December 5, 2024 • 50 mins
The Ruby Ridge standoff still lingers after more than 30 years. But who was at fault for the lives lost? Listen in today to learn all about this dark spot in American history.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you
should know the podcast the early nineties Black Helicopter Edition.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, this is Ruby Ridge, the incident, the standoff, the siege,
what do you call this?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The beginning of the far right militia movement being born
in the United States? For sure? It was huge, huge. Yeah,
it was a huge example of government overreach. It was
this researching this was really hard, man, This is a
hard one for me. It was just it's just such
an awful story all around. It's just terrible.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
So this is this occurred when I was I guess,
like a third year in college or so, and.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
That you know, I was.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
I've talked on the show before about like us not
having TV or cable and stuff, and so I wasn't
as newsy then as I am now.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
But this was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And I remember this and then Waco literally right after happening,
which we should do a Waco episode at some point too.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, unfortunately we should.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I just remember at the time being like, wow, okay,
I don't think I really agree with these people that
are having this standoff, but at the same time it
looks from as an outsider, like the government is just
going in guns blazing and kind of murdering people.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And it turns out both are kind of true for me.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah for sure. I mean, you don't have to sympathize
with the Weavers or any of their supporters to still
be like this is just messed up. Like, yeah, that's
what I was saying. The whole situation's messed up. I
don't agree with basically any of their views, but yeah,
it's just I say, we get into it, everybody to
make up their own minds, because it's definitely one of
those stories, you know.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, so just in the broadest two sentence overview, Ruby
Ridge was a standoff in the Ruby Ridge area of
Idaho in.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
When did it finally go down? Ninety two? Yes, yeah,
nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That was many, many, many months long in the making,
in which the US government had a stand off with
a family of children, a couple of adults, and the
rest were basically kids. Oh yeah, and it ended in
lost lives on both sides when there's absolutely no reason
(02:41):
why it should have. And this is that story of
the Weaver family.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, I guess you can start back at the very
beginning when the Weaver family itself began. Vicky who would
become Vicky Weaver. She was born Vicky Jordison and her
husband Randall Weaver, got married in nineteen seven. They lived
in Iowa, I think Cedar Falls right, Yeah, and she
was a secretary for Susan Roebuck. He had just been
(03:08):
discharged as a Green Beret honorably from the army and
had gotten a job working at the tractor factory for
John Deere. She can do a lot worse than that.
So they were like a very normal working class couple
just starting out in life.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, so this was, like you said, nineteen seventy one.
They had a daughter named Sarah in seventy six, and
then two more kids, a boy named Sammy and then
a daughter named Rachel, all over the next six years.
And those were you know, there was a kid that
would come later that we'll get to. But around the
latest seventies, kind of after the latest Arab Israeli conflict
(03:48):
came around, Vicky started basically kind of thought that was
a sign of the end times, the biblical biblical end times.
She kept having these recurring dreams of these omens about
a house on a hill where they could be safe
and hide, and she thought the end times were coming.
(04:08):
And she started sharing this stuff with Randy.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, and apparently it really jibed with him because he
got on board as well. I hadn't seen what exactly
was the impetus that triggered all that, so thanks for
clearing that up. But long story short, they ended up
becoming religious extremists together, and also like apocalyptic religious extremists,
not just garden variety religious extremists. Ye. Enough so that
(04:33):
they moved. And not only do they move, they gave
an interview to the local paper in Iowa saying that
they were moving and in fact, they wanted to go
find a place, build a place where they could have
a three hundred yard defensible kill zone. Yeah no, but
I mean your local paper is probably like, this is hot,
hot news.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah, for sure, hot off the presses local couple moving
to up depensible shelter. Not here they moved in eighty three.
I saw fifteen acres. I saw twenty acres regardless, somewhere
in that neighborhood of land with a freshwater spring.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
This time.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
They were in Idaho near Naples, in the Ruby Ridge area,
and this area had become a just sort of a
place where if you didn't trust the government, if you
didn't like paying taxes, if you maybe were a member
of a Christian identity group or a white supremacist group,
you may end up in this sort of rural era
area of Idaho.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
At the time, Yeah, for sure, this was like a
it's just I think it's still very much that way too. Actually,
I don't know what kicked it off, but I think
it started in the seventies in Earnest, so by the
time they moved there, it was it was in full swing.
That's just kind of where you went. And they actually
built their own home from what I saw, and pictures
(05:56):
of it are like, well, they did a really good job.
It's like a two story, nice looking cabin. To build
a bunch of outbuildings. They basically built themselves a compound,
and they did it largely using scraps in plywood and
stuff like that. And they started living the survivalist life,
like living off the land, planting vegetables. They homeschooled the kids,
(06:16):
of course, and the way I didn't know that in
Idaho or in the US.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
In Idaho at the time, at least it was not
legal to homeschool. So not saying that that was part
of their illegalities, but I guess technically it was.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
But I think it does kind of like get a
point across. It's a little subtle, like they couldn't have
cared less if the state or the federal government told
them that they couldn't homeschool their kids. That would just
be one more reason that they hated the government. And
in fact, one of the big movements in this area
was essentially like local sovereignty, where the highest authority in
(06:55):
the entire country for a specific area was the local sheriff.
Anything beyond that was fraudulent, right, So, yeah, they wouldn't
have listened to the state government saying they couldn't homeschool
their kids at all.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yeah, for sure didn't have power, no technically no like
official running water. I think they were able to get
water to the house via that spring, but you know,
they were living the rural lifestyle. They took in a
young teenage boy who had what sounds like a really
pretty awful home life. His name was Kevin Harris, and
(07:28):
he kind of came and went for a little while,
and then eventually basically was kind of adopted by the
family and he ended up staying there pretty much full
time at a certain point.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yes, so he wasn't like they didn't adopt him because
he was like, oh, I thought, I'm pretty sure it's
the end times too, right. He was just like a
kid that they helped out, which is pretty great. So
he was, you know, he would come and go. He
was just kind of living his life and he could
he just knew he had a place to stay in
a place where he could eat when things got bad
(07:59):
at home with the which I think says a lot about.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Them, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
And while they did kind of chum up to some
of the Aryan nation groups around there, they were never
like official members. They would go to a meeting sometimes.
They were very much aligned with the Christian Identity movement,
which is I mean, we can't get into the weeds
too much here, but one of the main tenants is
(08:24):
that Jews are literally the spawn of Satan, that Eve
and the serpent bore you know, Jews as babies, and
that non white people are mud people from a different creation.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
They are. I mean, how deep do you want to
go here.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Well, also that if you were of Celtic or Germanic
Germanic descent, you're the chosen people. You're the You're the
people who everyone else needs to cater to basically, And
that also they're the lost tribe of Israel, which legitimizes
them all the way back to pre Christian days.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Right, Okay, that's deep enough.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah, So Randy Weaver came on the Federal alays radar
as far back as nineteen eighty five because the Secret
Service showed up one time at the compound and said, Hey,
what have your neighbors told us that you've been threatening
to shoot Ronald Reagan? And somebody tried that before, so
we take it pretty seriously. Are you going to shoot
(09:26):
Ronald Reagan? Yes? No, maybe?
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Right? Which bubble did he fill out?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
He said no. He adamantly said no. He said, this
neighbor that told you that is basically trying to pre
internet swap me because they want we have we're having
a property dispute and they're just trying to bring the
heat down on me. And I guess his explanation was persuasive,
because that's as far as it went. As far as
I could tell.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, that's as far as it went. It could have
been a I mean, it could have been that innocent
because they you know, some of their neighbors they were
friendly with, some they didn't like very much. Some of
their neighbors. Can plane that kids were wearing Nazi armbands,
that Randy had fired shots at the houses before it was.
You know, it's pretty rough and tumble out there. In
(10:12):
nineteen eighty eight, Randy ran for sheriff, Like you're saying,
sort of the highest calling that you could have in
that crowd, and he was. It was basically a platform
of like, I'm anti government. In fact, I carry around
these get out of jail free cards and if you know,
if you're not a non violent criminal, then you're going
to get a second chance with me, and I'm not
(10:34):
gonna I'm not gonna be a government sheriff basically, right.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
It's the posse comatadis movement, which is kind of basically
what I was talking about. That based on this Act
from eighteen seventy eight, federal troops have to stay out
of law enforcement. So yeah, those black helicopters and un
soldiers and all the stuff that everybody's worried about were
just totally illegal, and I guess by that token, the
FBI would be totally illegal, or the ATF for the
(11:01):
DEA like there just isn't supposed to be such a
thing as federal law enforcement. That right, platform, he ran
under the party.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good break time, What
do you think?
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Yeah, all right, we'll take a little early Blake early
Blake took an early break.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Blake set up like, Yes, I've been waiting for this
for sixteen years.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
And we'll be back after this.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Earning stuff, Joshi.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Stuff, you shut all right.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So this is a time in the mid eighties, sort
of late eighties when militia groups were starting to sort
of be a thing, be in the news a little
bit more, and so of course the FBI is going
to start to begin undercover ops to infiltrate these groups.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
And see what the heck is going on.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And that is exactly what happened at an Aryan Nation
meeting when Randy met an undercover agent. His name was
Kenneth Fatally and he was going by the name Gus.
Gus Magisono's great undercover name.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I guess, yeah, but not exactly Germanic or Celtic in origin.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
You know, he was worked for the US Bureau of
Alcohol to back owned firearms the ATF and over the course,
like this whole operation was years and years long, because
it took like three years for him to get a
few different meetings with Randy.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
In which which culminated and if you ask.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
The FBI Randy saying, Hey, I want to sell you
some illegal sought off shotguns. If you ask Randy, he'll
say no, Man, I was entrapped. I didn't want to
sell the guns. The guy asked to buy guns several
times with me saying no, I don't want to do that,
until I eventually relented and sold him these firearms.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Right. So, however it happened the FEDS now had Randy
Weaver in their grips. So they thought, this is a
very routine thing that federal law enforcement does and I
think local as well. Like they will bust you on
some charge. It's fairly small, still enough that you could
get prison time. They're going to take you away from
your family. It's gonna be bad news for you, but
(13:23):
they'll totally forget about the whole thing if you start
informing for them.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yeah, he's a small fish right.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Keep sure right, and then they use that fish's bait
to get bigger and bigger, bigger fish right. So he
was just going to have to do what he normally does.
