CASE 1

MANDATE FOR MURDER

That day the FBI’s hidden sharpshooter coolly displayed his skill. From over two hundred yards away he blew off half of the woman’s face—shot her standing there in her doorway. Yes, she was armed—with her nursing child. Inside the shack, the Weavers’ two young daughters saw their mother fall in a heap on the kitchen floor, blood and splattered flesh, the baby falling with her. Their fourteen-year-old brother, Sammy, still with a boy’s high voice, had already been shot in the back, murdered by the marshals as he ran home.

The slaughter occurred in the back reaches of Idaho, a place called Ruby Ridge, where the Weavers had hammered together their scrap-lumber cabin in the woods, and where the family had retreated ten years earlier to prepare for the promised “Great Tribulation,” as they called it.

I thought it ominous that twenty-one years after the national media had endlessly hashed over the Weaver case like bums at a garbage can, and at the precise moment I was inching toward my decision to write about the case, the FBI should renew its contact with Randy Weaver.

It was May 27, 2013. Randy had opened his mail to find an official-looking paper from the FBI that proved to be an inventory of the physical items the Bureau had seized at Ruby Ridge that had belonged to the Weavers—thirty-two supposed pieces of evidence that the Bureau had seized two decades earlier and had kept buried in the bottomless strata of its secret files. The FBI was finally ready to return what it had taken.

“What do you want of this material that we still possess?” In effect the Bureau was asking: You want your boy’s little vest that his mother made for him? Has a bullet hole through it.

“Yes, I want the vest,” Randy said.

You want your wife’s fingertips? We cut her fingertips off, you know. We still have them. We can return them to you.

“Vicki’s fingertips? You cut off her fingers?”

Yes, we can return them to you.

When Randy told me about the FBI’s offer to send back his wife’s severed fingertips, I decided I had to write about the Weaver case.

Nothing changes.

Before, during, and after the trial, and many an hour since, Randy and I talked and raged and wept together. Immediately following the August 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, I traveled to the Weavers’ pieced-together cabin in the woods. By then the army tanks had begun rumbling back down the mountain, and the noisy helicopters had flown off to chop away at other innocent air. The gawking surveillance cameras had been removed, and the troops, how many hundreds no one knows, had pulled up their tents and headed on to other bloody adventures that were aroused by the government’s atrocities at Ruby Ridge, including the fifty-one-day siege at Waco, Texas, where on April 19, 1993, federal agents were responsible for the deaths of over eighty men, women, and children who clung to a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians. That holocaust was followed exactly two years later by the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by a small group of survivalists, led by Timothy McVeigh, who were angered by what they saw as vicious government overreach at both Ruby Ridge and Waco. That bombing claimed 168 lives and injured more than 680 people.

But, as we shall see, nothing changes.

I defended Randy Weaver before an Idaho jury in the longest trial in the state’s history, and the cold spoken words are recorded on thousands of pages of court records. I know and love the family, both the living and those murdered by our government and now in their graves. To accurately tell their story one must crawl into their hides and clutch their terrorized souls. And one must resurrect the dead. Such is the obligation of story. So I’ve come to tell the Weaver story. The siege at Ruby Ridge deserves to be told as story because it is the business of story to reveal the truth.

*   *   *

Before they’d come west to the mountains, Randy Weaver saw his life in Iowa as grasped by forces that wouldn’t let loose. Randy didn’t call it “forces.” He called it “the will of God.” You either believed it or you didn’t, and if, as when he was a boy, you looked across a field of corn in the tassel with the early sun making the broad green leaves look gold and shimmery and you didn’t believe in God, well, that was your business. “But a man’s gotta listen,” Randy said. “What the hell were we given two ears for if it wasn’t to listen?” And Randy heard the Lord.

It hadn’t been easy. He’d been listening every day since Vicki had her vision several years earlier. He listened with terrible concentration, with total faith, but for a long time he heard nothing. “You have to give Him a chance,” Vicki said. One day when Randy was on his motorcycle speeding in and out of traffic, a most unlikely time for a conversation with the Lord, he heard it. Not a voice, not tongues—just heard it. Like a thought but not a thought. Like a feeling, but not.

“What did He say?” Vicki asked.

“He said the same thing He said to you. He said we’re sinners and that the Great Tribulation is comin’. An’ I heard it again when I was lookin’ right at ya the other night.”

“When the preacher was here, talkin’?”

“Yeah. But none of ’em ever read the Bible. That’s why they don’t know about anything ’cept the fuckin’ money.”

Nothing she could do about Randy’s profanity. It was a part of him, and Vicki said you have to take people the way they are.

Vicki had fallen in love with this Randy Weaver, all cocky and profane and fresh from the army, his thin body muscled, this warrior who’d never gone to war but who’d volunteered for Nam, not one of those yellow-bellied whimpering protestors but a full-fledged volunteer who put in for the Special Forces, the Green Berets. He’d done jumps and had survival training, and he could make bombs out of practically nothing, and he was ready to lay it all down for his country. His face was tanned and smooth, and his blue eyes bright and brave as youth, and his black hair was clipped short, and he had a way of walking, a walk half a step short of a swagger, kinda bouncy, and to Vicki, he was beautiful.

But the army had sent Randy off to Fort fucking Bragg, North Carolina. “That’s like using a well-greased M-16 to dig a shit hole,” Randy said. Once he was part of an undercover drug bust at Fort Bragg, at least he got to do that much, but the captain in charge of the bust only turned in about half of the contraband that had been seized. “You don’t bust them drug-dealin’ bastards and then turn into one yourself,” Randy said. He reported the captain to the company commander, who told Randy to mind his own goddamned business, and mind it good.

Vicki went to see Randy at Fort Bragg. They were engaged, and after he got out of the army, they married right away. Vicki vowed to raise her children in the way of the Lord, outside of the sin-infected public schools where children were exposed to drugs and sex and the false word. She’d raise them where no hippies and no perverts reading their obscene pornography could capture their innocent minds. And when the child was sucking at her breast she felt the tongue of God, and she knew what she must do because the world was boiling in sin. Jesus was about to return and the Great Tribulation would be upon them. The hordes would descend. It was prophesied by all who’d read the Bible.

“Anyone with five cents’ worth of pig brains could see it,” Randy said. He lit a cigarette with his Zippo and slammed it shut to emphasize the point. “Ever’body’s gettin’ divorced, and screwin’ ever’body else’s wife, and they’re stealin’ and cheatin.’ Buncha the guys at the plant are stealin’ tools and sellin’ ’em on the outside. They’re a crooked, loafin’ lazy buncha low-lifers. All they do is hang around in the can readin’ girly magazines and jackin’ off. I’m sick of it.”

“We have to leave,” Vicki said.

“I’ll get us a buncha guns,” Randy said, “an’ a shit-pot fulla ammo, and we’ll sell the car and buy us a pickup truck, and rent a trailer, and we’ll sell the house and get the hell outta here while the gettin’s still good.”

“Oh, my God,” Vicki whispered as if the joy had all but choked her. And that’s all she said.

Then Randy asked, “Where do you want to go, Mamma?”

She didn’t speak for a long time. Then suddenly, “We have to go to the mountains. Matthew 24. ‘Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains,’ Jesus said.”

The next morning Randy quit his job as mechanic foreman at the tractor plant even though he had ten years in. The boss said, “You’re too fuckin’ far out, and it ain’t any of my business except when you stand there with a dozen of my men and keep ’em off the line while you’re preaching your shit to ’em.”

“I got a right to believe the way I believe,” Randy said. “Free country.”

“You can believe any bullshit you want. But you oughta learn to keep your bullshit to yerself,” the boss said. “Good thing you’re quittin’. Saved me the trouble of firing your ass for disturbance.”

Next Randy went to the Bullet Hole, a pawnshop owned by his buddy Vaughn Truman.

“I’m leavin’ this fuckin’ hole, Vaughn,” Randy said. “There’s gonna come a big fuckin’ tribulation, and when it comes I’m gonna be in the mountains with my family.”

“You’re kiddin’.”

“I’ll tell ya how much I’m kiddin’,” Randy said. “How much ya want for that Ruger?” He was eying a Ruger pistol.

“What’ll ya give me?”

“How about if I buy the Ruger and that Mini-14 over there?” The Mini-14 was a light semiautomatic rifle.

“That’s a good Mini. Never been shot. Practically got the cosmoline in ’er yet.”

“Maybe I’ll buy two. Maybe three. And what are ya gettin’ nowadays for a thousand rounds of ammo for the Mini?”

“Cheap. For you, a deal.”

They talked like that for an hour, then two. “You got four thousand rounds at that price?”

“Must be a hell of a war a-comin’,” Truman said.

“I can shoot up four thousand rounds in a afternoon. When it comes, it don’t do no good to have shot three thousand rounds and then run out of ammo and have the bastards take yer ass out.” Suddenly Randy put a hand on each of Truman’s shoulders, and he looked Truman in the eyes like a father looks at his son. “Vaughn, I love you, and Jesus loves you. And ya better come with us. Better get the fuck outta here while the gettin’s good.”

After that Randy traded his equity in the boat and the motorcycle to Truman, which wasn’t much, for three Mini-14s and the Ruger and four thousand rounds of ammo. There’d be no use for boats and motorcycles in the Matthew 24 mountains.

*   *   *

The Weavers loaded up their ’57 Dodge Power Wagon pickup with their essentials and said good-bye to their friends, some of whom wept, and then the family of five took off.

“This is one way, by God, for the family ta get close,” Randy said, the five squeezed into the old pickup like sardines in a can. They were all smiles, their eyes set to the West. “So let’s get goin’.” Jesus, according to the Word, according to the prophecies, according to their own lucid revelations, was about to return, and He wouldn’t wait on them or anybody else.

*   *   *

Ten years after leaving the swarming evil of Iowa, there on the side of a mountain called Ruby Ridge they’d built their small cabin one board at a time, the lumber mostly scraps gathered at the mill. They cleared out their garden from the forest, dug their water well close to the creek so that the digging wasn’t deep, and Vicki home-taught Sara and Sammy. They prayed for deliverance, prayed for guidance, for wisdom, and faithfully, patiently they prepared for the Great Tribulation.

And they waited.

In the same year a couple of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms cops put their sights on Randy. He’d made a lot of noise. He’d been seen at some Aryan Nations get-togethers, a white supremacist Christian bunch that the FBI called a “terrorist threat.” He, his wife, and those kids were obviously as poor as rats trapped in an empty garbage can. One day a couple of ATF operatives, with nothing more to do, approached Randy. They held themselves out to be shady characters and asked him to cut the barrels off of two shotguns—offered him a couple of hundred dollars that the family sorely needed.

“They claim cutting this barrel off six inches is illegal. What’s the harm?” Randy asked Vicki. “If I don’t, somebody else will. Fuckin’ water pump’s down, and the kids need shoes.”

Vicki said, “I’ll pray on it.”

“Well, ya better hurry up, because they said they was gonna get somebody else to cut the barrels.” And that afternoon he took out his hacksaw and cut off the barrels of two 12-gauge Remington pumps, and the agents gave him the money.

Then the government agents, these officers of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a division of the United States Treasury, shed their cover. They had Randy Weaver like a mangy coyote in a trap. “They want me to go undercover for ’em,” Randy said.

“We are servants of the Lord, not of men,” Vicki said.

“They want me to lie to somebody else.”

“You can’t trap people with lies,” Vicki said.

“If I don’t they say they’re gonna send me off.”

“And what would happen to our home and to our kids?”

Then they prayed to Yahweh for guidance, prayed in the name of Yahweh so as not to take the Lord’s name in vain. They prayed for wisdom and deliverance. They brought the family together and prayed with Sara and Sammy and with little Rachel. Randy also spoke of the trap to Kevin Harris, who, as a runaway teenager, had found a new family with Randy and Vicki and the kids, had helped build their shack, and over the years felt taken in, cherished, and adopted by them.

When the praying was over, Randy rose up and said he would not become the Judas goat who led the sheep to slaughter to save himself. And if he’d been wrong in cutting off the shotguns, which he would not concede, his wrong would not be made right by his lies against others.

“You can all go fuck yourselves” is how Randy put it to the agents of the United States government when they came back to see if he’d cooperate. “I ain’t gonna snitch for you or nobody else.”

The chief agent leaned his head out of his pickup truck and asked, “You sure of that?” and when Randy said he was sure, the government men turned to each other with sneers, and they drove off in their government pickup spraying gravel. Then the agent driving the truck leaned out of his window and yelled back, “See you in court, you stupid motherfucker.”

One afternoon two months later, Vicki asked Randy to take her on a short ride—just to get out of the house. Pregnant with their fourth child and about to deliver, she knew she’d be cooped up soon enough with the new baby.

Randy, driving slowly and without fault, looked up ahead and saw an old pickup with a camper stalled at the bridge. A man was peering under the hood. Dressed in ragged clothes, a coat that looked like it had been dragged through a thrashing machine, and an old blue striped woolen stocking cap pushed back, he was shaking his head as if in the throes of consternation. Beside him stood a frail-looking woman in a coat too thin even for the thawing weather. She was holding on to herself, her arms tightly folded across her chest attempting to capture her escaping body heat. She was intently watching the man working under the hood, and when she heard the Weaver pickup approaching, she looked up but then looked back down again.

