Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family

by Jess Walter

On the last hot day of summer in 1992, gunfire cracked over a rocky knob in northern Idaho, just south of the Canadian border. By the next day three people were dead, and a small war was joined, pitting the full might of federal law enforcement against one well-armed family. Drawing on extensive interviews with Randy Weaver's family, government insiders, and others, Jess Walter traces the paths that led the Weavers to their confrontation with federal agents and led the government to treat a family like a gang of criminals.

This is the story of what happened on Ruby Ridge: the tragic and unlikely series of events that destroyed a family, brought down the number-two man in the FBI, and left in its wake a nation increasingly attuned to the dangers of unchecked federal power.

Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime, History, Crime, Politics, Biography, Religion

603 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Jess Walter is the author of eight novels and one nonfiction book. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and his essays, short fiction, criticism and journalism have been widely published, in Details, Playboy, Newsweek, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe among many others.

Walter also writes screenplays and was the co-author of Christopher Darden’s 1996 bestseller In Contempt. He lives with his wife Anne and children, Brooklyn, Ava and Alec in his childhood home of Spokane, Washington.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Weaver case gave a name to that sometimes dangerous space between people and their government. It brought paranoia into the mainstream. For how can you convince people that their government isn’t out to get them when, on Ruby Ridge, the FBI gave itself permission to shoot its own citizens? How can you tell people to trust a government that covered up details of the case and assigned agents to investigate themselves? There is little wonder that for many it has become a symbol for government tyranny. But symbols are nothing more than half-truths and they fall short of explaining a place as hard and remote as Ruby Ridge. From this jagged point, the Weaver case is not proof of broad government oppression and tyranny, but of human fallibility and inhuman bureaucracy, of competitive law enforcement agencies and blind stubbornness. The Randy Weaver case is a stop sign, a warning – not of the dangers of right-wing conspiracies or of government conspiracies – but of the danger of conspiracy thinking itself, by people and by governments…”
- Jess Walter, Ruby Ridge: The Truth & Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family


Theoretically, the standoff at Ruby Ridge could happen anywhere. In reality, this is an only-in-America kind of story, a collision guided by forces political, cultural, and institutional.

On the one side, you have a family with all the freedom in the world, who were certain they didn’t have any; who believed in a vengeful, global-cidal God about to unleash the end times; and who insisted that black people were inferior, and that the world was dominated by a Zionist government.

On the other, you have a militarized federal police force facing off against a militarized populace; a bureaucracy better at covering up mistakes than avoiding them; and a law enforcement establishment toeing the line between arresting criminals, which is their purpose, and enticing individuals into criminal acts, which is not.

It’s a messy, complicated tale that has – in certain, potentially dangerous corners of the United States – become simplified, turned into a symbol that it does not deserve to be.

In Ruby Ridge, Jess Walter takes all the elements that are inconvenient, contradictory, and ambiguous, and puts them back into place. The result is a marvelous book that is as engrossing as it is troubling.

***

Randall (“Randy”) Weaver was an ex-soldier harboring an assortment of extreme views. Acting on those views, he took his family – wife, Vicki, and children Samuel, Sara, and Rachel – to a remote hilltop in Idaho, where he built a rudimentary cabin.

Randy drifted in and out of white nationalist circles, during a time when these groups were engaged in myriad criminal activities. To make money, he tried to sell a sawed-off shotgun to an ATF informant. This resulted in his arrest, whereupon he was released on bond, and required to report to court at a later date.

When he failed to appear in court, an arrest warrant was issued, and the matter turned over to the United States Marshals Service. While scoping out the Weaver cabin, three deputies collided with Randy and Samuel Weaver, and a third individual, Kevin Harris. Bullets started flying. Samuel and Deputy Marshal William Degan were both killed.

The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team took over. Operating under rules of engagement that were probably illegal, HRT Sniper Len Horiuchi fired two poorly-aimed, ill-advised shots. The first injured Kevin Harris. The second killed Vicki Weaver.

A siege ensued that – like Waco, shortly thereafter – drew large crowds of protesters and media. When it ended, with the help of a former Green Beret trying to run for president, Randy and Harris were put on trial, where they were assisted by famed attorney Gerry Spence.

***

If this seems like a sprawling story, it is. But Walter is more than up to the task. He is a natural storyteller, and a strong writer, showing a facility for everything from geographic descriptions to courtroom drama. It says something about his abilities that Ruby Ridge held my attention throughout, even when he switches gears from woodland gun battles to the drawn-out legal process.

***

Walter starts with a textured looked at the Weaver family, especially Vicki, who is identified as the driving force behind a lazy, drifting husband. The portrait that evolves is multi-angled, detailed, and rather sympathetic. Nonetheless, I found it exceedingly hard to like the Weavers. Randy and Vicki were viciously racist and anti-Semitic, while they worked to turn their kids into n-word spitting skinheads-to-be. They are unpleasant to spend time with, and we spend a lot of time with them. None of this nastiness, of course, justifies what they endured.

Walter does a good job of putting Randy into the context of the times, when the militia movement was surging, and white supremacist groups like The Order were carrying out armed robberies and targeted executions. In response, the Department of Justice cracked down hard, with various federal law enforcement agencies working to develop cases that could be prosecuted by U.S. Attorneys. As Walter notes, the DOJ’s effort was so intense that at many white nationalist meetings, a large percentage of the attendees were actually paid informants. It was Randy’s misfortune that despite a wavering commitment to these causes – he had the beliefs, if not the motivation – he ran into one of these men.

***

To me, the most fascinating aspect of Ruby Ridge is the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. Marshals Service went to avoid a disaster, and then stumbled into one anyway. Unlike Waco, where the ATF blundered up to the Mount Carmel compound despite the Branch Davidians being tipped off, the Deputy Marshals involved in Randy’s case spent over a year trying to get him to come peaceably down off his mountain. They sent him letters, they sent neighbors to him, they devised various ploys to grab him without endangering his children.

Ruby Ridge is held up as an example of unchecked federal power, which is sort of bleakly funny, given that one angry white man with a gun completely checkmated the government without even trying. It’s interesting to contrast the consideration given to Randy – the pleading, the imploring, the beseeching efforts to get him to show up to court – with the treatment generally extended by local law enforcement to minority communities, where the SWAT teams arrive, knock once, and break down the door.

***

Two deadly shooting incidents are at the heart of the Ruby Ridge tragedy. Having never been in a gunfight myself, I can only defer to voluminous accounts that consistently point to the confusion, fear, and telescoping of events that occurs once bullets start flying. To that end, Walter does a really good job of laying out all the different versions of events, most of which are starkly at odds with each other.

***

Ruby Ridge was originally published in 1995, under the title Every Knee Shall Bow. Given that only three years had elapsed from the 1992 standoff, Walter could obviously only tell part of this extensive saga. In 2002, this was rereleased with a more literal title, and with various updates and revisions. Though I haven’t read both versions, Ruby Ridge reads pretty seamlessly, with only minor hiccups. There are some grammatical errors and small mistakes – an M-16, for instance, is not a “machine gun” – but that’s modern publishing for you.

***

Ruby Ridge did not take place in a vacuum. It is part of an unpleasant continuum that involves militant racial separatists, conspiracy theorists, and antigovernment hardliners, all leading us to the precarious moment we now inhabit, with democracy itself teetering. Along that continuum is the siege at Waco, the Oklahoma City bombings, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Upon finishing Ruby Ridge, though, it seems a stretch to make it into a representation for anything, other than humans at their flawed worst.

We love to blame systems. It’s easy to do, because systems are complicated; they are impersonal; their workings are obscure or hidden, and therefore, possibly sinister. There’s also an element of hopefulness to this, the suggestion of an easy solution: fix the system, end the problem.

Unfortunately, the problem in the system is oftentimes the individual. The initial encounter that killed Deputy Degan and Samuel Weaver was not the result of an institutional flaw, but the consequence of men with guns blindly running into each other amongst trees and bushes. Murky rules of engagement aside, Lon Horiuchi’s killing of Vicki Weaver was due mainly to Horiuchi’s terrible decision-making and rotten shooting.

This should be an object lesson in the ways people make mistakes under extreme duress. Instead, every other possible conclusion besides this one has been drawn.

