ON OCTOBER 18, 1993, Randy Weaver was sentenced to eighteen months in jail—fourteen of which he’d already served—and a $10,000 fine. With good behavior, he’d be out by Christmas. Earlier, the judge had dropped one of the charges Randy was convicted of—committing crimes while on pretrial release—because he’d been found not guilty of those crimes (murder, assault, and the rest). After four years of investigation, at a cost of several million dollars, the U.S. government managed to convict Randy Weaver of failing to appear in court.
At his sentencing, two jurors—the Dorothys—testified that since the trial ended they’d visited Randy and met his family and they thought he should go home. Keith Brown also testified, saying Sara and Rachel were doing incredibly well, but insisting they needed their father back. Spence gave another stirring speech and asked Judge Lodge to limit Randy’s sentence to the fourteen months he’d already served.
“This is a man who has learned a great deal,” Spence said. “The only evidence before Your Honor—and I think the truth—is that this family needs its daddy.”
But Ron Howen was back from his bout with exhaustion, and he was ready to fight some more. He asked the juror Dorothy Hoffman if she’d ever sought out Bill Degan’s family, and he recommended that the judge sentence Randy to three years in prison. He said that no matter what happened in court, the standoff and the three deaths were ultimately Randy’s fault. Howen read a 1990 letter from Weaver’s attorney Everett Hofmeister, a letter that wasn’t allowed into testimony during the trial. “‘The present course you are following is suicidal,’” Hofmeister wrote two years before the shoot-out. “‘In a few short years, you will look back on what happened as a needless disaster.’
“You just want to weep when you read a letter like that,” Howen said.
“Since this trial has concluded, every morning I’ve gotten up and looked at myself in the mirror,” the prosecutor continued. “And I’ve asked, ‘What did I fail to do in order to convince that jury the defendant was guilty?’… Well, it is my responsibility, and I must bear it.”
Howen said he had begun to realize that he and Weaver were somewhat alike. He was raised in a German Mennonite home with separatist beliefs, Howen said, but he was also bound by the Bible’s admonition to submit to authority. And he said he was taught to love his neighbor. Howen’s voice cracked as he said he was even trying to love Randy Weaver. “It has been the hardest thing for me to do in my life.”
After the sentencing, Ron Howen was transferred out of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorneys Office. Kim Lindquist left Boise altogether and took a job in Bogotá, Colombia, working drug interdiction cases at the U.S. embassy.
In other federal agencies, many people blamed Howen for losing the Weaver case, because of his insistence on filing a broad indictment. A sweeping Justice Department investigation found the indictment was flawed. Howen was “overzealous” and used “faulty judgment.” His statements before the grand jury bordered on testimony and the decision to seek the death penalty was overreaching, the report stated.
Ron Howen refused to talk publicly about the case. He bought some farmland and set to work as one of the hardest-working attorneys in the civil division. Ten days after Randy Weaver was sentenced, Judge Lodge shifted some of the blame away from Howen though, finding the FBI in contempt of court and fining it $1,920 for its delays and obstructions.
“The actions of the government, acting through the FBI, evidence a callous disregard for the rights of the defendants and the interests of justice,” Lodge wrote. “Its behavior served to obstruct the administration of justice….”
DAVE HUNT WAS TIRED. After the trial, he decided to quit the U.S. Marshals Service. “I don’t want to do it anymore,” he told his wife. It wasn’t anything he could really explain.
The closest he could get was describing his feelings when he came home from Vietnam. So many guys died over there, and so many more sacrificed years of their lives and limbs off their bodies. Yet when Hunt left the Marine Corps and enrolled at Indiana University, people either ignored Vietnam vets or reviled them. He couldn’t understand that in 1971, and he couldn’t understand this twenty-two years later. “Feds Lose Big,” one newspaper headline screamed after the trial. Hunt knew mistakes were made in the case, but he hated the way it had become a symbol for federal law enforcement run amok. It was an awful feeling to think you were doing the people’s bidding and find out the people hated you. He wondered: What exactly did Billy Degan die for?
The other deputy marshals resumed their careers. They talked occasionally with Hunt about the case and said they were most upset that so few people believed Kevin Harris fired the first shot. Art Roderick sometimes wished the bullet that had whistled by his stomach had hit him so that people would see just how dangerous the Weavers really were. He and the other marshals agreed that everyone had forgotten the other victim in the case, Degan. His family remained quiet about their loss.
