No Regrets (16 page)

Chopped him up in the tub

Ruth served a drink to friend, Winnie!

There once was a lady named Ruth

Whose problem was telling the truth.

She shot up her hubby,

Cut him up in the tubby

And now needs a pardon from Booth!
*

There was a Lopezian named Ruth

Who tippled a little vermouth

She shot her man dead

And cut off his head

The judge said that Ruth was uncouth!

Some said the old lady was kinder,

Than one who would use a meat grinder.

Some said she stole money

But Ruth said, “That’s funny,”

Yet guilty was still how they’d find her!

Looking at the benign face of the elderly defendant, it was hard to visualize her participating in such a grisly crime. And the defense would certainly play on that.

After those who filled the courtroom for Ruth’s arraignment
got over the shock of the specific allegations— much less amusing now that they were said to be fact and not mere speculation—they realized they had something else to worry about. The second-floor courtroom had been so jammed with people that the floor beneath creaked and groaned ominously. It was a lovely building, very old—antique, really. But the memory of the scores of people who died in the sky-bridge collapse of Kansas City’s Hyatt Regency Hotel was fresh in America’s minds.

Suddenly, everyone wondered if the San Juan County Courthouse would survive Ruth Neslund’s trial, or, more urgently, if the gallery watching might not be in danger. It seemed that half the population in the surrounding islands hoped to attend at least some sessions of this long-awaited trial. Were they all going to plunge to their deaths when the floor gave way?

They would either have to have a change of venue to another county’s courthouse, reinforce the San Juan Courthouse, or build a new structure. Surely, there wasn’t enough time before Ruth’s trial to do the last.

Somehow, the county found the money to begin construction on a new courthouse, and the march to judgment moved ahead ponderously as different motions slowed the proceedings to a snail-like pace.

Judge Richard Pitt would not be eligible to preside at Ruth’s trial because he had been the inquiry judge who oversaw the second search warrant on the Alec Bay house a year earlier. San Juan County had very few judges to pick from; it had never been a problem before because they didn’t have that much crime. On April 15, the county’s only other judge, Judge Howard Patrick, was disqualified when Fred Weedon filed an affidavit of prejudice. The
Washington State Supreme Court appointed Snohomish County Superior Court Judge John Wilson to hear the case.

Ruth’s trial date was finally set: May 31, 1983. But then Deputy Attorney General Greg Canova—who would be representing the state—filed an affidavit of prejudice against Wilson.

Ultimately, the Washington State Supreme Court appointed Judge Robert C. Bibb, also of Snohomish County. Bibb had presided over trials of notorious defendants before—including the trial of Fred (now Kevin) Coe, convicted of being Spokane’s “South Hill Rapist,” as detailed in the late Jack Olsen’s book:
Son.

Anyone following the trail of Superior Court judges could be easily confused. “Bibb” who was now the trial judge replaced “Pitt,” the inquiry judge.

Finally, neither side had any affidavits of prejudice left.

On May 18, 1983, Ruth appeared at a pretrial omnibus hearing where Judge Bibb would rule on which pieces of evidence he would allow into her trial. Not surprisingly, Greg Canova wanted to present virtually everything seized during the 1982 search of the Neslund home, much of it devastatingly incriminating for Ruth. Fred Weedon continued to be a strong advocate for the defendant, treating her with such deference that Ruth seemed as delicate and fragile as the crystal pendants on her prized chandelier. He asked Judge Bibb to suppress the search evidence, insisting that the team of detectives from the Sheriff’s Office “grossly violated” Ruth’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Weedon was not convincing enough in his rhetoric. At the end of the hearing, Bibb allowed all five hundred
pieces of evidence in, everything Canova asked for— except for some photographs.

Not to be outdone, Weedon filed a civil case shortly after the omnibus hearing. Ruth’s threat to sue became reality as she filed a $750,000 civil suit against the investigators. Virtually everyone on the search warrant team was served with a subpoena.

The newest date of Ruth’s criminal trial was set for August 1, 1983, three years to the day, less one week, after Rolf Neslund had vanished forever.

But the pace slowed again. Fred Weedon and his co-counsel, Ellsworth Connelly, appealed to the State Supreme Court asking for a ruling on a discretionary review. He still insisted that Judge Richard Pitt had not been a “neutral” judge when he granted the second search warrant. How could he have been, Weedon asked, since he had also been the inquiry judge earlier in the investigation?

There would be no trial on August 1.

What Ruth Neslund’s defense team was working toward, of course, was a complete dismissal of charges against her. If they succeeded in having the evidence thrown out of the trial, their next move would be to question whether Rolf Neslund was really dead. Not even a fragment of his body had ever been found.

Even though the A Positive blood that remained in the Alec Bay house was the same type as Rolf’s, Ruth was also A positive. Furthermore, Connelly commented that he could see no way to prove that Rolf had not cut himself shaving, had a nosebleed, or suffered a household accident.

Through all the legal maneuvering, Ruth’s trial date seemed farther and farther away. Aware that the courtroom floor had trembled as if the islands had sustained a major
earthquake in Ruth’s 1983 arraignment, officials had condemned the building. As it turned out, there was plenty of time to construct the new courthouse in Friday Harbor before Ruth ever went to trial.

What appeared to be the final date was announced: May 1985. The courtroom had been reserved for six weeks, and trial was only a little more than a week away. The curious looked forward to sitting in the gallery, but there were those who thought it was time to just forget about Ruth Neslund and what she might or might not have done five years earlier.

