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Police State
How America's Cops Get Away with Murder
By Gerry Spence St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 G. L. Spence and Lanelle P. Spence Living Trust
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8520-2
CHAPTER 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Police State by Gerry Spence. Copyright © 2015 G. L. Spence and Lanelle P. Spence Living Trust. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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