But every once in a while he'd meets secretly with
some ATF handler and tell them everything he knew and
who was who and who was leading the stuff. And
Randy Weaver thought about it and he said, you know what,
you can go straight to hell. I'm not going to
(13:52):
be an informant, and you can press the charges if
you want to. The ATF did not like this at all.
From what I saw. They essentially took that almost personally. Yeah,
at the very least they came at him like they
took it personally.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, for sure. Vicky was pretty upset as well. Apparently
she wrote a warning letter and this is in quotes
to Aryan Nations and all our brethren of the Anglo
Saxon race. She filed an affidavit which you knew trouble
was coming. She filed an affidavit with a county clerk
saying we might have to defend ourselves from you know,
(14:27):
with firearms, because the federal government is going to come
after us and we want to file this affidavit right now.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
That wouldn't even cross my mind. That's forward thinking, you know.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Sure, so that was actually very precient too, VICKI writing
that because they they would end up having to defend
themselves by attacks from the federal government. And that will
come a little bit later. First, in January of nineteen
ninety one, the ATF, I guess they didn't arrest him
(14:58):
on the spot when they came and said that, you know,
they wanted him to be an informant. So a few
months later they decided to take Randy Weaver into custody.
But to do that, remember he had a three hundred
yard kill zone. He had a cabin up on a mountain.
You don't just walk up and tell somebody like that,
come on, you're coming with us to jail. So they
(15:18):
actually the ATF posed as and by the way, ATF
is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, another ostensibly
illegal agency. They posed this like their car had been
broken down, I guess on Ruby Creek Road, which is
the main road that led up to the cabin, and
(15:38):
they basically played on the Weaver's propensity to help strangers.
I guess.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Yeah. So they arrest him. He pleads not guilty.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
He's released on bond, a ten thousand dollars bond on
his own recognisance, which is a little surprising. Vicky, his wife,
again writes a letter to the US Attorney for the
State of Idaho that she addressed as the servant of
the Queen of Babylon and saying that we refused a
bow to your evil commandments, whether we live or whether
(16:10):
we die. So she, you know, she sent a clear
message that like, we're not fooling around here. And I
know we were on your radar, but you might as
well really put us on your radar because we're not
coming with you and you can't make us.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Or take us off your radar. Don't even mess with us,
you know.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Yeah, ideally, So Randy.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Had a trial set. He remember he's been out, he's
out on bail, but he still has to go to
court to face these firearms charges. And again he sold
firearms to an undercover federal agents of it was a
federal law that he broke. So these are federal charges
and they can be pretty serious, but it was still, again,
like you said, it was pretty small potatoes as far
(16:53):
as firearms charges go. We're just charges that you could
face in general at the time. Right, Ye's enough that
you know. They had a trial set for him, and
it was set for February nineteenth, nineteen ninety one, and
for some reason or another, it was moved by one
day to February twentieth, nineteen ninety one. Well, when the
government does that or the court system does that, they
(17:14):
have to alert you. So they sent Randy a letter saying, hey,
we've moved your trial date to March twentieth, And of
course it wasn't March twentieth, it was February twentieth, And
there was essentially a typo that the author of the letter,
a probation officer, had written. And so, of course Randy
Weaver didn't show up on February twentieth, and a bench
(17:35):
warrant was issued for his arrest for failure to appear.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Yeah, so this has been sort of debated here and
there about the mistake and the error that he didn't
even have the right court date to begin with. But
all indications point to the idea that he was not
going to come anyway. So I'm not saying it like
didn't matter at all, But they said, hey, we're not coming.
I don't think he'd planned on coming even if he
(17:59):
had the right date. But the long and short of
it is he didn't go. And so they you know,
they were really on their radar. Now they're like, we've
got a real situation here. And this is when this long,
like really long surveillance program started in the summer of
nineteen ninety one, when they kind of staked out around
(18:22):
the property and around the house with you know, binoculars
and things and surveillance cameras that they'd set up in
the woods, and they were just tracking what this family
was doing. They had a couple of plans.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
To go in non violently.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
One of them was to cut the water supply I
guess from the spring to the house to flush them
out because at a certain point they weren't even like
leaving the house. You know, they were having food brought
in and stuff because they knew what was going on.
Another plan they had was they were believers in the
minstrual cycle meeting. You were unclean and filthy, So when
you had your minstrual cycle in that family, you had
(18:57):
to go stay in the birthing shed on the property,
one of the outbuildings during the duration of your menstruation.
So they were like, all right, when Sarah, the oldest
teenager has her next mentro cycle, she's going to be
sent to the shed, and when the kids bringing food
and stuff out there will grab them and that they'll
immediately give up because we have the kids. But then
(19:18):
I guess someone said, well, wait a minute, that's kidnapping.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Yeah, you can't do that.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
We don't have a warrant for any of the children,
So that's we can't go with that plan.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
So they went with the worst plan.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
They did go with the worst plan, but they it
was in very very It was a terrible plan in
really slow motion that played out over a really long time,
throughout which so many people had so many chances to
be like, guys, wait a minute, what are we doing.
This is like a fairly small federal firearms charge. The
guys sold two salt off shotguns and then didn't appear
in court, Like, we're spending millions of dollars on this,
(19:53):
bringing huge resources to bear and it doesn't really make
sense until you find that the eight which was originally
the people with this case, they brought in the federal marshals.
The marshals eventually brought in the FBI, and the ATF
told everybody else that number one, Randy Weaver was among
(20:13):
the biggest firearms suppliers in the United States.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
Yeah, not true at all, with.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
No evidence whatsoever. The only thing that they had him
on record doing was selling two saud off shotguns. And
the other thing that they told the ATF told everybody
was that it was responsible for a string of bank
robberies in Montana. There's no evidence whatsoever that he ever
robbed a banker, had anything to do with these bank robberies.
And yet those two pieces of information transformed this from
(20:42):
there's some weirdo family up in the mountains with guns
who and the dad has a couple of he sold
a couple of sawed off shotguns, and then come to
court to we need to literally bring the FBI, the
Secret Service, the Marshals Service, everybody to camp out for
almost a year observing this house to figure out how
to get that guy out of there.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Yeah, it was an extreme reaction. I don't think there
are a lot of people that would disagree with that. No,
so they're watching this house. The house, like we mentioned,
is very depensable. This is the house on the hill
where they were to be safe from the dreams. When
they did go out, they would send usually they would
send the kids out ahead, supposedly with guns, to kind
(21:24):
of investigate and see what was going on. They had
neighbors recording license plates of people who came and went.
They didn't The Weavers didn't have a telephone, but they
tapped phones at the general store. Helicopters were taking aerial photographs,
they claim. The Feds claim that in March ninety two
(21:45):
they actually visited and said on the loud speaker and
via some sort of phone call, that hey, you got
a surrender, although Randy would contend that no, until it
all went down, no one said anything to me about surrendering.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Big deal, because that's the first step in a situation
like that, is telling the person just go ahead and surrender,
where we just want to take you to jail basically,
and that them not doing that is huge. That's a
big deal. Again, they were watching this place for basically
a year and had plenty of opportunity to do that.
(22:22):
Of somebody I did not see coming into the story
as Heraldo Rivera, and yet he has he was everywhere.
He has a minor role in it in nineteen ninety two,
he hired April of ninety two, he hired a helicopter
to fly over the cabin because by this time the
word was out that there was this family in Idaho
that was essentially in this long standoff with the Feds.
(22:45):
And he said, or the helicopter pilot's sad or somebody
said that they shot at the helicopter when it flew
over their compound. But apparently that was untrue. And I
think even the surveillance team that was watching the place
at the time said, didn't shoot at the helicopter. But
you know her, although he's like, it's gonna be we
won't get any ratings if they don't shoot at the helicopter,
(23:07):
so just say they shot at the helicopter.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So that was surprising. The most surprising thing to me
was an appearance by another human because somewhere in this
you know, stand off, while they were being surveilled. I
guess Vicky and Randy got a little randy and had
another baby. It's in my opinion, it wouldn't lead me
(23:32):
to feel amorous and in the baby making way, but
I guess things happened. They had a daughter in late
nineteen ninety one, Elishaba or Elishaba, I'm not sure they
pronounced it.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I'm going with Elisheba Elishiba. Okay. Right there in that
birthing shed is where they had Elisheba, and you know,
so that happened.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Just to know that there's a now a month's old
baby on the scene as well.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
For some reason, that just made me really uncomfortable the
way you put.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
That that happened.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, so that happened. I think let's go with Elishiba.
I think you're right the first time. That makes way
more sense.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
No, I think that's what you said.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
No, I said Elishaba. Oh Elishaba, Oh, no, I said Elishiba.
I don't know. It's one of.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Those Hey, how about this, we're both right.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Okay, so this is that was nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Just so yeah, late ninety one is when she's born.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
In the birthing shed on the property, right.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
That's right, or the you know minstrel shame shed.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Right, Well, it depends on the situation, I would guess. Right,
So everything is about to go down, chuck, and it's
going to go down really hard and really publicly, and
the whole thing starts in earnest. The standoff that everybody
talks about when they mentioned Ruby Ridge is it started
on August twenty first, nineteen ninety two. It was a Friday,
(24:58):
and that morning a few I think they were Federal
marshals right, showed up on the scene and they were
going to just do some more standard surveillance and some
stayed at an observation post and some others drove up
toward the road on the way to the cabin. They
showed up at like four thirty. This is not new
(25:19):
or weird or different, but I am four thirty am.
