Explaining the Unexplainable

The day before Rusty Weston drove to Washington, his grandmother asked him to “thin” the more than two dozen cats that roamed the cornfields and yards around the family home. Weston obligingly shot about half of them with a .22-caliber rifle.

The next day, Weston’s father found two of his favorites, Little-Bit and Tiger, lying dead in a bucket. “Mad and hurt both,” as Russell E. Weston Sr. described himself Sunday, he gave his long-troubled 41-year-old son 10 days to clear out.

The next afternoon, Russell Eugene Weston Jr., a pistol in his hand and bullets in his pockets, allegedly burst into the Capitol with a .38-caliber handgun, killed two policemen and wounded a tourist before collapsing with serious wounds of his own.

The younger Weston remained in a Washington hospital Sunday, but his condition was upgraded from critical to serious.

Meanwhile, it was announced that the bodies of the two slain Capitol police officers, John Gibson, 42, and Jacob “J.J.” Chestnut, 58, will lie in honor Tuesday in the Capitol Rotunda, where the coffins of presidents have lain in state. President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) plan to attend an afternoon service.

Sitting with his wife and daughter in the dining room of the family home Sunday, Russell Weston Sr. said he could not be sure if the confrontation over the cats propelled his son on a rampage. In fact, the elder Weston quoted his son as saying to him at the time, “Aw, take it easy, Dad.”

The elder Weston said his son had never been violent, although he had been behaving erratically long before he was first diagnosed by a St. Louis psychiatrist as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1980s.

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The family postulated that Weston, who saved copies of virtually every document he ever mailed or received, may have entered through the so-called documents door to the Capitol in search of proof that Clinton, among various others at various times, wanted him dead.

“Oh, tell people how terribly sorry we are,” Weston’s sister, April Callahan, said through her tears shortly after a phalanx of federal, state and local investigators left the home for the first time since arriving Friday night.

“My brother is so ill. He’s refused to take his medicine. We tried to talk him into it, and he just won’t. He just won’t.”

“Rusty’s gone off his medicine again” was a frequent refrain in Rimini, Mont., where Weston lived off and on. His family said he was almost never on anti-psychotic drugs. With the exception of a bottle of Valium in the 1980s, the only time he took medication was immediately after being released from a mental hospital in Warm Springs, Mont., in 1996.

He came home then and seemed better, his 62-year-old mother, Joey Weston, said. He took three medications. But the pills ran out after two weeks, and he never got more.

Investigators from the FBI, Secret Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms took with them a list of those medications, Joey Weston said, as well as two typewriters, Rusty’s two filing cabinets and bags of other items from his room.

They also took ammunition belonging to Russell Weston Sr. After learning of his son’s alleged crimes, the elder Weston looked between his bed and night stand, underneath a heating pad, where he keeps his Smith & Wesson .38 Special. It was gone.

The Weston family said that authorities told them they found a second .38 in Rusty’s pickup truck.

Rusty Weston’s troubles began soon after high school, the family said, when he began having delusions of grandeur alternating with episodes of paranoia.

He applied for federal disability benefits under the Supplemental Security Income program 14 years ago, claiming an elderly woman had injured his neck when she struck him with a cane. To qualify for benefits, which he has collected ever since, he needed a medical examination, and a psychologist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

His condition gradually deteriorated, according to his family. One day he would be a CIA agent on special assignment to protect the president. The next, he would be sitting in a rocking chair scanning the cornfields for a Navy SEAL sniper he believed the president had sent to kill him. He would rock furiously back and forth so that the sniper wouldn’t get an easy shot.

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When the Secret Service investigated in 1996 and deemed Weston a low-level threat to Clinton, they had it backward, the family said--at least in Rusty’s eyes. He thought the president was a threat to him.

After years of panning for gold in Rimini, Rusty began to grow weary of the bone-chilling winters. In recent years he came home for Thanksgiving and stayed until the Montana snows melted the following spring.

In the fall of 1996, he got an injection at a Montana hospital, his mother said, maybe for allergies. A few days later, he went back, complaining that the area had become infected. He raised such a ruckus that hospital personnel called sheriff’s deputies, who already knew about Rusty and decided to place him in jail on a mental hold.

A judge ordered that he be treated at Warm Springs for the state maximum 90 days. Fifty-two days later, the doctors decided he was no longer a threat to himself or others, and they sent him home with some prescriptions.

Jackie Bergen, a nurse in Helena, Mont., who has known Weston for 20 years, said his mental condition had seemed to deteriorate. His conviction that Clinton intended to kill him had become so acute, she said, that Weston did not return to Montana for fear that the president had agents there.

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Weston had never shown any signs of violence, Bergen insisted. “He was always a little odd, but he was always very polite, very respectful, very honest. I never felt that Rusty was somebody you would have been scared of.

“He always had his little odd ways of doing things. Like, he always saved receipts. He said that if you ever have anything going against you, you have to be able to prove where you were.”

In recent months, however, Weston seemed to grow more delusional, she said.

“His mind just got so far gone,” she said. “I just think he’s a paranoid schizophrenic, and his mind just got the best of him.”

In December 1996, he came home to Illinois for good, though he traveled occasionally to the family’s cabin in Montana and to Washington, D.C. According to the family, he once tried to apply for a job at the CIA.

For the last year and a half, he had spent much of his time poking around in the flower beds, between the pink plastic flamingos and green ceramic frog. Just recently, he cut cord after cord of hardwood, stacking and piling the logs in the backyard.

On Thursday, about 7 p.m., Weston went to his grandmother’s brick house, which shares a yard with the faded-green home he grew up in. He asked Lillie Weston for $50. He had to go to nearby Waterloo and buy a fan belt for his truck, he said.

His family said they believe he needed the $50 to help get him to Washington.

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Times staff writer Kim Murphy in Helena contributed to this story.