A Paranoid Loner With a Penchant for Trouble

You could practically set your watch by it: Two times a week, sometimes three, Russell Eugene Weston Jr. would park his old Ford pickup outside the Broadwater Market and plunk some bills down on the counter. “Two packs of Marlboro 25s,” he’d say. “And a roll of quarters.”

Then he’d go out to the pay phone and start feeding the quarters into the slot. Half an hour or more he’d be there. Then he’d climb back into the pickup and pull out.

As often as not, that’s when the phone calls would start coming in to Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Chuck O’Reilly. Weston was harassing them again, citizens would say. “Rusty’s gone off his medicine again.” That was a frequent report. “Or, he’d call us,” the sheriff said, “and those calls were usually delusional in nature.”

Throughout this wooded old mining town, an eerily intact cluster of old saloons and schoolhouses next door to log cabins and shady lawns, the 41-year-old prospector, who lived in little more than a shack teetering on the banks of the creek, was an accepted part of the landscape: quiet for the most part, harmless by all accounts, crazy as a loon when he went off his medicine.

Montana authorities tried to do something about it in 1996, when, after years of Weston’s threatening letters to editors and blustery appearances on local talk radio shows, local police had him committed to a state mental institution. Two months later, he was back in his cabin.

Everybody knew it when Weston--charged in Friday’s shooting rampage at the U.S. Capitol that left two federal guards dead and a 24-year-old tourist wounded--went off his medicine. He’d stand out in front of the Moore family’s satellite dish “and make some of the weirdest contortions,” neighbor May Moore said, apparently convinced the government was spying on him through the big bowl.

He’d park in the driveway at his sister’s house a few miles away and light cigarette after cigarette.

“He would sit out in his vehicle and smoke cigarettes, just sit there and sit there for hours and hours and hours,” remembered Nikki Noland, who lives next door. “I’d go outside and I’d get real scared. I’d say ‘hi,’ and wave, and there would just be nothing. And then he would start backing up and pull forward and back it up and pull it forward.” She shuddered.

“Every time he left, I was really hoping it would be the last time.”

One day he walked into the Broadwater Market and instead of just quietly passing over the money for the Marlboros and quarters, he looked owner John Luft right in the eye.

“Do you know about me?” Weston asked.

Luft allowed as how he didn’t. “He proceeded to tell me he knew about the conspiracy and what Clinton did to the Kennedys, and how the FBI and the CIA know that I know, and they’re watching me.”

(Luft is no stranger to the oddball customer. Twice in the last few years, Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski stopped in on his way to nearby Lincoln for a snack.)

“He was sure that everything and everybody was out to get you. It was mostly government, then it went from there--surveyors and people with satellite dishes. He was almost normal in every sense but that,” said Roger Siewert, a 54-year-old construction worker who often chatted with Weston when he’d stroll up the road.

“It was stories about those satellite dishes messing up his mind, and the CIA had a special way of doing people in. He said he was a member of the Kennedy clan, that he was from Massachusetts. You had to take everything with a grain of salt,” Siewert said.

Weston, neighbors said, claimed he had knowledge that the Clintons were involved in the assassination of President Kennedy and feared the government was out to kill him to keep it a secret.

Siewert himself, who normally could listen to Weston’s stories for three or four hours at a time, started to lose patience a few weeks ago, when he hired a local surveyor to measure his property down to the line by the creek, where it joined the site where Weston’s shack and two outbuildings stood. Weston called the sheriff’s office, insisting the surveyors be arrested.

“He was paranoid about surveyors breaking into his house and going through his stuff,” Siewert said. He shook his head.

Still, before Friday’s shooting, Rimini was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Out here, just off the highway where the road starts climbing up into the Rocky Mountains, it’s that way. “Most people up here like to be left alone,” Siewert explained. “It’s kind of secluded and peaceful.”

Barely a hundred years ago, Rimini was a boomtown, 3,000 people stuffed into the narrow gorge, most of them angling for the silver lode up on Red Mountain, silver so rich it paid to send it all the way to Wales for smelting. Then the silver dried up. Century Silver Mines closed up shop, and today barely 15 families call Rimini home year-round.