You're right? Sorry, Yeah. A few hours later they were
getting closer and closer to the compound, and apparently they
attracted the attention of the dogs, the weavers dogs, and
the compound was in a state where if the dogs
are suddenly going nuts, you get your gun and go
see what the dogs are barking at. And that's exactly
(25:39):
what they did.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, So, you know, I know I mentioned that these
were kids, but I just want to drive home the
point that you had Vicky and Randy, the parents that
were there. You had a ten year old girl, a
fourteen year old boy, a sixteen year old girl and
the Kevin Harris kid that was living who was in
his mid twenties by now, and then this.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Ten month old baby.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
So teenagers and a baby, one guy in his twenties,
and then the two parents, Sammy the teenage boy, Randy
is the dad, and then Kevin is the mid twenties
guy that was living with him. They go out with
their dog, Striker, a yellow lab, looking to see what's
going on. They come to a y fork in the road.
As the story goes, Randy took it one way, Kevin
(26:21):
and Sammy and Striker went the other way.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
And this is where another.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Record of dispute comes in, because the US government says
they were fired upon when they announced their presence as
federal agents. What Kevin says is no, no, no, they
didn't announce their presence as federal agents at all. All
we saw was guys in Camo and they're like eyeballs
peering through the bushes and my dog barking, and one
(26:48):
of the guys shot it and killed it.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, there's no dispute that the dog, Striker was shot
and killed. When it happened is a disputant who started
shooting first. So let's say According to Kevin's account, they
come up on these guys who didn't, like you said,
did not identify themselves as federal agents. They're wearing camo,
they're holding guns, and they shoot the dog. Sammy the
(27:12):
teenage son says, you shot my dog, you son of
a bitch, and like lifts his gun and I guess
starts shooting. So a shootout ensues. Sammy's shot, he turns
to run. According to Kevin's account, he turns to run,
is shot in the back and killed. Now, Kevin gets away,
Randy gets away, but a Deputy Marshal named Bill Deagan
(27:34):
is killed. Two So Striker the Dog, Deputy Marshall, Bill Degan,
and Sammy the son, the teenage son are all dead
from this sudden surprise gun battle that took place outside
of the compound.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yeah, and Kevin is the one to be clear who
shot and killed deputy the deputy Marshall.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Okay, that's that's one hundred percent verified.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah, okay, because Randy was not a part of that shootout.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I got you, so, yeah, I know that he took
a different road, so he wasn't there when it happened.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
I don't think so, I mean everything I saw was
that the shootout was between the teenage boy and the
twenty something year old and that you know, he shot
Deputy Building in the chest and killed him.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Gotcha. So either way, there's a firefight going on, a
shootout going on, and Randy and Kevin retreat back to
the compound, but they leave Sammy's body there temporarily and
they're just completely fixated, according to Kevin, throughout that time
on retrieving his body. This is a pretty tight family.
(28:38):
So you don't want to leave the dead body of
your fourteen year old son just laying in the road.
You want to go get him. And this actually runs
a foul of what the marshals were saying. Two of them,
They said that two of them were pinned down by
sniper fire for twelve hours, and Kevin and the rest
of the Weavers are like, that's not true at all.
We were scared out of our mind and totally grieving
(29:03):
already from Sammy's death. We weren't spending twelve hours pinning
down the marshals with sniper fire.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah, they said.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
They claimed at least that the only gunfire that came
from them at that point was Randy firing his gun
into the air because he was so upset about losing
his teenage son. Right, all right, so now we're at Saturday,
August twenty second, a hostage rescue team is dispatched by
the FBI, and this is when things get really hinky,
(29:33):
because the rules of engagement in the United States in
a situation like this are well known and generally ascribed
to when things are on the up and up, which is,
you do not engage unless you're under direct threat from
a violence or like somebody firing at you. Basically, they
amended this rules of engagement and it was approved by
(29:58):
the Bureau's Assistant Director for Criminal Investigation Division, Larry Potts.
That basically said, any armed adult man that you see
you can shoot and kill as long as you're not
endangering a child.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, unprovoked. Just see him walking through the compound, that
he's holding the gun at his side, you can kill him.
That is, yeah, completely outside of the boundaries of the norm.
Like you were saying, yes, so that's a huge escalation, chuck, right, that,
I mean, they were already, like like you said, overreacting.
You could say, now this is I mean, this is
(30:31):
just out of control escalating, And of course when you
have something like that, and you have a bunch of
snipers and you have a bunch of law enforcement people
sticking out a compound, the chances of somebody being killed
just have increased dramatically. And that's actually what happens. I
say we take a break and we come back and
(30:52):
talk about a huge turning point in the standoff. How
about that, let's do it stuff from Joshimes, stuff you
sho so chuck. By this time, this is Saturday, August
(31:20):
twenty second, blood's been shed from the shootout, and now
the hostage rescue team and their snipers from the FBI
have the authority to shoot to kill, unprovoked the people
in the compound as long as it's an adult male
holding a gun. And there was a guy one of
those snipers, an FBI sniper named Len Horiucci. He was
(31:42):
about two hundred yards away from the compound and he'd
been briefed on this revised altered rules of engagement that
the FBI had authorized, and he saw Randy, Sarah, and
Kevin all leaving the cabin the main building and they
started to make their way toward the berthing shed. They
(32:05):
later said that they were heading to the berthing shed
to start preparing Sammy's body for burial. They'd retrieved it
by this time, and Horryucci, following these altered rules of engagement,
took a shot and he shot Kevin. No, he shot
Randy in the arm. So of course, from that point
on they immediately scattered because all of a sudden, somebody's
(32:26):
shooting at them.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah, so they are headed back to the cabin. They
get to the door. Vicky, the mom, is holding her
ten month old daughter in her arms and kind of
holding the door upen getting people in. And this is
when lan Horiuchi takes a second shot. He said he
was going for Harris, but it went squarely through the
(32:50):
head of VICKI threw her head and hitting Kevin then
in the chest, and she apparently was still holding her
in daughter when she hit the floor dead immediately.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, so that was, like I said, an enormous turning point.
Now the son has just been killed by the FEDS.
Now the mom has just been killed by the FEDS.
But at this time, the FBI doesn't realize that they've
killed her. I don't know if len Horiyucci like went
home and didn't tell anybody what had happened. I'm not sure.
(33:25):
I don't know how you could shoot someone in the
head and not realize that you've done that. But apparently
it was not immediately understood by the FBI running this
negotiation that Vicky Weaver was dead. And also by this time,
we should say there is a ton ton of cops.
(33:46):
A lot of estimates put it in the hundreds. Yeah, federal, county, state,
local law enforcement all showing up to basically help out
or contain or do whatever. And one of the things
they did almost immediately was block the roads. And those
roadblocks became a site of protests for people who showed
up and were like, this is messed up, man, these
(34:07):
these this family needs to be let free.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
And these are you know, these are people from the
Aryan Nation groups and some other militia groups that it's
basically they're saying, hey, this is going down exactly how
we say this kind of stuff goes down.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
So that that's going on. They've blocked off the roads.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Like you said, Mom's dead body now is under the
kitchen table where it remains. Kevin is in pretty bad
shape because he was shot in the chest, so he's
in and out of consciousness. They're not quite sure you know,
what's going to happen to him at this point. And
we should also mention that lan Hori Yucci is a
sniper that also had a lot of controversial was also
(34:51):
controversial in the Waco siege, like very soon after this. Yeah,
so this same guy was at both of these sieges
and both times was a part of a pretty controversial
shooting incident.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
I okay, Well I didn't know that about Waco. I
had heard that he had not fired or shot at Waco,
but I guess that's not correct.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Well I didn't.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I looked into it a little bit, but then I
started going down the rabbit hole and thought we should
just cover Waco. But I think he was one of
the guys that was charged with firing like the incendiary
rounds into the building. But I might be wrong in.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
That, but we'll save it for the Waco up.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Yeah, and let's put it this way, like you can't
find anything about Lawn Horuci now, like, yeah, we know
he's still alive, but I'm sure he's not available for
you know, interviews, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
For sure. Yeah, So, like I said, they the FEDS
apparently didn't know that Sammy was dead, and they also
didn't know that Vicky Weaver was dead. They started destroying
buildings around the cabin. So now they're closing in this perimeter.
It's not just any longer like in this three hundred
yard Kills one. They're starting to move in and they're
(36:02):
destroying buildings as they go. And I guess when they
destroyed the birthing shed, they discovered Sammy's body and were like, oh,
one of the family members is dead, and he happened
to be a teenager. Again, they still didn't know that
Vicky was dead. And I guess because she had been
the ones writing the emphatic letters to the Servant of
(36:22):
the Queen of Babylon, et cetera, and filing the affidavits,
the hostage rescue team presumed that she was the one
who made the decisions in the family, so they continued
to address her even after she had been killed by
the FBI sniper. And so they would speak directly to
missus Weaver through their loud speakers, and the family was
(36:45):
just the They didn't realize that the FBI didn't realize
that they had killed VICKI, so they thought that they
were just adding like horrible torment onto the injury of
losing their mom and wife.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah, and you know, depending on who you too, there
are also people that say, no, they knew that she
was dead, and the things that they were saying were deliberate,
trying to provoke them and cause further upset by you know,
speaking to missus Weaver, who they knew well was dead.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
But again, it's just.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
It's one of those you know, you're never going to
get the truth out of a matter like this because
there are two sides. But they're trying to lure them out, saying, hey,
we had pancakes for breakfast. Once you bring the kids out,
I bet they'd love some pancakes. They send down a robot,
a remote control robot with a telephone, so they could
you know, this is one of the hugest ways they
(37:38):
broke protocol is that in a situation like this, you've
got to be in contact and negotiate with someone in
a standoff, and they didn't do that until well into it,
when they tried to get them a phone on this
remote countrol robot that had a gun mounted to the
front of it, which wasn't a good idea because of
course they saw that.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
They're like, I'm not going near that thing.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Right, Why would you even do that to defend the robot?