A man named Marcus E. Bonn wrote a letter to the “Speak Out!” section of the
Journal:

The letter demonstrated once again that the majority of laymen don’t understand the meaning of corpus delicti, believing that a murder case without a human corpse is no case at all. It was no wonder that the San Juan County sheriff’s investigators had to work hard to keep up their morale and belief in justice. It had been five years—no one seemed to care anymore about a trial, except to worry that it would raise taxes.

And, somehow, the fact that Ruth was a female seemed to make her a pitiful target, one incapable of doing any real harm.

Nevertheless, both sides were ready to go to court in August 1985. But then Ruth suffered what the defense said was a terrible fall; she broke her hip.

A courthouse regular walked beside Fred Weedon as he left the courtroom, having been granted one more delay. Sotto voce, the man commented, “All you have to do now, Fred, is see that she breaks her other leg.”

The latest trial deadline
was Monday, October 28, 1985, but no one seemed to believe it would happen—not even Ruth Neslund herself. It had been so long, and her new life revolved around her successful Alec Bay Inn. Ruth admitted to a
Post-Intelligencer
reporter that she, too, felt as though she was only a spectator at a theater production. She was sixty-five now, but looked older, walking unsteadily with a four-footed cane, mentioning that her “stroke” had left her “legally blind.”

“I still don’t believe I’m involved in it,” she said with apparent amazement. “It’s like watching a bad movie. I don’t really know how a thing like this can get snowballing—except it did, with some relatives who have never been very close to me.”

With tears brimming in her eyes, Ruth said she felt that Rolf had probably committed suicide, explaining how depressed he had been after being responsible for his ship hitting the bridge. “Although,” she whispered, “there are some days when I think he’s going to walk up the driveway.”

She spoke of hard times they had lived through, always together. Their first house on Lopez Island had burned. It had been a providential coincidence that Ruth was storing all of her valuable antiques in a trailer behind the house
when it went up in flames, in a fire whose cause was never determined. And, luckily, she had thought to get insurance. She recalled that after they lost the house, she had given Rolf a special Christmas present—plans for a new house she had drawn herself.

“I had no thought we would actually build it; I thought we were too old, but Rolf looked at the plans for the better part of an hour, and he said, ‘Ruth, why don’t you build it?’”

With two part-time carpenters, she said, she had done just that. Rolf had painted it. “He was the captain, and I was the crew in the household. I was strong as an ox when I built the house. We moved in in 1978,” she recalled nostalgically. But things had gone wrong after the bridge fell. “His mind was going,” Ruth told reporters. “The captain was hallucinating some and drinking a lot. Ever since the ship hit the bridge, he brooded a lot. He would sit for three or four hours at a time, only getting up to fix himself a highball.”

Rolf, of course, was not there to give his side of their story, and it was easy for young reporters to feel sorry for the aging might-be-widow. There were many on Lopez Island who raved about what a wonderful person Ruth was. “I was enthralled with her the day I met her,” a male acquaintance offered. “She is extremely generous with her time and personal things. She’d hear about a child who didn’t have a bicycle, and would say, ‘Oh, I have one in my garage. Why don’t they take that?’”

Ruth said she was hurt by those “who have found me guilty already. I do have some supportive friends, and I try to be strong and survive. I don’t sleep very well. I wonder about it a lot. I wonder about my own mortality in this very stressful time.”

Ruth said she kept busy running her bed-and-breakfast, playing the organ and piano by ear, and was diverting herself by learning to play the banjo.

Despite Ruth Neslund’s fans and friends, and her newly docile and mild demeanor for the press, Ray Clever had his own opinions, based on the facts he and Bob Keppel and other deputies had uncovered. He snorted in disgust as he read her pretrial coverage. “She just radiated evil. I believe that she was fully capable of everything she was accused of.”

It was almost
Halloween 1985, perhaps an apt date for a trial which promised ghastly details to start. At last, it was beginning. The Washington State Court of Appeals had upheld the prosecution’s right to present the hundreds of items of physical evidence. Judge Bibb said he would allow Greg Canova and Charles Silverman to present their case in any order they chose.

Of all ploys that defense attorneys in high-profile cases usually invoke, a request for a change of venue—seeking to relocate a trial to a more neutral territory—is the most often used. But Fred Weedon and Ellsworth Connelly had never asked for that. Sheriff Ray Sheffer had a theory on that. Off-islanders seem to view the rugged folk who lived in San Juan County as a bit more “primitive” than those who live on the mainland. “There’s absolutely a feeling about islanders,” he suggested, “that there’s a backwoods mentality, that there are a lot of moonshiners, and so on.”

Perhaps if this trial were held in Bellingham, Everett, or Seattle, it might be more likely to end in a conviction, just because large-city dwellers might expect shooting and dismembering a spouse and then burning the pieces would be something islanders would do to solve marital problems.

It was all quite ridiculous, of course. People in Washington State who live on windswept islands may be individualists
and close to nature, but they tend to be highly intelligent professionals, who visualize life there as more serene than city life, and are anything but low-browed renegades living in “hollers.”

Today, the price of San Juan and other island property is sky-high, and there are virtually no waterfront lots available to anyone who cannot afford hundreds of thousands—even millions—of dollars.

Judge Bibb was on the bench, assisted by Mary Jean Cahail, who had decades of experience as clerk of the Superior Court of the Joint Judicial District combining San Juan and Island counties. Connie Burns (Sundstrom) was her coclerk, and Karen King, the bailiff. Except for Judge Bibb, they were a “hometown” group of court officers who had served in the antique courthouse, now replaced by the new structure built with amazing speed with this trial in mind.

Ruth Neslund sat quietly at the defense table, the perfect picture of a sweet grandmother type. She had said that she still half-expected to see her missing sea captain come walking up their driveway. So did some of those anticipating her trial.