No Regrets (10 page)

Besides missing his appointment with Kay Scheffler, Rolf had also arranged to meet with one of Ruth’s nieces, Donna Smith, on August 12. He hadn’t shown up and that puzzled Donna.

The San Juan County sheriff’s investigators had now narrowed the dates of Rolf’s “leave-taking” to August 7 and 8. By the middle part of August, Rolf hadn’t shown up for any appointments he’d made.

When he left, he had no money, no car, no glasses, no medicine, no extra clothes, no lucky cuff links, no watch, none of the items he would need for a long journey.

But where on earth did he go? And how could he possibly mingle with other walk-ons onto a ferry headed off-island without someone recognizing him?

The search for
Rolf Neslund was ultimately frustrating. Several weeks after their initial visits to Ruth Neslund in her Alec Bay Road home, the San Juan County sheriff’s investigators had little doubt that Rolf was dead, but they had not one iota of physical evidence that might prove that to a jury. Cases can go forward with a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, but they were pretty sure that no prosecuting attorney would want to take on the case as it was. It was all smoke and mirrors and theory, nothing to take to the San Juan County deputy prosecuting attorney on criminal cases, Charlie Silverman. If they did, he would surely send them out to get more physical evidence.

Furthermore, it really didn’t seem likely that a woman of Ruth Neslund’s age, who was overweight and claiming to be in poor health, could have the strength to carry out a grisly murder. Still, when this information was lumped with all the other bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence the sheriff’s investigators had gathered, it was at least enough to allow the investigators to obtain a search warrant for the Neslund property.

They got their search warrant.

On April 13, 1981, Donald K. Phillips, a supervising criminalist from the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab,
traveled to Lopez Island. It was barely light when he boarded at Anacortes, and Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy met him on the ferry landing at seven-forty-five that morning.

It was going to be a beautiful spring morning. Trees and bushes were just leafing out with bright green new growth, fruit trees had blossoms, and daffodils, forsythia bushes, and Scotch broom dotted fields and yards with bursts of buttery yellow.

And so, eight weeks after Greg Doss and Ray Clever had first interviewed Ruth Neslund about her missing husband, a phalanx of official cars turned down the dirt lane that led to her backyard. Sheep nibbling in the pastures ignored the convoy.

Phillips, accompanied by Doss, Clever, and Caputo, was about to search for evidence that might prove that the old sea captain who had lived here had been dead for months—that he had never left home at all.

All of it seemed surreal.

The men located several green plastic garbage bins behind the red house. They were filled with burned and partially burned debris. When it was spread out on a screen and examined, they found a single spent .22-caliber cartridge and bagged and labeled it. The burned and partially burned material in the green garbage cans wasn’t unusual—only insulation, beer cans, blackened metal, glass jars, and some carpet.

Nearby, they saw that a blue metal burn barrel contained still-burning coals. Without garbage pickup on the island, everyone along the rural roads had burn barrels. This one was new, its paint barely singed, far too new to hold the remains of a man who had disappeared eight months before. Still it made the hairs on the back of their necks prickle to think that it was possible that Rolf Neslund
had been disposed of in a similar barrel. But when they looked in, the glowing ashes looked to be only papers and normal garbage.

The searchers spread out over the yard and into the pastureland beyond, their eyes focused on the ground as they looked for some sign of what might have been a grave. They found no suspicious dips or humps.

Next, they moved into the residence and searched it meticulously. The search warrant had listed the specific evidence they were allowed to look for: bullet holes in the wall and/or bloodstains. Phillips tested a number of stains he found to see if they were blood. They weren’t.

At some point, Joe Caputo sat with Ruth in her living room. He noted a book on her coffee table, a Reader’s Digest condensed edition. He read the title to himself
—To Catch a Killer: How to Get Away With Murder.
Ruth saw him glance at it, but said nothing.

A Chevrolet station wagon parked outside was also tested for bloodstains. There were none.

The search team spent two days going over the Neslund property, but in the end there was nothing at all in the homey house that could be construed as physical evidence in a murder: only a single bullet cartridge. That didn’t mean much out in the country. Ruth herself was known to be skilled with guns, and those Lopez residents who lived in the country sometimes fired rounds at dogs to scare them away from stalking sheep.