Randy, seeing the trouble, stopped his pickup. “I guess you better go see if you can help them,” Vicki said. He got out and walked toward the stranded couple.

“What’sa matter there, folks? Got a little engine trouble?” Randy asked. The man looked up and nodded, and then, when Randy was about ten feet away, he wheeled suddenly out from under the hood with a 9 mm automatic in his hand. “Federal officers,” he hollered. “Freeze.” By this time the woman had her gun drawn, the one she’d been holding under her folded arms. She aimed her gun through the half-open window on Vicki’s side of the car.

“Get out of the car,” she ordered. “Federal officers.” Vicki struggled to get her heavy body turned toward the door. “Hurry up,” the female federal officer said.

“What’s this all about?” Vicki asked, still struggling to get out.

“I’ll ask the questions,” said the woman with the gun.

The man with his 9 mm on Randy hollered, “Get on your belly, Weaver. You’re under arrest.”

“I ain’t gonna get on my belly in this slush,” Randy said.

Then from above the road came a heavy voice. “Get on your belly, Weaver, or I’ll cut off your legs.” A man was crouched on the overhanging cliff. He was wearing white camouflaged overwear with a white hood that blended in with the snow. He manned a machine gun sitting on a pivot. By this time three more fully armed agents had burst out of the back end of the pickup’s camper.

One of the agents came up from behind Randy and pushed him down. The other agents were on top of him like a pack of mad dogs. They pushed his face into the slush and gravel, slapped cuffs on him, and dragged him to his feet, dripping. They patted him down and shoved him into the camper.

The woman with the gun told Vicki to get down on her belly.

“I am a citizen of the United States of America,” Vicki said in a loud clear voice. “I have rights.”

“You been harboring a fugitive,” the woman with the gun said. “Get on your belly.”

Vicki squatted slowly, attempting to comply. Then the woman pushed her over on her side into the mud and began to frisk her.

“I have not been harboring any criminals,” Vicki said. “And you have no right to touch me there.”

“I am not touching you, I am patting you down.”

“You have no right to pat me there. I will report you to your supervisor.”

“He’s right over there, lady. Report away.” She threw in a few extra pats for good measure and then put the cuffs on Vicki and ordered her to get up. With her hands cuffed behind her, Vicki struggled against the weight in her womb. She staggered, fell to a knee, then struggled again to right herself. The woman stood over her, her legs spread apart and her gun still out. She offered no hand. When Vicki had at last gained her feet, the woman glared at her, looked her up and down, saw her condition, saw the mud on her dress and on the side of her face where she’d lain on the ground, and shook her head as one who beheld a disgusting sight.

“You’d better repent,” Vicki said. “You’re serving the evil One World Government.”

“You’re one of those Aryan Nations crazies,” the woman replied.

“That is another of your lies,” Vicki said.

“Are you calling me a liar?” The woman started for Vicki, but Vicki did not turn her eyes away from the woman, and as she came close, threatening in the way she stamped down her feet and swung her shoulders, Vicki stood taller as if to meet the charge, her fists clenched inside the cuffs.

Stopping short, the woman said, “You aren’t worth it.”

“Take her cuffs off,” the man said to the woman agent.

“What for?”

“We’re not taking her in. Too damn much trouble. Want to deliver a kid up in the cell block? Hell of a mess.”

“How would you know?” the woman asked. She removed the cuffs from Vicki. Then she gave Vicki one last slap on the rear and said, “Get the hell out of here, lady, if you don’t want us to take you in for obstruction of justice.”

“What justice?” Vicki said. “What are you going to do with my husband?”

“That’s our business, lady,” the chief officer said, and with that the officers slammed the hood of the truck shut, boarded the camper, and drove off through the wet January thaw with their prisoner. Vicki could hear the sound of the truck tires in the slush for a long time after it disappeared around the curve. When she could hear it no longer she crawled into the old family pickup. She didn’t know how to drive a stick shift.

*   *   *

They put up their makeshift house in the woods to secure Randy’s bond for his court appearance. Nobody would want that beaten-up, hacked-together shack, but it represented their total fortune.

Randy, charged with illegally sawing off those two shotguns, stood nervous and stiff before Magistrate Steven Ayers. Magistrate Ayers warned him that if he went to trial and lost he might lose his house as well. Later the magistrate admitted he’d misadvised Randy on the law. But at the time Randy believed, “If I lose in court I get my ass thrown in the can forever and lose our house, too? That’s all we got. And me and my four kids and Vicki’d be livin’ under the fuckin’ bridge.” He couldn’t afford a lawyer, and he wasn’t about to go to trial before a bunch of pecker-bills who wanted to do him in and who’d throw his wife and kids to the dogs. They gave him the wrong date for his court appearance. So, of course, he didn’t show and they had him on yet another charge—his failure to appear.

In the meantime the marshals held a big powwow—those government servants whose job is to keep citizens safe from vicious criminals. They formulated the best-laid plans that government minds could concoct on how to capture this vicious criminal who’d sawed off a couple of shotguns for a few desperate bucks. You can hear them. “And he’s one dangerous motherfucker for sure. Remember, he was a former Green Beret. Could put a bullet right between the orbs from five hundred yards. And he’s got all those guns and a truckload of ammo, and he taught the kids how to shoot, and the bunch of them are as crazy as a crowd of jazzed-up hopheads.”

Trapped in their little scrap-lumber shack, Randy and Vicki and the kids prayed on it some more. They came to a fairly reasonable conclusion: that if the ATF would set them up with a phony gun charge, make Randy a criminal, and then give him the wrong date to appear, thereby converting him into a fugitive from justice, the feds would end up taking their home, and they’d throw Randy in prison for the better part of his remaining life and leave his family fatherless and homeless. If they prayed long enough and hard enough, Yahweh would protect them. That was their best weapon—the intervention of Yahweh, who made it clear from above what was obvious from below: They had no choice but to stay put and fight off “the agents of the devil,” as Vicki called them.

*   *   *

After Randy failed to appear in court, a gang of federal marshals dressed up in brand-new camouflage gear with their automatic rifles and night-spotting equipment began to secretly invade the Weaver property. Squatted in the woods, they began spying on the Weavers, “gathering data,” as they liked to call it. They installed a TV spy camera up on the mountain behind the Weavers’ cabin that monitored every move the family made. For months they sneaked and peeked around in the woods spying on this peaceful family.

Behind the house the Weavers had constructed a small “birthing shed,” where Vicki had given birth to Elisheba, the Weavers’ newest child. It had another purpose, too. According to the Weavers’ interpretation of the Bible, during a woman’s “blood time,” she was to be separated from the family, which meant that she would stay in the birthing shed until her menses was completed. The marshals began keeping track of the days when Sara, the Weavers’ teenage daughter, had her period. When they were ready and Sara’s time came around again, they’d descend on the birthing shed and kidnap her, and when Randy tried to save his daughter, the marshals would capture him and take this vicious criminal into custody to be dealt with according to law.

In the meantime the feds needed to put the right slant on the case so the public would understand they were dealing with a dangerous criminal. So they conjured up a false history on Randy—even claimed he was a bank robber who was dragging a book full of prior convictions behind him. I mean, if all you’ve got to do is to capture a criminal whose worst crime is sawing off a couple of shotguns, well, you need a pretty good story behind it or you can’t call out a bunch of armed marshals with bulletproof vests and helicopters for surveillance, and all those radios and listening devices and cameras that can, as they say, “catch a gnat farting from half a mile away.” Accordingly the feds loaded the local and national media with demonizing stories about the Weavers so that if they killed him their actions would be fully supported by the public.

The feds also played up Weaver’s association with the Aryan Nations, “a fascist bunch of racists.” From their earliest reports on the case, the press would refer to Randy Weaver as a “white supremacist holed up in the mountains of Idaho.” And with coaching from the marshals, the media remembered that the founder of the Aryan Nations, Robert Mathews, died in a shootout with federal agents in December 1984. Weaver was just another of that violent bunch of crazies. So the clear message was “Get ready for the killing.”

Then one day when the wind happened to be just right, the Weavers’ dog Striker, an old yellow Lab who’d beat you to death with his wagging tail, smelled the marshals and began raising all kinds of commotion. It sounded as if the hounds of hell had come face-to-face with the devil himself. Given the volume of the dog’s barking, the Weavers thought it was probably a bear. Kevin Harris, along with the Weavers’ only son, Sammy, a fourteen-year-old who still spoke in a boy’s high voice and didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds, if that, decided to investigate what was going on down below the house.

“Striker’s gonna get us a bear!” were the words from Sammy’s excited lips, and the two boys took out after old Striker. Of course, the boys grabbed their rifles. Randy took the higher road in case the bear headed in that direction.

The marshals later claimed they were afraid of this waggly-tailed old dog. When he got to where they were hiding and he was about to flush them out, they shot him on the spot. You could hear him yelp as a bullet from one of their automatic rifles passed through his body, and then you could hear his slow, dying whine into the bright morning sun.

Little Sam heard the shots and saw old Striker fall. Who would shoot an old yellow dog? His dog. He hollered into the woods, “You sons of bitches, you shot my dog!” The sound of such bristling words from the soft lips of a child was startling. Then, standing in the open and in full view of the hidden marshals, the boy fired his rifle in the direction of the marshal’s shot.

Randy heard the shots from the upper end of the forest. “Come on home, Sam,” Randy shouted.

“I’m comin’, Dad.” Those were Sammy’s last words.

The marshals, still hidden in the forest, opened fire on the boy as he ran toward home. First they shot his arm—shot it all but off so that it was dangling by the hide. Then they shot the boy in the back. Kevin Harris turned toward the place in the forest where he’d heard the marshals’ shots come from and fired in that direction, once. Then he, too, turned and ran toward the house.

*   *   *

The marshals still hid in the dense pines, their bodies wedged prone against the boulders for protection, their faces smudged the color of dirty grass, their eyes, also unblinking, staring up the road. Staring. Their mouths clamped against words. A marshal in a new camouflage uniform looked for a long time at the body lying in front of him. Marshal Bill Degan was his name. He brushed at the air to keep the flies from the eyes of the dead man, open and unblinking. Then his hand returned quickly to his automatic weapon, and he stared back up the road, waiting.

When the marshals heard the people coming to reclaim their dead, they remained silent as the grasses. Then the marshals saw the three walking slowly down a road of two tracks through the summer brome, a tall, younger man on one track, a woman on the other, and following behind the woman an older man, smaller than the first and no taller than the woman. The smaller man, without hat or weapon, wore old coveralls, faded army green. His hair, graying around the ears, was clipped short. In the low evening sun the shadows of the people were long as trees, long, slow-moving shadows that lumbered downward toward the hiding men. In the evening sun the faces of the three were flaming and their eyes were the eyes of agony staring down the road.

The woman, in a once-white cotton dress, the skirt reaching to her ankles, moved with a grace not witnessed in the men, a smoothness in her steps so that her head did not bob up and down with each step like the heads of tired horses in their traces. The younger man stopped, and the others stopped with him. He looked down, and the others, in silence, gathered around where he looked, and it was then that the terrible wailing began, the sound of the woman’s voice first, the sound of the people wailing in terrible agony banishing the silence.

The woman fell to her knees, and the smaller man behind her fell to his, and the sounds of their suffering joined into a single wavering cry that stretched out into long thin threads of sound. Then the younger man walked on down the road to where the old yellow dog lay. He slipped his foot under the dog and turned the dog over, but the animal was already stiffening. Then the younger man turned slowly and trudged back up the hill to the source of the wailing. It had stopped. Then it burst into short sobs and billowed into high shrill peaks, sounds rising, quivering, and dying like ancient sounds.

The woman and the smaller man lifted the boy’s body, the man at the head, the woman with her arms under the knees. They lifted the body face-upward, and the evening sun shone on the boy’s body. The right arm fell halfway down and stopped in midair as if to make a point. The left arm hung from a patch of loose skin and swayed back and forth as the body was raised, and the arm twisted like the pendulum of a tired clock with the small boy’s fingers extended, beckoning the people home.

The smaller man, the father, started back up the road. He walked backward so that the mother following and holding the legs of her child could walk forward. The man and the woman facing each other did not look at each other, the woman guiding them like a tiller on a small boat. Once the father stumbled and fell, and the body fell with him, part of the body on top of the father, but the mother held on, and the head of the boy moved stiffly, but the mother did not drop her son. The father, refusing the help of the larger, younger man, struggled to his feet and walked on backward still bearing his son, the red sun fierce on the father’s wet face.

Sara, their daughter, saw them coming and ran out of the house and down to the porch to meet them. When she saw what her parents were carrying she stopped, afraid to come closer. Afraid of the dead. Afraid to look at the face of her brother, younger by two years, the brother who had laughed when she was frightened in the forest, and who promised more than once he would take care of her, forever, and who now had broken his promise.

“Open the door to the birthing shed,” Randy Weaver said, his panting voice speaking to no one. Sara stood as if she did not hear her father. Then she suddenly ran to the birthing shed and unlatched the wooden knob at the top of the door and flung the door open. She held the door open, and her father backed in with Sammy, head first, and they lifted the child onto the bed, the left arm still twisting in perpetual protest. Kevin Harris picked up the arm and laid it across the boy’s chest, and after that Sara, who had not looked Sammy in the face, ran to the house, wild-eyed and without weeping.