I mean, doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
I tried to find out, but I couldn't find anything
that was rational, So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
That's crazy. So that didn't happen. They weren't able to
establish contact aside from shouting at them through loudspeakers, right,
but it wasn't a back and forth or anything like that,
and the Weavers just dug in. They stayed in their
cabin for days. Remember the started on Friday, August twenty first.
(38:26):
The following Friday, August twenty eighth, this thing was still
going on. Mom was still dead under the table, and
they agreed to speak with a guy named bo Gritz.
He was also a Green Beret, a lieutenant colonel. So essentially,
what's happening now is Colonel Troutman for Rambo is showing
up to tell the authorities that Randy Weaver will eat
(38:46):
stuff that will make a billy goat puke like it's
it's uncanny how closely this resembled that part of Rambo, right,
and bo Gritz was able to get in and make
contact along with an ex cop from Phoenix named Jack mcclam.
Now both of them are We're huge, and I believe
still are in the conspiracy theorist circles that Randy Weaver
(39:09):
ran in. So it's not like they were just some
average people like they could. They could communicate with him
and talk his language, and he knew enough about them.
I don't know if he knew them personally or not,
but their reputation was enough that he let them come
inside to the to the cabin and talk.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
So they brought some food for the baby and milk
for the baby, which is great, and UH kind of
talked to uh talked Randy into ultimately coming out, but
initially just kind of got him in a better state
of mind.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
They are the ones when they came.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Back out that told the Feds, hey, Vicky's dead and
they're under the table. Randy's wounded. Kevin is wounded, like
big time wounded, and they were like, what that's news
to us. So on Sunday the thirtieth, Kevin finally surrendered.
Randy said it's okay, you need to go get medical help.
He was helicoptered out to spoke Anne and I believe
(40:08):
he's in serious condition, but he recovered. And then they
also allowed Gritz and a friend named Jackie Brown, strangely
enough to take his wife's body away and the pets.
They had a couple of pet parakeets that they took
away as well.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Right, so Kevin's out, it's now just Randy and his
three daughters, Sarah, Elisheba and Rachel. Yeah, and they were
alone in this cabin, still under siege. And so there
were a lot of supporters who are like, well, I mean,
we know how this is gonna and Randy's going to
come out with guns blazing and take out as many
(40:47):
of these Feds as he can before he gets taken down,
And very reasonably and wisely, Randy did not do that.
He made sure that he and his three daughters were
able to come down safely. Ostensibly under the care of
an attorney named Jerry Spence. He represented the estate of
(41:09):
Karen Silkwood, who also deserves an episode two. But essentially
she was a whistleblower who was mysteriously who mysteriously died
in a mysterious car crash. So he was pretty famous
as far as defense attorneys, and he had said I'll
represent this guy, if he'll come out, I don't know
if he did. Did he.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
I don't know?
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Okay, well, let's presume that he did and didn't go
back on his word. But regardless, they some people think
that that public announcement by Jerry Spence may have had
at least some role in getting Randy Weaver to come
out peaceably.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Yeah, and he had to talk his daughters into it.
You know, they were ready to go. They were both
brandishing guns. So he said, you know, fourteen year old
Sarah put down your nine millimeter and ten year old
Rachel put down that thirty eight.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
We're gonna get out of here alive. And they did that.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Randy and Kevin were ultimately charged with murder, conspiracy, assault,
and the girls went to live with their in laws.
I believe Vicky's parents in Iowa.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Right, And so of course they're, like you said, they're charged.
So their trial begins in April of nineteen ninety three.
And I don't know if ironic is the term, but
the trial started just before Waco ended. And if you
don't know how Waco ended, and you can't wait till
our episode on Waco ended really badly. A lot of
(42:36):
women and children died. It was just a bad jam.
So this is happening as this trial for the Ruby
Ridge standoff is starting, and the whole thing lasted for months,
I think finally on July ninth. Not only were there
months of testimony, the jury deliberated for twenty days. That
is a really long time to deliberate. And when they
(42:59):
came back, they acquitted Kevin Harris of all charges. And
you had said he definitely killed the deputy marshall, right,
so he was acquitted of that and everything else. And
Randy Weaver was acquitted on everything except for his failure
to appear in the original firearms case. That was it. Yeah,
(43:24):
So clearly this Idaho jury was like, yes, the Feds
very much overstepped their bounds and overreacted, and this is
like so much so that like we don't think these
people should be should go to jail for anything they
did in response.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Yeah, I mean it was sort of the facts of
the case too, Like everything I saw, it didn't seem
like it was just some uneven jury where they were
just sympathetic to the locals. Once the facts of the
case came out, it was pretty clear they changed rules
of engagement when they shouldn't have. They didn't follow protocol
setting up you know, communications, they and the guns blazing
(44:01):
and just basically murdered people. They in ninety four of
the family filed wrongful death lawsuits against the FBI and
the US marshals. They settled it. The JOD settled these suits.
They paid about a million bucks to each of the girls,
one hundred grand to Weaver.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
Harris many years later, in.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Two thousand won another settlement for three hundred and eighty
thousand dollars. And Lan Horiyucci, the sniper who you know
where things really took a turn when he got involved.
He it kind of went back and forth in different
appeals in different cases over the years of pursuing criminal
charges against him. So involuntary manslaughter was the initial charge.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
I think.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
They moved it to a federal district court who dismissed
it saying that he was acting in his official capacity,
so you can't convict a guy for that. And there
were a bunch of appeals and ended up in him
escaping any justice by having the charges dropped.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
So the Justice Department had their own inquiry and they
found out that this whole thing was pretty much a
cluster from beginning to end. The Senate held hearings in
nineteen ninety five featuring Fred Thompton, who would go on
to play the DA in Law and Order for a
couple of seasons back when he was a Senator for Tennessee.
And they also found that the whole thing was basically
(45:24):
a cluster from beginning to end. And one person who
did actually do time for this is actually an FBI agent.
The guy who was one of the people running the
operation e Michael Cahoe. He was sentenced to eighteen months
in federal prison because he destroyed an after action report
about the operation. He said he was acting in what
(45:46):
he thought was the Bureau's best interests, in that he
didn't want the local Idaho prosecutor getting a hold of
the thing and using it. I would guess against Lawn Horiucci,
I don't know, but he was the only person to
actually do time from this thing.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Yeah. Randy just died a couple of years ago at
the age of seventy four. He kind of abandoned a
lot of the just sort of further out there religious
ideas that is was in his marriage, seemingly because of Vicky,
and he was still like a you know, sort of
cause to eleb in the anti government world. And Sarah,
(46:24):
the oldest daughter, has it is very easy to find
interviews with her. She wrote a book at it about it,
called From Ruby Ridge to Freedom, and in that book
she forgave those federal agents.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I was reading an interview with her,
and she's a big commentator on that part of America
and its response to the federal government and how each
one needs to kind of interact with another. She's very
peaceful now.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
It seems like, yeah, seems like it.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
And like you said, Ruby Ridge was like a huge
impetus that was that gave like all of these far
right movements a shot in the arm. And this is
nineteen ninety three. Within two years, all of that momentum
would just be completely scuttled when Timothy McVeigh came along
and said, Hey, I'm going to blow up a federal
building in Oklahoma City, kill one hundred and sixty eight people,
(47:16):
including nineteen children in the daycare, and it's in retaliation
for Ruby Ridge and Waco. And it was so abhorrent
that all of those people who are like, yeah, Ruby
Ridge were suddenly like WHOA. I don't want to have
anything to do with militias anymore because this is what
people do. I don't want to have anything to do
with it. It wasn't until the early two thousands that it
(47:37):
started to come back again, where it is slowly developed
over time until we are where we are now, where
they're essentially public public office holders in some cases.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah, this is a tough one.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
So maybe let's see Waco in one year and then
we can do the Oklahoma City bombing in two years.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Have you ever been to Oklahoma City in that site?
Speaker 3 (47:58):
I have not.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
It's insane to stand there. It's just nuts. So yeah,
we should do one on that too, for sure.
Speaker 3 (48:06):
But we got a space. He's out.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Oh I agree.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
You're saying every December like a Christmas episode.
Speaker 4 (48:11):
You go, good idea American tragedy by Boy episode and
then our holiday episode. Yeah okay, Well, Chuck apologized just
a second ago, so that means it's time for listener now.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Yeah, here's a correction about Porcupines that I don't think
we got when that initially came out.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
But it must have been released as a Saturday.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Edition, right, you're sweet, Bippy, It was okay.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Hi, guys. My name is.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
Geta Oh and I'm an undergraduate at UC Irvine setting Biology.
I want to write about a correction in your porcupines up.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
Chuck was discussing the.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
Fact of how New World and Old World porcupines evolve
independently of each other. The phrase for that would actually
be convergent evolution, not co evolution. Oh, I think I misspoke,
and that actually we could probably clear that up in
our Peacocks episode coming up.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
Oh good idea, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Convergent evolution is what we need to remember. Co evolution
is a term where interactions between two species have a
reciprocal effect on each other's evolution, which is completely different.
Convergent evolution is when two separate population populations in distinct
geographic locations undergo similar phenotypic changes due.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
To selective pressures.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
I want to finish by thanking you both for always
peeking my interest.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
It's peaking.