Donald Phillips took sixteen photographs of the house which he had enlarged and later gave to Greg Doss.

One lawman who asked to be anonymous said, “We have a suspect, we have a motive, we don’t have a body, but we think there was one here once.”

Ruth Neslund was scornful and triumphant as she
crowed to friends that the detectives hadn’t found anything. Why should they? She assured them that she would never have hurt Rolf.

She told several people that he was most likely “sitting in the Greek islands, waiting for all of this to blow over— and then he’ll come home.”

But the months passed and seasons changed, and Rolf didn’t come home.

The missing persons case,
or, more likely, the possible homicide case, stalled.

Just as the deputies had suspected, Charlie Silverman was hesitant to bring charges against anyone without more proof or information. And for good reason. Should someone be charged with murder, tried, and acquitted, that would be the end of it. New evidence wouldn’t matter because double jeopardy would attach. No one can be tried for a crime again after he has been found not guilty. It was better to wait, but it was galling for the sheriff’s deputies who believed that Ruth Neslund knew exactly where her husband was.

Ruth’s supporters were steadfast, and they formed a circle of protection around her. She certainly wasn’t a pariah, and her life continued almost as usual. She was free to entertain her friends, to visit with them, to leave the island whenever she chose.

With the case becalmed, and the sheriff’s investigators backing off—or so Ruth thought—she went about her business. She had already sold Rolf’s Mustang a few months after he disappeared. In June, she placed an ad in a local paper, the
Friday Harbor Record’s
classifieds. She offered to sell her house and land, listing the property for half a million dollars. Even though she advertised it both
locally and in the
Wall Street Journal,
at that price, she got no serious offers, only a few lookers. Eventually, she changed her mind, and took it off the market.

By December 1981, Rolf had been gone for sixteen months, and Ruth said she needed some kind of resolution about their finances. Wherever her husband was, she had to live, and to do that she needed some income she could count on. Back in the spring, the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association had moved to block her from getting Rolf’s eighteen-hundred-dollar-a-month pension payments. She had always resented the way Rolf handled that money because she knew he had given some of it to Elinor to help out his children.

“All he wanted,” Kay Scheffler said, “was six hundred dollars for the house, six hundred dollars for her [meaning Ruth], and six hundred dollars for himself. Ruth told me that she said to him, ‘I’m not going to give it to you; you’re just going to give it away!’

“He was figuring he’d give his share to his sons,” Kay continued. “She [Ruth] figured to hold on to it.”

In her petition to be appointed trustee of Rolf’s property, Ruth complained to San Juan County Superior Court Judge Howard Patrick that she was barely scraping by. She said her current income was only about five hundred dollars a month.

In a hearing held on December 16, Rolf and Elinor’s younger son, Erik Ekenes, twenty-one, requested that he or “some other suitable person” be appointed as the trustee—anyone but Ruth. But even Erik’s attorney acknowledged that civil law decreed that the preferred trustee of the estate of a missing or incompetent person is normally that person’s spouse. And that, of course, was Ruth.

Judge Patrick appointed Ruth trustee—but with several conditions. The Court ordered her to file an inventory and an appraisal of the property. That would be used to fix the amount of bond she would be required to post before her trusteeship became official.

Erik and Rolf Ekenes agreed not to interfere with Ruth’s activities in any way. They weren’t after their father’s estate, because they didn’t believe there was anything left of it. Surely, Ruth had either already spent the money or hidden it away. What they did want was some resolution and some kind of justice for their father.

On January 8, 1982, Ruth dutifully appeared before Judge Patrick with her handwritten inventory. More realistically, she now valued her home at $266,533.73, a little more than half her asking price six months earlier. The judge ordered that 70 percent of that figure would be her bond, and he also stipulated that she could pay herself considerably more than five hundred dollars a month from income accruing to the property.

For the moment at least, Ruth Neslund’s life took on a modicum of serenity. Rolf was still missing, but she had her home and enough to live on, and she continued to buy and sell antiques and other items ranging from furniture to small parcels of real estate.