The mother untied her dead boy’s shoes. Sammy was a growing boy; they’d bought his shoes a size too large, and they slipped easily from his stiffening feet. Then the mother and father removed their son’s other clothing, and Vicki brought in a pail of water with soap from the kitchen, and they bathed the child’s hairless body for the burial, and they dried the body with a clean towel. When they turned the body over they saw the entry wound in the back, a bullet hole the size of a pencil, neat and round and glistening red. The mother, with lips as tight as silence, touched lightly at the edge of the wound like one confirming what the eyes had seen.

“I seen it,” Kevin Harris said. “That’s when I shot the bastard that shot Sammy.”

Suddenly, without warning, Randy dropped the bloody cloth he’d been using to bathe Sammy’s wounds and ran from the birthing shed. Vicki saw him run toward the house, and when he came out he had a Mini-14 rifle in one hand and clips of ammunition in the other. He had an automatic pistol on his hip. And she knew. For when they have killed the only son they have murdered the line, cut the unbroken line that reached back to savage stone beginnings. She knew that a man cannot bear such killing. Killing begets killing.

Vicki ran in those long graceful steps to cut off his path, and when they were face-to-face, he stopped.

“Where are you going?” She stood larger than herself in front of him.

“Don’t be in my way, woman,” he said. The sadness was gone from his face.

“They will only kill you. That will do us no good.” He tried to push past her, but she stepped quickly in his way again. “If they kill you we’ll all die here. And our children will die here.” She put a hand on each of his cheeks. She felt the roughness of his whiskers on her palms. She pushed his face up so that his eyes had to see her. His eyes were killing eyes. “Our children will die here with me,” she said.

“Get out of my way,” he said.

“Then you have to shoot me first,” she said, still holding his face. He tried to escape by pulling free, but she was quicker than he, and in front of him again. “You have to shoot me first,” she said again. He tried once more, but again she was in front of him. He struck out in her direction with the barrel of the gun, though not to hit her. “Let me be,” he said. “I have to go. It’s my place to go.”

“It is not a matter to argue about,” she said. He had seen this in her eyes before. The implacable. One cannot argue with the storm. Then he lifted his rifle to the sky and emptied it. Twenty shots, the small caliber with its high eerie cry exploding in far places, wounding the atmosphere. His cry of agony grew louder, higher than the shots from the gun, his cry of one mortally injured. He filled the rifle with another clip and again emptied its twenty shots. And all the while she stood back and watched and let the man empty himself.

And when all of the ammunition he had brought from the cabin had been fired, he pulled out his pistol and shot it in the air until it, too, was empty. He pulled the empty trigger, once, twice, again and again, and then he fell to the ground. And he wept and he did not rise up off of the ground until it was dark. Then he walked like the dead to the cabin.

The marshals had interpreted Randy’s firing to mean that a horde of his followers had engaged in the battle. The marshals called for help. At half past one in the morning the rescuers arrived at Ruby Ridge—the sheriff’s men, highway patrolmen, town constables, and volunteer firemen who, being of that kind, had volunteered themselves into the sheriff’s posse. They had volunteered to kill. In the dark of night, seventy-three men without discipline or order crept and stumbled into each other hugging their weapons close to their chests, their fingers ready.

The hiding marshals heard them coming and hollered, “Who goes?” Then one of the rescuers answered, “Hey, man, it’s us,” and the forest suddenly came alive with men expelling their breath and shouting in loud words so long held back.

“How many in that Weaver outfit are there?”

“Don’t know how many. Fire comin’ from every direction.”

Another said, “Musta shot a thousand rounds into us.”

“More’n that, maybe.”

“You musta heard it. Everybody heard it.”

“They were layin’ for us. They got Bill here. Shot through the heart.”

“They knew we were comin’.”

“Chased us down with dogs.”

“Ambushed us. Some of them Aryan Nations crazies—Weaver the worst.”

“Fuckin’ crazies. Had it out with them kind before up north.”

“Seen one, ya seen ’em all. Vicious sons-a-bitches, I’ll tell ya that much.”

“Thought you guys’d never get here. Where ya been?”

“We gotta get Bill outta here.”

“Where they at now?”

“We haven’t heard anything from ’em since about sundown. Then we heard a lot of screamin’ and a lot of shootin’. Sprayed the place with lead.”

“I don’t know where all their reinforcements come from.”

Then a couple of rescuers with flashlights searched the forest for small dead standing trees, pulled two of them over, trimmed them with a hatchet, and made an Indian travois, a frame of two long poles inserted through the arms of the coat of the dead marshal. They proceeded to drag him down the mountain, the rickety thing making scraping sounds against the rocks and the timber along with the panting of the men with death at their heels. Music for the dead.

By the time they arrived at the staging area, the sun was up, and armored personnel carriers had taken over the scene like bullies on the playground. Tents had been pitched, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty. Hundreds of cars were parked helter-skelter. National Guardsmen in full combat uniform, helmets and all, milled among the cars and pickup trucks and campers. Some were serving fresh-baked flapjacks and bacon from the tailgates of their trucks. When the rescuers pulling the travois came by, the Guardsmen opened the way and peered curiously at the dead man. Then, after the dead had passed, they went on eating. And laughing.

The television crews had also arrived. They jockeyed for position like horses out of the gate. Violence, blood, and death. We are addicted to blood and violence. When the rescuers dragged the travois by, the cameramen zoomed in on the dead man’s eyes, the cornea beginning to dry up, looking rough and dull, and his mouth hung open like the mouth of an old man sleeping. And the living, knowing they were on camera, smiled, and one man waved. And the millions on television were sold pizza, beer, and cars—fast, pretty cars.

The TV man shoved the microphone in the face of Senior Deputy U.S. Marshal David Hunt. “What happened?” he asked.

“We were ambushed by a bunch of those Aryan Nations individuals. We were hit. They trailed us with dogs. They were shootin’ at us out of a pickup truck. I don’t know how many. They killed Deputy Marshal Bill Degan there. One of the best. I’d like to be on record for that. Member of the Special Forces. Seen a lotta combat. Knew what he was doin’. But they got him.”

“How many of you were there?”

“We were outnumbered. Just the six of us. I don’t know how many there was shootin’ at us. Roderick called on the radio for help. The three of us came runnin’ down as fast as we could. Ran through a rain of fire like you couldn’t believe. Twigs snappin’. Dust flyin’. Shots hittin’ all around us. Musta shot a thousand rounds at us. When we got close, Roderick yelled out to us. And we dove in beside ’em. We had a medic with us. The medic said Bill was already bled out. Didn’t even try to give him CPR. I’ve already called Washington for ’em to bring in the Hostage Rescue Team.”

“Sounds like a war.”

“Big-time,” said Senior Deputy U.S. Marshal Hunt, and he nodded his head with a sharp little nod and thereafter gave the TV man the long, deep look of a man confirming the truth.

*   *   *

Through the torment of shock, grief, anger, and fear the Weavers hadn’t slept that night—none of them. The small brown mutt the kids called Buddy jumped up on Sammy’s bed, and they heard his whining through the thin walls. Nor did the chicken, Roger, sleep. Rachel named her chicken for Roger Rooster. They’d eaten all the other fryers out of the hatch except Roger. She’d protected Roger from the ax. But Roger had grown up to be a hen. The child held on to the chicken all night, squashed it to her until the chicken’s feathers were wet, and smelled.

Night was the worst. One cannot see things clearly in the mind at night. It takes the eye of day to see what’s in the mind. Randy saw the blood of his son on his hands. There was no water in the house for washing. They’d snuffed the kerosene lamps so that they wouldn’t be silhouetted against the door. Then Randy and Kevin went to the spring for water, but even at the spring Randy didn’t wash away the blood of his son.

Randy, grown calm and silent as empty rifles, made fifteen trips to the spring below the house, taking Kevin with him. Kevin could carry more. They ran out of pails, and the men filled empty gasoline cans, empty milk cartons, empty honey cans, and bowls and cups and empty fruit jars. They filled flower vases, the pots and kettles and the washbasin, but not for washing—for drinking. Six people drink a lot of water. They secured waxed paper over the top of the containers and tied the paper around with old store string, some with yarn, to keep out the dust and the flies, for in the morning the feds would surely cut off the spring.

Randy, too numb to weep further, had duties to the living. He began readying the guns. He hung their Remington 12-gauge with the short legal barrel on the west wall of boards, three shells in the magazine, the magazine legal. He hung the 12-gauge next to Vicki’s black Sunday hat, next to the camouflage jacket Sammy wore in the fall, hunting deer with Randy. He hung a single-shot 12-gauge on the wall around the corner, eye level, where it would be in easy reach. Then he stacked twenty boxes of shotgun shells on the floor, Federal brand, double-aught buck. Good for deer, but also capable of punching fifteen holes through a man at ten feet. Shoot a man with double-aught buck at close range and the argument’s over.

“Are they gonna kill us, too?” Rachel asked her mother in her small voice. The chicken clutched at her chest looked out with one wild eye, the other smothered against the child.

“No,” her mother said. “Yahweh will protect us.”

“Why didn’t Yahweh protect Sammy?” Rachel asked.

The mother didn’t answer.

Randy laid an AK-47 on the red sofa and set a case of ammunition beside it, and he laid a semiautomatic pistol there as well. The weapons were laid where the children could reach them, for the children, trained to survive the invading hordes that would descend during the Great Tribulation, knew how to fire all of the guns.

On the far wall, which was no wall but bare studs filled with bats of insulation and covered with plastic sheets, Vicki hung two bundles of candles—one red, one blue. She placed a box of kitchen matches beside the candleholder on the shelf, next to five boxes of .357 Magnum pistol ammunition: Western brand, hollow points, semijacketed. Kill a man easy.

“Y’all ’member how to use the gas masks?” Randy asked the room. No answer. Five black rubber World War II surplus gas masks gaped down like foolish black skulls. A year ago Randy had hung them on the wall, also low enough for the children to reach. “I asked, do y’all ’member how to use the gas masks?”

“Are they gonna gas us?” Rachel asked.

“If they try, I’ll kill ever’ one of the sons-a-bitches,” Randy said.

“Why did they kill Sammy?” Rachel asked. “He never did anything to them.” She began to cry again. Sara came to her and put her arm around child and chicken.

“It just happened,” Sara said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“This was Sammy’s Mini,” Randy said, but he fought against the weeping.

Vicki handed him a cup of coffee. “I’ll get your milk.”

He looked at her, and he saw in her what he had always seen in her, and when she handed him the cup he let his finger touch her hand, the finger with the blood of his son, dark and dry. “This’ll keep me awake,” he said in small protest.

“You aren’t gonna sleep tonight,” she said. Her voice was soft like her eyes. “Nobody is gonna sleep.”

“We could pray,” Rachel said.

“Yes,” her mother said. “We can pray.” The baby had begun to cry again and she patted its back, but it did no good. “My milk is gone,” she said.

“Pray,” Rachel said. “Please, Mamma, you know how to pray best.”

The mother sat down on a case of vegetarian beans and put her arm around the child.

“Go bring Sara here,” her mother said. “Gather up your father, and Kevin, too.” The baby was still crying.

“Come on, Sara. Mamma is gonna pray,” Rachel said.

Then Sara took her father by the hand and gave a little nod to Kevin that he should come, and she led her father to the box where the mother sat jiggling the crying child. Vicki looked past her grief for the dead into the waiting faces of the living, and she reached out her hand, the baby in her other, and Rachel grasped the hand, and Sara took hold of the other arm of her little sister, the arm holding the chicken, and Randy took the other hand of Sara, and, with Kevin, the family made a small tight circle. But the circle was never closed, for Vicki held on to the baby with the last closing hand, and Kevin did not take hold of the arm of another man’s woman.

Then Vicki began to pray through the wailing child. “Oh, Yahweh, bless those who attack us, and who would do all nature of evil to us,” she began in a voice made high to transcend the crying baby. “Oh, Yahweh, hear my prayers for my children, for they are Thy children. Oh, Yahweh, do not forsake Thy children. This I beseech Thee, Yahweh, do not turn Thine ear from them, for they are afraid.” Then she put her hand on Rachel’s head. “And bless this child. Take her fear from her. Save these, Thy children. And Kevin, too. Amen.”

The baby stopped crying for a moment.

“You didn’t pray for yourself,” Sara said. “You should pray for yourself,” but Vicki, without answering, walked into the kitchen patting the baby.

Randy pulled the first aid kit from under the bed. “Here’s the first aid kit,” he said, giving it a shove with his foot. On the far wall of the bedroom was pinned with ordinary straight pins a WEAVER FOR SHERIFF bumper sticker. If he’d won the election this never would have happened.

“We won’t need the first aid kit,” Sara said, looking at Rachel. “Mamma prayed.”

“Just the same, here it is,” Randy said.

In the kitchen the mother was silent, the fog of grief upon her, her fear for the living transcending. “Colic,” Vicki said. “Sara, bring me the baby’s bottle with some warm water. And the baby aspirin.”

Suddenly Kevin was in the room. “The baby knows I killed a man. And the baby don’t want me in this house. I am poisonin’ the house. Babies know.”

“Babies know nothin’,” Vicki said. “Babies have the colic.”