[Nick Borrelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. I've been trying to read some non-fiction that deals with big events that I vaguely remember from my childhood or teenage years. I remember seeing snippets of news coverage regarding Ruby Ridge and then explanations of it as I got older. And I know that this event motivated Timothy McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma City bombing due to the fact that he saw the government encroachment on private citizens as abhorrent and unacceptable. This book is all you really need in my opinion to get a clear picture of what took place on a secluded mountain ridge in northern Idaho. This is a case where all parties were at fault in some measure and the result was death and disaster. Excellent account and very well-written for those who want to know more about this event in our history.

[Mary Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

When the standoff at Ruby Ridge occurred in 1992, I was up to my eyeballs with my social work career working sixty hours a week. I didn't pay that much attention to it, probably also because I have no use for white supremacism, racism, and religious fanaticism. I picked up this book after reading and enjoying Jess Walter's novels. Walter's background as a reporter and investigative journalist interested me, and I thought if anyone could tell a story, he could. And he does. Randy and Vicki Weaver's beliefs were abhorrent to me, but they were not subversives; they were not members of any white supremacy organization and did not engage in the criminal and murderous activities perpetrated by these groups in Montana and Idaho; the Weavers did not proselytize or recruit. They were a family with four children living on their mountain who wanted to be left alone. The area was crawling with competing government agents of the FBI, ATF, U.S. Marshalls, and state and local police. All had informants who did not know who other informants were. If it were not so tragic, it would be comical-Keystone Cops-like, but sinister in the extreme. The Weavers were targeted and, I believe, entrapped resulting in the deaths of Vicki Weaver and her young son Samuel and serious gunshot injuries to Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris, the Weavers' young friend. The second half of the book recounts the 1993 trial in which the defense was led by Gerry Spence. The deception and incompetence of overzealous agents was on full display; the FBI was particularly culpable. In the end, although charged with multiple counts of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, and other felonies, Harris was acquitted on all charges, and Randy Weaver was convicted of the charge of failure to appear and sentenced to eighteen months, fourteen of which he had already served. This is a chilling story, and it helped met to understand (a little) the deep distrust of government by far-right extremists.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is gripping, if a bit long. Walter tries to set the stage for this tragedy and the prose gets a little purple now and again, but the book is a fairly full account of what took place on Ruby Ridge in 1992.

I have to admit remembering very little about the Weaver standoff when it was in the news. I travel to this part of Idaho not infrequently, so that's even more surprising. The story is a strange one. Randy and Vicki Weaver, a couple from Iowa, joined a fringe Christian group that was apocalyptic and racist. They weren't classic racists, but rather believed in the separation of races rather than the superiority of whites. Believing the end times were near, they packed their two kids and moved to remote northern Idaho to wait out the clock. They also took and acquired weapons.

This was a classic example of government overreach. In attempting to infiltrate supremacist movements in nearby Montana, an undercover plant began conversations with Weaver, supposing him to be insignificant to the movement. He knew Weaver trafficked weapons, but we wasn't a leader of any radical groups. Then he failed to show up for a court appointment. The feds went into military mode. Surrounding the cabin with snipers and marshals, the family, which kept its young children armed, had a showdown with the FBI, with tragic results.

In case you, like me, don't recall this episode, I won't give any spoilers. The book follows the standoff with a detailed account of the court proceedings afterward. This is nearly as dramatic as the standoff itself, with outsized personalities taking part.

As I note on my blog (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World) it's difficult to believe that the government once thought white supremacists dangerous. Now that we have them in all high levels of government, the world has changed (not for the better) since all this happened in the 1990s. It seems the more we learn the less we learn.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michelle Wildgen (Executive Editor, Tin House Magazine): Jess Walter’s Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family, originally titled Every Knee Shall Bow. I am often fascinated by writing about crime, but good God, the actual writing can be so terrible sometimes. So I was thrilled when I saw that among the list of past works for the wonderful writer Jess Walter was a book on the infamous 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff with Randy Weaver. That standoff, which resulted in the shooting of Weaver’s wife Vicki, among others, besmirched the FBI for good reason, but I was never fully clear on what led to it in the first place. Walter takes the reader not just into that final, thoroughly avoidable, standoff, but into the Weavers’ relationship years earlier, the relationship dynamics and the echo chamber of their ever-metastasizing beliefs, that led them to an isolated mountaintop in Idaho. The events may be 20 years old, but the radical fringe the Weavers inhabited has hardly gone away.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I type this, my library informs me that So Far Gone, Jess Walter's newest novel, is in; a 24-week wait, a caper about a Christian militia in Idaho and the culture clash with, inevitably, a gentler guy leaning towards the author's "Co-Exist" sensibility. So Walter's stint on his hometown Spokane paper, as Randy Weaver and his accomplice were tried across border in Boise, shows how a generation ago, he already was well, uh, prepped, for this assignment. Sprawling narrative, if paced and plotted.

I couldn't recall how these verdicts went, so this was nearly a courtroom thriller. Not my usual choice, true-life or imaginary crime, but Financial Lives of the Poets, Citizen Vince (and to a lesser extent, his two Caroline Mabry detective installments), and Cold Millions all've been favorably reviewed by me recently, so I finally got (wait list, tends to be the norm for Walter's oeuvre) to Ruby Ridge. Although fact, it opens as if fevered fiction, powerfully evoking Armageddon as surviving members of a plywood (!) cabin precariously perched atop (alas, once) pristine vistas resolve to resist (pre-hashtag) "ZOG."

If you know that slur, you may find this account matches your level of understanding. Not that I went in ignorant, but a slight flaw--for admittedly very much in the minority me--was that the farrago of "fake news," warped Scriptures, racist and antisemitic yet weirdly philo-Hebraic interpretation, and half-cocked proto-Zion Masada-like defiance fermenting a bitter mental brew, is all but skimmed over by Walter. Maybe just as well. Add machismo, home canning, guns, turkey hot dogs, delusion, back-to-nature Jesus Freaks, and--as I'd been spooked at age 12 during this same OPEC-Watergate-Godspell-"bring our POWs home" early '70s malaise--Hal Lindsey's apocalyptic oddball bestseller.

In Iowa (for far fewer Westerners are truly natives, take it from one who is born and bred past the Rockies), the young Weavers and sidekicks glom onto this post-hippie, denim homeschooling mom and leather biker dad mishmash; their autodidactic mindsets and heartland fears drive them up into the mountains. Their backstory settled, joined by jittery, boastful, well-armed misfits from the prairie or plains, they conspire against conspiracy while concocting their blurred, blustery, bad-ass, bozo, bizarre, bitchy Identity Movement; as extremists, it's riddled with scammers, informers, and rivals.

Walter evokes this emerging contrarian counterculture deftly. When the standoff, showdown, and sorry shootout transpire, and the latter half shifts to trial, he shows how savvy showboat for the defense Gerry Spence pivots charges so that the FBI, using dubiously improvised "under fire" rules of engagement, may be the truer, or false in deep-state truthiness (I update terms), bad actors vs. pre-# Resistance. Their assault, fueled by hearsay, if you bought it use it armory, and trigger fingers, stuns.

Walter remains attentive, in his reporter's stance (this originally appeared 1995, well-timed post-Waco + Oklahoma City, unfortunately: an afterword updates findings and fates), to our fundamental and formidable question: how fast or furious can those who rush in to rule over us for a greater good and public safety intrude on individuals bent on self-damning, self-imposed, self(ish?)-interests to go it alone? Where does "get off my lawn" and Second Amendment cross into damage, danger, death?

P.S. There's tragedy for another sequel in a subplot of a Good Sam bystander, seeing good in us all, caught up in this frenzy as cautionary tale. As harrowing as the fate of main characters, yet a slight, offstage victim. The lesson of this peripheral walk-on figure, who never stirred up hate, haunts me...

[Denny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruby Ridge is an outstanding work of investigative journalism that has the potential to change the minds of readers who come to it with preconceived notions of who was right and wrong during the Ruby Ridge standoff. Walter does a superb job of showing the errors, mistakes, and miscalculations made by people, agencies, and organizations on both sides of the issue. I can only imagine how many hours of painstaking research must’ve gone into the making of this book.