In the end, Hunt didn’t quit the U.S. Marshals Service. He just kept getting up and going to work. But he didn’t go after any more fugitives. Instead, he did some accounting for an organized crime and drug task force and took on administrative chores. Other deputy marshals tried to cheer him up: “You won your case. It’s okay.” Weaver had been found guilty of failure to appear, the warrant Hunt spent all that time trying to serve peaceably. But Hunt didn’t think he’d ever shake his empty feelings, and every time an Idaho resident complained on the radio or in a letter to the editor—”Why didn’t they just go up there and ask Weaver to come down?”—Hunt relived it all over again. Newspaper and magazine stories seemed to portray Randy Weaver as some sort of folk hero, someone who stood up to the oppressive government. Hunt pictured Randy hiding behind his kids—sacrificing his family because he didn’t want to face the charges, right or wrong, filed against him. It made Hunt sick.
The case stayed in the news for years, and just when Hunt thought people had forgotten it, some new report came out or a lawsuit was filed or some guy wanted on a minor charge announced that he wasn’t going to be taken alive. All over the United States, people who despised or feared the U.S. government drew inspiration from Randy Weaver. An accountant refused to testify before a grand jury in a drug case; a developer refused to file paperwork for a project; a tax protester refused to come out of his house.
For a few years in the mid-nineties, such cases seemed to be everywhere—angry veterans and patriots and militia members vowing to battle traffic tickets and zoning ordinances and court orders. Some local officials were terrorized and threatened. When one Montana sheriff asked for help with an armed fugitive living on a nearby ranch, federal agents said they worried about being drawn into a violent confrontation. Such reluctance had a name among federal agents. They called it Weaver Fever.
In 1995, more than twenty government protesters who called themselves Freemen holed up on a farm in Montana rather than face charges of bank fraud, robbery, and intimidating local officials. Saying they’d learned their lesson from Ruby Ridge, FBI agents surrounded the farm and waited them out. After eighty-one days, the Freemen surrendered without a shot being fired.
BO GRITZ DIDN’T WIN the presidency in 1992. He didn’t even win Boundary County. He received just 46 of the 3,850 votes cast in Boundary, 1.2 percent, not even half as many votes as Randy Weaver got when he ran for sheriff.
But in the right-wing survivalist movement, Bo Gritz had become a respected leader. He spoke at “Preparedness Expos,” and held paramilitary seminars called SPIKE—Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events—all over the country.
After the Weaver-Harris trial, Gritz moved from his home in Nevada to the hills near Kamiah, Idaho, a few hours south of Naples, where he bought two thousand acres with some partners—including Jack McLamb—and subdivided the land into thirty-acre parcels, selling them for as much as $3,000 an acre. He called it Almost Heaven, a covenant community for people sick of government and ready to prepare for the coming Apocalypse. For a few years, magazine and newspaper reporters, doing the requisite stories on the end of the millennium, scheduled stops at Almost Heaven and its sister community Doves of the Valley to check on the cabins and mobile homes and to hear Gritz’s increasingly bizarre theories.
When 168 people died in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Gritz said it was a masterpiece, “a Rembrandt,” and therefore was more than likely the work of government agents trying to discredit white Christian patriots. He took a stab at mediating the Freemen standoff and in 1998 offered to help accused abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph turn himself in. He claimed to have “inserted myself in the breech more than twenty-three times between embattled Americans and government … which has continued a swift descent into chaos and anarchy.”
By the late 1990s, after an apparent slowdown in the “chaos and anarchy” business, Gritz found himself mired in marital and financial problems. In September 1998, Gritz’s wife of twenty-four years filed for divorce. A few days later a passing motorist near Orofino, Idaho, found Gritz sitting next to his pickup truck, shot in the chest with his own .45-caliber handgun.
He wrote on his Web site that he’d almost joined “my comrades in arms who took their own lives because they thought their purpose was gone.” But Gritz recovered and worked hard to recapture his place in the downsized antigovernment movement. His latest vision was something he called FEW—the Fellowship of Eternal Warriors—a group he envisioned as “a dozen warrior-priests” who would join with him to “meet the increasing challenge of Satan’s globalism.”
ITS FRONT PORCH SAGGING, Sara’s gardens grown over with weeds, Randy Weaver’s cabin and twenty acres were finally sold in the spring of 1995 to a lifelong friend of Kevin Harris. Except for law officers, defense attorneys, and a few Weaver friends, it had been vacant since Weaver and his daughters walked out the door—frightened and solemn—in August 1992.
The Weavers’ friends Jackie and Tony Brown took care of the cabin for a while after Randy was arrested. They noticed every now and again a fresh set of car tracks on the old logging road or some other evidence that someone had been nosing around. They worried that people would break off parts of the cabin as souvenirs.