“If I hadn’ta shot him he woulda shot me. He already shot Sammy. Them feds had already shot ol’ Striker. They was layin’ for us. They was hid in the woods waitin’ for us.”

“You did right,” Vicki said, picking up the baby, her voice breaking with her patting of the child.

“I seen ’em shootin’ at Sammy. I mean, he didn’t do nothin’ ’cept put a round into where they was hidin’ after they shot ol’ Striker, an’ Sammy was runnin’ home.”

“You did right,” Vicki said again. “Nobody blames you. Yahweh knows what was in your heart.”

Then Kevin and Randy walked down to the spring for more water.

When they returned with the last of the water, Randy held his pack of cigarettes out to Kevin, and after he took one, and Randy took one and lit the cigarettes with his World War II Zippo, and after he’d blown out the smoke he looked at Kevin and stayed silent. Kevin knew he was supposed to wait for Randy to speak. Randy took another drag. Then he gave a small kick at a blue-green plastic suitcase that had held Kevin’s few things when he’d come to the family.

“Better get yer stuff together, Kevin,” Randy said.

“I ain’t goin’ no place,” Kevin said. “Vicki says all that’s wrong with the baby is colic.”

“In the mornin’ it’ll be too late.”

Then Kevin said the words again. “I ain’t goin’ no place. An’ ya need me. ’Member how I shot that gopher at a hundred yards and ya said I couldn’t hit it?” He took another drag. “Bible says a man’s got a right to defend himself.”

“Better git,” Randy said.

“I done what I had ta do yesterday. Sammy woulda done the same fer me. And if the little bastard was here he wouldn’t want me ta take off runnin’. Sammy knows.” He took another drag and blew smoke. “I spec’ he’s watchin’ right now, an’ ol’ Sammy says for me to stay and help his ol’ man and his mamma, and that’s what I intend ta do, with all due respec’.” The tears came to Randy’s eyes. “An’ don’t be cryin’ about it. There ain’t no more ta talk about.”

“You ain’t thinkin’ right,” Randy said.

“I beg ta differ with ya, with all due respec’,” Kevin said. “Them feds has got listenin’ equipment, and they’re probably listenin’ ta everything we’re sayin’ right now.”

“Well, if that is the case, let me say somethin’ they can hear,” Randy said. “Fuck you, you dirty rotten cowardly chickenshits. Fuck you!”

“Hush. I can’t get the baby to sleep,” Vicki said.

“Better get some clothes,” Randy said to Vicki.

“We are not going anyplace,” Vicki said. “This is where Sammy is. This is our home. And we’re stayin’ put. It’s the Great Tribulation,” Vicki said. “It is descending upon us. This is the place Yahweh sent us.”

Then he walked up close to his wife, held her with his eyes, only his eyes, and spoke so that the children could not hear, but so she could hear above the crying of the child. “Mamma. They are going to kill us all.”

There was a long silence as they looked at each other. They searched with their looks, the husband searching the wife, and the wife the husband. Finally Vicki said, “If they kill us all, it is the will of Yahweh.”

The husband turned from the wife. He looked once more at the blood on his hands. He started to speak to his wife, but held back his words.

“We gotta take it as it comes,” Vicki said. “Rachel, honey,” she hollered over the top of the baby’s head, “why don’t you feed your chicken? She’s hungry. She hasn’t had a thing to eat or drink all day. You could feed her some Quaker Oats.”

“She isn’t hungry,” Rachel said.

“Maybe you’re hungry,” Vicki said. “I could fix you a bowl of your favorite Campbell’s chicken soup and a peanut butter sandwich.”

“I’m not hungry,” Rachel said.

Then Vicki began to sing to the baby in her arms, the baby sobbing in little jerky sobs.

*   *   *

They’d prepared themselves, a little at a time as they got the money. They knew that to survive the Great Tribulation required more than weapons to stave off the invaders who would, as was clearly predicted in the Word, descend upon them as mobs to rob and pillage and rape. They needed a massive store of food.

Randy had worked odd jobs, as had Kevin. They logged in the winter with horses and built fence for neighbors. They took jobs at the sawmill. They lived sparingly, and they lived off the land. Their garden produced bountifully—spinach, lettuce and chard, radishes, parsnips, turnips and beets. They grew cauliflower and broccoli, cucumbers and squash, and pumpkin plants crept along the garden’s edge, and after the first frost the pumpkins were like great orange eggs dropped from some primordial beast, and the kids carved them into jack-o’-lanterns, after which the fearsome things were converted to pumpkin pie.

The garden produced tomatoes. Bushels of tomatoes. Vicki canned them ripe. She canned them green. She made relish. She made ketchup. She made juice when the profusion of tomatoes exceeded her ability to can them. It was Sara’s garden, watered from their well, pumped by the power created from a small surplus generator for which Randy had traded a World War I Enfield .30-06 rifle. It was Vicki’s canning that saved the money, and Randy’s hunting that brought in the venison. And the children wore hand-me-downs without shame, for the children were not exposed to public school and taunting children who made fun of old clothes.

As they had scraped the money together, they bought flour by the hundred-pound sack, and against the west wall of the living room they stored cartons of canned goods bearing the Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA) label. Sometimes they got together with neighbors, and Vicki covered the boxes with her mother’s old linen tablecloths and thought it all looked nice. Over time they’d bought cases of quick oats and several cans of Maxwell House coffee in the blue gallon tins. Coffee costs a lot. At the time of the Great Tribulation they’d have to do without the coffee.

When Vicki tried to think, all she could see was the body of her son. She saw the lines of small frail ribs sticking through the translucent skin. She saw the arm, as if it had been sliced deep and horribly with a knife so that the ruby red muscle in the forearm bulged out. She saw the flesh was dry, the bone sharp and white. She saw the boy’s face, the eyes that did not see her, the mouth without the ready smile, the terrible look of death on the small boy’s blameless face. Mothers die with their dead children.

The baby began to cry harder. On the pine dresser behind a vase of red dried flowers sat their squatty kerosene lamp, the one she lit every night as she prepared for bed and then blew out before she climbed into the covers. To light the fire and to blow it out—that was a ritual, like priests have rituals. Rituals were forbidden by the Word, but this one secret ritual surely would be forgiven, for it made her feel secure, as if what she did she had always done, and what she always did she would always do. But she could not do the ritual tonight. She could not sleep. What she saw through the eye of the mind would not let her sleep. And the wailing of the child was a blessing, for the demands of the living kept her from embracing the dead.

Randy said, “Give her some of that powdered milk. Maybe she’ll quit crying.”

“I already tried. She won’t take it,” Vicki said.

Randy said, “Mamma, maybe if ya got some rest and ate a little somethin’ yer milk will come back.”

Sara took the child from her mother. “You go to bed, Mamma. I’ll bring you some tea and a peanut butter sandwich.”

“I can’t sleep. Not with Sammy layin’ out there in the shed,” Vicki said.

“Ya gotta sleep, Mamma. The baby will get sick,” Sara said.

“Ya gotta sleep, Mamma,” Randy said. “Me and Kevin will go out in the kitchen.” He motioned Kevin toward the kitchen table. They sat for a long time in silence. Randy opened a new pack of cigarettes, offered one to Kevin, lit them with his Zippo, and blew out the smoke.

“Ya wanna know what Sammy’s last words were?” Kevin spoke in his high, kindly way so that his words were still touched with respect.

“I guess I do.”

“I heard ya callin’ him,” Kevin said. “An’ Sammy’s last words was, ‘I’m comin’, Dad.’ An’ then Sammy turns around and starts runnin’ home and the bastards opened fire on him.”

“I heard his last words, then,” Randy said. “And I heard the shootin’ an’ I couldn’t get him ta answer, so I shoots my 12-gauge into the air a coupla times tryin’ ta get him ta answer or ta come home or ta get his attention or somethin’.”

“It was too late,” Kevin said. “I heard a little kinda cry, a kinda whimper outta Sammy, and I seen his arm a-flyin’ an’ he dropped his gun, and then they hit him again and I seen him fall. He was runnin’ home.”

Silence except for the crying of the baby.

Then Randy saw Rachel had come into the kitchen. He saw the horror on the child’s face. “We shouldn’t be talkin’ about this in front of the kids,” he said.

“They gonna shoot us, Daddy?” Rachel asked.

“They ain’t gonna shoot nobody,” Randy said. “Now you go upstairs an’ go ta bed.”

“I ain’t goin’ ta bed,” Rachel said in a distant voice. “I ain’t goin’ up there alone. I want Sammy,” and she began to cry. Randy walked over to her and picked the child up. He carried her back to the table, where Kevin still sat, and he held her close to him.

“We’re gonna be OK,” the father said. “Let’s go play a game.”

“I don’t want to play a game,” Rachel said.

He carried the child over to the bookcase where the games were stored along with the children’s home study books about geography and history and English and a McGuffey Reader, all of which were taught to the children by Vicki. The bookcase sheltered a set of old Compton’s encyclopedias, the King James version of the Holy Bible, a set of World Books, The Late Great Planet Earth, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and the visionary book Atlas Shrugged. The games were stacked on top of the bookcase, Scrabble, Rummikub, Last Word, and several others.

“Pick a game,” Randy said.

“I don’t want to play if Sammy isn’t here,” Rachel said. “Will I see Sammy in heaven?”

“Yes,” Randy said.

“When?”

“Someday, child. Someday. Pick a story. I’ll read to you.” The child began to cry. “I want Mamma,” she said, and she ran from her father’s arms into the bedroom, where Vicki lay with her eyes open staring at the ceiling, the peanut butter sandwich and tea sitting on the dresser undisturbed.

“Come get in bed with me.”

Vicki put her hand on the child’s head and, still staring at the ceiling, pressed the child’s head to her.

“Are they going to kill us, Mamma?”

“Remember, honey,” the mother said, still pressing the child to her, “Mamma prayed,” and after that she pressed the child close to her for a long time.

They waited all night for the feds to attack—to burn them out, to gas them. Maybe to throw grenades through the windows or plow the house over with their army tanks. Randy nailed the front door closed. He nailed blankets over the windows. But no one slept. Nor did the baby ever sleep.

In the full, clear light of day, the end would come.

*   *   *

Vicki  Weaver, eyes strained and weary, saw the light leaking around the edges of the blankets that covered the windows. The day had come, and she felt relief. Better to look in the face of the enemy than stare at the ghouls of night. Like one bearing heavy burdens, she shuffled slowly to the kitchen in her gay pink slippers to fire up the stove for coffee. Sara was already up. She stood peering through the small hole in the blanket that covered the front window. “I don’t see anybody out there,” Sara said.

“They’ll be coming,” her mother said. She poked at the coals with a piece of kindling, once, then again, and when the coals flared back she tossed in the kindling. “They aren’t gonna show themselves to us.”

Randy next entered the kitchen. “They’re hidin’ out there like blood-suckin’ ticks. You makin’ the coffee, Mamma?”

“I’m makin’ it.”

“The cowardly bastards won’t show themselves.” He was smoking still. Smoked all night. “Gonna pick us off from ambush.”

Vicki lifted the claw hammer from the kitchen table and began to pull the nails that held the blanket.

“Don’t be takin’ that blanket down,” Randy said. “They’ll shoot us right through the fuckin’ window.”

“We gotta have light to think,” Vicki said. She tacked the blanket back and loosened the upper half to let the north light flood into the room. Then she did the same at the west window, and the window on the east. Ah, the blessed light of the east! She breathed in the light. The flat light cut through the smoke of fire and cigarettes.

She poured the coffee, stirred in the powdered milk for Randy’s, pulled the sugar bowl down from the shelf, and, knowing the exact quantity of sugar, stirred in two teaspoonfuls and handed the cup to her man. She did the same for Kevin, who’d been sitting quietly in the dark corner.

“You gotta come out of there and get into the light,” she said to Kevin. “An’ kinda stoop down in front of the windows when you walk by. You’re taller.” He took the coffee. Then the mother opened the firebox to the stove and picked up another stick of kindling.

“Careful, Mamma, we only got a little wood left,” Sara said. “The wood’s out on the porch.”

“I know,” the mother said. “But a person’s gotta have coffee to clear the mind. We haven’t slept. And we need to think.”

“I’ll go out and get some wood,” Sara said, heading for the door.

“I nailed the door shut,” Randy said.

“You can unnail it, Papa. They aren’t gonna kill me. I never shot anybody.”

“Neither did old Striker. Neither did Sammy.”

“We gotta go out there sometime, Papa. Sammy’s out there.”

“I ain’t forgot about him,” Randy said, his eyes tearing up again. “How we gonna get Sammy buried, is what I been thinkin’.”

“They know we gotta come out,” Sara said.

“I’ll go out and get the wood,” Kevin said with his soft words. “An’ I’ll go dig the hole for Sammy, an’ if they shoot, I don’t give a damn.”

“Nobody’s goin’ no place,” Randy said.

“Did you hear those planes over us all night?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah. They were flyin’ around and around,” Vicki said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Takin’ night pictures of us,” Randy said. “We used to do it in the service.”

“I hope things looked nice,” Vicki said. Then she pulled the curtains on the door window aside and quickly peered out.

“We need to go, Papa.” It was Sara. “If we go out now we can get it all done before they decide what to do. Remember how you used to say that government men drink coffee till ten, think what they are gonna do till eleven, get their stuff together, and then go have lunch. Remember? We could go now while they’re still thinkin’.”