As in his subsequent works of fiction, Walter has a gift for portraying his subjects in a very real and humane manner. When I decided to read Ruby Ridge, I had only the vaguest recollections of the events of 23+ years prior and of my impressions of those events, none of which were very flattering toward Randy Weaver and his family. While nothing in the book changed (and nothing can change) my intense dislike of and disagreement with the Weavers’ religious and cultural beliefs, it certainly helped to soften my judgment of their desires and actions. And for those who are staunch, unquestioning defenders of government and law enforcement agencies and agents, this book should serve as an aid to understanding their flaws and imperfections as well.

As has been remarked by at least one prior reviewer, Ruby Ridge should be required reading in high school and undergrad college civics and American government classes. That’s doubly true given the anti-government, libertarian, Tea Partying milieu that’s eating away at the USA’s unity and goodwill today.

[Jill Crosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY well-written. I was afraid Jess Walter was going to "Choose" one side or another in the Ruby Ridge stand-off, and spend 400 pages villifing the other side. My fears were unfounded, however, as he took great care to present both sides of this "Only in America" tragedy. Essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the whole birth of "homeland security" issues and the fringe elements of our society that believe only in the authority of a Biblical God whom they alone can interpret. Hard to put down!

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those crazier-than-fiction-ever-could-be type stories. Ruby Ridge, Idaho, was the location of a 1992 shoot-out between the government and the bat-shit crazy Weaver family who had holed up in the Idaho mountains out of a paranoid fear that the government was out to get them… a fear which then, much like fiction, became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the government did eventually have to come after them. Although the patriarch of the family, Randy Weaver, had only committed two minor criminal offenses, one of which he may have been entrapped to commit by the ATF, his nonsensical and overtly threatening behavior, coupled with the poor communication which plagues huge bureaucracies, created a situation in which the government was forced to react to a situation which had escalated beyond recognition, much to the detriment of everyone involved and at unbelievable monetary expense to the tax-payer. The situation ended in the incredibly unfortunate and pointless deaths of 3 people – a US marshal, and the mother and son of the Weaver family.

I was alive and old enough to watch news when this event took place, but I don’t remember it at all (although I remember being enthralled by Waco 2 years later). I really didn’t know anything about this event or its large cultural significance, so I’m glad that I found this book. I decided to read it because Jess Walter’s books were recommended to me and this was the only one that was in at the library at the time. As for the book itself… it definitely seemed thoroughly researched. The story was told in intricate detail from the early life of the Weavers, their move to Idaho because of paranoid fears and the desire to remove themselves from society and await the apocalypse “peacefully” heavily armed and off the grid, their 9 years at Ruby Ridge prior to the shoot-out, the shoot-out itself, subsequent court case, and lasting implications of the events. My criticisms are that the book was a bit too long, although it was interesting throughout. Also, I didn’t think that the writing was superb, maybe because it was Walter’s early work, but I thought he was too much of an omniscient narrator, telling us what each character was thinking and feeling all the time when he couldn’t possibly have known (although they may have told him some of it in interviews or in testimonies in court). The tone of the book to me didn’t sound particularly impartial, although he did do a good job of presenting all sides of the story.

As for my opinions of the case itself… of course the defense team made it about religious freedom and eventually won not guilty verdicts for most charges because of technicalities and governmental (mostly FBI) screw-ups. To me, this story was a good illustration of how many things in America – from governmental bodies (eh hmm… TSA) to individual citizens – operate without the use of common sense, and how this tendency can vary from annoying to downright dangerous. I think that in this case the FBI behaved deplorably. I think it’s a shame that there were so many different government organizations involved and that they were so poorly organized and inefficient. But I also think that there should be more severe societal expectations for behavior and conduct on people like the Weavers. It’s not ok to move to the mountains and choose not to educate your children adequately and to fill them will paranoid fears that if they go to school they’ll get AIDS. All religions should not be equally entitled to the government’s protection. Freedom of religion, if I understand it correctly, means that you should not be persecuted for your beliefs… which the Weavers were absolutely not… it shouldn’t mean that you’re exempt from abiding by societal and ethical norms of respecting your fellow human beings. Although religion in general does often bring out the crazies, America should be able to curb the actions of people whose “religious beliefs” espouse hatred. Legally, I don’t know how this law would look, but logically, something here is not adding up (again, that pervasive lack of common sense) and other countries have figured out how to do it, so surely America can, too.

However, the number one thing that I think that Randy Weaver was guilty of, and I absolutely feel that he should have been tried for this somehow and should have had to pay, was the tremendous cost that his actions cost to the tax-payer. His refusal to even listen to, much less negotiate with, federal agents for 18 months, while tacitly threatening them with violence in the form of his heavily armed family, created a situation that, at the end of the day, cost the government a ridiculous amount of money. Yes, the government probably could have found a cheaper and quicker way to handle the situation and, had they had the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure that would have been easy to do. However, huge bureaucracies, with their millions of employees, restrictions and regulations governing their behavior, do not have the freedom to “just let this one slide” in the same way that one dude and his little family can just temporarily bend their weird ideas and agree to negotiate in order to de-escalate the situation. Randy Weaver’s paranoid stupidity cost the tax-payer I don’t know how many millions (in fact I would have liked to see an estimate somewhere in this book). This is equivalent to calling the police out for no reason but times a million in terms of expense and time-wastage. It’s not ok to be paranoid and stupid and hole up on a mountain – no matter what your religious belief – if you’re then going to ask me, the tax payer, to foot the bill. Fuck that.

[Christopher Hudson Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like a novel. Jess Walter gives the reader an in depth look at the lives of the various people connected to Ruby Ridge and the key decisions that led to the tragedy. Walter helps shows how an otherwise average northwestern family can descend into religious fundamentalism and white supremacy, and how well-intentioned law enforcement can overreact and cause immeasurable injustice. A well balanced book for anyone looking to understand the events that transpired, the court trials that proceeded the standoff, and the legacy Ruby Ridge left behind.

[Sonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't even begin to tell about my feelings about this book. Let's just say the government was as corrupt then as it is today. Especially the FBI. When you have high level FBI officials today forming a "secret society" to discuss ways to " get rid of" our duly elected President, and a presidential candidate able to buy the nomination from the DNC that just shows our government is as corrupt as any third world country. I thank God everyday for blessing us with Donald Trump as our president.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written and riveting chronicle of a completely avoidable tragedy involving a far-right family and a government that completely mishandled the invent. This is my se rcond reading, I enjoy everything Walter writes, and this is no exception. Still relevant, and an insightful glimpse into the lunatic fringe that remains a threat to democracy.

[Briana · Rating 1 out of 5]

I stopped reading after the author misspelled Shafer Butte, a well-known Boise landmark. If he can’t get a geographic name right, how can I trust his speculations about the Weavers’ private conversations?

[aMandalin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve always been fascinated by this chilling account. I remember my parents telling me about it when I was younger. This book was way too complex and detailed. The amount of evil people involved in Weaver’s life, transforming him into the total extremist he ended up being, is all detailed in this book, exhaustingly. I ended up skimming the last half of it. The “how did they end up like that” was what I was most Interested In, and WOW. what a good warning for anyone. If you are not being led by Bible-based, God-called pastors and saints in your life, you can get off track really fast. They went from wanting to be a little self sufficient (something I admire and attempt myself) through gardening and hunting and bulk food- to thinking they were the only “Jews” God loved and everyone else was against them and other races and cultures were evil. I mean, that escalated quickly. Not really, because it took YEARS. But it just kind of gave me the creeps. It made me want to always stay right in the middle of the road, right in the center of God’s will. Also, they really ended up twisting Scripture to what THEY wanted it to mean. That’s terrifying. Those are the kind of people who are shocked at the Judgment bar. Anyways, I had to be in the right mood to read it for sure because of how dark it made me feel. Probably wouldn’t recommend for fun reading. 😂

[Everydayreader1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

In August of 1992, two members of the Randy Weaver family and a Federal law enforcement officer were killed at Ruby Ridge, a remote area in northern Idaho, a few miles from the Canadian border. The Weaver's moved to the area in 1983, choosing to live in an isolated cabin because they believed the end of the world was soon to be at hand. Their story is a long and somewhat complicated one, culminating in this loss of life. Jess Walter chronicles the lives and choices of the Weaver family, and the events leading up to the confrontation at Ruby Ridge between the Weaver's and government law enforcement officials, as well as the trial and its aftermath.