For a few years, people stopped at the Naples General Store or the North Woods Tavern and asked how to get up to the cabin. Sometimes they were given directions, other times not. A sign near Ruby Ridge warned: “No trespassers. No sightseers.”
But some people couldn’t resist. They wanted to stand on the rock outcropping and see just how defensible the knob was. They wanted to see the signs and cans used for target practice. They walked down to the Y in the logging road and tried to gauge the distances and the positions, tried to find proof that the marshals had been lying. Sometimes they hiked across the gully to where Lon Horiuchi had aimed at the house. They stared across that stretch of ground and looked for proof that he’d done it on purpose, although if they had come that far, they likely didn’t need much evidence to believe that Vicki Weaver had been murdered. Some of them stood on the porch and imagined it was them, that it was their wife holding their baby.
The cabin deteriorated further and was remodeled at least once. In 1995, Weaver and his daughters returned to film a television news program and then quickly left. Randy didn’t like being up there, but his girls continued to visit and eventually bought the land back. Long grass covered the meadow where the initial shooting had taken place and new families moved into the creases between the Selkirk Mountains. Eventually, even the Deep Creek Inn opened under new management.
IN AUGUST 1994, Chuck Peterson, Garry Gilman, David Nevin, and Ellison Matthews filed civil lawsuits on behalf of the Weavers and Kevin Harris, charging the government with wrongful death for killing Samuel and Vicki Weaver and with violating the rights and property of Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver. By the time they’d finished compiling all the damages they sought, the total claim was more than $300 million.
In the meantime, Nevin and Peterson, who’d become close friends during the trial, returned to what they jokingly called their “ham ‘n’ egg” law practices. If it was tough to go from getting an acquittal on murder and conspiracy charges with Gerry Spence to arguing a case in traffic court, they didn’t let on. Both men continued to work on the Ruby Ridge case and their law practices thrived.
In the Boise Yellow Pages, Chuck Peterson’s ad read: “Co-counsel with Gerry Spence, U.S. v. Weaver.” He was even hired by the National Rifle Association to help prepare for congressional hearings on the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco.
Occasionally, Peterson felt twinges of something else, the feeling that his biggest case might be behind him. It was a new kind of pressure, he thought, a lighter version of what Spence must feel whenever he came into some backwater like Boise and was expected to make magic. Suddenly Peterson was the well-known attorney, the guy who’d won U.S. v. Weaver. He’d never be allowed to lose gracefully again. In Great Falls, Montana, Peterson gave a case the Spence treatment and was promptly growled back into place by a judge who said he didn’t allow such theatrics in his courtroom.
David Nevin didn’t feel as changed by the case. Already one of the best criminal lawyers in Idaho, Nevin was haunted by the second-guessing temperament of a perfectionist. He had always believed in himself, that he was a great lawyer. His experiences with Spence only reaffirmed his own theories of defense law, and he never doubted that big cases would continue to come his way. He and Spence worked together on an environmental case, and after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Nevin was approached about being the lead attorney for Timothy McVeigh. He considered it, but didn’t want to move to Oklahoma and leave his wife and two sons behind.
He and his firm continued to represent Kevin Harris, who moved to Republic, Washington, got a job as a welder, and did his best to stay out of the spotlight.
A few months after the verdict, Nevin was invited to speak to law students at the University of Idaho, where he’d gotten his degree. These law students were more conservative than the recovering hippies he’d gone to school with, and Nevin wondered if they’d grasp the themes of religious freedom and government accountability that he found so inspiring in the case.
Nevin told the law students about his difficult decision to rest without calling any witnesses. He told them about the verdicts and how a deputy marshal had leaned over and told him that Kevin would have to go back to jail before being released. Nevin told the law students how he’d convinced the judge to set Kevin free right then and there.
“Someday,” he said, “I hope that all of you will get the opportunity to walk out the front door with somebody who’s been charged with murder but isn’t guilty.” The law students leaped up and began clapping. David Nevin started crying.
A MAN IN FLORIDA—one of Randy Weaver’s many supporters—paid Randy’s entire $10,000 fine. Weaver received money and letters of support from as far away as Europe and Korea, and more than a few letters from sympathetic, single women.
On December 17, 1993, Randy got out of jail. He spent a couple of days in Boise and then flew home to Iowa to be with his daughters. Delayed by a snowstorm, his plane landed two hours late on the night of Sunday, December 19. The concourse was dark when Randy came striding toward his daughters, and they squealed when they saw him. He hugged the girls and they stood around the Des Moines Airport, crying and smiling. Rachel, who was twelve, patted her dad’s jailhouse potbelly, and he rubbed her head. Sara wiped her eyes with one hand and kept the other around her dad’s waist. After a few moments, Elisheba went to her daddy.