“I ain’t gonna let ya. I lost one kid already.”

“Somebody has to. They aren’t gonna shoot a girl.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“I’m goin’ out. Just out on the porch.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I am.” She picked up the hammer and started for the door. She pulled at the nails until Randy took the hammer. He heaved up on the hammer handle and down again until the nails pulled free.

Sara walked up and down the porch, strutting some as if to show no fear, her feet making noise on the plywood floor. She looked around. “They must be moving an army in,” Sara said. “You can hear the trucks.”

“Probably tanks,” Randy said.

“Would they bring tanks in against just us?” Sara asked.

“Ever see the gov’ment do anything that made sense?” Randy said. “The way you figger the gov’ment is figger what you wouldn’t do and that’s what the gov’ment’ll do—ever’ time.”

Sara went out for another load of wood. Off in the distance the helicopters hacked at the air, circling, but not coming close. Sara stood, watching. She hauled in another load of firewood.

“Just as well get it while the gettin’s good,” Randy said.

She brought in two more loads of wood and stacked it up against the east wall.

“Nobody’s out there,” Sara said.

“It isn’t nine o’clock yet,” Randy said. “Besides, it’s beginnin’ ta rain.”

Kevin started out the door. “I gotta go,” he said.

“I wouldn’t go out there without my rifle,” Randy said.

Kevin picked up his .30-06 and headed for the door.

“I’ll go with you,” Randy said. “I gotta go, too.” He grabbed his Mini-14, and the two ran out into the rain. Vicki stood at the door watching, the baby in her arms.

“I gotta go,” Rachel said. She nodded toward the outhouse.

“I’ll go with you,” Sara said.

“Take your rifles, then,” Vicki said. “Maybe they won’t shoot so fast if you’re armed.” And Sara and Rachel grabbed their rifles, then ran in the rain to the outhouse.

When they came back, the mother was sitting on the couch looking out into the gray day, her eyes quiet, but the tears welling up and slipping down at the corners. Thank Yahweh the baby, exhausted, was finally sleeping. Kevin sat alone.

Then Randy said, “I gotta go feed the chickens. Just ’cause the fuckin’ feds are out there is no sign the chickens gotta starve.” Sara said she would go with him, and as she walked out the door she picked up the egg basket with the red-and-white-checked towel in the bottom, and they grabbed their rifles and they fed the chickens and gathered the eggs. Randy shut the chicken house window against the rain, and then they ran back into the house.

The day crept by like a tired old man. They heard the grunting and groaning of the gathering army below, the trucks, and occasionally, with the air currents right, the sound of men’s voices coming up clear in waves and then disappearing as soon. The people in the cabin talked in low gray tones that matched the sound of the rain on the roof, and they talked in short sentences, and they did not talk about burying Sammy anymore, but it was on their minds, that and the war that was about to come.

Toward evening Buddy, the little brown cur, began to fuss. “They’re here,” Randy said, and they all grabbed their rifles. Randy ran out the door.

“What the fuck’s the matter?” Randy asked the dog. Buddy was straining at his rope and yapping, his head pointing below to the road.

“Come back in,” Vicki said, standing at the door, now nursing the baby. Randy ran to the rock. Sara followed, and then Kevin.

“Get your asses behind the rock,” Randy said, and then he moved, a little at a time, around the big rock the size of a small school bus. He was peering in the direction where the dog had been pointing, the dog still yap-yapping away. It had stopped raining.

Then suddenly Randy started for the birthing shed, at a fast walk first, then at a run, and Sara and Kevin, seeing him go, followed after him. When he got to the birthing shed he reached up with his right arm to turn the latch at the top of the door, and it was then that the shot broke the air.

The high crack.

The whine.

Randy half fell, crouched down. Sara was there by then.

“I been hit,” Randy said. “The motherfuckers hit me.”

“Where? Where, Papa?”

“In the arm,” he said, still holding his rifle in the other hand.

Vicki opened the door, the baby in her arms, the door wide open, her standing there as plain as day behind the open door screaming, “What happened?”

“I been hit,” Randy hollered back.

“Come on, Papa,” Sara said, lifting at him, pulling him, and then pushing him in front of her. “We gotta get to the house.”

Randy, dazed, staggered forward, moving toward the house, partly running, with Sara pushing, pushing at his back, running and crying, “Come on, Papa. We gotta get to the house.” And she cried, “If you want to murder my Papa, you have to murder me, too. Come on, Papa, come on.”

Kevin was behind, Sara shielding the bleeding body of her father. As she ran, she knew she would be shot. They couldn’t miss her. The next shot would be for her, shot through the back like Sammy.

And when they got to the door, Vicki was holding it wide open, Elisheba, the baby, in her arms, and the mother screaming, “Hurry, hurry!” and the father staggering toward the house with Sara pushing and Kevin behind.

“Hurry, hurry! Hurry before they kill you,” the mother cried.

And as the three got to the porch, the mother, armed with the baby, was holding the door open.

“I’m hit, Mamma,” Randy cried.

“Get in here!” she shouted.

The three reached the door about the same time, Sara still pushing Randy through the door held open by the mother, and Sara diving into the house behind her father, Kevin on her heels. Then the second shot.

And the splintering of glass.

Sara felt sharp fragments cutting at her cheek, and her left ear was ringing, and she knew she’d been hit.

The FBI sniper, a marksman trained to kill, Lon Horiuchi was his name, had put his bullet into Vicki Weaver. Blew the whole side of her face off. She fell, the baby clutched to her, and after she fell, Randy, already wounded, was somehow able to pry the baby from her hands, and then Randy and Sara dragged Vicki’s body over to the side of the kitchen, her blood flooding the kitchen floor. The same bullet that hit Vicki pierced Kevin’s chest. He had passed through the door just behind Vicki as the sniper’s second shot reached them.

“Jesus, God,” Randy cried. “Jesus, God!” He stood staring at his wife, her face gone.

Sara found a blanket and laid it gently over her mother. Then Sara led Randy to a chair, and he sat bereft of words, bereft of thought. Filled with the agony of blood and death.

In the horrors of the night that followed, only Sara seemed alive—the others dead. Dead in horror. Dead in mortal pain. The child Rachel dead, too frightened to speak. And the baby?

In the night Kevin came to life, screaming, begging to be relieved of the pain, for Randy to kill him.

“Shoot me, for Christ’s sake, Randy. I can’t take ’er no longer.”

Randy didn’t answer.

“I’m beggin’ ya, Randy. I’d do the same fer you. Shoot me.” The high-pitched screaming came from lips robbed of faint smiles, lips twisted in agony.

Sara had tried to stuff gauze from the first aid kit into their wounds. But there wasn’t enough gauze, and it didn’t stop the bleeding. The pain was too great, and she didn’t know what to do or how. She brought them water. Kevin couldn’t drink. Randy took a silent sip. She poured peroxide on their open wounds and applied cayenne pepper and goldenseal to fight the infection as she’d learned from her mother. Then Sara tried to feed Elisheba. The baby was weak, and Sara was afraid she would die.

*   *   *

What would it be like for a child to exist, to continue breathing, alive and awake for seven days under that roof with the mother lying dead on the kitchen floor in the heat of summer?

The mother rotting.

Day on day the mother rotting.

Day on day the father moaning from his wounds and their friend begging for death.

The feds had crawled under the house and attached devices to listen to the horror they’d authored. They knew their sniper, Horiuchi, had killed the mother and perhaps had fatally wounded the men. The FBI kept the family awake with screaming noisemakers, the noise like sirens from hell, attacking, shattering sounds, yapping noises like crazed giant hounds—noises beyond the experience of man, sounds that stabbed at the ears and rattled sanity. Then came an evil voice wounding the wounded and laughing at the children. “Did you sleep well last night, Vicki?” the voice asked.

The FBI listened with its listening devices and heard the high, broken sobs of the children, the baby’s wailing, and at last their silence.

The FBI listened to the feeble moaning of Randy, the crying to Yahweh to save them, and to deliver them into the peace of death.

The FBI taunted the living with its high evil voice from the loudspeaker: “Show us the baby, Vicki.”

The FBI covered the house with flashing spotlights at night so the children and the wounded and dying could not sleep. And when the sun rose the voice asked, “What did you have for breakfast, Vicki?”

Such were the government servants of the people, servants in the pay of the people, servants who were sworn to uphold the Constitution and to keep the people safe—the people’s protectors.

*   *   *

As we shall see, the authorization to torture and to kill came from the highest authority of law enforcement in the United States. The headman knew there had been no warrant for Vicki’s arrest. Not one of the hundreds of United States officers who invaded Ruby Ridge held a warrant to arrest anyone. They had no warrant to arrest little Sam. But they were resourceful. They did what they could without warrants. They killed, and when they could not kill they wounded. And after they wounded they taunted the wounded.

The feds created their own rules under which they could kill—something they called “the Rules of Engagement.” The police, including the FBI, are permitted to kill only in self-defense. But the FBI manufactured its own law in the middle of the crisis. The first draft said that any adult with a weapon could be the subject of deadly force. But the final version included the words “can and should be the subject of deadly force.” Its new rule of engagement, without notification to those that were to be killed, was to kill any armed person.

Kill them.

The feds knew the Weavers always carried their weapons to protect themselves. The feds knew the Weavers were not told that the rule of law no longer protected them, that the rule of self-defense had been discarded, and that if they came out of their own house with any weapon, the hidden snipers, waiting in exquisite excitement, would kill them.

The FBI’s new rule was a mandate for murder.

The snipers had spent years perfecting their sweet expertise at killing. Would not all that time be wasted if after years of dreaming, when the “subject” is clean in the crosshairs and the finger is touching an eager trigger, one could only turn away? Such dreams shrivel up in old men who sit on the front porch and rock and remember the days when they could have killed. But at Ruby Ridge their dreams were not wasted.

The new rule was Kill any armed person, and Vicki was armed, remember, armed with a baby. It is merely how one interprets the rule.

Unless rescued, Randy and Kevin would soon die from their wounds. The children would be orphaned. In a way, the feds had killed the children with deep, invisible wounds—the unspeakable sight and sound and smell of decay and death that would be forever imprinted on the psyches of the innocent.

Then the FBI sent out a robot, something like a little tank with a 12-gauge shotgun attached to it, sent it up to the front porch, and they broadcast endless entreaties on their loudspeakers trying to entice Randy out of the house so the snipers could finally kill him.

None of the feds, none at the pinnacle of the FBI, not even the director himself, asked the simple question: Under the law, what is first degree murder? It is defined as a malicious, premeditated, intentional killing. If the same act were committed by any other person, such killing would necessitate the citizen’s arrest, trial for murder, and, after due process of law, incarceration for life in prison or, more likely, death by lethal injection—strapped to the gurney to face the insertion of the needles of death.

*   *   *

Colonel Bo Gritz telephoned me the following day, a Saturday. I was at home. Gritz was a massively decorated Vietnam War hero then running for president. The colonel had offered his services to talk Randy down from Ruby Ridge. Gritz was known to share many of Randy Weaver’s beliefs, and he and Randy were fellow servicemen. Surely Randy would trust Bo Gritz.

With consent from the feds, Jackie Brown, a longtime trusted friend of the Weavers, was the first from the outside to enter the cabin. She entered alone. She checked on the wounded. Kevin was weak. High pulse rate. Fever. The wound hole in his arm was large and gaping and ugly. Randy was feeble but coherent.17

The following day Gritz went up to talk Randy down, Jackie Brown with him. The first order of business was to remove Vicki’s body from the cabin.

Jackie said, “Randy cradled his wife’s head and upper body in his arms while Bo supported her lower body. Together they tenderly tucked her into the blue body bag Gritz had brought along.”

“I love you, honey,” Randy said. “You’ll be all right now. Look, Bo. Look what they did to my wife. She had such a beautiful face.”

“I know, brother. We’ll see that justice is done.” Bo’s voice was quietly reassuring as he pulled the flap over Vicki and zipped the bag shut. It was Jackie who cleaned up the blood and gore on the kitchen floor.

The next day, the eleventh in the standoff, Randy still wouldn’t come down. He said the girls wanted to stay. But Kevin was not doing well, and might die if he wasn’t evacuated. So Randy was reconsidering.

When Gritz phoned me, I knew only what I’d read of the Weaver case in the paper. “The area is sealed off,” the colonel told me. “About five hundred militarized police are up there. The FBI is in charge. They have their hostage and barrier teams surrounding the cabin. The Idaho State Police are up there, along with the county police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms people, and the U.S. Marshals Service.”

“Are any of Randy’s supporters around?” I asked.

“There’s an assembly of two hundred or more at a roadblock that’s been put up at Deep Creek—about four miles from the Weaver place. Been a vigil there since last Saturday.” Then he added, “They had a big funeral in Quincy, Mass., for Marshal Degan—they say seven thousand people attended. He was supposed to be the most decorated marshal in the history of the service.”

“Who killed Degan?” I asked.

“The Bureau is claiming that Degan was killed by Sammy. That he cried out, ‘You shot my dog,’ and then fired his .30-06 rifle and killed Degan. They’ll claim they shot the boy in self-defense.”

I was trying to put the scene together. A bunch of marshals hidden in the woods shooting a kid in “self-defense”?