What ever one's views about religion, separatism, the government and the use of power, this book has it all. Like many, I watched the media coverage of the events at Ruby Ridge and wondered how this could be happening and how things could have gone so terribly wrong. I think the author does an excellent job in chronicling the events in a way that explains without judging, and helps the reader to realize the intransigence on both sides and where it can lead, if unchecked.

[Lizpixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing was fantastic, easy to read & enthralling. The subject infuriated me though. Both sides have to shoulder blame, but the cover-ups, misleading & total obstruction by both the FBI & the US Marshall’s were totally disgusting. Absolute power definitely corrupted absolutely in this case. Five years later, when the marshalls involved actually tried to pin Samuels shooting on his father, enraged me to the point I had to walk away from the book for awhile. I really hope both agencies learnt to do better from these mistakes. But I’m not holding my breath.

[Beth Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars

This standoff in Idaho is heartbreaking because of the lives lost. There was so much manpower and money invested in this standoff and then the trials afterward. It was of a certain time (early 1990s) when combatting cults and compound were a thing. No one is in the right here. So much gray. I appreciate the frankness of Jess Walter. I believe this is my first non-fiction by him, and I liked his writing style just as much as I do for fiction.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Randy Weaver case is a stop sign, a warning—not of the dangers of right-wing conspiracies or of government conspiracies—but of the danger of conspiracy thinking itself, by people and the government.”

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“[….] people ought not to be murdered by their own government.”

The inherent brutality of the police state sometimes exposes itself to the light for comment, as it did in August 1992, when a missed court date resulted in three lives ended, more ruined, and millions of dollars wasted.

I was introduced to the Ruby Ridge case via Rise of the Warrior Cop. The short version: Randy Weaver and his wife had isolated themselves and their family on a mountain to protect them from the Apocalypse and government persecution. After receiving conflicting court summons and choosing to ignore them, Weaver’s property was surrounded by Federal agents, and they shot, in sequence, his dog, his son, a friend, his wife, and him. But why were they there, and why did Weaver resist them for months on the mountain, including eleven days when they were practically in his yard and his wife’s body lady in the kitchen?

The book begins by introducing us to Randy and Vickie, following their stories as they fall in love and begin making a life together. They were both unhappy with just living, and groped for meaning beyond the sex, drugs, and rock and roll embraced by their peers. They sought their meaning in religion, in an epic drama in which the world was a live battlefield between angels and demons — and they were a part of it, their minds consumed with the notion that one day soon a demon-driven government was going to come for them. Their electic beliefs, a mix of a race-cult and Jewish practices, drove them to a mountain retreat to live off the grid. The need to Be Prepared also motivated Randy to generate funds by selling firearms, and in so doing he became of interest to an ATF investigation into the remnants of violent white-nationalist groups with a penchant for robbery and explosions. Arrested by FBI agents pretending to be stranded motorists, Weaver retreated to his cabin after making bail and refuse to come down. Enter an increasing army of Federal agents gathering around his property with helicopters, troop carriers, and the works. This played perfectly into the Weavers’ persecution complex, so…the stage was set for a preview of Waco six months later: aggressive Federals sleep-walking to a violent confrontation with an increasingly paranoid target.

But while Waco was purely Federal incompentence at work, at Ruby Ridge the initial agents at least knew they were dealing with a man who didn’t trust them, and so they tread softly. They tried to understand how he was interpreting them, and to avoid escalation they simply waited. Eventually, Weaver would get tired of sitting, watching, and waiting and come out. But as months wore on and more agents became involved, people got careless, confrontational, and stupid. While exploring the Weaver property fringes, agents provoked the family dog and inagurated a firefight that got a child killed, as well as one of the officers. The Weavers were in the dark as to what happened, and assumed the Federals were at last coming in for the kill — and when the Hostage Response Team from the FBI was flown in, they assumed that the entire Weaver clan was actively trying to wipe out their ground forces. Two groups of people, both stumbling in the dark and driven by fear and sorrow, got into an armed standoff. Operating under aggressive orders that declared open season on any adult males, the FBI killed Vickie Weaver, severely wounded a Weaver family friend, and winged Weaver himself. Negotiations were impossible: Randy was paranoid BEFORE his son and wife were killed, and himself and his friend wounded. Both he and his oldest daughter believed they would be gunned down if they attempted to leave the house, and considering there was a remote-control robot with a shotgun barrel close to the house, they can hardly be blamed. Fortunately for all involved, a private citizen stepped in and served as meditator, preventing the FBI’s criminal incompetence and Weaver’s paranoia from killing even more people.

Ruby Ridge is a hard case to read about, with a strange and hostile family on one hand and a needlessly aggressive, frighteningly militaristic, and oblivious-to-apperances government on the other. The worst of it is that Weaver hadn’t even committed any serious crimes beyond refusing to leave his home: unlike David Koresh, he wasn’t screwing kids. When he was put on trial, he was found guilty of failing to apepar in court. When the government was put on trial for its own actions, they paid millions to the Weaver family in restitution. From its needless agression to consistently destructive failures to communicate, the FBI comes off here like Keystone Cops.

This is a hard tragedy to read about, but the expansion of militia groups in the nineties owed much to Ruby Ridge, as people saw they had good reason to fear the government. Ruby Ridge inflamed the minds of men like Timothy McVeigh; when he committed the largest act of domestic terrorism on American soil in 1995, Ruby Ridge and Waco were both on his mind. Ruby Ridge is a helpful reminder that “Goverment is not reason, it is not eloquence….it is force. Like a fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.”

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Book

Very informative and interesting read about the events, and aftermath, of Ruby Ridge. Jess Walter is a great writer and does a great job of telling the story from both perspectives.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be perfectly honest, the first half is a slog. I’ve read some of the other reviews, and I appear to be in the minority on this; others found the trial to be unbearably boring.
But at any rate, it needed to be told. The overstepping of authority was so much worse than I thought. The coverup was positively disgusting. Truly, the story of the Weaver family is heartbreaking and terrifying.
So if you’re gonna read it, I suggest you make a spreadsheet of every person mentioned. Because there are a TON of people in this book, and most of them resurface a few times. Maybe even print off a map with the small cities in the Idaho chimney clearly marked, just to give you some reference. The ebook includes several pictures at the end, so those can be referenced as you go along. Randy was handsome! That surprised me for some reason.
Four stars due to repetitive facts, and also I noticed the author had a tendency to switch between calling people by their first name or only last name, which added to my confusion. Admittedly, it doesn’t take much.
Notable passages:

Vicki wanted to be a housewife. Randy wanted to be an FBI agent.

he was treated with the deference of the only boy and the youngest child.

There was only one tree on the whole 3,000-acre town site, and so they nailed a plaque to it.

Randy was adamant about the Great Tribulation, how the government would turn on its people, and bloodshed would be visited upon white Christians. Then he talked about the beautiful piece of land he was buying and said, “Armageddon’s gonna end on that hill.”

Seemed every six months or so, the sheriff was called up to Ruby Ridge to talk to the Weavers or one of their neighbors. Someone was shooting guns at night. …This guy shot that guy’s goat.

“Am I correct in understanding that you believe the end of the world will come sometime in the next two months, that this will start to take place—something between the blacks and the Hell’s Angels—and that it will end up at your house, on your front door, and that it will be the start of the end of the world?” “More or less,” Randy said.

Sheriff in such a large, sparsely and strangely populated county was often a difficult job to fill. In 1983, the sheriff of Boundary County had gone to Alaska for a vacation and just never returned. His chief deputy assumed the job because there was no one else, and then, five years later, he quit, too. ..On the Democratic side was a part-time school bus driver, a bartender, and Boundary County’s first-ever bailiff. Running for the Republicans were Lonnie Ekstrom, the chief investigator for the sheriff’s office, and Randy Weaver.

She looked like any teenage girl except for the World War II gun belt slung around her waist and the semiautomatic pistol sticking out of the covered holster. “What do you want?”

Young and muscular, with stooped shoulders and surfer looks, Hart met the most important requirement for undercover work—no matter how long you stared at him, he just didn’t look like a cop.