They drove back to Keith and Julie Brown’s house, where Randy told stories about jail in between visits to the garage to smoke cigarettes. He stayed up until 3:00 a.m., talking about the government and about his heroes: Jesse James and Robin Hood. He said it was ironic that people called him a hero. “I just wanted to be left alone.” But, he added, “I believe in sticking up for your rights. If people learn that, well, that’s okay.”
He was awake the next morning by six o’clock, scanning the news on television and watching his daughters get ready for their last day of school before Christmas break. Then he borrowed a Cocoa Beach T-shirt from Keith and went to see his probation officer, who said Randy wasn’t allowed to have any firearms or to leave southern Iowa. After school, Randy packed up his daughters and drove to a house he’d rented from relatives in Grand Junction, a town of 880 near his family’s home in Jefferson.
They celebrated Christmas—although they called it “X-mas” because they believed it was a pagan holiday—and Randy set about raising his daughters. He was glad they were doing well in school, but he didn’t think school was that important. “The girls will meet men,” he said, “get married, and become wonderful homemakers like their mother…. I’m a chauvinist, I guess. But that’s their calling and that’s what’s best for them.”
Randy lived off donations from his supporters and Social Security benefits from Vicki’s death while he waited for money from his lawsuit against the government. He found a girlfriend and mostly kept his beliefs to himself. Still, his attorneys thought he talked too much and some people in Grand Junction accused him of spouting hatred in a bar one night. Randy consented to a few interviews. A photo ran in the New York Times showing him in a leather coat, thumbs hooked in his back pockets, a steely, James Dean look in his eyes. An Iowa television station called him “the man who fought off hundreds of federal agents”; Time magazine called him “the Rebel of Ruby Ridge.”
Friends said that in the first years after he got out of jail he seemed bitter some days, aimless others. He railed against the opinion that he’d put his children in danger, saying that everything he did was to protect his family. After his release from jail, Weaver said he didn’t fear the government anymore, but he hoped that someday the Justice Department would come clean about what had happened on Ruby Ridge. “It has to, so Vicki and Samuel didn’t die in vain,” Randy said. “I want them to bring the truth out. They know the truth, and I want it to be made public…. Everybody’s watching this case, and they’ve got to do what’s right.”
DURING THE TRIAL, Des Moines television stations occasionally showed old videotape of Sara and Rachel. One day toward the end of the trial, Julie Brown walked into the living room and found Sara curled up in the fetal position, sobbing and refusing to go to school. She said everyone would see her on television and would talk about her. It crushed Julie to see Sara like that, so she and Keith called the TV stations and brought them the girls’ report cards to show them just whom they were hurting. They asked the stations to please stop showing videos of Sara and Rachel. They just wanted to be normal kids, Julie Brown said.
A few months later, Gerry Spence called the Browns and said that Tom Brokaw wanted to do a piece on the Weaver case for his newsmagazine show Now. Spence said it was a great chance to show what the government had done and he said the girls needed to be interviewed for the show. Keith Brown explained how traumatic that could be for them, especially Sara.
Spence pleaded, “Keith, you’ve gotta put the babies on.”
But the Browns were still the girls’ legal guardians and Keith said no. So Spence went on without the girls, strolling along the logging road on Ruby Ridge with Tom Brokaw, talking about government and people’s rights. He pointed to an imaginary rabbit, and while Brokaw looked for the animal, Spence said Randy Weaver was sort of like that rabbit. As long as you left it alone, it was a peaceful animal. But if you stuck your finger in its home, it would fight back.
For the next two years, Spence continued to talk about the case and to decry the government’s actions. He was a regular on Larry King’s television program and on others, and his fame continued to grow. After O. J. Simpson was arrested and charged with killing his ex-wife, Spence seemed to be on every television talk show, doing play-by-play about the Simpson trial. “Larry,” he’d say, “it’s like this …” and then he’d toss out some endearing analogy about geese as a way to explain the complicated rules of discovery.
He took fewer cases himself, though he stayed involved with his Trial Lawyers College and his nonprofit public advocacy firm—Lawyers and Advocates for Wyoming.
But most of his time was spent being Gerry Spence.
He got his own cable TV show for a while, broadcast from his Jackson Hole log mansion, in which he spun O. J. trial strategy with his country-lawyer friends. But he seemed uncomfortable in front of the camera, as if he needed to see the jury to know how he was doing. His show didn’t last long.
