my arm right next to the door,” Nevin said. “Would you do me a favor? Would you say ‘bang’?”

“Bang.”

Nevin shook. “Did I flinch?”

“I can’t tell, sir.”

“You can’t see me, can you?”

“No, sir.”

Lon Horiuchi finished testifying the afternoon of June 4, on the thirty-second day of the trial, almost two months after it had begun. On the way, he paused and looked over the shoulder of a courtroom sketch artist who had drawn his steady, mechanical face. Later, Horiuchi asked if he could get a copy.

Ron Howen walked back to his office and slumped at his desk. A package was waiting for him. There was a cover letter from an FBI agent saying the package was in response to an April 13 subpoena for any records generated by the shooting review team. The package contained some documents that already had been turned over, but also notes of interviews with FBI agents that had never been given to the defense.

Most troubling were two crude drawings by Horiuchi. Scribbled on a hotel notepad, they showed a stick figure approaching a door, a dot on his chest, crosshairs on the door. In one of the windows of the door were two semicircles—two heads. Howen set the drawings down on his desk. Horiuchi had just finished testifying, and now the prosecutor was going to go into court and hand over notes and drawings that showed two heads where the sniper reported seeing none. Of all evidence problems and delays, Howen knew this was the worst. It was the low point of his career.

He checked the date on the cover letter. It had been stamped in the FBI mail room May 21, 1993. Two weeks earlier. The FBI had mailed this vital package fourth class.