“But about five days ago the U.S. attorney, Maurice Ellsworth, said they have this young man, Kevin Harris, charged with shooting Marshal Degan and also shooting Sammy,” the colonel said. “That’s the way the U.S. attorney has it stacked up now.”

“Why in hell would Kevin Harris kill Sammy?” I asked.

“I don’t think he did, sir,” Gritz replied and said nothing more.

“Weaver will be charged with murder,” I said. “I predict it. And how does Randy know of me?”

“I raised your name to him because Paul Harvey on his news program said twice for two days running that he personally would hire the best lawyer in the country. And so when I was talking with Randy about two hours ago I told him maybe we could get Gerry Spence. I learned that Randy had previously talked about you to some folks—referenced work you did in the Karen Silkwood case.” That was a suit I’d brought against the Kerr-McGee Corporation for Karen’s death; the movie Silkwood, starring Meryl Streep and Cher, was made about it.

“Randy will have a long, terrible row to hoe,” I said. “He’ll have a hell of a time getting a fair trial anywhere. From what I read, the FBI is already demonizing him—making him out to be a monster—so that a jury soaked up with all the feds’ propaganda won’t take long to convict him.”

Gritz nodded. The colonel’s voice was strong and calm. “They’re trying to connect him to the Aryan Nations, but he never belonged to that bunch.” Then Gritz said, “I asked Glenn, the FBI chief, if there was either a search warrant or an arrest warrant for Randy. I asked, ‘Was there anything that would allow camouflaged federal officers to come on Randy’s land, to shoot their dog, much less Sammy?’ The blank look on their faces told me what I needed to know.”

“What do you want of me?” I asked.

“I’d like to tell Randy that you’ll be his lawyer, and if he’ll come down from the mountain with his daughters he’ll have your voice in his defense.”

Finally I said, “Well, you heard quite a silence from me. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to take a case without first having met my client.”

“We have to get him down before any more damage occurs. To use an old hackneyed phrase, it’s pretty hard to think about draining the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators.”

“You can tell him that if he’ll come down I’ll meet with him. They’ll put him in a jail someplace,” I said.

“I really appreciate that. I believe he would consider it an arrow in his quiver.”

“Is there anything more you want me to do at the moment?” I asked.

“Don’t know. A five-minute trip to the top of the hill took me two hours. There were so many military and police vehicles around that just getting through them became the most onerous task of the day. I’m already late. I probably won’t get down until dark.”

The good colonel must have misunderstood me. I found out later that he told Randy that I had agreed to represent him if he’d come down. I’d never agreed to represent anyone from afar. In a way, the attorney-client relationship is like a marriage. You try to understand each other, to care about each other, and you end up living in the same house together—the courthouse. If you can’t lay it all down for the honest issues in the case, the jury will sense it. If I try to convey to the jury that I care about my client, but in that private place where my feelings are sheltered I don’t truly care, the jury will know it. You can’t ask a jury to care if you don’t care.

Based on Bo Gritz’s assurance to Randy that I had agreed to represent him, Randy surrendered. Ambulances hauled away Randy and Kevin and what remained of Randy’s family. They locked Randy and Kevin in jail, wounds and all, offering only the most minimal care—just enough to keep them alive for trial.

Single-handedly, Gritz and Jackie Brown had done what an entire army of cops and soldiers and seven days of merciless torture couldn’t do. Gritz had approached the crisis not with power and terror but with caring. Power never learns. Bo Gritz had always been a hero. I suspect he was born one. He continued to be one the day he brought Randy Weaver and his dying family down from Ruby Ridge.

*   *   *

My son Kent, one of my partners, and I met Randy in his Boise, Idaho, jail cell on the evening of his surrender. His eyes had no light in them. He was unshaven and dirty, clothed in yellow prison coveralls, and he was cold. His feet were clad in rubber prison sandals. In the stark setting of the prison conference room he seemed diminutive and fragile. He’d spent eleven days and nights in a standoff against the government and he had lost. His wife was dead. His son was dead. His friend was near death. He had lost his freedom. He had lost it all. And now he stood face-to-face with two strangers who towered over him and whose words were not words of comfort.

“My name is Gerry Spence,” I began. “I’m the lawyer you’ve been told about. Before we begin to talk, I want you to understand that I do not share any of your political or religious beliefs. My daughter is married to a Jew. Many of my dearest friends are Jews. My sister is married to a black man. She has adopted a black child. I deplore what the Nazis stand for. If I defend you I will not defend your political beliefs or your religious beliefs, but your right as an American citizen to a fair trial.”

His quiet answer was “That’s all I ask.”

Once again I was about to challenge the United States government with its unfathomable power—its armies, its weaponry, its lawyers and judges, and the media it manipulates so that the people’s minds are set against one of their own. Yes, I was afraid. But I’d learned that fear is my friend. It has always readied me for the fight.

*   *   *

We were preparing our defense of Randy Weaver. The feds had their man, feeble, without family or friends, a man benumbed in grief and imprisoned in a foreign city. How was such bravery kept alive? His feeling center must be jammed. His beating heart must be near paralyzed.

“Tell me where your strength comes from,” I asked Randy days later. He was thin like a Bataan death marcher, his once-dark hair graying on the edges. He held on to the bars to steady himself. His fingers were little more than bone.

“I want to live,” he said in a flat voice; his eyes said otherwise. “I got kids who need me.”

The federal government proceeded as I predicted: They charged Randy with the murder of Marshal Degan, along with nine other felonies that included—aiding and abetting murder, conspiracy to murder, assault, and, of course, the always included obstruction of justice. Obstruction of justice is a charge that comes like putting a period at the end of a sentence, and often carries the most severe punishment. The government’s strategy was not artful—something like fishing with ten fishhooks hoping to catch a fish with one, any one. (We safeguard our fish by making multiple hooks unlawful, but no such protection is granted mere human beings.) And if the accused pleads not guilty, the jury will catch him with something. They almost always do.

A defense attorney can defend one charge after another, and at last the jury concludes the defendant must be guilty of something. Somebody has to pay. It’s the cops’ word against that guilty-looking defendant sitting over there with two marshals behind him to make sure he doesn’t break loose in the courtroom and kill somebody else. That tells you about all you need to know, doesn’t it?

By April 13, 1993, a jury had been selected to try Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris in the federal district court in Boise, Idaho, before Judge Edward Lodge. David Nevin, already a great trial lawyer and later to become nationally celebrated for his many courtroom victories, represented Kevin Harris. I led our team for Randy Weaver, one buttressed by Chuck Peterson, a young lawyer from Boise who’d volunteered to help, along with his partner, Gary Gilman. Ellie Matthews, a veteran trial lawyer, provided his solid services, and my son Kent was there with his insights and support as well. These were the unsung heroes in the case. Not one lawyer received a penny for his services, nor did any expect to. We were rewarded with the opportunity to take on a system that itself had gone criminal. We became the prosecutors of cops as well as of prosecutors. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Howen was in charge of the government’s case. He was a big, square-jawed, stern, emotionally immobile fellow who, in or out of court, smiled so rarely that if he ever broke into one, it would scare the children. He was as tough and intransigent as an oak tree stump.

Yes, the government could have prevented that shameful massacre at Ruby Ridge. David Hunt of the Idaho marshals had learned that the Weavers’ vow to fight to the end was the product of Magistrate Ayers’s erroneous statement that if Randy were convicted, the Weaver family could lose their home. Marshal Hunt—give him credit—wrote Prosecutor Howen and suggested the prosecutor could probably end the standoff by assuring Randy that if he surrendered, his home would remain secure.

But Power does not bargain with the powerless.

Prosecutor Howen wrote back that the areas of negotiation “are the type of matters properly addressed in exchange for guilty pleas, but not Weaver’s mere surrender” (my emphasis).

*   *   *

At trial Howen began those weary, predictable government tactics: Make the jury fear and hate the Weavers by associating them with that dangerous cult the Aryan Nations. The Weavers had never been members of the Aryan Nations. Yes, they had attended some of their events, but in the end had rejected their doctrines. Still, the government lost no opportunity to broadcast its toxic propaganda—that the Weavers embraced religious beliefs that would be offensive to most of the jurors who’d be trying Randy Weaver. Never mind our constitutional right to freedom of religion. That right is mostly extended to those whose religion is substantially the same as mainstream America’s. Hanging out in a minority religion in America has been dangerous from the beginning. Ask the Indians.

Howen subpoenaed one of Randy Weaver’s skinhead friends, William Grider, whose son also wore his head shaved. He asked Grider how Randy wore his hair. The clear implication of Howen’s questions was that Randy was a skinhead and probably had a swastika tattooed on his rear. Howen was forcing me to object, causing the jury to wonder if I was hiding the ugly truth about my client. Over our objections, Howen was able to remind the jury that the Aryan Nations hated blacks and Jews, and that Randy once wore an Aryan Nations belt buckle. Howen’s subliminal argument came down to this: Since we are afraid of skinheads, and since Randy once shaved his head, and possessed an Aryan Nations belt buckle, we must find this dangerous individual guilty of murder. No further proof of Randy’s guilt would really be necessary.

Howen subpoenaed other witnesses who told the jury about the Weavers’ belief that the world would soon end—Armageddon—and how they’d armed themselves to fight off the hordes who would descend upon them. Without saying it in so many words, Howen portrayed the Weavers as fearsome individuals on the fringe who were itching to kill. Howen asked for the death penalty.

Howen called witness after witness, and their testimony dragged on for over three months. Often their testimony was so irrelevant that we had to be careful on cross-examination not to give Howen’s case credibility by overreacting to it. It’s a prosecutor’s standard strategy—if you have a weak case, put on endless witnesses, creating the impression you’ve proved your case beyond a reasonable doubt. The juror thinks, “The prosecutor never left a stone unturned.”

And the juror also thinks, “That Spence fellow is in there accusing that good judge and the prosecutors of violating the rules. They’re just trying to do their jobs. And remember, Spence’s client was a ‘Jew hater’ and a ‘nigger hater,’ and we have enough of those types in this country. And they’re dangerous. Probably killed the marshal. Maybe the Harris kid did kill Sammy.”

Howen’s attempt to hang Randy Weaver on whatever Randy’s beliefs were did prove one thing—that the government had no case. You don’t get the death penalty in this country for what you believe, no matter how repugnant your beliefs are. Not yet. But Howen had to face what took place at the Y intersection in the trails where the old dog, Striker, and little Sammy were killed. A case can sometimes be won in a few questions when the tainted core of the prosecution is exposed: They killed a kid’s dog. Then they killed the kid.

I was cross-examining Deputy Marshal Larry Cooper.

SPENCE: “Now the dog’s big crime was that he was following you, isn’t that true?”

HOWEN: “Objection.”

JUDGE: “Sustained.”

SPENCE: “Did the dog do anything that was illegal?”

HOWEN: “Objection.”

SPENCE: “Let me put it to you this way: As a member of the Special Operations Group, had you, in your training, been taught that because you had automatic weapons and you were wearing camouflage gear, you had the right to kill somebody’s dog?”

COOPER: “No, sir. That has never been taught to me.”

SPENCE: “Do you know of anyone in the history of the world that Striker ever bit?”

COOPER: “No.”

Remember, Randy was still near the house when Sammy was shot. Yet Randy was charged as a conspirator in the killing of Degan. And as the facts were beginning to show, the only conspiracy was the feds’—to charge and prosecute Randy and Kevin for crimes the feds themselves had committed. A memo written by FBI Deputy Assistant Director Danny Coulson on the fourth day of the siege made this all too clear:

OPR 004477 SOMETHING TO CONSIDER:

1. Charge against Weaver is Bull Shit.

2. No one saw Weaver do any shooting.

3. Vicki has no charges against her.

4. Weaver’s defense. He ran down the hill to see what the dog was barking at.

[Coulson got that wrong. Randy never left the area of the house.]

Some guys in camys shot his dog. Started shooting at him. Killed his son. Harris did the shooting. He [Weaver] is in a pretty strong legal position.

The trial would put on display the remarkable creativity of the government in attempting to tie Randy to Degan’s death. The FBI produced a bullet it claimed killed Degan and came from Randy’s rifle.

Let’s set the scene: When the shooting occurred at the Y, Randy was at the house. Between the Weaver house and the place at the Y where the bullet was supposedly found stood a quarter mile of solid forest. You couldn’t throw a rock three feet through it. Yet this bullet was supposedly found lying on top of a fallen leaf on the edge of the road at the Y. Not a scratch on the bullet. And to have been Degan’s murder bullet, it would have had to pass through his bone and flesh without a scratch and without leaving a trace of blood.

I called it “the magic bullet.” I thought that the FBI would be ashamed to resurrect another magic bullet like the one found on Governor Connally’s gurney after supposedly passing through both President Kennedy and the governor without a scratch. Before the trial was over, we were able to show that the magic bullet hadn’t come from Randy’s gun at all. It came from a .223 that belonged to Sara, a rifle the FBI had confiscated in its investigation. And Sara never left the house at any time relevant to Degan’s death. Far be it from me to suggest the unpatriotic thought that the FBI would manufacture evidence.

Under cross-examination, the FBI agent who claimed he discovered the bullet at the Y said he just happened to come onto it. He had, he said, picked it up and put it in his pocket, and sometime later put it down again at a place he thought was near where he found it so that the government photographer could take a photo of it lying there. But Howen had offered the photo as the genuine thing.