He fared better as an author. His sixth book, How to Argue and Win Every Time, was a bestseller, and more books followed in every conceivable genre. But he only wrote directly about the Weavers once—in a couple of slender chapters added to the paperback version of his 1993 book From Freedom to’ Slavery. In the book, he repeated misgivings about Randy Weaver’s beliefs—”Ideas can be as criminal as criminals”—and described fourteen-year-old Sam Weaver as a “child without an adult hair on his skinny white body.” Striker was, of course, “Old Yeller.”
He wrote that the case would not be over until federal agents were held accountable for their role in the tragedy of Ruby Ridge. “The lesson of the Weaver case must never be the vindication of Weaver’s beliefs,” Spence wrote, “but, instead, the need of all Americans to believe as they will, without risk of persecution …”
THE WASHING MACHINE—the one David Jordison had painstakingly rebuilt and was waiting to bring to Vicki—was still in his garage three years later. In a way, the Jordisons were like that, too, constantly waiting for the visit they never got to have with Vicki, like clocks frozen on the hour and minute of an earthquake.
For almost seventy years, David Jordison had a farmer’s practical understanding of the world. Now it made no sense at all. David, Jeane, and Lanny had all come to believe that Vicki was killed intentionally, that the FBI instructed its agent to kill her, that he aimed at her face and pulled the trigger.
Julie thought her parents would never heal as long as they believed the FBI had killed Vicki on purpose. Julie herself went back and forth. Once she began to realize some of the awful things the government did in the case, intentionally shooting a woman with her baby no longer seemed implausible.
But she thought her parents could live with what had happened if someone could just convince them that the deaths of Sam and Vicki were essentially accidents, the end result of a series of misjudgments and blunders.
For a while, Julie held out hope that someone in the FBI or the Justice Department would simply call her parents and explain how it happened and what they were doing to fix it. It would be easier for them all if they felt the truth was being told. She thought Gene Glenn—the FBI agent in charge of the standoff—could help her parents understand. But they didn’t hear from him and they came to believe that he’d known all along that Sammy had been shot in the back and that Vicki had been shot in the face. They figured he was only acting when he choked back tears and told them that Vicki was dead.
Julie hoped that the long-delayed Justice Department investigation would bring out the truth, or at least acknowledge that the FBI had made a horrible mistake by giving its agents the power to kill without provocation. Even if they hadn’t killed Vicki on purpose, agents had drafted rules that gave the snipers permission to kill the family. The Justice Department investigation had at least to punish the people responsible. By 1994, that seemed like the only thing that could help the family move on.
“NOBODY, THANK GOD, was following the rules of engagement,” FBI director Louis Freeh said in January 1994. He said the rules were “poorly drafted, confusing, and can be read to direct agents to act contrary to the law and FBI policy.” Fortunately, he said, the sniper Lon Horiuchi wasn’t following those rules when he shot at the Weaver family. He was protecting a helicopter, which fell under normal FBI rules of engagement, Freeh insisted.
Freeh said that no FBI agents committed crimes or engaged in any intentional misconduct. He doled out minor punishment to fourteen agents, half for poor evidence gathering and for failing to cooperate with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Danny Coulson, who had been in charge at FBI headquarters when the rules of engagement were faxed back to Washington, D.C., was given a letter of censure.
E. Michael Kahoe, involved in researching the rules of engagement and who later oversaw the flawed FBI review that found no wrongdoing, was reassigned to an FBI office in Florida. He was censured and suspended for fifteen days. Another agent involved in the review was suspended for five days.
Richard Rogers, the head of the Hostage Rescue Team during the Weaver and Waco standoffs, voluntarily accepted reassignment. He was censured and suspended for ten days. In a carefully worded release, the FBI said, “his drafting and recommending of rules of engagement that arguably directed agents to act contrary to FBI shooting policy and law, though not causally related to the shooting death of Vicki Weaver, demonstrated performance below the level expected of a person in his position of responsibility.”
Larry Potts, who had been in charge of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division and had approved—at least—drafting new rules before Rogers ever left Washington, was given a letter of censure, the same punishment Freeh gave himself once for losing an FBI cell phone. Potts had been promoted to acting deputy director, and at the same time that he censured his old friend, Freeh recommended he be made permanent deputy director, the number-two position in the FBI.
The most serious punishment was handed out to Gene Glenn, the Special Agent-in-Charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office and the on-scene commander at Ruby Ridge. Glenn was censured, suspended for fifteen days, removed from his position, and reassigned to Washington, D.C. Freeh ruled that Glenn was ultimately responsible for both the rules of engagement and the failure to cooperate with prosecutors in the case.
