No Regrets (21 page)

“Why did she ask you to come over?”

“I was her friend... Ruth told me she wanted me to come over. She said she needed me.”

At the defense table, Ruth laughed derisively.

“Winnie Stafford seemed believable to us,” juror Lisa Boyd said. “She was younger than Ruth was, kind of average-looking, and she didn’t have that ‘tough look’ that Ruth had. She looked like the woman next door.”

As Canova questioned her, Winnie Kay’s story spilled out. She recalled being summoned to the Alec Bay home around ten o’clock on that August night. It was warm outside, and twilight was just fading to darkness as she arrived. “Ruth let me in and she said she had killed him,” Winnie Kay said, her burst of words shocking in the hushed courtroom. “She said she had shot him—shot Rolf.”

But Winnie Stafford hadn’t mentioned any of this when she appeared before the special inquiry judge, Robert Pitt. Now her recall was very different.

“Why did you lie?” Canova probed.

“I felt what had been done had been done, and I was protecting Ruth.”

Winnie Kay described a grotesque tableau where she and Ruth sat on bar stools, sipping cocktails. Robert Myers was in the house, too, and Winnie Kay said she had seen him occasionally come to the sliding door of the room that adjoined “the music room” where the women sat.

“He smiled and looked in a few times,” she said. “She [Ruth] indicated to me that she didn’t want me to know any of the details,” Winnie Kay said, breaking into tears. “She said Bob was in the bathroom. She said Bob was cutting him—Rolf—cutting Rolf up . . .”

Winnie Kay hadn’t particularly wanted to know the details either, but they were almost unavoidable. It took
strong drinks to soften the electric edges of panic she felt. She knew that just down the hall, Ruth’s recently deceased husband was being disjointed prior to disposal. It was truly a psychedelic evening, a horror movie. She had told herself it could not be happening.

Some days later she had talked to Wanda Post, discussing what Ruth and Robert had done. Wanda offered that Ruth had also told her about what had become of Rolf.

“She [Wanda] had gotten Ruth intoxicated one night, and Ruth told her.”

Winnie Kay testified that, sometime after August 8, Ruth had expanded upon her motivation for killing Rolf. Ruth told her she and Rolf had fought over money when he discovered that he had no access to any joint bank accounts. Ruth told Winnie Kay that she had to put their money into her accounts because she fully expected Rolf to take it all with him when he left for Norway with Elinor. She couldn’t let him leave her penniless after all her years of managing their money so carefully—not when he deserted her for another woman.

When Winnie Kay Stafford’s long-awaited testimony was reported in news bulletins, John Saul added a caustic stanza to his endless limerick.

When Winnie came down to the Inn

Friend Ruth had committed a sin.

Ruth then she did urge her

Her honor to perjure,

And offered Miz Stafford more gin!

Called to testify again on rebuttal, Ruth strongly denied that she had ever said any of the things Winnie Kay testified to. It was all lies. Winnie Kay was making it all up.

•  •  •

The trial was virtually over, and it was time for final arguments. Between them, Greg Canova and Fred Weedon would speak for four and a half hours.

Greg Canova went first. He knew that the concept of a murder without a body seemed strange to laymen, and he explained once again that it was not necessary to show photographs of Rolf Neslund’s corpse to prove that he was, indeed, deceased. “All that was left of him [that was found] was blood on the concrete, and parts of his blood on the ceiling and on the gun that was used to kill him. Ruth Neslund must be held accountable for killing Rolf Neslund.”

The defense forensic expert had said that parts of Rolf might remain somewhere and suggested they hadn’t all burned to ashes. Canova reminded the jury that the state had never claimed that Neslund’s body parts had totally evaporated. What mattered was that they had never been found. The testimony from so many friends and relatives whom Ruth had confided in was far more compelling than finding the body parts. She had told numerous people how she got rid of Rolf’s remains. Ruth had been unable to contain herself, and admitted to bloody murder many times, giving macabre details, particularly when she had enough to drink to lower her guard and loosen her tongue.

That the murder had occurred wasn’t surprising. Canova commented that it had only been a matter of time before Ruth and Rolf—one or the other—would kill. They were deadly adversaries with “incredible animosity bubbling to the surface all the time.” That had become the norm for them.