Speaker 4 (49:41):
I Oh, you got me again.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
That really I thought you were just messing with me
a couple of months.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Wow, okay, And then later on it to only I
was like, I mispronounced peaking peaking, and Josh totally called
me on it, But I tricked him peaking my interest
in a variety of random topics I didn't I.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Needed until I did. Looking forward to learning more. And
that once again is from gta Oh.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Thanks Gita gita O is oh. Their last name.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
It is ji dash Tao Oh. They put a handy
pronunciation next to it.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Well, thanks a lot, gta Oh. That was a great name,
great email, and best of luck to you with your
biology degree. We need more biologists running around out there,
so bless you for that. And if you want to
be blessed by Pope Josh or Pope Chuck, you can
send us an email as well. Send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
(50:40):
is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (50:42):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you
should know the podcast the early nineties Black Helicopter Edition.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, this is Ruby Ridge, the incident, the standoff, the siege,
what do you call this?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The beginning of the far right militia movement being born
in the United States? For sure? It was huge, huge. Yeah,
it was a huge example of government overreach. It was
this researching this was really hard, man, This is a
hard one for me. It was just it's just such
an awful story all around. It's just terrible.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
So this is this occurred when I was I guess,
like a third year in college or so, and.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
That you know, I was.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
I've talked on the show before about like us not
having TV or cable and stuff, and so I wasn't
as newsy then as I am now.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
But this was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And I remember this and then Waco literally right after happening,
which we should do a Waco episode at some point too.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, unfortunately we should.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I just remember at the time being like, wow, okay,
I don't think I really agree with these people that
are having this standoff, but at the same time it
looks from as an outsider, like the government is just
going in guns blazing and kind of murdering people.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And it turns out both are kind of true for me.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah for sure. I mean, you don't have to sympathize
with the Weavers or any of their supporters to still
be like this is just messed up. Like, yeah, that's
what I was saying. The whole situation's messed up. I
don't agree with basically any of their views, but yeah,
it's just I say, we get into it, everybody to
make up their own minds, because it's definitely one of
those stories, you know.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, so just in the broadest two sentence overview, Ruby
Ridge was a standoff in the Ruby Ridge area of
Idaho in.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
When did it finally go down? Ninety two? Yes, yeah,
nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That was many, many, many months long in the making,
in which the US government had a stand off with
a family of children, a couple of adults, and the
rest were basically kids. Oh yeah, and it ended in
lost lives on both sides when there's absolutely no reason
(02:41):
why it should have. And this is that story of
the Weaver family.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, I guess you can start back at the very
beginning when the Weaver family itself began. Vicky who would
become Vicky Weaver. She was born Vicky Jordison and her
husband Randall Weaver, got married in nineteen seven. They lived
in Iowa, I think Cedar Falls right, Yeah, and she
was a secretary for Susan Roebuck. He had just been
(03:08):
discharged as a Green Beret honorably from the army and
had gotten a job working at the tractor factory for
John Deere. She can do a lot worse than that.
So they were like a very normal working class couple
just starting out in life.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, so this was, like you said, nineteen seventy one.
They had a daughter named Sarah in seventy six, and
then two more kids, a boy named Sammy and then
a daughter named Rachel, all over the next six years.
And those were you know, there was a kid that
would come later that we'll get to. But around the
latest seventies, kind of after the latest Arab Israeli conflict
(03:48):
came around, Vicky started basically kind of thought that was
a sign of the end times, the biblical biblical end times.
She kept having these recurring dreams of these omens about
a house on a hill where they could be safe
and hide, and she thought the end times were coming.
(04:08):
And she started sharing this stuff with Randy.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, and apparently it really jibed with him because he
got on board as well. I hadn't seen what exactly
was the impetus that triggered all that, so thanks for
clearing that up. But long story short, they ended up
becoming religious extremists together, and also like apocalyptic religious extremists,
not just garden variety religious extremists. Ye. Enough so that
(04:33):
they moved. And not only do they move, they gave
an interview to the local paper in Iowa saying that
they were moving and in fact, they wanted to go
find a place, build a place where they could have
a three hundred yard defensible kill zone. Yeah no, but
I mean your local paper is probably like, this is hot,
hot news.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah, for sure, hot off the presses local couple moving
to up depensible shelter. Not here they moved in eighty three.
I saw fifteen acres. I saw twenty acres regardless, somewhere
in that neighborhood of land with a freshwater spring.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
This time.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
They were in Idaho near Naples, in the Ruby Ridge area,
and this area had become a just sort of a
place where if you didn't trust the government, if you
didn't like paying taxes, if you maybe were a member
of a Christian identity group or a white supremacist group,
you may end up in this sort of rural era
area of Idaho.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
At the time, Yeah, for sure, this was like a
it's just I think it's still very much that way too. Actually,
I don't know what kicked it off, but I think
it started in the seventies in Earnest, so by the
time they moved there, it was it was in full swing.
That's just kind of where you went. And they actually
built their own home from what I saw, and pictures
(05:56):
of it are like, well, they did a really good job.
It's like a two story, nice looking cabin. To build
a bunch of outbuildings. They basically built themselves a compound,
and they did it largely using scraps in plywood and
stuff like that. And they started living the survivalist life,
like living off the land, planting vegetables. They homeschooled the kids,
(06:16):
of course, and the way I didn't know that in
Idaho or in the US.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
In Idaho at the time, at least it was not
legal to homeschool. So not saying that that was part
of their illegalities, but I guess technically it was.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
But I think it does kind of like get a
point across. It's a little subtle, like they couldn't have
cared less if the state or the federal government told
them that they couldn't homeschool their kids. That would just
be one more reason that they hated the government. And
in fact, one of the big movements in this area
was essentially like local sovereignty, where the highest authority in
(06:55):
the entire country for a specific area was the local sheriff.
Anything beyond that was fraudulent, right, So, yeah, they wouldn't
have listened to the state government saying they couldn't homeschool
their kids at all.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yeah, for sure didn't have power, no technically no like
official running water. I think they were able to get
water to the house via that spring, but you know,
they were living the rural lifestyle. They took in a
young teenage boy who had what sounds like a really
pretty awful home life. His name was Kevin Harris, and
(07:28):
he kind of came and went for a little while,
and then eventually basically was kind of adopted by the
family and he ended up staying there pretty much full
time at a certain point.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yes, so he wasn't like they didn't adopt him because
he was like, oh, I thought, I'm pretty sure it's
the end times too, right. He was just like a
kid that they helped out, which is pretty great. So
he was, you know, he would come and go. He
was just kind of living his life and he could
he just knew he had a place to stay in
a place where he could eat when things got bad
(07:59):
at home with the which I think says a lot about.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Them, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
And while they did kind of chum up to some
of the Aryan nation groups around there, they were never
like official members. They would go to a meeting sometimes.
They were very much aligned with the Christian Identity movement,
which is I mean, we can't get into the weeds
too much here, but one of the main tenants is
(08:24):
that Jews are literally the spawn of Satan, that Eve
and the serpent bore you know, Jews as babies, and
that non white people are mud people from a different creation.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
They are. I mean, how deep do you want to
go here.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Well, also that if you were of Celtic or Germanic
Germanic descent, you're the chosen people. You're the You're the
people who everyone else needs to cater to basically, And
that also they're the lost tribe of Israel, which legitimizes
them all the way back to pre Christian days.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Right, Okay, that's deep enough.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah, So Randy Weaver came on the Federal alays radar
as far back as nineteen eighty five because the Secret
Service showed up one time at the compound and said, Hey,
what have your neighbors told us that you've been threatening
to shoot Ronald Reagan? And somebody tried that before, so
we take it pretty seriously. Are you going to shoot
(09:26):
Ronald Reagan? Yes? No, maybe?
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Right? Which bubble did he fill out?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
He said no. He adamantly said no. He said, this
neighbor that told you that is basically trying to pre
internet swap me because they want we have we're having
a property dispute and they're just trying to bring the
heat down on me. And I guess his explanation was persuasive,
because that's as far as it went. As far as
I could tell.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, that's as far as it went. It could have
been a I mean, it could have been that innocent
because they you know, some of their neighbors they were
friendly with, some they didn't like very much. Some of
their neighbors. Can plane that kids were wearing Nazi armbands,
that Randy had fired shots at the houses before it was.
You know, it's pretty rough and tumble out there. In
(10:12):
nineteen eighty eight, Randy ran for sheriff, Like you're saying,
sort of the highest calling that you could have in
that crowd, and he was. It was basically a platform
of like, I'm anti government. In fact, I carry around
these get out of jail free cards and if you know,
if you're not a non violent criminal, then you're going
to get a second chance with me, and I'm not
(10:34):
gonna I'm not gonna be a government sheriff basically, right.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
It's the posse comatadis movement, which is kind of basically
what I was talking about. That based on this Act
from eighteen seventy eight, federal troops have to stay out
of law enforcement. So yeah, those black helicopters and un
soldiers and all the stuff that everybody's worried about were
just totally illegal, and I guess by that token, the
FBI would be totally illegal, or the ATF for the
(11:01):
DEA like there just isn't supposed to be such a
thing as federal law enforcement. That right, platform, he ran
under the party.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good break time, What
do you think?
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Yeah, all right, we'll take a little early Blake early
Blake took an early break.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Blake set up like, Yes, I've been waiting for this
for sixteen years.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
And we'll be back after this.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Earning stuff, Joshi.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Stuff, you shut all right.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So this is a time in the mid eighties, sort
of late eighties when militia groups were starting to sort
of be a thing, be in the news a little
bit more, and so of course the FBI is going
to start to begin undercover ops to infiltrate these groups.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
And see what the heck is going on.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And that is exactly what happened at an Aryan Nation
meeting when Randy met an undercover agent. His name was
Kenneth Fatally and he was going by the name Gus.
Gus Magisono's great undercover name.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I guess, yeah, but not exactly Germanic or Celtic in origin.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
You know, he was worked for the US Bureau of
Alcohol to back owned firearms the ATF and over the course,
like this whole operation was years and years long, because
it took like three years for him to get a
few different meetings with Randy.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
In which which culminated and if you ask.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
The FBI Randy saying, Hey, I want to sell you
some illegal sought off shotguns. If you ask Randy, he'll
say no, Man, I was entrapped. I didn't want to
sell the guns. The guy asked to buy guns several
times with me saying no, I don't want to do that,
until I eventually relented and sold him these firearms.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Right. So, however it happened the FEDS now had Randy
Weaver in their grips. So they thought, this is a
very routine thing that federal law enforcement does and I
think local as well. Like they will bust you on
some charge. It's fairly small, still enough that you could
get prison time. They're going to take you away from
your family. It's gonna be bad news for you, but
(13:23):
they'll totally forget about the whole thing if you start
informing for them.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yeah, he's a small fish right.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Keep sure right, and then they use that fish's bait
to get bigger and bigger, bigger fish right. So he
was just going to have to do what he normally does.