Lon Horiuchi received no punishment and continued to work with the Hostage Rescue Team. Freeh said the sniper acted “in defense of other law enforcement officers … to protect the lives of those agents.”
In Iowa, Vicki Weaver’s family was stunned. That was it? Letters of censure? Fifteen-day suspensions? How could the FBI say the rules of engagement had nothing to do with Vicki’s death? Randy, Sara, and Kevin were running for cover toward the cabin when Horiuchi fired and killed Vicki Weaver. How was that “in defense of other law enforcement officers?” The FBI seemed to be clinging to its conceit that Horiuchi was protecting a helicopter, and yet the charge that the family threatened a helicopter had been dropped long ago. At best, Horiuchi fired into a cabin filled with children. At worst, he followed illegal orders and intentionally shot and killed Vicki Weaver in an attempt to break up the family.
Gerry Spence called Freeh’s actions a hand slap and a cover-up. A few months later, Larry Potts was promoted to deputy director.
For more than a year, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno had been promising to release a 542-page Justice Department critique of the case, the result of an exhaustive probe by five lawyers and nineteen FBI investigators.
Among other findings, the report found that Kevin Harris and Randy and Sara Weaver were running for cover when Horiuchi fired his second shot and weren’t endangering the helicopter at all. That shot “violated the Constitution,” according to the report. It recommended that the case be turned over to the Justice Department and evaluated for possible criminal prosecution.
But by the spring of 1995, no charges had been filed and the report was still under wraps and FBI officials were working hard to discredit it. Finally, it was leaked to a couple of newspapers, and one of them, Legal Times, posted the report on the Internet.
Chief among its many criticisms was the sloppy way in which the rules of engagement were modified in Idaho and the stunning lack of leadership back in D.C.
“The Rules of Engagement were in effect … from the 22nd of August until the 26th of August, and yet, inexplicably, no one at headquarters admits to having been aware of what the Rules were or having read them,” the report read.
But Justice Department officials publicly rejected the finding that the second shot was unconstitutional. As they continued to look at the possibility of charges against agents, they concentrated on the sloppy series of reviews afterward and not on the actions of agents at Ruby Ridge. And when the report was finally made public, Justice Department officials distanced themselves from its findings, dismissing it as a preliminary, out-of-date document.
SARA WEAVER WALKED ONSTAGE at the Des Moines Art Center during the 1994 Annual Poetry Festival. She stepped up to the microphone and introduced herself before reading one of her poems, titled “Remembering.”
“My name is Sara Weaver,” she said. “Two years ago, my mother and brother were murdered. Today is my brother’s birthday. He would’ve been sixteen. I wrote this poem for my mother…. I guess the reason I titled it ‘Remembering’ is because I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.”
After Randy Weaver was released from jail, Rachel and Elisheba lived with him in a modest house in Grand Junction. Sara stayed in Des Moines to finish her senior year of high school. She visited her dad on weekends, but during the week she wrote poetry, worked at the movie theater, got good grades, and did her best to be a happy high school student.
Randy didn’t want to go back to Ruby Ridge, but Sara and Rachel returned to get a few things—like their mom’s rugs and quilts. The first time she went back, Sara just sat on the big rock outcropping near the door and sobbed.
In the spring of 1994, Sara graduated from high school. During her last quarter she got Bs in algebra and art, and As in advanced composition, physical education, and government.
After the standoff, federal agents had taken her dog, Buddy, to the pound, but some friends rescued him and cared for him until Sara could get her own house in 1994. The Weaver girls had about $24,000 left from the donations sent by supporters and Sara used some of the money to buy a tidy, one-story house near her father’s place in Grand Junction. She paid $8,000 for the house, put a park bench in the front yard, hung flowers, and planted a huge garden in the back. She got into recycling, contemplated going to college, and talked to her dad about writing a book.
With the Weaver girls gone, Keith Brown sold the station wagon and bought a convertible Camaro. He and Julie resumed their lives, but worried that Sara, Rachel, and Elisheba would have no one to provide an alternative to their separatist beliefs. Still, whenever they saw the girls, they seemed to be happy and well adjusted. Rachel got As at the grade school in Grand Junction, and she called one day to have Keith and Julie mail her certificate from a drug awareness program she’d completed.
Sara began dating a boy named David, a former skinhead who had protested during the standoff. He worked on construction sites and—his hair grown out—he moved to Iowa in 1994 and asked Sara to marry him. Keith was worried about what it meant, but Julie pointed out that David was very friendly and very good to Sara. Whatever his views were, he kept them to himself.
Keith and Julie found themselves debating tolerance, of all things—trying to be tolerant of someone whose views weren’t, loving someone without agreeing with them. Julie said that she’d already lost her sister because of the walls that are put up between people. She vowed not to lose her niece that way.