“What happened on August 8, 1980, was that it all exploded.”

Canova deemed the defense’s attempt to offer Ruth’s nosebleeds and minor accidents as excuses for blood remaining in the house unconvincing. “Isn’t it amazing how every aspect of this case that seems to have physical evidence happens to have been destroyed, or cleaned, or ‘can’t be traced’?”

There were numerous discrepancies, Canova pointed out, in Ruth’s stories. For instance, Ruth had testified that she found Rolf’s Lincoln Continental on the Anacortes ferry dock “a week or two after” Rolf left her “on August 14.”

But the bills from the classified ads and her own phone records showed that she advertised his beloved car for sale on August 13 and 14. “The reason the ad was running was because she had the car at home,” Canova said. “She knew exactly where it was. The car was never driven anywhere by Rolf after August 8.”

Greg Canova found Ruth’s statements, testimony, and the ensuing contradictions those of a woman “who knew exactly what she was saying when she was trying to cover her tracks. She just tried too hard and she got caught at it.”

Over all, there was “compelling” evidence that Ruth had shot and killed her husband on August 8, five years earlier, and then helped her brother chop up and burn his remains. “Taken together, all the physical evidence is overwhelming beyond a reasonable doubt that Rolf was killed and Ruth killed him.”

Fred Weedon’s final arguments stressed that there was no reason to believe that Rolf Neslund was really dead. “Just because Rolf hasn’t been seen since 1980, that’s no reason to believe he’s dead,” Weedon said.

Perhaps, Weedon suggested, he had decided to start life over somewhere far away from Lopez Island, or he might have killed himself in a state of depression. Weedon told the jurors that Ruth was not obligated to prove what had happened to Rolf. He had been depressed, and Weedon reminded them of the witnesses he had called to establish that.

As for Paul Myers, Weedon denigrated his effectiveness as a witness. “He’s a self-confessed drunk,” Ruth’s attorney said, a man with a blurred memory and a fogged-over grasp of reality. And Winnie Stafford—why hadn’t she heard any sound in the house where Robert Myers was allegedly cutting up a body? “Imagine if you can, the sound of a broad-axe chopping up a body in a bathtub.”

And why wasn’t the fiberglass tub scratched or dented from the axe? Weedon declared Paul’s testimony unbelievable.

Her attorney stood close to Ruth, his hand protectively on her shoulder, as he once more acknowledged that she wasn’t any angel. Yes, she, too, had a problem with alcohol, and she and her husband had been dealing with a marriage in trouble. But it hadn’t always been like that. Once, they had been happy, and Ruth had been “a person who took care of his [Rolf’s] every whim, his every need.”

Fred Weedon had spent years representing Ruth Neslund, his neighbor when he spent time at his family’s vacation home, a woman he seemed to sincerely believe to be innocent. He was emotional as he spoke of her travail, and the tears in his eyes appeared to be genuine.

Ruth Neslund was not a client any defense attorney might long for, but Weedon had worked very hard to show the jurors the other side of this case. What a travesty, he suggested, it would be if she was found guilty while Rolf
might turn up somewhere . . . someday. He painted her as a humble and pitiable figure. Her bowed head and her clasped hands did make her look somehow innocent.

Ruth was only sixty-five, but she had aged a great deal in the prior five and a half years—either from stress or from alcohol. More likely a combination of both. She had dangerously high blood pressure, and she walked with a painful limp from her broken hip. But her life had been good recently. She loved her bed-and-breakfast, and her new life.

Would she spend her last years in prison? Or would the jurors find that there was not enough evidence to convict her?

On rebuttal, Greg Canova scoffed at the lack of marks on the Neslunds’ bathtub. “Bob Myers was not a strong man,” he said. “He wasn’t swinging from his heels when he wielded that broad-axe. Can you imagine how long it took Bob Myers to do this terribly, terribly, gruesome thing?”

Up to this point, Washington State had never had a guilty verdict in a homicide trial where there was no body. There were many who believed it was impossible to convince any jury to rule for conviction in such a case.

But it was almost time for these jurors to wrestle with the two views of Ruth Neslund that had been presented to them. No one in the gallery envied them that task.