But every once in a while he'd meets secretly with
some ATF handler and tell them everything he knew and
who was who and who was leading the stuff. And
Randy Weaver thought about it and he said, you know what,
you can go straight to hell. I'm not going to
(13:52):
be an informant, and you can press the charges if
you want to. The ATF did not like this at all.
From what I saw. They essentially took that almost personally. Yeah,
at the very least they came at him like they
took it personally.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, for sure. Vicky was pretty upset as well. Apparently
she wrote a warning letter and this is in quotes
to Aryan Nations and all our brethren of the Anglo
Saxon race. She filed an affidavit which you knew trouble
was coming. She filed an affidavit with a county clerk
saying we might have to defend ourselves from you know,
(14:27):
with firearms, because the federal government is going to come
after us and we want to file this affidavit right now.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
That wouldn't even cross my mind. That's forward thinking, you know.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Sure, so that was actually very precient too, VICKI writing
that because they they would end up having to defend
themselves by attacks from the federal government. And that will
come a little bit later. First, in January of nineteen
ninety one, the ATF, I guess they didn't arrest him
(14:58):
on the spot when they came and said that, you know,
they wanted him to be an informant. So a few
months later they decided to take Randy Weaver into custody.
But to do that, remember he had a three hundred
yard kill zone. He had a cabin up on a mountain.
You don't just walk up and tell somebody like that,
come on, you're coming with us to jail. So they
(15:18):
actually the ATF posed as and by the way, ATF
is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, another ostensibly
illegal agency. They posed this like their car had been
broken down, I guess on Ruby Creek Road, which is
the main road that led up to the cabin, and
(15:38):
they basically played on the Weaver's propensity to help strangers.
I guess.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Yeah. So they arrest him. He pleads not guilty.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
He's released on bond, a ten thousand dollars bond on
his own recognisance, which is a little surprising. Vicky, his wife,
again writes a letter to the US Attorney for the
State of Idaho that she addressed as the servant of
the Queen of Babylon and saying that we refused a
bow to your evil commandments, whether we live or whether
(16:10):
we die. So she, you know, she sent a clear
message that like, we're not fooling around here. And I
know we were on your radar, but you might as
well really put us on your radar because we're not
coming with you and you can't make us.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Or take us off your radar. Don't even mess with us,
you know.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Yeah, ideally, So Randy.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Had a trial set. He remember he's been out, he's
out on bail, but he still has to go to
court to face these firearms charges. And again he sold
firearms to an undercover federal agents of it was a
federal law that he broke. So these are federal charges
and they can be pretty serious, but it was still, again,
like you said, it was pretty small potatoes as far
(16:53):
as firearms charges go. We're just charges that you could
face in general at the time. Right, Ye's enough that
you know. They had a trial set for him, and
it was set for February nineteenth, nineteen ninety one, and
for some reason or another, it was moved by one
day to February twentieth, nineteen ninety one. Well, when the
government does that or the court system does that, they
(17:14):
have to alert you. So they sent Randy a letter saying, hey,
we've moved your trial date to March twentieth, And of
course it wasn't March twentieth, it was February twentieth, And
there was essentially a typo that the author of the letter,
a probation officer, had written. And so, of course Randy
Weaver didn't show up on February twentieth, and a bench
(17:35):
warrant was issued for his arrest for failure to appear.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Yeah, so this has been sort of debated here and
there about the mistake and the error that he didn't
even have the right court date to begin with. But
all indications point to the idea that he was not
going to come anyway. So I'm not saying it like
didn't matter at all, But they said, hey, we're not coming.
I don't think he'd planned on coming even if he
(17:59):
had the right date. But the long and short of
it is he didn't go. And so they you know,
they were really on their radar. Now they're like, we've
got a real situation here. And this is when this long,
like really long surveillance program started in the summer of
nineteen ninety one, when they kind of staked out around
(18:22):
the property and around the house with you know, binoculars
and things and surveillance cameras that they'd set up in
the woods, and they were just tracking what this family
was doing. They had a couple of plans.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
To go in non violently.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
One of them was to cut the water supply I
guess from the spring to the house to flush them
out because at a certain point they weren't even like
leaving the house. You know, they were having food brought
in and stuff because they knew what was going on.
Another plan they had was they were believers in the
minstrual cycle meeting. You were unclean and filthy, So when
you had your minstrual cycle in that family, you had
(18:57):
to go stay in the birthing shed on the property,
one of the outbuildings during the duration of your menstruation.
So they were like, all right, when Sarah, the oldest
teenager has her next mentro cycle, she's going to be
sent to the shed, and when the kids bringing food
and stuff out there will grab them and that they'll
immediately give up because we have the kids. But then
(19:18):
I guess someone said, well, wait a minute, that's kidnapping.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Yeah, you can't do that.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
We don't have a warrant for any of the children,
So that's we can't go with that plan.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
So they went with the worst plan.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
They did go with the worst plan, but they it
was in very very It was a terrible plan in
really slow motion that played out over a really long time,
throughout which so many people had so many chances to
be like, guys, wait a minute, what are we doing.
This is like a fairly small federal firearms charge. The
guys sold two salt off shotguns and then didn't appear
in court, Like, we're spending millions of dollars on this,
(19:53):
bringing huge resources to bear and it doesn't really make
sense until you find that the eight which was originally
the people with this case, they brought in the federal marshals.
The marshals eventually brought in the FBI, and the ATF
told everybody else that number one, Randy Weaver was among
(20:13):
the biggest firearms suppliers in the United States.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
Yeah, not true at all, with.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
No evidence whatsoever. The only thing that they had him
on record doing was selling two saud off shotguns. And
the other thing that they told the ATF told everybody
was that it was responsible for a string of bank
robberies in Montana. There's no evidence whatsoever that he ever
robbed a banker, had anything to do with these bank robberies.
And yet those two pieces of information transformed this from
(20:42):
there's some weirdo family up in the mountains with guns
who and the dad has a couple of he sold
a couple of sawed off shotguns, and then come to
court to we need to literally bring the FBI, the
Secret Service, the Marshals Service, everybody to camp out for
almost a year observing this house to figure out how
to get that guy out of there.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Yeah, it was an extreme reaction. I don't think there
are a lot of people that would disagree with that. No,
so they're watching this house. The house, like we mentioned,
is very depensable. This is the house on the hill
where they were to be safe from the dreams. When
they did go out, they would send usually they would
send the kids out ahead, supposedly with guns, to kind
(21:24):
of investigate and see what was going on. They had
neighbors recording license plates of people who came and went.
They didn't The Weavers didn't have a telephone, but they
tapped phones at the general store. Helicopters were taking aerial photographs,
they claim. The Feds claim that in March ninety two
(21:45):
they actually visited and said on the loud speaker and
via some sort of phone call, that hey, you got
a surrender, although Randy would contend that no, until it
all went down, no one said anything to me about surrendering.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Big deal, because that's the first step in a situation
like that, is telling the person just go ahead and surrender,
where we just want to take you to jail basically,
and that them not doing that is huge. That's a
big deal. Again, they were watching this place for basically
a year and had plenty of opportunity to do that.
(22:22):
Of somebody I did not see coming into the story
as Heraldo Rivera, and yet he has he was everywhere.
He has a minor role in it in nineteen ninety two,
he hired April of ninety two, he hired a helicopter
to fly over the cabin because by this time the
word was out that there was this family in Idaho
that was essentially in this long standoff with the Feds.
(22:45):
And he said, or the helicopter pilot's sad or somebody
said that they shot at the helicopter when it flew
over their compound. But apparently that was untrue. And I
think even the surveillance team that was watching the place
at the time said, didn't shoot at the helicopter. But
you know her, although he's like, it's gonna be we
won't get any ratings if they don't shoot at the helicopter,
(23:07):
so just say they shot at the helicopter.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So that was surprising. The most surprising thing to me
was an appearance by another human because somewhere in this
you know, stand off, while they were being surveilled. I
guess Vicky and Randy got a little randy and had
another baby. It's in my opinion, it wouldn't lead me
(23:32):
to feel amorous and in the baby making way, but
I guess things happened. They had a daughter in late
nineteen ninety one, Elishaba or Elishaba, I'm not sure they
pronounced it.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I'm going with Elisheba Elishiba. Okay. Right there in that
birthing shed is where they had Elisheba, and you know,
so that happened.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Just to know that there's a now a month's old
baby on the scene as well.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
For some reason, that just made me really uncomfortable the
way you put.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
That that happened.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, so that happened. I think let's go with Elishiba.
I think you're right the first time. That makes way
more sense.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
No, I think that's what you said.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
No, I said Elishaba. Oh Elishaba, Oh, no, I said Elishiba.
I don't know. It's one of.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Those Hey, how about this, we're both right.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Okay, so this is that was nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Just so yeah, late ninety one is when she's born.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
In the birthing shed on the property, right.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
That's right, or the you know minstrel shame shed.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Right, Well, it depends on the situation, I would guess. Right,
So everything is about to go down, chuck, and it's
going to go down really hard and really publicly, and
the whole thing starts in earnest. The standoff that everybody
talks about when they mentioned Ruby Ridge is it started
on August twenty first, nineteen ninety two. It was a Friday,
(24:58):
and that morning a few I think they were Federal
marshals right, showed up on the scene and they were
going to just do some more standard surveillance and some
stayed at an observation post and some others drove up
toward the road on the way to the cabin. They
showed up at like four thirty. This is not new
(25:19):
or weird or different, but I am four thirty am.
