Murder In The House

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When one of Boehner's staff members opened the office door to peer outside, Capitol policemen were stationed in the hall. "The policeman told us to lock the door and stay inside," he says. Other officers gathered up tourists and shoved them into whatever offices they could, telling them to stay put as they tried to restore order and determine whether Weston was acting alone. The building was sealed, and officers began a room-to-room search, blocking stairways and elevators. When they had determined that this was not a coup, not a conspiracy, but rather another loner with a gun, they finally let people leave, filing back out into the sunshine, past the ambulances and fire trucks and microphones, while the FBI, Secret Service, ATF and D.C. police arrived to join in the search for evidence and answers.

We know a lot more now than we used to about angry boys who kill cats for sport; "Rusty" Weston made it to age 41 before he started killing people too. He divided his time between his parents' home in Valmeyer, Ill., and a shack on a half-acre plot in Rimini, Mont., a dirt-road hamlet in the shadow of Red Mountain named by isolated Irish miners smitten by a touring performance of Tchaikovsky. He panned for gold with little luck, tinkered with junked cars and lived on government disability payments that were based on a history of mental illness. Neighbors knew enough to keep a polite distance; he used to tell them he was John F. Kennedy's illegitimate son.

In the '80s, before moving to Rimini, he lived in neighboring Jefferson County, where he at first stayed in a broken-down cabin in exchange for caring for the owner's many dogs. He made a habit of harassing the local sheriff and his deputy, complaining they were incompetent. In 1983, according to undersheriff Tim Campbell, Weston began saying that Campbell and his brother were covering up an abduction of a four-year-old girl. Campbell does not have a brother. Weston was probably retaliating for being questioned in the case. He was then living about 2 1/2 miles from where the girl disappeared. She was never found, but he was ruled out as a suspect. His anger at local officials moved up the hierarchy. In 1991, says Sheriff Tom Dawson, Weston, who had by then moved to Helena, Mont., wrote two angry letters to the Governor ("I am writing this letter to represent my hate for you").

Growing up in Valmeyer, Rusty Weston was almost unnoticeable. A former schoolmate describes him as a "basic farm guy." In the Valmeyer high school yearbook, Weston posed with other members of Future Farmers of America. Looking over the yearbook, his principal, H.R. Baum, said, "There would be a half-dozen others I'd suspect of this before him."