Guys like that lost their whole lives over $600, over principles and ideologies that have no basis in reality, no logic. Hunt didn’t understand that blind devotion…Hunt had arrested more than 5,000 fugitives in his 15 years as a deputy marshal. Yet he’d never fired his gun in the line of duty. He was world-weary and gruff, a guy who stooped and shambled along persistently and who could bring anyone in with enough reasoning and cajoling. His best weapon was his tenacity. He just wouldn’t give up. A big, gentle-looking guy, the other marshals saw him as the hardest ass in the service, simply because he wouldn’t give up.

When the local sheriff walked into the house to arrest the fugitive, Kahl shot him. A federal agent outside the house also fired, again hitting the sheriff, who, before he died, managed to squeeze off a shot that killed Kahl. Agents outside didn’t know Kahl was dead, and so they fired tear gas inside, blistered the house with gunfire and, finally, dumped fuel into the house and burned it to the ground.

But the deliberate, hangdog Hunt proceeded the way he always did in such cases, learning the fugitive’s habits, tracing his family, figuring out where his money came from, trying to get inside his head.

Marshals duty in North Idaho was considered the worst assignment in the country because of cases just like this, stubborn antigovernment types whose failure to appear became more serious than the actual crime they’d committed. There wasn’t a lot of personal stuff on Hunt’s desk, a few family pictures and a photograph behind him, a picture of the bloody car door of a law officer who had gotten too excited during an arrest and had accidentally shot himself in the leg. It was a good reminder to proceed cautiously and a warning of how badly things could go. NAPLES, IDAHO, LOOKED LIKE A TOWN that was in a constant state of evacuation. In March of 1991, it was essentially a dying railyard and lumber mill, a tattered school and a general store, all clinging to an old highway in a glacial valley—Down the road a piece, at the North Woods Tavern, where the occupation of every third customer was “handyman”—some guy looking for work on a road crew or a dairy or a Christmas tree farm, anything to pay the property taxes while they finished the corral and got the roof on the log cabin.

“Whether we live or whether we die, we will not obey your lawless government.” That apparently was a no.

He was very sociable. He seemed like the kind of guy who only wanted to hop in his pickup truck, drive to a buddy’s house, sit on his porch, and bitch about the government. More than anything, Randy seemed to want to be a preacher, to have a following of people who agreed with his views. He didn’t seem suited to isolation. They were overestimating his military training. Randy had never been in Vietnam, although he didn’t seem to mind people thinking he had been. And he was no explosives expert, just an army grunt with some Special Forces training. Hunt completely discounted the theory that Randy booby-trapped his mountain. He was lazy and quite possibly a coward. He hadn’t held a job for a long time, and even some of Randy’s relatives said he was “as lazy as they come.” Vicki, who had grown up on a farm, seemed better equipped for the privation and solitude of Ruby Ridge. But one thing about Randy bothered Hunt more than anything else: his cowardice, the fact that he didn’t hesitate to place his children right in the middle of this danger.

And Hunt knew that when someone thinks they’ve been ordered by God to do something, they’re going to do it.

Hunt wasn’t about to call in the cavalry until he had exhausted every peaceful, commonsense solution.

It was a morning as peaceful as any she’d ever seen.

The next day, the Weavers were listening to their radio when they heard a report that they’d fired guns at Rivera’s helicopter. “The only thing I shot them was the bird.” Randy laughed. The crew later admitted they were probably mistaken.

Hudson listened as his top deputies explained how an Idaho woodsman could hide behind his kids for fourteen months and evade deputy marshals who knew exactly where he was.

Mark Jurgensen was a deputy marshal from Washington State who could fit in with the people of North Idaho for several reasons: first, he had a great beard; second, he was an excellent carpenter who could pass as someone building his own cabin; and third, he had false teeth that he could pull out, making him look like a toothless mountain man.

Randy was such a social guy, he wouldn’t be able to resist a friendly, bearded, toothless guy hammering away just down the road.

And then several things happened in rapid, foggy succession—the dog moved toward Roderick, Degan rose on his knee to identify himself, and in a thicket of who-shot-first stories, both sides agreed that everything just went to hell.

“Sam’s dead.” And then, Randy would remember, the family just went “plumb nutty.”

Hunt told a couple of marshals that headquarters wanted the CRT to wait. “You tell ‘em to go to hell, Dave,” one of the retired marshals said.

in the sanitized vernacular of federal law enforcement—”stabilize the situation.”

it had been three years since an HRT sniper had even fired a shot on a mission.

all fifty HRT agents—were sent on a single mission.

He couldn’t believe it when a Red Cross truck drove right past the evacuated people and turned up the hill to provide food to the federal officers. The Red Cross was founded in his native Switzerland as a neutral aid organization. They weren’t supposed to take sides! Red Cross officials said when they tried to help the people at the roadblock, they were chased off with clubs and sticks.

while a cold mist soaked them like grocery store produce.

Johnny Bangerter, a 23 year-old skinhead who looked like an angry Curly from The Three Stooges and who was the second cousin of the governor of Utah.

The APCs moved up and down the ridge, running over the gunshot body of Striker—which no one had bothered to move—twenty-seven times.

You have nothing to worry about.” “Get the fuck out of here!” Lanceley sat up and smiled. In fourteen years as a negotiator, he’d never heard profanity that sounded so beautiful.

If they think we are going to trust them, (We didn’t trust them before they shot us) they’re crazy!

“PAGE TWO,” PAUL HARVEY SAID. And then he talked about the standoff in North Idaho, and he pleaded with Randy Weaver to give up. “You can negotiate an end to this standoff right now, and believe me, Randy, you’ll have a much better chance with a jury of understanding home folks than you could ever have in any kind of shoot-out with two hundred frustrated lawmen.” …For most of the three-minute plea on his national show, Harvey criticized the federal government. “I wonder, too, with all the crass criminals we have running around in this country, this focus on you certainly constitutes grotesque overkill and frankly, from an objective distance, it looks pretty silly.”

Jeane felt lost, crying in a clearing in the woods 1,500 miles from her home, holding hands with an FBI agent who explained that they had accidentally shot one of her babies.

“There’s a shotgun on that robot!” Bo looked out the window. “Yeah, there sure is.”

And once you gird yourself up to die, it can be difficult to back down from that decision.

Other people were sorry the standoff was dragging to a close because the protest was going so well.

thirty people got pretty drunk pretty fast.

one of the Las Vegas skinheads posing with a black reporter from Boston, their faces dissolved in laughter as they Nazi-saluted the camera.

news reporters needed to realize how important their job was. They had to find some meaning in what had happened, some explanation. A few of the reporters almost sobered up. “I hope you will be responsible in telling this story,” Lorenz said. “And I hope you find the truth.”

Rachel and her grandpa walked through the grocery store in Sandpoint, looking for snacks to take back to the motel. The ten-year-old only wanted chocolate doughnuts. After all she’d been through, He wasn’t going to say no. She hadn’t been away from the cabin, hadn’t been off the mountain, in eighteen months, and now she was in a crowded grocery store, a blur of strangers and strange-looking people who were pushing carts with gallons of milk, loaves of bread, batteries, cookies, and frozen foods. She clung to her grandpa and whispered, “I sure wish I had my gun.”

a couple of the nicer skinheads

In October, two months after the standoff, Lorenz was so troubled that Wasiliki took him to visit friends at a nearby lake. And there he just snapped. He ran down the rural road, hiding in the bushes while his wife and friends looked for him. Then, the peaceful chef ran up to a house and dove through a picture window into a stranger’s living room, stood up, and began strangling a woman in the house, screaming that they were coming to get him. The woman’s husband hit Lorenz on the head with a baseball bat, and he collapsed. When he woke up, he ran away again and hid in a field until the police finally found him, curled up and whimpering.
At the airport, he screamed and cried and wouldn’t get on the plane. His friend decided to drive Lorenz back to northern Idaho, but a half-hour from the border, Lorenz begged his friend to stop. He grabbed his Bible and stepped out of the pickup onto the side of the road. A cattle truck was barreling down the highway, and Lorenz walked in front of it and was killed.

they began to see troubling questions: What were six marshals doing in the woods that day? Why would they shoot the dog during a gunfight? Why did they shoot Sammy in the back, when he was running away? Why did they need so many agents to settle the standoff?