Nearing the end of the trial and during a recess, my son Kent was inspecting the backpack Degan had been wearing when he was shot. Kent discovered a second bullet hole that had not been mentioned by the government experts. The shot appeared to have come from behind Degan at an angle but traveled clear through the side of the pack without hitting Degan. The looming question: Who had shot at Degan from behind?

We remember the marshals were equipped with automatic weapons so that several rounds could be fired in a split second. That meant that the fatal round and the round that Kent discovered in Degan’s pack might have come from the same rifle. Did Kevin Harris miss Degan altogether? Had Degan been killed by the hysterical fire of one of his own men?

At last Howen called the FBI sniper, Lon Horiuchi, to the stand. He was escorted down the hall to the courtroom by a platoon of surly, scowling, fully armed members of the sniper team, the FBI’s professional killers. At that moment I happened to be coming up the same hallway. When we met, that gang of toughs occupied the entire width of the hall, and when I tried to pass by I was shoved to the wall. It was an unsettling experience—one would think that in a federal courthouse one would be as safe as in a mother’s arms. Yet they could have decommissioned me in one of their esoteric ways and provided eyewitnesses from their gang to say they were only protecting themselves.

On the stand Horiuchi glared out at me. I asked the court to require him to disarm before I began my questioning. He immediately admitted to having held his crosshairs on Randy’s spine as Randy reached up to unlatch the door of the birthing shed where Sammy’s body lay. Just at the moment Horiuchi pulled the trigger, Randy moved, and the bullet entered his back and came out his armpit.

I handed Horiuchi his rifle with its scope and heavy barrel, the one that Howen had shown the jury.

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

HORIUCHI: “Yes, sir, it is.” His voice was like a single note played from the middle range of a flute, a chilling sound that never varied.

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

HORIUCHI: “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: “You saw somebody you identified as Kevin Harris?”

HORIUCHI: “Yes, sir.”

SPENCE: “You see him in the courtroom?”

HORIUCHI: “Yes, sir, I do.”

SPENCE (POINTING TO KEVIN HARRIS): “That’s the man you were intending to kill, isn’t it?”

HORIUCHI: “Yes, sir.” The politest of killers.

SPENCE: “You wanted to kill him, didn’t you?”

HORIUCHI: “Yes, sir.”

SPENCE: “Just before you shot the second time, you knew the door was open, didn’t you?”

HORIUCHI: “At that time, yes, sir.”

SPENCE: “Didn’t you know that there was the possibility of someone being behind the door?”

HORIUCHI: “There may have been, yes, sir.”

SPENCE: “You heard a woman screaming after your second shot?” That would have been Sara Weaver.

HORIUCHI: “Yes, sir, I did.”

SPENCE: “That screaming went on for thirty seconds?”

HORIUCHI: “About thirty seconds, yes, sir.”

SPENCE: “I want us to just take thirty seconds now and hear in our mind’s ear the screaming.”

I said nothing and looked up at the clock on the courtroom wall. The jurors, one and all, were glued to the clock as it ticked off thirty seconds. In the silence, the silent screaming was deafening and thirty seconds became an eternity.

Horiuchi denied he ever saw Vicki Weaver. The FBI claimed that the curtains at the cabin door were closed, and therefore Horiuchi didn’t see Vicki standing there with her baby in her arms.

As the old saw goes, “The truth will out.” The FBI, committed to the lie whenever useful, had simply lied again. It had willfully violated the court’s order to provide us all exculpatory evidence in the case (meaning evidence that tended to exonerate the accused). The FBI had intentionally withheld a pivotal drawing made by Horiuchi that had been in the possession of the agency from the beginning, one that showed exactly what Horiuchi saw when he shot and killed Vicki Weaver.

The drawing showed a window with no curtains. In the lower right-hand corner were the tops of two heads—Sara and Randy, who had dived into the house just ahead of Kevin. Horiuchi intended to kill Kevin by shooting him in the back as he ran for the house, and he had to know that someone was standing at the door, holding it open. This killer had the eyes of a hawk. Through his high-powered scope he could have seen the pores on his victim’s face. Yet he claimed he couldn’t see Vicki with her baby.

Howen, a hardened career prosecutor, had been exposed to such FBI tactics in the past. Finally even he could stomach no more. His investigating team, led by the FBI, was concealing and perhaps manufacturing evidence, and after months of this, near the end of the trial he confessed to Judge Lodge that the FBI had withheld this crucial evidence by having sent it to him Fourth Class Mail from Washington, D.C., just slightly faster than by Pony Express on a crippled horse.

Judge Lodge, as serene and emotionally expressive as mashed potatoes, came unglued. Yet what could he do? He couldn’t dump the whole Bureau in jail. Horiuchi wasn’t in charge of producing the evidence. Howen had done his honorable duty by disclosing the Bureau’s tactics. Finally the judge ordered that the Bureau pay us one day’s fees for our trouble. Of course, we were working without fee. And thereafter the government never offered to deliver a government check to us, again thumbing its bureaucratic nose at the judiciary, and at us. Some federal judge out in Idaho was not going to order the mighty Bureau to do anything. Nevertheless, the judge’s order served to make a powerful statement. A respected federal judge had officially found that the FBI would cheat to win a case. We’d known that all along. Judge Lodge made it official.

Judge Lodge further officially found: “The actions of the government, acting through the FBI, evidence a callous disregard for the rights of the defendants and the interests of justice. Its behavior served to obstruct the administration of justice.” If you or I obstruct justice, we have committed a felony that could land us in the penitentiary for years. The FBI responded with little more than a yawn.

Howen rested the government’s case; that is to say, he couldn’t dig up one more witness or one more exhibit. We moved for an acquittal on the grounds the government had failed to prove its charges. It’s a motion defendants must lodge to preserve their record for an appeal, and it always includes the defense’s futile hope that the judge will throw out at least a few of the many charges that make up the prosecution’s habitual overcharging.

Howen was beginning his argument to Judge Lodge opposing our motion to dismiss the case when he suddenly stopped short. He began shuffling through his notes like a child lost in the woods who couldn’t find his map. We waited. He kept shuffling. He stared out at the judge for a very long time. Finally in a wavering voice he said, “I’m sorry, Judge. I can’t go on.” He sat down. Marshals and FBI agents hurried to his side, and the judge called a recess.

Howen never returned for the rest of the trial. He left the case in the hands of his assistant, Kim Lindquist, a man who was younger and proved to be even more aggressive than Howen, a prosecutor perhaps better able to deal with the government’s misconduct.

We offered no witnesses and rested our case. That meant we wouldn’t call Randy to testify. Why? If he took the witness stand, he’d be cross-examined, maybe for days, by Lindquist. A contest between Randy Weaver and Prosecutor Lindquist would be like Randy trying to survive in the ring with a professional wrestler, one who’d slam Randy down flat to the floor and beat him to a bloody pulp. I try to keep my clients from wrestling with prosecutors. I’ll do my client’s fighting. It’s not that the accused lies. It’s that the prosecutor, in a reasonably skilled cross-examination, can make nearly any accused look guilty.

*   *   *

In Lindquist’s final argument to the jury, he set his theme. As he saw it, this was a case in which two people decided to defy the law and to violently resist arrest, all the while trumpeting their religious belief of hatred. He wrote the word HATRED in large red letters on the courtroom chart. Lindquist argued that the Weavers had intentionally brought on this confrontation with the government because they believed that otherwise Armageddon would not come to pass. No evidence supporting that statement ever appeared in the case.

David Nevin made a careful but powerful argument for Kevin Harris. He took more than two hours to examine the facts, one at a time, and to uncover in clear language the falsehoods that made up the government’s case. Nevin closed with one of George Washington’s arguments: “Government is not reason. It is force. Like fire, it’s a dangerous servant of a fearful master.”

I could feel my own fear preparing me for my final argument. What if I got lost in the tangle of facts we’d heard over three months of trial? What if I was too old, too tired, too shattered after months of war to convince the jury? I’d argued the case on the outskirts of sleep all night. What if I failed this poor man? What if his wife and son died for naught, and they hauled Randy off to prison to rot for the rest of his life in some vile concrete hole? Who would raise his kids? I thought of little Rachel. I thought of Elisheba, who was cradled in her mother’s arms when her mother died.

I spoke to twelve folks whom I’d come to know although we’d never exchanged the first word. I told the jury the truth. “Since my argument starts with me, I ought to tell you how I feel,” I said. “I feel afraid. I feel inadequate. I wish I were a better lawyer than I am right now.”

I turned to the man on the far left of the front row. He often smiled at me. I needed a friendly smile. I said, “May we all agree that government agents are bound by the law the same as we? They’re bound by the same morals and by the same justice and decency as we? May we agree that government agents can’t lie and say it’s all right because they’re officers? And they can’t come into court and play hide-and-seek with the facts and say that’s all right because they’re federal employees.

“And they can’t persecute people and they can’t entrap people, and they can’t state the wrong law, and they can’t use their huge forces and their power simply because they are federal officers. And they can’t turn what began as a piddly two-bit case, one they manufactured themselves, into a major case in which they expended millions of taxpayers’ dollars because they are federal officers.

“And they can’t attack us simply because of our religious or our political beliefs. And they can’t come into Idaho from Washington, D.C., and claim that Idaho law is null and void, like Mr. Rogers, the head of the task force, did, and say ‘I am the law,’ simply because they’re federal officers.

“We have three people dead—Sammy Weaver shot in the back, a little boy whose voice hadn’t even changed, and Mr. Lindquist says nothing about it. Killing him was like putting on your pants in the morning. Nobody seems concerned that Sammy Weaver was shot in the back and murdered. No investigation. Nobody charged. What’s going on here?

“We have Vicki Weaver shot in the head. Nobody seems to care. Killing is like putting on your shirt in the morning. No investigation. Nobody’s charged. Nobody seems to care. Now, what is this all about?

“We have Kevin Harris shot. We have Randy Weaver shot. What is happening?

“And so if you are the federal government, what do you do? Do you come up to His Honor and say, ‘Judge, we’re sorry, we killed Vicki Weaver, and we shouldn’t have,’ and do you go over to the judge again and say, ‘We’re sorry, we killed Sammy, shot him in the back, and we shouldn’t have’? What do you do?

“Well, instead, you charge Randy Weaver with everything you can imagine. And then you send the FBI out, and you do what psychologists call demonize him, to make the people of the state of Idaho hate Randy Weaver, to despise him because of his religious beliefs or his political positions. If you can demonize him in the press so when the jury is brought together every one of the jurors has read something about him and distrusts and hates him because he’s been called a Nazi and a member of the Aryan Nations and a far right kook and cultist, if you can charge him with the murder of a federal officer and charge him with all of those other charges and counts, then maybe you, the government, won’t have to answer why Sammy Weaver was shot dead in the back and his mother shot dead in the face.

“Now, you saw that happen in the courtroom not more than a few hours ago. You saw Mr. Lindquist put up a chart. By the way, Mr. Lindquist, I understand you don’t have the chart anymore, is that right?” (During the recess I had asked Lindquist for the chart, and he said he no longer had it.)

Lindquist replied, “I have it.”

“May I have it, please?” I asked him.

“I’m going to use it when I rebut this, as you well know.”

“I have a right to see the chart, and I would like to have you bring it up here so that I can answer it.”

Judge Lodge settled the matter. “The chart should be produced, but you shouldn’t write on it. It is Mr. Lindquist’s product.”

Lindquist produced the chart, the one that had HATRED written across it in large red letters.

As I argued I pointed at the chart. “What is the relevance of whether somebody has an Aryan Nations belt buckle? What is the relevance about a child whose head is shaved, Mr. Grider’s little boy? These are people who said Mr. Weaver was their friend. Mr. Weaver wore an Aryan Nations belt buckle and his head was shaved? You met the little boy when he stood up here, and I said to Mr. Grider, ‘Is this your son?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Are you proud of him?’ And he said, ‘You bet I am.’

“What is the relevance, ladies and gentlemen, of hauling in the ammunition, piles of it, but they don’t bring in the honey and the wheat and the canned goods and the supplies and the clothing? I mean, what’s the relevance of telling about the firearms when they are all legal, all fourteen of them? I bet there are people on this jury who own fourteen guns, or who have in their past. I’d hate to have the ATF come look in all my closets. But if they hauled them out in the courtroom and laid them out here, it might make you distrust me.

“What’s the relevance of talking about the Weavers’ position that the government is satanic, but in the next breath admitting that it’s all right to believe whatever you believe? A lot of people think the government is satanic. As Mr. Nevin said, George Washington thought the government was satanic.

“What’s the purpose of talking about their religious beliefs? Why? Randy isn’t the sweetest-looking guy I’ve ever seen—excuse me, Randy—but I’ve seen more innocent-looking fellows, but he is entitled to his beliefs.”

I turned to one of the most attentive women jurors in the back row. “Suppose the government brought in all your kitchen knives and laid them down, paring knife, cleaver, butcher knife, other knives, all across the floor. Some your kids gave you, some are dull and you can’t use, some you use every day. And then they began to tell the world about your witchery, your crazy beliefs. Don’t hold her beliefs against her—you mustn’t do that—but we want to tell you about them anyway. You heard me object, and I pounded the table about it, and they continued to say, we will tie it in, it’s ‘inextricably entwined.’ You heard that until you must have come home and said to your spouse, ‘Darling, you and I are inextricably entwined.’” Some jurors laughed.