Julie decided that people like Randy and Vicki need to be tied to the world somehow, connected by family or friends who keep them safely away from the edge.
After the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it seemed to Julie Brown that the whole country was living her dilemma: how to keep people on the fringe tethered to society. Releasing the truth about Ruby Ridge would be a start, she thought.
Julie and Sara stayed close. David made Sara happy but she still seemed torn between two places, the world she’d grown up in and the world she lived in now. In the end, Julie stopped worrying about Sara’s beliefs and just hoped she would find someplace in between where she could be happy.
She drew encouragement from a copy of Sara’s graduation photo that hung in their house. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” Sara wrote alongside the picture. “Love Always and Forever, Sara Beaver.”
GENE GLENN REFUSED to be the scapegoat for Ruby Ridge. In the spring of 1995, he wrote a letter to Justice Department officials, charging that the FBI’s investigation was unfair and was designed to protect top officials like Larry Potts. He insisted that on August 22, 1992, Potts approved the rules of engagement during a telephone conversation.
In May 1995, another Justice Department investigation had begun, this time into the alleged FBI cover-up of who actually approved the modified rules. After reportedly failing a lie detector test, E. Michael Kahoe was suspended for shredding an internal FBI postconfrontation critique on the case.
With the publicity from the Branch Davidian siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the U.S. Senate announced that it would hold hearings on Waco and Ruby Ridge. Under heat from the Justice Department, Louis Freeh asked Potts to step down as the FBI’s number-two official and he was reassigned to a position training young agents. Freeh stopped short of saying that Potts had done anything wrong, blaming his demotion on the publicity from the Weaver case.
In August 1995, Potts, Danny Coulson, and two other FBI officials were suspended while a criminal investigation was launched into allegations that they tried to cover up their roles in approving the rules of engagement. Two years later both Potts and Coulson had left the bureau when the Justice Department said there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them.
For years, the FBI had maintained that fine balance, punishing its agents for minor mistakes, but insisting those mistakes had—in essence—nothing to do with the death of Vicki Weaver. FBI officials continued to insist that Lon Horiuchi hadn’t been following the modified rules of engagement when he fired his two shots and therefore, any misconduct stemming from the drafting of the rules was beside the point.
The unreleased Justice Department report concluded, however, that the shot that killed Vicki Weaver was unconstitutional and that it was directly related to the modified rules. “We cannot fault Horiuchi alone for these actions,” the report concluded. “We are persuaded that his judgment to shoot … was influenced by the special Rules of Engagement, which he had no role in creating but which he was instructed to follow.”
In the fall of 1995 (just days after this book was first released) the Senate Judiciary Committee opened hearings on the debacle at Ruby Ridge. For the first time officials from the various agencies were called to explain their roles. Senators reacted with disbelief as they pored over photographs and reports, hoisted guns, and examined the bullet hole in the glass of the actual cabin door—brought to the hearing room by FBI agents.
Appearing before the panel in a denim shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, Randy Weaver gave dramatic testimony before the government he’d once vowed to fight. With Spence sitting mostly silent behind him, Weaver repeated his claim that federal agents set him up, purposefully killed his son and wife, and then covered up their crimes.
“If I had it to do over again, knowing what I know now,” Randy Weaver said in a prepared statement, “I would come down the mountain for the court appearance…. I would not let my fears and the fears of my family keep me from coming down. But my wrongs did not cause federal agents to commit crimes…. I have been accountable for my choices…. But no federal agent has been brought to justice for the killings of Sam and Vicki Weaver.”
Framed by the cracked glass of the cabin door through which her mother was shot, Sara Weaver angrily and tearfully testified about the standoff. She insisted that the curtains on the cabin door were open and that Lon Horiuchi must’ve seen Vicki before he fired.
The ATF informant, Ken Fadeley, testified from behind a screen with his voice altered—for his protection, he said, so he could continue his undercover work. Several senators expressed disbelief over Fadeley’s claim that Weaver had initiated the gun deal. The ATF was also roundly criticized for targeting Weaver and for falsely reporting to the U.S. Marshals Service that Weaver had a criminal record, was a suspect in a bank robbery, and was a former Green Beret who may have booby-trapped his property.
“The concern for [Weaver’s] potential for violence seems to have been blown out of proportion,” read the subcommittee’s final report. “We find this disturbing, and a potential contributing factor to the tragic events that occurred at Ruby Ridge….”