They reasoned that an expert sniper couldn’t miss twice

Like most PDs’ offices, Boise’s was horribly understaffed; at any given time, 150 cases crossed Nevin’s desk, with time to prepare only five of them. It was straight triage, like bringing one ambulance to the scene of a fifty-car accident every day.

His head was shaved, he was pale and weak-looking, shackled, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and orange thongs. Spence had expected a wild-eyed, charismatic kook, and what he was seeing was just a tired, little man. But he also sensed that he was listening to someone who was telling the truth.

“I have authorized Mr. Spence to undertake my defense understanding that he and I see eye to eye on very few political and religious issues. As a matter of fact, we are poles apart in our beliefs. But one thing he and I agree on, and that is people ought not to be murdered by their own government.”

He graduated high school at a time when it was still possible to go off to sea for adventure, and Spence had a fine time as a merchant marine. He drank rum, smoked cigars, visited whorehouses. But he refused to pay union dues, and the other merchant marines tossed him overboard and emptied a garbage chute on him. He eventually quit, moved back to Wyoming, was married, and got into law school, but his mom didn’t approve of his gambling or his godlessness, and they argued almost as much as Gerry and his wife did. During his first year of law school, Spence’s mother committed suicide.

at 24, Gerry Spence became the youngest county attorney in the state. He was a buzz saw. He shut down the Little Yellow House brothel in Riverton, revoked liquor licenses, and even prosecuted himself for shooting ducks outside of shooting hours.

a perfect mix of brilliance and self-promotion

“To think that three people are dead over a missed court date seems incredibly wrong and sad.”

This is a case, simply put, that charges Randy and Kevin with crimes they didn’t commit in order to cover up crimes the government did commit.”

But most juries know their job is to decide whose story contains less bullshit.

Striker became Old Striker and in coming days, That Big Ol’ Yella Lab, and finally, Old Yeller, Who Never in the History of the World Bit Anybody.

The jury seemed genuinely sorry for the sad, loping deputy marshal.

He said Randy told him he didn’t like the German kind of Nazis, but that they had some pretty good ideas.

Juries didn’t want to see some smooth lawyer, he reasoned; they wanted to see themselves.

She was attractive and smart, and most of all, she was telling the truth.

and she wore honorably and sadly the pain her family had been put through.

They could never put her on the stand. She was just too damn honest.

“You heard a woman screaming after your last shot?” Spence asked. “Yes, sir, I did.” “That screaming went on for thirty seconds?” “About thirty seconds, yes, sir.” “I want us to just take thirty seconds, now pretend in our mind’s eye that we can hear the screaming—” Spence was quiet and whether or not they wanted to, everyone in the courtroom watched the plodding second hand on the wall clock straight across…the jury was as close as it would get to the horror of Rachel and Sara Weaver, who screamed and screamed until they were out of breath while their mother lay dead on the kitchen floor.

walking past a violently bored pack of television and newspaper reporters, who—at one point—challenged some loitering skinheads to a game of football.

THEY WERE LOSING IT. The jury had already spent more time sequestered than Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris had spent under siege on Ruby Ridge. And now, the judge was telling them to start over. Some of the jurors were beaten.

“While I respect her love of country,” he said, “we should not let patriotic fervor stand in the way of the truth.

The Founding Fathers of our nation wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights with the idea that the citizens would be sensible enough to recognize the excesses of too much government power and gave us the tools so we could change or even abolish our form of government.”

He faced two stubborn coalitions that had moved from honest disagreement into angry dislike after weeks of debate, emotional outbreaks, and recriminations.

Sometimes, Jack Weaver wished they could ignore the precise jury instructions and use common sense to deal with Randy Weaver. “If I could have convicted him of gross stupidity, I would have,” he wrote in the diary he kept during the trial.

Seemingly shy and easily intimidated, the housewife wouldn’t budge. “I don’t want to send the message that it’s okay to shoot U.S. marshals,”

He said the case wasn’t over. “There is a dead mother who died with a baby in her arms. There is a little boy, four feet, eleven inches tall, who died with a bullet in his back. Who is going to be responsible for these deaths?”

After four years of investigation, at a cost of several million dollars, the U.S. government managed to convict Randy Weaver of failing to appear in court.

Such reluctance had a name among federal agents. They called it Weaver Fever.

He claimed to have “inserted myself in the breech more than 23 times between embattled Americans and government … which has continued a swift descent into chaos and anarchy.” By the late 1990s, after an apparent slowdown in the “chaos and anarchy” business, Gritz found himself mired in marital and financial problems. In September 1998, Gritz’s wife of 24 years filed for divorce. A few days later a passing motorist near Orofino, Idaho, found Gritz sitting next to his pickup truck, shot in the chest with his own .45-caliber handgun.

“Someday,” he said, “I hope that all of you will get the opportunity to walk out the front door with somebody who’s been charged with murder but isn’t guilty.” The law students leaped up and began clapping. David Nevin started crying.

“I just wanted to be left alone.”

A few months after the hearings, the deputy marshals assigned to the Weaver case were given the service’s highest honor.

In December 1995, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee: This country can tolerate mistakes made by people like Randy Weaver; but we cannot accept serious errors made by federal law enforcement agencies that needlessly result in human tragedy.” And that was it.

Amazingly, they found almost 40 pieces of evidence, many of which two crack teams of FBI agents had somehow missed when they searched the hillside in 1992 and again in 1993. Among the items that Sprungl noted were bullets and shell casings

Kahoe would remain the only agent charged. After five years and tens of millions of dollars, the federal investigation was over.

IN AUGUST 1995, the government settled the civil lawsuit filed by the Weaver family, paying them $3.1 million to compensate for the loss of Vicki and Sam Weaver. As part of the settlement, the Weavers dropped their claim and the government refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

“We didn’t hate anyone,” Randy wrote in the book. “We wanted to be left alone.”

It was the story of more accountability for agencies steeped in cold war secrecy and institutional arrogance.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently listened to Season 2 of Long Shadow: “Rise of the American Far Right,” an excellent podcast by Garrett Graff.

In this podcast, I also learned about the 10-day federal government siege on Randy Weaver’s family on Ruby Ridge in 1992 (an event unknown to me as I was seven when it took place). This is an event (coupled with the 1993 51-day government siege in Waco, Texas that killed 80 Branch Davidians) that increased the hatred and distrust of the government by many Americans and far right groups, and also motivated Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building one year later as revenge.

So I picked up this book to learn more about it.

Randy Weaver and his family slipped from conservative Christians to conspiracists, radicalized through a combination of extreme anti-government paranoia and white supremacist beliefs and Christian Identity beliefs, a racist religion that accepts obscure, ancient writings as legitimate. They were adamant about the Great Tribulation, how the government would turn on its people and bloodshed would be visited upon by white Christians. They moved from Iowa to a cabin on an isolated mountaintop in northern Idaho where they embraced a survivalist/isolationist lifestyle and developed a deep distrust of the federal government, found friends at the nearby Aryan Nations compound.

"Fear thrives in Boundary County. It takes form in tall mountain grass, peers down from granite crags, and waits in shaded creek beds. It jostles and pops along dirt roads and stares unflinchingly through strands of pine. Fear is the last cash crop left in North Idaho, the last big predator, the last roadside attraction.

From all over the country, fear dragged people away from cities and into the mountains of North Idaho. In the early 1980's, when the reasonable folk of North Idaho noticed all these strange newcomers, they quickly saw the hatred: of racial minorities, of the government, of the decadent society. But what many failed to notice was the fear, the choking paranoia that made young, reasonable families seek out a place where they felt in control of their lives again."
(Chapter 4)

In 1989 Randy was entrapped by ATF agents for selling sawed-off shotguns in an attempt to force him to become an informant and spy on the Aryan Nations. Weaver refused and retreated to his cabin where he tried to hide with his wife, son, and three daughters.

"They were seduced by conspiracy and a religion called Christian Identity, by beliefs steeped in racism and fear of government oppression, beliefs that helped bring about the very thing they feared."
(Introduction)

For 18 months, the U.S. Marshals tried to figure out how to get Weaver off the mountain. Six Marshals attempted to scout the mountainside to figure out how to retrieve Randy when the Weaver dog came upon them along with Randy’s son and friend. The Marshals shot and killed the dog, shot Randy’s 14-year-old son in the arm when he returned fire, and then shot him in the back when he tried to run away. The family friend who was with the boy returned fire and shot and killed one of the Marshals before retreating back to the cabin.