“They put an evil twist on everything—there wasn’t a thing that Randy Weaver did that was decent and right, not one thing. And when they opened their case they began by telling you about all of the people in the Aryan Nations that he knew. No evidence came in on that, but they told you about it.

“They showed you Mrs. Weaver’s little letters, which I thought were pretty gutsy. And I wish I had known her. If she were standing here today I would put my arms around her, and I would tell her how much I loved her. I think that this world could use more people who are no longer afraid of the government.

“So, ladies and gentlemen, the theme in this case is to make Randy Weaver into an ugly, hateful, spiteful person so that they can cover the murder of a little boy shot in the back, and the murder of a woman shot in the head. That is the theme.

“Now, somebody has to say no to this. I can’t do it. The only thing I can do is ask you to do it. You have more power than His Honor, and I don’t know many people who’ve got more power than His Honor. You’ve got a lot more power than Mr. Lindquist and Mr. Howen. You’ve got a lot more power than the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the ATF. You’ve got more power than the marshals. You’ve got more power than anybody because you can say no.

“And not only that, but every one of you has that power, each of you individually, because the verdict has to be unanimous. So any one of you can say no and that is the end of the government’s case. When you heard Mr. Nevin talk about George Washington and his desire to set up a federal government so you wouldn’t have to be afraid of it, that’s why our founders gave you that power, and that’s why you are so special.

“Now, after you kill a little boy at the Y, how do you arrange to cover this up? You would do just what they did. You would tell the Hostage Rescue Team half a story. Do you remember I asked Mr. Rogers on cross-examination, ‘Were you told about the Weavers being an Aryan Nations white supremacist cult?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And that they killed a U.S. Marshal?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And that they fired indiscriminately?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And they were heavily armed?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And highly dangerous?’ ‘Yes.’

“And they said the place was full of—you remember—booby traps. There weren’t any booby traps, and the marshals knew it—kids and dogs must have been very smart kids and dogs to live there day in and day out without setting off some alleged booby trap. Please!

“But the Hostage Rescue Team was told that the house was armed with booby traps. We saw the marshals’ surveillance tapes taken before the marshals shot the dog—hours of tapes showing little kids flying around on their bicycles and the old dog wagging his tail, and the people walking and living all over that little place up there, and yet the Hostage Rescue Team was told there were booby traps.

“The Hostage Rescue Team was getting excited, because they finally had a war. They could bring in their helicopters and their snipers, and they could have themselves a big war up in northern Idaho. In August. Get out of hot Washington, D.C.

“They were told that this man was a Green Beret and he had explosives training, and that his wife, Vicki Weaver, was crazy, and would kill her children—do you remember that? Likely the word was that Randy Weaver wouldn’t surrender as long as Vicki Weaver was in control.

“So did they tell the Hostage Rescue Team the truth? Did they say, ‘These marshals shot the dog and then they shot the boy in the back’? Degan was shot by somebody, and we’re not sure who shot Degan. Kevin and Sammy were just walking down the trail. They weren’t wanted for anything. They committed no crime. They’d done nothing. The marshals were hiding, and the marshals were in camouflage. Did they say that? No. They said the marshals were ‘ambushed’ by Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris. They didn’t say that Randy Weaver wasn’t even around where the shooting took place.

“The Hostage Rescue Team? Who were hostages up there, after all? That’s what they call themselves, the Hostage Rescue Team, which are nice words for ‘trained, expert killers.’

“What Mr. Rogers told you—that federal law supersedes state law, that federal law sits on top of state law—is wrong and he knows it.” I read to the jury the court’s Instruction 40: Federal law as governs the conduct of federal officers, so far as the law of self-defense is concerned, does not supersede the law of the State of Idaho.

“We proved that the feds lie. Nothing new. The only thing new was that they were caught. What makes government lies so detestable is that these liars are our servants, our employees. They work for us. But they lie against us.”

I looked over at Lindquist. He was faking utter boredom, his eyes closed, his head leaning heavily on his hand, his elbow propped against the tabletop. I walked over to his table, clapped my hands loudly at his face, and shouted, “Wake up!”

He jumped.

Some jurors laughed.

“It wasn’t Horiuchi who should be charged with murder, but those at the highest echelons of government who were so arrogant that they claimed their power nullified state law, those who brought on the killing of Sammy and Vicki, and the wounding of Kevin and Randy. The big shots were the true killers. But what they received for their killing were fat government pensions.

“Have you ever tried to defend yourself when you’re not guilty? The more you defend, the worse you look. But I can defend Randy because we have cross-examined fifty-six witnesses, and after fifty-six of their witnesses testified we haven’t called a single witness, because the evidence is that this is a man who has been the victim of a frame-up and whose wife and child were murdered. And I say he has been hurt enough and smeared enough and I don’t want him to suffer any more of it!

“And what did Judge Lodge say? ‘A defendant has the right to remain silent and never has to prove innocence.’ Now, isn’t that a blessing that in our country we don’t have to prove our innocence? How could we ever prove our innocence? In Nazi Germany you had to prove your innocence. Nobody would listen to you. Here, if a defendant does not testify, his silence can’t be held against him.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a murder case. But the people who committed the murder have not been charged. The people who committed the murder are not here in court.

“Now something horrid is happening here. What is happening in America when the government points not at criminals who are joined in conspiracies like dope dealers, and bankers who join in behind-the-scenes conspiracies and cheat old ladies out of their savings, but the government points its accusing finger at our families? The new low in American jurisprudence is to attack the American family and to charge that the American family can now be guilty of a conspiracy because they are a family.

“The indictment here alleges that Randy and Vicki, including some ‘other members of the Weaver family,’ were in on the conspiracy. Does the little child Rachel enter the conspiracy? They saw her coming out with her gun. I suppose Rachel, now as she tries to protect her daddy, is a conspirator. All those people are now guilty of a conspiracy to kill Degan? So, be careful, because if you have a family you could be guilty of a conspiracy. Big Brother will be listening!

“One other thing that I can’t let go unsaid—the business of calling this little house a compound. Now, is that a compound up there? Roderick fights to the end to call it a compound. Cooper, too. The FBI people want to call it a compound. Why? Because if you kill them in the compound it’s all right, but if you kill them in their little house it might not be all right. Those are the kinds of demonizing uses of language we’ve encountered.

“The government had even charged Randy with shooting at a helicopter that had Geraldo Rivera in it. They talked big about it but called no witnesses to prove it. The judge dismissed that count. The government, trying to make sure it would get Randy for something, even charged him with being a fugitive from justice who was in possession of weapons. They hauled out all of those guns to shock you. But Randy wasn’t a fugitive. The judge dismissed that, too.”

I told the jurors that Randy would go to prison for the rest of his life if it would bring back little Sammy and Vicki. “But hasn’t he been punished enough? Doesn’t this terror, this horror, have to end sometime? Shouldn’t you have the courage to stand up and say no?”

And with that I left Randy’s case in the hands of those twelve good citizens.

The government always gets the last word in a criminal case. When I sat down I would be silenced forever before this jury. Lindquist struggled with the facts, and I thought him best in the last minutes of his argument. Here is what he said:

“The statement was made that Randall Weaver would go to the penitentiary for life to get his boy back and his wife back. Well, I will tell you there is a wife and two boys who would give most anything they have to get their dad back.” He was, of course, referring to the Degan family.

*   *   *

The jury marched wearily out to deliberate. The lives of the Weavers had once been in the hands of government agents. Now those who had survived would be in the hands of twelve jurors who had never met Vicki or Sammy or, before this trial, Kevin and Randy. The system had been sorely tested over months. Would the system work to acquit the innocent?

The jury deliberated for twenty-three days. Jurors got sick. Jurors argued and fought. They formed alliances on certain issues and subgroups on others. Some couldn’t sleep. Some slept during deliberations. They weren’t allowed any outside contacts. Their newspapers were censored for any stories about the case. One woman was about to have a baby.

The juror who’d been smiling at me all along and who I thought believed I was on the right side of the case turned out to be the foreman. Later I discovered how wrong I could be in judging members of my species. He wanted both Kevin and Randy convicted and was smiling about it. After about two weeks of being sequestered with eleven others, he claimed he was sick. The judge called up one of the alternate jurors, and, of course, the jurors had to start their deliberations all over again.

I can’t imagine what Randy Weaver and Sara and little Rachel went through, waiting for the jury’s verdict. Randy was in jail, alone, and the torture of waiting, of seeing his family taken from him, of realizing he might spend the rest of his days in prison, was a horror that must have clung to his belly like an eternal, unbearable cramp.

The jury’s twenty-three-day-long deliberations were the longest I’d ever heard of. How did we survive the wait? We visited our clients in jail. We could give them little solace and no answers as to why the jury was out so long. We tried to prepare them for the worst. If they were convicted we would appeal, of course.

To stay sane we took trips into the backcountry of Idaho. Gary Gilman—a fine photographer—and I took many photographs. The team ate together and spent long evenings together. We talked and tried to laugh away our fears. We held each other up emotionally. Yet to this day we’ve never had the first understanding of the pain our clients endured during the wait. At last, on July 8, 1993, the jury returned its verdict. They acquitted Kevin Harris of all wrongdoing, and he walked out of the courtroom free, holding on to his great and faithful lawyer, David Nevin.

The jury acquitted Randy Weaver of all charges except his failure to appear on the charge of sawing off that shotgun. After four years of sneaking, peeking, lying—after all their killing and wounding, and the expenditure of millions of dollars—the government had only been able to convict Randy Weaver of failing to appear in court.

Randy Weaver’s trial gave America the opportunity to see the criminal justice system as it was then and, in all relevant ways, as it is today, and that painful gift will give him entry into whatever pearly gates may exist. I can see him one day up there pounding away, smoking and hollering to be let in.

“Open up the fucking door,” I can hear him hollering. He is who he is. He is real. He has courage. Perhaps too much. But he is a true American hero.

*   *   *

After the verdict, Howen came alive again. He wanted Randy sent off for three more years in prison for his failure to appear on the gun charge. I responded, “The only evidence the court needs to consider is that this family needs their daddy.” I asked the judge to give Randy credit for the fourteen months he’d already served in jail after he came down from Ruby Ridge and until the jury’s verdict. The judge gave him four months more, then released him to go home to reconstruct his life and to care for his children.

The Justice Department called for an investigation, summoned a lot of witnesses, and then blamed Howen for “faulty judgment and overzealousness.” There was a congressional investigation as well. You can predict that not one person in authority, not one member of Congress—not one—ever suggested that criminal charges should be filed against those who killed Sammy and lied about it. Nor did those at the highest echelons of the FBI—those who nullified the law and turned Horiuchi loose on Randy, Kevin, and finally Vicki—breathe a word of condemnation against their own killer. Power, then and now, dictates the law, not the people.

We sued the government for the death of Sammy and Vicki. But Power didn’t want the additional publicity that such a suit would reveal to America. The government offered the surviving children $1 million each, $3 million in all, and Randy $100,000. Randy and the family didn’t want to reenter that hellish landscape for another protracted trial. The family took the offer.

*   *   *

So what is there to say about the case?

It exposed the rotten underbelly of Power. It demonstrated the massive bravery that ordinary citizens can possess against the gigantic muscle of government. It identified a caring and courageous member of the judiciary—Judge Lodge—and equally courageous jurors who made the system work despite its frailties. It revealed trial lawyers at their best, who, no matter the cost, were willing to fight for justice until they dropped. And it provided the faint hope that occasionally justice prevails in America, the whole truth being that it fails most of our citizens most of the time.

It proved a truth that persists to this moment: that too many police will kill at will—even a child running home, even a mother armed only with her nursing babe. And it proved that Power will attempt to cover its own crimes.

No one was ever convicted for the murders at Ruby Ridge. That massacre proved that the Constitution can be set aside by Power at its whim, that the FBI could, and did, change the law as if it, not the people, created the laws of the land. If the United States, through its agencies, can garner sharpshooters, armies of hundreds, tanks, helicopters, and the forces to support them, and if they can change the law so that killing our citizens is foreordained when their opponents are but two wounded, dying men, three little girls, and their mother dead on the kitchen floor, their small brother dead in the shack behind the house—what more need be revealed of the crushing, mindless forces of Power?

Should we provide a name for such Power? Are we on the outer edges of the cliff looking down into the depths of a totalitarian state from which there is no return?

America does not provide enough well-trained lawyers to ensure that most accuseds will be afforded the kind of trial that Randy and Kevin were provided. A senseless murder of a small boy and his mother by their own government attracted a dedicated team of pro bono lawyers who laid it all down for the poor, the lost, the innocent, and the damned. The killing of our families by trigger-happy government agents is too high a price for a citizen’s chance at justice.

I praise those who praise America. They embrace the hope of our forefathers. As the old refrain goes, “Hope springs eternal.” Without hope, and the courage to fight for our dreams of freedom, we will have fallen over the precipice. We cannot limit justice to only those cases in which the entry fee is the murder of our families. The Weaver case demanded change. It demanded that we remain vigilant and dedicated to restoring America to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But nothing has changed.