You're right? Sorry, Yeah. A few hours later they were
getting closer and closer to the compound, and apparently they
attracted the attention of the dogs, the weavers dogs, and
the compound was in a state where if the dogs
are suddenly going nuts, you get your gun and go
see what the dogs are barking at. And that's exactly
(25:39):
what they did.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, So, you know, I know I mentioned that these
were kids, but I just want to drive home the
point that you had Vicky and Randy, the parents that
were there. You had a ten year old girl, a
fourteen year old boy, a sixteen year old girl and
the Kevin Harris kid that was living who was in
his mid twenties by now, and then this.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Ten month old baby.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
So teenagers and a baby, one guy in his twenties,
and then the two parents, Sammy the teenage boy, Randy
is the dad, and then Kevin is the mid twenties
guy that was living with him. They go out with
their dog, Striker, a yellow lab, looking to see what's
going on. They come to a y fork in the road.
As the story goes, Randy took it one way, Kevin
(26:21):
and Sammy and Striker went the other way.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
And this is where another.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Record of dispute comes in, because the US government says
they were fired upon when they announced their presence as
federal agents. What Kevin says is no, no, no, they
didn't announce their presence as federal agents at all. All
we saw was guys in Camo and they're like eyeballs
peering through the bushes and my dog barking, and one
(26:48):
of the guys shot it and killed it.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, there's no dispute that the dog, Striker was shot
and killed. When it happened is a disputant who started
shooting first. So let's say According to Kevin's account, they
come up on these guys who didn't, like you said,
did not identify themselves as federal agents. They're wearing camo,
they're holding guns, and they shoot the dog. Sammy the
(27:12):
teenage son says, you shot my dog, you son of
a bitch, and like lifts his gun and I guess
starts shooting. So a shootout ensues. Sammy's shot, he turns
to run. According to Kevin's account, he turns to run,
is shot in the back and killed. Now, Kevin gets away,
Randy gets away, but a Deputy Marshal named Bill Deagan
(27:34):
is killed. Two So Striker the Dog, Deputy Marshall, Bill Degan,
and Sammy the son, the teenage son are all dead
from this sudden surprise gun battle that took place outside
of the compound.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yeah, and Kevin is the one to be clear who
shot and killed deputy the deputy Marshall.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Okay, that's that's one hundred percent verified.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah, okay, because Randy was not a part of that shootout.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I got you, so, yeah, I know that he took
a different road, so he wasn't there when it happened.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
I don't think so, I mean everything I saw was
that the shootout was between the teenage boy and the
twenty something year old and that you know, he shot
Deputy Building in the chest and killed him.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Gotcha. So either way, there's a firefight going on, a
shootout going on, and Randy and Kevin retreat back to
the compound, but they leave Sammy's body there temporarily and
they're just completely fixated, according to Kevin, throughout that time
on retrieving his body. This is a pretty tight family.
(28:38):
So you don't want to leave the dead body of
your fourteen year old son just laying in the road.
You want to go get him. And this actually runs
a foul of what the marshals were saying. Two of them,
They said that two of them were pinned down by
sniper fire for twelve hours, and Kevin and the rest
of the Weavers are like, that's not true at all.
We were scared out of our mind and totally grieving
(29:03):
already from Sammy's death. We weren't spending twelve hours pinning
down the marshals with sniper fire.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah, they said.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
They claimed at least that the only gunfire that came
from them at that point was Randy firing his gun
into the air because he was so upset about losing
his teenage son. Right, all right, so now we're at Saturday,
August twenty second, a hostage rescue team is dispatched by
the FBI, and this is when things get really hinky,
(29:33):
because the rules of engagement in the United States in
a situation like this are well known and generally ascribed
to when things are on the up and up, which is,
you do not engage unless you're under direct threat from
a violence or like somebody firing at you. Basically, they
amended this rules of engagement and it was approved by
(29:58):
the Bureau's Assistant Director for Criminal Investigation Division, Larry Potts.
That basically said, any armed adult man that you see
you can shoot and kill as long as you're not
endangering a child.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, unprovoked. Just see him walking through the compound, that
he's holding the gun at his side, you can kill him.
That is, yeah, completely outside of the boundaries of the norm.
Like you were saying, yes, so that's a huge escalation, chuck, right, that,
I mean, they were already, like like you said, overreacting.
You could say, now this is I mean, this is
(30:31):
just out of control escalating, And of course when you
have something like that, and you have a bunch of
snipers and you have a bunch of law enforcement people
sticking out a compound, the chances of somebody being killed
just have increased dramatically. And that's actually what happens. I
say we take a break and we come back and
(30:52):
talk about a huge turning point in the standoff. How
about that, let's do it stuff from Joshimes, stuff you
sho so chuck. By this time, this is Saturday, August
(31:20):
twenty second, blood's been shed from the shootout, and now
the hostage rescue team and their snipers from the FBI
have the authority to shoot to kill, unprovoked the people
in the compound as long as it's an adult male
holding a gun. And there was a guy one of
those snipers, an FBI sniper named Len Horiucci. He was
(31:42):
about two hundred yards away from the compound and he'd
been briefed on this revised altered rules of engagement that
the FBI had authorized, and he saw Randy, Sarah, and
Kevin all leaving the cabin the main building and they
started to make their way toward the berthing shed. They
(32:05):
later said that they were heading to the berthing shed
to start preparing Sammy's body for burial. They'd retrieved it
by this time, and Horryucci, following these altered rules of engagement,
took a shot and he shot Kevin. No, he shot
Randy in the arm. So of course, from that point
on they immediately scattered because all of a sudden, somebody's
(32:26):
shooting at them.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah, so they are headed back to the cabin. They
get to the door. Vicky, the mom, is holding her
ten month old daughter in her arms and kind of
holding the door upen getting people in. And this is
when lan Horiuchi takes a second shot. He said he
was going for Harris, but it went squarely through the
(32:50):
head of VICKI threw her head and hitting Kevin then
in the chest, and she apparently was still holding her
in daughter when she hit the floor dead immediately.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, so that was, like I said, an enormous turning point.
Now the son has just been killed by the FEDS.
Now the mom has just been killed by the FEDS.
But at this time, the FBI doesn't realize that they've
killed her. I don't know if len Horiyucci like went
home and didn't tell anybody what had happened. I'm not sure.
(33:25):
I don't know how you could shoot someone in the
head and not realize that you've done that. But apparently
it was not immediately understood by the FBI running this
negotiation that Vicky Weaver was dead. And also by this time,
we should say there is a ton ton of cops.
(33:46):
A lot of estimates put it in the hundreds. Yeah, federal, county, state,
local law enforcement all showing up to basically help out
or contain or do whatever. And one of the things
they did almost immediately was block the roads. And those
roadblocks became a site of protests for people who showed
up and were like, this is messed up, man, these
(34:07):
these this family needs to be let free.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
And these are you know, these are people from the
Aryan Nation groups and some other militia groups that it's
basically they're saying, hey, this is going down exactly how
we say this kind of stuff goes down.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
So that that's going on. They've blocked off the roads.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Like you said, Mom's dead body now is under the
kitchen table where it remains. Kevin is in pretty bad
shape because he was shot in the chest, so he's
in and out of consciousness. They're not quite sure you know,
what's going to happen to him at this point. And
we should also mention that lan Hori Yucci is a
sniper that also had a lot of controversial was also
(34:51):
controversial in the Waco siege, like very soon after this. Yeah,
so this same guy was at both of these sieges
and both times was a part of a pretty controversial
shooting incident.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
I okay, Well I didn't know that about Waco. I
had heard that he had not fired or shot at Waco,
but I guess that's not correct.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Well I didn't.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I looked into it a little bit, but then I
started going down the rabbit hole and thought we should
just cover Waco. But I think he was one of
the guys that was charged with firing like the incendiary
rounds into the building. But I might be wrong in.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
That, but we'll save it for the Waco up.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Yeah, and let's put it this way, like you can't
find anything about Lawn Horuci now, like, yeah, we know
he's still alive, but I'm sure he's not available for
you know, interviews, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
For sure. Yeah, So, like I said, they the FEDS
apparently didn't know that Sammy was dead, and they also
didn't know that Vicky Weaver was dead. They started destroying
buildings around the cabin. So now they're closing in this perimeter.
It's not just any longer like in this three hundred
yard Kills one. They're starting to move in and they're
(36:02):
destroying buildings as they go. And I guess when they
destroyed the birthing shed, they discovered Sammy's body and were like, oh,
one of the family members is dead, and he happened
to be a teenager. Again, they still didn't know that
Vicky was dead. And I guess because she had been
the ones writing the emphatic letters to the Servant of
(36:22):
the Queen of Babylon, et cetera, and filing the affidavits,
the hostage rescue team presumed that she was the one
who made the decisions in the family, so they continued
to address her even after she had been killed by
the FBI sniper. And so they would speak directly to
missus Weaver through their loud speakers, and the family was
(36:45):
just the They didn't realize that the FBI didn't realize
that they had killed VICKI, so they thought that they
were just adding like horrible torment onto the injury of
losing their mom and wife.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah, and you know, depending on who you too, there
are also people that say, no, they knew that she
was dead, and the things that they were saying were deliberate,
trying to provoke them and cause further upset by you know,
speaking to missus Weaver, who they knew well was dead.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
But again, it's just.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
It's one of those you know, you're never going to
get the truth out of a matter like this because
there are two sides. But they're trying to lure them out, saying, hey,
we had pancakes for breakfast. Once you bring the kids out,
I bet they'd love some pancakes. They send down a robot,
a remote control robot with a telephone, so they could
you know, this is one of the hugest ways they
(37:38):
broke protocol is that in a situation like this, you've
got to be in contact and negotiate with someone in
a standoff, and they didn't do that until well into it,
when they tried to get them a phone on this
remote countrol robot that had a gun mounted to the
front of it, which wasn't a good idea because of
course they saw that.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
They're like, I'm not going near that thing.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Right, Why would you even do that to defend the robot?