Once this story got back to Washington, the FBI blew it out of proportion. They believed Randy was a highly trained Green Beret and Aryan Nations member who had booby-trapped his mountain with bombs and grenades, leading to a landslide of blunders, bad information and cold decision making, and they sent a cavalry of 300 agents to the mountain to eliminate what they viewed as a dangerous and radical family.

And here’s the most important part of this story that matters today: At the time, the FBI’s rules of engagement, clearly known by every agent, were: “Agents are not to use deadly force against any person except as necessary in self-defense or the defense of another when they have reason to believe they or another are in danger of death or grievous bodily harm. Whenever feasible, verbal warning should be given before deadly force is applied.”

With the Randy Weaver case, the sniper teams were briefed with new and inappropriate use of deadly force rules: “any armed adult male CAN AND SHOULD be neutralized.” In other words, a shoot-on-sight order.

While Randy was checking on the body of his son in a side shed, snipers shot him in the armpit and tried to shoot him again when he retreated into his cabin. The shot missed Randy, going through the door, killing his wife, who was holding their 10-month-old baby. An injured Randy stayed holed up in his cabin for 10 days with his three daughters and wife’s body while agents tried to negotiate him to come out (which he eventually did).

Randy was later tried for the murder of the dead US Marshal. After a lengthy and expensive trial, he was acquitted for everything but failure to appear in court. He later sued the U.S. government for the wrongful deaths of his wife and son and settled for $3.1 million.
In the October 1995 Senate subcommittee hearing about the incident, Deputy Attorney General Gorelick testified, "If you take the rules of engagement [at Ruby Ridge] on their face and in a vacuum, they are unconstitutional." As a result of those hearings, Gorelick announced to senators that the Department of Justice had, as a result, formulated its first "uniform, written deadly force policy" applicable to all of its law enforcement agencies.

The Ruby Ridge case is relevant today. The FBI’s rules of engagement in the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege were unconstitutional. The rules of engagement by our current U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies are also cruel and unconstitutional. I hope Congress will hold these agencies accountable for their police-state style actions currently being enforced in our country.

I read this book on Libby and had no idea this book was 600 pages long. It goes into great depth to tell the story of every character that was involved in this event, from the Weavers and their neighbors to the Marshals and FBI agents involved to the prosecutors, defendants and jurors. The family's gradual embrace of radical conspiracies in Iowa is every bit as fascinating to read about as is the actual stand-off. I think the trial is actually the best part of the book.

I only give this book 4/5 stars as the epilogue really let me down. As it was written in 2002, the author finishes the book as if the far-right movement became irrelevant and died out after the execution of Timothy McVeigh and the declaration of bankruptcy by Richard Butler and the demolition of the Aryan Nations compound. Given the past 18 years of history that involve the rise of militia groups following the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the rise of far-right terrorist attacks in churches, protests and synagogues following the election of the 45th president, to the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by violent insurrectionists, to our current day, where our 47th president openly embraces and enacts far right, white supremacist ideas and agendas...I think we can agree that the problem of the far-right has metastasized, spreading not just into our country’s main stream, but all over the world.
- - -
Some favorite quotes from the book:

"...the Weaver case is not proof of broad government oppression and tyranny, but of human fallibility and inhuman bureaucracy, of competitive law enforcement agencies and blind stubbornness. The Randy Weaver case is a stop sign, a warning--not of the dangers of right-wing conspiracies or of government conspiracies--but of the danger of conspiracy thinking itself, by people and by governments."
(Introduction)

"Few people who don't follow conspiracy theories comprehend their attraction: they create a framework for understanding everything by tying coincidence and accident together. If every event is part of the fabric of the conspiracy, then everything must have a reason, a meaning. And so, when the same unlikely details from one mimeographed pamphlet show up on a tape or in a mail-order book, it comes not only as confirmation but as revelation: "Here it is again! The Illuminati!" For true believers, the conspiracies seem no more unlikely or illogical than other things that are considered truth."
(Chapter 3)

"It was ironic that in a case that began because of conspiracy theories, that's what good lawyering resembled more than anything else. Both require careful selection of certain facts, rejection of anything that doesn't fit, and the formation of a cohesive explanation of everything that--by its nature--is only part of the truth."
(Chapter 18)

[Arthur Sido · Rating 4 out of 5]

In August of 1992 I was a young college student and newlywed husband starting school in that brief period before my wife and I started having children. It was a time of transition in America. The Cold War was over, the first Iraq war had done a lot to invigorate American pride and we seemed headed for a time of peace and prosperity. Then suddenly the world was focused on a mountain-top in Idaho that no one had ever heard of: Ruby Ridge. Ruby Ridge and the subsequent Waco massacre led to the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, the aftermath of which I recall watching on the news while eating lunch on campus. These events spanning three years saw the rise and sudden death of the "militia movement". The burgeoning "patriot" movement quickly fell apart as anyone who seemed a little too extreme or had too many guns or disliked the government too much got lumped in with the OKC bombings. Since I lived through it and as a right-wing-ish political science student I watched the unfolding siege at Ruby Ridge fairly closely, I thought I knew the story but it started to dawn on me that I hadn't really looked into it as closely as perhaps I should have. So I decided to read up on the fiasco that led to the death of a Federal agent, a teen-aged boy and a woman with a baby in her arms. What follows is part book review, part rant.

Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family written by Jess Walter was the book I chose. From a decidedly partisan reading perspective, I found Walter's book to be both engaging even when slogging through some slow parts and pretty even-handed. Like most people Walter doesn't have much use for Weaver's beliefs but he also doesn't pull punches when it comes to dealing with the myriad government screw-ups. It was a pretty easy read, about three days of casual reading start to finish. There are a lot of players on the government end and Walter does a good job of keeping them distinct, although every now and then I had to think about which person was which.

The story of Randy and Vicki Weaver is not at the core about a religious nut with guns shooting at Federal agents. It is a case of an arrogant law enforcement community that sought to entrap Randy Weaver and when he refused to go along with their scheme, started in motion a chain of events that would lead to the death of a teen-aged boy, a Federal agent and a woman with a baby in her arms.

The basics of the case are this. Randy and Vicki Weaver held some pretty out there religious views and moved from Iowa to remote Idaho to wait out the coming eschatalogical apocalypse. Their religious view included an assumption that a "One World Government" would be coming for them so they tried to be as isolated as possible. While living in Idaho Randy had some contact with the Aryan Nations, a "white supremacist" group although the Weaver's should more accurately be considered white separatists. Because of this, the Feds sought to lure Weaver into committing a criminal act that they could use as leverage to force Weaver to become an informant. In reality Weaver had pretty minimal contact with these groups and, desperate for money, was entrapped by a Federal agent into sawing the barrel of a shotgun and selling it to the agent. After being arrested, Weaver was ordered to appear in court which he refused to do. At this point he was considered a fugitive and the Marshall service began surveillance on the Weaver's remote cabin. During one of the many scouting trips, marshals threw rocks to see what the Weaver's dog would do. The dog began to investigate where the men were, followed by Randy Weaver, his son Samuel and friend Kevin Harris. What happened next is in dispute but I believe the facts show that the marshals killed the Weaver's dog and this led to a gunfight in which Kevin Harris shot and killed marshal Francis Degan and Weaver's son Samuel was shot in the back and killed. The marshals retreated and the Weaver's and Kevin Harris returned to the cabin.

Thus began an 11 day siege with hundreds of law enforcement personnel, helicopters, APCs and even a shotgun armed robot. During the siege, Randy Weaver walked out to an outbuilding to see the body of his son Samuel. Thanks to the very liberal rules of engagement, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot at Weaver, intending to kill him from cover. At 200 yeards Horuichi missed the fatal shot and wounded Weaver. Weaver, his daughter and Kevin Harris ran back to the cabin. Randy Weaver was a moving target at 200 yards and was trying to retreat, not shooting back. Regardless Horiuchi fired again, missing Weaver and instead striking his wife Vicki, who was holding their 10 month old daughter Elisheba in her arms, killing her instantly. Kevin Harris was also gravely wounded but recovered.