But any exultation Ruth may have felt over her small win in Judge Patrick’s courtroom would not last long. Sheriff Sheffer’s department had no intention of dropping their investigation into what might have happened to Rolf Neslund.

They continued to receive hearsay and tall tales that were circulating around Lopez Island.

All of it led exactly nowhere.

•  •  •

And then, Ray Clever’s reporter brother, Dick, wrote a story about the disappearance of Rolf Neslund, and it appeared under a prominent headline. It was enough to spur two women to come forward—even though they were afraid of vengeance if someone should be angry with them.

They were Ruth’s nieces, who were concerned about the way their “Uncle Rolf” had disappeared. They weren’t sure what the true story behind that might be, but they were worried. And they wrote to the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association.

Ruth’s older sister, Mamie, had two daughters in their thirties: Joy Stroup, who lived in Circleville, Ohio, and Donna Smith, who lived in Washington. The information the women sent puzzled those who opened mail at the Pilots’ Association, but longtime pilots Captain Gunnar Olsborg and William Henshaw followed up on the information they had sent. Both of them, especially Gunnar Olsborg, remained among Rolf’s closest friends. They read what sounded like a fearsome story: Joy Stroup had made a bizarre and shocking accusation against Ruth.

Joy wrote that she wanted to talk to someone in authority about her aunt Ruth. Ruth had evidently called her many times between November 1979 and July 1980. Most of the time, she had been drinking and said crazy things like, “I’m watching Rolf out the window,” and, “I could shoot him from right here.” Sometimes she spoke of “wasting Rolf” or “burning him.”

Joy’s sister, Donna Smith, lived in the Seattle area. She was the girl who had been like a daughter to Ruth when she was younger, but Donna remembered the time Ruth had locked herself in the bunkhouse to keep Rolf away.
Ruth had called her, saying, “If he comes back here, I’m going to shoot him!”

That was in the fall of 1979, and Ruth had threatened violence toward her husband in numerous phone calls since. Indeed, there had been so many phone calls when Ruth was inebriated that her relatives tended to dismiss them as drunken ravings.

But Captain Gunnar Olsborg had a sinking feeling about Rolf. He suspected his longtime friend was dead, his body hidden from view.

San Juan County authorities made arrangements for Joy Stroup to fly to Seattle for a meeting. The Puget Sound Pilots’ Association paid for Joy’s trip. Joy Stroup, Donna Smith, Gunnar Olsborg, San Juan County’s Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Charlie Silverman, Ray Clever, and an attorney met in the Columbia Tower, a soaring building in downtown Seattle.

This was a clandestine meeting for many reasons. Joy and Donna were afraid of reprisal from their aunt and from other family members, and neither the San Juan County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office or the Sheriff’s Department were able to act on what they heard that day. If anything that the young women described had, indeed, occurred, it still had to be proven.

An investigation like this would be difficult for a big-city police department and prosecutor; it seemed almost impossible for a small county sheriff and a prosecutor who was far better versed in civil law than in criminal proceedings. Silverman, newly elected, admitted that he felt he was in over his head. Beyond that, San Juan County had few citizens per square mile and their tax base didn’t spew out wealth to pay public servants and court costs for massive investigations.

Fortunately, the legislature in Washington State voted in a new law in 1981, a statute that would be central to the Rolf Neslund investigation. The State Attorney General’s Office now had a Criminal Division: prosecutors and investigators who, along with the Washington State Patrol’s criminalists, were available to assist some of the state’s smaller and less-affluent counties when they were involved in major probes. Attorney General Ken Eikenberry was sending his top team in to work beside the San Juan County detectives.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Greg Canova and Criminal Investigator Bob Keppel (the same Keppel who was the first King County detective assigned to the Ted Bundy cases in 1974, and who would later advise the Green River serial murder task force) were young, but they were already two of the smartest and most admired men in Washington State criminal law. Together the AG’s team would soon successfully prosecute murderers years after the killers thought they had, quite literally, gotten away with murder. The Neslund case would be their first.