I mean, doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
I tried to find out, but I couldn't find anything
that was rational, So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
That's crazy. So that didn't happen. They weren't able to
establish contact aside from shouting at them through loudspeakers, right,
but it wasn't a back and forth or anything like that,
and the Weavers just dug in. They stayed in their
cabin for days. Remember the started on Friday, August twenty first.
(38:26):
The following Friday, August twenty eighth, this thing was still
going on. Mom was still dead under the table, and
they agreed to speak with a guy named bo Gritz.
He was also a Green Beret, a lieutenant colonel. So essentially,
what's happening now is Colonel Troutman for Rambo is showing
up to tell the authorities that Randy Weaver will eat
(38:46):
stuff that will make a billy goat puke like it's
it's uncanny how closely this resembled that part of Rambo, right,
and bo Gritz was able to get in and make
contact along with an ex cop from Phoenix named Jack mcclam.
Now both of them are We're huge, and I believe
still are in the conspiracy theorist circles that Randy Weaver
(39:09):
ran in. So it's not like they were just some
average people like they could. They could communicate with him
and talk his language, and he knew enough about them.
I don't know if he knew them personally or not,
but their reputation was enough that he let them come
inside to the to the cabin and talk.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
So they brought some food for the baby and milk
for the baby, which is great, and UH kind of
talked to uh talked Randy into ultimately coming out, but
initially just kind of got him in a better state
of mind.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
They are the ones when they came.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Back out that told the Feds, hey, Vicky's dead and
they're under the table. Randy's wounded. Kevin is wounded, like
big time wounded, and they were like, what that's news
to us. So on Sunday the thirtieth, Kevin finally surrendered.
Randy said it's okay, you need to go get medical help.
He was helicoptered out to spoke Anne and I believe
(40:08):
he's in serious condition, but he recovered. And then they
also allowed Gritz and a friend named Jackie Brown, strangely
enough to take his wife's body away and the pets.
They had a couple of pet parakeets that they took
away as well.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Right, so Kevin's out, it's now just Randy and his
three daughters, Sarah, Elisheba and Rachel. Yeah, and they were
alone in this cabin, still under siege. And so there
were a lot of supporters who are like, well, I mean,
we know how this is gonna and Randy's going to
come out with guns blazing and take out as many
(40:47):
of these Feds as he can before he gets taken down,
And very reasonably and wisely, Randy did not do that.
He made sure that he and his three daughters were
able to come down safely. Ostensibly under the care of
an attorney named Jerry Spence. He represented the estate of
(41:09):
Karen Silkwood, who also deserves an episode two. But essentially
she was a whistleblower who was mysteriously who mysteriously died
in a mysterious car crash. So he was pretty famous
as far as defense attorneys, and he had said I'll
represent this guy, if he'll come out, I don't know
if he did. Did he.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
I don't know?
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Okay, well, let's presume that he did and didn't go
back on his word. But regardless, they some people think
that that public announcement by Jerry Spence may have had
at least some role in getting Randy Weaver to come
out peaceably.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Yeah, and he had to talk his daughters into it.
You know, they were ready to go. They were both
brandishing guns. So he said, you know, fourteen year old
Sarah put down your nine millimeter and ten year old
Rachel put down that thirty eight.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
We're gonna get out of here alive. And they did that.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Randy and Kevin were ultimately charged with murder, conspiracy, assault,
and the girls went to live with their in laws.
I believe Vicky's parents in Iowa.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Right, And so of course they're, like you said, they're charged.
So their trial begins in April of nineteen ninety three.
And I don't know if ironic is the term, but
the trial started just before Waco ended. And if you
don't know how Waco ended, and you can't wait till
our episode on Waco ended really badly. A lot of
(42:36):
women and children died. It was just a bad jam.
So this is happening as this trial for the Ruby
Ridge standoff is starting, and the whole thing lasted for months,
I think finally on July ninth. Not only were there
months of testimony, the jury deliberated for twenty days. That
is a really long time to deliberate. And when they
(42:59):
came back, they acquitted Kevin Harris of all charges. And
you had said he definitely killed the deputy marshall, right,
so he was acquitted of that and everything else. And
Randy Weaver was acquitted on everything except for his failure
to appear in the original firearms case. That was it. Yeah,
(43:24):
So clearly this Idaho jury was like, yes, the Feds
very much overstepped their bounds and overreacted, and this is
like so much so that like we don't think these
people should be should go to jail for anything they
did in response.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Yeah, I mean it was sort of the facts of
the case too, Like everything I saw, it didn't seem
like it was just some uneven jury where they were
just sympathetic to the locals. Once the facts of the
case came out, it was pretty clear they changed rules
of engagement when they shouldn't have. They didn't follow protocol
setting up you know, communications, they and the guns blazing
(44:01):
and just basically murdered people. They in ninety four of
the family filed wrongful death lawsuits against the FBI and
the US marshals. They settled it. The JOD settled these suits.
They paid about a million bucks to each of the girls,
one hundred grand to Weaver.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
Harris many years later, in.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Two thousand won another settlement for three hundred and eighty
thousand dollars. And Lan Horiyucci, the sniper who you know
where things really took a turn when he got involved.
He it kind of went back and forth in different
appeals in different cases over the years of pursuing criminal
charges against him. So involuntary manslaughter was the initial charge.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
I think.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
They moved it to a federal district court who dismissed
it saying that he was acting in his official capacity,
so you can't convict a guy for that. And there
were a bunch of appeals and ended up in him
escaping any justice by having the charges dropped.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
So the Justice Department had their own inquiry and they
found out that this whole thing was pretty much a
cluster from beginning to end. The Senate held hearings in
nineteen ninety five featuring Fred Thompton, who would go on
to play the DA in Law and Order for a
couple of seasons back when he was a Senator for Tennessee.
And they also found that the whole thing was basically
(45:24):
a cluster from beginning to end. And one person who
did actually do time for this is actually an FBI agent.
The guy who was one of the people running the
operation e Michael Cahoe. He was sentenced to eighteen months
in federal prison because he destroyed an after action report
about the operation. He said he was acting in what
(45:46):
he thought was the Bureau's best interests, in that he
didn't want the local Idaho prosecutor getting a hold of
the thing and using it. I would guess against Lawn Horiucci,
I don't know, but he was the only person to
actually do time from this thing.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Yeah. Randy just died a couple of years ago at
the age of seventy four. He kind of abandoned a
lot of the just sort of further out there religious
ideas that is was in his marriage, seemingly because of Vicky,
and he was still like a you know, sort of
cause to eleb in the anti government world. And Sarah,
(46:24):
the oldest daughter, has it is very easy to find
interviews with her. She wrote a book at it about it,
called From Ruby Ridge to Freedom, and in that book
she forgave those federal agents.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I was reading an interview with her,
and she's a big commentator on that part of America
and its response to the federal government and how each
one needs to kind of interact with another. She's very
peaceful now.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
It seems like, yeah, seems like it.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
And like you said, Ruby Ridge was like a huge
impetus that was that gave like all of these far
right movements a shot in the arm. And this is
nineteen ninety three. Within two years, all of that momentum
would just be completely scuttled when Timothy McVeigh came along
and said, Hey, I'm going to blow up a federal
building in Oklahoma City, kill one hundred and sixty eight people,
(47:16):
including nineteen children in the daycare, and it's in retaliation
for Ruby Ridge and Waco. And it was so abhorrent
that all of those people who are like, yeah, Ruby
Ridge were suddenly like WHOA. I don't want to have
anything to do with militias anymore because this is what
people do. I don't want to have anything to do
with it. It wasn't until the early two thousands that it
(47:37):
started to come back again, where it is slowly developed
over time until we are where we are now, where
they're essentially public public office holders in some cases.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah, this is a tough one.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
So maybe let's see Waco in one year and then
we can do the Oklahoma City bombing in two years.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Have you ever been to Oklahoma City in that site?
Speaker 3 (47:58):
I have not.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
It's insane to stand there. It's just nuts. So yeah,
we should do one on that too, for sure.
Speaker 3 (48:06):
But we got a space. He's out.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Oh I agree.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
You're saying every December like a Christmas episode.
Speaker 4 (48:11):
You go, good idea American tragedy by Boy episode and
then our holiday episode. Yeah okay, Well, Chuck apologized just
a second ago, so that means it's time for listener now.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Yeah, here's a correction about Porcupines that I don't think
we got when that initially came out.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
But it must have been released as a Saturday.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Edition, right, you're sweet, Bippy, It was okay.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Hi, guys. My name is.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
Geta Oh and I'm an undergraduate at UC Irvine setting Biology.
I want to write about a correction in your porcupines up.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
Chuck was discussing the.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
Fact of how New World and Old World porcupines evolve
independently of each other. The phrase for that would actually
be convergent evolution, not co evolution. Oh, I think I misspoke,
and that actually we could probably clear that up in
our Peacocks episode coming up.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
Oh good idea, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Convergent evolution is what we need to remember. Co evolution
is a term where interactions between two species have a
reciprocal effect on each other's evolution, which is completely different.
Convergent evolution is when two separate population populations in distinct
geographic locations undergo similar phenotypic changes due.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
To selective pressures.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
I want to finish by thanking you both for always
peeking my interest.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
It's peaking.
Speaker 4 (49:41):
I Oh, you got me again.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
That really I thought you were just messing with me
a couple of months.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Wow, okay, And then later on it to only I
was like, I mispronounced peaking peaking, and Josh totally called
me on it, But I tricked him peaking my interest
in a variety of random topics I didn't I.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Needed until I did. Looking forward to learning more. And
that once again is from gta Oh.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Thanks Gita gita O is oh. Their last name.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
It is ji dash Tao Oh. They put a handy
pronunciation next to it.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Well, thanks a lot, gta Oh. That was a great name,
great email, and best of luck to you with your
biology degree. We need more biologists running around out there,
so bless you for that. And if you want to
be blessed by Pope Josh or Pope Chuck, you can
send us an email as well. Send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
(50:40):
is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (50:42):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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