The Marshals Service was also criticized by the subcommittee for being sloppy with information, for waiting too long to brief the FBI about the initial shoot-out, and for failing to do a proper review of its role in the case out of a “desire to avoid creating discoverable documents that might be used by the defense in the Weaver/Harris trial….”
The most surprising moment of the hearings came when deputy U.S. marshals Cooper and Roderick testified. First they expressed indignation and disbelief that Weaver was being treated like a victim and that Bill Degan was being forgotten. And then they dropped a bomb—suggesting for the first time publicly that Randy Weaver had shot his own son in the back during the gunfight. It was a shocking allegation. Even though the bullet hadn’t been found, the evidence indicated that the shot that killed Sam Weaver had come from Cooper’s gun. Even prosecutors in Weaver’s trial hadn’t been so bold as to suggest that Weaver shot his own son.
While some senators expressed doubt and even outrage over this eleventh-hour allegation, it diverted attention and seemed to take a bit of the steam out of the subcommittee’s criticism of the Marshals Service. A few months after the hearings, the deputy marshals assigned to the Weaver case were given the service’s highest honor.
AS EXPECTED, THE FBI had the most to explain during the Senate subcommittee hearings, and, as expected, its agents were the least forthcoming. Horiuchi and Richard Rogers were still under investigation and refused to testify, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Among the agents who did testify, Potts and Coulson blamed the rules of engagement on Glenn and Rogers, who in turn blamed Potts and Coulson.
Frustrated senators admitted they couldn’t “conclude on this record who (if anyone) at headquarters approved the … Rules of Engagement.” But their final report decried the modified rules as “virtual shoot-on-sight orders” and blasted the agents’ “determination to lay blame for what occurred on others” as “a deficiency in leadership.”
Among the other criticisms of the FBI were inaccurate interview forms, sloppy crime scene investigation and lab work, and a complete failure to cooperate during the trial of Weaver and Harris. “This was not a case of innocent mistake or even excusable negligence,” the subcommittee reported; “rather the FBI willfully and repeatedly failed to abide by discovery rules and irreparably damaged the government’s presentation of evidence at the criminal trial.”
More criticism was aimed at the agents who came along to review and investigate the FBI’s handling of the case after the fact. They took agents’ stories “at face value,” “avoided uncomfortable facts,” and demonstrated “a protective attitude” toward other agents. “The various Ruby Ridge reports reveal several instances of friends reviewing friends’ conduct and the subjects of the reviews later sitting on the promotion boards of the very agents who reviewed their conduct.”
As for Horiuchi, the senators seemed convinced that “due to weather conditions and the late hour of day” he most likely hadn’t seen Vicki Weaver in the window before he fired his second shot.
But the subcommittee was openly critical of the bureau’s claim that Horiuchi wasn’t following the modified rules of engagement when he opened fire at Ruby Ridge. Based on Horiuchi’s trial, grand jury testimony, and the testimony of snipers who hadn’t fired that day, the subcommittee found there was “reasonable basis to conclude that the Rules of Engagement, more than any fear for the safety of the helicopter, prompted Horiuchi to take the first shot.”
And the second shot, according to their findings, “was unconstitutional. It was even inconsistent with the special Rules of Engagement,” since it put the Weaver children in jeopardy. “Horiuchi should have known that as he fired ‘blind’ through the cabin door, he was shooting into an area which could well have contained Vicki Weaver and her two younger daughters.”
For his part, Freeh testified that if he’d been on the hill that day he wouldn’t have taken the second shot. He said it was a mistake, “for policy and for constitutional reasons.” But he continued to support Horiuchi and to stress the danger in second-guessing federal agents in such dangerous and confusing situations.
He blamed the mistakes at Ruby Ridge on “one misstatement of fact exaggerated to another one, into a huge pile of information that was just dead wrong.” Freeh announced steps he’d undertaken to make sure that errors made at Ruby Ridge would never be repeated and that such aggressive rules of engagement would never be used again.
In December 1995, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information released its report, which noted that Randy Weaver bore the initial responsibility for what happened, but that he “recognizes his mistake…. This country can tolerate mistakes made by people like Randy Weaver; but we cannot accept serious errors made by federal law enforcement agencies that needlessly result in human tragedy.”
And that was it. Some Weaver supporters expressed relief that the standoff at Ruby Ridge had finally been exposed to the light of public criticism. But others saw the hearings as little more than a show. Too many central questions remained unanswered and the federal officials most responsible for the debacle seemed to have escaped serious punishment.
But the Randy Weaver case was far from over. A single line from the Senate subcommittee’s report signaled the direction in which the case was headed: “The shooting of Vicki Weaver as she held her baby daughter will haunt federal law enforcement for years to come.”