Lon Horiuchi is a highly trained sniper on the elite FBI Hostage Rescue Team. As someone who has been handling and shooting firearms since I was young, something impressed upon me at an early age by my father and hunter safety instructor is to always know where you are shooting and what is behind it. A rifle bullet that misses the target can travel a very long way. In spite of this most basic safety consideration, a highly trained Federal agent shot at a moving target as he tried to enter a home made of plywood that the agent knew contained a woman and small children. Even if Randy Weaver was standing perfectly still it was a stupid shot because a miss would hit the house. Shooting at a moving man with a house full of kids as the background is criminally negligent. It would be akin to a hunter shooting at a moving deer that was in front of a deer blind he knew kids were in. Unfortunately Lon Horiuchi never stood trial for manslaughter and is a free man to this day. Horiuchi was later involved in the controversial massacre at Waco where he allegedly was firing into the compound, which also contained women and children. I guess we are fortunate the Horiuchi's body count of civilians isn't higher.

Kevin Harris was acquitted on all charges, pretty amazing for having admittedly shot and killed a Federal agent. Randy Weaver was acquitted on most charges and spent a short stint in prison. The Weaver's later sued the Federal government and were awarded a settlement of $3.1 million.

The details are well documented in Walter's book and while he is no fan of the Weaver's, it is clear he places the bulk of the blame for much of what happened on the Federal government. He has done a great deal of research and the more you dig into the book, the more apparent it becomes that the Feds screwed up out of incompetence, inter-agency rivalry and sheer hubris. If you are looking for a "cops can do no wrong" book or a book that extols the virtues of Randy Weaver, you won't find it here, but as an even-handed treatment of the incident that will serve as a launching point that hits on critical issues like religious liberty (even when far outside of the mainstream), government power and what it means to be a free citizen in America, Jess Walter does a great job and I highly recommend his book.

Ruby Ridge, Waco and Oklahoma City form three corners of a triangle and still impact our lives today. After Ruby Ridge and Waco, the militia movement took off in America in response to what seemed to be a government out of control and all too willing to kill civilians. In 1995 the Oklahoma City bombing brought the militia movement to the forefront of American politics. The specter of the militia movement and the alleged connection to the Oklahoma City bombing still taint many right-wing groups today, from the Tea Party to the Bundy standoff. Many normal Americans think that the woods are full of heavily armed nuts looking for a building to blow up. In conjunction with highly partisan, agenda driven groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the law enforcement community has driven much of the right more or less underground. It is a running joke that most of the most virulent groups are mostly made up of FBI informants. From the militia movement to the Tea Party to the alt-right, whenever more extreme forms of right-wing, populist/nationalist expression have cropped up, they just as quickly seem to implode and draw the ire of the state. Not since the 60's have we seen anything similar on the Left, especially not with the frequently violent "antifa" movement. But I will say that I think that we are approaching an era when the further extremes of the right are going to become more mainstream.

Jess Walter's book on the tragic events at Ruby Ridge is a great primer on the topic and a must-read for people trying to understand the political dynamics on the extremes today.

[Chris Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched tragic story.

[Jeff Lochhead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost too detailed account of the Ruby Ridge standoff. It seemed to maintain a neutral view of the incident throughout, while maintaining the ability to question all that were involved.

[A. L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me nostalgic. Not because of the subject material which was disturbing and tragic, but because it’s been so long since I’ve seen this kind of fair, unbiased reporting. Jess Walter covers every angle, gives you all the information in a logical, factual way and without any obvious bias. It’s the way reporting is supposed to be! Honestly, I’d recommend this book for that alone, given how rare that is today.

Now, with my obligatory “old woman” rant out of the way, the subject matter is also really well handled. Walter truly does explain everything that led up to the Ruby Ridge tragedy, as well as the courtroom drama that took place after, in a marvelous, factual way that is still interesting to read.

I was a kid when this event happened and don’t really remember it, though we are still seeing the repercussions play out in our country today. So this book was a great way to try and understand some of the origins of our current state of affairs.

Highly recommend.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book for two reasons: (1) I heard about the Around the USA in 52 Books challenge, thought it sounded fun, and this book was a great way to pick up Idaho. And (2) I've loved the 2 novels I've read by Jess Walter and wondered about his non-fiction. I knew about Ruby Ridge in a super general way and had a sense that it involved the FBI accidentally killing some religious extremist neo-Nazis.

This isn't exactly what happened, as Walter does an incredible job showing in his book. I can't imagine how difficult it was to research and write, since the last chapter of a book is basically a list of all the various entities that attempted (all unsuccessfully) to sort out what actually happened on Ruby Ridge. Walter doesn't manage to sort it out either, but by the end of the book, I felt like he had a strong point of view and that I was more sympathetic to his point of view than I'd expected to be, which surprised me.

The research was amazing and the writing, as in Walter's novels, was top-notch. It took me a while to get through because the "cast" is so huge and the events so complicated and confusing. But it was a gripping read which is difficult for non-fiction even when the story is much more straightforward, so kudos to Walter for that. Have a feeling this one will stick with me for a while—I definitely thought of Ruby Ridge almost right away when I heard about the bombing at the Boston Marathon (though as of the time of this review, no confirmation that the bombing was the work of domestic extremists of course).

Highly recommended for anyone who likes non-fiction or Jess Walter, or is interested in getting into the head of Americans with extreme fear of the US government.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was really hard for me to read. Ruby Ridge happened very close to where I grew up. I was 11 when it went on, and I remember seeing military vehicles driving through town and hearing news reports about what was going on, but I was just young enough that I didn't totally get what was happening.

I wanted to read this so I would have a clearer picture of what actually occurred. But I found that the parts that were the biggest gut punches weren't about what happened to the Weaver family - I'll get to my impressions on them in a moment - but in the years proceeding the standoff. It's a pretty awful thing to find out that places I used to love going to as a child, like restaurants and parks, were being frequented at the exact same time by dangerous racists.

It's hard for me to feel any sympathy for Randy and Vicki Weaver. If I were to refuse to come to court for charges that were filed against me, hole myself up with my family for 18 months, arm my children and parade about with guns, I couldn't reasonably expect that the outcome would be good for myself or my family. Did the government make mistakes? Yes. But the Weavers put themselves in this situation, they put their children in danger, and if Randy had gone to court, none of this would have ever happened.

At the end of reading this, I felt like I had a really clear picture of what happened. And if I never hear anything again about Ruby Ridge or the Weavers, I would be perfectly happy with that.

[JBP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rare five stars! I am a fan of Jess Walter's fiction, but this is the best thing he's written in my opinion. I didn't know a lot about Randy Weaver and the siege/killings that took place in his ultra-remote northern Idaho patch of mountain land. I knew the end results and that it helped to inspire the Murrah bombing in OKC a few years later. Make no mistake, Weaver and his family were kooks, his apocalyptic leaning Christian Identity beliefs, extreme paranoia, and connection to separatist and racist folks like the Aryan Nations are ridiculous. That said, the federal government flat out bungled nearly every single thing connected to him and his family and it ultimately ended up with a dead 14 year old shot in the back as he was running away, a dead wife who was shot in the head by a sniper as she held an infant in her arms, and a dead FBI agent. Not to mention the family dog who took a bullet first to start the gunfight. This complicated story is so well researched, so well-written, clear-eyed and fair, that if makes me wish Walter wrote more non-fiction.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was inspired to search out Jess Walter's Ruby Ridge (1995) after seeing him as one of the the talking heads in a documentary about the Oklahoma City bombing on Netflix. This is a strange tale about a very misguided family that sees the government as a threat and in this story the government made some poor choices that would make them the target for subsequent terrorist attacks. The remote wilderness of the Northwest has always attracted people living on the fringes of society who have unusual and aberrant beliefs. I had already discovered Walter as an accomplished novelist (Citizen Vince, etc.) from my hometown of Spokane, Washington-however, I was not familiar with his journalism. I knew that he wrote for The Spokesman Review, but this was my first exposure to his nonfiction writing, but I can see how it informed his fiction. Walter is very good at describing people and settings as well as recreating people's conversations. His reporting here is very thorough and detailed. I suspect writing this book gave him the confidence to write his first novel.