Now the fifteen jurors needed to be winnowed down to twelve. There had been no need to replace any juror during the long trial, no one got sick or had family emergencies, and all fifteen had listened to the testimony and remarks. Court clerk Mary Jean Cahail drew three names at random, and those people were dismissed.

The dozen who remained left the courtroom and Judge
Bibb spoke to the attorneys. “I don’t often compliment attorneys” he said, “because if you do it too often, I find it diminishes the effect. But I’m going to do it in this case.”

He admitted that he had probably “snarled” at all four of them—Greg Canova, Charlie Silverman, Fred Weedon, and Ellsworth Connelly—at one time or another during the tense trial, but none of them “had lost their cool.” Bibb said they deserved to be commended for that.

It was late. Just as the sun set far into the evening on the August night Rolf Neslund probably died, the reverse was true in winter. The sun disappears prematurely in the Northwest in mid-December, and it was pitch dark outside the courthouse on Wednesday night, December 11, when they finished final arguements.

The jurors would not begin deliberating until the next morning. They would be sequestered during those deliberations. In a day, it would be Friday, the thirteenth, hardly a propitious date for someone hoping to be found innocent.

Perhaps it would not take that long. Some said the jury would be back before noon on Thursday. A jury that returns rapidly usually means a guilty verdict. The longer they debate, the brighter things look for an acquittal. Ruth Neslund’s jurors had four choices to consider: innocent; guilty of first-degree (premeditated) murder; guilty of second-degree (not premeditated) murder; and guilty of first-degree manslaughter.

If Ruth Neslund was found guilty of first-degree murder, a life sentence was mandatory. If she should be found innocent, she could go home to the Alec Bay Inn and resume her life, and never have to be wary of the San Juan County sheriff’s investigators again.

•  •  •

The jury began their deliberations at 9:00
A.M
. Thursday, December 12. Their first order of business was to elect a foreman. They were a diverse group—the youngest thirty-two and the oldest a woman in her late seventies. Someone said, “Who would like to be foreman?” A few people raised their hands.

One juror, an older man with snow-white hair, wanted that job, and was annoyed when he didn’t win the show of hands. They elected Elizabeth Roberts as foreman instead. She had once owned a Friday Harbor restaurant. She proved to be an excellent choice.

One juror, a woman who worked in the medical field, had a scientific mind. They would rely on her for the forensic science and medical details. Several were involved in real estate, appraising, or banking. One man had played softball with Ruth’s attorney, and some had worked on real estate transactions with him. Basically, it had been impossible to find jurors who had no history at all with the participants in the trial. But at the beginning, they had all been sure they could evaluate Ruth’s guilt or innocence with an open mind.

They agreed to deliberate until 7:00
P.M
. for as many days as it took. Many of them were emotionally exhausted from six weeks of trial already, but they were prepared to discuss the verdict ten hours a day until they agreed.

Two jurors said they should vote immediately. One man and one woman had been absolutely convinced by the prosecution. “It’s a no-brainer,” the man said. “Let’s vote for conviction and go home.”

The others shook their heads. Betsy Roberts led them through Charlie Silverman’s overview of the entire case.
She played “devil’s advocate,” taking the other side of dissidents’ arguments.

They did not return a verdict on Thursday.

Nor did they reach a verdict on Friday, the thirteenth.

They elected to continue deliberating on the weekend. When the jury failed to reach a verdict by Saturday night, the defense team and the accused had reason to feel a bubbling up of hope. Surely, if the jurors were so torn after three full days, they must be leaning toward acquittal.

No one knew what was going on in the jury room. A long time later, some of the jurors talked about their deliberation.

“We just couldn’t decide to convict,” Lisa Boyd said. “We talked about how long someone has to plan a murder for it to be premeditated. Was it weeks? Days? Minutes? We finally realized it didn’t have to be very long.”

They talked about the fact that Ruth and Rolf had the same blood type. And time lines. And they wondered about the gun used. One man wanted “smoking gun” evidence—not necessarily a real gun—that would make the verdict easier. But there wasn’t one.

A few of the women commented that Ruth had been ridiculously “cheap” when she had saved money by not replacing the bloodstained carpet padding, and for failing to texture her whole ceiling. Her stinginess had cost her a lot.