The front of the old saloon and part of the boardwalk remain; so does the white frame schoolhouse. But mostly it’s an odd cluster of Airstream travel trailers, small homes with sprinkled lawns and petunia borders--and shacks, much like Weston’s, which threaten every year to tumble into Ten Mile Creek, which already has undermined one corner of it. Weston’s tiny log structure probably has electricity, figure neighbors, most of whom haven’t been invited inside. But it had no plumbing, certainly no garden.

On Saturday, it was sealed off with yellow police tape and a line of officers who were awaiting authorization of a search warrant on the aging structure.

Montana authorities say Weston wasn’t ignored by the authorities. In 1991, Weston was arrested on suspicion of selling drugs in Helena, but the charges were dismissed. In the spring of 1996, the U.S. Secret Service interviewed him after local law enforcement reported several threats against President Clinton.

In October of that year, Weston was involuntarily committed to a state mental institution at Warm Springs for 52 days of evaluation and treatment, though the commitment was not related to the threats against Clinton, said Andrew Malcolm, director of communications for Gov. Marc Racicot.

“It wasn’t serious enough for a criminal arrest. He did something to cause the police first, and then the judge, to think he was unstable,” Malcolm said.

Though Montana’s civil commitment statute permits detention for up to 90 days, after 52 days of treatment and evaluation, “the medical and psychiatric staff came to the mutual conclusion that he was no longer a threat to himself or anyone else at that point,” Malcolm said.

“Once that determination is made, he’s a free person. He may be a strange free person, but he’s a free person.”

The doctors at Warm Springs made a series of psychiatric appointments for Weston at a mental health center in Waterloo, Ill., where Weston planned to join his parents.

On Dec. 2, 1996, a staff member at the hospital drove him to his cabin, where he said he wanted to drain the pipes and install storm windows before heading off to Illinois.

“That day he disappeared off our radar screen,” Malcolm said. “That tells the [hospital] staff either he wasn’t here or, if he was here, it was brief and he was well-behaved.”

Weston’s name had been in Montana law enforcement authorities’ books for years.

In the early 1980s, he was questioned in the disappearance of a 4-year-old girl who had lived half a mile from his home near Warm Springs Creek.

The mystery was never solved, and Weston was not considered an official suspect. “We could never put any direct links between him and the girl,” said Tim Campbell, undersheriff of Jefferson County.

Then, Weston got into a beef with the elderly woman for whom he was working as a handyman, living in a shack on her property in exchange for chores.

Deciding that she wanted to do something else with the property, and miffed that Weston wasn’t taking good care of her dogs, 86-year-old Dorothy Cole, now deceased, asked him to leave. He refused, and there was a confrontation, during which Cole hit him with one of the two canes she used to walk.

“He started making remarks to her that she didn’t like, and she hit him with a cane. She didn’t really hurt him,” said Chadwick Smith, the lawyer Cole retained after Weston filed a lawsuit against her.

The lawsuit was dismissed, but Weston took it to the state Supreme Court. He was furious that the sheriff’s department refused to arrest Cole for assault. He began making repeated threats against Campbell, Sheriff Tom Dawson and former Jefferson County attorney Richard Lewellyn.

He wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper complaining about the authorities because they had failed to act on his behalf. He appeared on a local radio talk show slamming Campbell and the others.

“We have a community day every year. I ran into him one year, and he was still upset because I didn’t arrest this 86-year-old lady for striking him with a cane,” Campbell recalled. “He said, ‘You better watch your back.’ I kind of looked at him and said, ‘Russell, get out of here.’

“I never thought he was dangerous. I probably would have said his worst enemy is his mouth,” Campbell said.

Then, he said, Weston started accusing Campbell of being involved in the 4-year-old girl’s disappearance.

“It was one of those things I blew off, but whenever he was in the area, I paid a little extra special attention, I kind of watched my back--like he said.”

Weston’s sister, Alice Callahan, an aide at a group home for the mentally disabled who lived a few miles away, was well-liked in the community, and sometimes took her brother in when he wasn’t living in Rimini.

One time, Callahan and her husband went on vacation and left Weston in charge of the house. John Karl, a neighbor, snorted with wry glee when he remembered.

“He was never there,” he said, grinning. “The garden dried up. Everything died.”